Tag Archives: Alan Davis

Hiroshima Tit Nepotism Summer Reading

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I spent last week at my brother’s. While my son frolicked with his cousins, I raided my sibling’s library. So here’s a series of brief reviews:

Barefoot Gen, Volume 1 by Keiji Nakazawa A story of world-historical import and great human tragedy is always improved by warmed-over melodrama, poignant irony, and random fisticuffs. Stirring speeches about the horrors of war are feelingly juxtaposed with scenes of anti-militarist dad beating the tar out of his air-force-volunteer son. On the plus side, though, drill-sergeant brutality set pieces are apparently the same the world over. Also, to give him his due, Keiji Nakazawa stops having his characters beat each other up for no reason every third panel once the bomb drops. Tens of thousands of civilians running about shrieking as their flesh melts is enough violence for even the most impassioned pacifist adventure-serialist. It’s okay to have Gen rescue the evil pro-war neighbors from their collapsed house and to have the evil pro-war neighbors refuse to help dig out Gen’s family and to have the sainted Korean neighbor help carry Gen’s mom to safety as long as you don’t have Gen and the Korean pummel the evil pro-war neighbors with a series of flying kicks as the city burns. It’s all about restraint.

High Soft Lisp by Gilbert Hernandez
Hernandez tells us several times over the course of this searingly human graphic novel that his protagonist, Fritz, has a genius level IQ. And how would we know if he didn’t tell us? Also, she was probably sexually-abused as a child, and therefore the fact that she fucks anything that isn’t nailed down is a sign of her profound psychological thingy, and not a sign that Hernandez likes to draw balloon-titted doodles fucking everything that isn’t nailed down. In this, of course, the comic is profoundly different from past works like Human Diastrophism, in which there were big tits and gratuitous fucking, but interspersed with paeans to the human interconnection of all of us who are bound together by empathy and profound meaningfulness and also by a love of big tits and gratuitous fucking.

Whoa Nellie! by Jaime Hernandez If you adore female Mexican wrestling and girls’ fiction about the ups and downs of friendship — then I still can’t really see why you’d want to read this.

But, you know, it’s “fun” and “enthusiastic”. “Buy it now.”

Ghost of Hoppers by Jaime Hernandez Alternachicks drift through their alterna-lives with quirky poignance and poignant quirkiness. Plus, bisexuality.

To be fair, to really understand the subtle characterizations here, you need to take the entire Hopey/Maggie saga and inject it into your eyelids weekdays 8:30 to 5:30 and weekends 12-6. Only when you’re blind and destitute and wretching blood in the sewer with the ineradicable taste of staples glutting your tonsils will you truly understand the blinding genius of layered nostalgia.

Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg Better than the movie Lomborg argues convincingly that it would be better to cure malaria and HIV than to wreck our economies by failing to reduce greenhouse emissions. Which largely confirms my suspicion that global warming is less a real policy priority than it is an apocalyptic fad — a rapture for Prius-owners.

Marvel Masterworks: Jack Kirby There’s been a lot of debate in comments here as to whose prose is more tolerable, Stan Lee’s or Jack Kirby’s. After trying and failing to read the Marvel Masterworks volume, I think I have to say, who gives a shit? Lee’s hyperbolic melodrama is slicker and Kirby’s more thudding, but the truth is that if you put the two of them together in a room with an infinite number of monkeys and a typewriter and gave them all of eternity you’d end up with a pile of monkey droppings and a lot of subliterate drivel. The ideal Jack Kirby would be a collection of his illustrations of giant machines and ridiculous monsters and weird patterned backgrounds with all the dialogue balloons excised. Short of that, you look at the pretty pictures and you try your best to skip the text.

Captain Britain by Alan Moore and Alan Davis It’s hard to believe anyone was willing to publish such an obvious Grant Morrison rip off, but I guess comics are shameless like that. It’s all here with numbing inevitability — the multiple iterations of our hero (Captain U.K. of earth 360b, Captain Albion of earth 132, etc. etc.), the goofily foppish reality altering villain, the cyberpunky organic/computer monster. Throw in a standard kill-all-the-superheroes plot and a bunch of high-concept powers (abstract bodies! summoning selves from further up the timeline!), add some borderline-satire of the square-jawed protagonist and you’ve got everything Morrison’s written for the last two decades. To be fair, though, Moore and Davis seem to be on top of their derivative hackitude, and as a result there’s none of the pomposity that can infect their prototype. Captain Britain doesn’t die for our sins and he isn’t an invincible icon; he’s just some dude in spandex swooping through the borrowed plot with equal parts bewilderment and bluster. Sometimes imitation works better than the real thing; maybe Morrison should try ripping off these guys next time.

The Defense by Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov’s characters sometimes seem more like chess pieces than like people; Nabokov pushes them here and pushes them there about the page, forming patterns for his own amusement. There’s no doubt that it is amusing, though, and while I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of the game, I enjoyed watching the patterns expand and dilate, moving in black and white through their silent hermetic dance. There’s one passage, which I wanted to copy out but now can’t find again, in which our protagonist, the corpulent, hazy chess master Luzhin, types a string of random phrases at the typewriter and then mails them to a random address from the phonebook. If any book makes me laugh that hard even once, I consider myself well-recompensed for my time.

