Flirting With Your Breakfast

Posted on November 5, 2015 by mouse

Totally Normal Advertisement.

We just can’t have nice things. I might eventually wrangle this column about Being a Furry back toward actual comics criticism, but journalists continue to report on furries to you, the humans of the species, as if you are all idiots. A mission of this column is to talk to you, the elusive normal-human-reading-this-who-has-no-unsavory-sex-hangups-about-Scar-from-the-Lion King, as if you are an adult. So I have to drag my Furry Scold cap out of its hatbox in the attic and once again scurry to countermand whatever half-baked copy some under-paid keyboard jockey hastily scooped under their deadline like litter under the bed. This week’s furry-punching detritus comes from Gawker Media, under the subheading Weird Internet. The headline reads “Tony the Tiger Can’t Tweet Without Furries Begging Him for Sex.”

Kellogg’s introduced a new social media campaign to promote their cereal Frosted Flakes and they gave their cartoon Tiger brand ambassador, Tony, a Twitter account. Tony treats us to a bunch of mock cartoon Instagram photos with candid moments of him just living his best life in various states of undress, all thanks to the energizing boost of a balanced breakfast. It is impossible to calculate exactly what is going on in the fevered, unbalanced minds of the advertising executives behind this campaign, but the implicit message in these images is “let’s make him a hunky dad. let’s make him conspicuously hot.”

Furries naturally took notice. Some even wondered if this giant corporation had even identified us as a demographic. Reading through Tony’s feed is a truly bewildering experience. But tons of us have responded to Tony’s new public platform with variations on *ahem* “I wouldn’t mind a little of that tiger in MY tank.” Twitter user @crucifalex picked up a few of these mentions and their tweet mentioning the “hidden gems of Twitter: the replies to Tony the Tiger’s tweets from furries” took off. The Gawker article basically attempted to alley-oop off of its popularity.

So considering that headline, I’m going to raise my paws flat to either side of my face to get your attention, and I am going to look you in the eye. We all know, of course, that Tony the Tiger is not a real entity that can tweet. “The Social Media Intern Who Tweets Under the Guise of Tony the Tiger Can’t Tweet Without Furries Begging Him or Her for Sex.” is far too long. Tony the Tiger, as a fictional brand mascot, has no agency or inner life and cannot tweet. We’ve gotten that far. But can you follow me further through this conceptual bramble bush? You know that we’re fucking joking, right?

Most of the replies highlighted are clearly jokes, antagonistically arch jokes at that. The author gets a giggle out of the term “cummies” which is used in furry slang that represents a satirical tone when joking about sexuality. The post isn’t openly hostile to furries, however the whole endeavor approaches furry twitter with a very self-conscious credulity. If readers are in on the joke, then no harm done. If they have a prejudice against us as deviant freaks, they can have a nice reassuring chuckle at our expense. The tittering is in part a balm for the readers’ normalcy (heterosexuality), as the coded imagery in the Tony tweets are clearly homosexual, and the jeering horny furry tweets come mostly from homosexuals. Furry culture is often coded as gay, and is as a result a safe outlet for coded anti-gay prejudice. “It sure is not a normal thing to engage with a brand in a way that the brand didn’t anticipate! How naughty! I engage with brands in a healthy way, which is not what these folk are doing.”

I mean of course we would fuck Tony, right? Maybe until we remember he’s a brand mascot, and as such is REAAAAALLY high maintenance. But a part of some of this engagement in an aggressively sexual way is a response to that style of marketing. By making uncomfortable overtures we are registering our discomfort with a cereal for children flirting with us. To see the eyes of clever marketers sizing us up as a potential demographic, possibly maybe. “Nerd” “culture” is a giantic tchotske factory (blocks my Captain Benjamin Sisko Xmas ornament from your view, wildly gesticulating). There’s a transgender beer for heaven’s sake. Many of us don’t want our culture chewed up and spit back out and sold to us when we have enough trouble maintaining an internal community economy. Inappropriate flattery is our sincerest form of mockery.

We see you.

‘Playing On’ Shakespeare

Posted on November 4, 2015 by Philip Smith

Edwin Landseer,(1848)

I spend a lot of time thinking about Shakespeare.

One of the reasons I spend a lot of time thinking about Shakespeare is that, like everything I enjoy, Shakespeare, or, to be more precise, the things we do with Shakespeare, often pulls me in conflicting directions. Attending a performance of Elizabethan or Jacobean theatre brings me genuine pleasure. At the same time, however, I also recognise that the cult of Shakespeare arose in concert with the colonial agenda of the British Empire. Today Shakespeare remains the archetypal dead white man who continues to dominate the literary canon and the reverence with which he is routinely treated, I believe, is less to do with his literary brilliance and more to do with the repackaging of the colonial myth of Western artistic dominance. I love watching Shakespeare, but I also love seeing people thumb their nose at Shakespeare in clever ways.

I do not like to see Shakespeare reduced. When I encounter Shakespeare adaptations or reinterpretations in the wild I recognise that the fact that I am familiar with something does not give me any authority over how it is used. Shakespeare belongs to everyone equally and I have no right to tell someone else what to do with his works. At the same time, I do not like the idea that Shakespeare needs to be reinvented, particularly when the reinvention occurs on the ground of ‘accessibility’.

One of the reasons why making Shakespeare ‘accessible’ irks me is that I feel it demeans the audience. Last year, while living in Indonesia, I taught A Midsummer Night’s Dream to both of my English Literature classes. Most of my students were born and raised in Jakarta and spoke Indonesian (or in a small minority of cases Dutch or Chinese) at home. They were all in their mid-teens. We spent several months working our way through the play. We stomped our way around the classroom to understand meter, we wrote messages to each other in early modern English, we performed short scenes, memorised monologues, watched sections from films, summarised readings of the play, wrote essays, flew to Singapore to watch Shakespeare’s Globe perform and, finally, performed a full version of the play as our annual school production. (Over the course of the year I made sure we challenged the myth of Shakespeare as being without peer, and I also made sure that female authors and writers of colour were well-represented in the rest of the syllabus.)

They loved it. In fact, they loved Dream more than any other text we looked at. They struggled with the language but they were up to the challenge. I was extremely proud of all they accomplished. The experience left me convinced that my love of Shakespeare was transmissible, and that teenagers are often a lot smarter than some would give them credit for.

It is because of this experience that I can empathise with those such as James Shapiro, Bitter Gertrude, or the numerous scholars on the listservs to which I subscribe, who have voiced concerns over the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On project to ‘translate’ all of Shakespeare’s plays (at least, all which are available and currently considered a part of the canon) into modern English. The grounds for this reinvention, it seems, is to make the works more readily understandable for actors and audiences. The idea that Shakespeare needs to be ‘translated’ conjures for me images of audiences who want to feel cultured, but also don’t want to have to work as hard as my students and I did.

My objections are, of course, horribly presentist. Those who, like me, hold that OFS are giving in to lazy audiences tend to see this as a departure from the ways in which we have always approached Shakespeare. We are wrong. There is good reason to assume that, during his lifetime and beyond, Shakespeare’s plays have been subject to revision, rewriting, and shifting fashions in theatre based upon audience tastes. Until the early eighteenth century the idea of textual fidelity as we understand it today simply did not exist. Companies frequently added to, edited, and completely reinvented Shakespeare’s plays. During a large part of its performance history, King Lear, for example, was played with a happy ending. Our modern way of giving Shakespeare (even with Elizabethan dress on the stage at The Globe and with original pronunciation) is not a pure transmission from the Elizabethan stage, but the product of editing, shifting fashions in performance, convention, and guesswork. So much of Elizabethan and Jacobean stagecraft has been lost to history that even when we deliberately seek to present ‘authentic’ Shakespeare today, we are at a loss as to what, exactly, that would look like.

Historically Shakespeare’s editors have altered the plays in ways which would seem somewhat daring, if not profane, today. To cite just a few pertinent examples, in 1807 James Bowlder published the first volume of The Family Shakespeare which omitted and rewrote words and passages which, in Bowlder’s view, were unsuitable for young minds. In the same year Charles and Mary Lamb published Tales from Shakespeare which used very little language from Shakespeare and, similarly, was aimed at children. Significantly, both of these volumes were instrumental in disseminating Shakespeare and elevating him to his modern standing. Modernising and rewriting Shakespeare in print, clearly, is not a new phenomena. In modern times Shakespeare-inspired films such as Scotland PA, and the No Fear Shakespeare study texts have continued to be popular. Indeed, the possibility of adapting Shakespeare has given rise to texts which seek to challenge the myth of Anglophone cultural dominance perpetuated through Shakespeare. Suzuki Tadashi’s King Lear, for example, forges an intercultural space which draws liberally upon both Shakespeare and Asian theatrical traditions without feeling the need to adhere completely to either. We might also note Inoue Hidenori’s overtly irreverent pop adaptations of Shakespeare or the intercultural texts Kathkali King Lear or Welcome Msomi’s uMabatha.

I would argue, then, that the question is not why we (I) do not like to see Shakespeare being ‘translated’ to suit audience tastes, but why now? What makes OFS’s departure from modern conventions around Shakespeare particularly repugnant? When we consider all that has been done to Shakespeare over the centuries we have had his works, the idea that a particular fashion of modern performance needs to be protected is, if anything, an aberration. After centuries of reinvention, we can safely assume that Shakespeare and Shakespeare adaptation is not a zero sum game.

If my apparently ill-founded annoyance at the idea of Shakespeare being adapted to suit audience tastes is to hold any legitimacy then perhaps the question I need to ask, then, is not if we should rewrite Shakespeare, but why? OFS write ‘[i]t is our hope and expectation that these translations will inspire audience members to return to Shakespeare’s original words, ideally with even greater understanding and enjoyment’ and as I read these words, even with history against me, I cannot help but feel uncomfortable. Will these modern translations be a bridge to the ‘original’? Or will they, for certain audience members, be a substitute? Will OFS deprive audiences of the pleasure and sense of accomplishment my tenth and eleventh graders felt? Given that Shakespeare’s plots were, themselves, almost entirely borrowed, if we take away his language then what we are left with is not what he created but what he preserved. OFS’s Play On project might, then, be effectively described using Dennis Kennedy’s eminently applicable term ‘Shakespeare without Shakespeare’; the final version of the Play On plays may be infused with the plots that made Shakespeare famous but empty of his language to the point that they constitute little more than an extended Shakespeare reference. To rid Shakespeare of Shakespeare for the sake of ‘understanding and enjoyment’, I still think, is an insult to one’s audience.

Marvelous Two-in-One Team-Up

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

Some of my favorite comics growing up were the oddball superhero pairings Marvel would throw together: Spider-Man and Scarlet Witch, Thing and Black Widow, Thing and, well, Thing (that was an odd issue). So I’m delighted that the marvels of the publishing universe have thrown together my two most anticipated new books with the same fall 2015 release: Lesley Wheeler’s Radioland (Barrow Street Press) and my own On the Origin of Superheroes (University of Iowa Press).

Obviously I’m anticipating my own book. Publishing means organizing readings, reviews, interviews, and every other kind of publicity. But it’s the poetry collection Radioland that I’ve actually looked forward to, that I can now sit back with a pre-release copy in my lap and sincerely admire. I already read it in multiple manuscript print-outs, but there’s nothing quite like the authoritative aura of a glossy-covered book fresh from its publisher’s packaging envelope. I’ve read all of Wheeler’s previous books (her scholarly Voicing American Poetry and The Poetics of Enclosure, and her collections Heathen, Heterotopia, and The Receptions and Other Tales), but Radioland is my current favorite. And not just because I teared up when I opened to the surprise dedication:

for Chris Gavaler

and other good fathers

I should acknowledge that I’m Wheeler’s spouse. We’re professors in the same English department too, so our professional identities team up constantly. But you never know which student or non-departmental colleague is going to give a startled blink at the discovery of our two-in-one domestic life. Aside from our three-sentence wedding invitation, we’ve officially collaborated on only one scholarly article (about poet Marianne Moore) and two children (a first-year in college and a first-year in high school). But our co-editing is invaluable.

After dutifully reading my weekly superhero blog, Wheeler saw me through the surprisingly complex process of rewriting and reorganizing the pre-1938 material into a cohesive manuscript. When an Iowa acquisition editor read the blog and contacted me to ask if I wanted to convert it into a book, I said yes. Obviously. But it was Wheeler who suffered the first drafts of each reconceived chapter, helping me rethink, rework and eventually refine. As I explain in the penultimate paragraph:

>Lesley Wheeler has no superhero scholarship I can cite either, but she’s seen me through each step of creation, critiquing everything from the first harebrained draft of that KKK essay to the thorniest midtransformations of this manuscript.

I dedicated my first romantic suspense novel to her (Pretend I’m Not Here is even set in the Virgin Islands where we honeymooned). But On the Origin of Superheroes is dedicated to John Gavaler, my father. He read comics as a kid in the 40s, fueling my comic book reading in the 70s. John is also one of the “other good fathers” of Lesley’s book dedication, a category that, when you read the collection you’ll see, doesn’t include her own. He’s more like the supervillain Nightmare haunting her sleep—no matter how many times she vanquishes him in real life. But her poetic superpowers more than make up for his failings when Radioland single-handedly realigns the universe into a better shape. “Gods and fathers,” her final poem concludes, “rarely signal / but rock vibrates /sympathetically. What else / could it say? Echo / a kind of love . . .”

Wheeler and I also appear together in last year’s superhero poetry collection Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, but our most superheroic successes are our kids. Oddly, that includes standing on the crumbling planet of their childhood and watching them blast away in private rockets. Madeleine is now adventuring in the distant solar system of Connecticut, and Cameron, while still homebound, is tearing Hulk-like through his adolescent wardrobe, poised to make the same single-bound leap into adulthood.

Meanwhile, we have our books. Not as brilliant and hilarious as flesh-and-blood children, but they are easier to read and to hand to a friend.

The Tragedy of Adrian Tomine

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

The tragedy of Killing and Dying isn’t that the collection is focused on hopeless men and their supportive spouses. Rather, it resides in the fact that Adrian Tomine hasn’t produced a comic of any real significance in years; perhaps over a decade. He is, for all intents and purposes, living on past glories, now precariously holding on to that faint promise of a youth filled with sketches drawn from an affable and compassionate realism.

Kim O’Connor is correct in suggesting that Killing and Dying doesn’t showcase a ‘complete’ writer. If an artist finds himself utterly incapable of inhabiting and recreating the life of women he might, with the years, drift away from such representations. This seems to be the case with Tomine even if there are notable exceptions to this in his oeuvre. He was, of course, drawing long form nominally women-centric stories since as early as 1996 in “Dylan & Donovan” (from Optic Nerve #3), a typically morose but trivial tale of two sisters navigating sibling rivalry and a comic convention.

The early Optic Nerves were characterized by workmanlike tales of loneliness, ennui, and urban paranoia. The influence of Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes was worn proudly, and the author’s calling card in those days seemed to be melancholic depictions of young love and relationship dramas, a topic which he revisited with some variations in 2007’s Shortcomings; here mildly enlivened by a foray into the sexual proclivities and hang-ups of Asian American males.

The high point from that period was probably “Hawaiian Getaway” from Optic Nerve #6 (1999), a story which refines and assembles Tomine’s themes into a satisfying whole.

Is Hilary Chan from that story a recognizable female human being or the kind of misanthrope (with a sex-change) so beloved of the alternative cartoonists of the late 80s and 90s? I’d say probably a bit of both. The Asian parental nagging she experiences is familiar but entirely plausible, as is Hilary’s reticence. This study of loneliness seemed groundbreaking for the young cartoonist at the time but now appears somewhat less epiphanic. Nor does it now carry the weight of expectation, for where others artists of his generation appear to have settled back into the comfortable settee of the cartooning gerontocracy, Tomine has largely remained in the background—a “known” artist who really doesn’t have any central work to his name. This despite being regularly included in various “best of” and bestseller lists over the years.

“Hawaiian Getaway” is filled with the juxtapositions which inform so much of Tomine’s work. Chan is a phone operator for a mail-order clothing company who finds it nearly impossible to open up in physical interactions. When fired from her job in the opening pages of the comic, she turns to telephones and other electronic devices to vent her frustrations and translate-record moments of intimacy. Almost all of her aggression, sadness, and distress is communicated through one end of a receiver. The phone device is obvious without being distracting; the ending filled with a kind of foreboding hopefulness; the significance of the story’s title hinted at but with a touch of ambiguity; a layered portrait of a person with an affinity for solitude which is at odds with the demands of modern human existence.

The merits of this story present a harsh reminder of the variable and uncertain trajectory of art and an artist’s career, especially when compared to the dry and ineffectual works which fill the pages of Killing and Dying.

The title story of the new collection is composed on repetitive 4×5-panel grids to add a quick fire rhythm to the exchanges between the members of the family, and to mimic the repartee of a stand-up comic. The symmetry of the layout of these pages is meant to create connection and meaning between both the home and the stage—to forge tension between the unspoken tragedy of a mother’s sickness and death, and the act of dying on stage; the stunted family conversations alternating with acerbic comedic one-lines.

The daughter (Jesse) “kills it” on stage during her amateur comedy night just as (one assumes) cancer and chemo is killing her mother. The absent (presumed dead) mother of the latter half of the story is played alongside Jesse’s own failings at improv. At every point we see the husband-father’s failings, his helplessness in the face of both physical and artistic ruination, a portrait of the rigidity of old age and the tenacity of youth (and in some respects women). The half-figure drawings which populate the panels seem alienated from reality, as if watched from a height like the intentionally gridded floor plan which closes the story. The approach is playful yet academic; the effect devoid of emotion.

As in the first story of the collection, “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture'”, Tomine’s rather enervated formalism seems to drain rather than instill meaning. In “Hortisculpture”, the gentle use of comic strip formalism is used to evoke the familiarity of the daily punchline but here tied with the bitterness of failure or perhaps existence in general (an approach widely used in Daniel Clowes’ Wilson). The vignettes are slight and might be seen as Tomine’s attempt at kind of levity which he is hardly known for or at least poorly practiced at. The artist’s benevolent attitude towards his characters, his kindly yet pensive hand when etching out their lives, is a poor fit for the strictures of the “weekly” strip. It has neither the harsh abruptness of Clowes’ Wilson (which I account a failure) or the tender simplicity of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. The figures remain unrealized ciphers of no consequence filling us with neither disgust or compassion.

It should be noted that the overriding failure of most of the dramas in Killing and Dying is as much that of narrative finesse as that of plot. The barest of plot informs the best story from this collection, yet in leaving completely his comfort zone of insistent dialogue, Tomine manages to achieve something which stands out quite starkly.

“Translated from the Japanese” begins with the opening page of a journal written in Japanese script, the translation of which marks the first page of Tomine’s illustrated story. We see this journal again turned faced down on an airplane tray 3 pages into the story proper, a ballpoint pen resting on its back cover, this information apprising us that the entry we are reading was written very close to the moment. The impact and meaning of the narrator’s emotions and actions are thrust on to seeming abstractions and inconsequential objects which drift into her line of sight: her anxiety is connected to a storage cabin; her solitary meditation to a lock on a lavatory door; an ambiguous and conflicted reunion to two symbolic bags on a carousel.

This story of only 8 pages is broken up at three points by long establishing shots of the Tokyo skyline, a tranquil depiction of commercial airliner in flight, and a nightscape of San Francisco—each being the narrator’s act of envisioning her “location from a long distance…something that always gave [her] a feeling of vitality.” It is a story which begins in the brightness of day before taking flight and descending into a glowing darkness; an entire life transcribed and bounded by moments of equanimity yet otherwise filled with the drabness of passage and taciturn resilience. The flavor of Tomine’s text gives the distinct feeling of translation which is further advanced by the evident culture of restraint. The lack of overt trickery serves him as well here as it once did in “Hawaiian Getaway.” The convulsions of black humor may be consuming Tomine’s writerly senses at present (at least on the basis of this collection) but it his mastery of discretion which has always served him best.

As for the rest of the collection, the less said about “Amber Sweet” and “Go Owls” the better. The former reads like a parody of the genre (see Kim’s review) and the latter is as edifying as watching someone dig the dirt from under his toe nails. It is in “Go Owls” that Tomine manages to mimic most closely the sheer poverty of imagination in so much modern American literary fiction.

It seems abundantly clear why many of these lesser stories exist. If one surveys Tomine’s oeuvre from the 90s to the late 2000s, it is not difficult to see the author settling into a kind of comfortable formula: the cultural arguments which reveal deeper insecurities; the young people mingling and touching in assorted diners, bedrooms, and bars. In terms of number of pages drawn, Tomine’s comic output is minuscule for a career which has spanned two decades. Yet the collective effect of viewing these works as a whole is a kind of worn familiarity. Killing and Dying seems both an acknowledgement of his age and a decisive attempt to get out of this rut even if it is largely a miscarriage.

________

Further reading

(1) A long and detailed interview with Adrian Tomine at Guernica magazine conducted by Grace Bello.

(2) And another interview at Salon with Scott Timberg.

Utilitarian Review 10/31/15

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Wonder Woman News

Joan Ormrod reviewed my book at Cinema Journal (mostly behind paywall, but she likes it better than Lepore’s, which doesn’t happen that much!)

On HU

Patrick Carland on Zen Pencils and an orgy of hate.

Ng Suat Tong on Ed Brubaker’s pallid noir, The Fade Out.

Chris Gavaler on Supergirl vs the Marvel cinematic universe.

Me on the Before Watchmen debacle.

mouse says, yep, furry is about sex.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from the end of 1949, including EC.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the New Republic I wrote about how we need to do away with the term Human trafficking.

At the Guardian I wrote about why a Die Hard origin story is dumb.

At the LA Times I said you should let your kids watch screens already.

At Playboy I got to write about Carpenter’s The Thing and male paranoia about dissolving into orifice-laden ichor.

At the new website the Establishment, I wrote about

—racism and killing women in Narcos.

—Ex Machina, the Perfect Guy, and how it’s more highbrow to have women who aren’t real.

At Splice Today I wrote that

—everyone wants to kill baby Hitler.

—Rubio may be hurt by racism.

—someone other than journalists should moderate debates.

Other Links

Josephine at Tits and Sass on Zola, social media and sex work horror stories.

Arthur Chu on the huge mess around the gaming panels at SXSW.

Daniel Larison on the GOP debates.

Emma Paling on Wikipedia’s hostility to women.

Katherine St. Asaph on how it’s okay to compare Joanna Newsome to other female performers.

“So is that a Sex Thing?” Furries and Smut (NSFW)

Posted on October 29, 2015 by mouse

This article is about sexuality, and contains sexually explicit images below. It is certainly NSFW. Please take care.

“So………. is that a sex thing, or?” my friend/coworker asked me some weeks ago, after reading my twitter feed closely enough and asking me about furries. As an answer I gave a furtive “UMMMMM. NOT REALLY.”

And since then I’ve been working on a “well, SURE.”

Sure it’s a sex thing. I can’t profess to write about furry culture without writing about it. Journalists can still safely grant themselves license to straight up make. shit. up. about us and our sexual lives without challenge, and here I am with a safe platform to speak my truth. Describing the exact affinity for cartoons is kind of beneath any of us at this point. We’re perverts. We watch too many cartoons. What do you want? Furries make cartoon animal bodies and mash them together with other cartoon animal bodies, and we mash together our human bodies too. We live outside our fungible ape forms on the internet and inside a fursuit, a swamp of our own breath and sweat. The fursuit, on the outside, is our insides, the cartoon inhabiting us. Furry sexuality is the flat null space between bugs bunny’s legs and the sensual line of ink distinguishing his tits. The life as a cartoon animal is one that wrestles with the anxieties of, and the frolicking joys of, inhabiting a human body, and that often centers the experience of fucking, or the experience of being fucked.

My history of my being a furry is my history of being in this body. Of wanting to survive cartoonish giant hammer blows. Living through the gulf of decades between Hare-Um Scare-Um and Space Jam and whatever that new cartoon is out now because if you’re strong enough, and you’re a cartoon, you can postpone death indefinitely as long as someone is watching. My body and mind existing in the Bosch-ian nightmare that is to be gazed upon and of inflicting a terrible gaze. Horniness making my teeth grow long and my bones to twist and my fur to come out. Overcoming the overwhelming paroxysmic fits of ticklishness that have previously made intimate touch feel like an attack. Not flinching from my femininity or my vulnerability. Feeling cute and safe in my little matchbox bed.

Enjoy some Ice Cream.
A piece I drew for Mice Making Love, a zine I made with my spouse.

Assigning value to furry smut categorically is a tedious process. It’s not on the whole a panacea against patriarchal repression or the feast of the Maenads with cat ears and a clip-on tail. Every furry is responsible for the continuum of choices in making and engaging with sexual material, as well as the atmosphere of the community as a whole. Though the images we repeat and the language we use to describe them can telegraph clues about attitudes, there is no linear elevation of tastes or kink that acts as a signpost for a person’s character. No threshold under which one is just vanilla enough to be beneath suspicion of making bad choices or taking advantage of someone. Which isn’t to say “hands off, judge not.” I think furries on the whole are reluctant to be self-critical of our permissive culture. Our reticence to call out has shielded some nasty behavior and unsocial attitudes among furs with a high enough reputation drawing porn in the community. Online spaces are especially fraught because the relationships people build, especially when they are young and emotionally isolated like I was, have lasting impact. Finding a community and gaining status when that experience is not connected to your offline life can be chaotic, radicalizing. I don’t know if I can count myself as lucky that I stumbled upon the Vixen Controlled Library and found that *enough* before I ever heard of ch*n sites. There was AOL furry roleplay before that. Yiiikes. Through furry I at least gained the advantage of encountering people whose sexual experience was radically, bewilderingly differently than mine. And I got to be friends with them.

Covers for Associated Student Bodies by Lance Rund and Chris McKinley.
Art by the great furry illustrator Terrie Smith.

On 90s furry Internet, I was able to uncover illustrations related to a furry comic called Associated Student Bodies by Lance Rund and Chris McKinley. A punchline by a generation of young furries much savvier and with more resources for articulating their weirdness than us greymuzzles. It became the great furry comic cliche. Lonely sensitive homo goes to college, everyone is gay and they all fuck, no one uses condoms and everything is lovely. I knew of this comic’s existence as a young fur but didn’t read it until I was older, collected in a nice hardcover edition. The comic means more to me as the previously unavailable prize, the sense of NEEDING to read it more powerful than whenever I actually got around to like… reading it. Squinting at the tempestuous, loathesome storm of my teenage years like a ship in a bottle now.

A common motif in furry porn is public sex. We are teleported to the locker room, the bar, the dancefloor, the back alley adjecent to the bar or dancefloor. The furry subjects in these dioramas are enthusiastically rutting while an audience telegraphs their titillation. Maybe one bystander performs a perfunctory gesture of being scandalized while the peanut gallery winks to the audience. The stigma of sex, of being seen as wanting sex, is flattened and erased in a cartoon environment. We watch ourselves watching each other, and in our inhibition we are free from the stigma of being watched. But isn’t it annoying when there’s a line of bottoms on the bar with tails up when you’re just trying to get a drink!

By my friend Artdecade.
You can see more at his website Artdecade Monthly or buy his gay furry visual novel game Willy Bear Beach.

I imagine a world where Waller, Whorley and Vances’ Omaha the Cat Dancer is more respected and influential in comics than R. Crumb’s body of work. They both radically sexualize funny animals. Omaha (notably after Kate Whorley’s involvement) is a sensitive portrayal of many people’s journeys as sexual beings, mostly women. It treats gay and bisexual people like people in a time when it is disadvantageous to do so (that time extends to present day). It’s described as a soap opera. It’s pulp is not the pulp like the paper that it’s printed on, that steals our breath. It is pulp like the orange that nourishes us. Omaha the Cat Dancer shows sex as a negotiation between two partners. Fritz the Cat is Crumb’s dick. His elegantly hatched dick. Fritz is killed when Crumb’s dick finds him boring, or when Scrutiny, the evil stepsister of Muse, becomes like… a total drag, man. The legacy of Crumb’s radically sexual funny animal art is as a cloak for more boring, insubstantial fuck art by people who don’t care about funny animals. The demographic division between furry comics and proper independent comics has been delineated as much by the sensibilities of comix doods who venerate Crumb yet ignore Omaha as the genesis of the CBLDF. As much as furry culture coalescing as a distinct identity that circulates material exclusively among our own community. In our timidity to address the centering of sexuality in our artistic community, we have found ourselves at the bottom of the hierarchy of prestige as folk who make. alternative. comics.

As a person who makes comics, or webcomics, a niche market, I’ve made the deliberate decision to make a niche niche furry comic. No, a niche niche niche furry comic with porn in it. When I express myself the calculations of getting the dollars of non-gay, gender-conforming people who don’t like cartoon animals because they’ve been tainted by furries like me aren’t that much of a factor in what ends up on my pages. It is possible, and it is an aspiration for me as an artist to depict, the love we give to each others’ bodies as affirming the inherent dignity and loveliness that inhabits our soft hairless ape shells. That the debasedness of sex as represented in art high and low, and our wrestling with what it means to us as creatures who have to live with each other, is illusory. To be a filthy animal is a fact of life. To be a filthy cartoon animal is a gift. We are squashed by ten thousand ACME anvils and do not bleed, only pool in a swamp of ink and reconstitute, with a constellation of dizzied stars and bells and tweeting birds circling our noggins. Our bodies are ink on paper. Just ideas at the mercy of a nib. You see us, you turn the page and you wash your hands.

Who Watches Them Piss on the Watchmen?

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This piece first ran at Slate.
_____

Even by the wretched standards of the entertainment industry, superhero comics are known for their dreadful labor practices. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, famously sold the rights to the character to DC Comics for $130, and spent the latter part of their lives, and virtually all their money, fighting unsuccessfully to regain control of him. Similarly, Jack Kirby, the artist who co-created almost the entire roster of Marvel characters, was systematically stiffed by the company whose fortunes he made. Though most of the heroes in the Avengers film were Kirby creations, for example, his estate won’t receive a dime of the film’s $1 billion (and counting) in box office earnings.

In keeping with this depressing tradition, DC will, next week, begin releasing new comics based on Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s seminal 1986-87 series. Before Watchmen will include not one, not two, but seven new limited series, written and drawn by some of DC’s most popular creators, including Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke, Amanda Conner, and Joe Kubert. Watchmen demonstrated to a mainstream audience that comics could be art, and became one of the most popular and critically acclaimed comics of the last 25 years. Up to now, it had also been one of the most sacrosanct. For over two decades, DC has resisted the urge to publish new material featuring Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, or the Comedian.

You’ll notice the list of writers and artists involved with Before Watchmen includes neither Moore nor Gibbons. This is not unusual in superhero comics. Most work for DC and Marvel is created on a work-for-hire basis. Thus, the original creator of, say, Walrus Man will usually go into a deal with one of the big two comics publishers knowing that the Titan of Tusk will become the company’s property—his aquatic adventures to be written and drawn by whomever the corporate overlords deem fit.

What is unusual, though, is the vehemence with which the original creator has denounced Before Watchmen. It’s true that back in the ’80s, DC tried to get Moore and Gibbons on board for a sequel. That didn’t pan out, though, and in the ensuing decades, Moore’s relationship with DC has soured, to put it mildly. Among (many) other things, Moore became increasingly angry with the company over the handling of the rights to Watchmen itself. In the original contract, DC had written a provision stating that the comic and the characters would revert to Moore and Gibbons once the series went out of print. Moore had assumed that, as with all comics in those pre-“graphic novel” days, this would happen within a few years. Instead, of course, Watchmen was a massive hit—so massive that the trade paperback collection of Watchmen has been in constant publication, and probably always will be.

Gibbons has largely seemed content with DC’s perpetual ownership of Watchmen. Moore, though, is a different story. He refused to accept recompense for the 2009 Watchmen film, which he referred to (sight unseen) as “more regurgitated worms.” As for Before Watchmen, he made his position painfully clear in an interview: “I don’t want money. What I want is for this not to happen.”

Watchmen‘s canonical status, combined with Moore’s dissent, has led to an unusually vocal backlash against DC. Chris Roberson, a sometime DC writer, decided to stop accepting work from the company because of its record on creator’s rights. Cartoonist Roger Langridge, who wrote the acclaimed series Thor: The Mighty Avenger for Marvel, followed suit, explaining that “Marvel and DC are turning out to be quite problematic from an ethical point of view to continue working with.” And Bergen Street Comics in Brooklyn will not be carrying the Before Watchmen titles; in explanation, Bergen Street’s manager, the comics critic Tucker Stone, said, “This is just gross, and we don’t want to be part of this one.”

It would be nice to say that Roberson, Langridge, and Stone are at the forefront of an all-out revolt against DC and Marvel’s business practices. That’s not really the case, though. For the most part, DC and Marvel’s writers and artists are still writing and arting as they always have; comics stores are still carrying the comics; and fans are still buying. Yes, if you go stumbling about in the comments of mainstream comics blogs (here for instance), you’ll find some outrage on Moore’s behalf. But you’ll also find a significant number of folks who don’t care, and who are actively irritated that anyone thinks that maybe they should care: As one fan said, “Alan Moore is a very arrogant guy that really hasn’t done anything relevant in a very long time and should really spend more time creating and less being a cranky old guy in a pub.”

J. Michael Straczynski, one of the writers on Before Watchmen, summed things up for many when he asked rhetorically, “Did Alan Moore get screwed on his contract? Of course. Lots of people get screwed, but we still have Spider-Man and lots of other heroes.”

Straczynski’s contrast between Alan Moore (screwed!) and Spider-Man (still ours!) nicely sums up the fandom dynamics of superhero comics. Creators are there to churn out marketable, exploitable properties … and then disappear. And because the comics companies own the characters, and because they have substantial marketing departments, they’re in a position to make that disappearance stick. Who knows who created all those different Avengers? Who knows who created Wonder Woman? Who cares? We want our modern myths packaged and available at our corner store and on our movie screens. Also … toasters.

Why is Moore complaining? It’s not about the money, as he’s said. (That’s probably a big part of the reason people call him a crank.) But Moore created a group of characters and the world they live in; those characters still mean something to him. Now a company he believes has screwed him over gets to colonize and even define that world. For example: Moore’s comics have often been concerned with feminism, and one theme of Watchmen is that the superhero genre is built in part on retrograde sexual politics and thuggish rape fantasies.

And how does Before Watchmen address these issues? Like so.

If this were some piece of fan fiction detritus—naked Dr. Manhattan, porn-faced Silk Spectre!—it would be funny. But given that this is an “official” product, it starts to be harder to laugh it off.

Of course, this is one of the things that always happens with art. If you create a beloved character or story, others are going to honor it, parody it, use it, and abuse it. That’s why there’s fan fiction. Indeed, Moore and artist Melinda Gebbie literally defiled Dorothy Gale, Alice (of Wonderland), and Wendy Darling in their exuberantly pornographic Lost Girls. Given that, what does Moore have to complain about exactly?

What he has to complain about is that he doesn’t own his own characters … and the company that does own them is free to pursue any version of the characters it likes, whether honoring Moore’s original vision (as DC has been careful to assert) or turning it into bland, infinitely reproducible genre product (as many suspect they will). And DC has the marketing might to ensure that, in the end, its version will be the one that’s remembered. After the third or fourth Before Watchmen movie, which iteration of the characters will be most familiar to the public? Rorschach and Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan have been raised from their resting place, and Moore—and the rest of us—now get to watch them stagger around, dripping bits of themselves across the decades, until everyone has utterly forgotten that they ever had souls.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Category Archives: Top Featured