Sex, Violence, Druuna

Posted on June 15, 2016 by RM Rhodes

Trigger Warning: This article talks about sexual assault and rape, at length. In an attempt to reduce inadvertent exposure to the material discussed, I will provide links to specific sequences.
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In 1986, Heavy Metal changed their format from monthly to quarterly. As part of this format change, they began to print full stories instead of serializing them. Mostly, these stories were originally printed in Europe – where the Francophone market published 48 page collected editions called albums.

The third full album printed in the new quarterly format was Morbus Gravis (Severe Disease) by Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri, in the Summer 1986 issue. This feature introduced Druuna, a sexually charged woman navigating her way through a nightmarish dystopic society with nothing but her wits and her sexual availability to keep her alive. Over the course of the story, she is forced to expose herself, prostitutes herself for medicine, and is forced to perform fellatio at knifepoint. In retrospect, this was tame.

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) this appalling level of sexual violence, Serpieri (and Druuna, especially) became massively popular among the Heavy Metal readership. So much so that a parody strip was published asking the question “Where is Druuna now?” (Answer: married, with two kids.)

The appeal was not and is not difficult to understand. Serpieri is a master craftsman. From the various sketchbooks that have been published, it is obvious that he enjoys drawing women. Naked women. Sexy women. And because he enjoys drawing them, he has gotten really good at it.

Any casual connoisseur of pornography can tell you that the act of sexual intercourse is not inherently anything – visually sexy, meaningful, or even necessarily pleasurable. It’s the elements that make up the context of the act that add significance. Even something as simple as bad lighting or poor framing can push a visual depiction towards embarrassing or arousing.

Making something look sexy is not an easy feat. Serpieri knows this and the amount of effort he puts into his work is obvious. He is an incredibly talented illustrator who also happens to have a very good grasp of sequential narrative. That he likes to use those talents to draw people having sex would seem like a net positive – until you realize that a lot of the sexual activity is non-consensual. But he has somehow managed to draw the assault as sexy, which makes the realization very uncomfortable when it hits.

Serpieri works best as a pin-up illustrator, creating one off images that are designed to titillate and arouse the viewer. These are, to a one, perfectly suited to do just that. There is no problematic text to distract from the purity of the visual depiction. Which feels like an argument for the platonic ideal of looking at women without talking to them, so as not to spoil the illusion, but there you go.

To be sure, there is a straw-man argument to be made (half-hearted at best – like you’d find from a certain kind of Twitter account holder, one who doesn’t like to be challenged on his enjoyment of problematic entertainment) that the story is set in a dystopic future where survival of the fittest is the rule and depicting sexual violence is both natural and understandable. After all, that’s what happens when society collapses and there is no means of enforcing mores like consent. Sure, but it is really necessary to depict it so much? And if society has to collapse for these kinds of things to be normalized, why does rape still occur in this day and age?

Serpieri himself claims that Druuna’s approach to sexual pleasures is actually a challenge to Judeo-Christian mores on sexuality. Which would be laudable if there wasn’t quite so much rape. And it’s not like Serpieri is unable to depict healthy, consensual sexual situations. He is. He just choses not to, for reasons.

To be clear – Heavy Metal had a long history of problematic stories. Sexual assault and rape are not the sole province of Serpieri. And he was not the first artist to produce beautifully rendered, overly sexualized science fiction that didn’t make much sense (I’m looking in your direction, Fernando Fernandez). However, to the extent that Druuna became emblematic of Heavy Metal as a publication, she also became emblematic of the sexual assault problems at the heart of the most problematic stories published by that magazine.
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In the Spring 1988 issue, Heavy Metal published a follow up Druuna story. In this story, Druuna is only raped once – by someone she knows and was actively fooling around with before he brutally and suddenly crossed the line into non-consent (page 42). About the best I can say is that it’s a very realistic example of a date-rape scenario. The sequence to that point is incredibly erotic, but subsequent rereads retroactively taint any potential for arousal.

The real sexual violence in the story is reserved for Hale – a woman that Druuna meets in the wilderness. Shortly after they meet, Hale’s father is killed by a group of soldiers. One of those soldiers immediately rapes Hale and takes her as his possession. The most disturbing part of this is the panel where we see Druuna and one of the soldiers standing by passively while we can read the off-panel dialog of Hale screaming “no” and being ignored (page 23). The page turn shows the actual rape in progress. As a piece of sequential storytelling, it’s very well executed. Both the reaction shot and the actual rape are excellent example of show, don’t tell. But that’s about all it has going for it. That and the heartbreaking shot of Hale wrapped around herself post-trauma.

Druuna’s advice to Hale is to just let it happen (!) because whatever the soldiers can do to them can’t be worse than the monstrous mutants who wander the wastelands could do instead. Survival is the key, and the best advice is to endure. Which is an interesting thing for a young, impressionable young man – a demographic that was reading Heavy Metal at the time – to read. Especially so close to such a graphic sexual assault.

Hale is raped a second time, and the act is used to drive the plot. While the soldier is distracted, a mutant comes out of nowhere and drags him away (page 29). Hale is laughing hysterically at her salvation and near-death experience and the death of the soldier is given a little too much dramatic emphasis, considering that he was mid-rape when he was whisked away. Again, Serpieri is a good enough sequential storyteller that we get to see this occur, from the rape onwards.

Completing Hale’s arc, we are shown a single image of her working as a prostitute in a military barracks and we hear nothing more about her for the entire series.

In the Summer 1988 issue of Heavy Metal, an editorial addressed current events. It seems that copies of the previous issue had been seized at the Canadian border for being in violation of code 9956 – a writ denying the importation of material dealing with sex with violence, bondage, etc. The editorial admits there was “sex with violence” in Druuna.

But there is a side of the strip that seems to have been ignored. Beyond the breasts, beyond the sex, there is an extraordinary power within the story – the horror of a world gone mad. We were not condoning the violence, simply presenting a frightening oftentimes exaggerated look into a future even more violent than the times we live in now.

That very issue, they featured a slew of stories from the Spanish version of the Illustrated Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Because they’d been censored, you see. This was a free speech issue.

Heavy Metal has always been a commercially-minded magazine. That approach has worked out very well for them and gave the publication a kind of self-aggrandizing swagger. You knew they were going to be over-the-top and merchandise everything, so nothing came as a surprise after the first five or six years.

Heavy Metal in the late 80s was filled with material by Daniel Torres and Peter Kuper – to the point where they felt like house artists. However, no character captured the public attention like Druuna. The two first books were republished as stand-alone hardback editions, as well as a slew of sketchbooks and other art books. Serpieri reprints became big business for Heavy Metal. So much so that these are all still in print, decades later.

An interesting side effect from the free-speech editorial board was that Heavy Metal began to censor some scenes of sex and violence. The series The Waters of DeadMoon received the most obvious changes, but Serpieri’s later works were given special attention. A few panels were altered, but mostly word balloons were placed at strategic spots to cover penetration, like a modern day da Volterra. In later years, this got to be almost farcical and a bored archivist could spend hours spotting the unnecessary bowdlerizations. In one later story, an entire six page sex scene disappeared, leaving readers confused.

Ironically, there was a note in May of 1992 (the first issue that Kevin Eastman’s name shows up in the masthead as publisher) that read

We have gotten a lot of flack about censorship in the Raoul Fleetfoot story (January 1992). Those little black bars covering up “casual indiscretions” were part of the story and not our way of screwing around with the First Amendment.

Given previous behavior, it would not have been that unlikely a conclusion to arrive at. I certainly came to the same conclusion when I read the story in question.
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In the November 1992 issue, the third Druuna story, Creatura, was published. Infamously, this story contains a four page sequence (pages 45-48) where Druuna is drugged and gang-raped. On the last page of the sequence, she wakes up and the following internal dialog shows up in a thought balloon.

Forgive me, we might have been able to live together. Your little devils gave me so much pleasure, you know? I don’t know how much those drugs were responsible… But I can reassure you it was a wonderful experience.

Which is, in my opinion, the crux of the problem with these stories. If there were no word balloons, it would be entirely possible to read at least one of the pages of the sequence as just a very well-drawn group sex scene, with attendant pornographic associations. It is drawn sexy. That’s how Serpieri draws these things – he’s very good at what he does and his artistic choices are on the page. With the context added in, the juxtaposition of sexy and horrific makes the mind recoil in realization.

However, the apology that the victim utters (even if it’s only in her mind) seems to absolve the instigator of the assault (a woman) retroactively on the theory that it was fun, once Druuna got into it. I cannot think of a more dangerous sentiment to present to the kinds of people that would find those pages more sexually arousing than horrific; keep in mind that I count myself as one of those individuals.

The first Druuna story was published in 1986, the year I entered high school. Heavy Metal was not news to me – on the contrary, my father had the complete run as I was growing up, so there was not a time when I did not know that Heavy Metal existed. But the perfect bound quarterly issues starting in 1986 did not fit into the official commemorative binders that held the first nine years of the publication. The new issues sat alone and were easier to consume as they came in.
The second story was published when I was still in high school and Creatura came out when I was living at home, having dropped out of college. In those pre-internet days, anything pornographic was a precious item and this one was mailed directly to my house. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I honestly wonder how much those three stories impacted my sexual development.

If you can read Marain, figuring out my FetLife profile shouldn’t be that difficult. I’m not going to make it easy for you, but I will say that enthusiastic consent is a massive turn-on for me. And even the slightest hint of reluctance makes me very uncomfortable. I guess that means I got the right message? It’s difficult to say for sure if I am representative of the average reader reaction or an outlier.

I will say this, though – I tend to be attracted to women with bodies that are similar to Druuna’s and that’s probably not a coincidence.
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Five additional Druuna stories were published between 1993 and 2003 (fun fact: more Druuna stories were published under Kevin Eastman as publisher than not), but I’m not going to recap them all in nauseating detail. They all are all set in more or less the same technorganic futuristic hellscape, a place full of horny soldiers, brutal authoritarianism, sadistic sexual predators, disease, ravenous mutants, and bewildering recurring characters.

There is a lot of philosophy and soul-searching. Consensual sex is found throughout the series, but usually only in the context of idyllic dream sequences that serve to demonstrate what the world could be like. On the other hand, the constant threat of violence and sexual assault seem to serve as a cautionary element, describing how the world is messed up.

Which works, on an allegorical level. But the stories themselves tend to duck and weave considerably around the outright identification of self-identification as allegories. In fact, Serpieri’s hyper-realistic artwork tends to work against reading these stories as allegorical. These are specific events, happening to specific people.

If Druuna is, indeed, some kind of ur-woman, what do her repeated sexual assaults mean, exactly? Are they meant to imply something about the universal condition of women? That’s pretty bleak, no matter how you turn the interpretation. However, if there is no meaning to these assaults, then the allegory argument falls apart on first principles.

It is entirely possible that I think too much about these things.

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One final story: When I was in a mall outside of Antwerp earlier this year, I was flipping through Anima, the first new Serpieri book in thirteen years, at FNAC. My girlfriend looked over my shoulder and noted that the book was not just “a little rapey” (as I had described his work in Heavy Metal) but depicted actual rape, complete with knives to throats during intercourse. Considering that the book is largely silent, this is both a testament to his sequential art capabilities and his pre-occupation with sexual assault.

Paolo, you’ve still got it!

My Favorite Childhood Softporn

Posted on June 14, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

It’s 1977, so I’m eleven, older if the magazine I found in one of my cousins’ bedrooms wasn’t his most recent newsstand purchase. The cover price is $1.50. I paid $8 after pulling it from a vendor’s long box at the Roanoke Comicon. Frank Frazetta painted it in 1971 for Warren Publishing’s planned POW!, a magazine that was never published. I don’t know what his fee was, but Warren must have paid it, since they used it six years later for Eerie.

The timing is no mystery. No. 81 is cover-dated February, so it was on newsstands after the Christmas release of King Kong. My father probably took me to see the remake that same month. I was annoyed that the promotional poster featured King Kong straddling the twin towers, while in the movie he has to take a running leap. The poster hung on my bedroom wall for years. It’s also on the Eerie back cover.

I was a Frazetta fan in middle school and high school, but I doubt I recognized the artist as a sixth grader. “Queen Kong,” like most of his other artwork, is about titillation. It’s a picture of a giant naked woman. Warren Publishing used it on the cover to sell copies of the issue to heterosexual males. My eleven-year-old self felt it too–but I was puzzled by the nonchalant placement of the magazine on my cousin’s bed, his bedroom door left wide open. Where was the Catholic shame? I apparently still felt enough residual embarrassment that, after giving into nostalgic urges, I did not share my new purchase with my fourteen-year-old son on our drive home from Roanoke.

And yet if you’re going to indulge in softporn, it’s not the worst choice. Type a Google search, and you’ll find Caroline Liddell includes “Queen Kong” on her Pinterest page “Images of Powerful Women,” explaining: “The male fear of what happens when women refuse to behave according to expected gender stereotypes–they run amok! It’s a wonder we all haven’t climbed up the Empire State building, swatting away annoying little gnat like buzzing planes since the vote made us all too big for our britches!!”

Maybe Frazetta was influenced by Dick Giordana’s Gulliver-esque cover art for the July 1971 issue of Lois Lane.

Those are actualy tiny Justice League clones tying her down, but the effect is the same. Gloria Steinem, a former assistant at Warren’s Help! magazine, also featured a Kong-sized Wonder Woman on a 1972 Ms. cover:

But not even a titillated eleven-year-old could mistake Eerie for second-wave feminism. Look over the previous year of covers, and all of the women are damsels in distress incapable of saving themselves from the monster of the month.

Rape is a thinly-coated subtext.

Frazetta, one of Warren’s most employed cover artists, was a big fan of women-in-peril. Each sprawls uselessly on the ground while a muscular hero battles to protect her. In terms of composition, the women are foreground, the heroes are central, and the on-coming threats are furthest from the viewer. In order to be heroic, the hero must be smaller than the threat, and so the woman crouches to give him comparative stature. The pose is inherently absurd, but the repetition is comic.

But Frazetta was okay with women-in-peril minus the heroes too. That sometimes requires her to take a more active position, occasionally substituting twirling hair for the missing hero’s combat gestures. Sometimes Frazetta even reverses angles.

When not in peril, Frazetta women fall into typical good girl and bad girl poses, the eroticism unmitigated by other action. Rather than presenting their backs, they face the viewer, though only a seductress offers direct eye contact.

Though all of Frazetta’s women are sexualized, and many are imperiled, not all are powerless–or their power is not always exclusively sexual. Erase the heroes, and the threatening animals can become an extension of the woman’s power.

Although the body of a Frazetta woman is too idealized to be monstrous in itself, she can command other larger and more monstrous bodies.

Which is why “Queen Kong” is unique. When not climbing the Empire State Building, Frazetta’s Fay Wray is just another seductress or imperiled-woman-sans-hero.

But Queen Kong is the monster herself. She follows the gender-flipping impulse of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, the 1958 knock-off of The Amazing Colossal Man. Although previews warned that actress Allison Hayes, “once a beautifully voluptuous woman,” would become “the Most Grotesque Monstrosity of All,” Hayes appears no different after her transformation. It is simply the sight of a giant woman (even an initially unconscious one) that produces Horror, Shock, Frenzy, and Devastation!

Queen Kong is beautiful and revolting too. Since all Frazetta women are first and foremost sexual objects, her body remains proportionally unchanged, but the context establishes her monstrous size. Her twirling hair isn’t emblematic of her gendered helplessness anymore. It is an extension of her combat pose, a nearer equivalent to a hero’s bow or sword. And though the foregrounded biplane is nearly her size, she is larger than the threats circling her–and so compositionally larger than Frazetta’s typical heroes.

Queen Kong embodies what Carol J. Clover terms “the female victim-hero,” that gender-disrupting monstrosity born from Stephen King’s 1974 Carrie and first embodied by Sissy Spacek in the 1976 film adaptation–both still popular when Eerie No. 81 shipped. We’re happy when Carrie kills all those high school bullies–just like we rooted for Kong against those pesky biplanes.

Provided, of course, the sympathetic monster knows when to die. “Monster” shares its etymology with “warn” and “demonstrate,” and a giant woman usurping King Kong’s crowning spectacle is a warning against and a demonstration of 70s gender revolution. Frazetta doesn’t paint her corpse after its plummet, but her death is implied. Queen Kong’s beautiful revolt must fail. Even a titillated eleven-year-old reading softporn comics on his cousin’s bed understood that.

Jeeves and Social Change

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Philip Smith

When I was thirteen years old my reading habits, which had previously been limited to J. R. Tolkien, W .E. Johns, and their ilk, expanded. Filled with intellectual curiosity and a massively inflated sense of my own understanding of the world, I tried to tackle books which, in retrospect, were far too intellectually unwieldy for me at the time. I dutifully read a volume by Eric Hobsbawm cover-to-cover despite understanding only one sentence in five. Orwell spoke to me (as he does to every teenager) although I could not quite square his politics with the smattering of Marxism I had read. Plath, of course, resonated.

One gem I uncovered during that period was the English comic novelist P. G. Wodehouse and when I look back on my formative years as a reader I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t have been better for me to set aside the weighter tomes (all those hours spent looking at Shakespeare) for a while and instead have devoted myself fully to the task of devouring the Wodehouse canon.

I found Jeeves and Wooster to be Wodehouses’ most compelling creation (history appears to be on my side on this point). Each J. and W. story follows, broadly, the same plot; Bertram Wooster, a well-meaning but somewhat, to use Jeeves’ affectionate words ‘mentally deficient’ man-child of independent means, gets into some kind of a mess and Jeeves, his faithful butler, rescues him from it. Bertie’s misadventures are rarely his own doing – they are generally instigated by an old school chum who has had a fall-out with his affianced and in need of help, or an aunt who is trying to out-maneuver her husband. Bertie’s problems are almost entirely external; left to his own devices he can generally be found sitting around in his New York or London apartment, spending time with his friends at the Drones (a gentleman’s club for boisterous – fourth sons with a lot of money and no occupation) or some of the more fashionable areas of France, reading a pulp detective novel, recovering from a hangover, or indulging in a little gambling. He occasionally finds himself temporarily besotted with a member of the opposite sex, but the danger soon passes. As each novel progresses a comedy of errors ensues. Various parties appear to foil the plans of Bertie and those he holds dear, often in the form of some terrifying patriarch who, as a result of some misunderstanding, wants to tear our young hero limb from limb. Just as we reach the moment when all seems lost, Jeeves swoops in with one of his ingenious plans and the whole matter is resolved.

One does not read Jeeves and Wooster for the story, of course, but for the language. One can let a Wodehouse novel fall open and, briefly surveying the page, find a marvelously-wrought sentence. Consider, for example, the following, found in Carry On, Jeeves:

Lady Malvern was a hearty, happy, healthy overpowering sort of dashed female. Not so very tall but making up for it by measuring about six feet from the O.P. to the Prompt Side. She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built around her by someone who knew that they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips this season.

In just three sentences Wodehouse leaps from the theatre (‘o.p.’ and ‘prompt side’ being opposite sides of a stage) to the language of fashion. The word ‘dashed’ wonderfully evokes not just a language but a world-view laden-heavy with the Edwardian era. His very phrasing at once evokes and gently ridicules a world of waistcoats, high collars, and entitlement.

Despite the oft quoted phrase that analysing Wodehouse is like ‘taking a spade to a souffle’, we have a variety of terms which we can bring to bear upon the numerous literary devices found in his prose. He is the master of dramatic irony (in Right Ho Jeeves Bertie sips a cocktail and feels like ‘Cesar having one in his tent the day he overcame Nervii’) and the transferred epithet (‘I pronged a moody forkful’). It is perhaps his bathos which produces in me the most glee. In Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, as a pair of lovers have a tearful and passionate reunion Bertie, witnessing the scene, muses that the toast he is eating is a bit cold, but that’s quite alright – he rather likes cold toast so long as it has plenty of butter on it.

We can describe the mechanics of Wodehouse’s prose, then, but there is a gulf between taxonomy and analysis. Here the spade soufflé analogy becomes apt, as Wodehouse’s works are often determinedly detached from historical and social realities. Evelyn Waugh, writing in praise of his peer, describes the world Wodehouse presents works as ‘idyllic’, and Auden described him as ‘one of the great English experts on Eden’. The two wars which Wodehouse lived through, including internment in a Nazi prison in France and a shattered reputation in England, never intrude upon his works. As a professional book botherer and Wodehouse fan one would think I would have a lot to say on his works, but I often find that there is little in Wodehouse which is not already on the page.

The quaint and insular world of the English gentry which Wodehouse presents is not entirely apolitical, however. Some have found in Wodehouse a reversal of roles and an unbalancing of the social order. Sophie Ratcliffe argues that in Wodehouse stories those of the lower social orders (butlers, chorus girls), often prove themselves to be more capable than those who were seen as their social betters. She defends the point by observing that in his correspondence Wodehouse shows a ‘lack of snobbery and prejudice’, being as diligent in writing to a former housekeeper as to George Orwell.

Following Ratcliffe, one can read Wodehouse as social critique. Bertie is unwittingly snobbish and child-like. He is a well-educated imbecile who wields his impressive vocabulary like a blunderbuss. He has achieved almost nothing in life (the prize for scriptural knowledge which he won as a child comes up with comical regularity). His opulence and unconscious disregard for anyone outside of his social class is striking. He worries, often, about Marxist radicals baying for his blood and when one sees how he lives one can understand why. It is a testament to the insularity of his world view that Bertie’s implied reader is one of his own (‘I don’t know if you were at Cannes this year…’ he writes).

Despite the heroic role given to the lower classes in Wodehouse’s works, it is rare we have more than a few lines of dialogue from the subaltern. Even Jeeves lives a life largely shrouded in mystery, appearing only to assist the young master in his time of need. We know that Jeeves likes to bet. He sometimes takes fishing trips. He has an extended family which is particularly replete with aunts. He routinely quotes Shakespeare and Tennyson, but these things appear only as glimpses of a larger, submerged, whole. We see him only through Bertie’s eyes – as a kind of dutiful sorcerer (he eats a lot of fish) and idealised mother rather than a human being. Even when Jeeves narrates one of the short stories he sticks to the particularities of the matter at hand. His inner life remains, frustratingly, obfuscated.

When Sebastian Faulks took the reigns he pushed this criticism a little further – his version of Jeeves lost a relative in the Boer War and, when he reports this, receives no sympathy. Some of Bertie’s lot lost money when Emily Davison threw herself before a racehorse and they are far more concerned about a poor bet than the social changes promised by women’s liberation. Faulks, unlike Wodehouse, situates Jeeves and Bertie in history, even if that history seems to pass them by, making their time on this earth jarringly finite (in one of his letters Wodehouse laments that his novels would become ‘historical’ after the war given that Bertie would not be able to afford a butler with income tax as it was).

This is not to say that the changing political climate in England never pushes against the boundaries of Bertie’s world in Woodehouse’s books. Plum was fully conscious that he was capturing the dying days of the British aristocracy; Bertie attempts (unsuccessfully) to learn how to darn his own socks, and at one point witnesses a Marxist rally (only because a chum was trying to win over a lady there present). The world never pushed too hard, however. Bertie encounters threats to his way of life, but those threats, like those internal to his world, are always resolved.

It is hard to read too much social criticism in Wodehouse, then, because there is no sting. Wodehouse does not want to see the British gentry come to an end – his work is a celebration of useless people. Bertie’s shortsightedness does not make him a monster, but a child, and Wodehouse, if anything, wants to protect him. We find Bertie, like my thirteen year old self, poised, precariously, on the cusp of adulthood, but (unlike self) he never quite falls. This is, perhaps, why he has such fondness for overbearing aunts, why he is terrified by father figures such as Robert Spode, (who reminds him of his old schoolmaster and tries to talk to him like an adult). Marriage is a prospect Bertie often, in moments of madness, embraces and then seeks to escape from. Bertie, Peter Pan-like, lives out a fantasy of perpetual youth. He belongs to a world of no responsibilities, where nothing really changes, where Jeeves’ maternal embrace will always encircle him. The predictability and insularity of Bertie’s life is comforting. Aunts will be disappointed. Old school chums will fall in, and out, and back in love. Fearsome men like Roderick Spode will make sincere attempts to kill Bertie. Social change looms. But at the end of the day Jeeves sweeps in and fixes everything.

Utilitarian Review 6/11/16

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Consuela Francis and Qiana Whitted on Captain America: Truth.

bit of a short week…though we do have more for next week, I promise.

Chris Gavaler explores the line between abstraction and narrative in comics.

On the tragedy of being named Noah.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Establishment I wrote about indigent defense, and how it can reduce mass incarceration.

At Quartz I wrote about how even if Mexico is not a race, Trump’s comments about Mexicans are still racist.

At The Week I wrote about Al Giordano, an activist and organizer threatening to run against Sanders for the VT Senate seat in 2018.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

—Dracula A.D. 1972 and old vampires same as new vampires.

—third parties, which don’t work in the United States.

Other Links

Daniel Harper on Death Proof.

Cripin Sartwellon why Stephen Hawking doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

John M. Harris praises the Confederacy.

The Tragedy of Noah

Posted on June 7, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
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When I was about ten or so at summer camp, I was woken up by a counselor looming over me in the dark. He was on some errand — I don’t remember what. But I do remember clearly him saying, as I came out of sleep. “Hey are you Noah?”

I groggily assured him that I was.

“Cool!” he said. “I’m Noah too!”

That probably doesn’t sound like much of a punch-line. But it was impressive enough to stay with me. In my whole life up to that point, I’d never met anyone named Noah. As far as I was concerned, I could have been the only Noah in the world, except for the original guy with the animals marching two by two. And now, here was another, grown-up Noah — a big dream Noah, foreshadowing the Noah I was to become.

It was a pleasant novelty to find another Noah —an entertaining aberration. For the most part, though, I liked being unique. My brother, Eric, often met other Erics, and of course I knew a slew of Michaels and Davids and Johns, to say nothing of Marys and Sues. It always seemed like it would be oppressive to be so common, and have your name on everyone’s lips. When someone said, “Mike,” how could you ever be sure they were talking to you? Better to be the one and only — or, short of that, to be rare enough that meeting your name out there in the world was a notable surprise.

Once I left northeastern Pennsylvania, though, my uniqueness began to fray around the special-snowflake-style edges. Oberlin has a lot of Jewish students, and while I don’t remember any other Noah’s, there was a Noam Birnbaum, whom I never met, but whose name would occasionally pop up uneasily, a not-quite-shadow off to the side of my social circle. I was still me, obviously, but somebody else out there, with my initials, was sort of me as well. Who did he think he was? He had a lot of nerve. Given his presumption, I was glad our paths never crossed.

But while that particular nefarious doppelganger never hunted me down, a slew of others did. The Noahs began to proliferate — especially after my son was born and I started interacting regularly with newly-minted individuals. Children, I discovered, were often named Noah. My son had a number of friends with the name. At school events I’d hear people yell for me, only to discover they were shouting to that friend to pass them the ball, or telling that child not to eat the dog poop. I had imagined that a generic name like “Michael” or “Tom” would be annoying — and so it was. Everyone was talking to me, even the people who weren’t talking to me. I thanked the stars and my Russian ancestors for my last name with its slew of Slavic syllables. Without that, I’d be anybody. I might even have to start using my middle initial or risk vanishing into google.

Things have only gotten worse. It’s now clear that the onslaught of Noahs began earlier than I thought; perhaps thirty years ago, they started to rise up, and now they are legion. This past year, I’ve heard, “Noah” was the single most common baby name in Illinois. I actually have to envy the Davids and Joes, now; they’re more idiosyncratic than I am. It’s true that the ubiquity means that I no longer have to suffer through stupid ark jokes, but it’s a poor trade off. Instead of finding myself as I age, I’m just finding that myself is all these other folks. Who knew that getting older would mean getting more and more bland? Once I was a child among millions, but now somehow, while I wasn’t looking, I’ve grown into everybody else.

Is This a Story?

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

I’m going to say yes. And not just because the four-panel comic strip is titled “I rowed my father’s boat to sea.” The sequence tells a visual story whether those words are included or not. And the best way I know of discussing wordless storytelling is Neil Cohn’s visual grammar, which includes five types of narrative panels.

My first panel is an Establisher, which “sets up an interaction without acting upon it.” I’m not entirely clear what Cohn means (how is a set-up interaction not itself an interaction? if the panel content is the interaction, then how does the panel content also act upon the interaction?), but the panel does establish the two main visual elements: the boat and the dock. There’s also minimal tension between them. The panel by itself would not imply a story. If instead the rope were taut and the boat were pointed away from the dock, then there would be a plot.

My second panel is an Initial, which “initiates the tension of the narrative arc.” I’m not sure an awareness of the future arc is technically possible, but the panel has tension. The boat and the dock are now much further apart–presumably because someone in the boat is rowing it away. A lot of narrative information occurs between panels: the rower climbed into the boat, untethered it, and began rowing. All of that could be a visual sentence too, using the same panel one as an Orienter, which “provides subordinate information, such as a setting.” Instead, the rower is undrawn, and so the visual sentence is only between the boat and the dock. This second panel might instead be a Prolongation, which depicts a “medial state of extension.” If so, the Initial is implied as the sequence leaps to a later a moment in which the tension is already extended.

My third panel is either a Peak, the “height of narrative tension,” or it is the Release, which of course “releases the tension of the interaction.” Personally, I think the Peak, like the Initial, occurs in the gutter. The boat has already rowed out of sight, and so the tension is over. Alternatively, the boat and the dock are still interacting, because we project the existence of the still moving boat beyond the panel frame. Either way, the story is basically over.

My fourth panel is more clearly a Release, either of the third panel’s Peak or as a secondary Release which extends the third panel’s Release further. The blue is ambiguous. Has our perspective continued to move higher and so now the dock is so small it is effectively invisible? Regardless, the boat and now the dock are out of the image and so there is no tension.

That’s all pretty straightforward. But notice that it all works on the assumption that pictures are pictorial. They picture something. While they are actually pixels on a screen, they are also representations of objects that are not pixels on a screen. So the story is about something that’s not actually present. The images are a little like words that way. Although, unlike words, pictures do to some extent resemble what they represent, they are also dissimilar to them. Even radically dissimilar. The “sea” is a blue square. The “boat” is an outline in negative space. The “dock” in panel two and three are recognizable only because they vaguely resemble the dock in panel one.

But what happens if there are no representational elements? If I replace the “boat,” the “dock,” and the “rope” with different visuals, do the four panels still tell a story?

The content of the revised panel one is now entirely abstract. Does Cohn’s Establisher panel type still apply? I want to say yes. The diamond in the upper left area and the random shapes along the right edge are still “set up,” and the overlapping circle between them suggests little or no compositional tension. The image is roughly balanced.

The second panel shrinks the first two elements, adding a few shapes to the diamond cluster, and doubling by mirroring and then simplifying and shrinking the second cluster of shapes. Are the two clusters interacting? Again, I want to say yes. The compositional tension is still low–but this was true in the representational version too. Although abstract, the tension is prolonged but waning.

The third panel is still either a Peak or Release–though now the diamond cluster can not be understood as having traveled out of frame. It simply does not appear. Also the former “dock” is not shrinking because our perspective is higher. There is no perspective. The shape is simply reduced in size.

The final panel again is all Release–no visual elements but the solid blue square and the white surrounding it. There is no tension. The image is perfectly balanced.

So the two versions of the four-panel sequence both follow the same visual grammar. Does that mean they tell the same “story”? Probably not. The first visual sentence is about a boat and a dock and someone rowing the boat out to sea. Things happen in time and space. The second visual sentence is about clusters of pixels. The only space is the space of the screen, and the only time is the time experienced by the viewer.

I’m not certain a “story” is possible without some kind of representation of time and spatial subject matter, but if it is, the second story is not the first story. They do, however, overlap. The abstract sequence and the representational sequence have the same arc. Is this inevitable? Since all representational images are also abstract marks (ink or pixels), do the two visual sentences always overlap?

Maybe. Unlike the above example, there would only be one set of images–whether analyzed abstractly or representationally. But that’s true of “I rowed my father’s boat to sea” too. The second just illustrates the innately abstract qualities of the first. Delete the second, and the first sequence is still open to both readings.

In both, blue dominates each successive panel until all white elements stop repeating. If blue is “water,” then the water dominates as the white of the “boat” and “dock” decrease in presence. In representational terms, this is because the boat rows out of frame as the viewer’s perspective grows higher until the dock is too small to see too. That’s not how I originally summarized the story though.

Using the grammar of the visuals as abstractions, blue has overwhelmed everything else. Not only has the boat moved far from the dock, the dock has shrunk away too. Since both decrease in size and then vanish, both are in visual tension with the water. I think Cohn would call the water “subordinate information, such as a setting,” but it actually serves as the sequence’s most dominant visual element. If this were a superhero comic, we might say the blue vanquishes the white. And since we begin the sequence identifying with the only human character, the implied rower of the boat, the blue is the villain. It destroys everything.

This reading occurs mostly at the abstract level. If we rely only on the representational qualities of the images, the water’s increase is primarily a side effect of the perspective and framing of the boat and dock. We are more prone to dismiss the blue as mere setting. Read abstractly, the blue is the story. The two visual sentences are not the same.

Does this mean that the meaning of any comic is incomplete if its content is read entirely or primarily in representational terms?

Utilitarian Review 6/4/16

Posted on June 4, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Erica Friedman on Maurice Sendak.

Chris Gavaler on whether a flag can be a comic.

Ng Suat Tong reviews Blutch’s Peplum.

Me on the Whiteness Project, and the virtues and limits of listening to white people talk about race.

Me on Captain America: Truth and racism in the gas chamber.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote about

—how chronic pain patients are being sacrificed to the drug war.

—the case for a female James Bond.

At Playboy I wrote about how Captain America has always been Hydra.

At the Daily Dot I wrote about how my son is super smart because he watches Crash Course.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—identity politics: not a slippery slope to neoliberalism.

—Scars of Dracula and defiling the virgin cross.

At Public Books, a little review of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice.

Other Links

Waitinggirl13 on the difference between legalization and criminalization of sex work.

Vann R. Newkirk II on Trump and political violence.

Alliterator on the history of dark Captain America.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon