Comics in the Closet, Part 2

This is the second part of a lecture I delivered last year. In the first part here I argue that super-hero comics are built around homsexual panic and repressed male bonding. In this second bit I’m extending that argument. (Be warned; there are some explicit images below.)

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What’s really revealing, though, is the extent to which the nexus of sentiment/self-pity/troubled maleness transfers so seamlessly from these old, easily dismissed super-hero titles to much more intellectually and culturally validated efforts. For instance, there’s Cerebus, Dave Sim’s extremely successful self-published black-and-white 80s mega-series in about a gazillion volumes about a sword-fighting aardvark and the meaning of the universe, not necessarily in that order. Cerebus is one of the most influential and respected English-language comics of the last thirty years or so. And in it, Sim goes out of his way to make fun of the whole idea of manly adventure narratives in general, and, at various points, of super-heroes in particular. Yet, despite its ironic distancing, Cerebus is in fact engaged and even obsessed with the same kind of conflicted masculinity that we’ve been discussing.

From its beginning, Cerebus is a parody of a particularly overblown masculinity. In fact, the central, ongoing joke of the series is that Cerebus behaves like Conan and yet, he’s clearly not Conan. In other words, Cerebus is in part a funny character because he has all the attributes of hyper-masculinity (temper, violence, a certain kind of competence, emotional distance, etc.) even though he is essentially a (feminine-associated) plush toy. The joke is heightened by the fact that the other characters in the story are, for the most part, oblivious. Cerebus is treated as if he had all the privileges of masulinity — women try to seduce him, for example, and he is treated as a political threat. Or, to put it another way, Cerebus successfully passes as a traditional (heterosexual) man.

And here’s just two pictures of women throwing themselves at Cerebus — a Red Sonja like barbarian maid from the first volume:

And a high-powered sophisticated political operator from High Society, the second volume.

Part of the pleasure of the story, especially on the early outings, is the reader’s awareness of this open secret — a secret everyone in the book knows, and yet which is only rarely alluded to. Cerebus himself doesn’t talk about it, or even seem to notice it for the most part. And yet, even as the story becomes more intricate and the formative Conan meme fades into the background, the fact of Cerebus’ difference, and its relation to his masculinity, remains of central importance. The second volume of the series, High Society can, it seems to me, be read as a story about Cerebus’ masculinity — his efforts to eschew femininity, and lay hold of a manhood which he obviously doesn’t really possess. Ironically, most of these efforts to resist the feminine involve precisely turning down offers of sex and/or close relationships with women (as you can see, in the picture above, Cerebus is engaged in loud protestations of continence.) So is this (not always successful) imperviousness to female attention a sign of Cerebus’ true status as a manly-man? Or is it a sign that he is something other than a man, after all — another species perhaps? Or maybe it’s both?

In any case, the emotional climax of High Society is very near the end. Cerebus is saying his farewell to the super-feminine elf maiden, with whom he has a somewhat prickly friendship. And, as they’re parting, Cerebus breaks down and cries.

Of course, Cerebus is claiming to have something in his eye because he’s too manly to admit to giving in to sentiment. But that refusal is itself more sentimental — the tears are heightened in impact and importance because Cerebus is the sort of guy, or whatever, who is unwilling to cry. Emotional coldness and imperviousness is the romanticized soul of gloppy sentiment.

Dave Sim, the author and artist here, actually has a very strange history; sometime after he wrote these comics, he experienced a kind of religious awakening, which led him to conclude, among other things, that women aren’t human, that feminism is a great conspiracy against all that is good and right, and that homosexuality is despicable. He also became a rabid believer in his own pure rationality, and in the unbearably flawed otherness of all things emotional. Here’s a fairly typical quote from his later days:

Emotion, whatever the Female Void would have you believe, is not a more Exalted State than is Thought. In point of fact, I think Emotion is animalistic, serpent-brain stuff. Animals do not Think, but I am reasonably certain that they have Emotions. ‘Eating this makes me Happy.’ ‘When my fur is all wet and I am cold, it makes me Sad.” “Ooo! Puppies!’ ‘It makes me Excited to Chase the Ball!’ Reason, as any husband can tell you, doesn’t stand a chance in an argument with Emotion… this was the fundamental reason, I believe, that women were denied the vote for so long.

I like especially the way he randomly capitalizes various words, like “Female Void”‘ “Exalted State”, “Emotion” etc. And when he talks about the female void, it’s not nearly as metaphoric as you might think; he’s got pretty bizarre cosmological ideas.

Anyway, later volumes of Cerebus deal more explicitly with gayness — or so I’m told. I actually found the second volume a chore to wade through, in large part because of the hamfisted way gender is handled, and since I know it only gets worse from there, I haven’t been inspired to go on. But, obviously, there’s a continuity between the conflicted and romanticized comic-booky take on masculinity here, and his rejection of all things feminine later in his life.

Not that it’s just right-wing whackos who are attracted to masculine sentiment. Conflicted male-bonding is at the center of Art Spiegelman’s indisputably liberal Maus, for example, in which all the father-son angst actually manages to overshadow the Holocaust. And lots of male autobiographical comics by folks like Jeff Brown or David Heatley or Ivan Brunetti are basically about guys feeling sorry for themselves. (If you haven’t read any of those folks, well…don’t.) Dan Clowes does a lot of work in this vein as well; the title character of David Boring has unresolved fetishes and sexual issues more or less linked to his absent father, who, we learn, was an illustrator of super-hero comics.

And then there’s Chris Ware’s best known comic, Jimmy Corrigan. Corrigan is basically a realistic story; no gargantuan semi-clothed behemoths switching brains as a prelude to uber-violence; no diminutive semi-clothed aardvark barbarians turning down sexual advances as a prelude to swordplay. But nonetheless, it’s vision of maleness is oddly familiar.

First of all, like Batman and Superman and Spider-Man, Jimmy Corrigan loses his father early in his life (though in his case it’s through divorce rather than death). And, like his costumed predecessors, this lack of a father is figured as the defining emotional fact of his life. Surely it’s his wounding and his loss which makes the utterly repulsive (racist, emotionally inaccessible) Corrigan at all palatable, just as Bruce Wayne’s nocturnal nuttiness is made coherent by his tragedy.

Here’s one page form Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan.

The top part is a quick and unexplained flashback, showing Jimmy in a failed one-night stand. The woman has gotten cold feet, so Jimmy leaves her with the sensitive exit line, “Well, my dear, I for one have better things to do than waste my time with some cocktease whore.” The bottom sequence shows Jimmy awkwardly interacting with his father, whom he has just met. The parallel paths here are, I think, supposed to be emotionally linked, and maybe even causal. Jimmy’s failed relationship with his father on the bottom of the page is supposed to explain his overweening but incompetent heterosexuality. Or, to put it another way, beneath the icky heterosexual interaction is an icky male-male interaction of greater importance.

Ware, in other words, relies for his emotional effects on the exact same dynamic as Batman, Stan Lee, and all those old pulpy super-hero comics did. It’s all about men ostentatiously refusing to cry about their lack of manhood, mourning their failure to be heterosexual icons. Ware himself makes the connection quite explicit. A recurring character in Ware’s comics is a super-hero named Superman. This Superman isn’t quite like the one you’re familiar with. The costume’s different for one thing. For another, though he’s billed as a hero, he tends to behave more as a sadistic super-powered bully. In my favorite of Ware’s comics, Superman strands Jimmy Corrigan on an island for years, occasionally visiting him to break his arm, mock him, or masturbate to dirty films starring Jimmy’s mother.

Here’s a picture of Superman abusing a young Jimmy Corrigan.

In this sequence, Ware is, I think, critiquing the kind of conflicted masculinity we’re discussing. Superman is an ogre of empowered masculinity, but his violence, as always in these situations, seems linked to self-doubt and self-justification. He drops Jimmy on the island because Jimmy dislikes his new stepfather. Superman reacts to this seemingly minor threat to patriarchal and adult authority with hyperbolic violence. Control and arbitrary power are built on a masculinity absorbed in eternally mourning its own potential failure. The fear and pity of failing to be a man justifies anything.

Unfortunately, when he collected his Jimmy Corrigan strips into a complete work, Ware decided to leave this material out. Superman is still present as a character of sorts, but he’s not “real.” On the one hand, he’s just some guy dressed up in a super suit who sleeps with Jimmy’s mom. On the other hand, he’s a metaphor floating about at the edges of the narrative. The frightening authoritarian masculinity that Ware created in the early strips is carefully bifurcated, and what we end up with is a figure ripe for enabling sentiment. Instead of critiquing comic-book maleness and its compulsive dynamic of pity and violence, Ware embraces it. Superman becomes a symbol for the elegaic sadness of insufficiently heterosexual nerds everywhere.

For instance, here’s another page from Jimmy Corrigan; that’s Jimmy Corrigan and his father erupting from Jimmy’s stylized mouth in an explosion of agonized and bifurcated male self-birth. In the background you see Jimmy sitting on the toilet wearing a Superman shirt.

And this is the last image of the comic; Superman flying amidst the falling snow. It’s similar to the final melancholy transcendence in James Joyce’s “The Dead” — except here the nostalgic swoon is prompted not by mortality or doomed lovers, but by the iconic super-hero father-figure.

Ware’s move here in turning comics themselves, as a cultural artifact, into signifiers of beautifully failed maleness, is actually a more and more popular move for thoughtful intellectuals. To the limited extent that I was able to force myself to read it, it seemed to be what Michael Chabon was doing in *Kavalier and Clay* for example. That novel is about the friendship between two Jewish comic-book creators set in the early twentieth century, and, it mostly deals with nostalgic atmosphere and male-bonding, both tied explicitly to super-hero fantasies. Fiction writer Jonathan Lethem gets at something similar when he muses that:

“This is a closed circuit, me and the comics which I read and which read me, and the reading of which by one another, me and the comics, I am now attempting to read, or reread. The fact is I’m dealing with a realm of masturbation, of personal arcana. Stan Lee’s rhetoric of community was a weird vibrant lie: every single true believer, every single member of the Make Mine Marvel society or whatever the fuck we were meant to be called, received the comics as a private communion with our own obscure and shameful yearnings, and it was miraculous and pornographic to so much as breathe of it to another boy, let alone be initiated by one more knowing.”

An all-male community tied together by “obscure and shameful yearnings,” in which it is “pornographic” to be “inititated by one more knowing” — could there be a clearer description of the closet? Comics are every man’s shameful truth; the sign that he is not really or fully a man. But, and in the same way, they serve as his apotheosis; he is special, because he understands comics. His otherness is his tragedy and his sentimental validation. The secret identity is simply lover of comics — the love that, on the one hand, dare not speak its name, and, on the other, won’t cease sentimentally snivelling about it.

In her book, Eve Sedgwick talks a lot about the dangers of labeling something “sentimental.” As she points out, the tendency is to use “sentimental” as a feminizing insult. I’ve perhaps been guilty of that here. But my problem with the sentimentality of American comics isn’t so much the sentiment itself as the kind of sentiment expressed and where it seems to point. So as a point of comparison, I want to turn briefly to another comics tradition.

Japanese comics, or manga, have developed very differently from comics in America. Most importantly for our purposes, manga isn’t predominantly male, the way American comics is. On the contrary, there’s a whole genre of manga, called shojo, directed at, and mostly created by, women. I’ve been arguing that American comics are furtively and anxiously gay; shojo, on the other hand, is openly, enthusiastically flamboyant. In shojo books, men turn into women, women turn into men, and characters fall in love with a delirious unconcern for boundaries of age, station, or gender.

For example, here’s a scene from Rumiko Takahashi’s, Ranma 1/2, where Ranma turns into a girl. Note that Ranma isn’t technically a shojo title — it was first serialized in a shonen magazine for boys. However, it was hugely popular, so both boys and girls read it, and it’s fairly clearly in a shojo tradition in a number of ways, even if it isn’t “really shojo.” (Just wanted to make that clear in case there are manga addicts out there waiting to trip me up.)

And below is a very explicit panel from Fumi Yoshinaga’s “Gerard and Jacques” depicting a homosexual, intergenerational quasi-rape.

This is actually an example of a subgenre of shojo called yaoi. Yaoi like all shojo, is mostly by and for women, but it features homosexual relationships between men. Often these relationships, as here, are very explicit. Yaoi is very popular in Japan, and is catching on here as well. Since it’s not a genre native to the U.S., lots of people sort of look at it strangely and say, basically “What? Women want to read stories about gay men having sex? What’s with that?” I have some answers to that, but here I just want to point out that the gender politics in American comics are *at least* as bizarre and homoerotic as those in Japanese ones.

So shojo has a lot of gender bending, and a lot of openly gay content. This isn’t to say that shojo repudiates the closet. On the contrary, sexual secrets are extremely important in the genre, and those secrets are productive, as they tend to be, of tons of melodrama and even more gushy sentiment. As an example, take the series Cardcaptor Sakura, written by a female collective which goes by the name of CLAMP. The series is about an elementary-school-girl named Sakura who must collect a series of magical cards while wearing a succession of excessively girly outfits.

And here’s a couple of those outfits from just the first volume:

The improbable plot, and even the improbable fashion statements, are both much less important than character interactions — basically, everyone has a crush on everyone else, and the narrative momentum happily effervesces into a haze of unrequited sighs, longing looks, pregnant silences, and moments of ecstatic embarrassment.

So, for example, here’s one character blushing as his secret crush is revealed.

Despite all this extended teasing, the title does manage to reach a climactic moment, when, having collected all the cards, Sakura is confronted with a final magical trial. In a super-hero comic, this would be the moment in which the villain threatens to blow up the city, or the world, or the multiverse. CLAMP, though, refuses to go there — they explicitly state that if Sakura fails, “The Evil that is released…isn’t something…that will destroy the world or move Heaven and Earth.” Instead, if the evil triumphs, all of the main characters will simply forget the person “they care for most.” Everybody’s secret crush will be erased.

Here’s Sakura learning that she will forget the person she cares for the most.

My first reaction on reading this was, “oh, come on.” I mean, how preposterous, not to mention sappy, can you get? But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed exactly right. In Cardcaptor Sakura, and in shojo in general, the stories are held together by relationships. Many of those relationships are unrequited or unspoken…but that doesn’t make them less important. The love you don’t say can be the point of your life; secret love is meaning. Without it, Cardcaptor Sakura’s narrative, its world, would come apart. In Cardcaptor Sakura, the closet exists, but it opens outward. And what you find inside is love, which invisibly binds together the world in a web of affection and sentiment.

In contrast, the American comics I’ve been discussing look suspiciously like the emotionally empty world which Sakura struggles to avert. What happens when your crush disappears? Does sentiment vanish? Or does there remain the sense of a secret without content; an empty closet in which emotion rots and festers, slowly poisoning itself? Batman and Cerebus and Jimmy Corrigan all hide the fact that they have nothing to hide. The inside of their closets contain, not love, but love’s absence — an incoherent dream of an identity that never was. And if love produces life, this vapor creates only a simulacrum — an empty image of an empty self.

That simulacrum of a dream is masculinity — the non-face you get if you fold and spindle your entire comics collection like one of those old Mad magazine Al Jaffee fold-ins. In America, comic books are men, men are comic books, and the two drop, one from the other in an endless series of immaculately tedious births. Manliness isn’t so much a secret identity as it is a repetitive compulsion. That’s why, whether radioactive high school student, anthropomorphic animal, or literary darling, American comics characters always seem to be putting on the same damn mask.

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Update: Another post with some similar related thoughts here.

Sailor Moon

The manga Sailor Moon is the series that demonstrated, once and for all, that American girls will read about super-heroes with great enthusiasm. It features a young-looking aggressively typical school girl named Bunny. But then, one day, Bunny meets a talking cat, who turns her into… a super-hero Princess! With long hair! Nifty jewelr! Lots of deferential friends, and a handsome, dashing, mysterious true love! And, of course, she gets to keep the talking cat.

Needless to say, this abject wish fulfillment went over quite well with the target demographic; Sailor Moon manga and anime were huge in Japan, and were one of the early big manga successes in the U.S. as well. Thanks to its influence, Marvel and DC quickly leaped at the chance to reach the heretofore untapped female audience. Marvel released a Spider Girl title where the protagonist improbably turns out to be a Princess and seeks for magical jewels with companions like Grasshopper Girl and Ladybug Girl, while DC devoted its entire Minx line to sugary SF adventures in the Sailor Moon vein.

Or, you know, possibly it didn’t happen quite that way. But be that as it may…as somebody whose been incessantly blogging about at least one female super-hero, I’ve been thinking that I should read Sailor Moon for awhile. I finally managed to get to it this week, and….

Well, I wish I could say that I liked it. Obviously, it’s not intended for middle-aged guys, so my disapprobation isn’t all that surprising. Still, just because something is aimed at teen girls doesn’t mean I’ll hate it. I appreciated the naked wish fulfillment in Twilight. I adore the sugary glop that is contemporary R&B. I even enjoyed, with reservations, the manga series Cardcaptor Sakura, which is a fairly naked Sailor Moon rip-off.

Sailor Moon itself though, or at least the three volumes I managed to get through, is just not very good. In the first place, Naoko Tekeuchi’s art just doesn’t do a whole lot for me. It’s not horrible, or anything…the drawing is certainly more consistent than is often the case in American comics, and while the cartoony stylization can be a little cloying, it’s at least done professionally. Her pages, though, can get really cluttered and messy.

Clamp’s work for Cardcaptor Sakura, as a comparison, is a lot better.

As with Sailor Moon, Clamp breaks panel borders and works with different size images all jammed into one space. But they balance that by not using extraneous background detail; by using lovely, controlled patterns (the tree branches with blossoms are especially nice), and by using the panel breaks to move you thorough the story (you follow the girl’s body down to oversized legs and into the next panel of the narrative.) It’s just much more deftly done; the difference between artists with an aesthetic sense and one without.

The wriitng in Sailor Moon is similarly muddled. Bunny, or Sailor Moon, couldn’t be a much more generic or less interesting character. She’s really more a collection of traits than a person; we learn she likes video games and sleeping, that she’s terrible at school, and that she whines a lot…but cutely (at least in theory.) Her personality, as such, never takes shape beyond these not-especially-appealing tidbits — and, moreover, even these vague delineations are quickly abandoned. By the third volume, we learn that Bunny is actually Princess Serenity reincarnated (or something), and her returning memories more or less obliterate the Bunny we (barely) knew. This would be, perhaps, an improvement, except that Serenity’s only character trait seems to be mooning after her crush object, Prince Endymion.

As for the narrative itself…it’s really less a plot than a series of disconnected cliches, drawn about equally from video games and mid-drawer fantasy. There’s an eldritch evil, there’s a crystal that needs to be protected, there’s an ever escalating series of helpful sailor scouts who must be awakened, each with their own sailor power; there are battles which inevitably end in victory…etc. etc. etc. There’s some vaguely kinky mind-control too, but it’s hard to much care as fractured scene after fractured scene rushes by. Is Endymion in thrall to the evil overlord forever? I’ll never find out, since I can’t stand to read the fourth volume…but, still, I’m guessing not.

So yeah; not good — though it could be worse, certainly. There are certainly appealing moments; the gratuitously cute totem cat, for example, is in fact cute. Sailor Moon’s battle cry (“On behalf of the moon, you’re punished!”) is charmingly corny; the sort of thing you could imagine a little girl actually yelling in battle. And, though the plot is an incoherent mess, it’s a welcoming, open incoherent mess. American super-hero comics are often involuted and incomprehensible because they draw on a mass of useless continuity trivia that’s (A) stupid and (B) of no interest to anyone who hasn’t read American super-hero comics for the last twenty years. Sailor Moon, on the other hand, makes no sense not because it’s insular, but because it’s so extraneous. Sailor Moon has no background…even from volume to volume, anyone can pretty much start anywhere on any page and you’ll be as at home as you would be anywhere else. You’ve got cute girls fighting evil; you’ve got crushes; you’ve got nifty special effects; you’ve got cute cat; you’ve got gratuitous wish fulfillment. That’s it. There’s really nothing else going on — not character, not plot, not themes, nothing. In some sense, I wonder if that’s part of the reason for the series’ success. If you’re a girl, it might be easy to imagine yourself as Sailor Moon, since Sailor Moon is barely there. It might be easy to imagine your own adventures, since the adventures on offer barely exist either.

Sailor Moon gets the pander right, and given that, additional specificity might well get in the way. The books, in short, remind me a little of McDonald’s — they aren’t good in the usual sense, but you have to admire the way they identify a need and fill it with maximum efficiency and minimal frills.

*Cough* — Manga — *Cough*

Valerie D’Orazio whines that nobody buys female super-hero comics.

The next step for women in mainstream comics is to translate our hopes and dreams and talents and superheroines we love into comic book sales. Past the idealism, past the blog posts, past everything — we need to sell these books. Nobody fucks with JK Rowling, and there’s a good reason for that.

Of course, D’Orazio is talking about stuff like Wonder Woman and Hellcat (how many of you bought the Hellcat mini-series? she asks plaintively.)

Here’s a tip or two for those wondering about super-hero comics:

1. Supporting titles as an act of socio-political charity may get you an unread copy or two of Hellcat, but it’s not going to prevent the series from getting cancelled.
2. There are a number of extremely successful female super-hero comics. They just aren’t put out by Marvel and DC.

Number 2 is probably going to leave the fangirls scratching their heads. Where are these successful super-hero titles with woman they ask? Why haven’t I seen them?

Well, the titles I’m thinking of are things like Buffy, and Sailor Moon, and Cardcaptor Sakura. Stuff that doesn’t look like super-hero comics; that comes out of a manga genre or crosses over with horror/goth. These titles have all the hallmarks of super-herodom — someone with extraordinary powers runs around saving people. But they forswear the kind of tights/double-identity/clubhouse continuity crap that is there to appeal to 25-35 year old guys.

In other words — you want super-hero comics for women? Then don’t go begging to the fans to support you. Instead, write fucking super-hero comics for women. Lots of women. Not just the very small number of women who care about the super-hero-genre-as-sold-through-the-direct-market. Because you know what? There aren’t enough of those women to support a title. There’s never going to be enough of those women to support a title. It’s just not going to happen. Especially in a fucking recession.

And, let me add, it’s not clear why it should happen. There’s lots and lots of product out there. Why do women need to run around trying to appreciate a genre that has never, and will never put them center stage as consumers? The fun bits of super-heroes for women can be picked out and put in other contexts — and, indeed, they have been. So why deal with the rest?

Now if you want to blame mainstream comics for promoting an insular, unimaginative approach to their product and marketing — hey, I hear you. But blaming women (or anybody) for not buying this crap? Color me unimpressed.

Update: Edited to correct spelling of D’Orazio’s name. Sorry about that Valerie!

Update the second: Well, to no one’s surprise, I didn’t actually read all the back links before I posted…but now I have (sort of.) Josh Tyler started things off with a kind men are from mars, women are from venus argument about why women don’t like super-heroes; then Heidi has a round-up of various folks taking him to task because women do too like super-heroes and he’s sexist.

I think Josh is right that women and men have different genre interests. I think his accusers are probably right that the way he parses those genre distinctions (women like romance; men like things that blow up) is simplistic enough to verge on lad mag territory (which is to say, it’s kind of sexist.)

Josh’s argument is in the context of movies; he’s arguing there aren’t many super-hero movies and there never will be, and that’s fine. But, of course, and again. there are heaps of female super-hero movies. Lara Croft, Buffy, Underworld (or whatever the hell that’s called), the Terminator, Alien — just lots of tough women onscreen performing super stunts in the interest of saving people. Oh, right…and Kill Bill and The Matrix has that too…and Charlie’s Angels, and…well, the list goes on. A lot of these are aimed at guys, obviously, but it’s hard to imagine they don’t have a bigger female audience percentage-wise than DC and Marvel do in general. Again, it’s not that women don’t like super-heroes; it’s that, within the limits of corporate fan fic, the aging stable of female characters owned by the big two just isn’t all that appealing to a broad audience. I mean, could you take Wonder Woman, give her a gun and a vampire boyfriend and…I don’t know, a horse, a cool car, anything except that fucking stupid invisible plane and the weird-ass lasso — and have her suddenly be popular? Maybe. But once you’ve done that, why call her Wonder Woman?

Raised by Functionaries

I was reading CLAMP’s Cardcaptor Sakura recently. It’s a series that my wife likes a lot, and Jason Thompson gives it high marks in his amazing guide to all things manga ever. So I wanted to like it…but it just didn’t really do it for me. I can certainly see part of the appeal; Clamp’s art is great; Sakura’s ever-changing round of preposterously frilly costumes is especially entertaining…especially since it brings up the much-neglected question, “Don’t those super-heroes ever get tired of wearing the same thing?” And I like the fact that everybody in the series seems to have a crush on everybody else, more or less regardless of gender or even age. Longing between teenage boys, between girls, or between an elementary school girl and her teacher are all viewed through the same bittersweet lens of romantic sighs and giant expressive eyeballs. You’ve got to love the gay utopia.

But overall, the storyline felt a bit flat for me. I think the problem is that, if I’m going to read a fantasy series about larger than life struggles between clashing mystical forces, the eldritch evils need to be impressively, um, eldritch and evil. Clamp is certainly visually up to the mystical pyrotechnics, but their chipper everyone-loves-everyone-else worldview has left them unable to deliver a villain of any sort. Instead, all Sakura’s tests are just that — arbitrary tests. Her enemy, Clow, isn’t a bad guy at all; he’s a mentor figure who keeps putting her in “dangerous” situations in order to help her realize her true potential. Admittedly, the protagonists are all school kids, but the plot is still disturbingly school-like — some supposedly all-knowing shit-head tormenting the protagonists with pointless exercises while all the time claiming its for their own good. At the end everybody hugs, but I would have been happier if they’d slapped Clow silly for deliberately wasting everyone’s time.

I’m probably just hopelessly jaded, but I much prefer my magical fairy tales for children to have some teeth. Childhood, much like adulthood, is rather scary, and it’s hard for me to cathart if my escapist material doesn’t at least nod at this actuality. C. S. Lewis’ “The Last Battle,” or John Christopher’s “The City of Gold and Lead,” Tolkein, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea” are all suitably apocalyptic…but even just a touch of sincere menace, as in “Where the Wild Things Are” can go a long way. I read Dame Darcy’s “Frightful Fairy Tales” recently, and that gets it just about perfect — it really shows how fantasy and horror started in the same place, and still haven’t drifted that far apart. Darcy’s stories are knowing, and there is an ironic wink or two, but for the most part her tales are told straight. I think the most effective one is “Persimmion, in which a witch changes a young woman into a statue, which stands in the forest for many years, ignored and weathering, as the world around her changes. There’s a happy ending here, too, with true love winning the day after many, many years, but the joyous spring is given weight, conviction and depth by the painful winter. We like to think of childhood as a series of carefully managed stages, through which benevolent parental dictators guide their eagerly willing trainees. But I think Darcy’s closer to the truth in painting it as a series of painful and largely uncontrollable transformations, preceded or followed by long periods of frozen boredom and helplessness. And I’m not sure, ultimately, that the second version isn’t less cruel than the first. The witch who changes the girl into the statue has at least done her the honor of hating her honestly. In Cardcaptor Sakura, Clow’s lovingly duplicitous guidance seems to me indistinguishable from contempt. If you have to choose, it’s better to be raised by an ogre than by a God.

And, yeah, I like Darcy’s art better too. The two are actually quite comparable; Darcy’s art too is girly, filled with frills and flowers and mooning large-eyed ectomorphs. But she also has an otherworldly menace that Clamp quite deliberately eschews. In Clamp, all the characters look like plush toys; for Darcy, they look like plush toys wandering around in one of Edward Gorey’s dreams.

*****

Incidentally, Darcy contributed a piece to the Gay Utopia symposium I edited. The symposium also has a creepy shojo take on Little Red Riding Hood by Nishizaka Hiromi which I’d encourage you to check out.