The Real the True and the Told by Eric Berlatsky Eric printed an excerpt of his book on HU here, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to read the whole thing till now. Despite his daughters’ review (“Why are you reading Daddy’s boring book?”) I really enjoyed it. The basic thesis is that post-modern texts like Graham Swift’s “Waterland” or Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” don’t actually deny the reality of history. That is, history in such works is not just text. Rather, postmodern lit tries to approach the real through non-narrative means. The emphasis on the textuality and artificiality of historical narratives is a way of reaching through those narratives to reality, not a way of denying the existence of reality altogether. Basically, for Eric, post-modern fiction rejects, not reality, but simplistic narrative, suggesting that the first can only be accessed by rejecting or resisting the second.

I think it’s a convincing argument about the goals of post-modern fiction, though I question whether the tactic is as successful as Eric seems (?) to want it to be. There are two problems I see.

First, as Eric’s book kind of demonstrates, the anti-narratives and non-narratives Eric discusses are themselves, at this point, narrative tropes. When Artie in Maus laments the insufficiency of narrative, for example, he’s voicing long-standing clichés intrinsic to accounts of the Holocaust; when Kundera talks about Communists rewriting history, he’s voicing long-standing clichés about totalitarian regimes which go back to Orwell, at least, and probably before him. Self-reflexive, alternative narrative structures are their own genre at this point…they’re well-established narrative traditions in their own right. It’s hard for me to see, therefore, how those narrative traditions really effectively escape their tropeness and encounter the real in a way that’s diametrically opposed to the way that more traditional narratives encounter the real. Which is to say, Eric’s argument seems to be that the Book of Laughter and Forgetting is through its form closer to the real than Pride and Prejudice — and I don’t buy that.

The second problem I have is that the real in many of these books (and in Eric’s discussion) ends up being linked to trauma. The Holocaust and pain and suffering is more “real” than love or marriage. Eric also notes that the quotidian, or unnarrataeable is often figured as the real too…which would mean that the real is either trauma or boredom. I’m as pessimistic as the next Berlatsky I think, but I’m not really sure why bad or neutral is more real than good.

Which brings me to my second second (and last) problem…which is that I think it’s quite difficult to theorize the real without theorizing the real. Or to put it another way, can you talk about the real while bracketing theology? If you’re at a place where the real is either the Holocaust or tedium, it’s hard to see how exactly that’s different in kind from nihilism — and if you’re a nihilist, what are you doing talking about the real in the first place?

Anyway, the book was great fun to argue with, and probably the thing I read on vacation that I most enjoyed. It’s amazon page is here in case you want to raise the fortunes of the extended Berlatsky family.

The Amish Plot Against the Superheroes

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I’ve been reading The War of the Lamb, the last book written by John Howard Yoder. Yoder was the most important theologian of pacifism in the last century or so, I think. Appropriately enough for a pacifist theologian, he was a Mennonite.

And, of course, the subject of Mennonite’s made me think again (mostly to my sorrow) of writer and illustrator Alan Davis’ 1998 JLA alternate reality exercise The Nail. For those fortunate enough to have missed the series, it’s high concept is that John and Martha Kent ran over a nail on day that Superman’s rocket ship landed on earth. As a result, the Kent’s didn’t find the ship. Instead (as we learn towards the end of the book) an Amish family found it. Since the Amish won’t interact with the rest of the world and since they are (like most Mennonite sects) pacifist, the fact that this family discovered Supes meant that he never became a superhero; he just stayed on the farm. Without his iconic presence, superheroes (and especially aliens) are distrusted, Lex Luthor becomes mayor, no one is tough enough to stand up to Kryptonian technology…etc., etc. In short, things go to the bad, and it’s all because of the stupid Amish.

Most superhero comics are stupid, and The Nail is no exception. Still, there is something of the idiot savant about it. Davis was looking for a way to neutralize Superman and, by extension, all of superdom. What is the opposite of the superhero? The obvious answer is, a supervillain. Too obvious — and, incidentally, untrue. Superheroes and supervillains are part of the same world, the same milieu. Superman being a supervillain doesn’t remove or negate him; it just puts him front and center in a different role (Earth 3! And god help me that I know that….but anyway….)

So, supervillain is no good. But…what if you make him a pacifist? Then he’s ineffectual, irrelevant — he’s nothing. Which is to say, it’s not supervillainy that’s the opposite of superheroics — it’s pacifism.

The book in its final pages, then, glorifies superheroness not primarily through derring-do, but rather through a thumbnail repudiation of non-violence. This repudiation is sealed by the gratuitous and gruesome obliteration of Superman’s Amish parents, who barely get a panel or two to express their misguided philosophy before Davis reduces them to ash. That’s what you get for keeping Superman down, you religious weirdos!

Yes, that’s Jimmy Olsen as the supervillain. Don’t ask.

Anyway, following this sequence in which Supes sees his (Amish) parents killed, and then attacks the evil Jimmy superOlsen, the Supes and Jimmy battle. Unfortunately, Supes (being Amish and not good at fighting) can’t beat him. Luckily, though, Olsen spontaneously disintegrates because his powers are unstable (again, not worth explaining why.) In the aftermath, Superman decides to become a standard issue superhero, and the implication is that his innate awesomeness will defuse the anti-alien hysteria that has swept the world.

So…parents killed, check; vengeance inflicted, check; dedicate life to superheroics to honor parents, check. Except that, from the point of both the drama and the plot, Superman’s repudiation of nonviolence is completely superfluous, and even, arguably, detrimental. Supes could have just as easily handled Olsen through nonviolent means — getting in his way, or holding on to him. Since Olsen essentially disintegrated on his own, the outcome would have been the same — except that Supes would have actually kept faith with his parents rather than betraying their beliefs for nothing. Similarly, if the world is terrified of malevolent aliens, the sudden revelation of an even more powerful violent alien in their midst seems unlikely to calm things down. On the other hand, had Supes revealed himself to the world as a superpowerful alien who embraced nonviolence and noninterference in the affairs of the world…well, it seems like that might have been a more effective statement.

The logic of the story Davis has constructed, in other word — with Superman as Amish — seems to lead naturally to a parable about the triumph of nonviolence. After all, if the greatest hero in the world is a pacifist, it makes sense that you’d end up with a story in which pacifism is heroic. Unless, of course, you see pacifism and heroism as mutually exclusive, in which case the heroism comes, not from the pacifist witness, but from repudiating your entire past in order to embrace violence in the name of your dead parents who would, undoubtedly, be appalled.

Davis’ story also resonates oddly with broader arguments about pacifism. The usual dig against pacifism is that it is foofy pie-in-the-sky nonsense. As an ideal, it’s all well and good, but in the real world, violence is sometimes necessary. Davis’ story makes this argument by, in part, going out of its way to make the Amish impractical to the point of callousness. Not only do they advocate non-intervention, but they argue that their son shouldn’t help Batman in any way, even though he’s being beaten to death literally on their doorstep. This is surely a bastardization of Amish beliefs; the Amish, after all, can vote; they can interact with outsiders. The depiction here is a caricature, intended to make their position seem ridiculous…and unrealistic.

But the irony is that the world where Superman stays in his Amish community and doesn’t interfere in the outside world is actually more realistic. Because, you know, Superman doesn’t interfere in the world. Because there isn’t a Superman. Nobody has to resort to violence to defeat supervillains, because there aren’t supervillains. The DC Universe is unrealistically violent. The opposite of the superhero is the Amish not just because the superhero is violent and the Amish are not, but because the superhero doesn’t exist, and the Amish do. What happens at the end of The Nail is not an eruption of realism into the Amish fantasy of nonviolence. It’s an eruption of fantasy violence into the Amish’s realistic pacifist community. Perhaps that’s why the Amish parents have to be so summarily dispatched; if they were allowed to stick around, they’re solidity would have made Davis’ entire farrago of nonsense dissolve into mist.

In The War of the Lamb, John Howard Yoder talks a little about heroism, specifically in terms of Martin Luther King and Che Guevara. Both men, he points out, were killed; both have, as a result, been viewed as martyrs. Yoder points out that following King’s assassination:

] Many leaped to the conclusion that nonviolent alternatives had thereby been refuted. At the same time, all over Latin America, the fact that Che Guevera had been gunned down in the Bolivian mountains did not mean that guerrilla violence had failed. Why not?

The inconguity is even more striking when we remember that King…had expected to be martyred. This was true both in the general sense of the knowledge that nonviolence will be costly, undergirded by the Christian readiness to ‘share in the sufferings of Christ’ and in the more precise sense that King gave voice to ominous premonitions in the weeks and days just before his death. Che’s defeat, on the other hand, was not in the Marxist scenario. On the general level, for the Marxist the victory of the revolution is assured by the laws, as sure as those of mechanics of dialectical materialism. In the narrow sense as well, Guevara, just before he was captured and killed, was still expecting to win as head of the violent insurgency in Bolivia.

Is there not some flaw in the logic here? Of a man who predicted his death, who explained why he accepted it, whose work did not perish with his death, the critics argue that his view is refuted by that death. Of the other man, who premised victory and whose campaign did collapse with his death, his faithful proclaim his resurrection…. The Marxist believe that their hero’s death is powerful on some other level than his military defeat. Whatever that reasoning may be called, it is not standard Marxist pragmatism, but some kind of apocalyptic myth.

The Nail suggests that, for “apocalyptic myth,” we might substitute “genre fairy tale.” The narratives that justify violence are, predominantly, not about realism, but about revenge or excitement or masculinity — which is to say, they’re pulp. Perhaps, The Nail suggests, nonviolence isn’t wrong because its unrealistic, but rather because it gets in the way of the really quite embarrassingly stupid stories we like to tell ourselves.
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For more on superheroes and pacifism, here’s my essay about Spider-Dove.