Gluey Tart: Otodama: Voice from the Dead

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Youka Nitta, 2010, Digital Manga Publishing

I was worried about reading this manga. The first and perhaps most “reasonable” reason (or, well, maybe not) is that I was frightened by Embracing Love as a child. At least, I was kind of turned off by the football player necks when the first volume came out, and I’ve stayed away ever since. I’m starting to think that might have been a mistake, but I can’t fix it now because the series is out of print and some of the volumes are woah!-surely-nobody’s-actually-paying-a-hundred-bucks-for-this-no-matter-how-good-the-sex-is expensive. The perhaps slightly less reasonable reason (again, this is obviously something of a judgment call) is that I hate starting a series and getting left in the lurch. I am immature and have abandonment issues and perhaps ought to consider Prozac (well, Fluoxetine Hcl, since my insurance insists on the generic), but I have a pathological fear of falling in love with a series and not being able to finish it. Or, you know, becoming somewhat interested in a series. Whatever. And a series by Youka Nitta is high risk, as far as abandonment goes.

Ms. Nitta left the industry for a while after an art-copying scandal in 2008, leaving several much-loved series on hiatus or dead or something. Nobody knew. Well, she is back (or so her new English-language Web site indicates), so maybe she’ll start working on Otodama again – but who knows? It’s unclear how derailed her career is. Not utterly, I hope, because damn it, I like this book (yes, it’s all about me). There’s apparently one more volume in Japan (which is not yet slated for publication in English, so far as I can tell – Doki Doki’s site doesn’t have any scheduled releases posted past summer 2010, which might just be a minor glitch but does nothing to ease my mind), and that volume does not conclude the storyline.

Only tangentially related aside
But in checking that out, I discovered that June is going to publish Ayano Yamane’s Target in the Finder series this summer! Holy shit, this is good news! I have the first two volumes in English but didn’t get the third before it went out of print, and I have suffered for years over this egregious lack of judgment. I even bought it in German because – well, we will not speak of that, but my German is only very slightly better than my Japanese, so I still need the English volume.

Back to the post
Speaking of Doki Doki (yes, we were), that reminds me of my only real objection to Otodama – no sex. (Doki Doki is DMP’s sex-free line, damn their eyes.) In discussing this sort of thing, people often say things like “it was so good, I didn’t even miss the sex,” and brava, I say to them, for they are obviously mature about their comics reading in a way that I am not. Because Nitta is an artist and author who is deservedly famous for her explicitly sexy yaoi, and I want her to put out, damn it. This is an enjoyable supernatural police story, and no, the utter lack of sex doesn’t leave any gaps or anything – but the setup is sexy, and this is Youka Nitta! There could be lots of hot sex! Why wouldn’t I want that? And the series might never be finished, so if she was building up to it slowly, we might never get there! Arrgh!

Sigh. Life is cruel, but we will try to go on as best we can, despite our lack of inner resources. (“We” meaning “me,” of course, although you should feel free to overly identify.) This manga – Otodama, the book about which I am ostensibly writing – is really very enjoyable. The story is solid – batshit crazy, but solid – and the boys are pretty. Their necks are not overly thick, you’ll be relieved to know.

The setup is ridiculous. The first chapter is called “Aural Hypersensitivity.” Which is pretty funny all on its own. The details are good, too. Kaname (the pretty blond without the stubble or cowboy hat, as opposed to the mysterious Shoei, the pretty blond with the stubble and the cowboy hat – and boots – and, um, chaps, WTF?) has hearing so acute he can perceive things nobody else can, including voices of the dead. He was once a forensic researcher who was known as “the ears of the police” and was “famous throughout the agency for his good looks.” He is now an “acoustical analysis expert” and naps in a sound-proof shelter. This cracks me up, all of it, but especially the sound-proof shelter. Non-stubble blond sometimes works with Hide (the one with spiked dark hair and no glasses) a private investigator, former police detective, and brother of the senior investigator, Superintendent Nagatsuma (the one with the non-spiked dark hair and glasses). Unstubbled blond and spiky brunette did a lot of police work together but resigned over the same case, several years ago, all of which becomes increasingly important and germane as the story progresses. (If the story progresses. Wah!!! The uncertainty! The humanity!)

Ahem. Anyway. I have decided against outlining the plot. There’s a lot of plot here, y’all. Too much plot to capture in a few hundred words. Which is nice, especially since you can actually follow it, and it makes sense (in a batshit crazy way, obviously). There are two stories in this book, the first one kind of independent of the second one, except for all the setup (and there’s so much setup it gets kind of awkward, but it pays off eventually). The second one is longer, and it develops a lot of what the first story alludes to. And the crimes are solved very scientifically. A cherished example: unstubbled blond listens to a recorded cell phone message the police weren’t able to make anything of, and he announces, “Your client’s voice is coming from behind the suspect… From the atmospheric reverb, I’m certain they’re in a car. From his voice, I’d say the facial structure is unusually narrow… He’s young, too, no older than thirty. He’s short, and I don’t hear any stress, so he may be unemployed.” That last bit is what seals the deal for me. That is quality pseudo-forensic babble.

There’s also a female character who serves a structural role in the story and is insanely hot. I see this as an unexpected bonus. Kinukitty does not read yaoi – or sort of implied boys love, in this case – for the female characters. This is not because I don’t like female characters. Far from it. I’m just not much good at multitasking, and when I’m reading yaoi, my focus is on the guys. Perhaps the near-tragic lack of physicality between any of the guys has allowed me to appreciate Superintendent Tadashiki.

Nitta’s layouts aren’t the star of the show, but she does provide lots of nice details in the art. When Acoustic Man puts on his headphones and slumps forward, listening to police recordings, he looks pained in a way that makes you want to give him a cookie and put him in bed for a nap. Or in his lounge chair in the sound-proof shelter. And when spiky-haired brunet watches him suffering, you feel his pain and discomfort, as well. There are some interesting visuals, too.

I like the legs progression, although I can’t see any reason for it. It doesn’t flow very well into the next page, where spiky-haired brunet is anguishing. (Twice.) I do like that image, though, on its own. The art pulls its weight in telling the story.

So, was it worth it? Did my Otodama experience justify all the angst? Er, yes. Thank you for asking. The story isn’t a cliff hanger, so, hysteria aside, it really does kind of work as just one volume. There’s a lovely and, yes, fulfilling connection between the two characters. It’s enough.

Would have been better with sex, though.

Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis: A Reply to Alan Choate

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This is a reply to some of Alan Choate’s comments on my original article on The Book of Genesis (see comments 52 to 58). Rest assured, this won’t disrupt the regular programming on HU.

Firstly, Alan, thanks for putting all these thoughts down. Given their length, you might have been better served by a proper blog entry rebutting my article but we’ll have to make do with what we have. My first instinct was to let your comments stand as a useful antidote to the ambivalence or sheer negativity you detect in my article. But allow me to take on a few of them if in haste:

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Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Gary Groth and Victorian Dresses

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A week or so back, I posted a response to a post by Jeet Heer which prompted a strenuous objection from Gary Groth. In the course of responding to Gary, I said this:

I was replying to the structure of [Jeet’s] argument and to his examples, not to his actual argument per se.

There seemed to be some confusion about this, and some suggestion that more explanation would be helpful. So I’m going to give it a try. This is going to be somewhat ad hoc, and I suspect if I knew my linguistic theory better, I’d be able to (a) have better terms at my fingertips, and (b) present a better case. But you work with what you have.

Right; off we go.

Any work of art (defined quite broadly here) is going to create meaning in various ways. I’m going to divide those ways of creating meaning into two.

First, you have what I”m going to call “emphatic” meaning. I also thought of referring to this as utilitarian meaning or didactic meaning. This is the meaning that is purposeful or directed; it’s what the work of art is saying that it is about. In a novel, this might be plot; in a portrait, this might be the effort to represent the sitter. Intentions aren’t always easy to parse, but with that understood, emphatic meaning would in general be the obvious, intentional point of a piece.

Second, you have what I’m going to call “phatic” meaning. If you’re not familiar with the term “phatic,” Wikipedia is helpful as ever.

In linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information. The term was coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the early 1900s.

For example, “you’re welcome” is not intended to convey the message that the hearer is welcome; it is a phatic response to being thanked, which in turn is a phatic whose function is to be polite in response to a gift.

Here, though, I’m using “phatic” not just to mean a word or phrase meant as a social placeholder, but rather any element in a work of art that isn’t directly pushing the emphatic meaning. The phatic here is the excessive, the superfluous, the additional. I think you could argue, in fact, that the phatic defines the aesthetic; it’s the additional meaning beyond the utilitarian, which creates ambiguity, frisson, beauty, and the other kinds of confusions and responses we think of when we think “art.”

These distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, and you could argue about whether a particular meaning is phatic or emphatic. And of course most critics (which is to say, most readers or viewers) don’t systematically separate out meanings in this way. But I think the terms and concepts can be useful in thinking about what we’re doing as critics or readers.

Okay, so let’s try some examples. Here’s a Victorian fashion plate, as shown in Sharon Marcus’ 2007 book Between Women: Friendships, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England.

The emphatic meaning here is, obviously, “look at the pretty clothes.” (Though you lose some of the emphasis thanks to my not ideal scan; sorry about that.) The image is designed so that the viewer (presumably female) can look at the dresses on display. The dresses themselves, then, are the emphatic content. In some sense, you don’t need anything but the dresses. The dog, the horse, the guy in the background, even the women filling up the dresses are superfluous. They add charm or interest, but they’re not the emphatic point.

So if you wanted to talk about this picture looking at the emphatic meaning, you could critique the rendering of the dresses (are they accurate? are they pleasing?) and you could also pull back and talk about whether selling dresses like this is a worthwhile use of art (capitalism, Marxism, hackwork, what have you.)

However, there is also phatic content in the picture — that is, it isn’t just two dresses standing there. There is the dog, there’s the guy, there’s women filling the dresses out. Though the point is the dresses, those dresses have been placed in a scene — and we can think of that scene as excessive, or phatic.

Now, you could just say, “well, the scene isn’t the point — it’s phatic, and so it’s not worth getting into how it’s set up or why the artist made the choices he/she did.” That’s one possibility. But you can also take the phatic content as being as, or even more, important than the emphatic content. That is, the phatic content has meaning too; it’s excess, but it’s not empty excess.

So here’s Sharon Marcus, doing a critical reading based mostly on the phatic content of this image;

Fashion plates were images of women designed for female viewers, and that homoerotic structure of looking is intensified by the content and structure of the images themselves. Fashion plates almost never depicted women singly or coupled with men, but most often portrayed two women whose relationship is contained and undefined. An 1879 plate shows a woman on horseback staring intently at another woman whose back is to us and appears to return the rider’s gaze; a male figure in the background appears to look toward and reflect the viewer, who watches the two women as they inspect one another. The park setting and the physical distance between the two women code them as passing strangers, intensifying the erotic valence of their mutual scrutiny. The composition suggests that the two women are about to move toward one another….Fashion, often associated with a sexually charged inconstancy, becomes a respectable version of promiscuity for women, a form of female cruising, in which strangers who inspect each other in passing can establish an immediate intimacy because they participate in a common public culture whose medium is clothing. That collective intimacy extended to the fashion magazine itself, consumed by thousands of female readers separately but simultaneously.

A woman who looked at a Victorian fashion plate did not simply find her mirror image, for in that plate she saw not one woman, but two.

In a bravura move, Marcus takes the excessive phatic meaning (not one dress, but two women) and twists it back into the emphatic meaning (fashion as not just intended to sell dresses to women, but to sell the women in the dresses to each other.)

An analogous example in prose: Marcus in her book does an extended reading of Great Expectations. She talks a good deal about the plot…but she also pays a lot of attention to when Dickens does and does not describe Pip’s clothing. In one sense, the description of fashion is always superfluous to the plot; you don’t need to know what Pip is wearing to know what happens to him. But Marcus argues that the book is in large part about Pip’s effort to escape his social class, which is equated with his masculinity. That is, Pip is trying, in her reading, to become a woman, and the sign of this in the text is his relationship to his clothes. His finery, therefore, is a sign of his progress towards (or a failure to progress towards) his Great Expectations. The excess phatic meaning is not just excess silk and lace, but something which can be read as important in its own right.

Doing a reading that includes a discussion of phatic content isn’t at all controversial. On the contrary, the phatic content is the focus of a lot of the most creative criticism, precisely because it is less straightforward and often more open to interpretation.

But, at least among the folks I talk to in the comics blogosphere, there seems to be some resistance to thinking about phatic fripperies as central when it comes to critical prose. For me, on the other hand, it seems like a very natural thing to do. That’s what I did in my initial discussion of Jeet Heer’s post. In particular, when Jeet said this:

If we define criticism narrowly as analytical essays on an art form or particular works of art, then it’s true that criticism is a minority interest. But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself. To be more concrete, some of the best comics criticism has come in the form of interviews done by artists like Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc. As Joe Matt mentions elsewhere in the discussion, he turns to interviews in The Comics Journal before anything else. Without these interviews, our entire sense of comics would be very different.

I responded by saying this:

For Jeet, the ultimate justification for criticism seems to be that artists do it.

Gary in turn responded by saying this:

Jeet said nothing of the sort, seemingly or otherwise, in the paragraph you quote to support that assertion. His point, obviously, is that criticism takes place in interviews.

And Gary’s right; that is the most obvious point of Jeet’s statement. In the terms above, it’s the emphatic point. Jeet’s argument, the point he is getting at, is that there is criticism in interviews. Period.

But there’s more in the statement than just “There is criticism in interviews.” Jeet doesn’t just say, “There is criticism in interviews” (or,more fully, “There is criticism outside of analytic essays.”) He fleshes that argument out with other words, examples, and rhetorical flourishes. All of that excess is the phatic content. And if you look at how the argument is arranged, what you see is that Jeet states in general that there are many different kinds of criticism, and then clinches (or makes concrete) the worth or importance of those kinds of criticism not by attempting to explain why criticism is important or necessary in itself, but instead by making an appeal to authority.

This is why Gary is especially wrong when he says that “Jeet doesn’t let Matt off the hook”. Because if you look at the way the argument is structured, the final appeal to authority is to — Joe Matt. The argument is structured not in terms of, “Joe Matt said this dumb thing, and he’s wrong for this reason.” Rather, it’s set up as a tension between authorities. Joe Matt said this; however, that contradicts other authorities — and ultimately, when we look at it closely, we see that Joe Matt is actually not opposed to criticism at all, but supports it in the context of interviews. Far from undermining Matt, Jeet uses him as the final prop for an argument whose other supports are a series of imposing appellations (“Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, etc”.)

You can see a similar process at work in this sentence:

But if we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art, including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art, then criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself.

The main point here, the emphatic meaning, is that “If we define criticism more broadly as any discussion of art or works of art…criticism is as unavoidable and essential as art itself.” Nestled in between that if/then construction, though is phatic content: the phrase “including conversations and the response of artists themselves to earlier art.” The second bit there is the clincher; we already know about “conversations” (a synonym with discussion), but Jeet feels it necessary to add, to highlight, the phatic fact that the response of artists to earlier art is part of criticism. The very fact that the phrase is superfluous to the argument gives it weight; it’s what Jeet decided to add even though he didn’t have to. In short, while Jeet’s emphatic meaning is a simple assertion that criticism is important, his phatic excess points again and again to artists as the exemplars and support for his statement.

In this context, I think Jeet’s note in comments that ” I think you are reading implications into my writing that weren’t meant to be there (and which other readers aren’t seeing either),” is an interesting commentary on emphatic (intentional, sometimes common sense) and phatic (excessive, implicit, requiring interpretation.) Jeet’s forswearing implications, especially those he doesn’t see. But surely part of what critics do is precisely to look for those excessive, phatic moments not, perhaps, directly connected to artist intention, but still, perhaps even all the more, important for that. Jeet’s emphatic point may not have been “criticism is valid because artists do it,” but his phatic excess shows that he validates criticism through reference to the fact that artists do it.

So here’s a final example: Gary’s response to me in comments.

It’s as if you just want to argue for arguing’s sake and since no one of any prominence is stupid enough to suggest that we substitute artists for critics or justify the validity of criticism on the grounds that artists do it, you extrapolate wildly from an essay so that you have something to argue with. You’re like a precocious 12 year old who hears the grown-ups arguing and has a compulsion to enter the fray without having the wherewithal to know what’s being discussed.

The emphatic argument is basically “you, Noah, want to argue for arguing’s sake.” But, there’s also excessive, phatic material here, perhaps best exemplified by the analogy in the last sentence. Gary accuses me of being “like a precocious 12 year old who hears the grown-ups arguing.” The phatic meaning zeroes in on generational conflict; Gary wants to infantilize me. He and Jeet are the grown-ups, I’m the precocious 12-year-old. This is especially resonant, of course, given Gary’s status as éminence grise — and given his longtime campaign to pry comics away from their status as children’s entertainment. (Indeed, the argument over who is or is not juvenile gets picked up again in later comments; I throw it at Tom Spurgeon, who volleys it back with gusto. )

Gary’s discussion is especially relevant here since he actually maps the adult/juvenile discussion onto what can be seen as an emphatic/phatic distinction. That is, he accuses me precisely of arguing for argument’s sake — for phatic (excessive) fripperies, rather than for good, emphatic reasons. Emphatic arguments are adult, phatic arguments are childish…and Gary sides with adulthood.

Supposedly. The irony is that phatic readings are, as I noted above, really what experienced “mature” critics are supposed to do. The phatic is what criticism is made of; it’s where creativity comes into criticism. It’s this kind of effort that Tom Spurgeon revealingly (and phatically) denigrates as “mak[ing] shit up.”

For Tom, making shit up, in reference to me, is a synonym for lying or, more kindly, for inadvertent but systematic misrepresentation. But, of course, making shit up is also what artists are supposed to do. And it’s what critics have to do as well; there’s an imaginative effort to figure out what the author or artist is and isn’t saying, and how that can be rephrased, rethought, recreated. The emphasis by Tom, Gary, and Jeet on intentionality, the nervousness around interpretation, does precisely the opposite of what Gary seems to hope for it. It doesn’t make writers about comics look adult and serious. It makes them look petulantly childish.

Not that Gary would necessarily be opposed to that entirely, I don’t think. After all, you don’t go around calling someone a 12-year-old if you aren’t enamored to some degree of schoolyard taunts. And Gary shows other signs of waffling around the issue of child/adult when he notes that

If Jeet has any fault as a blogger, it’s that his posts are virtually impossible to argue with — smart, literate observations that are by and large uncontroversial.

There’s a sense there that Gary wishes Jeet were maybe just a little less grown-up; that there was more juvenile, phatic pep in his posts (though, as we’ve seen, Jeet provides plenty of phatic goodness if you’re willing to look for it, and so Gary’s criticism in this case is really just unfairly projecting his own emphatic dullness.)

The emphatic point here, of course, and at length, is that I am right and everyone else is wrong. But secondarily, I want to note that the central place of interviews in comics criticism which Jeet points out seems to me to be of a piece with the tentativeness in this conversation around phatic meanings. To see the artist as the best or most important interpreter of his or her own work inevitably privilege intentionality and emphatic meaning. There’s a feeling in these discussions that phatic readings may undercut everything Gary and his cohorts have worked so hard for; that if you start playing with too many meanings you’ll end up acting like a child. Artists know best what artists say, and that emphatic meaning is and always will be, “we are not just precocious 12-year-olds, damn it.”

And that’s right, actually. Precocious 12-year-olds are smart, they’re fun, they’re surprising. If I have to choose between the 12-year-old and the intellectually stupefied eminence defending his turf…well, it’s not a hard choice to make. But really, and overall, I’d rather not pick one over the other, but just put bustles, and petticoats on both. The excess on life is art; the excess on art is crit; and the excess on both is the blogosphere with its endless rustling of frills.

A comment on Ken Parille’s discussion of Robert Crumb’s Genesis

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Before I forget and these connections are lost in the mists of time, I just wanted to add a link to Ken Parille’s lucid explanation of the attractions of  The Book of Genesis. Some notable excerpts:

“The fundamental achievement of Crumb’s Genesis for me is that it avoids something that’s central to so many illustrated versions of the bible or representations of biblical scenes: Crumb rarely idealizes his subject matter. He is not creating an  inspirational text, a magical text, or a sympathetic mythology — nor is  he mocking the bible. The wonder of Crumb’s Genesis is not the unknowable wonder of  God’s ways but of people’s actions as the bible recounts them. If there  is reverence in Crumb’s work, it’s for the flesh, for the materiality,  both ugly and beautiful  (though more often ugly), of biblical characters  and the things they do.”

” I feel a greater sympathy with Crumb’s strategy  than I do with, say, Michelangelo’s. In its refusal to idealize,  Crumb’s seems more ‘real’ to me. The thickness and gritty texture of  Crumb’s line and character designs (thick legs, thick lips, thick  fingers) tell a truth about the Book of Genesis obscured by more  reverential approaches. (It’s almost as if the medium of  cartooning is better than painting for this text . . .)”

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Utilitarian Review 7/17/10

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On HU

Matthias started the week off with a discussion of the Argentine comic strip Mafalda by Quino.

I wrote about the aphasiac power fantasy of Gantz.

Richard Cook talked about Wonder Woman, new costumes, and patriotism.

Suat wrote an extensive post comparing R. Crumb’s Genesis to other works of Biblical illustration.

Vom Marlowe discussed the squick factor in Mick Takeuchi’s Bound Beauty.

And I returned to my Bound to Blog run through all of the Marston/Peter Wonder Womans with a discussion of Wonder Woman #20.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At his own blog the Metabunker, Matthias Wivel provided a balanced appreciation of Harvey Pekar.

He hasn’t always been served equally well by his collaborators and seems to have been somewhat insensitive to the visual side of comics, leaving too many of his stories to the deadening hands of mediocre artists. But when it worked, it worked beautifully: notably Frank Stack brought the emotional turmoil of Our Cancer Year (1994) to life, and Crumb of course animated Cleveland and its inhabitants as only he could. A case in point is the story “Mr. Lopes’ Gift” (1978), which suggests a whole life in the fragments given us by Pekar. Crumb’s portrayal of a man he had probably never seen is empathetically real, providing the world for us to read in furrowed brow of this construct.

On Tcj.com, Matthias wrote about David Prudhomme’s Rebetiko.

As chance would have it, I have two articles up this week about the television show Bones. First at Comixology I talked about an episode focusing on super-heroes.

Superheroes are sometimes regarded as modern day myths; archetypes harking back to ancient heroes like Gilgamesh who famously wore his underwear on the outside and engaged in curiously vigorous male-bonding activities with his youthful ward Enkidu.

Gilgamesh aside, though, the whole ancient myth thing is maybe obscuring the fact that superheroes have much closer cousins than Hercules. Cousins like, for example, Sherlock Holmes. Absurdly dedicated, supremely skilled guardians of right who bring evil-doers to justice — switch the moustache for the helmet, or even just paint the first on the second, and how much difference is there really between Iron Man and Hercule Poirot?

And at Madeloud I talk about the black metal episode of Bones.

Also at Madeloud I review an album of Nigerian disco.

Finally, as I mentioned yesterday on the blog, Caro had an extended, um, discussion with the folks over at Comics Comics yesterday. Tim Hodler and Frank Santoro were part of the back and forth, and I burbled some too. Here’s one of the less incendiary bits from Caro:

I’ve heard and read this argument many times — that comics generate medium-specific, unique “new insights and ambiguities” that are comparable to those of fine art and literature. I’ve heard it over and over from the writers here and from other enthusiasts about the artistic possibilities of comics. But when critics like Suat put these comics in specific, detailed, analytical conversation with the high bar set by fine art and literature, they generally fail to measure up. And they generally receive comments, like the ones Ed Sizemore made over on HU, that the comparisons are unfair. This is contradictory: either comics are good enough for the comparisons and will stand up against them, or they’re not. Critical evidence tends toward “not.”

Other LInks

Kristy Valenti has an interesting article about volume and women in comics.

From Bookforum, I think this is a good, albeit short, review of Best American Comics Criticism.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #20

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It’s been a long time since I last worked on the Bound to Blog series, in which I was blogging my way through every issue of the original William Marston/Harry Peter run on Wonder Woamn. The last issue I wrote about was the squickily racist Wonder Woman #19, way back in November shortly before we left the blogspot address. So (as you can probably figure out) that puts us at #20.

So…with a good eight months or so of anticipation, was it worth the wait? Well, no, not really. This issue is decidedly weak tea. In a lot of ways it’s a rerun of the lackluster Wonder Woman #17, which was also focused around time travel and which was also disjointed and not especially spirited.

The issue still looks great, of course. I love that cover, with Redbeard (Redbeard! hah!) looking absolutely enormous through the miracle of shaky scaling, ridiculous beard flapping every which way. And check out those gnarled hands — they each look big enough to cover WW’s entire head.

I think this is the best page in the book.

Redbeard’s face in the upper right corner is fantastic, with those elaborately curving eyebrows, the half-moon irises, that magnificent nose. WW sinking thorugh the water with the giant fish behind her is also hard to resist (Peter has used the fish trick before, but it never gets old for me.) And I love the way in the last panel the ocean spray mirrors the stars on WW’s shorts. And the guys falling out of the ship, with their elongated arms making them looks more dynamic and twisted as they drop….and Redbeard’s beard again in that final panel. It’s just a solid sequence all around.

I really like this too:

Those are the hands of a giant time monster (I’ll talk a little more about him ) shortly). And they’re great hands. But what I’m really enjoying here is the way Peter dispenses with speech bubbles, just writing “Zounds!” and “Help!” and “Quarter!” directly on the art. There’s an analogous effect here, in one of his silent sequences, which includes a couple well-placed “Bonk”s and the like:

This is an interesting shift for Peter; when he did wordless bits in earlier issues, they were mostly without sound effects as well — for instance, in this bullfight the knocked out bull snores with an image rather than a sound effect. It’s clear, in other words, that Peter is still experimenting, still trying to do new things with the comics form.

Here’s another nice moment:

The hothouse B & D lesbian seraglio, complete with the veiled and ample Etta in the foreground, is of course hard to resist — but what really makes the panel is the picture within the picture, with the quickly sketched, golden-haired, (entirely?) nude winged cherubs hovering together suggestively — mirroring the triptych of the mistress and the two kneeling slaves in front of it.

There are a couple of interesting narrative points as well. WW gets her bracelets welded together, robbing her of her powers…but Marston cheats and lets her do a bunch of feats of super strength anyway. He offers the excuse that even without her Amazon abilities, she’s still no weakling — but really you get the sense that it was just helpful to the plot — and maybe too that he couldn’t quite stand having her helpless.

There’s also some back and forth with Julius Caesar:

Marston wrote a whole erotic novel about Julius Caesar, and he’s clearly borrowing from himself. In the book, as here, Caesar worships Venus and understands women, which is the source of his greatness. And in the book, as here, Caesar is really pretty dull and I wish Marston would talk about something else.

Like this:

This sequence occurs right at the beginning of the story, and it’s maybe the oddest and most fraught moment in the comic. Peter draws Nifty with extra oomph even for him; her tight dress and low neckline certainly seems to have caught Steve’s attention in that second panel. But, of course, it’s not Steve who reacts to her most strongly, but Diana. A giant ghostly monster materializes (with a ridiculously prominent (ahem) nose)…and Diana leaps upon Nifty…incidentally giving us a fetching shot of her rear, just in case we’d forgotten what a butch woman and a femme woman wrestling mean to Marston.

Diana’s sudden burst of enthusiasm/passion knocks off her glasses — almost allowing Etta to pierce her double-identity. And as soon as Diana scurries off, we learn that Nifty has a double identity of some sort too — she’s the leader of a “gang,” and also apparently the avatar or other self of the weird monster with the phallic nose.

Marston, then, seems to be circling around ideas of doubling and ideas of lesbianism; Di and Nifty have a bond of attraction/repulsion which is tied to their split selves. Furthermore, the monster is a “time monster”, pulling Nifty back into the past so that she can have revenge. Connecting the past, violence, and disassociation of the self strongly suggests trauma.

There are a lot of ways to go from here. Marston could have examined the idea of bifurcation/trauma and its relationship to patriarchy/incest, as he did in issue 16. Or he could have gone further into the Diana/Nifty relationship and female bonding as a powerful, potentially dangerous force, which can either be used on behalf of patriarchy or against it (I talk about this more here. Or, you know, he could have just let us see a whole lot more of the crazy monster and given us more background on how it related to Nifty, since that’s the easily the nuttiest idea in the book,and the one with the most potential for ridiculous/unlikely/entertaining elaboration.

But he doesn’t do any of those things. Instead he gets wrapped up in how cool Caesar is and we never find out what the deal is with the Time Monster, or why Nifty is bonded to it, or what it wants. At the end there’s a kind of half-hearted suggestion that it was summoned by Nifty’s desire for revenge — directly contradicting earlier suggestions that it was itself pushing Nifty towards desiring revenge. I guess you could see the monster as an avatar of maleness; when women embrace violence, they are possessed by the patriarchy or some such. Again, though, Marston usually makes these points pretty explicitly when he’s paying attention. This one feels like he was mostly just going through the motions.