Racism in the Gas Chamber

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

I published a piece at Playboy yesterday about the new revelation that Captain America is part of Hydra. I mostly talked about Truth: Red, White, and Black, the miniseries by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker, which imagines the supersoldier serum tested on a group of black soldiers in a Tuskegee-like experiment.

Anyway; one thing I wanted to get into the piece but couldn’t quite fit was a discussion of this sequence.

Isaiah Bradley, the one survivor of the supersoldier experiment, has been sent on a suicide mission in Germany. In the course of his effort to destroy the Nazi supersoldier project, he attempts to rescue Jews from a gas chamber. They don’t realize he’s trying to rescue them, though. In fact, they think the Nazis have sent him to rape them. Their confusion, it is implied, is caused by the fact that he is black. In short, the comic presents Holocaust victims, at the moment of their death, as racists.

This is probably the single most shocking moment in a comic that is full, front to back, with shocking moments. The scene is obviously played for gothic horror; the naked, emaciated women swarming over Bradley, a zombie tide of death. But the gothic is here, specifically, a white gothic. The Jewish women, moments away from becoming victims of racist murder, find a final, horrible solidarity in anti-black racism. They can’t see Bradley as a savior because of their racial preconceptions, and so he can’t save them from their racist murderers.

This scene obviously isn’t true; nothing even remotely like this ever happened. Black people were depicted as rapists by German propaganda though—and in Maus, Art Spiegleman shows his father, a concentration camp survivor, as harboring racist animosity towards black people. It certainly seems possible, and in fact likely, that some of those who died in the concentration camps believed that black people were inferior and subhuman—just as the Germans believed Jews were inferior and subhuman.

You could see Truth as a vision of reconciliation, or solidarity, between black people and white Jewish people. Captain America was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, both Jews, and he here becomes a symbol of black pride, and of American blackness. “Isaiah” could for that matter be a Jewish name; Bradley is, in effect, both Jewish and black, deliberately connecting the persecution, and the heroism, of both identities.

The scene in the gas chamber points to a less cheerful reading, though. The experience of oppression doesn’t have to unite the oppressed. In some cases, instead, the fear of oppression, or the brutal, intimate, immediate, reality of oppression, can lead to more racism, more hatred, and more violence. Morales and Baker depict Jews, at the moment of their genocide, choosing, in fear and horror, to be white. That doesn’t have to be the Truth. But still, it’s a choice that is a bit too familiar for comfort.

What White People Say

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

“I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything that’s made me aware of my race,” says Kathie, a middle-aged woman from Buffalo, NY. She was interviewed in 2014 as part of the Whiteness Project, an interactive investigation of what white or partially white people think about their own race, conducted by Whitney Dow.

Kathie’s insistence that she doesn’t, and shouldn’t think about her race neatly underlines why the Whiteness Project is necessary and useful. For the most part, white people don’t have to confront, or address race; whiteness is unmarked and unremarked. For most purposes in popular culture Spike Lee is a black director; James Cameron is just a director. Barack Obama is a black president; George Washington, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan were just presidents. Part of the magic of being white is that you’re the default, rather than the exception.

In defining white people by their whiteness, the Whiteness Project insists that whiteness isn’t normal or natural. Instead, whiteness is a specific, constructed, created identity, which white people acquiesce to, or embrace, or fidget inside of, with varying degrees of grace and insight. “So does the Whiteness Project re-center white people?” Steven W. Thrasher asked at the Guardian when the first round of interviews came out in 2014. “Yes,” he concludes, “but that’s part of the point: Dow wants his subjects to be the center of attention, and the reason for their viewers’ discomfort about white people’s views on race.”

Often, the very thing that seems to define whiteness, in fact, is the resistance to defining or seeing whiteness. In a new series of discussions with millenials in Dallas, TX, released in April 2016, the Whiteness Project interviewees repeatedly think about whiteness in terms of refusing to think about whiteness. Ari, 17, talks about how he’s stigmatized for being Jewish, and points out, perceptively, that while he doesn’t consider Judaism to be a race, other people do, which affects him. But when he talks about whiteness he insists that “the color of my skin has nothing to do with my everyday experiences”—as if his experience and those of black Jewish people would be interchangeable, or, perhaps, as if he hasn’t considered that black Jewish people exist. Sarah, 18, similarly insists, “I never think about my race…my age and my gender has a bigger influence on what I think of as my identity.” More aggressively, Leilani, 17—who is part Asian— insists, “If we want to get rid of racism, stop talking about racism.” For her, talk about whiteness is no talk; when she thinks about her white identity, she thinks about not thinking.

Other interviewees are more willing to try to see past whiteness’ invisibility. Lena, 21, whose father is Arab-American, talks about how she didn’t want him to come to school events because she would be teased or insulted when people realized she wasn’t white (enough.) “Being realistic, I think it’s good that I don’t look too much of anything, because just getting jobs…it’s much better for you if you look white.” Carson, 18, says, “it’s hard to know that I’ll be given more. And it makes me call into question my merit.” Connor, 24, talks about dealing drugs and notes that “there’s been plenty of times where I’ve consciously taken advantage of the fact that I was white.” He adds, ” I would be in jail if I was not white.”

Lena, Carson, and Connor are all talking about privilege, and about the fact that whiteness is not just invisibility, but power. Invisibility and power, are in fact intertwined. You stay out of jail because you’re white, but then the whiteness becomes invisible, so suddenly you have no jail record because of personal merit, rather than because of the color of your skin. Or, as Lena says, you can get a job because your white, and then having the job on your resume is attributed to merit, rather than individual whiteness, when you go on your next job interview. In that sense, the Whiteness Project, by making whiteness more recognizable, undermines the notion that white people come by their success through personal awesomeness alone. As such, it works to confront, or destabilize, racism.

Or that would be the optimistic take. When the first batch of videos in the Whiteness Project was released, there was a certain amount of skepticism on social media from black viewers, many of whom wondered why white people needed to be given more space to talk. And some of those criticisms resonate with this second round of interviews as well. What good does it do, really, for Connor to explain that his whiteness is a get out of jail free card? To what degree is any particular anti-racist agenda advanced by listening to Chaney, 18, explain that she isn’t responsible for the history of racism and doesn’t want to pay reparations. “You can’t get things for people who are dead,” she says intensely. “It’s all in the past.” There is no more racism; there is only white people talking about their innocence, forever.

After each interview, there is a little statistic. In Chaney’s case, that statistic is that 51% of Americans think slavery is not responsible for black people having lower incomes today. The framing is particularly unhelpful; slavery happened a really long time ago, but as Ta-Nehisi Coates documents in “The Case for Reparations,” racism, and using racist laws to expropriate the wealth of black people, didn’t stop in 1865, or 1975, or with the racist subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. Reparations isn’t just about slavery; it’s about what happened in the 150 odd years since slavery, all the way up to yesterday.

“Whiteness Project aims to inspire reflection and foster discussions that ultimately lead to improved communication around issues of race and identity,” the statement of purpose on the website says. That’s a laudable goal. But framing reparations solely as an issue of slavery doesn’t improve communication around race. Instead, it makes communication around race worse. Asking white people to talk about race is useful in highlighting the importance of and power of whiteness—but it also spreads a lot of disinformation. White people, it turns out, are not all that great at talking about race, both because they lack practice, and because part of white identity is ignorance. As a result, the Whiteness Project includes a lot of white people spouting nonsense. Correcting that, or pushing the conversation to a productive place, requires more than a few statistics, especially when, on occasion, the statistics themselves are misleading.

It’s important to highlight whiteness, and to force white people to realize that white identity exists, even when (or especially when) they don’t want to think about it. As Lily Workneh says at Huffington Post, the insights here
included both unsettling and enlightening reflections” But white people becoming more self-conscious about whiteness isn’t, in itself, an assurance of progress: white supremacists and Neo-Nazis are very self-conscious about whiteness. If there’s not an explicit, and forceful, anti-racist agenda, a discussion about race can just end up rehashing prejudices. The Whiteness Project raises important issues. But ultimately, without greater critical context and engagement, racism is unlikely to be defeated, or even meaningfully addressed, by a bunch of white people talking,

Review: Blutch’s Peplum

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Ng Suat Tong

Publisher’s Synopsis

“…. a grand, strange dream of ancient Rome. At the edge of the empire, a gang of bandits discovers the body of a beautiful woman in a cave; she is encased in ice but may still be alive. One of the bandits, bearing a stolen name and with the frozen maiden in tow, makes his way toward Rome—seeking power, or maybe just survival, as the world unravels…. Peplum weaves together threads from Shakespeare and the Satyricon along with Blutch’s own distinctive vision.”

Blutch (Christian Hincker) is the 2009 winner of the Grand prix de la ville d’Angoulême.

Is there any suggestion that Blutch’s Peplum is inspired by the Satyricon of Petronius apart from the fact that the author has told us so?

There is the presence of the protagonist’s young male lover, Giton, as well as the licentious poet Eumolpus (both unnamed in the comic but central figures in Petronius’ work). There are also at least two instances where Petronius’ Satyricon is “quoted” if not wholly then at least in part.

Yet the comic is fixed in a strange but plausible landscape; it is less earthy, less strange and altogether less theatrical and decadent then the book and Fellini’s film. Both the original and film versions of Satyricon are filled with the rank physical reality of sex, not the curious delusion which Blutch’s protagonist engages with throughout.

If anything, Peplum is a kind of delightful mongrel taking in the high adventure of the pepla genre, the theatricality of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the moral entertainments of Eric von Stroheim’s Greed (or even The Treasure of Sierra Madre) as well as Petronius’ fitful and (for historical reasons) fragmented narrative. Edward Gauvin (the translator; citing Blutch himself) suggests the strong influence of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, presumably for its tribal motifs, strange accouterments, sparse landscapes and ritualized violence. All of this told in a virtuoso voice laced with a smattering of European high culture and Blutch’s own conception of the pagan world. The adventure and the splendid drawing is what keeps Blutch’s audience engaged as the artist’s mind wanders across this landscape of high and low.

Yet it must be said that even this synthesis has its counterpart in Petronius’ novel. The most famous and well preserved section of the Satyricon is that section known as Trimalchio’s feast where there is an equally debauched mixture of excess and high culture. Here, for example, is the rampant luxury of overeating mixed with recitations of Homer:

“So let’s start enjoying ourselves again, that’ll be better, and let’s watch the recitations from Homer.’

In came the troupe immediately and banged their shields with their spears. Trimalchio sat up on his cushion and while the reciters spouted their Greek lines at one another in their usual impudent way, he read aloud in Latin in a sing-song voice.”

It seems improbable that Peplum was cast together haphazardly if only because of its rhetorical symmetry. As Gauvin, relates in his introduction:

“[Jean-Louis] Gauthey commissioned an epilogue from Blutch and devised the book’s structure: Ten chapters prefaced with new vignettes and chapters heads.”

The album begins and ends with Encolpius greeting his goddess, first as a miraculous vision and at the end as a deathly visage. In our second encounter with Encolpius, he murders Publius Cimber in private and gains his name, while in the penultimate section of Peplum he kills a rabid woman perhaps to save his own life, perhaps to protect his very chastity. In the third chapter of Peplum, Encolpius is tortured by severe sea-sickness and asks for the merciful release of death; in the corresponding section in Chapter 8, he is tortured (on a ship) for posing as Publius Cimber by the brother of the same.

In the fourth chapter, Encolpius encounters a tribe of women with amputated limbs. He is tied down and pummeled by a rush of phallic arms and promptly ejaculates.

In the analogous seventh chapter, he longs for coitus with the most beautiful woman he has ever seen but is ultimately impotent. There is every reason to believe that Peplum is in part a study of repressed homosexuality. It will seem odd to state something so obvious but neither of the comic’s illustrious forebears seem the least bit concerned about the sexuality of its protagonists despite the rampant pederasty on display.

What the comics does share with the Satyricon is that element of class conflict, that vivid description of lower class Roman society coming into contact with the upper classes. Like Trimlachio, the wealthy freedman of the Satyricon, Encolpius has risen through the ranks if not in kind then at least in name. His shifting fortunes—first tortured for impersonating a noble man and then celebrated for the act of killing—reflects the way in which the “supernatural” was thought to have a part in the acquisition of wealth. When he finally reaches the center of empire in the epilogue, he is distinctly out of step, a stick in the mud. Peplum isn’t as rich as its source material in this respect but neither is this its central theme.

At the pivot point of chapters 5 and 6, Encolpius first finds his young Ganymede, Giton, before forsaking him for the illusion of his goddess (his Lady of Auxerre), a speechless statue (or human?) frozen against all reason and physical probability. Encolpius doggedly persists in his denial of the tangible world, its substances and its consequences: first interrupting a staged mythological performance of Theseus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur, killing the latter for his lack of grace on stage; then suffering impotence in the face of real physical (heterosexual) desire, any semblance of love thwarted by his idealization and greed.

This section constitutes Blutch’s main transcription from Petronius, namely Encolopius’ (impotent) encounter with Circe. From J. P. Sullivan’s translation of chapter 128 of Petronius’ Satyricon:

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Does my mouth offend you in some way? Does my breath smell through not eating? Is it the unwashed sweat from my armpits? If it’s not any of these, am I to suppose you’re somehow frightened of Giton?’

Flushed with obvious embarrassment, I even lost whatever virility I had. My whole body was limp, and I said:

‘Please, my queen, don’t add insults to my misery. I’ve been bewitched.’

It is a loose adaptation but done with a kind of subtle commentary; for a number of panels have been lifted from old photographs of Nijinsky’s ballet for the Ballets Russes, The Afternoon of a Faun.

The ballet is inspired by the famous poem of the same name by Stéphane Mallarmé (L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1876) and imagines a dream-like state where the faun encounters two nymphs and cannot be entirely sure if they are real or imagined.

“I’d love to make them linger on, those nymphs.
So fair,
their frail incarnate, that it flutters in the air
drowsy with tousled slumbers.
Did I love a dream?
My doubt, hoard of old darkness, ends in a whole stream
of subtle branches which, remaining as the true
forests, show that I’ve offered myself (quite alone, too)
the roses’ ideal failing as something glorious––
Let me reflect . . .
what if these women you discuss,
faun, represent desires of your own fabulous senses!”

The faun, like Encolpius, is navigating the realms of reality and the purely intellectual, eroding the lines between both. In an article at the New York Times, Jeffrey M. Perl explains that his is a “search” for the:

”…distinction between real and imagined experiences…[…]… The skeptic faun has proof the nymphs existed—the love bite on his chest—but he mistakes proof for a mystery. The faun’s doubt about his afternoon has become the real experience. The creations of the mind, like poetry, exist.”

Unlike the faun of Mallarmé’s poem who remains at rest, wandering in his imagination undecided and unresolved, the protagonist of Peplum, the false Publius Cimber, exchanges the reality of his pederastic love for the fantasy of an unattainable goddess—a desire so absolute that he ignores the gold and precious stones in the treasure house where this goddess is stored, a delusion so captivating that all other encounters are rendered sterile.

What follows is Encolpius’ capture, unmasking as a false Publius Cimber and torture.

Then somehow miraculously the ship sinks and he is cast upon an island where he immediately faces a life and death struggle with a blood thirsty ravenous woman who he promptly cuts down.

But not is all as it seems. Consider the fact that the protagonist is last seen in chapter 8 with his eyes gouged out and is then seen lying in the hold of the ship in painful slumber before a caption enigmatically states that:

“The great ship sank one night. The chorus of the shipwrecked.”

Why then are his eyes suddenly restored even as he lies in the bottom of a small boat (a ship of fools) rowed by an equally blind Charon mercifully dispatching his compatriots with a knife. It is almost as if Encolpius has to be blinded before he can truly see. Is all that follows merely a specter before death? Has he finally arrived at the end of his travels on an isle of the dead, an Elysium where his one wish, his one desire for a reunion with his goddess is fulfilled and shown to be absolutely corrupt and extinct? And is this land of the dead merely the one which most of us take for that of the living? This is by no means a happy or desirable end; this awakening from a pliable and abstract slumber to a haggard reality.

And here is where the comic’s chiastic structure lends additional meaning to the proceedings. Where the performance of Julius Caesar’s assassination was greeted with the silence of the murderers and readers at the start of Peplum, the gladiatorial might of Encolpius against the ghastly apparition of death is heralded with a laurel wreath and acclaim despite his protestations—he is the new champion and Caesar of this nether world, his face scarred with the shadowy countenance of brutality and revelation.

Writing at TCJ.com, Sarah Horrocks sees the central motif of Peplum as being that of surviving “the after-effects of an encounter with sublime beauty”:

“The question of how to negotiate desire in the face of the thing which destroys all other desires; how to live after seeing death–this is the panic that terrifies Peplum’s central protagonist…[…]… He has seen part of God’s face, and been driven mad by her…When finally his goddess abandons the mortal plane and assumes her shape as abject corpse, Encolpius has been deranged into this dark strange howl of a man who answers humor with horror. If in the presence of the divine he was rendered into infantile psychopathy, in its absence he has become the demonic knowing man, suffused with the horror of living.”

One of Ryan Holmberg’s complaints in the bellicose comments section of Horrocks’ review is that Blutch’s comic revels in its vulgarity and the deplorable view that serious works of art should engage in the sheer sordidness of life:

“It felt like skimming across the surface of cliches of “edginess,” accentuated with moody brushwork and smudges, without taking anything too far too any extreme to break with good taste…[…]…I think this graphic novel participates in that common move, where representations of evil are automatically taken as more authentic than representations of good, where death and violence are seen as more real, where shock is used (or attempted to be used) as a substitute for more subtle thinking about a subject.”

This thesis is worth considering.

At one level, it does seem that Blutch is providing a counterpoint to the light-hearted easy heroics of the pepla (that strangely bloodless yet epic world of the ancient Romans) as well as the bizarre sexual antics of the Satyricon (or even Apuleius’ The Golden Ass). What we get are intermittent injections of violence and the fruits of violence, the bestial nature of the ancient world.

Yet there is little sense that this comparison is taken lightly, or that it dismisses hallucinatory fantasy or the pleasures that can be taken from idealistic art or lighter fare. The audience in Peplum seems to be constantly amused by the antics of Blutch’s hero: from the crows which greet Encolpius and the grave robbers in the first chapter.

…to the strange children hiding in the trees of the barbaric hinterland. There are the thoroughly amused city dwellers watching a mythological play, Giton giggling as he watches his lover murder a cave dweller with absolute callousness; and the exuberant witnesses of Encolpius’ gladiatorial exploits on the isle of the dead—all of them laughing and applauding for seemingly aberrant yet mystical reasons (is this a kind of “sublime laughter”; the knowing chuckles of those who see the complex whole).

The protagonist’s longing for an eternal untarnished beauty is shunned and ridiculed throughout the text but his final act of violence (after a string of atrocities) is greeted with a kind of ironic acclaim which he rejects. There is the sense that the protagonist consistently engages in acts of violence to protect his own avarice, his own sense of what is of eternal worth; like an artist depicting these things without reflecting on their real world counterparts. Blutch is a glorious artist and the inhumanity he depicts so utterly adroit that we can often quite easily suspend the apprehension of its horrors.

Is this a limitation in the artist or a limitation in the art? It might be said that Encolpius’ coupling with the wild woman at the tail end of the comic is more feral, more terrible, and more ugly then the slaughter depicted above; if only because he faces this head on and not as a background to his own avarice; his shaved head suggesting that he has joined his compatriots in the charnel house. In this way at least, Peplum is as much a meditation on the practice of art (its difficulties, dilemmas, and temptations) as it is one centered on artistic influence and aporia.

Yet the final state of the protagonist is hardly one to be desired; now firmly residing in the dour reality of unmitigated brutality, lost to the black humor of life. It is as if both the protagonist (the artist and performer of this strange world) had lost the power to see. And that, in one sense, is the “meaning” of Blutch’s epilogue.

The revelers and storytellers of this latter day Satyricon are gathered in a large space telling tall, humorous tales of human misconduct (are the stories of Peplum the stories they have told?). The secluded villa of their congress is shrouded in the savage inking of darkest night. Their sublime laughter like the birds, children, and Giton before them resounding through the halls. One storyteller speaks of “folks who were so hungry they ate the insides of their cheeks.” The protagonist can only talk sullenly of mothers with half eaten babies clutched to their breasts.

This is the final line of Petronius’ Satryicon, a story without an ending (the work is largely lost) given new meaning in Peplum. Encolpius’ mastery of death and reality seems to flow seamlessly into his insensitivity to pleasure, song and poetry. He has become the unwitting master of Hell.

____________

(1) From an interview with the artist conducted by Matt Madden:

“I adore Fellini Satyricon and I’ve watched it a bunch of times, but I made a decision not to look at it while I was working on Peplum. In fact, I had Orson Welles on my mind instead…[…]… I was especially looking at his low-budget Shakespearean films—Othello, The Chimes at Midnight—that he made with little money or resources. I love how economical he is in those films, those minimal sets, that whole aesthetic was really what I was after. I didn’t want a lavish epic. I wanted something simple…[…]… I really wanted it to feel like a B-movie.”

(2) Sarah Horrocks mentions Blutch’s interest in the “sublime image” and also Julia Kristeva writing’s on the same. So I thought I’d include a short section from Kristeva’s Power of Horror to refresh our memories:

“The ‘sublime’ object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be. As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers—it has always already triggered—a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly. I then forget the point of departure and find myself removed to a secondary universe, set off from the one where ‘I’ am— delight and loss.”

Is This a Comic?

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

I’m going to say no. Though why, I’m less sure. The image does include three panels, and if you read then sequentially, then that’s a comic. It’s even a kind of narrative: a short page’s descent into black. The three panels of color might even take on metaphorical meaning.

The problem is whether that descent from light blue to red to black really is sequential, or if you read the three blocks of color simultaneously, like a flag:

The French flag is not a comic strip. It’s also not a narrative. Though I’m not sure whether narrative is a requirement for a comic. Comics can be abstract, but can an abstract image still have a narrative? Does narrative require representational imagery in order to divide the page into a sequence? Can a purely abstract image even have sequence? If I rearrange “a short page’s descent into black” into “a wide strip’s left-to-right progression into black,” is it more narrative-ish?

Not really. But if I add minimal representational elements, do the same three blocks of color become a narrative?

Each block has its own partial white circle, and those circles have iconic meaning. So instead of a progression into generic black, is it now a progression into Night? Is the blue also Day and the red Evening?

Read that way, the three panels are not only representational, they now represent the same space. Though your eye moves left to right to read them, your brain understands that within the world of the image your eye is stationary as you blink through three snapshots, each divided by a time span of something like six hours. The bottom edge of the frames also becomes a repeated horizon line.

Which is a lot of information for just three partial circles to convey. So what if I include only one of the circles? What exactly is the minimal requirement for an image to be representational?

Of course now that you “know” the middle circle is the sun, it’s probably impossible not to read the image representationally, and therefore narratively. I could instead leave out all of the partial circles and include some other detail to establish a representational setting.

Now we’re looking at the changing sky beyond a seaside dock. The noon sun is “above” the top frame of the first panel; the newly set sun is “beneath” the horizon line of the middle panel, and the sun is even further “beneath” the same internal line in the last panel. Compared to the water and the blocks of sky, the boards of the dock are teeming with detail. But if that’s still too abstract, drop the partial circles back in.

I could call the three-panel strip “Dock Sunset.”

More weirdly, I could call the first flag-like sequence the same thing. The three formerly abstract rectangles of color are now both representational and fully narrative.

Utilitarian Review 5/27/16

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Nadim Damluji on caste in Indian graphic novels.

Me on imperialism in Anne Leckie’s Ancillary series.

Kim O’Connor on the end of Comics and Cola and how the comics community will learn nothing from it.

…and we had a shortened week since I’m on vacation.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Quartz I wrote that the Democrats should work to enfranchise voters in DC and Puerto Rico.

At Reason I reviewed Rajan Menon’s new book on why humanitarian intervention is awful.

At the Daily Dot I wrote about virtue signaling about virtue signaling about…

At Religion Dispatches I wrote about Orientalism in Don DeLillo’s crappy new novel.

At the Guardian I wrote about Holy Hell and the appeal of cults.

At Random Nerds I declared that superheroes aren’t myths, damn it.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—Matt Bruenig and the argument that hurting bad people is morally justified.

—Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula and sexual revolution.

I’m Leaving Now (back later)

Posted on May 25, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

I’m on vacation the rest of this week, so the blog’ll be off the next couple days as well. See you all next week!

We Learn Nothing

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Kim O'Connor

Faced with the task of finding the right subject for her final post for Comics & Cola, Zainab Akhtar chose a comic about a talking bear. “Having a ginormous talking bear as a life mentor sounds interesting and unpredictable,” she wrote. “The ability to be both cute and scary is an important one.” I mean, have truer words ever been written? It was the perfect thing for a sad moment—and though I doubt it happened this way, I like the idea of her typing up her thoughts on that talking bear and thinking, with satisfaction, I rest my case.

One of the best things I read last year was Zainab’s review of Venom #1 by Mickey Zacchilli. I don’t exactly keep a running list, but that’s probably my favorite review of anything, ever. I like the way its casual but considered style matches the vibe of the comic. I like the perfect way she describes the dream logic meme riffs of Tumblr when she talks about the opening spread. Just the details she picked out are more entertaining to me than most things. An “ice-cream van trundles past” in the background of a fight scene. “Eddie hangs out with his alien symbiote friend who snarfs popcorn while he watches TV.” Trundles. Snarfs. Even at the level of word choice, that review gives me a good feeling.

I’m pretty sure I would’ve dismissed Venom #1 if I’d encountered it anywhere else. I’m old and chronically uncool, and to me, at a glance, it looks like something someone doodled on a napkin. Studying those images through Zainab’s eyes, their charm was so striking and obvious that it almost felt like I was the one who discovered them. It makes me think of how David Foster Wallace described the work of a writer as showing readers how smart they are. That’s much harder to achieve than you might think. (It’s so much easier to show readers how smart you are.) Comics & Cola has—had—a generosity of spirit that’s sorely missing in comics writing. That’s part of what made it feel so fresh.

Sometimes I wonder how other people read reviews. I usually wait until after I’ve read or watched or listened to the thing. Part of it is just that I like to think my own thoughts before I think about someone else’s. But also, if I’m being honest, there’s this other, grosser thing where I find it really hard to care about someone else’s opinion in the absence of my own.

Uncharacteristically, I’ll often read Zainab’s reviews when I have no intention of checking out whatever it is that she’s writing about, which is probably more often than not. I sort of don’t care that she’s a great critic, though she plainly is. Her stuff has always felt more like a novel to me. Like something I want to read on vacation. So much of the writing I consume day to day just feels like it’s for nightmare people, by nightmare people, regarding our respective journeys through this nightmare world. Comics & Cola was basically the opposite of that. It was also the opposite of everything I find deficient and uncharitable about my own writing, and maybe more generally myself.

The first time I was asked to write for Comics & Cola, in 2014, I told Zainab I wasn’t sure I keep up with enough comics to offer an opinion. “Who cares?” she wrote back. “It’s impossible to read everything anyway.” In a milieu that’s all too often about gatekeeping, she doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on expertise, though she has plenty. Her criticism seems to spring from that same attitude. It’s positive, but not in that tedious “let me explain the importance of this to you and rehash the plot” mode that I see everywhere. When Zainab writes about her love for comics, she doesn’t just convey that enthusiasm; she makes you feel it yourself. It’s an incredible talent—a magical talent, really—and so far as I can tell she’s the only one among us who has it.

Zainab is frequently and rightfully cited as one of the best and brightest voices in comics crit. But for a long time now, I’ve noticed a real disconnect in how Comics talks about Zainab and how Zainab talks about Comics. Many times over the last year and a half or so in particular, I’ve read—on her website, on Twitter, and in her emails—about the frustration and sadness that the comics “community” has made her feel. “Spent most of last year in depression for the first time in my life as a direct result of comics ‘discourse’ around Charlie Hebdo,” she tweeted in February. The occasion for her comments that day was the buzz surrounding what was by then a regular tradition at the Comics Journal, the recapitulation of an argument that’s as old as the tragedy itself: that calling out Charlie Hebdo for racist and Islamophobic imagery is tantamount to saying the victims deserved it.

Victim blaming. These are words I understand. Sometimes I wonder if the people who have thrown them around know that it’s a real and terrible phenomenon in the world, not just shorthand for I think that was gauche. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a single soul in the kingdom of comics who’s given a cogent explanation as to how blaming the victims applies to the Charlie Hebdo conversation. Granted, as a rule, I assume that comics critics aren’t ISIS sympathizers. But even in that inflammatory piece that Carta Monir wrote for this website—you know the one—the proof is plain to see: “The fact that twelve people are dead is hateful, and I can only pray that their attackers are brought to justice.” And also: “Nobody should have been killed over those cartoons.”

I don’t want to misrepresent the tone of that piece, which was angry, or the critique, which was blunt. But I understand why it was angry and blunt, just as I think I understand the original sentiment behind Je Suis Charlie. In those early hours and days after the tragedy, people perceived different states of emergency, chiefly threats to freedom of speech and rampant Islamophobia. The emergency that Carta perceived was the lionization of racist and Islamophobic work, and her piece put an essential check on a conversation that was, in that moment, out of control. But at the same time, some of her harsh (and in places, incorrect) words set the stage for what would become the two “sides” of the Charlie Hebdo conversation—sides that map, however imperfectly, onto how the Hebdo coverage played out at the Comics Journal and here at HU.

Contrary to what many seem to believe, those sides were never diametrically opposed. The chief complaint against that HU piece, and subsequently anyone who wrote about racism and Charlie Hebdo, is that it condones or even celebrates murder. For more than a year, to say anything ill of the work of the dead was regarded as monstrous in the face of grief—a grief that was itself unassailable, and only ever credited to one side. My side, the heartless victim blamers, consists purely of goblins who are incapable of empathy, or so I’ve heard. It’s all about the clicks, baby! Any writer who has appeared here at the Hooded Utilitarian can tell you that! Why, I’m quaking in my chair even now in anticipation of the multiple, if not dozens, of clicks this very piece is sure to get.

I’ll admit that my powers of empathy have been taxed, not by the tragedy, but by the discussion surrounding it. I can certainly see how grief might have led Tom Spurgeon to change his Twitter avatar to a Hebdo caricature of a hook-nosed Muslim in an unthinking moment. I understand less why his explanation for that would be I deliberately chose the grossest thing I could find, or why such an admission wouldn’t be followed by something like in retrospect, that was shitty and I apologize. Instead, when asked about it in an interview with the New York Times, Spurgeon said, “Some people questioned such work as simply cruelty hiding behind the idea of free speech. But when it comes down to killing people, for me, that’s black and white.”

Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t for the life of me understand the relationship between those two sentences. Can you not interrogate someone’s work and believe that killing them is bad at the same time? Because I have to tell you, the whole issue of killing people is black and white for me, too. I don’t want shitty satirists, Tom Spurgeon, or anyone else who exercises their right to propagate a garbage opinion to get murdered. I don’t even want them to have a bad day.

In good faith, I’ve tried to understand why Art Spiegelman thought that “Cartoonists Lives Matter” was a good slogan. I’ve also struggled to understand why my “side” has been consistently and aggressively derided and misrepresented by people like Spiegelman, Neil Gaiman, and a whole host of people at the Comics Journal. I was floored when Tim Hodler had the gall to say that Charlie Hebdo’s “How Did We End Up Here?” editorial, which was authored by cartoonist Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau, “is not strictly speaking a comics story.” What is it that constitutes a comics story these days, I wonder? The lengthy takedown of Carta’s year-old essay that Hodler had published less than two months before? A single link in a blog post and TCJ’s discussion of Sourisseau’s bile-filled screed against all of Islam was done and dusted. Whatever happened to TCJ’s regular reports on why Charlie Hebdo’s treatment of Muslims is so defensible? Cynthia Rose, girl, where you at? Remember when you wrote that people who criticized Charlie Hebdo “shared a certain characteristic stench”? Do you still think that shit? I want an update.

Of course, on some level, Hodler was right: the editorial wasn’t a comics story, insofar as comics wasn’t claiming it. In early April it finally became fashionable to call out Charlie Hebdo for Islamophobia. What a time to be alive. Comics swiftly distanced itself from “that asinine Charlie Hebdo editorial,” drawing no connection whatsoever between the shitshow that the CH “conversation” had been and the bald-faced nightmare views expressed in that editorial. I mean, what if…what if those of us who’d been banging on about Charlie Hebdo being racist for the last 16 months weren’t just desecrating the names of the dead? And is it just possible, given that Zainab had announced she was shuttering Comics & Cola due to Islamophobia mere weeks before that happened, that the relationship between the bigotry on display in that editorial and the stuff that’s been going on within the world of comics might warrant some serious, sustained reflection? The ‘discourse’ that made Zainab feel depressed—that wasn’t just a bunch of trolls and Twitter eggs. That was us. Because in case you haven’t noticed, the two sides of this conversation haven’t had anything that resembles the serious dialogue that these issues demand and deserve.

Instead there’s been been a lot of emphasis on talking about Zainab’s decision as a matter of self-care. Admittedly, I’m sort of a self-destructive disaster person, but I hate that fucking phrase, which for me conjures the image of some Before Times tubercular quitting her life to take the waters. Let’s be clear: Zainab is an incredibly tough person who was worn down by a hard thing. And instead of giving up, she’s started a host of new projects to find a way to engage with something she loves in a way that doesn’t compromise her health. I hate that stories like hers are so often framed in terms of female fragility.

To date I haven’t seen any substantive discussion of Zainab’s decision other than vague denouncements of Islamophobia, which predictably has been framed as something Other People Do. Heidi MacDonald, for instance, used her own tribute to Zainab as an opportunity to affirm the greatness of our “community.” Of all the posts that MacDonald writes every day, that’s the one in which she chose to assert that “people who say comics have a particularly toxic environment are both right and wrong.” There’s no doubt that MacDonald meant well, but I can hardly imagine a more condescending and absurd move than praising the “close knit community” in a post about the closure of Comics & Cola.

At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I don’t see…whatever this is…as a community at all. I think of it more as a small town. I grew up in a Tennessee cowtown where everyone knew each other, or at least knew of each other…and comics reminds me of that. Unlike many (maybe most?), I don’t perceive these two degrees of Kevin Bacon as a net plus. In fact I believe that’s exactly what insulates people from exposure or critique as they indulge and indulge and indulge in a spectrum of bad behavior ranging from mild unprofessionalism to straight-up sex crimes. Sure, I’ve met some great people in comics who I think of as real friends—but I’d like to think that if those people did something indefensible, I wouldn’t feel moved to aggressively defend it. History suggests that someone could come forward tomorrow with proof that Chris Sims invented bum fights and he’d still be writing for Comics Alliance. Chris learned a lot from those bum fights. It’s all good.

Does anyone remember Zainab’s measured critique of the Lakes festival? Organizer Julie Tait and Chris Butcher, who organizes the festival’s sister event, engaged in behavior that I can only describe as an extensive, if almost certainly unintentional, gaslighting campaign that systematically undermined Zainab’s carefully worded claims. I mean, I’m hardly an event planner. I can barely tell time. Still I feel confident—very, very confident—that if you run an event and someone’s feedback is, “Yikes, racism,” it’s your responsibility to handle that information with care, credulity, and respect. Maybe you can do something to address it; maybe you can’t. But what you definitely should NOT do is accuse that person of being out of order and/or totally off base. That’s not how professionals should treat a colleague, nor is it how event planners should treat anyone in their audience. Except, you know, this is Comics—an ecosystem that thrives on abuse and other ill-considered reactions that, in most other forms of media, would be relegated to the comments section. In writing comics stuff, you’re not just going to take shit from Chris Sims trolls; you’re also going to take it from event organizers, publishers, peers, and creators. That’s just how it is.

If Comics is patient zero for all the cultural anxiety that’s been kicked up surrounding political correctness, what I see here makes me really worry about the world. In comics, as on the Left, the concept of political correctness is often articulated by white men who have a vested interest in characterizing it as the shrillest, most misguided people you went to college with. They frame it as a Theater of Correcting People because their experiences have not given them the ability to imagine a reality in which they could be wrong.

Like everyone else who’s “politically correct,” I hate that term, but I’ll adopt it for the moment to explain that, to me, political correctness doesn’t have anything to do with R. Crumb or Gary Groth or Jonathan Chait or Freddie DeBoer or Matt Bruenig or Jon Ronson or whoever else. I could care less about making them feel bad about about themselves (and anyway I believe that’s impossible). My political correctness is just a very simple practice of trying to believe a person who tells me that someone or something has caused them pain. In comics and beyond, I try to believe women, POC, and queer people who say they’ve been mistreated or abused. I believe them when they say they’re frightened. I believe them when they say they’re uncomfortable. I believe them when they say that something made them feel a little funny. This is literally the least I can do.

I believe them for a lot of reasons, most of which are logical and statistically significant. I see the “rewards” they reap when they say those things. I recognize the small margin of error. But I guess I believe them most of all for the times I was unable to believe myself.

However dear you may hold the notion of community, consider for a moment what kind of hellscape this milieu must be that it robbed Zainab—someone who loves writing about comics, and whose writing about comics people love to read—of her willingness to participate in it. Sit with that for a moment, will you? Ask yourself: is it possible that, even though it has been invisible or puzzling to me, the experience she’s talking about is real? Is it even possible that I unwittingly played a role in it? Consider whether or not there’s something you might do to make it different.

On the very day that my last column for Comics & Cola ran, two things happened: its subject announced his promotion, and its publisher announced that she was shuttering her website. These two events aren’t related (or even analogous), but together they make a certain sort of sense to me. I’ve been hearing similar stories for years, though of course some are way worse than others. I expect we’ll keep passing them down through the generations like some shitty folk tale until finally, one day far in the future, they’ll be regarded as relics of some distant backwards world.

What else can I say about Zainab Akhtar? I’m her friend, her fan, and all too often her inferior. Comics & Cola was a good place, and now it’s gone. I don’t have a joke or a take or a pithy observation. I don’t have a single fucking thought about it, really. Just this feeling I can’t quite name.

I know it’s heavy.

This piece was published in conjunction with “Comics Are for Everyone, or So We Say: Goodbye Comics and Cola,” a collection at Women Write About Comics.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon