Utilitarian Review 10/31/15

Posted on October 31, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Wonder Woman News

Joan Ormrod reviewed my book at Cinema Journal (mostly behind paywall, but she likes it better than Lepore’s, which doesn’t happen that much!)

On HU

Patrick Carland on Zen Pencils and an orgy of hate.

Ng Suat Tong on Ed Brubaker’s pallid noir, The Fade Out.

Chris Gavaler on Supergirl vs the Marvel cinematic universe.

Me on the Before Watchmen debacle.

mouse says, yep, furry is about sex.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from the end of 1949, including EC.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the New Republic I wrote about how we need to do away with the term Human trafficking.

At the Guardian I wrote about why a Die Hard origin story is dumb.

At the LA Times I said you should let your kids watch screens already.

At Playboy I got to write about Carpenter’s The Thing and male paranoia about dissolving into orifice-laden ichor.

At the new website the Establishment, I wrote about

—racism and killing women in Narcos.

—Ex Machina, the Perfect Guy, and how it’s more highbrow to have women who aren’t real.

At Splice Today I wrote that

—everyone wants to kill baby Hitler.

—Rubio may be hurt by racism.

—someone other than journalists should moderate debates.

Other Links

Josephine at Tits and Sass on Zola, social media and sex work horror stories.

Arthur Chu on the huge mess around the gaming panels at SXSW.

Daniel Larison on the GOP debates.

Emma Paling on Wikipedia’s hostility to women.

Katherine St. Asaph on how it’s okay to compare Joanna Newsome to other female performers.

“So is that a Sex Thing?” Furries and Smut (NSFW)

Posted on October 29, 2015 by mouse

This article is about sexuality, and contains sexually explicit images below. It is certainly NSFW. Please take care.

“So………. is that a sex thing, or?” my friend/coworker asked me some weeks ago, after reading my twitter feed closely enough and asking me about furries. As an answer I gave a furtive “UMMMMM. NOT REALLY.”

And since then I’ve been working on a “well, SURE.”

Sure it’s a sex thing. I can’t profess to write about furry culture without writing about it. Journalists can still safely grant themselves license to straight up make. shit. up. about us and our sexual lives without challenge, and here I am with a safe platform to speak my truth. Describing the exact affinity for cartoons is kind of beneath any of us at this point. We’re perverts. We watch too many cartoons. What do you want? Furries make cartoon animal bodies and mash them together with other cartoon animal bodies, and we mash together our human bodies too. We live outside our fungible ape forms on the internet and inside a fursuit, a swamp of our own breath and sweat. The fursuit, on the outside, is our insides, the cartoon inhabiting us. Furry sexuality is the flat null space between bugs bunny’s legs and the sensual line of ink distinguishing his tits. The life as a cartoon animal is one that wrestles with the anxieties of, and the frolicking joys of, inhabiting a human body, and that often centers the experience of fucking, or the experience of being fucked.

My history of my being a furry is my history of being in this body. Of wanting to survive cartoonish giant hammer blows. Living through the gulf of decades between Hare-Um Scare-Um and Space Jam and whatever that new cartoon is out now because if you’re strong enough, and you’re a cartoon, you can postpone death indefinitely as long as someone is watching. My body and mind existing in the Bosch-ian nightmare that is to be gazed upon and of inflicting a terrible gaze. Horniness making my teeth grow long and my bones to twist and my fur to come out. Overcoming the overwhelming paroxysmic fits of ticklishness that have previously made intimate touch feel like an attack. Not flinching from my femininity or my vulnerability. Feeling cute and safe in my little matchbox bed.

Enjoy some Ice Cream.
A piece I drew for Mice Making Love, a zine I made with my spouse.

Assigning value to furry smut categorically is a tedious process. It’s not on the whole a panacea against patriarchal repression or the feast of the Maenads with cat ears and a clip-on tail. Every furry is responsible for the continuum of choices in making and engaging with sexual material, as well as the atmosphere of the community as a whole. Though the images we repeat and the language we use to describe them can telegraph clues about attitudes, there is no linear elevation of tastes or kink that acts as a signpost for a person’s character. No threshold under which one is just vanilla enough to be beneath suspicion of making bad choices or taking advantage of someone. Which isn’t to say “hands off, judge not.” I think furries on the whole are reluctant to be self-critical of our permissive culture. Our reticence to call out has shielded some nasty behavior and unsocial attitudes among furs with a high enough reputation drawing porn in the community. Online spaces are especially fraught because the relationships people build, especially when they are young and emotionally isolated like I was, have lasting impact. Finding a community and gaining status when that experience is not connected to your offline life can be chaotic, radicalizing. I don’t know if I can count myself as lucky that I stumbled upon the Vixen Controlled Library and found that *enough* before I ever heard of ch*n sites. There was AOL furry roleplay before that. Yiiikes. Through furry I at least gained the advantage of encountering people whose sexual experience was radically, bewilderingly differently than mine. And I got to be friends with them.

Covers for Associated Student Bodies by Lance Rund and Chris McKinley.
Art by the great furry illustrator Terrie Smith.

On 90s furry Internet, I was able to uncover illustrations related to a furry comic called Associated Student Bodies by Lance Rund and Chris McKinley. A punchline by a generation of young furries much savvier and with more resources for articulating their weirdness than us greymuzzles. It became the great furry comic cliche. Lonely sensitive homo goes to college, everyone is gay and they all fuck, no one uses condoms and everything is lovely. I knew of this comic’s existence as a young fur but didn’t read it until I was older, collected in a nice hardcover edition. The comic means more to me as the previously unavailable prize, the sense of NEEDING to read it more powerful than whenever I actually got around to like… reading it. Squinting at the tempestuous, loathesome storm of my teenage years like a ship in a bottle now.

A common motif in furry porn is public sex. We are teleported to the locker room, the bar, the dancefloor, the back alley adjecent to the bar or dancefloor. The furry subjects in these dioramas are enthusiastically rutting while an audience telegraphs their titillation. Maybe one bystander performs a perfunctory gesture of being scandalized while the peanut gallery winks to the audience. The stigma of sex, of being seen as wanting sex, is flattened and erased in a cartoon environment. We watch ourselves watching each other, and in our inhibition we are free from the stigma of being watched. But isn’t it annoying when there’s a line of bottoms on the bar with tails up when you’re just trying to get a drink!

By my friend Artdecade.
You can see more at his website Artdecade Monthly or buy his gay furry visual novel game Willy Bear Beach.

I imagine a world where Waller, Whorley and Vances’ Omaha the Cat Dancer is more respected and influential in comics than R. Crumb’s body of work. They both radically sexualize funny animals. Omaha (notably after Kate Whorley’s involvement) is a sensitive portrayal of many people’s journeys as sexual beings, mostly women. It treats gay and bisexual people like people in a time when it is disadvantageous to do so (that time extends to present day). It’s described as a soap opera. It’s pulp is not the pulp like the paper that it’s printed on, that steals our breath. It is pulp like the orange that nourishes us. Omaha the Cat Dancer shows sex as a negotiation between two partners. Fritz the Cat is Crumb’s dick. His elegantly hatched dick. Fritz is killed when Crumb’s dick finds him boring, or when Scrutiny, the evil stepsister of Muse, becomes like… a total drag, man. The legacy of Crumb’s radically sexual funny animal art is as a cloak for more boring, insubstantial fuck art by people who don’t care about funny animals. The demographic division between furry comics and proper independent comics has been delineated as much by the sensibilities of comix doods who venerate Crumb yet ignore Omaha as the genesis of the CBLDF. As much as furry culture coalescing as a distinct identity that circulates material exclusively among our own community. In our timidity to address the centering of sexuality in our artistic community, we have found ourselves at the bottom of the hierarchy of prestige as folk who make. alternative. comics.

As a person who makes comics, or webcomics, a niche market, I’ve made the deliberate decision to make a niche niche furry comic. No, a niche niche niche furry comic with porn in it. When I express myself the calculations of getting the dollars of non-gay, gender-conforming people who don’t like cartoon animals because they’ve been tainted by furries like me aren’t that much of a factor in what ends up on my pages. It is possible, and it is an aspiration for me as an artist to depict, the love we give to each others’ bodies as affirming the inherent dignity and loveliness that inhabits our soft hairless ape shells. That the debasedness of sex as represented in art high and low, and our wrestling with what it means to us as creatures who have to live with each other, is illusory. To be a filthy animal is a fact of life. To be a filthy cartoon animal is a gift. We are squashed by ten thousand ACME anvils and do not bleed, only pool in a swamp of ink and reconstitute, with a constellation of dizzied stars and bells and tweeting birds circling our noggins. Our bodies are ink on paper. Just ideas at the mercy of a nib. You see us, you turn the page and you wash your hands.

Who Watches Them Piss on the Watchmen?

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This piece first ran at Slate.
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Even by the wretched standards of the entertainment industry, superhero comics are known for their dreadful labor practices. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, famously sold the rights to the character to DC Comics for $130, and spent the latter part of their lives, and virtually all their money, fighting unsuccessfully to regain control of him. Similarly, Jack Kirby, the artist who co-created almost the entire roster of Marvel characters, was systematically stiffed by the company whose fortunes he made. Though most of the heroes in the Avengers film were Kirby creations, for example, his estate won’t receive a dime of the film’s $1 billion (and counting) in box office earnings.

In keeping with this depressing tradition, DC will, next week, begin releasing new comics based on Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s seminal 1986-87 series. Before Watchmen will include not one, not two, but seven new limited series, written and drawn by some of DC’s most popular creators, including Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke, Amanda Conner, and Joe Kubert. Watchmen demonstrated to a mainstream audience that comics could be art, and became one of the most popular and critically acclaimed comics of the last 25 years. Up to now, it had also been one of the most sacrosanct. For over two decades, DC has resisted the urge to publish new material featuring Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, or the Comedian.

You’ll notice the list of writers and artists involved with Before Watchmen includes neither Moore nor Gibbons. This is not unusual in superhero comics. Most work for DC and Marvel is created on a work-for-hire basis. Thus, the original creator of, say, Walrus Man will usually go into a deal with one of the big two comics publishers knowing that the Titan of Tusk will become the company’s property—his aquatic adventures to be written and drawn by whomever the corporate overlords deem fit.

What is unusual, though, is the vehemence with which the original creator has denounced Before Watchmen. It’s true that back in the ’80s, DC tried to get Moore and Gibbons on board for a sequel. That didn’t pan out, though, and in the ensuing decades, Moore’s relationship with DC has soured, to put it mildly. Among (many) other things, Moore became increasingly angry with the company over the handling of the rights to Watchmen itself. In the original contract, DC had written a provision stating that the comic and the characters would revert to Moore and Gibbons once the series went out of print. Moore had assumed that, as with all comics in those pre-“graphic novel” days, this would happen within a few years. Instead, of course, Watchmen was a massive hit—so massive that the trade paperback collection of Watchmen has been in constant publication, and probably always will be.

Gibbons has largely seemed content with DC’s perpetual ownership of Watchmen. Moore, though, is a different story. He refused to accept recompense for the 2009 Watchmen film, which he referred to (sight unseen) as “more regurgitated worms.” As for Before Watchmen, he made his position painfully clear in an interview: “I don’t want money. What I want is for this not to happen.”

Watchmen‘s canonical status, combined with Moore’s dissent, has led to an unusually vocal backlash against DC. Chris Roberson, a sometime DC writer, decided to stop accepting work from the company because of its record on creator’s rights. Cartoonist Roger Langridge, who wrote the acclaimed series Thor: The Mighty Avenger for Marvel, followed suit, explaining that “Marvel and DC are turning out to be quite problematic from an ethical point of view to continue working with.” And Bergen Street Comics in Brooklyn will not be carrying the Before Watchmen titles; in explanation, Bergen Street’s manager, the comics critic Tucker Stone, said, “This is just gross, and we don’t want to be part of this one.”

It would be nice to say that Roberson, Langridge, and Stone are at the forefront of an all-out revolt against DC and Marvel’s business practices. That’s not really the case, though. For the most part, DC and Marvel’s writers and artists are still writing and arting as they always have; comics stores are still carrying the comics; and fans are still buying. Yes, if you go stumbling about in the comments of mainstream comics blogs (here for instance), you’ll find some outrage on Moore’s behalf. But you’ll also find a significant number of folks who don’t care, and who are actively irritated that anyone thinks that maybe they should care: As one fan said, “Alan Moore is a very arrogant guy that really hasn’t done anything relevant in a very long time and should really spend more time creating and less being a cranky old guy in a pub.”

J. Michael Straczynski, one of the writers on Before Watchmen, summed things up for many when he asked rhetorically, “Did Alan Moore get screwed on his contract? Of course. Lots of people get screwed, but we still have Spider-Man and lots of other heroes.”

Straczynski’s contrast between Alan Moore (screwed!) and Spider-Man (still ours!) nicely sums up the fandom dynamics of superhero comics. Creators are there to churn out marketable, exploitable properties … and then disappear. And because the comics companies own the characters, and because they have substantial marketing departments, they’re in a position to make that disappearance stick. Who knows who created all those different Avengers? Who knows who created Wonder Woman? Who cares? We want our modern myths packaged and available at our corner store and on our movie screens. Also … toasters.

Why is Moore complaining? It’s not about the money, as he’s said. (That’s probably a big part of the reason people call him a crank.) But Moore created a group of characters and the world they live in; those characters still mean something to him. Now a company he believes has screwed him over gets to colonize and even define that world. For example: Moore’s comics have often been concerned with feminism, and one theme of Watchmen is that the superhero genre is built in part on retrograde sexual politics and thuggish rape fantasies.

And how does Before Watchmen address these issues? Like so.

If this were some piece of fan fiction detritus—naked Dr. Manhattan, porn-faced Silk Spectre!—it would be funny. But given that this is an “official” product, it starts to be harder to laugh it off.

Of course, this is one of the things that always happens with art. If you create a beloved character or story, others are going to honor it, parody it, use it, and abuse it. That’s why there’s fan fiction. Indeed, Moore and artist Melinda Gebbie literally defiled Dorothy Gale, Alice (of Wonderland), and Wendy Darling in their exuberantly pornographic Lost Girls. Given that, what does Moore have to complain about exactly?

What he has to complain about is that he doesn’t own his own characters … and the company that does own them is free to pursue any version of the characters it likes, whether honoring Moore’s original vision (as DC has been careful to assert) or turning it into bland, infinitely reproducible genre product (as many suspect they will). And DC has the marketing might to ensure that, in the end, its version will be the one that’s remembered. After the third or fourth Before Watchmen movie, which iteration of the characters will be most familiar to the public? Rorschach and Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan have been raised from their resting place, and Moore—and the rest of us—now get to watch them stagger around, dripping bits of themselves across the decades, until everyone has utterly forgotten that they ever had souls.

Supergirl vs. the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Posted on October 27, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

I grew up thinking of DC and Marvel as rival teams in a vast, superpowered Olympics. Who’s stronger, Superman or Thor? Who’s faster, Quicksilver or Flash? Every spin of the comics rack was a new exhibition in their never-ending face-off.

That’s why new Supergirl show is such a game-changer. Sure, the character has been around since 1949 (though that “Supergirl” was Queen Lucy from the Latin American kingdom of Borgonia, not Kara Zor-El, Superman’s cousin). Melissa Benoist’s Supergirl looks perfectly fun too. I’m even happy to see CBS back in the superheroine business. They rescued Wonder Woman from cancellation in 1976, before introducing the first live-action incarnations of the very male Marvel pantheon: Spider-Man, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Daredevil, and, one of the most successful superhero shows ever, The Incredible Hulk. We’ll see if Supergirl survives five seasons too.

But aside from its team-switching network, it’s the show’s timeslot that throws the biggest red flag on the DC-Marvel playing field. Mondays at 8:00? That’s when the pre-Batman series Gotham airs. I would shout FOUL! But can you foul your own teammate? Supergirl and Batman, they’re both DC regulars. So it must be an off-sides penalty? One of them should be lining up Tuesdays at 9:00 to go head-to-head with Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., right?

Actually, no. Supergirl is CBS, Gotham is Fox. Neither networks cares about comic book rivalries. Their playing field is primetime. The CW airs a pair of Justice League characters too, Flash and Arrow, plus soon Atom, Hawkgirl and a few other second-stringers in their third DC-licensed show, Legends of Tomorrow. If CBS preferred any of those time slots, they’d land Supergirl there instead. Worse, Warner Brothers has a Flash film scheduled for a 2018 release—but it will be staring Ezra Miller, not CW actor Grant Gustin. If Green Arrow makes into 2019’s Justice League Part Two, Stephen Amell can expect to be benched too.

These aren’t just facelifts. The TV and film versions of DC superheroes are different people living in different worlds. Christopher Nolan had barely completed his Batman trilogy in 2012 when Warner Brothers started their Ben Affleck reboot. Supergirl earned her pilot because of her cousin’s box office success in 2013’s Man of Steel. But that’s not the same Superman. Look at Jimmy Olsen. The difference is literally black and white. He’s played by Mehcad Brooks on TV, and Rebecca Buller in the film (okay, they changed the female Jimmy to Lana Lang, but still).

Compare that no-rules rulebook to Marvel’s team-player strategy. In addition to the Avengers, the Marvel Cinematic Universe includes five solo franchises (Ant-Man, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk), four Netflix shows (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, Luke Cage), and two ABC shows (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Agent Carter). And they’re all jigsaws pieces in a single, unified puzzle.

When the Netflix Matt Murdock talks about uptown superheroes, he doesn’t just mean Thor, Iron Man and Captain America; he means the Chris Hemsworth, Robert Downey Jr., and Chris Evans incarnations of Thor, Iron Man and Captain America. Peggy Carter began in the first Captain American film in 2011, before spun-off in her own TV show last year, and she appeared in the first scene of this summer’s Ant-Man, and she’ll appear again for her own funeral in Captain America 3 next spring.

Imagine the galaxy-sized migraines involved in keeping all those planets spinning in the same solar system. No wonder DC and Warner Brothers happily hand-over creative control for each of their independent universes. When asked about Supergirl, Nina Tassler, President of CBS Entertainment, said “we’ve been given license and latitude to make some changes.” In other words, forget continuity, our Supergirl flies solo. That might sound less impressive—hell, it is less impressive—but orbiting inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe carries its own penalties.

Witness director Edgar Wright. The hilariously idiosyncratic British film-maker approached Marvel about Ant-Man back in 2004. The then-fledgling studio was delighted. But when production finally rolled around a decade later, the Marvel blockbuster mill wasn’t so keen on Wright’s personal take on a potential franchise. Avengers director Joss Whedon adored the script, but Marvel scrapped it, handed the rewrite pen to Paul Rudd, and subbed out Wright for the lesser known but far more malleable Peyton Reed. Granted, Reed’s miniature battle scene shot on a Thomas the Tank Engine train track was genius, but the rest of the film was by-the-Marvel-numbers.

There’s at least one potential reason for that all-controlling gravity. At the center of the Marvel Cinematic Universe spins a supermassive black hole named Disney. It also owns ABC, home of Carter and S.H.I.E.L.D. It was also the TV home for Superman in the 50s, Batman in the 60s, and—for a season at least—Wonder Woman in the 70s. But the Mickey Mouse subsidiary isn’t interested in promoting Warner Brothers property anymore.

The megalomaniacal one-puzzle policy has even taken root in Marvel Entertainment’s root company, Marvel Comics. Its continuity used to include thousands of free-wheeling universes. On Earth-1610, Spider-Man is black and Hispanic; on Earth-2149, superheroes are zombies; on Earth-8311, Peter Parker is a pig named Peter Porker. There was even an Earth-616, where we all read Marvel Comics, and Earth-199999, home of the Evans, Downey Jr., and Hemsworth Avengers, who apparently are completely unaware that Marvel Studios is watching and recording them.

That all changed last summer. With its mini-series Secret Wars, Marvel Comics destroyed its fifty-year-old universe, and rebooted its most beloved characters into a single, one-size-fits-all reality (All-New All-Different Marvel!), in which its writers and artists must toil in perfect, lock-step synchronization.

Meanwhile, DC is following Supergirl in the opposite direction. After their own recent, reality-transforming maxi-series Convergence, every character, storyline, and alternate world that’s ever appeared in any DC comic book is officially back on the playing field. Apparently the writers were envious of their TV and screenplay counterparts and wanted the same unfettered free-for-all. And now they got it.

So when you tune in to Supergirl Monday nights, enjoy the metaphysical implications of your viewing choice. That’s a whole new world blinking on your screen.

The Fade Out: Hollywood Meh

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

A Review of The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser.

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Synopsis: 1948 Hollywood. Charlie Parish wakes up from a drunken stupor to find a dead starlet in the room next door. He covers things up and later finds out that the studio is making things go away with a story about a suicide. Parish has writer’s block but he’s aided by his blacklisted writer-mentor, Gil Mason—a loose cannon who will soon turns things upside down for him. At the edge of Parish’s vision is a Hollywood fixer-producer in the vein of Eddie Mannix. A new star is cast and it seems like the couch really sucked way back then. Movie execs—they suck (and seem to have a thing for kids)! Actors—they like sex and porn! Orgies, sex communes, violence, the red carpet, bar fights, homosexuals in car accidents (seems like a Van Johnson reference)…etc.

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Some people told me to read this. And I’ve seen it recommended to semi-retired comic readers returning to the fold; just like you would, say, hand a copy of Maus to your friend the sniffy English Literature/Media Studies professor (but not Watchmen presumably).

It’s as if these friendly comics evangelists hadn’t read a single noir novel, watched Chinatown (or Farewell, My Lovely, or Sunset Boulevard or whatever) even once, or been apprised of the assorted falsehoods of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Because you don’t need to be an aficionado to realize that almost everything on display here is as old as the Hollywood hills—the drunken pool side orgies, the black list, the abused ingenue, the darkened rooms where the wretched eke out their meager lives on typewriters, hard liquor, and shadows from louvered blinds. It’s as if someone went to some Hollywood noir buffet, stuffed himself silly and then purged himself in both directions with the vigor of a water cannon.

And, hey, didn’t I see this one on Ray Donovan just the other day? I mean the whole waking up beside/near/on top of a dead woman thing. He like sorted it out in about 10 minutes after smacking some people around, which is about the maximum amount of the time I can tolerate this nonsense. Dead women and tortured writers—they go together like horses and carriages in Hollywood apparently; like pineapples and Mai Tais—the men being the hard rum and the women the delicately sliced garnishings. What we need is more broody depressed women waking up beside dead men for a change (kidding).

So a tiresome retread then.

If not for Sean Phillips photo-referenced studiousness, this would be almost unreadable. It is Phillips’ art which carries the comic’s sense of time and space. Every other character seems to be scraping by on the barest of plots (sexual deviance, pedophilia, your common or garden listlessness) and headlines cribbed from crumbling newsprint—Wars! Scandal! Commies! The smattering of period history smothers any sense of suspense or urgency. This isn’t the “real” world; it’s lousy, meaningless research (and I’m not talking about the photo reference which is fine).

On the other hand, did women’s panties really look like men’s briefs back in the late 40s?

Now there’s a trick when you’re too lazy to do the work—it’s called just making things up. Frank Miller had a firm grasp of this principle in The Hard Goodbye (the first Sin City story). There’s a dead woman in a heart-shaped bed in this one as well but Miller isn’t interested in ladling on the “reality.” The only thing that concerns Miller in Sin City are his sexual fetishes—his deep conviction that every woman really wants to be a stripper and/or a whore, and every man a pimp and a bouncer. The first Sin City, at least, is essentially one long act of masturbation, and the characters and situations fully coherent within that setting. The Fade Out wants the regurgitateded noir tropes with the historical reality and succeeds at neither. The women don’t fare much better either, mostly fucking and sucking to get by; occasionally beaten up and then dying.

Otherwise, housewives (okay, there’s a lady publicity agent in there as well but maybe she’s the murderer). It’s all in the Hollywood scandal playsheet. I always knew that Father Knows Best gave us the whole truth about American life.

Now I have nothing against homage and there’s quite a bit of that going on in The Fade Out. It’s cute when you have Otto Preminger turn up as the exemplar German film noir director or when you see a skewed version of Gun Crazy filmed later in the series. But what I do find utterly tedious is the rehashed war traumatized, guilt-ridden, would be writer-detective stumbling his way through a Hollywood conspiracy thingamabob. And of course he falls in love and gets to have great sex with the Veronica Lake lookalike. I mean, why wouldn’t he? It’s called motivation. The sex, as always, is a call to action, and there’s also an important plot point which turns on the fact that she has been told to shave her pubic hair. This only happens in the real world.

I think we’ve just about sucked the marrow dry when it comes to stories Hollywood tells about itself. And yet a surfeit of vanity and forgetfulness means that we will never see the end of these projects. With cinema now the new religion, it seems only natural that comics should pay deference to this modern Moloch. You should be careful that he doesn’t eat your brains though.

Utilitarian Review 10/24/15

Posted on October 24, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

News

I’m running a Patreon in the hopes of creating a weekly column focusing on stuff I don’t get to write about in mainstream venues. So, if you like my writing, consider contributing.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Meg Worley on Wilfred Santiago.

Chris Gavaler on George W. Bush’s favorite cowboy artist.

I started a Patreon.

Kim O’Connor on Adrian Tomine’s poor record on female characters.

Me on Watchmen, Daredevil, and using crime grit to validate superheroes.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from mid 1949.

Utilitarians Everywhere

My first piece for Pitchfork! I wrote about Tarantino, Johnny Cash, and the white fantasy of the black outlaw.

At Playboy I wrote about why James Bond’s violence is more troubling than Quentin Tarantino’s.

At Quarts I wrote about how remembering the Holocaust is used to justify violence.

At the Guardian I wrote about the limitations of Star Wars diversity.

At the Chicago Reader I had brief reviews of

—pop math rock trio Tricot

—weirdo death metal grandpas Autopsy.

At Splice Today I wrote about

—why America should admit it doesn’t care about AFghanistan

—the heartbreak of not writing that Back to the Future thinkpiece.

Other Links

The greatest moment in comics history.

Yasmin Nair on why Clinton won’t reign in Wall Street.

Selena Kitt on Amazon’s efforts to make writers of self-published erotica miserable.

Ted Gioia on the case for musical universality.

No Trenchcoat for the Giant Squid

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

So, as some of you probably know, I’m currently working on a Patreon to fund one column a week about topics I can’t get mainstream sites to publish. (The column will be called Twisted Mass of Heterotopia, by the by — or it is called that, since this is the first one!)

This piece is a kind of sample of the sorts of things I might write about. I initially placed it at a lovely little crime fiction site called The Life Sentence. But before it could get published, the site shut down. Because there’s no business model that makes printing things like this affordable.

So, since it was homeless, I figured I would run it here. If you’d like to see essays like this on a regular basis, please consider contributing.

Thanks also to Lisa Levy, my editor, who offered a bunch of suggestions that made the piece better.

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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s 1987 graphic novel Watchmen famously opens with a murder mystery: the Comedian, superhero and government operative, has been thrown to his death from his upper-story apartment. The detective investigating the crime, trench coat and all, is the brutal, deadly superhero Rorschach. After the police leaves he invades the Comedian’s apartment in a grid of light and shadow, his body leached of color as a semi-silhouette against dramatic squares of black and yellow. In this context, Rorschach’s masked face, with its shifting globs of black on white, becomes a genre reference. The superhero’s secret identity in Watchmen is noir — at least until Moore and Gibbons undermine that, as they undermine most everything else.

Watchmen is probably the most critically acclaimed superhero comic ever ;,regularly appearing high up on best of comics lists, and even garnering a spot on Time’s list of 100 Best Novels,. It is perceived as, and presents itself as, serious art . And part of the way that it presents itself as serious art is by using the tropes of tough pulp crime .

Compared to highbrow lit, crime fiction can seem declassé. But superhero comics have long been aimed at children, and have a tradition of whimsical goofiness — Captain Marvel fighting an evil sentient worm, or Wonder Woman bouncing off to the stars on the back of a giant space kangaroo, In comparison, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson come across as relatively validating and adult. Crime lends superheroes grit, seriousness, and realism.

And so Rorschach’s origin story involves the true-crime 1964 Kitty Genovese rape . In a case early on in his career Rorschach investigates a child’s murder, and ends up killing her killers in bloody fashion. He later breaks a man’s fingers for information, and tracks down a crime boss in a shadowy prison saturated with enough blood and tough talk to fit neatly into the lineage stretching from Assault on Precinct 13 to Oz.

Watchmen created a whole slew of adult, gritty violent superhero narratives in its wake. One of the most notorious was a 1994 Green Lantern story in which GL”s girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. Another was the 2004 series Identity Crisis in which Sue Dibny, the wife of that silly character, the Elongated Man, was brutally murdered. These comics were not necessarily highly thought of, but they show the trend towards using crime and pulp violence as a way to signal adult fare, and separate superheroes from their infantile past. There’s nothing like a murdered superspouse to demonstrate that comics aren’t for kids any more.

