War in Pieces

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Petar Duric

The United States has a war canon. That’s a pretty uncontroversial statement. We can even populate this canon in a trivial way by just listing off war movies. American Sniper. Eye in the Sky. Zero Dark Thirty. The Green Zone. Saving Private Ryan. And the list goes on, with movies as well as written work from Tom Clancy to James Fenimore Cooper.

But there is not a whole lot of room in that canon for movies that make the audience really uncomfortable with war. Eye in the Sky is a major exception, but even that movie depicts war as the moral backdrop against which brave soldiers prove their dedication by making the difficult, but necessary decision to risk murdering a child. You know, to keep us safe
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Regardless, these movies, and many more, all depict war as the backdrop against which mere mortals become heroes. Almost always, they do this by demonstrating their masculine willingness to kill civilians (American Sniper, Eye in the Sky), or by demonstrating their masculine willingness to torture (Zero Dark Thirty). The Green Zone presents an exception in that Matt Damon spends the film invalidating the justification for going to war in Iraq. But it is still a story about a white guy demonstrating his heroism with the Middle East as the backdrop for his journey.

The American war canon is, therefore, largely designed to whet the audience’s appetite for war, as a system and an action. So what if you were to construct a war canon that dulled the audience’s war appetite, a war canon antithetical to the one we are saddled with now? Setting aside the fact that such war canons already exist in other nations, where would we start if we wanted to construct a new one?

I argue that the manga/anime (I discuss the anime) Attack on Titan, the comic Saga, and the webcomic Gone with the Blastwave form a solid base from which to start. Of the three, Attack on Titan is the most comprehensive and forcefully crafted, but all three depict war as a hellish landscape (metaphorically and literally) from which you escape only if you are lucky, whether you are a civilian or a combatant.
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The anime, Attack on Titan, provides an excellent position from which to start, as it directly confronts the subjects of trauma and class during wartime, and presents a direct challenge to the American notion of heroism in war. When substantiated by, and viewed in tandem with, Saga and Gone with the Blastwave, Attack on Titan forms the solid base for a new war canon that acknowledges war as a hellish landscape from which combatants and civilians alike escape only of they are lucky.

The most stark and obvious of the three is Gone with the Blastwave, which depicts a handful of soldiers navigating their way through a city that is so drenched in radioactive fallout that the soldiers only survive because they wear full-body protective gear and gas masks that obscure any identifying features. The only way to tell them apart as they traverse a gray, rubble-covered, otherwise featureless landscape is by tiny emblems on their helmets. In this way, the environment literally created and mirrored by war itself dehumanizes those involved, stripping them of their identities and forcing them to some disgusting lows to survive.

GWTB doesn’t even ennoble this struggle for survival with a reason for the war’s perpetuation. The faceless soldiers fight a meaningless conflict against equally faceless enemies, themselves having no ideology or allegiance accept to fight and to escape. Saga achieves the same fatalistic effect by relegating the origins of a galaxy-encompassing conflict to long-lost historical memory. The war goes on because those people over there shot me, so fuck them.

In this way, Saga’s depiction is equally bleak, despite its forcefully colorful artwork. The rationale for the persistence of this galaxy-spanning war is that it has always happened. An interplanetary system of violence naturally reproduces itself through hatred and trauma, and so the only response the average citizen can muster to the question, “Why do we fight?” is, “To win the war,” followed by a fatalistic shrug, “Meh…works for me.”

The conflict rages on, because fuck the enemy.

Of course, the central conceit at the heart of Saga is that two new parents from opposite sides of the conflict fall in love, and resolve to raise their child away from the war. The panel above represents the war as a literal barrier to parenthood, blocking the nascent parents’ path to safety, where they can raise their child. The whole thrust of the series is these parents, Alana and Marko, trying to escape the war, literally and figuratively, for the sake of their child. When they eventually find a safe place to settle down, away from combat, they are then faced with the demons they brought back with them. Alana is driven to narcotics in order to endure her trauma and the soul-crushing nature of the work she takes to make a living. Marko is haunted by the specter of his own history of violence, on and off the battlefield. In both cases, the parents are chased from the battlefield by demons that repeatedly threaten to endanger their family, as bodies and as a community. As their favorite author, Oswald Heist, notes in a kind and sagely voice, “In the end, nobody really escapes this thing.”

This truism makes Attack on Titan especially tragic, as the main character, Eren Jaeger, hinges his entire motivation on his desire for freedom. Eren lives in a society that is hemmed in by huge, 50-meter walls, which serve to protect the last vestiges of humanity from the Titans, bloodthirsty, man-eating giants. The Titans devour and crush humans, creating a literal embodiment for the way in which war figuratively devours and crushes humans. Eren becomes a soldier in order to slaughter the Titans and bring an end to the fear and captivity of living behind walls. He learns to use “omni-directional mobility gear,” designed with a grappling hook-and-gas power mechanism to allow humans to swing around vertical environments like Spiderman, enabling them to fight the Titans with some success. By any measure, these soldiers learn to move and fight in ways that are nigh superhuman. In the lead-up to Eren Jaeger’s first battle with the Titans, he and his fellow cadets talk trash to each other and boast about how they will beat the Titans back with ease. The bravado is so intoxicating that it is a genuine shock when Eren and his fellow cadets are almost immediately decimated by the Titans, eaten alive in a matter of minutes.

This turns out to be merely the beginning of the carnival funhouse of horrors that is the Battle of Trost District. A young woman tries to revive her clearly deceased sweetheart in the middle of an empty street. A central character wears a look of visceral shock as he stumbles around the city after watching his friends get eaten alive. A group of cadets cowers inside a building as the Titans roam outside, staring into the windows, while one calmly cleans a rifle and blows out the back of his head in front of them. And amidst all of this, vital officers and support personnel all lose the will to fight, leaving the majority of the cadets out in the cold against their monstrous adversaries. Where the arc starts with vibrant colors and blue skies, the main body of the arc paints the scenery in dull, muted grays, as the once cocky and macho cadets wear looks of fatalistic resignation. In short, this is not an environment that breeds heroes. It devours them whole.

So when one of the cadets, Jean Kirschtein, takes the lead, he makes ruthless decisions that prioritize the survival of the majority over heroism and nobility. As he watches a comrade get caught and eaten by Titans, he freezes in place, and when two more of his comrades heroically enter the fray to save the very same comrade, they get caught too. Jean can do nothing but watch his friends get devoured as he grows roots in a high place away from the Titans’ reach. That is, until he takes command and orders the remaining cadets to use the Titan feeding frenzy as a distraction in order to grapple past them to safety.

What follows is a high-octane, pell-mell sprint to safety through a mass of Titans that continue to swat and chomp Jean’s comrades, and he uses every death as an added distraction to aid his own flight and the flight of his remaining friends. Upon landing in a safe place, he kneels in shock and asks himself, “How many friend’s deaths did I use?” We never get an answer, but we do witness a later conversation between Jean and Marco Bodt, a talented and friendly comrade, who praises Jean’s ruthless decision. When Jean castigates himself for weakness, Marco says that he thinks the fact that Jean is not strong helps him appreciate how the weak feel in battle. Marco goes on to say that it is this “weakness” which led Jean to a decision that kept Marco, and many others, alive. The sweet, sensible, and affable Marco tells Jean that his outwardly ruthless and cowardly decision was actually the compassionate and brave response needed to save his friends.

But the escape that Jean engineered is only temporary and superficial. When the battle ends and the cadets are no longer in danger of outright death, they have to deal with the trauma of combat. A particularly illustrative scene shows Jean aiding in the triage and cleanup after the battle, and finding Marco’s body, cleaved in half as if by a giant maw, laid down in an isolated corner of the battlefield. Jean is visibly shaken and worn by the realization that the friend who praised his leadership and character suffered a lonely death at the hands of a monster, with no friends to aid him, or even witness his demise. It is a brutal and blunt reminder of the lingering effects of war.

However, the war lingers much further beyond the battlefield than the triage tent. Attack on Titan extensively demonstrates the effect the war against the Titans has on society, namely the class stratification aided and abetted by the military hierarchy. One scene has a member of the landed gentry, living near the center of human territory, far away from the danger of the Titans, attempting to brow-beat a high-ranking commander, Dot Pixys, into abandoning the perimeter towns to the Titans, instead pulling his forces back to protect the noble’s lands. While this effort fails, the landed gentry, the clergy, and the merchant class nonetheless form a powerful block that clearly benefits from a stratified society, with wealth clustering in the center of human territory, and the poor scattered about the fringes. This structure is aided by the military, which depends heavily on the patronage of the merchant class for its supplies and food. Moreover, military politics threaten to squander multiple strategic opportunities to fight back against the Titans, with the military police serving the interests of the merchants and the nobility by suggesting conservative strategies, which prioritize the wealth of that class. In the midst of all this, the military is the only way for the poor to access a comfortable life in the interior, with upward mobility by other means relegated to the dustbin of utopianism.

Guess where all the rich people live.

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples depict essentially the same scenario in Saga, except it is less symbolic and more concrete. Vaughan’s narrator, Hazel, goes on a lengthy aside to discuss the society in which her mother grew up, saying about military recruits, “Many of those who answered this call [for military service] did so out of a genuine sense of duty. Others were merely looking for adventure. Some were trying to escape a bad situation. Almost all of them were poor as shit.” When a poor man named Dengo kidnaps a royal heir of the Robot Kingdom, an ally of one of the warring sides, an intelligence operative tells the Prince that is the heir’s father, “If you’re lucky, he’s hiding. If you’re not, he’s trying to start a revolution. And trust me, that’s the last thing you poor bastards want. The whole point of having enemies abroad is getting to ignore the ones back home.” In these cases, and in Attack on Titan, constant warfare plays cover for class stratification, and the military serves to weaponize the poor against a foreign enemy in the interests of the political class and the wealthy.

Which brings us back to the original point of this piece, that being why these three works could form a fruitful basis for a new American war canon (in spite of the fact that two of the three works were not originally made by Americans). Saga and Attack on Titan both depict societies dominated and consumed by warfare, and GWTB mirrors this by crafting war into a literal, toxic environment against which the protagonists set themselves. In all three cases, the protagonists’ main concern and goal is survival, in the short and long term, actions can be judged as heroic only against that goal. In other words, all three works depict their protagonists struggling concretely and in the abstract against a totalizing militaristic system that presents itself as the main obstacle to their own safety and happiness. As Eren notes in a conversation with Dot Pixys, humankind has a common enemy in the Titans, and yet they still squabble over property and class. Ozymandias’ alien tentacle monster has descended from the sky, and humankind has decided to carry on as usual.

In all three works, participation in the war machine is a Pyrrhic venture at best, and a Sisyphean one at worst. In all three, the protagonists struggle against the totalizing militaristic system in which they live, as much as they do against, “the enemy”. Most importantly, in stark opposition to the predominant American war canon, all three aggressively ask the question, “Why do we fight?” and force the audience to acknowledge the unsettling, blindingly obvious answer, “I don’t know.”

That Time Law & Order Kinda Got It Right

Posted on July 13, 2016 by Jimmy Johnson

This post first appeared on cico3.
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Law & Order ran a simple formula. Roughly the first half of each episode followed a police investigation (order) while the latter half followed a prosecution (law). One frequent addition to this formula was adding in “ripped from the headlines” stories. This ensured that topical politics were commonly part of the franchise though normally covered only superficially and from a center-right perspective. Yet on occasion Law & Order put out an episode that really captures something sharp, perhaps unintentionally. One such episode is “Burn Baby Burn” which aired on 22 September 2000 and examines an ex-Black Panther who kills a cop in self defense.

“Burn Baby Burn” builds on public sentiment after the NYPD murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999 and acquittal of the cops who killed him earlier in 2000, followed by the NYPD killing ten more people, mostly Black and most notoriously Patrick Dorismond, prior to the episode’s airing. But the headline that most guided the episode was the killing of two cops in Georgia for which former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader and Black Panther Jamil Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown) was arrested and later convicted.

The episode opens with two young Black men finding a white cop shot dead in a hallway outside an apartment. The cop had accidentally gone to the wrong address as part of following up with a witness. Detectives Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin) and Lenny Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) arrive on scene to investigate. The apartment is rented to Selina Watts (Sandra Daley). Watts is a Black Muslim woman who works at an anti-eviction group in Harlem led by Lateef Miller (Clarence Williams III), an ex-Black Panther. Miller is suspected to be the shooter and is taken into police custody by Green at a mosque in Harlem after Friday prayers.

Green and Briscoe question Selina Watts

Miller and his lawyer Leon Chiles (Joe Morton) initially focus on how the police in general and the NYPD and dead officer specifically are racist, and hint they might be framing Miller (this is never explicitly accused). After Green and Briscoe find evidence linking Miller to the site of the shooting, Miller and Chiles switch tactics and present an affirmative defense where Miller killed the cop in self defense. They contextualize this in a long history of racist policing. In response Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterson) presents Miller as long advocating the killing of police and attributes the shooting to Miller’s supposed prejudice against white people. The jury finds Miller’s claim of self-defense convincing and acquits him of the murder charge.

The improbability of the result notwithstanding, this is an interesting and quite good Law & Order episode. Much of the time Black liberation and civil rights activists on the various Law & Order shows are portrayed as cartoonish hucksters, people interested in self-promotion whose advocacy for rights and liberation is at least in part disingenuous. “Burn Baby Burn” does not do this. The closest it comes to sloppy white caricatures of Black liberation is in an early scene right after Miller is arrested where he appears in court and shouts that because he is a political prisoner, the Geneva Conventions do not allow for the hearing. Either the writers did not know what the Geneva Conventions are or they wanted Miller to appear nonsensical. Miller’s quiet, measured narration (from Williams III’s truly terrific performance) throughout the rest of episode show the initial courtroom performance to be unrepresentative in a throw-away scene.

The episode lays out Black grievances against racist policing in depth exceedingly uncommon on Law & Order or any other police show, The Wire notwithstanding. After Miller and Chiles switch to the affirmative defense the judge holds a hearing to consider their request to introduce new evidence of the history of police racism. Miller and Chiles are shown partially obscured by many large boxes representing the evidence. The scene begins with the following exchange:

Judge: What evidence are you seeking to admit Mr. Chiles?

Chiles: Evidence of police violence against African-Americans: Abner Louima, the Amadou Diallo murder–

Assistant District Attorney Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon): The police in that case were acquitted.

Chiles: Heh. Not in my client’s neighborhood. The Michael Stewart murder, Eleanor Bumpurs, Rodney King in LA, the Fred Hampton assassination in Oakland [sic].

Chiles and Miller behind boxes of evidence of racist police brutality

Cop shows simply do not offer long, historical contexts for police racism. Just as importantly, the episode offers this alongside unambiguous portrayals of police racism and police brutality against Black people. In one example, a white cop points his gun at an older Black bartender and shouts, “If you’re lying to us I’m gonna kick your Black ass!” Det. Green confronts the cop outside afterwards.

Cop: Oh aren’t you a big shot? What are you playing Al Sharpton in front of the brothers?

Green: Hey man I’ll take you anytime. Anywhere.

Cop: Oh like we don’t know who’ll wind up all jammed up outta that. Certainly not the brother.

Green: You say ‘brother’ like that one more time and I swear to god I’mma stomp your ass into the pavement! [Emphases in original]

Cop threatens an elderly Black bartender

This is also perhaps the best character episode for Green. In the exchange above Green has demonstrably justified rage as a Black man against racism, something uncommon in cop shows. He later tells Lt. Van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson) that, “Lateef’s like a living legend, you know what that makes me.” Green is referring to what James Baldwin described in his 1967 essay, “Negroes Are Anti-semitic Because They’re Anti-white.” Baldwin writes, “We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder–on your head–to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other niggers.” Van Buren assures him, “Oh I know you’re not buying that.” Green kind of shrugs, as if he’s partially thinks this is true. Later in the episode this idea comes back when, after the initial case is not going well for the prosecution, Green says, “I didn’t come all this way to let this guy go.” The episode’s context suggests that “all this way” refers to Green working semiconsciously towards racist ends. Green is caught between being a Black man who would be targeted by the police as part of the general criminalization of Black people and being a cop, a position that does the targeting. This is true in all of Green’s episodes but it is virtually never acknowledged, much less explored.

One of the episode’s most powerful segments comes during Chiles’ questioning and then McCoy’s cross examination of Miller’s former Panther colleague Rolando August (Chuck Cooper). August lays out the history of police violence against the Panthers noting everything from surveillance to infiltration to disinformation to harassment to murder.

Chiles: What impact did these events have on you.

August: They left me pretty cynical about the police.

Chiles: Even after thirty years?

August: Not much has changed. You recruit a bunch of white, high school kids from up in New Paltz to come down and keep order in the hood. That’s how you end up with forty-one shots in some poor Black guy coming home from work.

McCoy tries to isolate Miller by asking why August had not been in touch with him in recent years.

McCoy: “Was that because you no longer wanted to associate with a person who was still committed to violence?”

August: “I promise you sir, his fear of cops is my fear of cops. And his anger is my anger. Every time a police siren pulls up behind me I still get a feeling in my gut they’re gonna pull over, and mess with me!”

McCoy: “Does that mean you could see yourself shooting a cop who came to your door?”

August: “It means I’m tired of being messed with.”

August tells McCoy he’s “tired of being messed with.”

Miller testifies to Chiles about the circumstances of the killing. McCoy’s cross examination consists mostly of gaslighting Miller. Miller asserts that he could see racism in the cop’s eyes and McCoy accuses Miller of something akin to that famous unicorn ‘reverse racism’. Miller, in tears, responds shouting, “It’s my life’s experience!”

Miller is cross examined by McCoy

Chiles then begins his closing argument.

I think you have a very good picture of what the world looks like to Lateef Miller; a man whose suspicions of the police were nurtured by the racism that existed and still exists in this country. A worldview shaped by the political foment of the sixties and then crystallized by current events; a never-ending list of African-Americans that have been attacked or murdered by white police officers.

The jury turns in its vote to acquit. Afterwards, McCoy chats with District Attorney Nora Lewin (Dianne Wiest).

Lewin: Don’t beat yourself up too badly over this one Jack.

McCoy: A guy shoots a New York City police officer in the line of duty and I can’t convict him.

Lewin: Enough of the jury identified with his fear of cops.

McCoy: Used to be fear of cops didn’t justify shooting them.

Lewin: Used to be a lot of things.

It’s worth noting again how uncommon all this is on U.S. television. I suspect the writers still intended to portray this as someone getting away with a murder they should not have. And the show still privileges the points of view of the police and prosecutors. Yet the episode offers context enough for any reasonable people to conclude, “Yes, he was right to be, as a Black person, afraid for his life from the police.” Lewin in the middle of the episode said that Chiles and Miller were “hitching [their] wagon to the anti-police sentiment in the city.” And the episode amply laid out the reasons for that sentiment.

The episode aired to over 18 million viewers initially, this during NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s reign of “broken windows” policing that was much lauded in the local and national media even with the temporarily increased scrutiny that came with Diallo’s murder. In today’s environment with an audience (including white people) significantly more skeptical of prisons and racist policing, thanks mostly to prison abolition groups and authors and more recently the #Blacklivesmatter movement, this episode might read differently than it did at the time. It might read more like it would have in 1968. Miller, a fictional ex-Black Panther, successfully used self-defense to justify his killing of the cop and this is presented alongside descriptions, portrayals and critiques of racist policing. This invokes the Black Panther Party itself which was, after all, originally called The Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

Kirby vs. Steranko! Silver Age Layout Wars!

Posted on July 12, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

When did the Silver Age of comics end and the Bronze Age begin? There’s no definite year, but the 1973 “SNAP!” of Gwen Stacy’s too-perfect neck in Amazing Spider-Man #121 is a contender. 1970 is a bigger year, with Jack Kirby’s move from Marvel to DC, plus the start of Neal Adams and Dennis O’Neil’s Green Lantern / Green Arrow. Steve Ditko left Marvel for Charlton in 1966, turning both Spider-Man and Doctor Strange over to new artists for the first time. Marvel veteran Bill Everett took on Doctor Strange with Strange Tales #147, but for me Strange Tales #154 is the sea-changing Silver-to-Bronze moment. It’s the first episode of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.E.I.L.D. that the recently hired Jim Steranko wrote, penciled, and inked in 1967.

Like other artists Marvel hired in the 60s, Steranko imitated Jack Kirby, first auditioning by inking two of his penciled layouts for a proto-S.H.E.I.L.D story, and then by adopting the Kirby-defined Marvel house style. Gil Kane, who started freelancing at Marvel in 1966, explained during a 1985 panel discussion at the Dallas Fantasy Fair:

“Jack’s point of view and philosophy of drawing became the governing philosophy of the entire publishing company and, beyond the publishing company, of the entire field…. They would get artists, regardless of whether they had done romance or anything else and they taught them the ABCs, which amounted to learning Jack Kirby…. Jack was like Holy Scripture and they simply had to follow him without deviation. That’s what was told to me, that’s what I had to do. It was how they taught everyone to reconcile all those opposing attitudes to one single master point of view.”

After passing his employment test, Steranko apprenticed by inking three of Kirby’s twelve-page Nick Fury episodes. Kirby had co-created the series with Lee in 1965, but after the inaugural Strange Tales #135, nearly a dozen different artists had worked on the title. Kirby also co-penciled the two issues leading up to Steranko’s run, which suggests that Steranko’s credited “illustrations,” “artwork,” “rendering” may include more than just inking. Kirby is credited only for “layouts,” and they certainly look like his. Issues #151-3 are a close match to Kirby’s first Nick Fury episode:

#135: Seven regular 3-row pages

(including three implied 3x2s),

three regular 2-row pages (including two implied and one actual 2×2),

and two full-page panels (including the opening splash).

#151: Ten regular 3-row pages (including four implied and two actual 3x2s), one regular 2-row page, one full-page panel (splash).

#152: Ten regular 3-row pages (including seven implied and two actual 3x2s) one regular 2-row page, one full-page panel (splash).

#153: Nine regular 3-row pages (including seven implied and one actual 3×2), two regular 2-row pages (one implied and one actual 2×2), one full-page panel (splash).

Kirby draws no irregular layouts, so panel heights are consistent on each page and, since three-quarters of the layouts are regular 3-row based, across a majority of pages too. Of the thirty-six 3-row based pages, twenty-six are also 3×2 (typically implied, occasionally actual). The percentage is higher in Kirby’s last two issues, with seventeen of nineteen regular 3x2s. All rows include either one, two, or three panels of equal width. When he does vary from 3-row layouts, he uses 2-rows instead, averaging two 2-row pages per issue. Each issue begins with a full-page splash panel and ends with a 3-panel row in a regular 3-row page. Excluding full-page panels, each issue includes between five and eight pages with a full-width panel; twice in one issue, two full-width panels appear on the same page. Kirby draws no full-height panels or sub-columns, so all reading is horizontal. All panels are also rectangular and framed by gutters. Kirby draws no insets or overlapping panels. The overall effect is lightly varied and highly orderly.

The Nick Fury layouts changed with Steranko’s first solo issue:

#154: Four regular 3-row pages (including one implied 3×2), three irregular 4-row pages, two full-page panels (including the opening splash), one irregular 2-row page, one regular 2×3, one mixed column-row page.

Only three of Steranko’s layouts appear in Kirby’s issues: two full-page panels and an implied 3×2. Like Kirby, Steranko favors regular rows, although not exclusively. Unlike Kirby, Steranko’s 3-row based layouts are a minority, comprising one-third rather than three-quarters of the total pages, and where slightly more than half of Kirby’s pages are 3×2 based, Steranko’s one implied regular 3×2 is the rarity.

Three of Steranko’s regular 3-row pages lightly modify Kirby by including three new elements. First, two rows are divided into four panels; Kirby’s rows never exceed three panels. Second, some panels are irregular, and so their widths vary within the same row; Kirby’s panels are always divided equally. Third, two full-width panels include insets, effectively creating a row of two irregular panels; Kirby draws no insets.

Six of Steranko’s layouts contradict Kirby completely: three irregular 4-rows;

a regular 2×3; an irregular 2-row; and a mixed column-row page. Although the final page features the first instance of vertical reading, the concluding two-panel sub-row echoes the regular 3-panel row that concludes each of Kirby’s issues too.

Despite the range of differences between Kirby’s #153 and Steranko’s #154, most of Steranko’s additions can be found in Kirby’s earlier work:

The Fantastic Four #1 (August 1961) includes irregular 4-row pages, regular 2x3s, rows of four panels, and rows of irregular panels. Fantastic Four #2 include the same variations, but 4-rows and 2x3s vanish afterwards.

With the exception of splash pages, The Incredible Hulk #1 (May 1962) is also entirely regular 3-row based, with only three pages that vary the format with irregular panels or a regular four-panel row.

By The Avengers #1 (September 1963) Kirby’s layouts are also almost entirely 3-row based, with no more than three panels per row, and only two rows of irregular panels; the one irregular 2-row implies a 3×3 grid.

The X-Men (September 1963), published simultaneously, has even fewer variations: a subdivided panel in a regular 3×2, and one row of two irregular panels.

The twelve pages of Kirby’s Captain America feature in Tales of Suspense #59 (November 1964) are even more rigid, containing only regular 3-row layouts, all but one implying a 3×2 grid.

The Nick Fury episode of Strange Tales #135 (August 1965), Kirby’s last new series for Marvel, is comparatively diverse. Becoming the Marvel house style seems to have required Kirby to regularize his layouts, presumably so they could be more easily imitated. Variation and innovation are not qualities easily taught, and they do not produce a unified style across titles.

Although Kirby appears to have curtailed his own style to create the Marvel house style, insets and columns are still rare in his early Marvel work too. Fantastic Four #3 does include one, partial inset with its own gutter, and #5 features a highly atypical 1×3 page—which Steranko echoes in his next Nick Fury issue with a three-column page of his own.

One of Kirby’s very first comic books, the eight-page “Cosmic Carson” in Science Comics #4 (May 1940), includes four sub-columns, but no page-height ones. The following year, Captain America #1 includes sub-columns too.

“Cosmic Carson” also shows Kirby’s early use of a regular 2-row with a top full-width panel; identical layouts appear in Strange Tales #s 135, 151, and 152 as well as Steranko’s later #157.

Overall, however, Kirby uses columns rarely, while for Steranko they would become part of his signature style. His next column concludes #160, then beginning with #166, at least one appears in nearly every issue. #166 includes two: a regular 1×2 and, more distinctively, an irregular 1×2 in which the first column is an unframed, full-height figure defining the panel edges of the second column.

#167 includes no columns—in part because of its seven full-page panels, including Steranko’s innovative fold-out “quadruple-page spread,” which also doubled the price of the issue from twelve cents to twenty-four.

#168 then includes three columned pages in a row: an irregular 1×2 with no panel divisions;

an irregular 1×2 with the first column divided into five regular panels; and a highly irregular 1×2 in which the unframed full-height figure overlaps with the three panels of the second column.

Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D then switched to its own independent title, and #1 featured another irregular 1×2 with an unframed, full-height figure.

#2 includes a lone column and a later half-column of insets on a full-page panel, as does #3, and #5, Steranko’s last, includes a new column layout of a regular 1×3 with only the middle column divided into six irregular panels.

Because Steranko fell behind schedule, another creative team filled-in #4, marking the beginning of the end for Steranko at Marvel. He would leave the following year, 1969, after objecting to Stan Lee’s editing of his work. Steranko’s penultimate issue, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D #3, bears little relationship to Kirby’s earlier layouts:

1: full-page splash panel

2-3: mixed column-row, a two-page panel with a column of letter-shaped panels

4: irregular 3-row with irregular panels

5: irregular 2-column with three irregular insets over the page-panel

6: irregular 3-row with two insets in the middle row and one inset in the bottom row

7: irregular 2-row with two full-width panels

8: mixed column-row, beginning with a full-width panel, followed by a nearly full-page panel with a two-panel column of insets

9: mixed column-row, an irregular 3-column of full-height columns, with a top row of four regular insets

10: regular 3-row with irregular panels

11: mixed column-row, an irregular 2-row with a two-panel column of insets over a full-width half page bottom column

12-13: two-page panel

14: irregular 3-row with irregular panels

15: irregular 3-row with irregular panels and one inset

16: mixed column-row, an irregular 3-row with a three-panel column of insets over a middle full-width panel

17: irregular 3-row with irregular panels and one inset

18: irregular 3-row with irregular panels

19: irregular 2-row with a column of text beside a nearly full-page panel

20: mixed column-row, an irregular 3-row with a sub-column of two insets

Although nine of the twenty pages are exclusively row-based, only one features rows of uniform height, and six additional pages include a mixture of rows and columns. The complexities are greater when also considering unframed and overlapping panels, but the contrast to Kirby’s last issue, published a year and a half earlier, is already stark:

1: Full-page splash panel

2: regular 3×2

3: regular 3-row with top full-width panel implying a 3×2

4: regular 3-row with middle full-width panel implying a 3×2

5: regular 2×2

6: regular 3-row with middle full-width panel implying a 3×2

7: regular 3-row with bottom full-width panel implying a 3×2

8: regular 3-row with bottom full-width panel implying a 3×2

9: regular 2-row with a top full-width panel implying a 2×2

10: regular 3-row with a bottom full-width panel implying a 3×2

11: regular 3-row with a bottom full-width panel implying a 3×2

12: regular 3-row

Kirby built the Marvel house style on a 3×2 grid and punctuated it with an occasional 2×2. After both Kirby and Steranko left Marvel, Kirby’s flexible page schemes would give way to a norm of irregular layouts, fluctuating between 2-, 3-, and 4-rows, with an open base pattern.

Kirby’s Silver Age layouts were gone.

Fecund Horror Is Here

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

My ebook on exploitation film, Fecund Horror, is now available from Amazon.

Here’s an exciting description:

Terrror! Blood! Torture! Insect sex zombie apocalypse! In Hollywood films the guy gets the girl and the monster is defeated, which is boring and unsatisfying, since who wants Tom Cruise to win, anyway? But in exploitation films, the monster gets the girl, the guy gets torn limb from limb, and the whole project is really more satisfying for everyone. This 49K collection of essays covers horror films, slashers, rape/revenge, women-in-prison and other mean, twisted, exploitation atrocities which chew up your humanity and your gender and spit it out as a staggering chitinous abomination. Freud, feminism, the male gaze, and a hideous ichor from beyond the stars engage in a struggle to the death as the world dissolves in filth and abasement.

Among the films discussed are The Thing, Cronenberg’s Shivers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Under the Skin, I Spit on Your Grave, The Stendahl Syndrome, The Last House on the Left, Martyrs, Hostel, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Caged, The Big Doll House, Death Proof, and Switchblade Sisters.

“So, while you may not have seen everymovie discussed, his enthusiasm may make you want to. At a minimum, itmakes the essays a delight to read even if they’re not about yourfavorite exploitation sub-genre. — Kate Skow, Splice Today”

Hope some of the regular readers here will feel inspired to read it…and maybe to leave a comment on Amazon if you like it (comments are important for sales, I’m told.)

I’ve published the introduction to the book (about Carpenter’s Halloween) on Patreon for subscribers…so if you want a sneak peek, you can become a patron, and help contribute to more such ebooks in the future too.

Utilitarian Review 7/8/16

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

News

My exploitation film ebook Fecund Horror is out on Monday, July 11! Kate Skow wrote a review! If you can’t, can’t wait, you can contibute to my Patreon at $3/mo and get it earlier!

Or! if you pledge $2/mo, you can see my essay on Under the Skin and alien domesticity right away, rather than waiting for the ebook to come out.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Sina on Robert Kirby.

James Romberger on how Huston’s The Dead is more sexist than the Joyce story.

Chris Gavaler wonders whether Warhol’s Monroe paintings are comic strips.

Jimmy Johnson on the colonial subtext of animal attack movies like The Shallows.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about Dallas and the myth that good guys with guns will stop gun violence.

At Random Nerds I wrote about Wonder Woman’s sword and feminine superpowers.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—the fascism of Mr. Smith goes to Washington (beginning a series on political films)

—Ross Douthat and how anti-elitism stumbles into anti-Semitism.

At the Reader a short review of Castle Freak, grindcore true believers.

Other Links

Amanda Ann Klein and Kristen Warner argue (contra me) that pop culture writers need to read and talk to academics.

Great interview with Mariame Kaba, prison abolitionist.

Kelly Lawler on why Tom Hiddleston fans aren’t happy with him dating Taylor Swift.

Die, Shark, Die

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Jimmy Johnson

This post originally ran on CiCO3

Jaume Coller-Serra’s new film The Shallows follows Blake Lively in a test of wills against a great white shark. Apart from an unintentionally farcical and groan-inducing last act, it’s a pretty well shot and acted story. It is one of countless stories about wild beasts threatening the lives of humans. Most of these are, from a statistical or scientific perspective, no less ridiculous than The Shallows‘ silly conclusion. These stories almost always involve absurd science. And towards what end that bad science is deployed tells us a lot, as does the selection of which killer animals are portrayed.

In The Shallows Blake Lively’s character is out surfing when she happens upon a whale carcass. A shark near the carcass sees her as a potential meal and decides to have a bite to eat. Over the next day the shark ignores the massive quantity of food available with the whale carcass while stalking Lively, and during that time eats two and a half other people.

All this is exceedingly unlikely. The shark ate somewhere around 200kg of people over those two days which is, using the most conservative estimates, around two months of food for an adult great white (other studies suggest this is closer to six months worth of soylent green). So the shark ignores (or leaves, it’s not clear) a massive whale carcass which could feed a host of sharks for months and instead goes after a bunch of swimmers and surfers that don’t have the yummy (for sharks) smell of rotting meat. And it does so in order to overeat by quite a bit! For contrast in the infamous 1916 New Jersey shark attacks a shark ate a maximum of .3 people over twelve days (though it killed four).

This is common in these kinds of stories. For example the T-Rex in Jurassic Park should be done eating after she eats the company stooge. That’s (probably) enough calories for a T-Rex for two days. That it keeps hunting seems pretty unlikely. The shark in Jaws eats even more beyond its likely diet. And it is exactly this voraciousness that identifies the creatures as antagonists in these stories.

There is a species power dynamic in play obscured by this. My back of the envelope math says humans comprise about .0000042% of deaths in fatal human-shark encounters. No big surprise here. It’s common enough knowledge that humans kill exponentially more sharks than the other way around. And given the challenge in imagining a shark’s point of view, it isn’t all that surprising that humans with almost no exceptions tell the stories of those .0000042% of fatalities rather than the 99.9999958% percent of them. Sure, the Discovery Channel trots out the annual shark slaughter statistics during “Shark Week” but they’re invariably mixed with stories of shark attacks lending a false narrative symmetry even as the statistical symmetry is denied. Man-eating bear, wolf, lion, snake and other such stories all follow this same pattern.

This is how power generally works, both between our species and others and inside our own species. The oppressive relationship is inverted no matter what the science says. So despite all populations using and selling drugs at nearly identical rates, it is Black people who are portrayed as the drug-dealing criminals thus positioning them not as victims of racist mass incarceration, but as justifications for the oppressive system. Despite Israel dispossessing Palestinians on a daily basis, it is Palestinians who are portrayed as the violent aggressors, much as natives are commonly portrayed in US Western stories. The dynamic is analogous to how the tv show Zoo tells of a worldwide animal revolt that threatens humanity while we are in the midst of an anthropocene/capitalocene mass extinction event. The bad science of insatiable predators is deployed to justiy the bad practice of exterminating them.

The inter- and intra-species analogies are, of course, imperfect even as the racist narratives invoke a certain dehumanization. But the racialized component of which killer animal stories are told tells us just as much about inverted narratives of threat and power. For some animals do kill, and even kill and eat, vast numbers of people every year. Blake Lively will likely never star in one of these stories.

Nile crocodiles kill somewhere between several hundred and several thousand people every year in Africa throughout their range. We don’t even have sound estimates because relatively few resources are dedicated to tracking African deaths. Crocodiles eat people on a daily basis because people have to spend so much time in crocodile habitats with minimal protection. This isn’t a problem of reptilian predation, this is a problem of capitalism and colonialism. The stories told of crocodiles eating humans are instead like Lake Placid, a fun film that is science fiction both because of the vast numbers of people consumed and because of which people are consumed. Out of some three dozens feature length films about killer crocodiles and alligators, I know of only one that takes place in Africa, 2006’s Primeval, a racist story of white people in constant danger from both Burundians and the crocodile.

Though not eating us, snakes kill tens of thousands of people every year, predominantly in South and Southeast Asia (and to a lesser extent in Africa and parts of South America). These incidents are tied to poor labor and housing conditions which are, again, a problem of racism and colonialism. The Anaconda tetralogy and Snakes on a Plane do not tell these stories.

The most deadly animal, though, by a wide margin, is the mosquito. Mosquito-related deaths which number in the hundreds of thousands every year despite malaria being, for the most part, easily treatable were resources dedicated to the task.

These killer animal stories are not told on screen because the victims aren’t fully human in the eyes of those choosing what stories get produced. And those stories with fully human victims like The Shallows invariably invert the material world predator-prey relationship. The exceptions are exceedingly rare and even then are told with circumscribed or regressive politics. The Ghost and the Darkness and Prey for example, are pro-colonialism stories of animals preying on humans based upon the man-eating lions of Tsavo. The body count is attributed to lions and not the colonial railroad project (a dam in Prey‘s version) that brought people into the lions’ habitat in the first place. But telling such stories can illuminate vast political economic problems and indicts the systems that produce the death tolls. Capitalism and colonialism continually produce horror stories of animals killing people with body counts beyond all but apocalyptic imaginations. Jaws simply cannot compete.

Is Marilyn Monroe a Character in a Comic Strip?

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

I’ve been obsessed with Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe series lately. When I found out the poster art for Night of the Living Dead isn’t copyrighted, I made this Warhol-inspired knock-off:

Warhol painted his series in 1962, as a kind of requiem for Monroe after her August death. Because it is a grid of nine squares–a classic 3×3 comics panel layout–it looks a lot like a comic strip to me. And so a part of me wants to say it is a comic strip. Consider Scott McCloud’s definition: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

Clearly the nine images are “juxtaposed.” And that would be true even if the images were all identical, as in my variation on Warhol’s source photo (like I said, obsessed):

But it’s the “deliberate sequence” part that gives me pause. I’m not exactly sure what “deliberate” means here (can a sequence be non-deliberate? even if the process of composition is random, the resulting arrangement becomes deliberate once finalized by the artist), but “sequence” is fairly clear. Most dictionary definitions include the phrase “a specific order.”

So the individual images form a specific path for the viewer to follow. That implies there are wrong paths–or at least paths that don’t produce the aesthetic result that following the intended sequence will produce. I don’t think that’s true of Warhol’s painting or my two variants though. Their arrangements are aesthetically deliberate, but your eye needn’t begin, for example, in the top right corner and proceed to the right in a Z-pattern in order to best appreciate all those juxtaposed Marilylns and Zombie Girls. If you instead focused first on the center square and then scanned up and to the left or any other direction, the aesthetic content doesn’t change. If order doesn’t matter, then the arrangement must not be a sequence. And if comics are sequences, Warhol’s painting isn’t one.

The term “image” is a problem too. Comics have to have more than one. As I mentioned in a previous blog, that’s why the French flag is not a comic. Though it is composed of three parts (a blue rectangle, a white rectangle, and a red rectangle), we read it as a single, unified image:

So is Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe a sequence of images or just a single, flag-like image? Is it made of nine juxtaposed images (and so then possibly a comic), or is it one image made up of nine parts (and so definitely not a comic). It’s hard to say since there’s not always a clear distinction between a visual element that is an “image” and a visual element that is “part of an image.”

This variation on Roy Lichtenstein’s “Crying Girl” is, I think, clearly a single image–even though it is made of the identical component image flipped and juxtaposed four times:

Would it be a comic if I divided the four quarters with frames and gutters? I doubt it. What about images that don’t repeat any of their parts? Consider this entirely abstract composition I’ve ingeniously titled “39 Lines”:

It consists of thirty-nine visual elements, but I would say it is only one image. No individual lines or clusters of lines produce a response that’s separate from the composition as a whole. Now consider this:

It is also composed of thirty-nine visual elements–the same thirty-nine that make up its sibling image. But it is also a sentence, one quoted from comics artists Will Eisner. Unlike “39 Lines,” “WORDS ARE IMAGES” also has linguistic meaning. It is composed of three, separable linguistic units. The first eleven lines form the word “WORDS,” not because of some intrinsic qualities of the lines themselves, but because of an English-reading viewer perceiving that particular conceptual unit. That linguistic property is so obvious that it’s easy to forget that words are also always rendered images–which was Eisner’s point.

But, unlike the French flag or the Warhols, sequence does matter. The lines that compose the sentence “WORDS ARE IMAGES” must be perceived in a very specific order for the linguistic meaning to occur. That’s why McCloud includes the adjective “pictorial” in his definition, to distinguish comics from sequences of lines that produce only letters, words, sentences, etc.

“39 Lines,” in contrast, has no specific order for taking in its constituent visual elements. Your eye is free to enter the image at any spot and then wander at will. There’s no sequence that produces additional meaning. The same is true of “26 Parts”:

It’s just lines arranged to form an abstract image. But consider those same twenty-six visual elements in this arrangement:

Your eye is still free to enter and wander freely, but the arrangement of the same ink (or pixels) now conveys an additional meaning. It represents a face. That’s another kind of conceptual unit. The arrangement produces a meaning that is not an intrinsic quality of its individual parts. Like “39 Lines” and “26 Parts,” it’s a single, unified image made of individual parts, but, like “WORDS ARE IMAGES,” the face-lines produce an additional aesthetic response, one that’s pictorial rather than linguistic. The difference is that linguistic images must be perceived in a specific order, and pictorial images do not.

So pictorially, my next Warhol variation isn’t a sequence either:

Your eye is once again free to wander through the nine faces in any order. But this time, some of the visual elements are letters, and if you read them in the right order, they spell “SUPERHERO.” That’s a sequence. Since those letters are also part of juxtaposed pictorial images, this 3×3 grid fits McCloud’s definition of a comic, while all of the previous examples do not.

But is “SUPERHERO” a comic when expanded with wallpaper-like repetition?

The repetition isn’t itself the problem. I could create a wallpaper-like expansion of this three-panel arrangement of Rodin’s “The Thinker” and still produce sequential meaning:

Unlike my earlier layout of the identically distorted Monroe photo, the left-to-right repetition of this identical image can suggest a continuation of behavior through increments of time. It’s ambiguous how much time is passing (seconds, hours, months, etc.), but the figure can be understood as a living figure who is holding a pose as he sits and thinks. That’s not the case with this next Warhol-esque variation on “Crying Girl.”

Like the repeating Thinker figure, the repeating Crying Girl figure doesn’t change her pose. But because the pose is transitory and unmotivated (why and for how long would someone look askance like that, and the laws of physics would have something to say about those suspended teardrops), time does not seem to be passing. The face, like Warhol’s Monroe, does change colors–but those seem to be changes to the image of the woman, not the woman herself. This is not a left-to-right sequential representation of time passing. It is a sequence though. Unlike Warhol’s Monroe, the changes follow a specific order: ROYGBIV. Which produces a pun: “ROY” and “Roy.” So is that sequential element enough to call that 3×3 grid a comic?

What about this one?

Here, finally, is something that strikes me unequivocally as a comic. It’s a sequence of an incrementally changing image. In addition to color changes, twenty-six parts of “Crying Girl” move from their face-signifying positions to a non-pictorial clump in the bottom half of the final frame. It tells a kind of story. Which I think is what McCloud means by “deliberate sequence.” He wants comics to be narratives.

That produces another problem. While the vast majority of comics are narratives, some are not. Check out Andrei Molotiu’s Abstract Comics and you’ll find meaningfully juxtaposed images that include no words, no people, nothing but non-pictorial lines:

Some of the pages in Abstract Comics, however, appear no more sequential than Warhol. Which could mean some of them aren’t actually comics. They might just be subdivided images. Many are even subdivided into panels and gutters, but do they use those visual elements as panels and gutters? Do they produce a sequence?

Part of the confusion is the non-pictorial content. Visual storytelling typically involves drawings of settings and characters. But it doesn’t have to. Consider this four-image sequence:

There’s no setting but a white background, and there’s no character in any traditional sense. But it does tell a kind of “story.” The first abstract image appears to change into each of the subsequent abstract images. Even though the image doesn’t represent anything else, it does represent itself. According to Bill Blackbeard’s definition, comics are “about recurrent, identified characters, told in successive drawings.” The cluster of black shapes is both identifiable and recurrent. That makes it a kind of “character,” one able even to undergo a change or “character arc.”

I can apply the same narrative to Monroe:

In this case, the first image, because it’s a photo of Monroe, does represent something other than itself. But that’s not true of the rest of the sequence. Each change is a change to the photo only. They don’t represent changes to Monroe herself. She’s not the character of this abstract, four-panel comic. Her photo is. The same is true of my previous “Crying Girl” variations. Even though they’re representative images of a woman, the woman is not the character of the narrative. Her representation is.

Incremental changes to a repeated visual element, however, don’t guarantee a story. These chessboard permutations strike me as a single image made up of many, evolving but ultimately dependent parts:

There’s no specific order to the parts, and so there’s no story, and so it’s not a comic. Characters, especially abstract characters, need a sequence in order to become characters. That’s true of images that have linguistic rather than pictorial meaning too. Even words, because they’re images, can be visual characters in their own abstract but sequential plots:

So is the Monroe image in Warhol’s painting a “character” too? It undergoes similarly abstract changes, but those changes still aren’t sequential. Neither Monroe nor the repeated representations of Monroe are segments in a visual story.

Which is all a very long way of saying: No, Warhol’s painting is not a comic.

It just looks like one.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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