Tag Archives: Heidi MacDonald

The Unwitting Supremacist

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With friends like these, who needs enemies? Last week, outspoken proponent of diversity Heidi MacDonald used her platform to belittle and mock some of the biggest meanest bullies in comics: people who want to talk about racism.

How much do you know about the Mahou Shounen Breakfast Club (MSBC) controversy? If it’s nothing, congratulations on living your best life; you can, if you want, catch up on it here. (We’ll wait.) If you are familiar with MSBC, please set aside for the moment your take. One of the few undisputed facts of the whole debacle is that its creators decided not to make their comic anymore. The impetus of MacDonald’s post, as she describes it, was to use her capacity “as a reporter to investigate if their decision was justified.” Well, stop the press, Vicki Vale. Their decision was entirely within their rights as creators, and is therefore justified no matter what you or me or anyone else thinks about it.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of opinions on both the comic (which doesn’t strike me as cultural appropriation) and the creators’ decision to quit (which I find ridiculous). But those are not journalism. MacDonald’s post is what is known as a hot take, and it is made up of her total misunderstanding of both cultural appropriation as a concept and one person’s blog post that went up after the comic was cancelled. Along the way, she asserts that manga appropriated Walt Disney(?) and Robert Louis Stevenson(??), and accuses Jem Yoshioka, the aforementioned blogger, who is of Japanese descent, of being dismissive of Japanese culture. Whatever you might think about all that, it sure as shit isn’t reporting. The fact that the author sees it as such comports neatly with her central claim, which is that champion of equality Heidi MacDonald knows racism, and this ain’t it.

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Anyone can have an opinion. But it’s inappropriate to position yourself as a cheerleader for people from one or more demographics to which you don’t belong, disparage their opinions, displace them with your own, and then act as if you’re doing them a favor. If you do so in your capacity as editor, it is not just distasteful; it is an abuse of power. It is being a fucking bully.

While there are many examples of this behavior in comics, let’s zoom in on a case study from the world of High Literature. If you can even bear to get pulled into another insider-y saga, I’d like to share an illustrious tale about Times Literary Supplement editor Toby Lichtig. About two weeks ago, the Los Angeles Review of Books ran his remarkable essay on gender inequity in the literary magazine milieu. Lichtig wrote with great news for me and my fellow women writers: he has thought deeply about our struggle, and he wants us to know it’s going great.

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Hey girl. Just want u to know ur doing great. xo, Toby

Lichtig’s essay, like MacDonald’s post, is inside baseball at its worst. It is, variously, a takedown of a takedown of the London Review of Books; a piece that somehow both denies and accounts for the lack of women in literary criticism; and a wrongheaded critique of one frustrated woman writer, Katherine Angel, and her ilk for writing “casually” about gender (which I guess is what passes for a sick burn in British English). Despite its casualness, Lichtig frames Angel’s writing as a violent attack:

I’d like to make a small case for the magazine at which I work—the Times Literary Supplement—one of the publications so casually attacked by Angel as bastions of androcentricity. I say “casually” because Angel’s main focus of attack was the LRB, and she only offered a sideswipe at the TLS. And I also say “casually” because some of her writing on the subject was indeed casual. (emphasis mine)

Lichtig’s essay also describes a “sort of ‘blah’ that habitually creeps into writing about” gender inequity. By “blah” he means unfair generalizations, which he perceives Angel’s essay and just in general (lol). In the spirit of specificity, Lichtig waxes on about how each and every literary magazine is a super special snowflake (…sound familiar yet?). He takes a close look at numbers that aren’t really so different from one another. He even explains how statistics could never truly account for the True Celebration of Womanhood that was TLS’s recent Susan Sontag issue. Or something?

TL;DR: NOT ALL MEN. But reaching past the essay’s fundamental pettiness, it is a fascinating cultural document. In Lichtig, we have an associate editor of a magazine who elected himself to speak not just on behalf of that publication, but for the experience of all women in the literary world. Standing behind him, we have his employer, the Times Literary Supplement, which (presumably) thought that having him speak in this way sounded like a good idea. And finally there’s the LARB, the publication that deemed it fit to print. The final product is some 4,000 words of egregious mansplaining implicitly endorsed by one of the most reputable literary publications in the world.

It is important to realize that the struggle of women writers is not Lichtig’s real subject. His subject is his misguided opinion on the struggle of women writers, and in disguising that as objective truth he is not altogether artless. His opening paragraphs are a master class in how to put a woman’s exact words into scare quotes. And there is real rhetorical sophistication in his invocation of feminist icon Mary Beard, his TLS colleague, whom he quotes twice. In the world of Lichtig’s essay, it is only women—including Katherine Angel, LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers, novelist Kathryn Heyman (whose name Lichtig misspells twice), and Beard herself—who commit acts of sexism against other women. Kind of like saying that someone of Japanese descent is being dismissive of Japanese culture, if you can see where I’m going with this.

What’s really galling about the essay is not Lichtig’s tactics (gross as they are) or his ideas (which are really nothing new), but the patronizing way in which he positions himself as a cheerleader for women in the literary world even as he discounts their experience and opinions:

Portraying the situation as intractable and representing the literary world as a male-dominated monolith against which women can only bang their heads or give up can be counterproductive, leading not to resistance but resignation. Rather than argue that literary editors are “perpetuating” gender disparity, better to look at the historical facts: we have made great progress in redressing “the shocking paucity of women of authority and expertise” in most areas of our culture over the past 200 years, and we should rededicate ourselves to continuing that progress, rather than blaming literary publications for slowing it down.

These words speak to me, not with the message they’re meant to convey, but as an artifact of the time in which I write. Lichtig’s paternalistic pep talk, his complete mischaracterization of another thoughtful essay (on which his own is supposedly based), his half-baked historicism, and his self-congratulation are all too familiar. I see it all the time in comics. (Shoutout to The Comics Journal!) Today, I happen to be talking about The Beat.

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Call them the unwitting supremacists. “Awareness” will always and forever pour forth from the mouths of well-meaning people like Toby Lichtig and Heidi MacDonald. But the inequities they seek to redress by definition demand their thoughts should count less. They require fewer proclamations of “awareness” and more ongoing, concrete editorial action and opportunities to cede the floor to other voices.

Lichtig, for one, could GAF about voices. Wearing the mantle of editorial authority, he only seeks to ease our worried minds. “We [editors] notice the gender divide,” he writes. “We think and talk about it regularly. And it is, I think, this awareness that is key to things changing.”

Reader, I humbly submit to you, here towards the end of an essay that has long since surpassed take-level meta, that awareness is not the key to change. Awareness is an abstraction, or worse, an illusion. Sometimes, as in MacDonald’s piece, awareness is wielded as both a talisman and a weapon—and then it’s closer to a lie. I guess it’d be one thing if it only powered bloated blog posts and ill-considered essays, but the sad historical fact is that it permeates everything from editorial policies to dismissive emails and tweets—all manner of communiqués, public and private, from people with cultural capital who earnestly believe themselves to be proponents of change. It is, to use Lichtig’s word, casual sexism and racism, and it is often culturally and institutionally supported, if not explicitly endorsed.

Back to MacDonald’s post. “If you have been reading my writings for any amount of time, you know that I’m a fan of multicultural diversity, and of multiple viewpoints and creators of every sex, religion, creed, race and sexual orientation getting a chance to tell their stories,” she writes. “I’m also a huge fan of cultural context for stories that examine how the preconceptions of a work of art are reflected in the execution. But I never want to see these criticisms used to PROACTIVELY SILENCE ART.”

Those capital letters are the author’s, and they are used throughout her screed, along with boldface and incredulous subheadings, to convey her utter indignation that people started a conversation about cultural appropriation in some comic she has officially deemed OK. Like Lichtig, MacDonald frequently describes critique as violent attack. She casts critics of MSBC as enemies of good art and bullies who “silenced” its creators. And even as she ascribes to them this incredible power, she mocks them as overly sensitive, irrational people whose claims are no more than “hurt feelings.” This rhetorical hypocrisy will sound familiar to anyone who has a passing familiarity with indie comics criticism. Political correctness is killing comics, or so they say. What it amounts to is a bunch of hubbub that sounds like it’s supporting diversity, but works diligently to protect the status quo. And what is getting lost—and, worse, derided—are the actual voices that were marginalized in the first place.

What is silencing? A lot of people in comics seem confused, so let me be plain: silencing is using your platform to punch down. It involves, in MacDonald’s post as in posts at other prominent comics sites, characterizing conversations about racism (or any given -ism or phobia) as censorship and/or irrational bullying. When someone called bullshit on MacDonald’s post, she said, “We need to do better. If we want to fight the cultural ascendance of ONE viewpoint—the white male cis viewpoint—we can’t let weak arguments define our position.” Then MacDonald said, to another person, “I am an equal opportunity jerk.”

Her language is reminiscent of every comics asshole ever who has refused to examine their own bias. The difference is that MacDonald thinks she’s doing it in the name of diversity—which is, I think, worse. It’s no accident that equal-opportunity offenders always ALWAYS offend certain people. When those people try to then explain where they are coming from, that is not attacking or policing comics. It is straight-up self-defense.

Anyone who has tried to follow the MSBC controversy as it has unfolded knows how difficult it is to see past mainstream coverage on The Beat and Bleeding Cool. To wade through the primary sources is a ridiculous exercise that’s emblematic of the dearth of prominent platforms available to divergent perspectives. Gatekeepers like MacDonald are not yet convinced of those critics’ humanity, instead casting them as anon trolls, proponents of callout culture, or bullies who aren’t even personally invested in comics.

MacDonald got some blowback for her piece, which she acknowledged in an addendum to her post that reaffirms her own imagined cultural awareness. (Har har.) Meanwhile, Jem Yoshioka, the blogger MacDonald mocked and diminished—and whose post, whether or not you agree with it, was respectful, thoughtful, and kind—has received at least one death threat from GamerGate. Such are the stakes of trying to carve out a place for yourself to exist in this crazy world: you’re threatened with extinction, or else laughed at even as you’re imbued with the magical power to kill comics with your thoughts. This milieu is unacceptable and depressing, but not hopeless. One thing I know: downstream voices on Twitter, Tumblr and elsewhere are punching up and speaking out. It won’t always have to be for survival. Someday it will feel like victory.

So What Does A Gal Have to Do To Get Into Comics?

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Editor’s Note: This first appeared as a comment on Heidi MacDonald’s recent post “So What Does a Gal Have To Do to Get Into the Comics Journal Anyway?” Annie edited her comment slightly before reprinting it here.
 
I grew up idealizing male cartoonists: Berkeley Breathed, Herge, Schulz, Jim Davis, Gary Larson, Maurice Sendak, and unbeknownst to me at the time, Art Spiegelman (for his work on the garbage pail kids). I had literally no idea I could even be a cartoonist until I got older–I had unconsciously relegated the vocation to the exclusive world of men. Until I rifled through my first roommate’s collection and had my mind blown open by Phoebe Gloeckner, Debbie Drechsler, Julie Doucet, Lynda Barry, and Love and Rockets (I was still too scared of myself to pick up a copy of Dykes to Watch Out For> and plus I was a punk, so I got my lesbian comics fix with L&R at the time).

summer1011I remember when Dylan (Williams) told me Debbie Drechsler’s Summer of Love was the most important graphic novel in his life, his favorite book. i think he is the only man I have even heard bring her merits up in a conversation. For the comics class we were teaching, he suggested we assign the interview with Drechsler in TCJ # 249. But when I read it I was appalled at Groth’s insensitivity, disrespect and dismissal. Like, it was reaaally bad. And guess who stopped drawing comics altogether (shortly after creating the #1 book in Dylan’s library)?

I have not been able to stomach Groth’s interview with Gloeckner in the comics journal long enough to finish it (haven’t seen any new comics from her for awhile, though I am anticipating her newest project, a book that takes a close look at the femicides in Juarez. Wonder how that one’s going to go over with critics?)
By the time the interview with Alison Bechdel came out in #287, someone had the sense to ask a woman to interview her–but then added an addendum from some dude at the end who felt that the woman interviewer had not been thorough enough (I thought the interview was brilliant) and proceeded to ask Alison a bunch of asshat questions including something about masturbation to which she replied “did you ask Crumb these questions?” Reading this addendum turned my thrill at reading the article a little sour.

So I’m saying, all this relates to the environment of comics at large, the confidence of women artists, and the inclusion of people besides just straight white men. Groth’s comment about what is ‘good’ or not is the rule, not the exception. I cannot tell you how many women, queers, people of color have told me that they used to draw but stopped completely after someone told them their drawing was not ‘good’, because it did not look like what the straight white men were drawing. I’ve heard this from dozens and dozens and dozens.

My experience teaching in the IPRC comics and certificate program in Portland illustrates this point. Pre-program, we had a meeting to decide how to divide up the accepted applicants between the two teams of teachers (two different classes). When I entered the room, I saw that the director had already divided the applications up into two groups: ‘good art’, students whose work was perceived as ‘more advanced’ were on one side of the table (assigned to the teacher he considered the ‘expert’–a man) while on the other side were the beginners, the ‘unclassifiable’ applications, and the artists that he considered ‘less advanced’–assigning them to the ‘fun’ team of teachers (one of which was a woman). As I circled the table and read the applications, a rock grew in my stomach. “Did you notice that nearly all the artists you consider ‘good’ and ‘advanced’ are men, and the artists you consider ‘less good’ and ‘less advanced’ are all women?” Radio silence. I was the only female in the room. It took several minutes before the other men reading the applications could assess the situation and reiterate my observation to the director who eventually acknowledged (albeit through a different, male teacher) that my critique was valid. The gender imbalance being obvious, at first glance, only to me.

Is it any wonder that The Comics Journal gets so many proposals from women on the subject of comics education? It’s one of the only spheres in which we are granted authority, at best. Of course women want to have a say in what gets taught and how in all of the new schools.

The irony of a company whose name and image were built on the foundations of feminist artwork/stories, drawn by two people of color, whose most loved and reknowned characters are two Latina queers and a badass lady who carries a hammer around for protection and rage, is not lost on me.

How Can You Hate a Fan?

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Kerfuffle, in common parlance, is a “disturbance, commotion, fuss.” Unassumingly rustic and awkward, kerfuffle is an inherently strategic word. Kerfuffle is cute and funny sounding. It’s easy to imagine a kerfuffle as a small sheep-kitten hybrid. It’s a wonder the English language Pokemon games never appropriated it. Not unlike baby-talking, kerfuffle allows the speaker to dismiss whatever battle or disruption she chooses as futile, silly, and beside-the-point, and to seem good natured, good humored and superior while doing so.

Critic Heidi MacDonald opens her article on the recent Jason Karns comments-war at The Comics Journal with the word. She writes, “Indie comics circles don’t have kerfuffles—defined as in depth analysis of the social, racial or gender-based meaning of a certain comic or statement. Those are for nasty old mainstream comics.” Until the site shut the comments down, the ‘kerfuffle’ occurred between one camp who thoughtfully addressed the troubling prevalence of racism, misogyny and violence in comics and in Karns’ work in particular, and an equally passionate camp defending the nostalgic value of racism, misogyny and violence, (at least, that was my take.) Her reduction of this debate makes her sound parental and hokey. I wonder why she works so hard to diminish something the comics community cares deeply about.

MacDonald then shifts and observes the possible use for more study of ‘cultural context’ of independent comics, vacillating with statements like “BTW, I’m not advocating for change here,” and finally concluding,

“Context seems to have less and less inherent value against this backdrop where immediate emotional resonance is the currency. Perhaps it’s this very quality that makes comics one of the most vibrant and relatable mediums of the day.”

Perhaps it’s this very quality that makes comics such a safe haven for deeply offensive power fantasies. Most of the article wanders around without going anywhere. MacDonald hypothesizes that contextual analysis is only of “secondary interest to those consuming and creating comics,” yet its unrealistic to expect any subgroup or population to be motivated to contextualize itself. She also shores up her vision of contextualization with anecdotes from mainstream comics criticism. Tellingly, she relates Todd McFarlane’s rejection of deeper readings of his work, but does not give examples of actual analysis. Critique of a comic’s racial and gender-based meaning does not a cultural contextualization make. According to her definition, it makes a kerfuffle.

It’s unclear whether MacDonald is calling for greater analysis or not, and if the Karns debate doesn’t count for serious analysis, what would do better. MacDonald is a central figure in contemporary comics criticism, and its worthwhile to get to the bottom of what she means by ‘cultural contextualization,’ and why she thinks it could be helpful. What is she advocating for, if weakly? An institutionalized project? A tit-for-tat expose of independent comics’ parallel problems to superhero fare? Does pointing out sexism and racism count as contextualization? Warrant it?

Contextualization isn’t unknown to comics discourse, after all. MacDonald contextualizes Frank Santoro, the writer of the original Karns post, as a heart-of-gold veteran comic lover. How can he be blamed for seeing the best in a vile, racist comic book? He is part of a culture of fandom, a background MacDonald urges her readers to consider before she mentions anything else from the Karns debate. Karns is “one of those energetic and imaginative artists who has so far chosen to work in the gross out genre.” MacDonald typifies most cartoonists as “ethnically homogenous groups of suburban white kids” whose work falls short when they “stray too far away from writing what they know.” This last one deals in some knee-jerking stereotyping—I’d consider that a good part of independent cartoonists are rather open-minded art students living in urban settings.

The comics industry is structured around a cult of individual creators and super-fans. Even outside of autobiographical work, any ‘famous’ cartoonist’s life history and personality will be well-known, and factor into how fans read a work. Cartoonists are fashioned as auteurs, and creator rights seems to be the industry’s de facto high priority topic. Publishers and critics contextualize comics all the time, but always at the level of the creator, who is framed through the culture of fandom and attributed its origin story. Cartoonists are cast as introverted misfits with great imaginations– their particularities and belonging to the ‘brotherhood’ of comics fans rises above whatever culture they are ‘outsiders’ to. Their culture is their comic-making. To use an example Heidi MacDonald skirts around, Craig Thompson’s Habibi is pretty racist, but how can you deny that he’s also a really nice guy? He loves comics so much. Don’t his personal qualities somehow temper the book? Isn’t this all excusable, considering he’s a white guy from a small, Midwestern place? I suspect that ‘cultural’ contextualization is a comfortable go-to, and readily used to reconcile fissures like the Karns debate.

As she stated, MacDonald doesn’t want change. She calls for a future where independent comics can continue to move forward on its vibrant, beautiful trajectory, everybody holding hands and drawing in different styles, in a void, all on board. Emotional resonance is the currency. It is exchanged for the train ticket. The ticket-man accepts empathy, insight and nostalgia equally. He knows the first two are a little harder to come by. The important, unifying thing is that everyone is making comics, and that everybody knows your name. Karns isn’t so bad– he’s a fan just like you. Don’t go and make a fuss.

 

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Indie Comics vs. Context — Death Match

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Heidi over at the Beat had a post at the end of last week in which she argued that indie comics are rarely examined in cultural context.

And yet, it does seem that indie comics and cartoonists are rarely examined in a larger contextual way. This is possibly because the content involves a lot of what some call introspection, and others emo shoegazing—even the greatest one—and maybe because this kind of analysis if of a secondary interest of most of those creating and consuming indie comics? And to be fair, a lot of indie comics are created by an ethnically homogenous groups of suburban white kids. When they stray too far away from writing what they know, as Craig Thompson did with Habibi, the results aren’t awesome. Even a work as great as Building Stories is a personal story—on a most simplistic level, it’s telling us that it’s better to have a happy marriage than lie in bed every night wondering if you should kill yourself.

I disagree with the vast majority of what Heidi says in that post…but I don’t know that a fisking would really be that productive. So, instead, I thought it might be fun to take her post as a challenge, and try to do a roundtable on indie comics in social context.

What “social context” means is a little unclear; Heidi seems to be particularly focused on issues of racism, sexism, and gender, since she’s responding specifically to the recent discussion of Jason Karns work (Heidi has all the links on her post.) I’d certainly be interested in hearing folks talk about those issues in relation to indie cartoonists, but I’d think other approaches would be useful as well. For instance, looking at comics in terms of their relationship to visual art traditions, or to literary traditions, or, for that matter, to comics traditions, seems like it would qualify. Talking about comics in relation to historical events could work too. I’m sure folks could think of other possibilities.

The term “indie comics” also seems like it’s somewhat up for grabs. We’re trying to avoid mainstream superhero titles, obviously, and genre works (manga or otherwise) seem like they should be out too. Heidi expressed interest in focusing on more recent cartoonists (i.e., not Crumb, Clowes, etc. etc.), though again that’s maybe more something to think about than a hard and fast rule.

So…anybody in? I think I’d aim for early October or thereabouts. If you’re interested, let me know in comments, and maybe mention who you might write about if you have an inkling, since I think that would be a nice way to spark discussion and generate ideas.
 

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Anya Davidson’s School Spirits, which Heidi talks about at her post.
 

The Popularity of Hate

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Over at the Beat, Heidi wished us a happy anniversary…with some caveats.

Indeed, Hooded Utilitarian is one of the most exasperating comics sites in existence—a standard of smart commentary and insight often undone by an outrageous need to get links. As always, I’ll continue to praise the good and ignore the bad.

I responded in comments:

Hey Heidi. You’ve said this before, and I don’t really get it. As far as I can tell, the best way to get links is to cover news and write about popular things. I don’t make any concerted effort to do either of those; we hardly ever cover news, and people pretty much write about whatever they like, which is sometimes popular, but more often not.

I assume that the point is that I try to get links by being contrarian…but really, as far as I can tell, that’s not an especially good strategy. The things we’ve run that were most popular were Sean and Joy’s piece reimagining the Wire as a Victorian serial, Robert Stanley Martin’s best comics poll (which wasn’t contrarian at all, pretty much), Erica Friedman’s piece about why she loves Sailor Moon… The contrarian stuff sometimes sparks interesting discussion, and is worth doing for that reason, but if I was looking for hit counts qua hit counts, the site would be very different (probably more like the Beat…not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

Anyway; thanks for mentioning our anniversary!

 
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.