The Most Obscure, Uninteresting Comic Book Character

Posted on July 15, 2015 by Chris Gavaler

“What if an American comic book company were to ring me up (not that it was going to happen) and they offered me my first U.S. assignment, only it was the most obscure, uninteresting character I could imagine? So let’s, out of the blue, pick the most obscure American comics character I could think of and just see if I could reinterpret him and make him interesting.”

That’s Alan Moore describing himself, just before an American comic book company really did ring him up. It was DC editor Len Wein offering him a shot at Swamp Thing.

Weirdly, the “most obscure American comics character” Moore had practiced on was The Heap—the 1940s character Wein had knocked-off to create Swamp Thing in 1971.

The character type was oddly popular in the early 70s. Roy Thomas had been a Heap fan as a kid, and so when he got a staff writer job at Marvel, he created the Heap-like Glob for The Incredible Hulk #121 in 1969.

A year and a half later, Skywald comics resurrected the original Heap.

Thomas had told his pal, former Marvel employer and Skywald co-founder Sol Brodsky, it was a good band wagon to jump on since Marvel had its own Heap knock-off, Man-Thing. Stan Lee dreamt up that name, but apparently the Glob was all the regurgitated Heap that Thomas could swallow, so he handed the assignment to scripter Gerry Conway. Gray Morrow’s drawings even include a visual homage to the Heap’s vine-like nose in Savage Tales #1 (May 1971).

Thomas tossed the next Man-Thing assignment to Len Wein and Neal Adams who worked up a second episode, but Marvel cancelled Savage Tales after the first issue. Wein also freelanced at DC where he created Swamp Thing with artist Bernie Wrightson for House of Secrets #92 (June–July 1971). It took another year, but the Wein-Adams Man-Thing eventually surfaced in Astonishing Tales #12 (June 1972), just a few months before Wein and Wrightson updated their House of Secrets Swamp Thing for DC’s Swamp Thing #1 (October–November 1972).

That’s a murky swamp of overlapping characters and creators to sift through. Worse, Wein and Conway were sharing an apartment at the time, and yet Wein swore Swamp Thing had nothing to do with Man-Thing—even though Man-Thing’s premiere is dated a month before Swamp Thing’s.

Thomas’s timetable doesn’t add up either: Skywald’s Heap premiered in Psycho #2 March 1971, three months before Man-Thing in Savage Tales #1. Add in the unknowable differences in production time, and the quagmire keeps deepening.

Neither Marvel nor DC tried to sue the other for copyright infringement, since both their characters were infringing on the Heap that Harry Stein and Mort Leav created for Hillman Periodicals’ Air Fighters Comics #3 in 1942. But Stein and Leav don’t get original credit either, since the Heap looks a lot like Theodore Sturgeon’s short story “It,” published two years earlier in Street and Smith’s Unknown.

Wein says he conceived Swamp Thing in December 1970, but

“Why I decided to make the protagonist some sort of swamp monster . . . I can no longer recall. . . . Coincidentally, Joe [Orlando, then-editor of THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY and THE HOUSE OF SECRETS] had been thinking of doing a story along the lines of Theodore Sturgeon’s classic fantasy tale ‘It’ . . . a story I had actually never read.”

And the swamp goes full circle when Roy Thomas scripted Marvel’s “It” adaptation for Supernatural Thrillers #1 (December 1972).

Sturgeon was invited to the 1975 San Diego Comic Convention so Ray Bradbury could hand him a Golden Ink Pot award. “I learned,” wrote Sturgeon, “for the very first time that my story ‘It’ is seminal; that it is the great granddaddy of The Swamp Thing, The Hulk, The Man Thing, and I don’t know how many celebrated graphics.”

The comic book swamp, however, was already draining, since Man-Thing was cancelled in 1975, and Swamp Thing the year after. It’s hard to explain the initial rise, though it probably has something to do with the 1971 change in the Comics Code:

“Vampires, ghouls and werewolves shall be permitted to be used when handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high calibre literary works written by Edgar Allen Poe, Saki, Conan Doyle and other respected authors whose works are read in schools around the world.”

The Heap, after all, is a reanimated corpse. Though the cause of that reanimation is as murky as Swamp Thing’s creative origins. Is “the unearthly transformation” because World War I German pilot Baron Emmelmann’s “will to live” is such a “powerful force” that it merges his body with the slime and vegetation of the Polish swamp where his plane crashed, causing him to rise two decades later as “a fantastic heap that is neither man nor animal”? If so, why does the Heap “die” two issues later, only to be reanimated by a nefarious zoologist’s “serum”? And what does that mysterious serum have to do with “Ceres, Goddess of Soil,” who in 1947 is retconned (by an uncredited writer) into the origin, raising the dead pilot as an agent of peace in defiance of the god Ares?

Alan Moore did an even deeper retcon to Swamp Thing. Instead of a man transformed into a plant, the 1984 Swamp Thing is a plant transformed into a man.

The 2005 Man-Thing movie (it apparently was intended to be theatrical release before demoted to the Syfy channel) goes for supernatural agency, though the Lee-Thomas-Conway-Morrow original was pure scifi: the inventor of a super-soldier serum injects himself and crashes his car into a swamp to keep the serum from the bad guys. The “formula”—updating Captain America’s premise for the Vietnam-era—is apparently napalm-based (a newspaper headline reads “NAPALM BOMB” as the inventor laments: “It’s bad enough the chemical will be used for more killing”), and so Man-Thing’s touch burns. Or it did until the second episode, when Wein decided it only burns those who feel fear because . . . that’s how napalm works? Steve Gerber ran with that non-scifi premise, mixing more supernatural agency into his revised swamp, which, it turns out, is really a doorway to multiple dimensions.

Although Man-Thing hasn’t been lying completely dormant for the last few decades, I’d say he’s still a descent contender for the current “most obscure, uninteresting comic book character” category. Or at least a mindless, shuffling heap of muck that reflexively burns people who are afraid isn’t a superhero high on Marvel Entertainment’s film and TV project list. Like Thomas for the Heap though, I have a squishy spot in my heart for him. So let me take on Alan Moore’s thought experiment, and see if I can “reinterpret him and make him interesting.” Or maybe the problem is Man-Thing is already too interesting? So my assignment is to cover his range of weirdness while sticking to a single, scifi-only premise.

I’m placing my swamp near New Orleans and staffing it with weapon designers. Instead of napalm and super-soldiers, it’s a burning black plasma that swirls and geysers when in contact with a remote control beacon, incinerating everything else it touches. But to be practical in the field, you’d need a live soldier to operate it. So the new design is a hazmat body suit with direct neural interface. The head gear includes two large red “eyes” and tubes down the nose and sides. Things are going great until the suit-tester starts getting nervous. As his vitals rise, the plasma hits new levels of heat and mobility. It starts burning through the suit, and before they can shut it down, it incinerates him, leaving only a blackened skeleton and gas mask. But since the plasma is encoded with the last neural input, it’s now moving on its own, splashing and lurching around the complex with its puppet of a charred corpse. When it breaks outside, it vanishes into the swamp, where the plasma merges with the muck and bonds around the skeleton. What emerges isn’t sentient. It’s not even alive. It just roams randomly or sits dormant until its eyes glow red with internal heat when it senses human fear—which it then extinguishes with its burning touch.

The original Conway script includes a scantily-clad female spy who betrays the inventor and then later gets her face burnt off by Man-Thing—so let’s please avoid that double dose of misogyny. Maybe the inventor is the woman this time, and the guy testing the suit is the spy who’s seduced her to steal the tech. His vitals spike because she’s about to find him out—so it’s not just fear but his guilt too. To his own surprise, he really does love her, and it’s only his bursting into flame that prevents the discovery of his betrayal, giving his transformation a redemptive edge. Turning into a monster stops him from being a monster. And I’m betting at the end she’s the only one who can face him without fear, an act of forgiveness that also allows the plasma to finally shut down and Man-Thing to collapse into a puddle of mud and bones.

Okay, so maybe not the light PG-13 tone of the current Marvel movie universe, but what do you expect from a mindless, fear-burning swamp beast? I suggest Marvel use the character for a multi-episode subplot during season three of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, not unlike how they used Deathlok (another early 70s super-soldier monstrosity) in season one.

Now let’s see if anyone rings me up.

(Meanwhile, instead of sitting by his own phone, Swamp Thing is headed to Reykjavik, Iceland, for the International Popular Culture Association Conference at the end of July. Nathaniel Goldberg, a colleague from the Washington and Lee University Philosophy department, and I are presenting our paper, “Donald Davidson and the Mind of Swamp Thing.”)

Where Angels Fear to Tread: Constantine, Promethea, and the Fool

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Kristian Williams

Part One: Constantine

1969 ends with a surprise—the seventies.

In its last three pages, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s Century: 1969 suddenly departs from the eponymous year and drops us, without warning, a decade further on. The bright, LSD Technicolor has washed out of London, replaced with a heroin gray that never even fades to black, but only to darker and sootier grays. The place seems desolate, desperate, depressed, a throwback to the Ingsoc years, but without a Big Brother to blame. The Basement, a “Beat Club,” “where the Rutles first played London, apparently,” is now Debasement, a seedy punk bar where at closing time they probably don’t bother to sweep up the broken glass. The sixties, so hopeful at the peak, seemed to promise the world. The seventies promised nothing, and delivered. Nihilism is all the rage.

Another change as well: There’s an old man, who looks like a young man. Or is he a young man, who looks old beyond his years? He sits alone, slumped at a table, dejected. He has short, slightly spiky hair—more Richard Hell than Billy Idol—and he hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. He wears a suit that was probably pretty sharp when he put it on, but now looks like he slept in it—and, over that, a dingy trench coat. We know he is Allan Quartermain, but there at the end, I would swear he is John Constantine.

He may well be both.

We’ve seen this trick before. Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary, chapter seven (“To be in England, in the Summertime”), begins by announcing the death of a Constantine stand-in named John Carter. “Who’s John Carter?” Elijah Snow asks.

“Old friend of ours,” Jakita says. “Had serious connections in the occult underground. Real player in the eighties.”

“The word,” the Drummer cuts in, “. . . is scumbag.”

We turn the page and we see him, in Jakita’s memory, slightly unkempt hair, cynical expression, trench coat. He is lighting a cigarette. By the end, we learn that Carter/Constantine is not really dead. He shows up, head shaved, the moon forming a halo behind him. When he takes off the trench coat, we see that he’s wearing a black sports jacket and no shirt underneath. Large, bold, black tattoos adorn his chest. Suddenly Jack Carter isn’t John Constantine anymore; he’s Spider Jerusalem instead.

“The eighties are long over,” he says. “Time to move on. Time to be someone else.”

He walks away, into the darkness, leaving behind the smallest drift of smoke, twisting like a question mark.

Both of these stories are, in their way, stories about stories. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen began by assembling a Victorian superhero team—Quatermain, Wilhelmina Murray, Captain Nemo, Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man—and filling their world with fictions borrowed from other fictions. Subsequent volumes in the series have followed the key characters as the years progressed and they grew old—or, in some cases, thanks to a Fountain of Youth, did not. Moore, then, does what he does best, simultaneously deploying adventure story tropes and commenting upon them.

Ellis does something similar in Planetary, where a team of “mystery archaeologists” tries to uncover “the secret history of the twentieth century,” and thus encounters alternate-world versions of superheroes, movie monsters, pulp adventurers, mad scientists, and other pop-culture figures. Here, too, the stories are critiqued even as they are told.

Moore borrowed Quatermain, but invented Constantine; Ellis borrowed Constantine, but invented Jerusalem. The transition—Quatermain, Constantine, Jerusalem—is interesting in several respects. For one thing, it is broadly in keeping with important aspects of each’s character’s story.

Allan Quartermain, whom Alan Moore once dismissed as “just another white imperialist out to exploit the natives” becomes, in the League‘s story, something more and something else. When we first find him he is a heroin addict, old and pathetic, strung out, filthy, and waiting to die. It takes a woman in danger to bring him back to his old self. And yet he doesn’t remain his old self. He grows tender, broadens, changes. He comes to respect Miss Murray as an equal, then to love her, then to love, also, the androgynous and immortal Orlando. He travels to a magic pool and comes back a young man, posing as his own son. He is no longer the “old” Quartermain at all. Alan Moore thus reinvents Allan Quatermain. And Allan Quatermain reinvents himself.

Constantine, as a kind of magical con artist, lives by his wits. He is constantly adapting, constantly improvising. The central conflict of Hellblazer is that of the individual, a mere human, confronting powers much greater than himself—heaven, hell, and Margaret Thatcher. The question the series poses, taken as a whole, is how much of a bastard can one be and remain a decent sort of guy? Or, at times: How much of a bastard does one have to be? Of course, the temptation—for John and for his writers—is always to push it too far. The challenge for the writer is to stay true to the character; the challenge for John Constantine is to stay true to himself.

Transmetropolitan poses many of the same questions, the same challenges. Spider Jerusalem is a rogue journalist, a cyberpunk Hunter S. Thompson, determined to tell the truth and consequences be damned. The story he’s pursuing, or a crucial part of it, concerns the persecution of the “Transient” community, a rather cultish group who alters their genetics to become part alien. In other words, Transmetropolitan is about the relationship between integrity and autonomy, and in particular the defense of the second being required for the preservation of the first.

A theme uniting the two transitions—Quartermain to Constantine, Constantine to Jerusalem—is the idea that heroic characters are expressions of the cultural needs of their eras. Thus Jakita’s explanation for the “faintly ridiculous” appearance of the Vertigo heroes: “They’re eighties people.” And furthermore, they’re English: “England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture.” Thus, also, Alan Moore’s observation in his introduction to The Dark Knight Returns: “[H]eroes are starting to become rather a problem. They aren’t what they used to be. . . or rather they are, and therein lies the heart of the difficulty.” He goes on to explain: “The world about us has changed and is continually changing at an ever-accelerating pace. So have we.” However, despite advances in technical knowledge and social conscience, “comic books have largely had to plod along with the same old muscle-bound oafs spouting the same old muscle-bound platitudes while attempting to dismember each other.” Changing times, he says, demand “new themes, new insights, new dramatic situations.” Our heroes have to change.

The personal tension in 1969—between Mina, Allan, and Orlando—largely hinges on their different approaches to adapting to the new times. Mina is somewhat desperately trying to adopt the most up-to-date dress and slang, an affectation that her teammates find ridiculous. It’s easier for Allan, at least on the surface, as men’s fashions are more stable (witness the iconic trench coat) and the culture is more forgiving to men as they age—not that he ages, exactly. But Mina, perhaps because of her earlier, less idyllic experiences with immortals, has picked up on something deeper. She fears obsolescence, becoming “fossilised as a Victorian freak” in a world that will grow increasingly alien. For Orlando it is different. Orlando is always changing—names, sexes, allegiances; even her history is subject to revision—and Orlando is never changing. He, or she, is a constant throughout history, always present where the drama unfolds, cynical and self-centered past the point of narcissism. Whatever tragedy he may witness, we can be sure that he will be counted among the survivors. Fashions change, ideas changes, and Orlando will take them up, or not, as it suits her. His very mercurial nature is a kind of constancy; whatever else happens, Orlando will adapt and survive. There is a stable center beneath the shifting appearances, the momentary attachments. And so, in the shadows and grime of the seventies, as they discuss Mina’s disappearance and the end of their League, it is naturally Orlando who gets up and leaves. Quatermain remains, unsure what else he could do.

Part Two: The Fool

In Books of Magic, Neil Gaiman and Paul Johnson present Constantine as an archetype drawn from the Tarot. Dressed as the Fool, he mocks, and riddles, and provokes.

The occultist Arthur Edward Waite wrote of the Fool:

“With light step, as if earth and its trammels had little power to restrain him, a young man in gorgeous vestments pauses at the brink of a precipice among the great heights of the world; he surveys the blue distance before him – its expanse of sky rather than the prospect below. . . . The edge which opens on the depth has no terror; it is as if angels were waiting to uphold him, if it came about that he leaped from the height. His countenance is full of intelligence and expectant dream. . . . He is the spirit in search of experience.”

Johannes Fiebig and Evelin Bürger add that the card’s number, Zero, “indicated a very personal bottom line, the self, the starting point from which everything else flows. This is the beginning and the end of that which makes you a unique person.” They advise: “You must have the courage to face the future, even if you cannot predict or determine the future in advance. You must have the courage to walk your own path and to be open, even if your back isn’t covered, and even if conventional wisdom and common sense suggest otherwise.”

In Promethea, Alan Moore, Constantine’s creator and a practicing magician himself, describes the Fool in verse:

“Indeed in blithe, uncaring bliss

The Fool steps o’er a precipice

As if he trusts the winds, so chill,

To bear him wheresoe’er they will.

Thus any venture is begun,

This reckless step from naught to one.

It’s magic’s foremost trick, I guess,

How something comes from nothingness.”

In some depictions, the Fool is accompanied by a bird (perhaps representing freedom) or a butterfly (transformation). Moore’s Promethea and Gaiman’s Books of Magic—stories of quests, in which a novice is introduced into the world of magic—both show the butterfly in their versions, or in the first case, a Promethea moth. Moore’s Fool seems to be following it over the edge.

Gaiman has made use of the Fool before. In the Sandman series, Destruction, who has long ago abdicated his responsibilities, decides he cannot stay in the home he has made for himself since abandoning his realm.

“What will you do now?” Dream asks.

“I will make the most of what I’ve got. I shall live out my days doing what I have to do, one day at a time. Life, like time, is a journey through darkness.”

A few pages later, Dream inquires again, “You are going now?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Oh, out there, somewhere. Up, out.”

We see him, carrying a stick with a bundle knotted at the end, walking up into space, until he is as small and as bright as a star. It is the Fool, stepping over the edge at last, and rising rather than falling.

Destruction, like the Fool, has a dog for a companion. “Barnabas can be a bit of a pain,” Destruction says, “and he has no poetry in his soul, but he means well.” In the Tarot, the dog represents caution, prudence, and common sense; he sounds a warning as the Fool approaches the cliff. It is fitting that Destruction, or the man who was once Destruction, when he steps into the sky, leaves the dog behind, on firm ground.

The theme of transformation—”time to be someone else”—is in fact the moral of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series: “One must change or die.” Destruction decides to change; Morpheus, to die.

Constantine’s greatest trick was probably surviving for as long as he did. He is after all, just a working-class bloke with a habit of getting in over his head. If he could be said to have powers at all, they would consist chiefly of arrogance, recklessness, a certain rakish charm, and a large measure of pure blind luck, along with knowing a little of magic and a lot of people. It is, in fact, precisely the same qualities that get him into trouble and get him out of it.

As William Blake wrote in his “Proverbs of Hell”:

“A fool who would persist in his folly becomes wise.

Folly is the cloak of knavery.”

The Fool is a knave by another name. “Not John,” Constantine’s end-of-everything doppelganger tells Tim Hunter, “But Jack . . . Jack Fool. . . . A Jack-a-Napes when I tell riddles and merry tales; Jack Pudding, when I play my pranks. . . .” And the jack in a deck of cards is sometimes also called the knave.

This knave, cloaked in folly, knows more than he says. Moore writes:

“What magic shaped the way things fell?

The Fool smiles, knows, but does not tell.”

When young Tim Hunter asks the Constantine-Fool, “I’m meant to be learning about magic. What have you got to tell me?” The reply is a feint of ignorance: “Me, good sir? What do I know of magic? Why, nothing, my masters. Nothing at all.” But as he speaks, as he tells them he has nothing to say, he is at the same moment creating and then juggling balls of white flame—literally playing with fire. Is he brazenly lying, or is he hinting at a deeper truth—that there is daring but no wisdom, that magic is a question of will rather than knowledge? Is it skill or is it luck? Constantine’s brand of magical bluffing suggests that the two often amount to much the same thing. The only trick is not losing your nerve until you see it through to the end, whatever that may be.

Part Three: Promethea

In Snakes and Ladders, Alan Moore tells of seeing John Constantine in a sandwich shop: “He looks at me. He nods, and smiles, and walks away.” (He smiles, knows, and does not tell.)

“Years later,” Moore continues,”in another place, he steps out from the dark and speaks to me. He whispers: ‘I’ll tell you the ultimate secret of magic.'” We see him, cigarette in hand, and a slight, mischievous smile. Moore leans toward him, listening.

“‘Any cunt could do it’,” Constantine says.

The casual manner is a pose. Constantine promises to tell us a secret—or more, the secret—then seems not to, but actually does. It’s not just showmanship, it’s illustrative. It is itself a part of the secret—the smiling, knowing, telling, not telling. (“What do I know of magic? Why, nothing…. Nothing at all.“) It’s a coded language, a teasing performance full of double meanings. The profanity is part of it as well. “[The] profane and scared are both one,” Moore writes. Cunt, you understand: Is it literal or metaphorical? And what is the difference?

Moore’s Promethea is another story of an artist conjuring a fictional character into reality. A young student, Sophie Bangs, is researching a mythical figure who recurs in stories throughout the history of literature. What she discovers is that

“Promethea was a real little girl who lived in 5th century Roman Egypt. Her father was a hermetic scholar. . . sort of like a magician. A Christian mob killed him. . . But the gods intervened, taking his daughter into their world of myth and fiction, The Immateria. Promethea became a living story, growing up in the realm that all dreams and stories come from. Sometimes, she’d wander into the imagination of mortals. . . . Some of them, taken over by this powerful living idea, even physically became Promethea. . . . See, anyone with imagination and enough enthusiasm for the character can bring her through from the Immateria, by thinking themselves or others into the role.”

Sophie becomes the latest incarnation of Promethea, leading her—and therefore, also, the reader—on a instructive quest to learn about magic, or at least the basics of Alan Moore’s theory of it. Some of what she learns helps to elucidate the meaning of Constantine’s secret.

The magician Jack Faust instructs her: “The vessel between woman’s thighs is the cup’s highest aspect. The chalice. The grail of divine compassion.” Later, they have sex, and he continues:

“Magicians, irrespective of their gender, are male. Their symbol is the wand, the male member, because they are that which seeks to penetrate the mystery. But once they succeed—then they become magic. They become the mystery, become that which is penetrated. They become female.”

This is all rather literal in the story. Writers and artists, their pens and pencils serving as their wands, approach a woman who is not only mythic but myth itself, who is imaginary and who represents imagination. Those who are most successful, at least one man included, then actually become her.

Later, Sophie encounters a female Aleister Crowley, who reiterates Faust’s point: “Here, magicians become magic itself. The penetrator becomes the penetrated. Male becomes female.”

Sex is magic, magic is creation. Magic is about transformation, change. But it is also about unity, and the unity of opposites in particular—illusion and reality, male and female, virgin and whore, sacred and profane. Something doesn’t just come from nothing: the emptiness contains everything within it already. Zero means nothing, but it is also the number of infinite potential. Transformation is also a revelation, and the revelation transforms. Magic is a system, a system of meanings, perhaps of essences—but it is an unstable system, a destabilizing system. That is why it is transgressive. That is why it is dangerous.

And in a sense it is dangerous whether it exists or not. Magic may not be real in the way that toothbrushes and parking meters are. But stories are real; symbols are real. They may only exist in the mind, or in the culture, but they have real effects. Tampering with the symbols, Moore argues repeatedly, changes consciousness, changes the meaning of things. If this idea is even remotely correct—and for these purposes it makes no difference whether we conceive of the process as “magic,” as Moore does, or simply as “art”—then the project of re-imagining our heroes takes on new importance, and greater urgency. It’s not just about having better comics, but about finding new ways of seeing the world, and new ways of being in it. Changing ideas changes the world. It’s just a matter of imagination, and having the nerve to take the first step.

When Sophie next encounters Crowley he is dressed as the Fool, sitting at the bottom of an ornate staircase reaching to the heavens. At the top, he tells her, one can “behold the vision of God, face to face.” Crowley, the gloomy Fool, waits uncertainly, despondently. “I’ve always been sitting undecidedly here,” he says. But also, he says, “I’ve always been there,” up above. “You go ahead,” he tells Sophie. “Good luck with God.”

God turns out to be the moment of creation: “Something from nothing. One from none. . . . Always here. Always now. . . . One perfect moment, when everything happens.” Implicit in that moment is the unity of all Being. “All one. All God. . . . We are each other. And we are God. . . . And God is one. And one is next to nothing.” There, in that bliss of oneness and that barely-there heaven, along with everything else, is (again) the Fool—the familiar image this time, the one taken from the Tarot. Satchel over his shoulder, dog barking behind him, his next step will take him over the ledge. Perhaps there is some slight resemblance to Crowley.

And from that ultimate height, one finds another edge. Looking down one sees the universe, arrayed like the Kabbalah. Sophie steps over, and falls back into our world.

Watchmen and Neoliberalism: An Interview with Andrew Hoberek

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

As I’ve said before, my book, Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism, came out last week. It’s published in the Comics Culture series at Rutgers University Press. My book is the second volume to be published; the first, released in late 2014, was Andrew Hoberek’s Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics, focusing on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen.

Andrew’s book is appreciative but not reverent; he’s especially skeptical of the political stance in Watchmen. HU has talked a lot about Alan Moore’s politics over the years — so I thought it would be interesting to talk to Andrew about his take as the last post in my book release roundtable. Andrew and I spoke by email.
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Noah: Your central argument about Watchmen’s politics, as I understand it, is that Watchmen is based in Moore’s sweeping distrust of institutions. For Moore, that connects to 60s anarchism and progressivisim, but your point is that it’s also the basis for the neoliberal attack on government institutions. So when Moore rejects political collective action, he ends up on the side of Reagan and Thatcher, who he hates. Have I got the argument right there? And maybe you could talk a bit about where or how you see Moore rejecting collective politics?

Andrew: I think one example, perhaps relevant now, is the protest against Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre freeing Rorschach from prison that spills over into a group of skinheads killing the original Nite-Owl, whom they confuse with Dan Dreiberg.

Another way to think about it is the fact that Moore’s respect for individualism transcends actual political stances, to the extent that the rightwing Rorschach is a much more sympathetic character than the liberal Ozymandias. Ozymandias is a classic totalitarian figure, someone who (like Stalin) wants to impose plans from the top down and who doesn’t care if literally millions of people have to die in the process. This is very much the kind of figure that Reagan or Thatcher deployed to justify both their foreign policy and their domestic cuts, and that we still have with us in the form of the (absurd) assertions that Barack Obama is a socialist.

That said, I think “ends up on the side of Reagan and Thatcher is strong.” It’s probably more correct to say that he shares an anti-collective stance that hadn’t yet become totally the property of the neoliberal right at that point (It was still central to the sixties left from the Port Huron Statement to the anti-Vietnam movement), but was on its way to doing so.

Noah: So, do you think it’s possible to see Ozymandias as in some ways a critique of neoliberalism, or as trying to think through the connections between liberalism, capitalism, and authoritarianism? You say that Veidt is a classic totalitarian figure, but he’s awfully pro capitalism. And it’s not industrial Nazi-era capitalism either; it’s way more late capitalism, consumerism of the image, it seems like (part of his evil plot is essentially to make a movie.) Casting Veidt as the villain seems like it’s at least in part casting big business as the villain.

Andrew: That’s a good qualification. As I was writing the book I had my eye on the way that Veidt’s portrayal exemplifies a general distrust of institutions that has gone from being a shared feature of both the left and the right in the cold war period to a hallmark of neoliberalism. But another way to think of Veidt is as a figure who embodies Moore’s distrust of large-scale capitalism–a thing I associate in the book with the way he stands for the big comic book companies who exploit the intellectual property of work-for-hire creators. At the same time, it’s when Ozymandias steps outside the profit motive, and attempts to perform what he believes is an altruistic act, that he becomes the villain of the piece. Moore’s thinking about the comic book industry and his general politics remain entwined here, in that the celebration of individual comic book creators remains entwined with a kind of romantic ideology of small property ownership (in this case intellectual property) that’s long been central to American thought, and in some ways has facilitated or served as cover for the rise of neoliberalism. We think of Reagan and his successors as champions of small business–in part because they continuously tell us so–but their policies have largely benefited big capital.

Noah: Veidt’s capitalism doesn’t end though. And in fact he takes advantage of his knowledge of the change in the world situation to switch his investments around and make even more money. Liberal one-worldism and neoliberal corporation seem to fit together seamlessly.

I guess I wonder in part whether the critique of institutions you point to, or the sympathy for Rorschach and the distrust of Veidt — the assumption in your book seems to be that that’s politically retrograde or problematic. But— I mean, for myself at least…if the book is anti-Stalinist, and anti-violent revolution, which I think it is, I’m kind of on board with that. I feel like Moore points out that revolutions are really bloody, kill real people, and don’t necessarily actually change all that much, or can’t be counted on for real transformation. Those all seem like reasonable points — and stand in contrast to V for Vendetta, for example, where V seems infallible and revolutionary violence and torture result in Evey’s personal transformation rather than in the kind of pointless pile of corpses you see in Watchmen.

It also seems prescient in terms of our current political moment. Obama’s not Stalin, obviously, but like most of our Presidents he’s happy dropping bombs on people in the name of a better world. He really doesn’t look all that different from Veidt in a lot of ways (he’s even a successful creator of intellectual aesthetic content, right?)

Andrew: The Obama-Veidt comparison is a fascinating one, although I guess an even better comparison would be Veidt and Mitt Romney, since Romney too made a lot of money and now seeks to turn his attention to public service. (Of course he didn’t make it all on his own after starting from the bottom, the way Veidt and Drake did.) For my money, though, I think the things that are problematic about Obama actually have to do with his very Reaganesque dislike of large organization. For all the flak that he takes for his past as a “community organizer,” this is a figure whose commitment to ground up consensus building reflects a sixties left critique of big government in an era when anti-government sentiment has become a major tool of those in power. Obama’s missteps (including, one imagines, those with the security state, although we’ll probably never know the details there) seem to me to be a property of his desire to compromise and build consensus with everyone. To my mind I’d prefer a Lyndon Johnson who knows how to work within organizations and who isn’t afraid to strong arm opponents to get what he wants. I actually think Lyndon Johnson is–mistakes with Vietnam aside–an unacknowledged hero of the twentieth century. I’m getting a bit away from Watchmen here, but these days you don’t see too many celebrations of institutions on either side of the political fence: Spielberg’s Lincoln is one of the few I can think of, and a great, unheralded film for that fact.

Noah: Hah; I loathed Lincoln. Part of my broader loathing of all things Spielberg. I don’t think it does actually celebrate institutions, exactly. It celebrates Lincoln as white savior hero genius. Barf.

Andrew: My defense of Lincoln’s would be Adolph Reed’s, which is simply that it portrays politics and dealmaking as valuable and even dramatic activities, in contrast to a movie like Django Unchained which seems racially progressive but which actually personalizes both the critique of and solution to an institutional problem like slavery.

But to return to Watchmen in conclusion, I think this whole political question has a lot to do with the history of the superhero in which Moore and Gibbons play a key role. The pre-Watchmen history of the genre runs from 1938 or so to 1986, precisely the period in which Americans believed in the potential of government to make things better. In that respect, I tend to see the superhero as a figure for the New Deal state itself–a figure of extra-ordinary power committed to doing good in the world. The post-Watchmen idea of the superhero (in which Moore and Gibbons participate, even though they later come to bemoan it) as an obsessive or self-interested figure who claims to do good but in fact makes things worse nicely parallels, by the same token, neoliberal accounts of government.

Words Count

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

I read the first issue of Watchmen while it was still on comic shop shelves back in 1986. Though “read” is the wrong word. A total of three words appear on pages five, six, seven, and eight. No captions. No thought bubbles. No dialogue. Just Rorschach mumbling “Hunh,” “Ehh,” and, my favorite, “Hurm” to himself as he investigates a crime scene. The action is cerebral. No heroes and villains exchanging punches and power blasts. Rorschach notices that the murder victim’s closet is oddly shallow, and then bends a coat hanger to measure it against the depth of the adjacent wall. A further search reveals a secret button, and then a hidden compartment, complete with (SPOILER ALERT!) the Comedian’s superhero costume.

That’s just nine panels of Gibson and Moore’s unnarrated 31-panel sequence. I’d never “read” anything like it. Not that Moore had anything against the English language. Look at the pages right before and after the silent sequence. 198 and 199 words each. When chatting, the Watchmen are as wordy as Spider-Man in his 1962 debut. Open Amazing Fantasy #15 and the first two pages clock in at 196 and 234 words each.

Not many letters shook loose in the leap from Silver to Bronze Age. Take a couple of pages from my personal ur-comic, The Defenders #15 of 1974, and you get 232 and 169. When Omega the Unknown debuted two years later, wordage had shrunk only a little, with pages of 156 and (I hope you realize how annoying it is to count these) 177.

But now fly back to the Golden Age. Scan Action Comics #1, and the 1938 Superman only muscles out 94 and 95 words. The mean skyrockets if you average in Jerry Siegel’s two-page prose story in the back Superman #1, but DC was only placating some now obscure publishing requirement. Marvel included a similar experiment in 1975, dropping single pages of prose into Defenders episodes (the improbably advanced vocabulary included “vacuous,” “belie,” and “veritable.”) My nine-year-old eyes barely skimmed them.

Despite varying word counts, the maximum for a dialogue-heavy panel remains about the same through the decades. Clark and his Daily Star boss cram in 30 words. Same number as the more talkative Omega panels. Peter Parker’s would-be manager leans over him with a 38-word speech bubble. And the cops investigating the Comedian’s death spit out some 35 words per panel too. So dialogue is the comic book’s universal constant. Moore didn’t mess with that. When talking, his characters sound like everybody else. The difference is when they shut up.

Before the mid-eighties, comic books were written in an omniscient third person voice. Those pages of prose in 1975 weren’t a freakish contradiction. They were the culmination of the industry’s style, the medium’s secret default setting. The background hum of talk. The author just couldn’t keep his mouth closed. It was as if he didn’t trust all those vacuous little pictures not to belie his veritable story.

“It takes a very sophisticated writer of long experience and dedication,” Will Eisner explains, “to accept the total castration of his words, as, for example, a series of exquisitely written balloons that are discarded in favor of an equally exquisite pantomime.”

There was a lot of castration anxiety from early comic book writers. Jerry Siegel’s Superman captions read like instructions to artist Joe Shuster: “With a sharp snap the blade breaks upon Superman’s tough skin!” Bill Finger’s Batman captions distrust Bob Kane’s pen even more: “The ‘Bat-Man’ lashes out with a terrific right . . . He grabs his second adversary in a deadly headlock . . . and with a might heave . . . sends the burly criminal flying through space.”

Two decades later and Spider-Man was just as redundant: “Wrapped in his own thoughts, Peter doesn’t hear the auto which narrowly misses him, until the last instant! And then, unnoticed by the riders, he unthinkingly leaps to safety—but what a leap it is!” Steve Ditko and Stan Lee tell the core of the origin—the radioactive spider bite—in three panels, speechless but for Peter’s “Ow!” But those three captions cram in 112 words.

Lee understood the complexity of visual story-telling. (The original Amazing Fantasy art boards include his margin note: “Steve—make this a closed sedan. No arms showing. Don’t imply wreckless driving—S.”) But comic book convention mandated narration, regardless of redundancy. Even when working without a script, Ditko covered his pages in empty captions and talk bubbles for Lee to fill in later. In Amazing Spider-Man #1, Spider-Man webs a rocket capsule as it flies past the plane he’s balancing on. The panels are visually self-explanatory, but words were still required. Instead of narrated captions, it’s Spider-Man pointlessly announcing “I hit it!” and “Mustn’t let go!” and “I reached it! But now . . .”

