Tag Archives: feminism

“Then Protest!”

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by James Romberger

François Truffaut’s films are most often analyzed in terms of their cinematic structure and the interpersonal relationships of their stories, and these qualities do account for a good part of their appeal. His films are not considered particularly political in the context of his contemporaries of the French New Wave. However, Truffaut does critique the forces that shaped his world: the destructive nationalism and militarism that crush people and culture in their wake, and the patriarchal structures that keep women the longest-suffering victims of oppression on the planet. Since women do not share equal rights with men, gender relations are political. Truffaut made some sincere efforts to explore those dynamics.

Truffaut’s 1962 film Jules and Jim bears reexamination in this light. In his adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roché’s semi-autobiographical novel Jules et Jim, the director compresses the whole to fit within the confines of a movie that is an hour and three quarters long. Truffaut chooses passages from the book and recombines them to create new meanings unique to his production. He alters the real people and events that inspired the original text, to construct a new narrative about female autonomy and fidelity in love, and affords key correspondences between the early pivotal scene on the bridge and the ending. Truffaut also extends beyond the WWI scenes of the book to incorporate his more personal references in the form of veiled and overt references to WWII: he “post-actively” incorporates his memories of his childhood in occupied Paris and his perception of the deep repercussions in France from the collaboration of some of the country’s citizens with fascism.

The credit sequence immediately foreshadows Truffaut’s intent. It recontextualizes an incidental dart game played in the book to become a metaphor of sexualized violence: a competition to penetrate a target. The title characters of Jules and Jim are young artists of bohemian Paris before World War I, who compete for the love of their lives. They and their relationships mirror Roché’s own experience. Jim is meant to represent Roché, an extremely influential high cultural connector who, among other networking flourishes, introduced Picasso to Gertrude Stein. But Roché’s acute sophistication and legendary promiscuity are not so present in Jim, in the film portrayed as a man without the courage of his convictions and underplayed by the tall, hesitant Henri Serre.
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Overthinking Things 11/07/10

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It is the future.

Acid rain has become too toxic for humans to bear. The city of New Tokyo is too crowded, humanity piles on top of humanity in crowded layers of existence. Billboards float through the air and drive by on streets. The police are a corporate entity, run for the benefit of the zaibatsu who own them. And humans are being hunted by creatures from another dimension known as Lucifer Hawks.

Silent Mobius follows a special squad within the police hierarchy, the Attacked Mystification Police, AMP. The women of AMP all have skills that no police exam can test. Shinto priestess Nami, artificial intelligence expert Lebia, esper Yuki, cyborg Kiddy, sorceress Katusmi, led by the incredibly powerful Rally Cheyenne, combine forces to protect humans from the Lucifer Hawk – and rectify the mistake that allowed them access to our world in the first place. “Our world,” I say, even though this dystopian, Philip K. Dickian vision of the future has not quite yet come to pass. This is classic speculative/science fiction.

What makes Silent Mobius work is that the people in this series are people. They are, despite the unrealistic setting and even unrealer powers displayed, people we might know. The humanity of the characters – the utter normality of their behavior in extraordinary circumstances – is what makes this series so exceptional.

Created by Asamiya Kia, Silent Mobius was serialized from 1991-2003 in Comic Dragon. The manga was collected in 12 volumes, had a 26-episode TV anime series, two movies, several volumes of “gaiden” or supplementary stories, and a number of Drama CDs. Silent Mobius was a spectacular example of a series that successfully crossed readerships and genres in Japan – and in America. The English manga, first put out by Viz is currently being re-released by Udon Press.

Artistically, Silent Mobius combines dystopian future scifi with an aesthetic that has largely passed from the world of manga – characters that look like the adults they are. The Lucifer Hawks are rendered as complicated shapes that don’t *quite* make sense – there’s a quality they have of making them hard to “see” that fits their extra-dimensionality.

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Blog Versus Professor: Aline Kominsky-Crumb is Authentic, Too

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How useful is Charles Hatfield’s notion of “ironic authentication” for understanding the autobiographies of women cartoonists?

I ask that question provocatively, but sincerely. The concept is worked out in the comics of male cartoonists: Hatfield first offers a compelling account of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, claiming it as the origin point of a comics tradition of realist-naturalist autobiography (which he just calls realist). He then opposes this naturalism to the fantasy mode typically associated with “mainstream” comics, outlining the transformative impact Pekar’s naturalism had on the scope of the “comic book hero.” He next tackles the far more theoretically ambivalent territory of autobiographical subjectivity, beginning by emphasizing the ways in which comics resonate and amplify autobiography’s inability (identified and emphasized by Autobiography Studies in literature) to escape the inherently fictive attributes of narrative subjectivity: “comics pose an immediate and obvious challenge to the idea of non-fiction.” Dan Clowes and the heightened formalist self-awareness in Just Another Day is read first, for insight into how the unavoidable fictitiousness of cartoon selves “distills and mocks Pekar’s ethic of fidelity to mundane truths,” then linked to R. Crumb’s The Many Faces of R. Crumb in order to assert that the seemingly unanchored “fictitiousness” of Clowes’ perspective actually is a “truthful” representation of the plasticity of identity. This elegant and theoretically savvy series of readings culminates in an examination of Gilbert Hernandez’s parodic “My Love Book,” which “teases the reader with a disjointed series of confessional vignettes, between which his visual personae shift so radically that we can confirm their common identity only through the repetition of certain motifs of in dialog and action” and which ends with an ironic suicide that “adverts to the limitations of autobiography” and “muddies its own assertion of truth.”

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Overthinking Things 10/3/10

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Me, Mo and Alison

The Bechdel Test. A thought exercise that consists of a series of three criteria applied to media.

Does the media have:

1) More than one woman

Do they:

2) talk to each other

3) about something other than a man

It’s pretty well-documented that Hollywood movies fail miserably at even these three very basic criteria.

However, (and possibly surprisingly,) a great deal of Japanese manga does *not* fail the Bechdel Test. A shockingly large amount of manga, both by and for women and by and for men, fulfills and surpasses these criteria. And it dawned on me that this would make a great topic here at Hooded Utilitarian. So, I threw it out on Twitter that I would be writing about manga series that met the criteria and what suggestions did people have?

Almost immediately, my Twitter feed filled up with…really, bad suggestions. Stories of magical elementary school girls, stories of gender-bent political bedroom politics, stories in which the hyper-competent, super cool, yet totally sexy lead female was, with the exception of a few “bad girls,” the only female in the series. (To be fair, I received good suggestions, too, but the bad ones were more interesting in a lot of ways.)

I found myself having to explain the concept of the Bechdel test over and over. I was accused of adding criteria when I explained that it really had to be something that someone like myself might read.

And, ultimately, someone I respect greatly suggested two truly excellent series (by which I mean that I consider them both well-written,well-drawn by masters of the craft; that I loved one and anticipate very much liking the other when I read it) that, in my opinion utterly failed to meet the spirit of the test. Why? Because *I am Mo.* I am an adult woman with an preference for stories about adult women which are not exclusively focused on their relationship with men. (Or women. I discounted almost all ot the Yuri I read, because the conversations are focused on romantic relationships with women.) There were some heated words on the topic on Twitter. And eventually, I decided to ask the source – Alison Bechdel herself.

Here was the meat of my email:

I have a question that really, only you can answer. I write about Japanese comics and I’d like to do a post that highlights some titles that pass the “Bechdel Test.” Japanese comics do this better than any other media I’ve ever seen. There are many female leads, many non-guy conversations between women. Even in romances. In conversation with other folks about this, two suggestions were made that I turned down. I have been challenged about them, but I believe that while they both meet the criteria literally, they fail at meeting the spirit of the test. And so, I’m asking you what you think.

The first is Emma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_(manga)) – a story about a Victorian maid who falls in love (mutually) with a man from the upper classes. It’s a pretty realistic story. The women certainly do talk about things other than guys, because the main character is a servant and she has a lot to do, and tradesmen and other servants to deal with. There are other women – her mistresses, for instance. She discusses her love interest with almost none of them. However, the story is ostensibly a love story and while the conversation is not about guys, would Mo sit through that?

The second is Ooku, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooku) which is a story about Japan’s Edo period, in which many of the men have died and women take on men’s roles to keep the country going. The gender roles are flipped – the Shogun’s harem is now all men – but the women still maintain the facade of it being male rule.Both of these series are written by women.I know this is asking a lot, but I would really appreciate a note letting me know whether you think these pass or fail the Bechdel Test. I greatly appreciate your time.

Here is Alison’s answer:

I think I’m with you. I like your distinction between the letter and the spirit of the rule. Although whether Mo would sit through these stories is not, technically, a criterion of the test, I think she would not. Sit through them, I mean.

***

So, the question for me became not “what manga passes the Bechdel Test?” but “why is it so hard for people to understand what might pass the Bechdel Test?” Arrogant as this sounds, I have no problem at all coming up with titles that meet both the letter and the spirit of the test.

Is it that readers have *such* low expectations of female characters that them merely existing is enough? Is there some inherent difficulty in identifying a series that includes women in non-relationship conversations? Or are are female high school students in hopeless romances with the wrong guy, or sexy women wielding guns the only things being translated into English? It’s true that many of the popular action series for the younger crowd have the traditional one girl who is the potential love interest one day, when they all grow up and the lead male character isn’t focused on winning so much. But One Piece, a series that is arguably the most popular manga in the world right now (and is *still* under appreciated by most critics,) is targeted to that same age group, and passes the Test with flying colors.

Writer/reviewer Sean Gaffney says, “The Bechdel Test makes sure your characters aren’t dull. Who wants to hear women just talking about the same thing? It leads to well-rounded characters and better stories, and makes you THINK more. It also makes you want to step up your men.”

Melinda Beasi talked at length in her article here on HU about the way that women distance themselves from “girly” things, but it’s clear from the revenue generated by the Twilight franchise, that the fantasy of being the princess who needs rescuing and wants to be possessed by a man who is compelled by animal need, runs deep in many girls and women. I see much the same kind of thing in the Yuri/lesbian lit world, the only difference being that the “Prince” is female.

The default in western entertainment is that the female is the love interest, there for the man so, in the absence of the man, audiences will naturally assume the female has to be his replacement – that is, she must be the Hero (e.g., Salt, Aeon Flux, La Femme Nikita). Where there are multiple women, they will often  either be a team of replacement men, doing “manly” things (Set it Off, Resident Evil) or not doing anything and talking about the men they need to do those things (Waiting to Exhale ). Of these, only Waiting to Exhale does not pass the Test. The others have women in heroic roles…and therefore pass.

There are many manga that pass the Bechdel Test. Next month, I will review one of those that are available in English- a series that I think best exemplifies what the Bechdel Test stands for.

The Bechdel Test is a starting point, not a place to end. It’s a thought exercise the point of which, I have been reminded, is to make one think.

If I were to posit that women are still socialized to be needy, or that female fantasies of being swept off their feet are precisely because so many women are the ones to shoulder more responsibility to keep everything together in difficult times, I’m sure I’d be challenged to “prove” it, or chatised for either buying into it, or being sarcastic about it (or all three at once. ^_^)

So, I’ll ask you, the incredibly intelligent readers of Hooded Utilitarian – why do you think it’s so *hard* to conceive of entertainment in which a woman has a conversation with another woman, about something other than a man?

Feminine Dignity and the Empowered Sexpot, Part 1

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The film version of Barbarella gets a semi-bad rap as an over-the-top sex farce with an almost-camp sensibility and a genuinely bad rap as a film either completely disengaged from its own gender politics or completely sexist:

While women strove to clothe their gender with dignity, Barbarella endeavored to strip them of it…Barbarella’s sexual appeal proves to be her most powerful weapon, but she does not control it as much as it controls her. Each episodic dilemma moves to the next by Barbarella’s sexual encounters with alien strangers, at first a pittance she pays them for saving her life. Notably, circumstances leading up to this event strip Barbarella of most of her clothes. The only exception is when she has sex with Duran Duran’s machine, in which her multiple orgasms ruin the device and foil his scheme to kill her. Opening with an erotic scene of Barbarella undressing herself, the film begins with the statement, woman equals sex [Ed.: italics added], for by that point the audience does not know who she is, and spends the remainder of the time underscoring their assertion. [Source here.]

This is a particularly egregious example of feminist critique, but the fact that anybody can seriously advance the notion that a simple striptease is sufficient to denote “woman equals sex” indicates that we may be to the point where we’re so deft with the feminist critique of objectified female bodies that we overlook the ways in which those bodies function not just as oppressive representations of women but as ambivalent representations of cultural dynamics about women. (Not to mention for not-inherently-problematic aesthetic pleasure.)

One of the most striking lines from the film in this context is “The Mathmos has created this bubble to protect itself from your innocence.” The line is spoken by the Great Tyrant, after she and Barbarella are dunked into the ever-hungry Mathmos expecting to die, only to find themselves protected by a spontaneously generated enclosure that looks a little like the Jetsons’ car (I failed to find a decent picture online.) Delivered in the film’s final minutes, after Barbarella has eagerly rewarded three rescuers with sex and survived the Orgasmotron, the line encapsulates the film’s characteristically 1960s’ stance on the inherent goodness of sexual pleasure. Like much popular culture from the era, Barbarella works to recast the traditional, Puritanical distinction between innocence and corruption, making “purity of body” almost entirely inoperative and advancing the idea that the “good-hearted” (male and female) enjoy sex too.

This is not “woman equals sex.” This is “sex is really, really, fun but mostly irrelevant.”

As an artifact of sexual liberation, Barbarella is certainly subject to the more-limited feminist critique that the sexually liberated woman is a male wish fulfillment, but in the world of the film, Earth culture has evolved to a future state where the Hippie premises are simply business as usual and the power dynamics that inform them in the present have evaporated. Sex is casual; pleasure is paramount; goodness is manifest; and power is besides the point. The other stereotypical Hippie assumption, that mind-altering drugs are benign and progressive, has a surprisingly ambivalent status: on Earth, a drug that allows for the “rapport” of minds has replaced physical intercourse. Although the film doesn’t strongly disparage the use of the drug, it definitely depicts physical sex as both more “primitive” and better.

Thematically, Barbarella’s fantasmic sexual receptiveness is a function of that “primitive goodness” – the merging of physical sensuality with a nurturing and anti-violent sensibility – a concept not entirely unrelated to the later feminist concept of “woman’s wisdom.” The fantasy extends significantly beyond access to the desirable female body, and the film’s politics – sexual and otherwise – are consequently more complex. The critique of Barbarella as brute objectifiation is one of those reductive arguments deriving from an adherence-to rather than an awareness-of the contemporaneous feminist dictum that the personal is political, and it misses the extent to which there’s a lot of politics in this film that has nothing to do with Barbarella’s breasts.

Countercultural exoticism, in both its erotic and philosophical modes, often reflected the influence of the “Hippie trail” – the search for enlightenment in the uncorrupted cultures of the East, viewed as more primitive, authentic, or “in touch” with nature. This affection for primitive eroticism drives the film’s motifs, although the space-exotic aesthetic owes more to the curvy “woggles” of Morris Lapidus than to primitive art or the ethnic tapestries of the subcontinent so characteristic of more earthbound 60s mythologies. Barbarella’s primitivism takes a particularly Western formulation: She is Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall: a helpmeet and sexual partner to man, but “innocent” and “pure,” uncorrupted of spirit, naïve about the ways in which her sexuality is both powerful and political.
Released in 1968, the year of the Battle of Saigon and the My Lai massacre, the movie is also ambivalent about violence: the opening sequence, in which the President of Earth sends Barbarella to locate and stop Durand Durand from an as-yet-unknown nefarious plan, establishes that “the Universe has been pacified for centuries.” When the (completely nude) Barbarella receives weapons to help her in the mission she campily complains about being “armed like a naked savage.”

Societies with a propensity to war are described as “in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility.” Without even a hint of contradiction, primitive violence is every bit as bad as primitive eroticism is good. Make love, not war.

Aesthetically, the film is a shaky and rollicking hybrid of this hippie utopia with space age bachelor fantasy: Barbarella is beautiful, strong, available for sex at the drop of an innuendo, handy with gadgets, and pacificist, but a perfect shot, able to destroy aircraft from an entirely unbelievable distance with merely a handgun. The world she inhabits is fashionable, uninhibited, and full of stylized villians who are easily defeated.

But perhaps the most illuminating element of the hybrid lies in the residue of domesticity. Barbarella does not keep house; she does not cook; she is not waiting around for the men she sleeps with to take care of her or provide for her. She is a “five-star, double-rated astronavigatrix” with her own spaceship who gets direct calls from the President of Earth. She is also immensely kind, consistently nurturing, and completely not manipulative in any way. This is surely male fantasy, but it is not the oppressive “barefoot and pregnant” male fantasy of first wave feminism or even the “hang around the Mansion and look gorgeous” fantasy of Hugh Hefner. If Barbarella dressed in a smart polyester pantsuit and unzipped it less frequently she would be as unobjectionable as Mary Tyler Moore.

Watch this spot for a link to part 2.

Overthinking Things

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When You Think Deeply, You Think Alone. When You Don’t Think, The Whole World Doesn’t Think With You

Hello, my name is Erica Friedman and this is my obligatory wankery self-introductory post here on Hooded Utilitarian..

I originally began to overthink anime and manga in 2002, and now Noah has given me the opportunity to overthink comics  as part of the team here on HU.  Who among us would pass up the chance to overthink comic books, cartoons and related stuff? And with a pre-existing audience to boot?  In the blogosphere building an audience is the hard part.  Any schmuck can build a blog – getting other people to care about it is work.

So you’re probably wondering what I’m going to bring to the HU table.  Well, I think I’m here to provide a unique perspective.

I’m not just here as a woman or feminist or a lesbian.  I’ve always been pretty bad at being a good female comics reader (my collection started in 1972 long before “female readers” were a thing) and I’m a terrible lesbian (I hate cats and Ellen Degeneres and have completely forgotten to run out and buy Batwoman, whoops.)  I’ve been in the industry as a publisher of Yuri manga since 2003, and have been writing stories of and articles about lesbian themes in comics for many years.  I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler. My perspective is uniquely mine.

Frankly, there’s no such thing as the “female perspective” or the “lesbian perspective” anyway.  Summing up the thoughts of 51% of the world’s population (or the miniscule portion thereof that reads comics) isn’t really doable.  As for representing lesbians, I can clearly remember a day on a mailing list I *own* when a member replied to a post I had made about what lesbians want in manga with something like, “I am also a lesbian and I have never agreed with a word you said and you do not speak for me.”

Therefore, when I write about perspective here, I’m basically speaking for no one but myself – and not for myself of the future or past, only the myself that is right now.  So, here’s my perspective right now:

My perspective is that I do not read comics like most women, nor do I read comics the same way men do just because I’m a lesbian.  I don’t like big breasted female characters with tiny waists AND I don’t like sunken-chested, sparkly lads, but I do like strong women.  I have this utterly weird belief that comics don’t owe us reality in situation, but they do owe us realistic portraits of people acting consistently within the rules of the world portrayed in the story.  My perspective is that comics don’t have to condescend to women or minorities and the fact that they still do is everyone’s fault – publishers, writers, artists and readers.  It’s my perspective that the Internet may have killed the comics industry, but it is has saved sequential art.  It’s my perspective that overthinking things is the third best thing about comics, after creating them and enjoying them.   It’s my perspective that the best reason to be involved in comics is to meet the obscure, unknown,  independent artists who are reinventing the wheel every time they create a work from scratch.

And it is my perspective that I will have a great deal of fun here overthinking things in the months to come.  Thank you Noah and thank you HU audience.  I look forward to working with you!

Erica Friedman is the President of Yuricon & ALC Publishing. She blogs about Yuri in anime and manga at Okazu.

Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Phallus

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In his post, Eric argued that Moore’s Swamp Thing is feminist, both because it presents Abby as a strong, heroic figure and because it critiques Swamp Thing’s own abusive use of patriarchal power.

I agree with Eric that power and gender are both important themes in the Swamp Thing series. I’m less certain that Moore always manages to be especially thoughtful about them, though. It seems to me, on the contrary, that in the marriage between Moore and his tropes, it’s as often the green, lumpy pulp that wears the jeans in the relationship as it is the feminism.

Having brutally murdered that innocent metaphor…I thought I’d look back at the same issues I discussed in my first post — the two-part story in which Swamp Thing goes to Rann.

This story is built around doubled couples: Swamp Thing, in exile from earth and Abby, is mirrored by Adam Strange, who is in a constant vacillating exile from Rann and his wife, Alanna. In both of these pairings, the male/female roles are apportioned in familiar manner. Swamp Thing and Adam are the seekers, questing across space, engaging in feats of daring-do, in order to return to hearth and home embodied by Abby/Alanna. Female means stability and civilization; male means adventure and rough virility. Moore is careful to tell us that the people of Rann are hairless, and that they see Adam as a kind of atavistic hairy monster. Alanna, then, is a (literally) smooth, perfect, (literal) princess in a tower; a fairy tale dream — just as Abby is referred to as a “Hans Anderson princess” at the very end of Moore’s run on the series.

Moore, moreover, links his males questing nobly for the womb explicitly to phalluses and sperm. There’s one sequence where Swamp Thing gets transformed into a bulbous member spouting suggestive liquid…and look at that caption.

“Her cries like a panther’s” indeed.

Of course, that same page we’ve got Adam with that ridiculous headgear holding his smoking gun at crotch level. After that, it’s almost (ahem) anti-climactic when Swampy uses his powers to refertilize Rann…or when we learn that Adam has been brought to Rann because the “fierce vitality” of his sperm is needed to impregnate Alanna on a world where all the men are apparently sterile.

The person talking all up in Adam’s fierce virility is not his wife, but rather Keela Roo, a Thanagarian hawk warrior. Keela Roo is a very different kind of feminine. Instead of waiting at home in a castle, she sallies forth in spikes and skin and fetish boots. She wears a big flamboyant headress that stands in stark contrast to her male-subordinates unadorned helmet. She is, in short, a dominatrix and a castrating bitch; vital, animal, sexy, and unhealthily virile. Here, for example, she goes after Swampy by inserting her big phallic weapon into his split and oozing orifice.

As is generally the case in these pulp narratives, the dark queen is scary, but she’s also attractive — not least because she actually has a personality. Abby doesn’t exist (in these issues) except as a name and a desire. Alanna never speaks in English, and though her Rannian dialect isn’t entirely opaque,and though we do get to see her desire for Adam, keeping her voice from the reader effectively makes her seem distant, exotic, mysterious, soft-spoken, and unattainable. The princess in the tower again.

Keela Roo, on the other hand, has a universal translator thingee — she wants you to know what she thinks. Language is something she has mastered, and she uses it seductively. Several scenes between her and Adam have a not-very-subliminal sexual subtext. Here she is wearing that preposterous outfit while Adam talks to her in his bathrobe:

And this next sequence is a brazen come on (with Adam in a bathrobe again. Doesn’t he ever get dressed?)

That “aid proposal” seems very like a euphemism for another kind of proposal, especially as we’re getting a shot down her cleavage.

Keela Roo tells Adam, “We are both fighters,” and she’s right of course. The problem is that she’s the wrong kind of fighter. She’s a twisted fighter, a perverted fighter — in short, a cross-dressing, feminine kind of fighter, when the right kind of fighter is a male fighter.
Thus, poetic justice demands that Keela Roo be killed, not in equal combat, but by domesticity itself. In battle, she manages to kick Adam Strange’s ass, but he fools her by leading her to his home, where his household guardian water creatures disposes of her. She is, then, not merely defeated, but humiliated — her fetish mask is torn from her, stripping her faux masculinity and leaving her as just a woman after all.

In the final twist of the knife, the creature who disposes of her is itself feminine (taking the form of a cat); a liquid female personification of hearth and home, which makes short work of that other woman Adam has been dallying with so that he and Alanna can be reunited again.

The point here isn’t that Moore is an irredeemable sexist, or even that this story’s handling of gender is particularly offensive. Rather, the point is that Moore, here and elsewhere, is using tried and true genre ideas (male quests; adventure vs. home.) And his main means for dealing with those concerns are received pulp tropes or DC comics ideas. Alanna is a princess not because Alan Moore made her one, but because some old DC writer steeped in Edgar Rice Burroughs and Flash Gordon made her one; the hawk woman is dressed like that because some pulp dc writer steeped in pulp cheesecake figured why the hell not.

Moore takes these ideas and runs with them…but though he runs pretty far, he doesn’t necessarily run to a different planet. In space opera, good women are beautiful paragons who sit at home being good and nurturing; bad women are aggressive and dominant and get killed off despite (or because of) their appeal. And that’s the way it is in Moore’s space opera as well.

Eric argues that at the end of the series, Moore undermines standard pulp narratives about revenge, domestic bliss and male power. But to me at least, reading back through some of these stories, Moore’s use of pulp in Swamp Thing seems less like undermining and more like assiduously and inventively cultivating.
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You can read the whole Swamp Thing roundtable here.

Jog’s massive concluding Swamp Thing blowout post will be up tomorrow.