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Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Tom Spurgeon on Criticism

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Tom Spurgeon of The Comics Reporter was kind enough to agree to an interview about criticism and art. We communicated by email.
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Noah: Your site seems to work to promote a sense of comics as a community —pointing out events and birthdays and doing collective memory projects like the one involving Frank Frazetta. So I guess the first question is, do you see what you’re doing as encouraging, or serving a comics community? And does criticism work against that sense of community, or is it one way of building it?

Tom Spurgeon: No, I’m not really interested in a comics community in that way. I just write pieces I’d want to read. I can see how you’d think that. For instance, I don’t really care about people’s birthdays, I just think it’s interesting to know how old certain industry players and important artists are, and it’s a handy structure for routinely exposing people to art they might not be aware of. You’ll note I don’t run the birthdays without a birth date, although people frequently ask me to.

I have no idea what role criticism might play towards any sense of community. I would assume any community would want to embrace a self-critical aspect and would ideally value the people that challenge conventional wisdom on a routine basis. At least that’s what my pet unicorn Daughtry tells me.

More generally, what do you think the point of criticism is?

Writing about comics for me is about as deep as that I like writing about comics. As someone who reads some criticism, I know that I appreciate it most when I get some insight into the work being examined and that I encounter effective prose. I know when I was a kid and lacked the tools to find things on my own, criticism was a way to learn about stuff I wouldn’t see otherwise. I wouldn’t be able to speak to your question generally, nor would I presume I could.

If you just like writing about comics, what is it about comics as a medium that particularly engages you?

I do like the medium, although I’m a theater guy first, preference-wise. Just in really basic ways. I like visual metaphors. I like that I don’t understand comics all that well — my big book would be called “Failing To Understand Comics.” I think that having an emotional attachment to comics from my youth is helpful in sustaining interest. I think I’m lucky in that it’s the most intriguing art form in terms of the number of artists over the last ten years making compelling work. Although it’s not a motivation, I think I’m lucky to write about comics because I don’t think I write well enough or am effective enough as a critic to have anyone pay attention to anything at all I’d say about prose or film or theater.

One thing I like about comics as a medium is that you can choose to engage comics while holding a variety of competing notions in mind at the same time. You can read a panel progression but also consider bigger and smaller elements of design. You consider what’s right in front of you but also project fundamental circumstances on things that aren’t portrayed. You can look at an object portrayed as the object it portrays but also as an object itself. I never get tired of that kind of thing. We live in an increasingly literal world, where people don’t like movies because they think the actress is too ugly, rather than being able to see her as attractive because you’re being asked to see her in the story that way. Comics is like the advanced class of the opposite of that.

Do you still follow theater?

I try to see as much live theater as I can, although it’s difficult given where I live. I still read a few dozen plays a year. My favorite playwrights are Stoppard, Pinter and Saroyan, although there are certainly individual plays that I admire, from a lot of playwrights. I like everything that Rebecca Gilman has written except for her hit, Spinning Into Butter. I really liked her play Crime Of The Century, about the Richard Speck murders. I liked reading Paul Peditto’s play Essanay.

I think live performance can be thrilling, and live performance unpacking a sophisticated worldview even more so. That’s the majority of it.

There’s a review of Comic Art Magazine from a while back in which you said approvingly, “Comic Art Magazine is a comics publication that rather than engaging with the good and bad of the medium right now has chosen to investigate the good and interesting no matter when it’s been done.” Do you think that criticism is more useful or worthwhile when it focuses on the good and interesting from all time rather than the shitty from yesterday? And, if so, on what grounds would you defend Tucker Stone’s writing, (which I know you’ve praised in the past)?

I apologize in advance if my memory is faulty here. As I recall, it’s more that I thought that was a particular strength of Comic Art, not that I was making a general principle known with CA as the example. It wasn’t really intended to be a grand theory of criticism in other words. Comic Art helped claim a bunch of works as good ones at a point where it was difficult — for me at least — to track the number of potentially good works coming out. It also gave voice to this curatorial impulse that a lot of interesting writers seem to have. It’s very foreign to my own. I’m sure I was back to trashing some poor guy’s life’s work and making Vinko Bogataj jokes within hours after writing that about Comic Art.

I’m not sure exactly what I’ve written about Tucker’s work. I like how engaged he is; I get the sense it’s important to him. He’s kind of the current paragon of youthful enthusiasm for writing about comics – this generation’s Jeff Levine. He’s one of those critics I find useful because his reading habits are very different than my own. I’m entertained by him, which is a bigger deal than you might imagine when you’re reading like 40-50 people on a regular basis.

As long as I’ve mentioned Tucker, I wondered if you could maybe comment further on this quote of his from your interview with him. This is where he said:

There’s a temptation to label mainstream fans as being lazy for not caring about Swallow Me Whole or Blankets, to call them “bone-ignorant” — that’s just a bunch of horseshit. It’s an attempt by boring assholes to assign an overall meaning to a bunch of personal choices made by a group of people that those boring assholes don’t know anything about. On an individual level, I’ve heard a couple of people say they don’t want to read comics that focus on the mundanities of regular life, but I’m more often exposed to people who just like what they like because it’s what they fucking like….

I read a lot of different comics because I like comics, because I like to see as much contemporary stuff as possible. But I’m pretty sure I don’t deserve a prize for that, the same way I’m pretty sure that nobody else deserves a prize for only liking one type of thing in the first place. The world isn’t going to become a better place if everybody starts reading a wider variety of comics. Not going to happen. It might make the conventions more interesting, that’s about it.

I know you said you disagreed with Tucker there — I’m wondering if you could flesh out why a little. Do you think it is ignorant to refuse to try different kinds of comics? Is the point of criticism to some extent to tell people when they’re being bone-ignorant?

No, I don’t think it’s ignorant to refuse to try different kinds of comics. I think that’s healthy. I’ve always been a proponent of read what you like or read for the purposes you think important. The fact that anyone would NOT be a proponent of that seems pretty crazy to me. I have a brother who’s as smart as they come and every comic in his collection has either Namor, Black Bolt or the Badger in it. I’m not kidding for effect. That is his actual collection. It fits into a couple of beer cases and I think it’s a pretty perfect thing. Comics for him provide a certain kind of entertainment and he knows exactly what he wants out of them. Similarly, I like a certain kind of jazz more than others and prefer early 20th Century novels.

Two things, though.

First, where Tucker kind of irritated me there is that the question of ignorance was asked by me, not presumed by me, and I think he got some points there kind of beating me up on a position I don’t really have. It’s one that I recognize, especially as a first reaction, but not one I share.

Second, I think the ignorance isn’t in limiting one’s reading but in not recognizing that one’s reading is limited, in strongly dismissing things out of hand because they’re not your cup of tea.

I guess that could be the point of criticism to some extent, to call people names or to advocate for the expanding of horizons. It’s not really for me, not most days, but those seem like fine goals all said.

I know you’ve said at some points that in criticism you look especially for writers who deal specifically with the work at hand. I wonder if you could talk about what you mean by that.

One of my favorite writers about comics is Bob Levin, who is kind of a classic case of a guy who’s not always interested in dealing with the work in front of him. I’m very interested in a lot of different kinds of writing about comics. I do find useful writers that are engaged with the text, where it doesn’t seem like you could swap out any number of books and get roughly the same piece. Mostly that’s because I’m not a very strong reader, I don’t think I pick up on the nuances and complexities of a lot of works. So I admire that in others.

I don’t have the time to provide examples of works that are less engaged with the subject matter in front of them, but I think we know them when we see them: reviews that spend the majority of their time repeating general principles about a genre or creator, reviews where the reviewer speaks about themselves more than the work in question.

Could you point to a recent critical article you really disliked and talk briefly about why?

I didn’t like the Savage Critics roundtable on Wilson. I thought most of the opinions were inarticulately expressed, I didn’t understand at all some of the lines of reasoning like when Abhay Khosla brought up Art School Confidential like it should disqualify Clowes from speaking on – having a character speak on, even! – the movie business, and I was left with the overall impression that some of those guys really were just deep-down pissed about that Dark Knight crack.

I basically agree that saying, “Well, Clowes’ character shouldn’t talk about Dark Knight because Clowes was involved in a lousy movie,” seems ridiculous. I do have some sympathy with the irritation Abhay expresses. Which is, there’s a default stance in certain regions of lit comics land which is basically: “life sucks and people are awful.” Which I think is glib and overdone and tedious, a, and which, b, can be made even more irritating by the fact that the people promulgating it are, you know, fairly successful, and (what with various autobiographical elements thrown in) the result often looks like a lot of self-pity over not very much.

So…I’m wondering how strongly you would push back against that characterization of lit comics in general…and also whether you feel it is or is not ever appropriate to think about a creator’s biography in relation to his or her work in that way.

At this point I wouldn’t push back at all against the stance that says the default mode in lit comics land is basically “life sucks and people are awful” because it’s no longer an argument I take seriously. I don’t think it’s true by any reasonable measure and I’m done with entertaining the notion until someone presents the argument in a much more effective or compelling fashion than what always sounds to me like some angry, lonely, re-written Usenet post from 1997.

As for creator’s biographies, I don’t know that I’m the arbiter of what’s appropriate or not, and I’m not sure I understand the use of that word here. I think it’s fine to consider biography when looking at a work. Why not?

Could you talk about a recent critical article you liked?

I liked Jesse Hamm’s short piece on Frank Frazetta. I’m like most comics critics in that I’m poorly prepared to talk about art in that way, and I thought his piece had an admirably clean and straightforward quality to it.

And finally; your enthusiasm for the Jesse Hamm review has a lot to do it seems with the professional knowledge he brings to the discussion as an artist. Do you think that criticism by comics creators is especially worthwhile or useful in general? Do creators bring more insight to their criticism than most critics do?

First, I wouldn’t say “enthusiasm.” I liked the piece, Noah, but I don’t recall getting enthusiastic about it. I didn’t even bring it up until you asked. Also, I clearly stated I liked things in Jesse’s piece like the presentation and tone, which are just as important as the exercise of Jesse’s artistic knowledge in building that piece. You seem a bit over-concerned with pinpointing my passionate endorsements of these things that I like, and extrapolating some principle or set of principles to which I must logically adhere as a result of liking A, B or C. It really doesn’t work like that. I wish I were that disciplined and consistent.

As for the questions: I like criticism from comics creators when it’s good criticism. I don’t think criticism from comics creators has any special quality that makes it any better or worse than criticism generally. One thing that might get underestimated is that the average cartoonist spends way more time than the average writer-about-comics thinking about comics. I get to spend three hours a day with comics; someone like Seth may spend 8-10 hours a day working on them. So I think there’s an advantage that cartoonists have just from time sunk into thinking about the art form.

[On second thought Tom noted that Seth should probably be changed to “a working cartoonist.” He noted:”Seth probably spends most of his time on his illustration work, and I can’t really speak to anyone’s individual schedule.”]

There are trade-offs, too. I think a lot of creators have a hard time not letting their personal outlook on making art bleed into their critical perception of art. I think artists build pantheons for themselves in terms of making art and then are tempted to argue a bigger place for their idols in history because of that rooting interest. Things like that.
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Update: In a somewhat heated back and forth in comments, Tom expands on some of his remarks and questions my integrity, so scroll down if that sounds appealing.

Utilitarian Review 5/15/10

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On HU

We started the week off with Matthias Wivel’s new column titled DWYCK (in honor of Guru; Matthias has a lovely obit here.) This month’s column on HU focuses on the relationship between cartooning and classical art.

I sneered at the title of Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism. (Prompting Matthias to call me “asinine” in comics — welcome aboard Matthias!)

Suat reviews Dan Clowes’ Wilson.

Richard Cook reviewed Peter Milligan and James Romberger’s Bronx Kill. (James himself weighs in in comments.)

Old HU hand Tom Crippen returned for a guest post about writing criticism.

Vom Marlowe discussed comic character perfumes and the virtues of fandom.

And I digitized one of my old zines, titled “Superheroes I Have Known.

Utilitarians Elsewhere

At comixology I have an essay about pregnancy and homosexuality in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.

Ito seems to be suggesting that all men secretly want to — that the only thing preventing constant man-on-snail coupling are a few thin taboos which will warp and dissolve like cardboard before the smallest liquid spray of desire. This is, of course, the fever-dream behind the most alarmist kinds of homophobia; the terror, not so much that gays are recruiting, as that, with just a little prompting, men will embrace any excuse to abandon heterosexuality, and with it humanity. From a Freudian standpoint, you can see it as the combined fascination with and horror of the father; a desire for the power of the phallus which must be carefully regulated through totem and taboo if we are not to all slide into cannibalism and anarchy.

I review Pam Grier’s new memoir over at Splice Today.

Foxy: My Life in Three Acts certainly is affecting in parts. As the father of a six-year-old, I found Grier’s account of being raped at that age actually nauseating. Less somberly, Grier’s discussion of one of her visit’s to the gynecologist has to be one of the top gossip anecdotes of the year so far. In her account, Grier explains that the doctor discovered “cocaine residue around the cervix and in the vagina” and asked Grier if her lover was putting cocaine on his penis. “ Grier responds, “That’s a possibility … You know, I am dating Richard Pryor.”

Then she admits to the doctor that during oral sex her lips and tongue go numb because, apparently, Pryor did so much coke that it made his semen an opiate.

Other Links

Tom Crippen sneers wearily (and effectively) at John Constantine.

Dyspeptic Ouroborus: What am I doing? What are you doing?

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I was wondering about what people do when they practice criticism. Everyone here writes out their thoughts about comics, movies, music, etc. What are you doing when you do that?

What I do is to feel my way. Whatever I’m writing about, I want to write about it as if I had never seen the thing before. What is this thing you call “comic”? How could it ever have come to be? Why do people keep it in existence? And how did this particular example of “comic,” the one I’m holding, fluke into being? What can we tell about ourselves from its existence?

I guess at answers by keeping my eyes open and noticing everything (trying to, I mean), and I refine my guesses by comparing them with what I know of the world, including the people and industry that produced the item in question (the comic, movie, or whatever).

So I start out pretending to know nothing, then I pull in what I know or think I know. It’s quite a change of gears, and in either case it’s like I have to take myself by surprise, ambush my perceptions from a direction I don’t expect.

Always getting blindsided and feeling like a dope can get your adrenaline up, even if you’re just typing your thoughts about Civil War. But it can also leave you ragged. The “ah ha” moment come by often enough to keep you playing, but most often it’s like you’re trying to find your cold medicine in an ocean liner and the lights have gone out and the damn floor keeps moving.

Possibly somebody else might follow the same approach that I do, the same “dream it up/check it out” two-step, and that person might not feel at all stupid. Instead of “Everything I know is useless,” the person might think “I see the universe in a plum!” Instead of “I can’t possibly be right,” he’d think, “My flashes of perception are transformed and broadened by my sure knowledge of the world.” Which makes that hypothetical second person sound like a fatuous ass, but whatever. You don’t have to suffer to do good work.

And it’s very likely that other people follow quite a different method. The thing is, I don’t know anything at all about how other people write criticism. I’ve never studied the subject and never thought about it, beyond noticing that critics I like don’t necessarily supply opinions I agree with. (For instance, Pauline Kael and Citizen Kane’s alleged “dime-store Freud.”)

Anyway, how other people write criticism. It involves theory, right? As indicated above, I proceed by sensibility and fact-checking. My ideology (which I won’t try to define) is always there, but it sneaks in. I never feel oriented, never proceed from an overview, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to.

Anything but Capes: More Crime

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Bronx Kill
Writer: Peter Milligan
Artist: James Romberger

I learned two things from reading Bronx Kill.

1) In my previous post on crime comics, my definition of the genre was too narrow. Most crime comics tend to be about hard-boiled detectives, vigilantes, or dangerous heists. In other words, they’re typical male adventure stories. But there is another type of crime story: the missing loved one.  Like hard-boiled detective stories, the plot is based around a mystery – what happened to my missing wife/lover/child/etc. – but the mystery is much more personal for the protagonist, and the emotional impact of the crime is far greater. Missing loved one stories can sometimes function as vengeance fantasies, which could be seen as empowering. But more often than not they’re much bleaker stories where death and loss are inescapable, pain is all-consuming, and discovering the truth is actually far worse than not knowing. The most famous example of this sub-genre is The Vanishing, in which a man obsessively searches for his missing wife for three years, only to discover her terrible fate by sharing it.

Bronx Kill faithfully sticks to the missing loved one formula. The plot follows a novelist named Martin Keane, who wakes up one morning to discover that his wife is gone. Her disappearance has a strange connection to the murder of Martin’s grandfather and a rundown section of the Bronx riverfront named, obviously, the Bronx Kill. As the weeks go by, Martin’s sanity begins to slip, and he becomes increasingly irrational and violent until he finally stumbles upon the awful truth. And as these stories tend to go, the truth is far worse than the mystery.

Judged solely on its merits as a missing person mystery, the Bronx Kill is a decent comic. Milligan never strays far from genre conventions, but he knows how to pace a story and arrange the pieces of a plot so that the outcome isn’t obvious from page 1. Romberger’s art is functional and unassuming; it doesn’t add much to the comic but at least it doesn’t distract from the story either.

The one tedious aspect of the mystery is Milligan’s attempt to connect the main plot to a crime novel that Martin Keane is writing. The comic will occasionally be interrupted by a few pages of text about a murder in 19th century Ireland. Unfortunately, the novel is boring, and Milligan’s prose is often a chore to read. Rather than function as a thematic reflection of the main plot, the prose sections simply screw up the pacing.

2)  The other thing I learned from reading Bronx Kill is that writers are not manly. I’ll repeat for emphasis: WRITERS ARE NOT MANLY. Apparently, this is the great tragedy of being a writer. You can create entire worlds and populate them with fascinating characters who enrich people’s lives, but at the end of day you’re still an impotent wimp. Worse, you’re a wimp who has to be saved by your girlfriend after being threatened by a bum.

And then there are the daddy issues. God help the writer who has a father with a manly profession, like law enforcement. 50% of Bronx Kill is just Martin dealing with the fact that he can never live up to the expectations of his old man, a respected New York police detective. And while I’m trying to avoid being spoilerish, I can’t resist noting that Martin is cuckolded in an exceptionally emasculating manner.

To be fair, Milligan seems to know just how ridiculous it is for writers to constantly fret over their masculinity. Martin Keane may not be as tough as his father, but he eventually realizes that his dad is full of shit. And Martin is at least competent enough to solve the mystery of his missing wife (albeit only after a big clue falls conveniently into his lap).

But acknowledging the shortcomings of the masculine ideal isn’t the same thing as coming up with an alternative. And Milligan is still working within the confines of a male genre, so the climax of Bronx Kill is the same as the climax of most crime stories: fists, guns, and screaming. Nor are the wife’s motives of any real importance. This is yet another story that’s all about men dealing with their crappy fathers.

Bronx Kill is an uneven, occasionally engaging entry into an often overlooked sub-genre of crime, though a reader’s enjoyment of the comic is dependent on their tolerance for writers with daddy issues.

Not the Best

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Suat pointed me to the Comics Reporter, where Tom Spurgeon interviews Ben Schwartz about his new book Best American Comics Criticism.

I’m hoping to do a review of the book itself at some point in the medium term, so I don’t want to shoot my mouth off too much. But I did want to highlight this interesting exchange:

SPURGEON: You touch on Europe’s concurrent literary comics movement through a few piece, but the pieces that engage manga are limited to I think a single interview with Yoshihiro Tatsumi and I didn’t see anything that dealt with an on-line comic. Do you think that’s a weakness of the book? Was that about the kind of work or about the writing you encountered? How would you describe their omission to someone who really values those kinds of work and thinks they’re as much a part of the modern comics movement as anything? Is there something qualitatively different about the writing done on those works?

SCHWARTZ: It’s not an omission. It’s just not the book they want to read. Tatsumi is not there to represent manga, but gekiga, the Japanese version of lit comics. His choice to break with manga is as big as Eisner’s in splitting with the superheroes, so that’s why he’s in it. I’m going by his definition there. As for on-line comics, I never came across a piece or interview about them that stood out like that. Do you feel, between 2000-2008, that a great piece of writing was done on on-line lit comics that I missed? Lit comics and it’s post 2000 arrival in the mainstream lit world is what the book covers. I just didn’t find anything on them that relates to the book — or 2000-2008 Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, etc. So, it’s not a weakness of the book. It’s the point of the book. I’m a huge BPRD fan, but that’s not in here. Except for Pete Bagge on Ditko’s Spider-Man and John Hodgman on Kirby or Gerard Jones on Siegel and Shuster and the first wave of fans — not much.

Schwartz is clear about this in his introduction too — his book is focused specifically on the rise of literary comics between 2000-2008. That’s his topic. He has a strong narrative, focusing on the emergence of literary comics, and he chose pieces based on how well they fit into that narrative. The best piece of criticism ever may have been about manga, or on-line comics, or mainstream comics, or may have been written, for that matter, in 1968 — but none of those pieces are eligible to go in this book, because this book focuses on criticism about literary comics between 2000-2008.

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not a fan of the literary end of comics, as regular readers will know, but I have no objection to someone who is a fan putting together a book to cover the phenomena. It’s obviously a big deal over the last decade. I don’t think it’s unworthy of attention.

My one objection, though, is…well the title of the book. Here’s the cover.

If you’ll look closely, you’ll see it’s not called, “Literary Comics, Literary Criticism, 2000-2008.” Hell, it’s not even called, “Best American Comics Criticism, 2000-2008.” It’s called, and I quote, “Best American Comics Criticism.” Period. No dates. No caveats. Just “Best American Comics Criticism.”

Now, if you title a book “Best American Comics Criticism,” I think your readers are entitled to assume that it is a book comprising the best comics criticism written in america. Not the best comics criticism written about the comics you happen to think are important. Not the best comics criticism written between 2000-2008. Just the best american comics criticism. Because that’s what it says on the title, you know?

Of course, I understand how these things happen. Schwartz and/or Fanta wanted to create a book focusing on the lit comics revolution they care about, without having to think about manga or on-line comics or random comics criticism written 50 years ago by god knows who and lord knows who holds the rights. But they figured that a book called “Literary Comics, Literary Criticism, 2000-2008” would sound like it was created by a bunch of boring, insular stuffed shirts who rarely peer over the towering castle walls of the luxurious Fanta compound. So they figured, “you know, if we call this Best American Comics,” it’ll sound like all those other “Best American” books, and people will buy it because they like Best American things — and, what the hell, literary comics are the best anyway, and only the best people write about them, so it isn’t like we’re lying really.”

I mean, I don’t begrudge Schwartz and Fantagraphics trying to sell books. Capitalism is capitalism, and you do what you have to. But given Gary’s longstanding insistence that commercial crap is evil because it is commercial, and his further longstanding belief that literary comics are the antidote to said commercial crap, the fact that this valedictory love letter to all things Grothian is making its way into the world festooned with the most cynical brand of marketing doubletalk is pretty amusing. If one were as uncharitable as Gary can be about such things, you might even call it contemptible.

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Update: Speaking of marketing, Fanta apparently has a big 30-50% off sale on TCJ back issues. So check it out and maybe support the company that supports us (even if they occasionally regret it.)

Utilitarian Review 5/8/10

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On HU

This week on HU, Erica Friedman wrote her first column, in which she discussed whether or not feminine and lesbian perspectives in comics exist.

I highlighted some comments from the Fiore/Berlatsky grudge match.

Suat explained why the Unwritten doesn’t deserve an Eisner.

I discussed time and change in volume 3 of Ooku.

I reprinted a review of Lilli Carre’s The Lagoon.

Vom Marlowe looked at Bran Doll

Caro talked about how Anke Feuchtenberger writes the body.

And Suat provided an appendix of Feuchtenberger drawings.

Tomorrow we’ll have the first of Matthias Wivel’s columns — so be sure to click back!

Utilitarians Everywhere

Speaking of Matthias, he’s got a discussion of the Fumetto festival online at tcj.com.

Anyway, good art tends to thrive on the fringes, and Fumetto is as great as any showcase of the best contemporary comics have to offer. Amongst the highlights was an inventively curated exhibition of the work of Nadia Raviscioni, with focus on her new, autobiographically inflected fantasy, Vent frais, vent du matin, ten years on the making. Beautiful, funny and inventive work synthesizing big-nose cartooning and textural illustration in pages that alternate naturally between gag mode and oneiric suggestion, this promises to be a major book.

Also on tcj.com, I reviewed a really bad coffee table book about Wonder Woman.

Instead, we get a hodgepodge, mishmash Wonder Woman; a Wonder Woman thrashing about helplessly, but alas, not fetchingly, in the piss-golden strands of indifferent storytelling, sub-par artwork, nonchalant exploitation, and endless, grinding, remorseless continuity. Author Robert Greenberger [Update: with art Director Chris McDonnell] is a wonder himself, choosing illustrations by blindfolding himself and stumbling around DC’s offices after closing hours, while all the while cheerily and randomly retailing the intimate minutiae of idiotic, best-forgotten subplots.

At Splice Today I compare Shelby Lynne to of all things, death metal.

I’ve been obsessed with death metal recently. Decapitated, Disincarnate, Dismember, Deicide, Demilich and, of course Death; the best fucking band names in the world of music, and these are just the ones that start with “D.” I love that listening to death metal on an iPod is like collecting every word in the dictionary that could possibly be considered morbid and gross and putting them together almost at random. And yes, I’m sure there’s a band named “Morbid Gross” out there somewhere, and their singer sounds like he’s gargling knives and the music is like being bashed upside the head with a decaying goat tied to a spinning helicopter motor because that’s what death metal is, damn it. Just ask Carcass or Cancer or Cannibal Corpse or Kreator.

And at Madeloud I review the latest by nu-doom metallers Apostle of Solitude.

Other Links

Bert Stabler muses on faith, capitalism, and my recent fracas with R. Fiore.

Also in re said fracas, Charles Reece pointed me to this great essay about cultural and psychological darwinism.

And coffeeandink has a quietly but bracingly negative review of Natsume Ono’s Not Simple.

Fish without Bicycles: Feuchtenberger and the Distortion of Scopophilia

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Over in the comments to Erica’s introductory post, Robert Stanley Martin commented that the art of Amanda Vahamaki’s The Bun Field (the subject of the last Fish without Bicycles) doesn’t appeal to him. I’ve heard similar things recently from male friends about both Vahamaki and Anke Feuchtenberger, specifically W the Whore Makes Her Tracks. Although Feuchtenberger’s drawings are sharper than Vahamaki’s with much more contrast, they’re aesthetically related (maybe someone with more art knowledge can give me some vocabulary here), and there’s indeed something about this aesthetic that doesn’t appeal to a number of men I know. Not all the men of my acquaintance – the book was recommended to me by a man. But women seem to like it more. It’s not a scientific sample, but it’s good enough to trigger a blog post.

In the same comment, Robert also called out an objection to French Feminism, specifically Hélène Cixous, who is perhaps best known for coining the term écriture féminine – used by all the French Feminists to describe a kind of richly metaphorical, non-linear writing that “inscribes the female body,” playing off the Pythagorean table of opposites and trying to embody the elements associated conventionally in the West with the female half of the table.

Male Female
Odd Even
One Many
Right Left
Straight Crooked
Activity Passivity
Solid Fluid
Light Darkness
Square Oblong

 

In prose, this project often results in writing that is nearly impossible to parse; the (intentionally) less-than-comprehensible Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche by Luce Irigaray (whom Robert also has issues with) is the definitive case in point.

Feuchtenberger’s work, in contrast, strikes me as far more successfully accomplishing Cixous’ ambitions for “women’s writing”:

“A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity.”

Her work “inscribes the body” with a crystalline clarity that the prose experiments never quite master.

Given that, and the apparent frequency with which men dislike this style of art, does the reaction against the aesthetic imply that it alone constitutes something like an “écriture féminine” for comics, something that is inherently, if unconsciously, challenging to male readers and empowering for women? It’s not impossible, especially if you’re very Freudian, but I don’t think so: The shadowy, filtered aesthetic gives a surreal quality that makes room for Cixous’ metaphorical, non-linear écriture féminine, but the aesthetic in itself isn’t sufficient to make that happen. Although it’s common to see this type of aesthetic deployed in the service of metaphorical or non-linear graphic narratives — narratives which are always, somewhat condescendingly, called “dreamlike” — the aesthetic doesn’t mandate any particular content, and I’m hesitant to gender a visual style independent of what it represents.

I find Feuchtenberger’s book remarkably more “feminine” than Vahamaki’s, but the gendered perspective is not in the aesthetic so much as in the imagery. I would not describe The Bun Field in Cixous’ terms, whereas they seem precisely appropriate for W the Whore Makes Her Tracks, despite the surface similarities in aesthetics (and with no implication of intent). Whereas Vahamaki’s text deals with the experience and perception of older children of both genders (a topic often interesting to women but not exclusively so), the subject matter of W the Whore Makes Her Tracks is explicitly sexed: the perspective not (only) of a woman’s mind but of the female’s body.

There is something very much interior about this style of art, something dark and fluid and in keeping with the right side of Pythagoras’s table. It certainly makes sense aesthetically for Feuchtenberger’s narrative. The perspective is intimate – no wide angle here – and the light is dim. The landscape is clearly imagined rather than seen; it does not yield readily to the creation of a “mental map”, except metaphorically. It is immensely difficult to orient yourself in space and impossible to orient yourself in time, except very slightly in terms of relative time internally to the narrative (such as it is.) The use of one panel per page rather than a grid enhances this sense that the story’s movement through time is less important than the visual metaphor of the landscape. The narrative is almost entirely metaphorical, and the overall effect is, again, either of the surrealist mindscape or the imagined Other-world.

But these elements are only obliquely “feminine,” and insufficient to account for any immediate aesthetic reaction against this kind of drawing. It seems wrong to say that men have an unconscious reaction against metaphorical, dreamy, non-linear stories. (One of the men who objected said, “It’s not that I don’t like it really. It’s that it looks like it’s going to be a lot of work.”)

Although the aesthetic itself is not gendered, it would surely be difficult for a man — at least a heteronormatively gendered man — to “recognize” the imagery in the book as true to his experience, especially the more metaphorical imagery:

Feuchtenberger creates the contours of her landscape out of fragments of the female body during the sex act – but unlike most representations, the perspective imagines sex from the interior of the woman’s body:

 

Of course, men can certainly “parse” the imagery – all the typical Freudian visual metaphors for sex make appearances in the book: tunnels and trains, phallic-shaped anythings, orchid-like flowers…they’re all there, and they still mean the same thing.

These images are semiotically packed: as stand-alone panels their signification is already varied. The last image for example is simultaneously (most representationally) the view of a woman from above, a view of sex from inside the woman, and a view of birth from outside. It also carries narrative significance for the book’s foregrounded conceit about sexual objectification and the marked-ness of the female gender.

But that turned-around perspective resonates more with a woman’s experience of her body…

…than with a woman’s visual image of her body, whether from the mirror, photographs, or a sexual gaze.

So what can we conclude from this? Despite this sexual subject matter, the book is not erotic. Bart Beaty comments, in a discussion of Feuchtenberg’s earlier “W the Whore” in TCJ 233, that “even in her nakedness none of the images are particularly sexualized.” Although I don’t have the earlier book to compare, the statement is true for this book as well, even though W the Whore (the character) is not naked very much in this volume.

But why is it that these evocative sexual images don’t have an erotic effect?Of course, they’re not intended to have an erotic effect, because that would undermine the critique of objectification. But what is it about them that interferes? Beaty’s observation puts into perspective not only how much our ideas about what counts as “erotic” are shaped by artistic (aesthetic/dramatic) representations of sex, but how conditioned we are to perceive even our own sexuality from the external perspective of most of those representations: “sexualized imagery” generally is based on something you can see during sex, not on things that you feel. Watching sex on TV or seeing sexually provocative images in a comic or illustrated book doesn’t replicate the experience of sex, it replicates the experience of voyeurism. This is – or at least has the potential to be – an immensely objectifying construct for both men and women, making sex less of an experience and more of a performance. To no small extent, the immense anxiety over body image that many women suffer is connected to this distorted, externalized perspective — as Feuchtenberger’s narrative explicitly points out.

Beaty describes Feuchtenberg as “exploring the outer margins of the comics form with seemingly no interest in making concessions” and “casting the very project of comics storytelling into doubt,” but I think this is too narrow a vantage point to accurately discern what makes this work so distinct an artistic achievement. The conventions of comics storytelling are no more called into question than the conventions of films and books for how to represent stories of women’s erotic experience. Comics form is part of the same broader culture of representation, and it is illuminating to shift the emphasis away from limited questions of form to questions about the extent to which gendered – in this case, sexed – erotic experience informs and shapes perception in general.

It’s a bit of a truism that women find erotic fiction much more arousing than erotic images, and Feuchtenberger’s perspective throws some light on why this is: representing the “inside out” experience of feminine sexuality is, on the surface, much more difficult in art than it is in words. Prose is appealing – and representational art vastly limited – for capturing interior experience: mind, imagination, sensation. In prose, you can just describe the experience, whereas the visual artist has to find a way to bring non-visual sensation to mind through visual means. Resonating with Cixous’ challenge to women writers, Feuchtenberger’s images make clear that French Feminism is profoundly physical but not in the least bit scopophilic. (The French Feminist emphasis on physicality has resulted in charges of essentialism by a great many Anglo-American feminists, including Susan Gubar, whom Robert also didn’t much like). When Feuchtenberger does represent scopophilia it is very distorting:

or creepy, represented by a crowd of anonymous watchers (also visible in images 5 and 6 below). The watchers represent that “experience of voyeurism” discussed above, and stand symbolically in the narrative’s interior space for the ways women internalize the perspective of these collective, objectifying voyeurs.

To parse the literal strain of the narrative, recognizing the distorting effects of this scopophilia is “freeing” for W the Whore, but ultimately futile.

Despite this rather despairing narrative thread emphasizing the futility of écriture féminine, Feuchtenberger’s text in conversation with Cixous’ is “freeing”: it allows us to see the effects of a cluster of binaries between text and image, voyeur and participant, inside and outside, seeing and feeling, male and female. W the Whore Makes Her Tracks illuminates the cultural insistence that “the body” is what we see from the outside rather than what we imagine and experience from the inside, and it turns that insistence “inside out.”

The conventions of illustration and representational art insist that we think of Feuchtenberger’s vantage point as “metaphorical” and “dreamlike.” And yet, Feuchtenberger’s most significant achievement in the book is very direct: the reminder that there is no reason why what we find erotic should be based on the perspective of the voyeur, and that there is so much more to the body than what that voyeur can see. Although I think it definitely matters that this book was written by a woman, it seems like that insight applies equally well for men.