The most recent high-proifle example of superhero crime as validation is the highly aclaimed Daredevil Netflix series. Daredevil is the most ground-level, grimy, street-level-crime focused Marvel franchise since 1998’s Blade. The series is loosely based on the also much-admired Frank Miller/Dave Mazzucchelli graphic novel Born Again — not so much in its plot as in its vision of Matt Murdock fighting alone against the Kingpin and his tangled web of organized villainy. Daredevil’s origin story (in both comic and television) involves his boxer dad enmeshed in a price- fixing scheme. On Netflix, his first episode battle is against human traffickers. These familiar genre narratives signify realism because they ooze a familiar corruption and sleaze.

The fact that the Kingpin is involved in a complicated gentrification scheme seems like meta-commentary . The upscale skyscraping jauntiness of Iron Man or Thor or even Ant-Man has no place here in these grim, rent-controlled, crime-ridden streets. Daredevil is tougher and truer because he’s fighting street-level dealers and pimps and local-news-headline scum. The hero has supersenses (not very realistic that) but he usually uses them to figure out whether people are lying so he can torture them in classic tough guy style. The interdimensional alien invasion which closes out the Avengers film serves as the backdrop for the Daredevil series — the evil Loki’s monster army destroyed all the buildings that the Kingpin plans to rebuild. But that decidedly un-gritty invasion backstory serves as a foil. Those silly things fly around up there in someone else’s superhero narrative. Here (for the most part) our superpowers are dark, serious, and earth-bound.

An alien of sorts also whooshes in at the conclusion of Watchmen — and not coincidentally, that ending has often been seen as one of the series’ weakest moments. All the grim darkness and dark grimness, and this is the end? Rorschach’s pulp investigation turns out to be a preposterous red herring set up by super-villain/hero Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. No one was out there murdering superheroes, as Rorschach thought. Instead, it was all a distraction from Veidt’s plan to build a giant Cthulhu-analog complete with broadcasting psychic-brain and explode it in New York, thus uniting the world against the alien invaders. The whole thing is utterly preposterous sci-fi goofiness. And Rorschach, our intrepid detective, is disintegrated by Dr. Manhattan with an energy blast. So much for realism.

I remember reading Watchmen when I was in high school and being hugely disappointed by the goofy conclusion (did I mention Ozymandias catches a bullet? He’s got Tibetan mystical skills or something, so he catches a bullet.). But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the ruthless silliness with which Moore undercuts his own pulp validation. Rorschach thinks that crime and the brutal law of the streets is reality. As a ground-level detective, he figures that the problems he faces are ground-level problems that he can work out. Solve a murder, find the killer, break a few fingers —maybe it won’t save the world, but it’s doing good by inches in the muck of Real Life.

But what if Real Life isn’t particularly real? What if all that local-news-panic crime doesn’t actually matter? Veidt saves the world in one big rush by dropping a gigantic alien bomb — or possibly he doesn’t save anything, and just kills a whole mess of people, like George Bush rushing into Iraq. Either way, he and his ridiculous megalomaniacal schemes are a lot more real, in the sense of real consequences, than Rorschach wandering around looking for some cape-killer who seems small-scale enough to exist but actually doesn’t. Pulp conspiracy theories are too small; the people at the top have bigger plans. There are supervillains, and they always win. All the time.

Watchmen is often credited with deconstructing, or undermining, superhero tropes — with showing how naive and silly the caped saviors are. That’s a reasonable way to read the comic. But I think, by the end, you could see it not as a deconstruction of supeheroes, but as a way to use superhero tropes to deconstruct, and undermine, the grim gritty myth of pulp noir crime realism. At the end of Watchmen, Rorschach is dead, and the debris and blood is being washed and cleansed away from the New York streets. The future is gleaming and shining and new. and littered with dead bodies. The small scale cop solving just one murder at a time seems almost too cheerful—an exercise in Nostalgia, which, not coincidentally, is the name of the perfume line Ozymandias’ company abandons at the conclusion of the comic. A fake alien is more real in the end than a fake gumshoe. And compared to the machinations of the superpowers, crime looks less like reality, and more like a distraction.
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The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon