Tag Archives: Alan Moore

The Flaw in Watchmen

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In his post last week, James Romberger argued that the “offensive flaw” of Watchmen is its suggestion that a woman could forgive, and even love, her rapist.

Sally kissing the photo of the late Blake amplifies the flat note in what is otherwise one of the most carefully and sensitively composed comics ever done. In a medium predominantly directed to males, an often overtly misogynistic form oblivious to the consequences of sexual violence, this rare realistic depiction of rape in comics comes to represent a offense a woman could forgive, that she even might even come to love her rapist.

James is certainly correct that the trope of woman-falling-for-her-rapist — the conversion rape — is a standard of misogyny. As I’ve noted before, the ur-conversion rape is probably the notorious scene in Goldfinger where James Bond overpowers Pussy Galore and fucks her. Afterwards, Pussy Galore abandons her lesbianism and betrays her boss, risking her life and the lives of her whole lesbian posse for the love of Bond’s magic penis.

what’s especially offensive about this whole scenario is the extent to which Ms. Galore is so completely beside the point. The rape and transformation is never about her; in fact, we don’t ever get a sense of her as a character except that she’s tough and independent, and then, suddenly, not so much. She falls for Bond because he’s just so darn overwhelmingly attractive, and she abandons her (never quite stated) lesbianism as if she were doffing a hat. There’s no actual psychological progression attempted; it’s just, insert phallus, hello enlightenment. The whole point of the encounter is, in fact, to annihilate her as a character; in entering her, Bond replaces her will with his own, and she becomes simply his catspaw. It’s the crudest kind of male power fantasy, and one which is more than a little pitiable, suggesting as it does a desire to fuck a mannequin, rather than a real person.

The Bond/Pussy Galore conversion rape is undoubtedly misogynist — but it’s also really, really different from the rape in Watchmen. In the first place, there’s nothing romantic or pleasurable about the sexual violence that Sally experiences. On the contrary, Blake’s assault is bloody and miserable. He himself is anything but cool; Gibbons portrays him pathetically pulling his pants up afterward, and then getting beaten to a pulp by the Hooded Justice.

Moreover, Sally is not converted by the rape. On the contrary, she never forgives Blake.

She hasn’t forgotten, she hasn’t decided what he did was okay. He’s a monster, she knows it, and she’s never going to let him have anything to do with her daughter.

Of course, the part that gets James, and that he feels is misogynist, is that Laurie is Blake’s daughter too. Sally did not forgive him, but she did love him.

James feels that that is problematic. In part, he seems to feel that it is problematic because it is unrealistic (“this rare realistic depiction of rape in comics comes to represent a offense a woman could forgive, that she even might even come to love her rapist.”)

But is Sally’s reaction unrealistic? Women do often love, or are intimately attached, to the people who abuse them, whether husbands or boyfriends. This is an uncomfortable truth, especially for a feminist vision that puts a premium on empowerment and autonomy. Sally Jupiter is certainly not perfectly self-actualized; there’s no question about that. But because she’s not perfectly self-actualized, does that mean she and her choices are necessarily wrong or misogynist?

In James’ reading, Sally’s love becomes the misogynist smoking-gun; the love is wrong. I don’t accept that. It’s not Sally who’s wrong. It’s Blake. It’s not the love that’s at fault; it’s the violence.

James says that:

Even more offensively, Snyder in his film made the fact of Laurie’s very existence through Sally’s forgiveness be the salvation of the world. This concept unfortunately lurks in the book…

I’m relieved to discover that I’ve almost completely forgotten Snyder’s crappy film. In the book, though, Laurie’s existence is indeed seen as a miracle (though not necessarily as the salvation of the world, as my brother points out). As Dr. Manhattan puts it:

So yes, Sally’s love (though not, as I said, her forgiveness) is seen as transformative, and even beautiful. And it is seen as transformative and beautiful in large part because it produced Laurie, who Sally loves, and who Jon loves.

I think James in part sees Sally’s love as a flaw because he sees it as mitigating, or validating the rape. But I don’t think that’s the case. Just because something good comes from evil doesn’t make evil good. Paul Celan’s poetry is wonderful, but it doesn’t validate or recuperate the Holocaust. Or, as C.S. Lewis says in Voyage to Venus, talking about the fall from Eden:

“Of course good came of it. Is Maleldil a beast that we can stop his path, or a leaf that we can twist His shape? Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him. That is lost for ever. The first King and first Mother of our world did the forbidden thing; and He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good; and what they lost we have not seen. And there were some to whom no good came nor ever will come.” He turned to the body of Weston. “You,” he said, “tell her all. What good came to you? Do you rejoice that Maleldil became a man? Tell her of your joys, and of what profit you had when you made Maleldil and death acquainted”…

The body that had been Weston’s threw up its head and opened its mouth and gave a long melancholy howl like a dog….”

That could be Blake at the end giving that howl, almost. Certainly, he dies ignominiously and alone, having lost even the comfort of his amorality. Laurie, as a living manifestation of her mother’s love, is a standing rebuke to Blake and his life. If Laurie is a miracle, then the Comedian’s cynicism and nihilism truly mean nothing. This is not to say that Moore and Gibbons, or even Laurie herself, entirely reject the Comedian’s evil or his violence. But it is to say that, to the extent that Watchmen does reject it, it’s because of, not despite, Sally and her choices.

I don’t mean to say that those choices are ideal. Sally herself doesn’t think her choices are ideal. But just because a woman fails to make ideal choices, and just because she does not respond to violence with hate (or at least not only with hate), doesn’t make her a failure. If feminism requires perfect women, there won’t be any feminism. Sally may be a flaw, but humans aren’t gems. Flaws don’t make them less precious.

Post to Incestuous Sheets

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The Rub at Magic Futurebox

This last weekend I traveled into the depths of Brooklyn to witness The Rub, a re-envisioning of Shakespeare’s Hamlet done by a small troupe, the Tremor Theatre Collective, which includes my wife and fellow Hooded Utilitarian Marguerite Van Cook in the role of the young prince’s mother, Queen Gertrude. After Marguerite’s many late rehearsals, she’d tell me of the unusual methods of director Nessa Norich, an innovative theatrical force emerging from France’s Jacques Lecoq International School of Theatre. Norich’s actors formed the production from improvisation, from physically interacting with each other and with the deep columned space of the host theatre Magic Futurebox. From weeks of coaxing and collating the freely invented dynamic interpersonal movement and gestural variations of her cast and imposing a anachronistic montage of verbal and visual references, Norich finally introduced a script in the last week of rehearsals. As I was trying to help Marguerite run her lines, they seemed almost peripheral to the source text with only scattered bursts of Shakespearian diction, but Norich’s presskit describes a “surreal and playful investigation of the frustration, anxiety, passion, complacency, selfdoubt, delusion, isolation and desire that come with being heirs to a state rotting from the inside out.” That’s basically what our Will was on about, as well as where we Americans seem to be at. When I actually saw the results of Norich’s intriguing construct, I found that Shakepeare’s narrative is well represented even as it is made part of something contemporaneous and electrifyingly involving.


The Rub: Gerson, Van Cook and Stinson. Photo by Nessa Norich

The character of Hamlet is effectively played by several actors: one (Micah Stinson) sulks and simmers while another (David Gerson) adopts a keenly fearsome, sinuous aspect of outrage held barely in check. Three more Hamlet alters argue by turns and interweave at breakneck speed through the cavernous room (Colin Summers, Daniel Wilcox and Steven Hershey, who also flow seamlessly into a mellow-voiced Laertes, a loquacious Polonius and an opportunistic King Claudius, respectively). Queen Gertrude’s role is here expanded to be a fiercely comedic whirlwind of Freudian complication. I can’t claim objectivity, but it’s awesome to see Marguerite use some of her many performative skills. As Gertrude she works the stage like a vaudevillian; she stalks with limber, cartoony malevolence, she flummoxes a game reporter (Chas Carey) like a Danish Ghaddafy, she purrs, cajoles and overtly schemes with her new husband against Caitlin Harrity’s earnestly vulnerable Ophelia. Site-specifically mapped projections cunningly use the architecture of the theatre to add ominous, surreal narrative elements. The audience is brought out of their seats to follow the scenes into the depths of the room, making them complicit in the action as it boils to its inevitable final conflagration. While it certainly adheres to the spirit of Shakespeare’s intent, The Rub also shows a freedom of conception that to me is the essence of Art. I love it and so does Magic Futurebox, who have extended the production through next Friday and Saturday.

The Rub @ Magic Futurebox: 55 33rd Street, 4th Floor, Brooklyn, NY (D, N, R trains to 36th St) on Friday Feb. 17th at 8pm and Saturday Feb. 18th at 8pm

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Before Watchmen: Too Sullied Flesh

Shakespeare’s plays are in the public domain; he left no heirs but he is always credited as the source of any use of his works because his efforts are of undisputed quality and value. I suppose it is possible that the more extreme liberties taken by the Tremor Collective might put some Shakespeare purists’ noses out of joint, but theatre is by its nature an act of interpretation. It is a given that a source play is subject to adaptation.  Plays are meant to be reimagined through the efforts of the director, actors, set designers and other members of the ensemble putting up the production.  This is not the case with the current news cycle bummer about DC Comics’ reworking of co-authors Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, a book that was not conceived with the intent that it should be re-interpreted by other creative talents, on the contrary: Watchmen could not be a more deliberately complete work than it is.

As it has stood for 26 years, Watchmen has gone through many editions and enriched DC Comics financially and in terms of credibility. In fact, this multifaceted work is virtually the jewel of their crown. It is one of the key books that began to give comics a degree of critical acceptance, and it is one that deserved such attention—it gave the company a cache to build on, which they have sometimes tried to do with their more ambitious efforts such as the Vertigo line and their similarly convoluted graphic novels, story arcs and miniseries. They could have continued to profit from Moore and Gibbons’ book and striven to emulate their example of excellence, without violating the bounds of decency. But that was not to be. First, Moore disowned the adaptation of Watchmen to a film by Zack Snyder and for a good reason: the comic stands as a finished and hermetic work of Art in the form of a comic. I doubt that he could anticipate how bad the movie would be, though; it reglamorized the violence which Moore and Gibbons had taken pains to deglamorize, changed the ending entirely and amplified what I see as the flaw of the book.


Watchmen: Sally Jupiter is sodomized offpanel; and the “cover-up.”

Make no mistake, what Edward Blake does to Sally Jupiter is not attempted rape, it is rape. He assaults and beats her, then sodomizes her. This is a DC comic and so we are not shown explicit penetration. Instead, the rape happens in a space of indeterminate timing between the first two panels shown above and outside the cropped image of the second panel, where the two characters’ relative positions, Sally’s choked scream of pain and the symbolic bestiality represented by the ape’s head in the case make abundantly clear what is happening. In panel 3, Blake isn’t removing his pants, he’s pulling them up. The colorist has obscured where Gibbons drew Sally’s shorts and stockings pulled down in panel 4, which represents a typical male reaction to rape, at the time and often still. Hooded Justice’s harsh direction to Jupiter to cover herself can be seen as an indicator of why both her daughter Laurie and Hollis Mason (in his book excerpt within the book) are unaware that the rape was actually perpetrated in full: the truth had been suppressed.


Laurie is given clue #1 that Blake is her father.

Jupiter’s previous flirtations with Blake are used as justifications for her contemporaries to think that she had somehow “brought it on herself” and Jupiter’s own feelings of shame and what can be seen as typical victim psychology cause her to diminish the crime, to the extreme that a decade later she has an affair with Blake, which produces a child: Laurie.


In Laurie’s childhood memory, Sally tries to explain to her husband why she has a tryst with Blake, the rapist; confronted by Sally, Blake gives out with clue #2; and their daughter’s epiphany on the moon.

 


Hammering the offensive flaw: Sally loves her rapist.

Sally kissing the photo of the late Blake amplifies the flat note in what is otherwise one of the most carefully and sensitively composed comics ever done. In a medium predominantly directed to males, an often overtly misogynistic form oblivious to the consequences of sexual violence, this rare realistic depiction of rape in comics comes to represent a offense a woman could forgive, that she even might even come to love her rapist. Even more offensively, Snyder in his film made the fact of Laurie’s very existence through Sally’s forgiveness be the salvation of the world. This concept unfortunately lurks in the book, but shorn of the larger rationale of Moore and Gibbon’s ending which involves the human race uniting in the face of a manufactured outside threat, in the film the forgiveness of the unforgivable, the purpose of conception superceding a woman’s rational sensibilities, the “miracle” of the existence of even the product of a rape, all become the primary lynchpins of a narrative seemingly altered to pander to Christian Americans.

For his part, Moore removed his name and refused to profit from this adulterated mess, while he ensured that his collaborator and co-author Gibbons was the sole beneficiary of any royalties. Moore and Gibbons always steadfastly declined to do any more comics with the characters of the book and for 26 years DC respected their contribution to DC’s standing enough to let it go. It should be noted that a production of new comics like Before Watchmen did not happen under the watches of the more sensitive Jenette Kahn or Paul Levitz. No, it takes a corporate pitbull like Dan Didio to make such a decision. With the recent announcement, Moore immediately registered his protest and Dave Gibbons—well, unlike Moore, he still works for DC on occasion, so I’d guess that he couldn’t risk anything but a vague “good luck with that” statement. DC’s behavior, along with Marvel’s recent anti-creative legal victories, should send a cold chill through comics professionals.

And that brings one to question the involvement of all participants. Now, I shudder to imagine that I was more of a “team player,” that I hadn’t bitterly complained about such things as inequities of cover credit, that I drew in a still gritty but somewhat prettier style and had somehow “moved up the foodchain” of artists who draw for DC, or that Brian Azzarello in a generous mood had decided to throw me a bone for drawing his very first professional script, the results of which pleased Axel Alonso so much that he made his new writer a star, and Azzarello had actually recommended me for a gig. Okay, that’s a little poke at Brian, but let’s pretend that for any of these reasons I had been actually offered the Rorschach title. Then I would have been faced with the painful prospect of turning down such a very high-paying, high profile job for reasons of ethics. It’s hard to come down on people who need work. “Tough economic times” can be a powerful incentive to ethical compromise. But one wonders whether people as successful as Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke and J. Michael Straczynski need the work. Rather, they seem to all believe that they are entitled to presume on Moore and Gibbon’s masterpiece, because they are bursting with their own “stories to tell” about the characters. One wonders how they would feel if the shoe is on the other foot and it was their brainchildren at stake. Regardless, their presumption shows a disregard for comics as an art form of any significance and disrespect for the accomplishments of their contemporaries.

It gets worse: given that the actuality of the rape has been debated, one wonders how the re-interpreters will further mangle Moore and Gibbons’ intent. One might dread Cooke’s version of the adolescent Laurie in Silk Spectre, even if it will be drawn by Amanda Conner, because Cooke, known mainly for his reinterpretions of others’ creations, in his first adaptation of the appallingly misogynistic Parker books invalidated any claims of sensitivity or irony in his approach by having the lack of taste to render all the female characters with his typical cute Batman Beyond template. What one gets is interchangeable, expendable girls dying cutely for no reason at all, while the main character could care less. It doesn’t bode well and the covers of the new comics released so far carry out a theme of disempowerment, some directed deliberately at women, as Noah showed in his HU post yesterday. A general theme of uncaring seems to blanket Before Watchmen; as Azzarello stated in The New York Times what seems to represent mainstream comics’ overall regard for their audience’s intelligence: “a lot of comic readers don’t like new things.” Jack Kirby must surely be spinning in his grave. Perhaps Azzarello in his case was being ironic, but he couldn’t be more clear that one won’t be seeing anything new in Before Watchmen.

Jon? What Are You Doing Back There?

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I’m not the first to have noticed this,, but I happened to see Adam Hughes promo cover for Before Watchmen and….

Given Jon’s usual free-swinging ways, the position of his hands, and Laurie’s distracted expression, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that we’re being treated to a scene from the action here.

Charitably, one could consider this a friendly Lost Girls tribute. Less charitably, one could surmise that it’s a smug thumb (or something) in the eye to Alan Moore, telling him right out what DC and its new creators plan to do to his characters. Least charitably, it points simply to the usual level of utter mainstream comics cluelessness. DC’s disinterest in women is apparently so extreme that they can’t even be bothered to look at their flaccid cheesecake before they slap it up there on their marketing campaign for all the world to see.

Probably the most fatuous thing you will read about Before Watchmen, at least for today

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Part I.

Captain Marvel 1939. C. C. Beck, Bill Parker

Marvelman 1954. Mick Anglo

Swamp Thing 1971. Bernie Wrightson, Len Wein

Jack the Ripper, his poor victims, William Gull, Inspector Abberline et al. 1800s. God or Jah-Bul-On or whatever

The basic premise 1976. Stephen Knight

Thor Ye olden days. Some Viking dudes with ZZ Top beards, presumably

The Avengers 1963. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

Spider-Man 1962. Steve Ditko, Stan Lee

Doctor Strange 1963. Steve Ditko, Stan Lee

The Hulk 1962. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

The Fantastic Four 1961. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

Captain America 1941. Joe Simon, Jack Kirby

Assorted other Marvel characters 1961-1970. Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Stan Lee et al.

 

Superman 1938. Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel

Assorted other DC characters 1938-1970(ish). A whole heap of people but particularly (for Moore’s purposes) Mort Weisinger and Curt Swan

seriously? okay [deep breath]

Mina Murray 1897. Bram Stoker

Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde 1886. Robert  Louis Stevenson

Allan Quatermain 1885. H. Rider Haggard

The Invisible Man 1897. H.G. Wells

Captain Nemo 1870. Jules Verne

Sherlock Holmes 1887. Arthur Conan Doyle

Professor Moriarty 1893. Arthur Conan Doyle

Fu Manchu 1913. Sax Rohmer

The martians from the War of the Worlds 1898. H.G. Wells

Dr Moreau 1896. H.G. Wells

Orlando 1928. Virginia Woolf

Prospero c.1610, according to wikipedia. Francis Bacon

James Bond 1953. Ian Fleming

Bulldog Drummond 1920. “Sapper”

Emma Peel 1965. The writers of The Avengers, Diana Rigg

The cast of the Threepenny Opera 1728. John Gay

Everyone else in the history of fiction c. 10,000BCE-present Every artist ever

…and, while we’re at it:

Wold Newton 1972. Philip Jose Farmer

Wonder Woman 1941. William Moulton Marston, H. G. Peter

The Spirit 1940. Will Eisner, plus a bunch of ghosts who still aren’t properly acknowledged in the goddamn Spirit Archives

Plastic Man 1941. Jack Cole

Various Standard characters 1940s. various creators

Assorted Lovecraft nonsense 1928. H.P. Lovecraft

Wendy Darling 1904. J.M. Barrie

Alice 1865. Lewis Carroll.

Dorothy Gale 1900. L. Frank Baum

Part II.

I’m not sure but I think I might have forgotten something?

Part III.

Let there be no doubt: DC has treated, and continues to treat, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons unjustly. They’ve exploited unforeseen changes in the market to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of their contract with the artists. And it should go without saying that Watchmen 2: The Watchmening will be wretched.

Still, again, creators like J.M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll might have been just a little bit unhappy with having their own work turned into hardcore pornography featuring rape, incest, bestiality, miscegenation, self-abuse, sex outside marriage, and vigorous hand-holding.

Part IV.

Well, Baum might have been, anyway.

(All images ripped off comics.org)

Force For Good

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I’ve recently finished reading Ben Saunders’ book, Do the Gods Wear Capes?: Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes. It’s a really enjoyable study. The chapter on the Marston/Peter run on Wonder Woman in particular filled me with bitter envy; I wish I had written it, or that if I had it would have been done so thoughtfully.

Anyway, perhaps in recompense for my blighted hopes, I thought I’d talk a little about the non Marston-Peter parts of the book and about some differences I have with it. In doing so, I’m going to refer to Ben as “Ben”, because we’ve been corresponding, and so it feels weird to call him by his last name. Hopefully he won’t resent this or other liberties.

So as the title of the book implies Do the Gods Wear Capes? looks at superheroes in terms of religion. However, Ben is not (thank God) adding to the dreary discourse which attempts to validate superheroes by asserting that they are modern myths. Rather, he makes the much more interesting claim that superheroes are myths about modernity. To quote his conclusion at some length:

Superheroes do not render sacred concepts in secular terms for a skeptical modern audience, as is sometimes claimed. They do something more interesting; they deconstruct the oppositions between sacred and secular, religion and science, god and man, the infinite and the finite, by means of an impossible synthesis. They are therefore fantasy solutions to some of the central dichotomies of modernity itself. A cynic might conclude that the suspension of disbelief required to enjoy such fantasies applies no less to their unlikely depictions of ethical perfection as it does to the spectacle of men and women who can fly, climb walls, and see through satellites. But, less cynically, we might instead interpret these stories as testaments to the strength of not just our will-to-power, but also of our will-to-love — our will-to-kindness, concern and decency. The dream of the superhero is not just a dream of flying, not just a dream about men and women who wield the powers of the gods. It’s also a dream about men and women who never give up the struggle to be good. W.B. Yeats once wrote, “in dreams begin responsibilities.” But perhaps possibilities of all kinds begin in dreams. And perhaps among these possibilities there is still the prospect of a spiritual awakening — even from within the skeptical, rationalist, materialist assumptions of modernity.

Ben works this theory through in terms of a number of characters…but he starts, logically enough, with Superman. For Ben, Superman isn’t defined as the quintessence of strength or the quintessence of power — rather he’s defined by “essential goodness”. Various creators have attempted to struggle with what “essential goodness” means in various ways. Ben talks about the early Siegel/Schuster issues, in which Superman beat up capitalists, suggesting an uneasy antagonism between the good and the democratic/capitalist institutions of the United States. In the 1950s, Ben says, Superman comics linked “the good” and the United States in a more straightforward manner (“Turth, Justice, and the American Way!”) Later, in the 70s and 80s, creators who worked on Superman struggled with his establishment image. For instance, Ben points to the Eliot S! Maggin story “Must There Be a Superman?” in which Superman is told by the Guardians of the Universe that his presence on earth is hurting the moral development of humanity, and in which he is confronted with the moral dilemma of how, or whether, to encourage migrant farm workers to organize.

People often argue that superheroes are dumb because they’re simplistic; because they create a bone-headed binary between good and evil. Ben’s argument is that, in fact, Superman stories have traditionally not so much asserted as investigated this binary. In the light of late modernity, as religion has faded, Superman asks “how can human beings be good?”

Ben finds one of the most effective answers in the Morrison/Quiteley All-Star Superman, in which Superman-as-reporter=Clark-Kent visits Lex Luthor in prison. Luthor spends the entire visit boasting about his greatness and threatening Superman and so forth. Unbeknownst to Luthor, though, riots and chaos are breaking out in the prison around him, and Superman-as-Clark has to save his life repeatedly. Ben concludes:

At such poignant moments, we see that only Luthor’s vanity could allow him to think of Superman as his enemy. In fact, Superman is his gentle savior — so gentle that even as he preserves Luthor’s life, Superman allows him to maintain his illusions of power and control. Thus, through Luthor, we see that Superman’s devotion to humanity is such that even the worst of us will always be treated with infinite patience and compassion. The results are both funny and moving, and leave the reader in no doubt as to the most incredible aspect of Superman’s character. Few human beings are ever so good. This, perhaps, is the final, paradoxical lesson that we can draw from the 70 years and more of Superman’s adventures — that it may be easier to fly, to see through walls, and to outrace a speeding bullet, than it is to love your enemy.

The sentence that most stays with me from that paragraph is this: “Few human beings are ever so good.” I like it’s simple wistfulness, and I like the way it suggests that, while few are, some might be — that goodness is, after all, something we can share with Superman. Being good isn’t a fantasy. It’s something people can strive for.

But while I like that sentiment, I also feel it’s perhaps a little misleading. Because while human beings can be good, they can’t actually be good in the way that Superman is being good in Ben’s description. The goodness Superman offers, in Ben’s telling, is the goodness of providing complete physical protection while simultaneously allowing the object of that protection to not know what is happening. Obviously there’s a metaphorical sense in which this could happen — anonymous charity, for example. But, in the first place, we’re not reading about anonymous charitable donations, and part of the reason we’re not reading about anonymous charitable donations is, surely, because we would rather watch Superman exercise his many, many superabilities. And, in the second place, even the “anonymous charity” analogy is a vision of the good dependent on a disproportion of power.

Ben is attempting to disaggregate. He looks for the most essential superquality, and that quality is goodness. All the others — strength, speed, flight, superbreath, and on and on — are just gilding on the basic concept. Superman is not about the powers. He’s about the good.

But what if, instead, he’s about both? Or what if, even, the good is essentially one of his powers? Tom Crippen suggests something like this in his own take on Superman and modernity.

Superman has a fine temperament and a lovely smile. It’s not a question of him personally being cold. I saw him on the cover of a kids’ book of math problems, or possibly it was a display ad for an insurance company. But he was taking off into the air and looking delighted about it, and why not? The reaction was perfectly right for him. He’s agreeable and fun loving; that’s not the whole of his personality, but the stuff is in there. It’s there along with all the other qualities the best sort of personality would have. You can assume the presence of all of them, whatever they are; they’re implied, and any of them can surface. If Superman flies off looking keen and determined, that suits him too. So the problem isn’t so much that Superman himself is pompous, either in his icon form or as a continuing-story character. It’s that, as a character, he seems like an afterthought to himself. Everything about him is derived in such a straight line from the central premise—this man is super—that there’s not much point to experiencing him.

Tom sums up the point by saying that Superman, “By definition, by being super, he is the best of whatever comparison he finds himself in. If he is one of two large men, he is the best—that is, strongest—of the two of them.”
By the same token, there are two good people in a room, Superman is the most good.

And part of the reason he is the most good, I think, is because he is also the most strong. The goodness of Superman can’t be disaggregated from the superness; the two are intertwined, and that intertwining has meaning. If the ultimate good is the ultimate force, then it seems logical to conclude that goodness and force rely upon each other.

Here’s another take on force and heroism from Simone Weill’s The Iliad, Or The Poem of Force.

Force, in the hands of another, exercises over the soul the same tyranny that extreme hunger does, for it possesses, and in perpetuo, the power of life and death. Its rule, moreover, is as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter. The man who knows himself weaker than another is more alone in the heart of a city than a man lost in a desert…

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it. The human race is not divided up, in the Iliad, into conquered persons, slaves, suppliants, on the one hand, and conquerors and chiefs on the other. In this poem there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force.

There is one Superman tale I can think of that captures some of Weill’s insight into force. That would be Alan Moore and Curt Swan’s “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” In this “imaginary” story, Superman deliberately kills an overpowering enemy..and then, in expiation, exposes himself to gold kryptonite, destroying his powers. Here, force and goodness are definitively separated; the first, as Weill suggests, must be cast off if the second is to survive. But when force disappears, so does Superman. What’s left is a good man who is not a superhero — a good man who decisively declares “Superman was overrated. Too wrapped up in himself. Thought the world couldn’t get along without him.” At that point, the comic ends. Superman is still supergood, but he can no longer perform superfeats…and the superfeats were, as it turns out, the point.

I think Ben would respond to this by saying that superhero comics have confronted these very issues — that they explicitly question the goodness of power. Ben talks about this most directly in his last chapter, which focuses on Iron Man (aka Tony Stark). Ben notes that from his inception, Iron Man expressed

ambivalence towards technology — desired as a source of power, but feared and resented, as the cause of a crippling dependency for those who rely upon it…. [This is a] fundamental element of the original version of the Iron Man character — built into his armor, we might say, in the form of his chest plate, which is not only the main energy source for the suit, but also prevents the inoperable fragments of shrapnel embedded in his chest during his days in Vietnam from reaching his heart and killing him. Tony Stark’s very life depends on this piece of equipment; consequently, he can never remove it, amking it a resonant symbol of the double-edged nature of his techno-dependence, as well as a literal barrier to intimacy.

Ben argues that this ambivalence about technology — ultimately an ambivalence about power and humanity’s wielding of power — cryztallized in a 1979 storyline by David Michelinie, Bob Layton, and John Romita, Jr. known as Demon in a Bottle. The story centered on Stark’s effort to get out of the armaments industry, and the government’s subsequent plot to take over control of his company. In addition, the arc follows Tony’s struggles with alcoholism. In the story, Ben argues, dependence on alcohol and dependence on technology are linked. Both alcohol and the Iron Man suit are technologies of control; alcohol providing the illusion of control over one’s own emotional state, the suit providing the illusion of control over….well, everything else.

The cure for both forms of dependency, it turns out, is to acknowledge that the fantasies of radical independence — absolute power, total control, complete self-reliance — are just that: fantasies. The answer to the problem of negative dependence is therefore not the pursuit of independence…but the radical acceptance of interdependence.

In a virtuoso move, Ben then links this realization to the ideology of Alcoholics Anonymous — an ideology which Ben argues is specifically focused on modernity’s obsession with control and power. Leslie Farber, a psychoanalyst whose theories were central to AA, is quoted by Ben as follows:

“Nietzsche, I believe, was not as interested in theological arguments about the disappearance of the divine will in our lives as he was in the consequences of its disappearance. Today the evidence is in. Out of disbelief we have impudently assumed that all of life is subject to our will. And the disasters that have come from willing what cannot be willed have not at all brought us to some modesty about our presumptions.

For AA, of course, the solution to this solipsistic mania for control is to put one’s faith in a nondenominational higher power — to acknowledge that one does not have the ultimate power over one’s own life, much less over the world. Ben links this realization to a Warren Ellis/Adi Granov Iron Man story from 2005, in which Stark experiences something like a crisis of faith, and is able to go on only by acknowledging the limits of his own power and knowledge. Stark in this story does not know that he is doing the right thing…but his uncertainty is itself the (ambivalent, uncertain, but still) sign of his goodness. Like a recovering alcoholic (which Stark is), the acknowledgment of his own limits allows him to function, and to function for good.

The problem, though, is precisely with the “function”. AA critiques alcohol as a technology of (false) control. But the solution it offers is a solution — which is to say, it is a technology itself. The 12-step program is a program, a system, a utilitarian fix. It specifically brackets content (what exactly is that higher power?) in the interest of getting the alcoholic back to becoming a functional member of society. As Ben says, AA does not insist on the existence of God, but rather “insists on the necessity of the God concept.” God is not a transcendent hope; he’s a convenient tool, like a socket wrench.

Tony Stark does not, then, take off his suit of armor to find vulnerability and connection; he takes off his suit of armor to put on a bigger, badder, better suit of armor. The acknowledgment of his dependence and powerlessness is not the beginning of a different kind of story. Tony Stark does not change his life; he is still committed to an existence where he gets up, suits up, and shoots bad guys in the face with repulsor rays. The change for Stark is simply a retooling; humility is a necessary pit stop on the way to greater feats of godlike power. The means, in this case, justify the end. AA is a part of, not a solution to, the technological pragmatism of modernity, in which even god is valued solely as a cog in an ever-more-functional machine.

That’s the case for superhero comics as well, I think. Ben is right when he sees superheroes as a myth of modernity. But I think he’s overly-optimistic when he sees in that myth a hopeful sign of a possible spiritual reawakening. Rather, it seems to me that superhero comics suggest not modernity’s possible salvation, but its depressing limits. For both superheroes and modernity are genres in which the good waits upon the powerful.

Alan Moore: Conversations Hype

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Thanks to Noah and HU for agreeing to shill my new book, Alan Moore: Conversations, now available in paperback (and hardcover) from The University Press of Mississippi. As the name suggests, it’s an edited collection of previous Alan Moore interviews, spanning from 1981 to 2009. I tried to collect the interviews that were most enlightening in terms of Moore’s creative practices, and/or most revealing about the meaning and significance of his oeuvre. The book contains lengthy discussions of most of his major works and many of the minor ones as well. There is also an introduction be me and a chronology of Moore’s career. My goal was to make the book an indispensable one for Moore scholars, critics, and readers. You can only judge my relative success by buying a copy at retailer!

Below, I’ve included a series of quotes (one from each interview) to whet your appetite and make you ache desperately to have the book in your sweaty palms, now driven mad by the spirit of capitalism, and the wisdom of Alan Moore, who speaks at length on comics, sex, drugs, brain science and bad movies.

On the struggle of writing comics: “I find writing comics to be staggeringly easy.” (from David Lloyd’s 1981 interview in the SSI Newsletter)

On the complexity of Marvel characterization: “That’s characterization the Marvel way. They’re neurotic . They worry a lot. If they haven’t got anything wrong with them like that, something physically wrong will do— perhaps a bad leg or dodgy kidneys, or something like that. To Marvel, that’s characterization.

…[Chris Claremont’s] thing with characterization is that he makes all his X-Men foreign. One’s a Russian. One’s a German. Russian! They’re incredibly Russian. They sort of sit there and let you know how Russian they are by thinking:

“How I long for my Ukrainian homeland. How I miss my poor dead brother Thiodore.”

And then:

“How I miss the happy camaraderie of the bread queues and the surprise purges.”

(from David Roach’s 1983 interview in Hellfire fanzine)

On the social function of comics: “Comics, when I was growing up, were part of the working class tradition. Mothers gave them to their kids to pacify them. Instead of a Valium, it would be a copy of The Topper or The Beezer.” (from Guy Lawley and Steve Whitaker’s 1984 interview in Comics Interview)

On influences: “If I had to single out one major influence on my work, it would probably be [William] Burroughs. I would never attempt to duplicate his style of writing….I do admire his style, but I suppose the biggest influence is his thinking, his theoretical work, some of which has been wild and extreme, but the relationship he draws between the word and the image and the importance of both, I think, is significant. Burroughs tends to see the word and the image as the basis for our inner, and thus outer, realities. He suggests that the person who controls the word and the image controls reality.” (from Christopher Sharrett’s 1988 interview in Comics Interview)

On paranormal experiences: “I have only met about four gods…a couple of other classes of entity as well. I’m quite prepared to admit this might have been a hallucination. On most of the instances, I was on hallucinogenic drugs. That’s the logical explanation — that it was purely an hallucinatory experience. I can only talk about my subjective experience, however, and the fact that having had some experience of hallucinations over the last 25 years or so, I’d have to say that it seemed to me a different class of hallucination. It seemed to me to be outside of me. It seemed to be real. It is a terrifying experience, and a wonderful one, all at once. It is everything you’d imagine it to be. As a result of this, there is one particular entity that I feel a particular affinity with. There is [a] late Roman snake god, called Glycon. He was an invention of the False Prophet Alexander. Which is a lousy name to go into business under. He had an image problem. He could have done with a spin doctor there. “ (from Matthew de Abaitua’s 1998 interview in The Idler)

On brain science and comics: “They found that comics was far and away the best way for people to take in information and retain it. I think people would remember the picture and that would cue the words they had read going along with that picture. I think that this might be because comics engage both halves of the brain simultaneously. One half is concerned with words. One half is concerned with images. With comics, you do have single static images, single clumps of words. Maybe the two halves are engaged in a different way than they are with other art forms, and this accounts for the kind of imprinting that comics are capable of. This is only speculation. I try to keep up with science and neurology, and how the brain works, but at the end of the day, I am largely a comic writer, so you probably shouldn’t trust me to perform extensive brain surgery or anything like that.” (from the edits of Tasha Robinson’s 2001 interview in The Onion)

Looking back at Watchmen: “Watchmen was kind of clever. I was going through one of my clever periods— probably emotional insecurity. I thought: ‘People will laugh at me ‘cos I’m doing superhero comics. I’d better make ‘em really clever, then no-one will laugh’ [laughter]. So, we’ve got all this sort of thing with the metaphor of the clock face, and yes, it is a kind of clockwork-like construction— a swiss watch construction— where you can see all the works of it. Different areas where the text reflects itself, different levels— I was showing off…I kind of decided after Watchmen that there was no point ever doing anything like that ever again…” (from Daniel Whiston’s 2002 interview in Zarjaz)

On sex and censorship: “Sex—we all got here because of sex. We all do it, if we’re lucky. We’ve been doing it for millions of years. It’s perhaps time we got over it and moved on. A couple of million years, that should be time for us to have gotten over our understandable panic at the idea of sexual reproduction.” (from Jess Nevins’ 2004 interview in A Blazing World)

On the mainstream comics industry: “…I think that the comics industry, really, if it wants to attract, if it wants to be talked about as a grown-up medium, then it ought to be a medium that will attract grown-ups, in terms of [the] rights of the artist.

It ought to be a grown-up medium. It ought to grow up its business practices, rather than have them all rooted in the prohibition-era gangsterism of the 1930’s. If it really wants to be an industry that’s proud of itself, then it really shouldn’t go around alienating the talent that has actually lifted it up our of the quagmire.

That is obviously something that is not in my control. It is purely in the industry’s control. I think that having spent 25 years laboring within the comics industry, that has probably reflected better on the comics industry than it did on me. Probably the comics industry got more out of the association than I did. (from Chris Mautner’s 2006 interview in The Patriot-News [Harrisburg])

On the Watchmen film: “Sure, I’ve heard it’s great seeing Dave Gibbons’s images reproduced on the big screen. ‘They’re exactly the same as in the comics, but they’re bigger, moving, and making noise!’ Well, putting it cruelly, I guess it’s good that there’s a children’s version for those who couldn’t manage to follow a superhero comic from the 1980s.” (from Alex Musson’s 2009 interview in Mustard)

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.