Alan Moore trusted pictures. When captions appear in Watchmen, they contain character speech, usually juxtaposed from a previous panel. When characters stop talking, the frame is silent. Nobody is chattering in a box overhead. The murder victim in the first issue isn’t the Comedian. It’s the narrator.

Unlike most deaths in comic books, this one was permanent. When Jonathan Lethem and Karl Rusnak created a new Omega the Unknown in 2008, they opened with two pages of wordless panels. Although Rusnak says Steve Gerber, the original writer, “raised the since out-of-favor device of caption narration to an art form,” Lethem still “wasn’t interested in captioning—in fact I wanted to mostly work without it.”

That goes for most creators today. Look at Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman. Look at Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man. Look at Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead. It’s not just the word counts that changed. Words count differently.

Superman on the Throne

Posted on March 12, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Jerry Siegel stole Superman’s 1938 tagline “champion of the oppressed” from Douglas Fairbanks. The silent film star’s 1920 The Mark of Zorro opens with the intertitle: “Oppression—by its very nature—creates the power that crushes it. A champion arises—a champion of the oppressed—whether it be a Cromwell or someone unrecorded, he will be there. He is born.”

You can quibble with the superheroic logic (is oppression always self-defeating?), but the word that made me pause (literally, I thumbed PAUSE on my remote) is “Cromwell.” As in Oliver Cromwell, the man who chopped off King Charles’ head in 1649 to become Lord Protector of England until his own, kidney-related death a decade later (after which Charles’ restored son dug up his body and chopped off his head too). All perfectly interesting, but what, you may ask, does that have to do with Zorro?

Johnston McCulley doesn’t mention Cromwell in The Curse of Capistrano, the All-Story pulp serial Fairbanks adapted. Some American Fairbanks trace their name back to the Puritan Fayerbankes, proud followers of Cromwell since the 1630s, so maybe Douglas was just carrying on family tradition. Except The Mark of Zorro isn’t the first Cromwell mention in superhero lore.

George Bernard Shaw lauds him in “The Revolutionist’s Handbook,” an appendix to his 1903 Man and Superman, the play that first gave us the English ubermensch. Shaw (or his alter ego John Tanner, the Handbook’s fictional author) declares Cromwell “one of those chance attempts at the Superman which occur from time to time in spite of the interference of Man’s blundering institutions.” A devout eugenicist, Shaw/Tanner longed for a nation of supermen, “an England in which every man is a Cromwell.”

By the time Siegel was copying Fairbanks’ intertitles in the 30s, “Cromwell” and “Superman” were synonyms. Biographer John Buchan (better known for his Hitchcock adapted Thirty-Nine Steps) called him “the one Superman in England who ruled and reigned without a crown.” P. W. Wilson extended the comparison to modern times, ranking England’s Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin “among the supermen,” and likening his overseeing of Edward VIII’s abdication to Cromwell’s regicide.

Alan Moore extends the superhero connection even further. In a 2007 interview, Moore (like Shaw’s John Tanner) identifies himself as an anarchist (“the only political standpoint that I could possibly adhere to would be an anarchist one”) and so longs for a society with “no leaders” (he’s literally anti “archons”). He traces his inspiration to 17^th England when underground religious movements were espousing the heretical view that all men could be priests, “a nation of saints.” And, Moore explains, “it was during the 17th century that, partly fueled by similar ideas, Oliver Cromwell rose up and commenced the British civil war, which eventually led to the beheading of Charles I.”

Guy Fawkes (inspiration for Moore’s V for Vendetta) had tried to kill Charles’ father, King James, a half century earlier, but Guy was no Oliver. Moore revels in the thought of headless monarchs, but Buchan celebrates the executioner, “an iron man of action” with “no parallel in history.” Cromwell ignored his own council of commanders during the civil war and, after making England a republic, he ignored Parliament too. “It was too risky to trust the people,” writes Buchan, “he must trust himself.”

That’s the ubermensch Shaw adores. Not a champion of the oppressed, but a champion of the self. And it’s a quality still central to every superhero, all those iron men of action who trust only themselves, ignoring and sometimes defying law enforcement to maintain their own sense order. Zorro opposed the colonial regime of a corrupt California governor. Cromwell fought for religious freedom against a tyrant who persecuted anyone who did not conform to the Church of England.

But what happens after oppression is crushed? Fairbanks’ Zorro retires into happy matrimony. McCulley rebooted his Zorro for more oppression-opposing adventures—inspired by Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel, an iron man of action dedicated to rescuing noble necks from the kind of execution blade Cromwell wielded. Once enthroned, the Lord Protector imposed his own, literally Puritanical order on England. He closed taverns, chopped down maypoles, outlawed make-up, fined profanity, and, as a real life Burgermeister Meisterburger, cancelled Christmas.

When Alan Brennert wrote his 1991 graphic novel, Batman: Holy Terror, he kept Cromwell on the throne another decade, creating an alternate universe in which the U.S. is an English commonwealth run by a corrupt theocracy. It seems Supermen in charge are not such a good thing for the common man. Look at Garth Ennis’ The Boys (2006), or Mark Waid and Alex Ross’ Kingdom Come (1996), or Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme (1986), or, best yet, Alan Moore’s Marvelman (AKA, Miracleman, but let’s not go into that right now). I bought No. 16 from my college comic shop in 1989, a year after I graduated college. It’s the last issue before Neil Gaiman took over and I stopped reading the series. Gaiman is great, but the story was over. Marvelman has rid the world of nuclear warheads, money, global warming, crime, childbirth pain, and, in some cases, death. He’s not king of the world. He’s its totalitarian god.

Marvel Comics is re-releasing and completing the series now, and, what the hell, I’ll probably pick up where I left off. But my worship of Moore is long over. I considered him the reigning writer of the multiverse for decades, but his rule grew increasingly idiosyncratic and, less forgivable, dull. His last Miracleman, “Olympus,” is a tour of the dystopic future. From Hell offers similar tours, literally horse-drawn, which, while aggressively non-dramatic in structure, basically work. But my heart sunk when the third volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman devolved into a balloon ride over yet more of Moore’s meticulously researched esotoria. Yes, the dream-like Blazing World is ripe with 3-D nudity, but this is no way to conclude a plot. When Promethea, my favorite of all Moore creations, plunged down the same rabbit hole, I couldn’t make myself keep reading. Moore was running his own imprint at this point, America’s Best Comics, with no Parliament or War Council left to ignore, and no corrupt tyrant to oppose.

Heroes need oppression. Even Fairbanks’ son, Douglas Jr., knew that. After his father’s death, he wrote, produced, and starred in The Exile, a 1947 swashbuckler about Charles II, the son of the king Cromwell beheaded. He hides out on a Holland farm and falls in love with a flower monger while battling Cromwell’s assassins before Parliament calls him back to his throne. It’s a happy ending made happier by the fact that Fairbanks didn’t follow it with a sequel. After Charles started waging wars and suspending their laws, Parliament regretted their invitation.

Every Cromwell—by his very nature—creates the Cromwell that crushes him.

Lone Woolf and Cubs: Alan Moore, Postmodern Fiction, and Third-Wave Feminist Utopianism

Posted on March 8, 2014 by Eric Berlatsky

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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Alan Moore’s most recent glossy graphic novel is, despite its title, more akin to Lost Girls than to the two previous volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (LOEG). LOEG: The Black Dossier, like Lost Girls, is preoccupied with other creators’ fictional characters having copious amounts of sex with one another in a variety of positions. This is particularly the case in the first third of the book where Allan Quatermain (King Solomon’s Mines, etc.) and Wilhemina Murray (Jonathan Harker’s Dracula companion) have bathed in a fountain of life/immortality, which serves to make them both young, blonde, and perpetually randy. The pool may as well have been filled with liquefied Viagra, given the dramatic shift away from the subtly represented sexual dynamics between the two in both previous volumes, set some fifty years earlier. Their intermittent congresses are punctuated by excerpts from the “Black Dossier,” a government file stolen by Quatermain and Murray, which collects documents on the “extraordinary” members of the League in its various incarnations. Among these are Fanny Hill, star of a pornographic 18th century novel by John Cleland, and Virginia Woolf’s androgynous Orlando, eponymous hero/ine of the 1928 novel. Introducing Hill and Orlando as part of Leagues that both preceded and followed the turn of the Victorian century version detailed in the previous two volumes gives Moore an excuse to indulge again in somewhat graphic sexuality, particularly with Orlando, whose propensity to change gender every few centuries allows for the exploration of heterosexual couplings from either gender’s perspective, as well as frequent gay and lesbian sexual encounters, with a heavier emphasis on the latter.

Graphic gratuitousness, from LOEG: The Black Dossier

To suggest that Moore’s increasing interest in sexuality is merely an excuse to get artist Kevin O’Neill to draw some dirty pictures for him is unfair, however, since the fascination with sexuality is clearly linked to an almost Romantic obsession with the liberating powers of the imagination. The “Blazing World” section that closes the book presents readers with a utopian “magical kingdom” of fantastic fictional creations, symbolically representing the scope and power of the human imagination, frequently repressed or ignored in the “real world.” That is, while Moore’s LOEGverse is already only populated by fictional creations (James Bond, Hugo Drummond, Emma Peel, Wodehouse’s Jeeves, etc. all make memorable appearances in The Black Dossier), there is a constant implication that in this “real world” the most imaginative of imaginative creations are slowly being pushed out, due to oppressive social policies and a general incapacity (or unwillingness) to access the most powerfully imaginative parts of our brains. England, in the 1958 LOEGverse is ruled by the dystopian Party from Orwell’s 1984, while fairies, sprites, and magical beings (apparently common in the LOEG Renaissance Britain) have either been exterminated or have fled to the “Blazing World” (from Margaret Cavendish’s novel of the same name). So, while Moore retains the trappings of the previous LOEG in giving us a world wherein all of the characters are other authors’ fictional creations, he also creates yet another world in which things are even more “fictional,” fantastic, and imaginative…turning the original LOEGverse into a dystopian lack of imagination and the “Blazing World” into its utopian flipside. Not coincidentally, the “Blazing World” also presents its readers with tantalizing sexual possibilities, including the union of Fanny Hill and Venus, the goddess of love, and a ménage in the offing between Quatermain, Murray, and Orlando. All of which brings us, at long last, to my erstwhile brother’s project on this website of “the gay utopia” and it’s problematic application in Moore’s graphic novel.

What does Moore’s pornographic fascination with and valorization of polymorphous and androgynous sexuality have to do with his equal fascination with the potential utopia of the human imagination? Presumably, the former is what my brother is labeling the “gay utopia,” a label I do not completely understand or endorse, since it is neither “gay” nor a “utopia” from what I can discern. Rather, it seems to be a version of “third wave” feminism, or “post-feminism,” or (perhaps) postmodern feminism as theorized by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault (and many others) and practiced by contemporary writers like Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, and Caryl Churchill (and many others), all of whom are transparently influenced by Woolf’s exploration of androgyny in both Orlando and A Room of One’s Own. Moore’s affinity with this group of writers is not only indicated by the central place of Orlando in Black Dossier, but also by the conspicuous placement of a poster advertising the performance of Fevvers, Carter’s androgynous winged circus aerialist in Nights at the Circus, on a poster in Quatermain and Murray’s seedy hotel room.

Woolf’s discussion of androgyny in the final chapter of A Room suggests the possibility that all people are both male and female, and that it is, in some sense, “unnatural” for us to think of ourselves as linked to one gender or the other. Rather, Woolf suggests, many of the problems with contemporary writing is in its “unnatural” sex consciousness, most likely caused by the women’s suffrage movement and the proprietary masculine response to it. While much of A Room, then, is spent detailing various oppressions of women (particularly economic and educational deprivations) that have presented the flowering of female genius in the field of writing, she ends by advocating the dissolution of the gender categories which make such oppression possible. If we do not think of ourselves as male or female, it would, no doubt, be impossible to deprive certain members of society certain privileges on the basis of gender. Logically, it would also dissolve the notion of default “norms” of sexual orientation, since sexual attraction would be based on a much looser sense of both our own gender and that of our partner(s). Again, it would be impossible to oppress people on the basis of the gender of the person we choose to sleep with if gender itself were not an operable category. Woolf herself doesn’t explore the sexual ramifications of this notion of androgyny in A Room (she tended to be fairly reticent in portrayals of and discussion of sex), although there is a bit more of this kind of thinking in Orlando, wherein the hero/ine falls in love with women, men, and other metaphorically androgynous characters (who likewise fall in love with her/him). None of this seems to shatter Woolf’s fundamental belief in gender, however, since she insistently suggests that there is something “special” and “suggestive” about women’s writing that is simply absent from the majority of male output. That is, while it is essential for women to forget that they are women while writing, that writing will still be characteristically feminine. All of which is to say that Woolf herself never quite asserted that gender did not exist in some kind of fundamental/natural way, just that gender consciousness had taken a far-too-prominent role in human society.

Not to fear, however, because these fairly limited suggestions about a possible “androgyny of the mind” become a full-fledged denial of the existence of the male/female gender division in post-structuralist (and post-post-structuralist) thinkers like Foucault and Butler. To boil down the highly influential thought of both theorists into two words, gender and sexual orientation become matters of “discourse” and “performativity.” For Foucault, of course, there are no natural or “essential” truths. Rather, “truth” is a matter of social agreement, or what people “say” in a variety of discourses. In his History of Sexuality, Foucault details how certain sexual practices are described through discourse (and therefore authorized) as “normal,” while others are labeled as “abnormal.” Implicit (and occasionally explicit) in this argument is that there is no “real” normal, just what people have labeled as “normal” through discourse, all of which provides the impetus and the practice of the “specification” of and oppression of the “perverse”: the gay, the pedophiliac, the practitioner of bestiality, etc. The attribution of these behaviors as “abnormal” is primarily a practice by which societies label and specify an abnormal “other” which serves to justify and valorize the “normal” self of any community. The normal/abnormal binary then authorizes and excuses various forms of oppression.

While Foucault is more interested in “sexuality” than in gender, his general argument works just as well for these categories. There is no such thing as “natural” sex or gender divisions, the argument goes. Rather, the binary is created in discourse as a means of defining the masculine (normal, complete, phallically endowed) self against the other (abnormal, lacking) that is the feminine. Those in power generate the most influential discourse, and these discourses perpetuate power relations by presenting social constructions (like gender) as biological fact. For feminist thinkers following poststructuralist thought (third wave feminists in Julia Kristeva’s formulation), then, resistance to masculine dominance becomes less a matter of advocating for economic, political, or educational equality, and more a matter of exposing the fact that gender is a false category that merely perpetuates certain power relations. Presumably, exposure of this “false consciousness” will lead to a revolution of the mind that would put an end to oppression on the basis of these categories (gender, perversion) and lead to some kind of gender-free utopia. Foucault’s own position on this is never this optimistic, however, since he argues that any discourse is by its nature “disciplinary” or oppressive, and so a change in discourse about sexuality would not free us from oppression, but merely deliver us into a new form of it.

Butler’s claim in Gender Trouble (1990) is somewhat more positive, however, since it hinges on the liberating potential of “performativity” and not on the inherently oppressive power of discourse. For Butler, as with Foucault, gender categories are inherently false. In fact, Butler denies the typical division of “sex” and “gender” with the former referring to biological/natural differences between men and women (chromosomes, genitalia, etc.) and the latter referring to socially defined “roles.” For Butler, while chromosomal and genital differences may exist, it is a social (discursive) decision to use these categories that divide a society. We might just as easily call all blondes “male,” and all brunettes “female” and ignore the differences we now use to distinguish male from female just as we now ignore other kinds of differences between people (finger length, for instance). So, while differences between people may be “real” in some sense, the meaning of particular differences is never natural, essential, biological, or ontological. Butler argues the “gendered body…has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (2497) and that this “fact” is the essential definition of performativity. Our sex/gender, she argues, is only a collection of acts within a social discourse. Drag queens and transvestites, then, become her primary examples, since their “internal” essence is so easily confused with their “external” act. Quoting Esther Newton, Butler notes how drag queens may be read as female on the outside (clothing), but really male (since they have genitals, Y chromosomes, etc.), or they may be read as male on the outside (in their bodies), but female on the inside (in their “soul,” their “self,” their primary self-identification). Butler notes then that drag, while an imitation of gender, also reveals how all gender is imitative: “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself- as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of the radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary.” (2498). Again, as with Foucault, gender/sex is revealed not as “natural” and “biological” but as a social construction of discourse. If we only see these constructions, then, we can perhaps act outside of them, performing the gender we wish to perform (including, perhaps, androgyny, or some other gender outside the male/female binary) and not be constricted by discourse. As with much thought I think of as postmodern, the primary claim here is for the “lack of reality of reality” (Lyotard 146), or the revelation that things we think of as “real” (sexual orientation, gender/sex) are in fact not real at all, but are instead mere social agreement that would change if we (as a society) were merely able to “imagine otherwise.” If, as a culture, we could shift our attention away from binary divisions like normal/abnormal, hetero/homo, woman/man, etc. the oppressions that arise from these divisions might be avoided, subverted, or destroyed. As Butler argues “gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences” (2500) and presumably if “gender” were eliminated, those consequences would be alleviated.

While Foucault’s discussion of unavoidable discourses from innumerable intersecting power structures may be unnecessarily draconian (you’re oppressed by discourse, but there is no way out!), Butler’s discussion of drag and performance may be unrealistically utopian (despite the fact that Butler always keeps an eye on the oppressive discourses that construct gender). By suggesting that “performance” is the most operative word in discussions of gender and sexuality, she implies that if we all start “performing” in opposition to dominant power structures, such structures would dissolve. Moore’s Black Dossier and Lost Girls seem to operate within that logic. By presenting us with a cornucopia of sex acts, sexual attractions, and shifting genders, Moore works to undermine typical oppressive divisions like male/female and homosexual/ heterosexual, particularly in his clever division of the “real” LOEGverse and the “Blazing World,” the latter of which is only clearly viewable with a pair of included 3-D glasses. Again, the message seems to be that a shift in perspective (from the two dimensions of the league to the 3 dimensions of our world, through the 4th dimension of time, and finally to the supposed 5th dimension of the “Blazing World” wherein the characters experience all times simultaneously). The possible simultaneity of time is a standard element of Moore’s work (from Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen to Jack the Ripper’s multi-temporal experiences in From Hell), as is kinky and non-conformist sex (perhaps the most vivid example being Abby Cable’s intense and sweaty sex with a vegetable in Swamp Thing). The two are brought together most clearly in the final section of The Black Dossier, however, wherein it becomes clear that a shift in dimension, an escape from viewing time as linear, gives a fresh perspective, allowing us to see gender itself as not “real” and therefore available to re-vision.

This is particularly the case because although the “Blazing World” represents vivid and imaginative fiction, the restrictive oppressive world of the “real” LOEGverse is clearly just as fictional as its Blazing counterpart. Both are populated by fictions. It is merely the case that one of these fictions reinforces typical gender binaries and oppressions, while the other frees us from them, that separates the two. Ian Fleming’s James Bond (called merely “Jimmy,” no doubt for copyright reasons) is the key character in this regard in the “present” section of the real LOEGverse. His brutal violence and misogynist attitude towards both Mina and Emma Peel (of the Avengers) suggests the standard gender divisions and gender oppressions that exist in our own “real” world. At the same time, his obvious fictionality reminds us that these attitudes are also “fictions” in their own way, constructions of social discourse without recourse to “essential” reality. Of course, any character in a “novel” is a fiction, but Moore’s characters are made more obviously so by the fact that he is appropriating them from other people’s fictions. This self-referential indication that one’s creations are “texts” not “truths,” is a staple of “postmodern” fiction, of course, but it not mere textual game-playing here (although it appears to be in parts of the other League volumes). Rather, it serves the post-feminist agenda of suggesting that sex/gender and sexual orientation are themselves fictions. The polymorphic sexuality of Orlando is then set against the misogynist heterosexuality of Bond, both as fictions from which we can choose, but only one of which has a proven track record of oppression and abuse. It is in this way that The Black Dossier’s utopian dimension functions: as a “real” choice between two discursive fictions, not as a choice between quotidian reality and liberating imagination. As Prospero/Moore heavyhandedly notes in his final speech, our reality is at least as much a fiction as our imaginative creations. Nevertheless, in The Black Dossier, Moore makes the choice between these two fictions too easy and too reductive.

In any accounting of gender in a postmodern context, it is important not to too easily adopt a utopian perspective about the liberating potential of gender performance without also acknowledging the pervasively restrictive power of discourse and the possibility of additional restrictions of biology/nature, which may be too easily disregarded by radical social constructivists like Butler and Foucault. Grant Morrison, another comics “star,” provides a similarly utopian outlook in The Invisibles, which also combines explorations of the simultaneity of time, extra-dimensional perception, existential freedom of consciousness, and trans-gender androgyny. (Really, he and Moore may as well be the same person for all their personal squabbling). In the Apocalipstick story arc, the transvestive Lord Fanny can only gain her eldritch powers if she can “fool” a Mexican goddess-figure into believing that s/he is a girl. S/he stabs herself near the groin, fooling the extra-dimensional creature into believing that s/he is menstruating and thus gains his/her superheroic powers. As in Black Dossier, Morrison seems to suggest that gender is a matter of performance and self-identification, available for vision and re-vision, given the proper perspective (again from a 4th or 5th dimensional angle in the majority of the story). Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: A Game of You, while less giddy and inventive, may provide a reparative to this perspective, however. In this story, a witch gathers together the various women in an apartment complex to rescue one of their sisters from the “evil” Cuckoo. Wanda, a pre-operative transsexual formerly named Alvin, prepares to go with them, but is denied access to the dream realm because, well, he still has a penis. While Gaiman’s story (like Moore’s, like Morrison’s) is largely about the freedom to choose one’s identity, to perform the self, and to resist social discourse and definitions, here this possibility is ultimately defeated by the intractable reality of Wanda’s gender. In this case, the goddesses cannot be “fooled” or convinced by performance. Indeed, Wanda’s inability to accompany his friends leads inexorably to her/his death. Gaiman’s cautious pessimism indicates a less “postmodern,” and perhaps more realistic approach to gender oppression. Imagining gender differently, while possible and potentially liberating, doesn’t necessarily make certain “realities” disappear. Indeed, even if sex/gender are merely products of social discourse, there is no “Blazing World” that we can access in which such discourses disappear. Rather, discourse may be just as intractable as biology.

Most works of postmodern feminist fiction acknowledge these substantial barriers to gender liberation more clearly and more comprehensively than Moore’s does, and this is one of the primary failings of Black Dossier. Indeed, Woolf’s Orlando, written almost eighty years (and thousands of pages of feminist theory) before Black Dossier, is already more sophisticated on these issues than the later book. When Orlando emerges from her male to female sex change, she initially has no sense of her own gender while living among a group of gypsies. As soon as she returns to English society, however, her new gender has a significant impact upon her life. The juxtaposition of the “civilized” English with the “natural” gypsy culture gives Orlando (and Woolf) the opportunity to configure gender as something that rises out of social discourse, while Orlando’s experiences as both man and woman allows him/her to act as both despite the fact that s/he “remained exactly as he had been” (138). Orlando then is able to experience the freedoms of dressing as a man at night, while remaining a woman in the day during periods of the 18th century. At the same time, however, her activities and opportunities, particularly social and economic, are drastically curtailed as a woman, and her marriage (to a more ambiguously androgynous man) is described not merely in terms of love, but also in terms of social compulsion and as the “jaws of death” (262). That is, despite being Woolf’s most “utopian” novel, exploring as it does freedom from gender, the possibility of androgynous and lesbian love, and emergence into a new “present” that may evade the constrictions of the past, much of the novel is devoted to the depiction of these restrictions and the monumental power they have to control our sense of self and our daily actions. Woolf is more concerned in her work with the disciplinary nature of discourse about gender than with a performative utopian escape from those discourses.

Likewise, followers of Woolf, like Winterson and Carter, are less inclined to display a utopian dimension without counterbalancing it with a more “realistic” reparative. Carter’s Nights at the Circus (cited in Black Dossier) contains an androgynous heroine (Fevvers) and an increasingly androgynous man (Walser) who get married (like Orlando and Shel) and declare the possibility of a utopian future led by Fevvers as “New Woman”. Still, the book focuses at length on a variety of patriarchal abuses, including the merciless beating of one character, Mignon, by a series of men. These abuses are accompanied by sardonic critiques of a utopian mindset by Fevvers’ lifelong companion, Lizzie. Similarly, Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, which, like Black Dossier, contains meditations on the simultaneity of time as part of its feminism, provides us with a more ambiguously heroic androgynous heroine. The Dog Woman’s excessive enjoyment of and reveling in violence makes the reader begin to think that her feminist resistance to masculine discourse results not in “freedom” from gender binaries and oppression, but in a new era of oppression, violence, and abuse that merely reverses the male/female terms rather than erasing them. In depicting matters in this way, there is some suggestion that such an erasure of the gender binary may be impossible. Winterson’s The Passion also contains an androgynous heroine, Villanelle, whose webbed feet are signifiers of masculinity, while her genitalia/chromosomes suggest otherwise. Her liberation from an abusive marriage doesn’t result in freedom/happiness, however, at least not for all, as Henry (her friend and murderer of the husband) ends up on an island insane asylum, much like his previous “love,” Napolean.

Similar ambivalences are available in Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud 9, whose very title suggests a utopia, but whose contents are more conflicted. While the first act focuses on repressive Victorian gender and racial discourse, the sexual fantasmagoria of the second act is surprisingly less liberated than one might expect. While the first act is dominated by simple oppressive binaries of race and gender (complicated by transgender casting), the second act is dominated by homosexual affairs, followed by various ménage a trois, and finally by incestuous and inter-generational orgies. None of these physical acts seem to free their participants from the discourses of patriarchy available in Act I, however, as two gay men quickly adopt typically “masculine” or “feminine” roles, while the matriarch of the family, Betty, continues to want to serve men even after she leaves her husband and discovers the liberating pleasures of masturbation. That is, while Churchill’s play clearly views gender and sexual orientation as both discursive and performative, she is not so quick to suggest that a sudden shift in perspective, or trip to a “Blazing World” will make liberation from circumscribed gender conceptions possible.

None of this is to suggest that Moore is completely devoid of irony or self-critique. One humorous aside notes that when Orlando is male, he has a tendency to become increasingly violent, while a brief Tijuana Bible from the 1984 years depicts a man declaring, in the middle of a sexual act, “Ahh! Yes! In this moment of timeless animal love, we cast off our shackles!” That this sex act is immediately followed by betrayal by his partner and submission once more to the totalitarian government, seems to suggest the folly in believing that a series of diverse sexual practices will somehow “free” us from the discourses that determine social “norms” like gender and sexual orientation.

Still, despite this ironic disavowal of such unalloyed utopian notions, this is precisely the idea that The Black Dossier most frequently represents. The key first movement of a new consciousness in post-feminist thought is the realization that gender (and sexuality) are social constructs that can be ignored and re-invented. The result of this, perhaps, would be an openness to polymorphous sexuality and more various gender-identity. Moore’s book, however, seems to suggest that exposure to polymorphous sexualities and gender-identities will somehow lead us to an acknowledgment of gender’s inherent falsehood. While Black Dossier thematizes the fictionality of gender, it more often shows us lots of sex (especially in the first third of the book), a practice that tends not to serve the interests of post-feminism, but instead has the reverse effect. Mostly, what readers of the book are given (and it is a given, in the world of mainstream comics, that most of those readers are male) is a plethora of beautiful women in various states of undress, performing sex acts with men and/or other women. Rare is the depiction of homosexual male intercourse, and rarer is the depiction of sex that doesn’t conform to what might be typically titillating to men. Women are quite consistently, and especially in the Orlando and Fanny Hill sections, on display for men to ogle and appreciate, with the more serious ideas about the value of gender re-evaluation likely missed by many if not most readers. Nowhere is this problem more clear than in the Fanny Hill section in which one page (and its only picture) are devoted to a society in which all women walk around naked, while the men are fully clothed. While it is possible to view this as a commentary on the socially-derived convention of wearing clothes (and its ridiculousness in warmer climates), it is more likely to be read as an opportunity for mostly male readers to look at pictures of naked women. It is hard to construe this as a step for feminism. While, again, it is possible to argue that Moore seeks to be true to the style of his source material, reproducing such source material in an effort to advocate overcoming it is a problem typical of postmodern pastiche.

The exact same problem emerges in Moore¹s treatment of race. The “rescue” of Murray and Quatermain performed by the blackface sambo-style doll, the Golliwog (a character in children’s books by Florence Upton and Enid Blyton, the latter a favorite of Moore’s), may be read as an effort to promote the possibility of “reimagining” racial stereotypes in positive ways. Given the lack of critical distance, or self-conscious discussion, in the book itself, however, the portrayal of the Golliwog seems more consistent with racist caricatures than in opposition to them. Given Moore’s sketchy history of representing race (the zombie issues of Swamp Thing, the firedrake in Miracleman), there is little in Black Dossier to suggest that racist representations are under critique. Instead, the Golliwog is presented as an imaginative “hero,” instead of as a typically white failure of the imagination. The problems of racial politics inherent in the use of the Golliwog should, at the very least, be explored, just as the contradictions inherent in a man presenting naked women for the viewing/reading of other men should be considered, before claims for the inherent “liberating” power of Moore’s (or anyone else’s) imagination can be taken seriously. None of this is to suggest Moore is a “racist” or a “sexist” in any kind of easily attributable way. His left-wing credentials are, indeed, well-established. Instead, the Black Dossier seems to assert a bit too easily that intractable social problems (like racial and gender discrimination) can be overcome with a little fifth dimensional imagination, a notion that is offensive in itself.

White people are so imaginative!

Overall, The Black Dossier is a disappointment in almost every way. The playful integration of Victorian fictional characters in the previous volumes is replaced by an exhaustive encyclopedic attempt to integrate nearly all fiction into one world. The sex doesn’t reach the erotic excesses of Lost Girls, but retains many of the philosophical problems associated with pornography. The meditations on the freedom of the mind are less compelling and less complex than Moore’s early ruminations on anarchy in V for Vendetta or his vision of an unavoidably repressive utopia in the closing issues of Miracleman. Moore’s engagement with feminism and sexual freedom has been evident over the course of his illustrious career, but his most recent efforts to depict and promote a kind of utopian alternative to our vexed reality in Promethea, Lost Girls, and Black Dossier is both less entertaining and less insightful than his previous work, all of which contained fewer sex scenes.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. From Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. 2488-2501.

Carter, Angela. Nights At The Circus. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Churchill, Caryl. Cloud 9. New York: Routledge, 1979, 1984

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978.

Gaiman, Neil. Sandman: A Game Of You. New York: D. C. Comics, 1991-1992.

Morrison, Grant. The Invisibles, Vol. 1, #¹s 13-16. New York: D.C. Comics,
1995

Moore, Alan and Kevin O¹Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier. Wildstorm/America’s Best Comics, 2007.

Winterson, Jeanette. The Passion. New York: Vintage, 1987.

___. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1928.

___. A Room of One’s Own. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 1929.

I Hate Superheroes

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

That’s what Alan Moore told a recent interviewer. “I don’t think the superhero stands for anything good,” he said. “They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine-to-13-year-old audience.” But since all they do nowadays is entertain 30-60-year-old “emotionally subnormal” men, Moore considers superheroes “abominations” and their continuing dominance “culturally catastrophic.”

This from a self-professed anarchist who considers the shooting of government leaders a “lovely thought.” Little wonder his first superhero was a terrorist.

Moore and artist David Lloyd started V for Vendetta in 1981 for England’s since defunct Warrior magazine. I started reading it when the series moved to DC in 1988. I was 22, Moore’s age when he first conceived a story about “a freakish terrorist” who “waged war upon a Totalitarian State.” But it was Lloyd who transformed Moore’s freak into “a resurrected Guy Fawkes, complete with one of those paper mâché masks in a cape and conical hat.”

Their plan was to create “something uniquely British,” and, sure enough, the Fawkes reference meant absolutely nothing to this Pittsburgh-born college senior. When I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale the year before, I though Margaret Atwood was forecasting an original future: “when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress . . . The entire government, gone like that.” But Fawkes beat her by almost four centuries.

I didn’t read up on the Gunpowder Plot till I was a student teacher prepping Macbeth for a class of tenth graders. Shakespeare staged his tragedy of a regicidal anti-hero after Catholic terrorists tried to blow-up King James during the 1605 opening of Parliament. They’d rented a storage space under the House of Lords and crammed in three dozen barrels of gunpowder. Fawkes was arrested before he could light the fuse, tortured into betraying his dozen co-conspirators, tried, hanged, and his body displayed in pieces as a warning to sympathizers. He was still in prison when London lit bonfires in celebration of the King’s survival, and Parliament later declared the anniversary an official holiday, complete with fireworks and newspaper-stuffed “guys” set ablaze.

But hatred is a funny thing. Somewhere along the line the point of all those celebrations got hazy. Guy Fawkes Night lost its official standing in the 19^th century—around when penny dreadful writers were converting England’s most abominable traitor into a romantic hero, a conspiracy Lloyd happily joined. “We shouldn’t burn the chap every Nov. 5,” he told Moore, “but celebrate his attempt to blow up Parliament!”

I want to say the American equivalent would be championing John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald, but Fawkes’ rehabilitation might be possible only because his assassinations failed. Benedict Arnold could be closer—except no one remembers what treason he was planning (and even if you do, surrendering West Point to the British just doesn’t have the same audacious charm).

So Lloyd wanted to “give Guy Fawkes the image he’s deserved”—but I’m not sure Moore was fully committed to the plot. Despite his anarchist rhetoric, he doesn’t “believe that a violent revolution is ever going to work,” and he doesn’t hide his freakish terrorist’s violence under POW! and BAM! bubbles either. It was Lloyd who banned the sound effects (along with thought balloons—probably the most important moment in Moore’s development as a writer), but Moore’s dialogue complicates the violence Lloyd renders otherwise bloodless:

“I’ve seen worse, Dominic, physically speaking. Like I say, it’s the mental side that bothers me . . . his attitude to killing. Think about it. He killed them ruthlessly, efficiently, and with a minimum of fuss. Whatever their faults, those were two human beings . . . and he slaughtered them like cattle!”

The terrorist also enters quoting Macbeth, the monstrous anti-hero Shakespeare’s audiences (including King James for whom it was commissioned) would have linked to Fawkes. Moore’s Chapter One title, “The Villain,” is a bit of a clue too. V goes on to murder and maim his way through some thirty more chapters, but the part that troubled me most at the time was the psychological torture he inflicts on Evey. Yes, he rescues the damsel from a back alley rape in standard Batman fashion, but then he dupes her into believing she’s been imprisoned by the fascist government, shaves her head, starves and waterboards her, all in the name of . . . what exactly? By the end Evey is a good little Robin, taking on her mentor’s mission, but there’s more than a whiff of Stockholm syndrome between the panels.

“The central question is,” Moore says, “is this guy right? Or is he mad? I didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements.”

Which, by the way, is a pretty good example of using a superhero to actively expand an audience’s imagination.

Meanwhile, Guy Fawkes keeps adventuring. The “hacktivist” network Anonymous adopted Lloyd’s Fawkes mask for their 2008 Scientology protest—which they then carried over to Occupy Wall Street and, most recently, a worldwide Million Mask March held on Guy Fawkes Day to protest government austerity programs. The group’s anti-corporate message, however, gets a bit hazy once you know Time Warner owns the copyright on the mask (via DC I assume) which are manufactured in South American sweatshops and earn the company a killing on Amazon.

Something to think about, Moore might say.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: Alan Moore