Frank Miller, Could Be Worse

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week Suat wrote a post on Frank Miller’s recent artwork, which shows signs of steep technical decline. Miller’s draftsmanship was never stellar, but he had a strong, dramatic sense of design, and a consistent, idiosyncratic stylization that mixed Kirby, Frazetta, and manga in a way that wasn’t off-puttingly derivative of any of them.

As Suat says, Miller’s recent work shows a steep decent from this good-if-never-great peak.

Interestingly, Dan Nadel expressed some appreciation for this late Miller of the ugly Frankenstein zombie Elektra with arms taken from some other, bigger zombie woman.

I understand why people would dislike this new stuff. It’s ugly and incoherent, but coherent Miller isn’t that interesting to me, and I like ugly sometimes. Free of his obvious influences — Eisner, Adams, Moebius, Kojima — he just made weird work. Intentional? Maybe not. Maybe so. We’ll probably never know. It’s not genius or anything… just odd end-of-career work by a pulp artist, kinda like Lee Brown Coye’s late work. Consistent in its weirdness. Certainly the covers he’s drawn in the last year are all of a piece, and make sense as slightly deranged mark-making.

That’s an outsider art take; Miller gets more interesting as he gets less controlled and less coherent. As the control over the material disintegrates, you can appreciate the images not as representations of superpeople, but simply as lines on the page; “deranged mark-making”, which happens to look like zombie Elektra, but really could just as easily be something else for all Miller, or the viewer, cares.

I don’t know that I entirely buy Nadel’s take; Elektra is too obviously a struggling picture of Elektra to appreciate it as simply disincorporated pencil tracings,and the ugly isn’t quite weird enough to send me. This isn’t Harry Peter, where confused proportions and oddly defined composition create a vertiginous sense of spacelessness, with the figures hovering between characters and two-dimensional pen marks.

There’s incompetence and then there’s incompetence. Peter’s scattershot drafting and compositional skills resolve into an alienating, sublime effect. Miller’s ugliness just sits there, sadly, asking you to admire it as beauty.

Still, I don’t actually hate that Elektra drawing the way I hate, say, the art in Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, or for that matter the art in a lot of mainstream superhero books.

I guess that’s by Mike McKone. I guess this is the sort of thing that comics fans think is acceptable, as opposed to Miller, but…that’s pretty sorry shit, isn’t it? There’s something seriously wrong with the foreground character’s anatomy; her stomach seems to trying to escape through her backbone. The composition is static and awful; they’re all just standing there looking serious, thinking deep thoughts like, “wow, we’re really poorly drawn, aren’t we?” The coloring is slick and bland, they’re all thin and bland and straight; it’s a bunch of superbored supersticks. If you could pan down, you’d expect to see that they all have wooden feet hammered into the ground.

Miller’s Elektra isn’t cool as shit action art a la Frazetta, and it’s not outsider art interesting—but at least it’s trying something. Elektra is supposed to be sexy and badass, and she fails at that…but at least the failure registers as a failure. He tried something and it didn’t work, and it’s kind of funny and kind of sad. It doesn’t get to ugly enough to be good or interesting, but it’s got enough ambition to get to ugly. Mike McKone’s drawing, on the other hand, is so bland it makes no impression; like much superhero art, it might as well just be a scrawl declaring, “art needed here on deadline.”

Frank Miller is a big enough deal that when he turns in art, he actually turns in art. Not good art, necessarily, but not personalityless corporate default, either. You look at Elektra, and you feel like Miller put some of himself in there, even if that self is an indifferent draftsman far past his prime. I guess that’s what it is to be a mainstream superhero artist these days; you work and work in the hopes that you’ll become popular enough that someday, somehow, you’ll be allowed to make the crappy art you’re truly capable of.

Civil War, Civil Crap

Posted on May 4, 2016 by Ng Suat Tong

So the critics like it, they really really like it.

Poor old Batman v Superman (RT Score 28%) is sitting in the corner sucking his thumb as Captain America does his victory jig and Iron Man shakes his buttocks in delight.

But at least BvS didn’t put me to sleep which is more than I can say for Captain America: Civil War. I spent the first hour of the movie fighting back the urge to take a nap and I almost never fall asleep while watching movies at the theater. Yet how are we to fathom this when the Grand Lodge has determined the vast superiority of Civil War (RT Score 94%)?

I think it’s fair to say that the only thing worse than a comics critic is a movie critic, at least as far as standards are concerned. At The New Republic, Will Leitch swoons over Joss Whedon and Jon Favreau as if they are demi-gods of celluloid, proclaiming them “terrific four-quadrant filmmakers.” In the very same breath, he suggests that Civil War can’t stand up to the two previous Avengers movies but is awesome nonetheless.

I’m sometimes seen as a harsh critic but saying that a movie is worse than Avengers: Age of Ultron is nothing short of farting pointblank into someone’s face. I cringe in horror whenever I think of Whedon’s farm house scene from Ultron especially when I remember how Whedon supposedly fought tooth and nail for its inclusion and considers it the epitome of his superhero aesthetic—in other words shallow, fannish, unnecessary, and dumb.

At the New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey gushes uncontrollably and announces that, “Civil War is the “antidote to Batman v Superman’s poison for comics fans.” Speaking as a comic fan, I think Marvel-Disney has done an exquisite job of poisoning comics and pissing on its grave but let’s not quibble over the finer points. Here’s the best part of Gilbey’s review:

“The plot is so satisfyingly worked out, and the foundations for the hostilities in the second half of the film so carefully prepared, that you want to take aside the makers of Batman v Superman (who thought it was motivation enough just to have one superhero mistakenly believe that the other was running amok) and say to them: See? This is how it’s done. It’s not so hard, is it?”

It helps also that there is nuance and colour here. The characters are multi-layered, crammed full of old allegiances and grudges and irritations. They have personalities. Remember those?”

I don’t know Mr. Gilbey, I agree that Batman v Superman isn’t made of the brainiest stuff (maybe it needs to be retained a year or two) but having two opposing superhero groups decide to wreak havoc across continents because Steve Rogers doesn’t want to sign a UN contract and just wants to protect his mass murdering pal (Bucky) does seem like rather poor motivation compared to seeing all your friends and colleagues killed by two superpowered Kryptonians.

And, no Mr. Gilbey, despite being the characters with the most lines in the movie, Captain America and Iron Man do not actually have “mutli-layered” personalities. They both speak in clichés, are one note cardboard caricatures, and barely have time to articulate a single serious idea; largely because they spend 50% of the movie beating people up, and a solid 25% of their waking hours cracking jokes while destroying public property.

But Gilbey is as nothing compared to the Uber Marvel fanboy, Justin Chang, writing in Variety:

“The shaming of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will continue apace — or better still, be forgotten entirely — in the wake of Captain America: Civil War, a decisively superior hero-vs.-hero extravaganza that also ranks as the most mature and substantive picture to have yet emerged from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.”

Now I’m happy for Batman v Superman to be buried and forgotten as long as its tentacles reach out from the deepest nether regions and pulls every single Marvel movie down with it as well. What a wonderful world that would be. No more Superhero Movies as the Scarlet Witch once said. Chang continues:

“And the sides-taking showdown between Team Captain America and Team Iron Man, far from numbing the viewer with still more callous acts of destruction, is likely to leave you admiring its creativity.”

So let me see, would this lack of numbing callous destruction also include the part where the Avengers destroy parts of Lagos, a Berlin airport, and some unimportant city where the Winter Soldier is camping out? I guess it’s all less “numbing” because only Marvel superheroes ravage foreign lands with a smile. Chang is so clearly invested in these idiotic characters that it’s pure comedy to see him turn the joyless lives of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers into Ingmar Bergman Spandex hour. But he continues:

“In assembling this Marvel male weepie, scribes Markus and McFeely show a rare talent for spinning cliches into artful motifs: The pain of deep, irrecoverable loss recurs throughout the narrative, and for both Iron Man and Captain America, the bonds of friendship are shown to run deeper than any commitment to the greater good.”

In other words, Civil War is 3-Kleenex movie: one for when you feel the bile emerging from your stomach, the second for when you spit on the ground in disgust and have to clean up after yourself, and the third for when you finally fall unconscious and someone needs to wipe the dribble from mouth. But let’s talk about that “deep, irrecoverable loss” shall we?

The most affectionate moment between Tony Stark and his parents (the great motivator of the movie’s final fist fight) occurs near the start of the movie where the audience is abused with some godawful CGI which turns Robert Downey into some pasty refugee from Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf. Seeing this in IMAX 3D did not help one bit. Tony then emotes to a lecture hall full of MIT students about his exquisite feelings of loss before handing out grant freebies to them all. Voila! Instant emotion and reason for knocking the crap out of Captain America. I guess when you’re shot up with the Marvel Super Critic serum, you don’t really need to see and hear the loss to feel the loss. You can just get it by telepathy, presumably from the rotting corpse of Walt Disney.

These are frightening people, folks. They want to convince us that the doggie doo in the apple pie is good for you. But there’s still some butter in the crust. I think it’s possible to see Civil War as a kind of Dr. Strangelove style satire without the bite; all hidden in plain sight with the umbral subtlety of a Dick Cheney.

The fact is, the protagonist of the show (Captain America for those not paying attention) encapsulates the true American Spirit of derring-do and humanitarian intervention. Chris Evans is dressed in primary colors unlike our bespectacled madman, Peter Sellers, but he’s a true psychopath of near Tom Cruise-ian Mission Impossible levels.

When someone tells Cap not to break things, he lets them know that he has to because it’s his Responsibility to Protect; he has to burn the village to save it. He has no interest in the judicial system since it’s run by military madmen just like himself. Like a true villain, his loyalty to Bucky overrides all moral and ethical responsibilities. Logic isn’t his strong suit, he just needs his freedom because his Democracy of One is indubitably best suited to the practice of ecstatic violence. The true heart of the movie is that Captain America wants to save a world that doesn’t need to be saved; a world that was never in any danger in the first place. The real hero of Civil War is Baron Zemo who has engineered a preposterous scheme to get Cap and Iron Man to fight each other and disassemble the Avengers (if they don’t kill each other first) so that the world will be saved from Marvel movies. He’s the Ozymandias of Civil War and, of course, he fails; doomed to watch reruns of Bambi in his jail cell for the rest of his days.

Even the Captain America of the comics turned himself in after a while and got himself killed, but this isn’t an option for the Steve Rogers of the movies since he’s probably all ready to do battle in Marvel’s upcoming Infinity War. Hopefully they’ll just kill him off when the Marvel movie universe starts tanking (just like the superhero pamphlets) some years down the road. Nothing lasts forever…I hope.

Superhero Parents: The Hidden Difference

Posted on May 3, 2016 by Ben Rietano

This is part of a series of essays written for Chris Gavaler’s comics class.

What happened to Peter Parker’s real parents? Most people cannot answer that question, and many have never even considered it. But anyone with a basic understanding of comics knows that Parker’s real parental guidance comes from his aunt May and uncle Ben. Because of Ben and May, Peter goes from a nerd given superpowers to a real superhero. Similarly, it is an event related to Bruce Wayne’s parents that transforms Bruce into Batman; if Mr. and Mrs. Wayne survived the gunshots outside of the cinema, Bruce would just be the next wealthy leader of Wayne Enterprises. Meanwhile, in a more modern comic, Ms. Marvel: No Normal, we can see that Kamala Kahn’s parent’s overbearing control actually sets her free and enables her to become a superhero because of her initial need to rebel.

Comics, much like Disney movies, have a tendency to eliminate parents early and to portray them as an obstacle for development. THIS IS WRONG – parents aren’t an obstacle. When parents are taken out of their picture, their guidance still lives on through their children. Parents play an instrumental role in the development of superheroes. But they remain an often overlooked part of superhero comic analysis.

How did Bruce Wayne become a superhero when he has no powers? Bruce and his parents were walking home from a movie when a gunman held them up and shot both Mr. and Mrs. Wayne mercilessly. This moment was incredibly emotionally painful for the young Bruce, but it was also a critical moment in Bruce’s transformation. In a panel in Detective Comics following the blood-soaked concrete of his parents’ death, we see a praying Bruce saying: “And I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.” With those words, Bruce Wayne begins his physical and mental preparation for his later transformation into Batman. Thus, we can see here that it is explicitly stated that he fights criminals because of his parents’ death and their unforgotten guidance.

Later, the reader is introduced to Batman’s future sidekick, Robin. In the introduction, the young man, named Dick Grayson, witnesses the death of his parents on a trapeze ‘accident’. When the boy plans to call the police, Batman stops him and invites the young Grayson to join his vigilante quest against crime. Of course, Robin accepts the invitation. Batman quickly becomes a fatherly figure for Robin, pointing him in the direction against crime and advising him in the same way Grayson’s father may have. Thus, if it weren’t for Batman essentially adopting Dick Grayson, and for the tragic loss of both of the heroes’ real parents, neither Batman nor Robin would be stopping crime.

Why did Peter Parker, a nerd mad at the world and given superpowers, decide to use his powers for good? Peter Parker — the “teacher’s pet”, “science nerd”, “mama’s boy” of high school — is given supernatural powers in a classic superhero development story. An irradiated spider falls from the ceiling and bites Parker, shocking him with a jolt of power relative to that of a spider. Needless to say, Peter’s life changes – now the kid who got bullied has an opportunity to be the bully. Prior to the surge of power, Peter had said that he loved his aunt and uncle but that “the rest of the world could go hang, for all [he] cares!” Initially, Peter’s childish attitude and apathy towards helping others with his new powers leads him to miss an opportunity to save his uncle from death. Consequently, Parker proceeds to have a life filled with regret. He feels forever in debt for the guidance that uncle Ben gave him, and he also feels a responsibility to help his aunt May because of her becoming a widow. Uncle Ben left Peter with some extremely valuable words, and Peter never forgot them: “With great power there must also come – great responsibility.” Those words define Peter, and uncle Ben’s death serves as an awakening for Peter to recognize the importance of helping others. Still, it is aunt May that serves as his constant reminder to always act with honor.

Ms. Marvel is not a classic comic. It’s maybe not even a comic you’ve heard of unless you are an avid superhero comics reader. However, Ms. Marvel has gained significant media attention since its publication because of how different its protagonist is from many other superheroes. She is given her powers from a spiritual hallucination of Captain Marvel. Kamala Kahn struggles through her teenage years until this Captain Marvel offers her an opportunity to change and to break away from her overbearing parents. Kamala had been feeling pressure from her parents and was stressed about her identity, so this transformation allowed her to develop into a hero. Initially, Ms. Marvel is uncertain about what to do, but before she can seek action, the excitement finds her. Before entering the scene and helping a drowning girl though, Ms. Marvel recalls a lesson from her father that reminds her that “whoever saves one person, it is as if he has saved all of mankind.” With this lesson in mind, Ms. Marvel acts heroically. She continues to act with this moral compass throughout the story, and several more times she attributes her good deeds to the guidance of her parents. Thus, it is the overbearingness of Kamala’s home that forces her into rebellion and leads her to her powers, and then it is the guidance of her parents that make her a true hero.

Many of us would perhaps call your own parents “superheroes”. In our lives, it is our parents who enable us to face stress and to feel loved. With this idea in mind, it is unimaginable to consider a world without them. Incredibly, both Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker harnessed their emotions and used events relating to family and past guidance to turn themselves from powerful people into superheroes. Meanwhile, Kamala Kahn gained her powers because of a dislike for her parents’ control, but then trusted her parents’ advice most in hard times. Thus, all of these characters gained their powers by different means, but they all are superheroes because of the everlasting guidance of their parents.

Frank Miller Triumphant

Posted on May 2, 2016 by Ng Suat Tong

Frank Miller (c. 2016) is the Donald Trump of comics. Not merely because he’s demonstrated some ebullient racism, not because he really hates Muslims, not because of his warped ideas about women, but because of the general incoherence of his vision. The sad thing is that Miller considers Trump a bit of a “buffoon.”

There’s a whole article to be written about Miller’s political beliefs from the 1980s to the 2010s: how a man who wrote a satire on Reagan and Nuclear Armageddon could transform (?) in latter years into such a reactionary (presumably he always was one); how an artist who created a comic about an all conquering female ninja and her masochistic, castrated male partner (he only gets an erection when he submits) could come to see women in latter years as harlots. I guess Freudians would put this down to a Madonna-Whore complex.

Frank Miller the thinker is a slightly knotty problem, but there’s nothing especially complex about the drawing hand of Frank Miller circa 2016. The one time master of dynamic movement and page composition has hit rock bottom and his fans aren’t amused.

He has a 12-page back-up story in The Dark Knight III: The Master Race #4 which is little more than one big fight scene with some barely sketched out characters just limply hanging in blank space. Then Aquaman appears in all his shoddy glory and…the end. This is a rigorous reflection of the story in the main body of the comic which is also little more than an extended fight scene between Superman and his daughter, with Batman and Carrie Kelley as spectators. Remember the scene in The Dark Knight Returns where Batman beats Superman to a bloody pulp under some street lights like the lowlife street mugger he is? Well, the new comic is yet more fanservice for Batfans who think the Man of Steel sucks (Miller is the inspiration here, not the cause).

But it’s not all corrupt—if you take individual panels out of context you can still see some remnants of the old artist. A silhouette here and some adequate superhero posing there.

Still, no one really cares about Miller’s subliterate backup story; the internet is far more disgruntled by his series of covers for DC. The most recent culprit is his portrait of Wonder Woman for a DK3 #4 variant cover.

Yet for me, this seems closer to that time when Trump emerged from a relaxing spa a few months back and said that he would be friendly with Russia—which is infinitely preferable to World War 3 I should add.

Yes, she looks a bit sullen but not everything needs to be fun and games a la Marston and Peter. He’s on song again because of the nostalgia he has for the warrior-child motif from his days as a fan of Lone Wolf and Cub. The thing isn’t conventionally erotic or pornographic; this Wonder Woman doesn’t want to make love to you; she doesn’t even want to be tied up with her sorority girlfriends. She just wants to beat you up, hence the gorilla-like stance with her fists on the ground. The breasts are a wee bit big but they’re covered and it could just be the armor doing the talking. The bicycle shorts are cool and the stars quite well drawn. Anyone who knows anything about recent Miller will tell you that this is “decent” Miller as opposed to OMFG Miller. To wit:

I will accept intimations that this image is a natural extension of Miller’s penchant for night spots of all sorts in his sequential work, and thus a homage to drag queen clubs; maybe a bad homage but a homage nonetheless.

Every few months, Miller releases his new modernist vision of superheroes to the world to the general consternation of the Twittersphere. And every time, one of these images appears, the internet expresses equal parts astonishment, outrage, and delight that something so grotesque should exist in this universe. It’s like stepping on some dog poo just as you’re about to get into work—you have to tell someone because it just stinks. If you don’t, they’ll find out and then where would you be?

Everytime one of these things hits the stands, it’s as if Miller is pulling out his dick and saying, “Fuck you, DC! And fuck your pet rabbit!” The most obvious screw you was his infamous Superman with a package (he packs to the right) splash page/cover.

Miller fans point to moments like these as expressions of his genius and his innate feminist instincts—the drawing hand may be withering but that brain! It still works and wants to let the supermen (and their cocks) have it as good as the superwomen.

The people who go to conventions and collect original art were well apprised of this paradigm shift in Miller’s abilities at least a few months in advance of the general public, with responses ranging from delight at owning a hand drawn masterpiece from the Master to earnest attempts at retrieving whatever vestiges of dignity remained in the art—the equivalent of trying to pick a really dry piece of snot from your nostrils. Utterly disgusting for all concerned.

Any hesitation to declare this a sharp deterioration in artistic prowess does not simply reside in the level of respect Miller has garnered over the years from the fan community but the simple fact that you simply don’t make jokes about the afflicted. And Miller has looked pretty ill for some years (the exact nature of his ailment is a mystery). The internet gasped with incredulity when Miller took a photo with Stan Lee recently.

But there’s every indication that he’s on the mend. The recent photos while far from hearty are still a significant improvement over those from not so long ago. Like a mud-caked Batman in The Dark Knight Triumphant, Miller is having it out with the Mutant Leader. Something is telling him to stop with the art but he’s not listening to it; and that’s all for the best.

So if you’re sick (and there is by no means any public confirmation of this) and are still able to support yourself, I think more power to you. And if you want to do a Dark Knight IV all by your lonesome in years to come, well, I guess why not—DC deserves it, and fuck “artistic legacy.” But, you know, get Klaus Janson to help out a bit I think, now that you’ve both kissed and made up. Because there’s really no shame in getting help, especially when not getting help results in this:

These monstrous ninja zombies are of course depictions of Miller most famous creation, Elektra; which sort of makes sense considering her resurrection in Miller’s early Daredevil comics. I guess if you created the character, you get to decide if the lady has flat-rectangular shaped nipples or has a tattoo of Matt Murdock on her left thigh or has glow in the dark areolae. There’s little doubt that Miller considers most of these images transcendent spank material.

Speaking of which, how much do you think this wank material is worth? $2000 maybe? You need to account for the fact that we’ve had several suppositories of Quantitative Easing for close on 10 years (though with nary an effect on inflation). So maybe $4000-5000? Miller is a living legend in superhero circles afterall. Apparently a nice big Batman sketch like this goes for somewhere in the region of $10-12K.

The Elektras? 8.5-9.5K. There were nasty rumors circulating that customers who bought an Elektra stood a better chance of getting a Batman. When I heard about this from a fellow collector, I assumed it was a buy one and get one free deal. But no chance, Frank Miller (and his handlers) are nothing if not great businessmen.

Which only goes to show that you don’t need close readings or a smattering of comics history to understand the baseline ethic at work here. When exciting new conceptions of the decaying female form are greeted with ready wallets, then Capitalism dictates that we sell them. As for the rest, DC will just have to suck it up because they started it first.

Utilitarian Review 4/30/16

Posted on April 30, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Ng Suat Tong criticizes Dan Clowes on criticism.

Caroline Drennen on Turkish Airlines’ flights to Metropolis.

Ng Suat Tong on the theological confusion of Chester Brown’s May Wept.

Jimmy Johnson on what Aquaman’s ancestors were doing during the Middle Passage (and how slavery doesn’t exist in the DC/Marvel universes.)

Me on why it’s okay for artists and critics to know each other.

Chris Gavaler on Hamlet, superhero.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Daily Dot I wrote about

—how doxxing is abuse, not invasion of privacy.

—the upside of Google controlling everything.

At The Establishment I wrote about the virulent racism in Marston’s original Wonder Woman comics.

At PLayboy

—I interviewed Sara Benincasa about her new book, sex, art, and puppies.

—how Beyoncé is the most important pop musician ever.

At Splice I started a series on the Hammer Dracula films! I’ll be writing about all nine in chronological order; for this first one, I talked about how narrative sinks its teeth into you—with your help.

Also at Splice Today I wrote about

—how fame and money go together for writers less and less.

—being old and seeing old rockstars rock loudly.

At the Reader I wrote about La Sera, a band that’s a little bit country, a little bit the Smiths.

Other Links

Katherine Cross on male dreams of subservient female robots.

Nice Pitchfork write up of the new Dawn Richard track.

Andrew Wheeler explains that Frank Cho is an idiot.

Something is Rotten in the State of Gotham

Posted on April 29, 2016 by Chris Gavaler

“There’s only one Hamlet (and most children don’t read it), whereas comic books come by the millions.”

That’s what Frederic Wertham told readers of National Parent-Teacher in 1949, his second of three reasons why comics are bad for kids. Six years later in Seduction of the Innocent, he quoted a publisher using the same Shakespeare play as an excuse for comic-book content:

“Sure there is violence in comics. It’s all over English literature, too. Look at Hamlet.”

Wertham roundly mocked the comment, but the publisher had a point, and not just about violence. Lone heir of an aristocratic family avenges his murdered father in a society ruled by corruption. Sound familiar? Hamlet is the boiler plate for Batman and other vengeance-motivated vigilantes across the multiverse.

So while it’s true most children don’t read Hamlet, Hamlet knock-offs come by the millions. But if you don’t think Batman is a Tragedy, take another look inside Shakespeare.

Bruce Wayne, haunted by the unjust death of his parents, dedicates himself to a noble war on criminals. Does that make Bruce a tragic hero? Depends on your definition. Hamlet is a tragic hero in the sense that he is the hero of a tragedy. Macbeth is also the hero of a self-titled tragedy, but the two characters are polar opposites. Macbeth overthrows the peaceful order of Scotland by murdering the king and stealing the throne. In Hamlet, that’s Claudius, the guy who murdered Hamlet’s dad and set his ghost wandering the ramparts. It takes the not-of-woman-born Macduff to defeat the usurper Macbeth and restore order. In Denmark, that’s Hamlet’s vigilante mission.

The ur-Tragedy Oedipus Rex combines the roles of Macbeth and Hamlet into one character. Oedipus is the supervillain who killed his own father, stole his father’s wife and throne, and sunk the city of Thebes into supernatural plague. But he’s also the hero who solves the mystery and restores order by punishing the criminal—which means gouging his own eyes out. If you define “tragic hero” as that sort of a self-punishing criminal, neither Hamlet nor Macbeth make the list.

But Hamlet, like Batman, is an avenger. He didn’t make Denmark rotten. That was Claudius, and if Claudius self-punished like Oedipus, Claudius would be a tragic hero too. But Claudius is just a garden-variety villain, and so Denmark needs a hero to set things right. Enter Hamlet. He’s “tragic” only in the sense that he dies, and since he dies after completing his heroic mission, he dies triumphant. But unlike the deaths of Claudius, Oedipus, and Macbeth, his death isn’t necessary to restore order. It’s just an epilogue.

Unlike tragic heroes who start out unjust and so corrupt their kingdoms before eventually punishing themselves, an avenger is aligned with justice from the start. Hamlet is “tragic” only because he ends in what Northrop Frye calls social isolation. The most extreme version is death—six feet under is pretty isolated—but social isolation comes in a range, and avengers embody it all. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett in The Myth of the American Superhero identify the standard type: “lonely, selfless, sexless beings” each of whom “never practices citizenship.”

Your traditional gunfighter doesn’t settle down after restoring order. He moves on. Which implies the role of avenger is socially subversive in itself. Because the avenger is a response to injustice, the avenger reflects and embodies that injustice. Once the criminal is punished and justice restored, the avenger also has to conform to tragedy’s ABA structure. His own pre-hero state has to be restored too. It’s a mini-version of society’s former golden age, an age free of crime and so also free of crime-fighters. A full restoration of justice ends the role of the justice-seeking avenger, and so the avenger has to vanish with the villain.

To end in social integration instead, an avenger has to give up the avenger role. That means hanging up the costume and getting married—how early proto-superheroes Zorro, the Gray Seal, and Spring-Heeled Jack all ended their crime-fighting adventures. Serial heroes like Batman remain avengers by prolonging the B phase of the tragedy plot structure, that quixotic war on criminals that by definition can never end. If Bruce just needed to hunt down his parents’ killer, he could have retired a long time ago and married Julie. Remember Julie? Probably not. She was Bruce’s original fiancé, but, like Ophelia, Julie called it quits long before the end of the action.

Other avengers at least pretend to be on a simultaneous quest for personal restoration. Superheroes often figure their fantastical abilities as blessings for society, but curses to themselves, and so their ongoing serials project a desire to give up their powers and live a normal life. Alan Moore mocked this idea when he took over Swamp Thing, calling “the premise of a monster trying to regain his humanity” flawed because

“if that were to happen, the series is over. The dimmest reader realizes that isn’t going to happen, meaning the character is going to spend the remainder of the series on the run, moping about what was not happening. So Swamp Thing ends like Hamlet or just a Silver Surfer covered in snot.”

Hamlet, grandfather of monstrously moping superheroes, is a prototype of the isolated avenger whose identity is too defined by the avenging mission to give it up. Once he has completed the mission assigned to him by his father’s ghost and restored justice to Denmark by punishing his mother and usurper uncle, Hamlet’s death eliminates the last traces of Claudius’s corruption.

Hamlet could instead “regain his humanity” and reenter society by marrying, but Ophelia dies because her boyfriend can’t stop being a hero—the same way Spider-Man would never willingly cure himself of his power-bestowing mutation. Marrying Ophelia before completing his mission would turn Hamlet into a failed hero or, worse, a villain, just another guy willing to be a citizen of a corrupt town. Like Batman, Hamlet can’t settle down till he’s scraped the rot out of Denmark. Lamont Cranston tells his fiancé the same thing: he can’t marry until he has completed his avenger mission as The Shadow, making Margo Lane an Ophelia who avoids death by accepting endless delay through a serial form’s never-ending B structure.

Which is a long way of saying: No, Frederic, there’s more than one Hamlet, and millions of fans do read them.

Artists and Critics Sometimes Know Each Other

Posted on April 28, 2016 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
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As a critic, I not infrequently know the artists or writers whose work I write about.

If you’ve been following the #gamersgate controversy at all, you know that some people think that this is really wrong. “Journalistic ethics!” people shouted over and over on twitter. It wasn’t exactly clear what they meant by this, but critics knowing artists seemed to be at least one semi-inchoate focus of outrage.

To some degree, you can understand the concerns. There’s a vision of journalistic objectivity which involves a reviewer ruthlessly evaluating the work in front of him or her without any reference to, or knowledge of the creator. The critic, in this view, is supposed to be a completely impartial observer, affixing a stamp of quality or animadversion so that readers can know that they are spending their hard-earned dollars in the best of all possible ways.

The reality is a lot messier. In part, that’s because, if you review a work positively, one of the things that often happens is that the creator of the work gets in touch with you to say, hey, awesome, you liked my work! Often creators will write me just to say thank you (which is lovely). Sometimes, though, they’ll contact me in the hopes that I might review their next book or project, too.

So, is that unethical? Now that I’ve talked to them, am I supposed to never write about their work again? That seems silly; the only reason I know them, after all, is that I like their work. I guess you could argue for some sort of disclosure — but what would I say? “Fair warning: I really like this creator’s work; this creator likes that I like their work. Now on to the review, where I say I like their work!”

The thing is, when I do like somebody’s work, that can also open the way for other collaborations. Many writers and artists I admire, like Ariel Schrag, Edie Fake, and Stacey Donovan, have posted on my little, all volunteer blog at one point or another, because I love their work and when they appear in my inbox to say they liked a review, I’ll sometimes ask them if they would be interested in contributing. If you were determined to be offended by that sort of thing, you could argue it’s a quid pro quo, and that I’m receiving content (even if not money) for good reviews. Edie even designed the banner for my site (which I happily paid him for.) But again, the whole reason I find their contributions valuable is because I value their work — which is what I say whenever I write a review talking about how awesome Ariel Schrag and Edie Fake are.

The disconnect here isn’t just about ethics. It’s about the nature of criticism. A lot of the people posting to gamersgate seem to see reviews primarily as a way to make purchasing decisions. Reviews, from this perspective, are a buyer’s guide; it’s the equivalent of a consumer report. You don’t want the person who evaluates the gas mileage on your Prius to be buddies with the Prius manufacturers, because you’d worry that they might try to help their friend out by saying that the Prius gets better gas mileage than it does. You want an objective take on the value of that Prius.

But while objectivity makes sense as a goal in evaluating Priuses, it doesn’t as a goal for evaluating art. Criticism of art is always, by its nature subjective. And, at least for me, criticism tends to be less about saying, buy this or don’t buy this, and more about trying to engage with, and think about, what an artist is saying, or what a work is doing. A piece of criticism is as much about talking to, or with, the artist as it is providing a consumer report. On #gamersgate art is seen as a product, which is certainly one thing art can be. But art’s also a community. Which is why having actual conversations with the artist in question doesn’t seem like an ethical violation. Having conversations with the artist is my job.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon