I Smash … Planet Hulk

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Over the past couple months my comics reading has mostly consisted of manga with a handful of American titles that have nothing to do with superheroes. I stopped following mainstream superhero comics some time ago, on account of the bad art, endless crossovers, etc., etc. But there is a part of me (the foolish, masochistic part) that would like nothing better than to sit back and read a truly enjoyable superhero story.

That’s why I’m returning to first principles. And by first principles, I mean Hulk smash. Originally, I planned to read the popular Planet Hulk storyline by writer Greg Pak and artist Carlo Pagulayan. But then Marvel did me a favor by adapting the story into a cartoon, so now I don’t have to read anything!

For those not familiar with the story, it begins with the heroes of Earth, led by Iron Man, deciding that they’ve had enough of the Hulk and his smashing. So the heroes come up with a perfectly sensible, if not exactly heroic, plan: they load the Hulk onto a rocket and shoot him into space. To be fair, the heroes intended for Hulk to land on a verdant paradise uninhabited by intelligent beings. Of course, things don’t go as planned and Hulk crashes on a barren world called Sakaar. He’s immediately captured by slavers and forced to fight as a gladiator for the amusement of the evil Red King. After some success as a gladiator, the Hulk reluctantly takes charge of a rag-tag team of slaves and rebels struggling to overthrow the tyrant. It’s basically Gladiator with the Hulk instead of Russell Crowe, which I consider an improvement. The plot is predictable, but that’s not necessarily a terrible thing in an action flick.

But there are problems with adapting a fairly long comic storyline into an 80 minute movie. First, there’s a painful amount of expository dialogue, and yet most of it seems unnecessary given the simplicity of the plot. Another problem is that there are at least half a dozen major supporting characters that need to be introduced, and several of them get substantial flashbacks. But the characters still feel like strangers by the end of the movie because there simply isn’t enough time to show viewers why anyone besides the Hulk matters. The 80 minute runtime produces a movie that is, at once, too long for its simple story and yet too short to effectively establish its universe and characters.

The time crunch is further exacerbated by some incredibly misguided fan-service. One of the flashbacks consists of aliens fighting Thor for what feels like half an hour. To call it tangential to the plot would be generous. Now, I’m sure there are plenty of Marvel fanboys who squeal whenever Thor shows up, but the scene wasted precious time that should have been devoted to the Hulk. But at least a fair number of non-fanboys actually know who Thor is. In an even stranger decision, the movie includes a lengthy fight sequence with Beta Ray Bill of all people. Again, I’m sure there are a couple fanboys out there who think that everything is better with Beta Ray Bill. They are wrong. His appearance feels awkward and the Hulk come across as a guest star in his own movie.

Also, the dialogue is really bad. Obviously, this is a Hulk movie, and I wasn’t expecting Hamlet. But there’s no reason why all the characters have to speak in the same insufferably earnest manner. There’s no humor, no enthusiasm, no personality, not even the little character ticks that Stan Lee would throw in.

The animation is better than the writing, though it has its share of flaws. Rather than attempting a highly detailed style, Planet Hulk rips off the character design style introduced by Bruce Timm and used extensively in DC animation. This is actually a good thing; if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. The characters have a sleek, minimalist look that works well in action-driven animation. The backgrounds are given more detail, though they’re rather generic sci-fi.

But the animators can’t hide the fact that they’re working on a tight (direct-to-video) budget. During the action scenes, it often seemed like “frames” were missing from the film. The animators probably didn’t have enough time or resources to draw a sufficient number of cells so that the movements would appear quick and fluid. Instead, The action is often choppy, characters move sluggishly, and frequent edits are used to hide these faults. The cumulative effect is that the fights feel small and disconnected from their environment. The action sequences are presumably the main selling point of the movie, but they’re not much of a selling point, unfortunately.

Despite my panning, I know some people might still want to watch Planet Hulk with their kids, so I’ll comment on the age-appropriateness. Way back in the good-old-days, Noah criticized the Wonder Woman animated feature for being too violent for young kids and yet limiting that violence in rather obvious and cowardly ways (probably so that the movie wouldn’t be completely inappropriate for younger viewers). Planet Hulk is also too violent for young kids, but it doesn’t half-ass it. There’s a stunning amount of graphic violence for a PG-13 movie, and it’s far more gory than either Wonder Woman or the live-action Incredible Hulk (I’m not exaggerating, if you don’t like blood, this isn’t the movie for you). So it’s probably not appropriate for the youngest viewers, but teenage boys will love it.

If I were to rank Planet Hulk in comparison to  recent DC animated features, I’d say it’s better than the profoundly stupid Superman/Batman, but it lacks the technical polish of Wonder Woman (flawed as the story was, it had great animation) or Green Lantern: First Flight.

In which Caro reads The Bun Field, muses on gender and metaphor and remembers how hard it is to write short

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This is the first of a series of posts about art comics by women, combining reviews with critical attention to whether it matters that women wrote them. Bear with me through a little awkwardness; it’s been awhile since I’ve stretched these muscles.

In her response to last week’s “Gender and Cartooning in Chicago” thread, Erica Friedman gave an insightful and succinct summary of a theme that’s run through a number of recent HU posts: “Men represent men’s stories,” she said, “and set that as societal norm, so any women looking to rise in the field will have to write/draw those stories too or be relegated to an inferior ‘girl’s’ position.”

Hold that thought for a few paragraphs, will you, please?

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Finnish artist Amanda Vähäm?ki’s The Bun Field (Campo di Baba) got a decent amount of attention from critics when it came out in English translation last summer (June 2009). If you haven’t read it, Bart Beaty gave the following summary of the action in his review of the original Italian publication :

Campo de Baba is not much of a story, and it is probably not even a story at all in the classic sense of the word. A young man (sic) awakes from a dream — or does he? At breakfast he is confronted by a blob-like creature. He goes for a drive with a bear. He trades teeth with a dog. He is winked at by an apple. With a tractor, he slaughters a field. He disappears.

Most reviews of the English-language version follow Beaty’s lead and read it as a lushly drawn extended dream sequence that makes no particular attempt at specific meaning. Other critics, like Popmatters’ Sara Cole, go a little further and claim the book represents the “lived experience of a child,” the vulnerability and confusion, how nightmarish the adult world seems. But even Cole says it “lack(s) a coherent narrative.”

To the book’s credit and in defense of the reviewers, part of Vähäm?ki’s achievement is that the book satisfies equally well either way…

…but the incoherence is vastly overstated.

Up through the title scene, it works just fine to read The Bun Field using one or the other of these two interpretations. But the panels with the younger child on the bicycle don’t fit very well with those readings.

The younger child leaves our heroine crying and rides her bike back into the setting of the original sequence (with Donald duck and the brontosaurus).

Original sequence (second panel in book)

 This time, though, from the perspective of the younger child, this setting is not ominous and foreboding; the child is not vulnerable, and the world is not surreal.

To make the narrative coherent, we have to account for that shift in perspective.

There’s a double meaning in the title of this book that admittedly is a little weak in translation. The baba of the original title is an Italian pastry shaped like the buns in the bun field, but it’s also the way a baby says “baby.” In English, you’ve got to come up with “bun in the oven” before it starts to hang together.

A Google search for “Finnish bun metaphor” adds an additional image: “eating a dry bun” is something like “a hard pill to swallow.”

The coherence of the narrative – the scene in the bun field – hinges on this cluster of metaphors: the bun is a symbol for early childhood, plowing the field destroys (eats up) the buns, the loss of childhood innocence is “a hard pill to swallow” but an inescapable part of growing up.

The moment in childhood that the book’s narrative represents marks the collision of the affectionate, imagination-rich world of the young child, where animals drive cars and talk, with the colder, crueler, more violent adult world that the older child is becoming aware of – an awareness symbolized by the acquisition of the canine incisor.

That’s why the trigger for the sobbing is not her realizing that she’s killing the buns, but the younger child telling her she could “come home,” that “everybody was waiting” for her.


In the initial readings, the tears were trauma from the inescapable nightmare, or guilt and impotence over this “murder” she was forced to commit, and the younger child was an anomaly. Here they are tears of grief over the loss of that innocent perspective of childhood, over the fact that she really can’t return home to that beautiful place where the younger child still lives with the smiling dinosaur.

That’s a pretty coherent narrative, really. It’s a fully symbolic narrative, it isn’t transparently obvious or even particularly readily accessible, and I make no claims that it’s the only possible coherent narrative in the book – but it is coherent. What it isn’t, as Bart Beaty points out, is a “story.”

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Erica commented that “men write men’s stories.” The obvious corollary to this, which came up in other comments and threads, is that women write women’s stories. Erica’s point, though, is that both women and men end up writing men’s stories, men because they’re interested and women because they have to. But if this book isn’t a story, then it can’t really be a man’s story or a woman’s story in any obvious way.

I thought it might be helpful to see a piece of writing that was more obviously a “man’s” take on these themes – the casual cruelty of the grown-up world and the lack of control that naïve children have over their interaction with that world. I asked my well-read-in-comics friend Christopher Keels for an example (Thanks, Chris!), and while nothing set in early childhood came to mind, one selection stood out as a useful contrast. Josh Simmons’ Wholesome, from Kramer’s Ergot 4, also features a world-wise dog and the broad themes of cruelty and vulnerability/control, but the dominant emotion in Wholesome is anger.

Anger is aggressive and grief is passive, so in the most reductive, Pythagorean-opposites type of gender analysis I could say that based on these associations, Vähäm?ki’s book is feminine and Simmons’ story masculine. The comparison with Simmons certainly makes Vähäm?ki’s book feel more feminine than it does on its own, but there isn’t an equivalency. Simmons’ book feels more masculine than Vähäm?ki’s does feminine.

But Erica’s point is that women have to either mime male voices or accept a lower standing, and while it’s debatable whether the feminine perspective is important for reading this book, I can’t find a reading where Vähäm?ki’s miming an explicitly male voice. She privileges neither women nor men – we all experience childhood innocence and we all experience cruelty and grief. The main character is so neutral that Bart Beaty actually got the gender wrong (the English translation identifies her as a girl in the bar scene.)

“Stories” tend to work by invoking ideas and actions and relationships that are deeply embedded within a culture; stories have histories of their own independent of the specific manifestation of them in any given book. In many ways, “story” performs the same function in plot-driven fiction (like most genre) that “metaphor” performs in The Bun Field – it’s the thing that you have to recognize in order to tie the whole thing together and make it make sense.

So thinking about Erica’s point in light of Vähäm?ki’s work raises the question of whether metaphor takes on gender characteristics in the same way that story does – do “women’s metaphors” and “men’s metaphors” exist and work in the same way that men and women’s stories do? I think you have to answer that to determine whether any difference is made by the fact that The Bun Field was written by a woman.

It isn’t really a question that can be answered for myself by reading one book, though. I’ll just have to read some more art comics by women.

Next up: Renee French

 

Bill Randall Provides Free Professional Advice for TCJ.com

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I still haven’t reconciled myself to Bill Randall’s departure from this blog…so I’m going to pretend he’s still here by stealing his comment from an earlier thread and making it into a post against his will.

Especially since I occasionally hope that someone form tcj.com reads this site, and I wanted to put this where they’d see it, just in case.

So here’s Bill:

My quips aside, here’s an online marketer’s perspective, since I do that in real life. And I am snowbound & procrastinating, unlike Vancouver.

(My first draft turned into an online business plan. Split-testing, Crazy Egg, conversions. Madness! If you’re interested, drop me a line and I’ll have you selling acai berry in an hour.)

Short version: the design gaffes suck, mainly for framing the launch as TCJ/Fail. Yet they can be fixed… install the Disqus comments manager here, move the RSS feed to the top there. “Continuous muddling” becomes “continuous improvement,” as Toyota would have it.

The big problem?

The “interminable stream of content” favors clicks, while TCJ is (and should be) written for readers.

For clicks, sell ad space. Split articles up over multiple pages. Tell advertisers you get X unique visitors and X^2 pageviews. Put the ads in the hotspots for ads.

For readers, find out what they want, watch what they do. Give them free stuff (essays, TCJ-Date, Krypto-Revolution of the Age with tween trolling & RickRolling in the comments) and they give you time & attention, eventually as a reflex. Everyone reading this has sites you check 5 times a day, and TCJ’s main page is not one of them. HU might be.

Right now TCJ’s design favors clicks over readers. Johanna Draper has pointed out it needs just a few small fixes– the commenting thing is the main one, easily fixed with a plugin like Commentluv or Disqus. Read her post, though, for her accurate take on the mismatch in Gary Groth’s opening shot and the reality of the site’s execution.

One of the biggest things I’ve learned since Noah invited me to HU, since I left, and from hanging out, is the very real degree to which the internet is about conversation. Its whole damn architecture favors conversation. Whoever fosters that will thrive, whoever stomps it out or ignores it will fade. Noah’s very, very good at fostering it. TCJ was when people wrote letters. If it can translate the spirit of the old Blood & Thunder into curated blog comments, six months from now everyone will be reading it first thing in the morning for the spit & gristle.

And buying acai berry from their email list.

And here’s a question: what are some sites to model?

PS
I left out the best thing.

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Update: And while we’re on the subject: why the hell is Eric Reynolds writing this for the Comics Reporter rather than TCJ.com? (Link by Sean Collins.

Update 2: Just to be clear; there’s nothing against Eric. It’s a fascinating essay, and Tom’s to be congratulated for getting it and putting it up. But it just seems like gross negligence that tcj.com can’t even get important news features and scoops from Fantagraphics own publishers.

TCJ.com/fail/update: A Comment

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(Part of an impromptu mini-roundtable on the failure of TCJ.com)

A few days ago, Noah wrote to me about a critical endeavor that he is planning for the HU site. By the by, I mentioned that TCJ.com deserved another “kick in the butt” now that it had enough time to improve itself to which he responded that he was planning a little something on Sunday (read here).

Noah’s complaints are not the voice of a single cranky individual, they are merely some of the unvoiced grievances of a number of online reviewers and comics enthusiasts. Noah, as well as I, can point to a number of seasoned reviewers and bloggers who find the new TCJ.com a mess.

Continue reading →

TCJ.com/fail/Update

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It’s been more than two months since I wrote this post discussing some of the problems on TCJ.com. I wanted to do another go round — though I think this time there’ll be a good bit less fire and brimstone. In part that’s because there have been improvements to the site. Mostly, though, it’s because my initial disbelief and panic has largely given way to resignation. This is the tcj.com we’re going to have; best to get used to it.

Let’s start with the positive though. The site design has been improved. Clear visual boundaries have been added at the bottom of each post, and the “Read More” links have been made clearer and more attractive. Some (though not all) posts now have brief summaries on the main page rather than just starting in with text, so the posts no longer ends in the middle of a sentence. The Comments links on individual posts are also easier to find. And helpful blue tags (“Review” “News” “Blog” etc.) have been added to each post. All of this may seem like small beer, but the cumulative effect is noticeable. The site still isn’t particularly appealing, and the flashing ads on the side remain distracting and ugly. But it’s no longer a chore just to look at the content.

TCJ has also added a box of links to “Top TCJ” stories in the sidebar. Again, it’s not a huge change, but it’s definitely a good idea — and will hopefully give new users a good introduction to recent content. Individual posts now have social networking links available, which seems like a good move. And the link to the message board is now better marked, which is helpful (though it may be too little too late at this point.) Finally, TCJ is now down with those newfangled social networking sites. (Though one of the first Twitter posts is a Ken Smith link? Why?)

So that’s the good.

The bad is that TCJ’s content has been unsettlingly erratic, to put it mildly. There remains a lot of good writing, from Shaenon Garrity, Matthias Wivel, Tom Crippen, and many others.

But there’s also been David Ritchie posting random tchotchkes, Dave Pifer posting even more random snapshots and
Kent Worcester posting his course syllabus, complete with advice on writing style quoted from Strunk and White. And while these are particularly egregious examples, they aren’t aberrations. You don’t get through a week on tcj.com without at least a post or two that makes you think, “what the fuck?” And not in a good way.

The problem here isn’t that posting random photos or random crap or your syllabus is necessarily wrong. My very strong preference would be not to look at any of those things…but probably someone out there is interested, and what the hell…more power to them. I mean, I keep posting these music downloads even though it’s fairly clear nobody really wants them. But, damn it, it’s my blog, and my readers can l scroll past it once a week if they want to get to the comics criticism.

That’s kind of the thing though; it’s my blog. With tcj, it often feels like there’s nobody at the helm. To pick on poor Dave Pifer again — who is he? Why am I looking at this snapshot he posted, anyway? TCJ.com has managed to get a blog’s randomness without the blog’s personal touch. Thus, for example, R. Fiore’s one-liners come across not as charming eccentricities, but as half-assed fuck-yous by somebody who’s posting because he’s supposed to, rather than because he’s actually committed to being there.

The sense that no one gives a crap is only accentuated by the fact that so many of the supposedly regular bloggers are already AWOL. Where did Anne Ishii go? Eric Millikan, one of the most interesting promised bloggers, barely even got started. There are some constants; Shaenon has been a rock; R.C. Harvey pops up consistently to talk about the comics pages; Rob Clough has been blogging his heart out. But overall…well, on February 10, there were 7 posts, one of which was an HU link, and one of which was Journalista. So you’ve got like 20 writers listed on the side there and effectively five posts. One of which, as it happens, was a review by me.

Meanwhile, on the same day, Tom Spurgeon had 17 posts. Sure, some of them are just individual images…but many of them were substantial. With its layout problems, the one thing tcj.com had going for it was the promise of constant, high-quality content…and yet its team of dozens is getting its ass kicked by one guy. Because that one guy actually cares. And caring, as it turns out, really matters.

I’m being somewhat inconsistent here; in my earlier post I said there was too much content; now I’m saying there’s too little. But, alas, I think the site has managed to have both problems at once. Because there’s no sense of why what’s being posted is being posted, the site feels both overwhelming and insubstantial. The whole thing has an air of despairing malaise — the toilet paper spools and spools, and you can hear the creaking and the distant flush. Who are we talking to? Do they want to hear tit jokes? Do they care what happens at the Hooded Utilitarian, and if so do they really want those damned desperately “controversial” updates every day? The comments sections positively echo; the message board has been rendered almost mute; it’s like everyone’s sitting around with their mouths slowly sagging, waiting for the drool to plop out and ruin their laptop so they can get up and burn their longboxes in despair .

I’ve made suggestions before about what the site should do, and I guess I still have ideas about what I’d change if I were king of the world. But at this point it mostly feels like rearranging the deck chairs, etc. — or, to pick a more poignant metaphor, like adjusting the format of your magazine for the fifth time while the industry goes belly-up. I think tcj.com’s main problem is simple, and perhaps unfixable — there’s no sense of editorial guidance. I have the highest regard for Gary, Michael Dean, Kristy Valenti, and Dirk. Individually and together, they know a ton about the industry, a ton about the internet, and a ton about putting a magazine together. For whatever reason, though, all that talent, knowledge, and dedication has so far added up to a site which seems to be running on autopilot. I mean…why not have themed weeks? Why not have roundtables? Why not have new interviews, for god’s sake — that’s what the Journal is known for, right? (And when you do have an interview why not include a paragraph or two of introduction so that people who don’t already know the interview subjects have some incentive to wade into the four part video?) Why not have Gary dive into that rolodex and get some creators to write pieces? Why not do something to make it seem like the energy that went into so many issues of the journal is being put into tcj.com? Everybody involved knows that a successful magazine needs enthusiasm, heart, and genius if anyone is going to want to read it, but nobody seems to have noticed that a successful website needs the same thing. The cosmetic changes are helpful and appreciated, but until and unless someone decides to treat this site as a personal labor of love, it’s not going to be worth the bytes it’s printed on. And bytes aren’t worth a hell of a lot.

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Update: Suat has an even more brutal take here

Update 2: And Johanna Draper Carlson weighs in.

Just in case anyone thinks that this particular snarkfest brings me joy, I thought I’d mention that reading Suat and Johanna on tcj.com, as well as many of the comments here, makes me feel vaguely sick. I would like tcj.com to succeed anyway, but having tied my fortune to their wagon…well, let’s just say I keep hoping that things aren’t as bad as I think they are. Being continually disabused of that hope by a long line of folks whose opinion I value is not especially pleasant.

Update: And Heidi weighs in.

Caroline Small Joins the Hooded Utilitarian

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I’m very pleased to announce that Caroline Small (better known to our comments readers as Caro) is going to be joining the Hooded Utilitarian as a regular blogger. In her day job, Caro runs the Flebus Project, a digital humanities collective that preserves mid-20th-century visual culture. She’ll be starting in with the blogging either this week or next, so say hello when you see her.

Utilitarian Review 2/13/10

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On HU

We started out this week with me explaining why R. Fiore is wrong about the Watchmen. A lot of comments, some of them even about Watchmen.

I posted my report on a panel on Gender and Cartooning in Chicago.

Richard reviewed the first volume of Parasyte.

Suat discussed a classic comics adaptation of the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber.

I reviewed Manhwa 100, a catalog of Korean comics.

And this week’s download featured Beethoven, prog, and other things.

Utilitarians Everywhere

In my monthly Comixology column I review Craig Yoe’s recent collection of Joe Shuster’s fetish comics.

So Shuster was into kink, then? Yoe does manage to uncover some evidence that the artist had an eye for chorus girls and the female form. But while that’s interesting, it’s not really the main issue. The point here isn’t that this or that creator had a personal thing for spanking or sadism or masochism. Rather, the point is that as a genre superhero comics simply aren’t that far removed from the kind of pulp fetish porn that Shuster retailed in Nights of Horror. Read through Yoe’s plot synopses of the sixteen plus issues that Shuster illustrated and you’ll get a definite feeling of déjà vu. Damsels in distress, evil hooligans, manly private dicks, and fiendish torture devices — didn’t Shuster illustrate all of this somewhere before? You’ve even got a fair number of men getting shown up just like that milquetoast Clark Kent…though, admittedly, Kent’s humiliation didn’t usually involve a French maid.

On tcj.com I sneered mean-spiritedly at kid’s manga Dinosaur King.

Also on tcj.com, also sneering, my review of the shojo title Book of Friends.

On Metropulse I review Sade’s new album.

And on Splice Today I talked about why John Le Carre’s famous novel, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, is an idiotic, melodramatic piece of horse dung.

Other Links

I enjoyed this mean-spirited manga review by Erica Friedman.

Shaenon defeats Captain America.

And Matt Yglesias
makes with the Watchmen reference.