Tag Archives: Johnny Ryan

Gender Spring, Gender Break

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The index to the Indie Comics vs. Context roundtable is here.
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I talked about this comic a bit in comments over here. It’s still on my mind several weeks later. It’s one of the favorite things I’ve seen by Johnny Ryan, I think. I love its rhythm; it has a merciless dream logic that has more to do with Kafka or David Lynch than with standard gag cartooning. (Which is probably why the commenters at Vice seem so thoroughly alienated.

Beyond that, and intertwined with it, I really like the way that gender in the comic is both omnipresent and divorced from individual bodies. The main character, Mills, wears a t-shirt with a picture of a vagina on it that says “Pussy Pounder University.” Mills appears to have a working class masculine job digging holes, so you could see the shirt as a kind of frat-brother marker of hyper-masculinity.

But the strip mostly works against that reading. When he has a break from his job, Mills doesn’t do manly things like drinking beer or checking sports stats; instead he straps springs onto his feet and goes bouncing off into the woods. The bizarre panel where we see him first standing with the springs has him, unnaturally tall in the foreground, juxtaposed with a television tower in the background. It semss like a parody of masculine imagery, turning Mills into a failed phallus. That’s more or less confirmed when he goes bouncing off into the woods shouting “wee!” and then immediately stumbles and bashes his head against a tree trunk.

Up to this point, we haven’t really gotten a clear view of the shirt. When we finally see that he’s wearing a vagina, he’s flat on the ground bleeding from the head. In fact, in the image, his head looks like the vagina on his shirt; the line of his mouth mirrors the curve of the text, and his tongue looks like the lips in the image. The liquid coming out of his mouth becomes a double entendre for sexual lubrication; the blood reads as menstrual blood. He isn’t a dude-bro who owns the pussy as a sign of hyper-masculinity. Rather, he is his shirt, a feminized victim of violence.

If a man can become a symbolic vagina, then it makes sense that a woman can become a symbolic phallus — which is what happens in the next panel. Just as Mills initially seems to fit into a standard male stereotype, so the women who find him seem default valley girls, grossed out by blood, shallowly distracted by fashion (“Whoa, check his rad shirt!”) But then they pick up a giant stick/penis and start thrusting it into Mills’ head/vagina while screaming “Harder! Harder!” The rape imagery is not especially subtle — and what they get from that rape is the shirt with its symbolic vagina, turning them into the bros partying with the other guys at spring break.

The structure of the strip — build-up, violence, pause, escalation of violence — imitates, or references, rape-revenge narratives. But the dislocation of gender dislocates the violence as well. Unjust violence doesn’t lead to just violence; the victim does not become the victimizer. Instead, the victim just gets attacked again, because when you’re weak people take your stuff. Femininity is still, as in rape-revenge, used as a narrative trigger for violence, but that trigger is presented self-consciously as symbolic. “Woman” is an arbitrarily assigned position; a marker that has more to do with narrative convention than it does with actual bodies or identities. The vagina on the shirt is, for that matter, no more or less a drawing than Mills or the girls who find him. Why do we see Mills as male initially, anyway? “Mills” isn’t a strongly gendered name; he’s got mid-length blonde hair. No one refers to him as “he” in the first part of the strip; we just know he’s a guy because he’s digging that hole, which is a guy thing, and the people around him have facial hair. In a narrative, gender is a convention — but a convention that can kill.

I doubt Ryan would exactly agree that this was the context of his strip. He’d probably say that he wasn’t thinking about it that hard, or that he was just following his ideas wherever they took him. Still, I don’t think that makes me wrong. The central idea here — that weird vagina shirt — seems in keeping with a lot of Ryan’s comics, where gendered body parts float free of the bodies they’re supposed to be attached to, and narratives of gendered violence are scrambled with a malevolent clumsiness. It’s body horror as failed punchline, bouncing carelessly along till you bash your brains and/or gender out in the forest. Even then, though, meaning is still drawn on you; arbitrary and inescapable, like Fort Lauderdale.

The End of Race

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If you talk about white people, you’re not talking about race. If you talk about black people, you are. This is arguably the essence of racism; black people are an aberration or a disturbance; white people are natural. Therefore, to end racism, artists should treat black and white individuals exactly the same. If art doesn’t see color, then the art isn’t racist. QED.

This is the logic that Lamar one of the co-creators of the Pixies’ video “Bagboy,” used when he defended his decision to present a narrative in which a white kid gleefully and giddily trashes a house which, at the video’s conclusion, turns out to belong to a black woman who he has trussed up in her own bedroom.

We knew we were taking some risks when we made the video. When most people see a white kid (Nik’s little brother) and a black woman (my older sister) they can’t help but think “racist” and “misogynist”. This is pretty sad.

From the beginning, when we originally thought of the concept, it was never our intention to make it about a white kid terrorizing a helpless black family. I, myself, being black have gotten to the point where I don’t automatically see color in people. It’s the same for Nik. If the character’s races were switched you’d probably have the same amount of stuff to say about the video.

It’s 2013, at what point do we stop seeing everything as racist. At what point do we stop making things a bigger deal than they are.

The problem here, as Bert Stabler points out, is that claiming color-blindness doesn’t make the rest of the world color-blind. Declaring racism over doesn’t make it so, and there isn’t really any way to show a white kid terrorizing a back woman’s home without referencing the way that white people really have, in the recent past, conducted vicious campaigns of terror against black people for daring to move into middle class homes. The video doesn’t come off as color-blind; it comes off as thoughtless, or (as Bert suggests) as cynically courting controversy. Not seeing race now can’t erase a history of racism, especially when not seeing race seems to just result in you unthinkingly mimicking that history.

Danity Kane’s Ride For You does a much better job of suggesting that race doesn’t matter, though not exactly by ignoring race.

Towards the end of the video, the five female members of the interracial group pair up with various hot guys. Those pairings are integrated; there’s a black guy/white girl couple; a white guy/black girl couple, a back guy/black girl couple, and two white guy/white girl couples. This almost surely has to be a deliberate choice; Danity Kane is not a spontaneous punk rock kind of group,and everything else on the shoot, from the multiple costume changes to the round robin vocals, certainly seems focus-grouped within an inch of its life. Someone during the making of that video decided that they wanted to present a color blind world. But to do that, they had to admit (to themselves, and I think to the audience as well) that they could tell which of their singers (and which portion of their studly male window-dressing) were black, and which were white.

Johnny Ryan’s “E.T. on the Street” also is also quietly but deliberately conscious of race in the interest of avoiding stereotypes, though the success is more mixed.
 

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Laurel Lynn Leake dismisses this, arguing “That whole ET comic is just “what if ET was a bl- I mean, urban man! He would be a total greedy sociopathic asshole, amirite?!” And there’s certainly something to that argument. At the same time, though, you can see Ryan (usually thought of as eager to offend everyone) trying quite consciously to avoid offense. The black guy at the beginning of the comic isn’t a gangsta, and he hasn’t been shot — he’s been hit by a car, and E.T. robs him, not the other way around. Along the same lines, the violent thug at the end is white, not black. And, for that matter, E.T.’s race is unclear. Is he supposed to be black? Or is he supposed to be a tourist in a black neighborhood — ignoring the misery there, and then pretending (with that backwards baseball cap) to be one of the folks he’s just callously robbed? Is the joke that E.T. is a black man and is therefore an asshole? Or is the joke that he’s a white guy pretending to be black, and is therefore an asshole?

The strip is conscious enough of race to make that reading plausible, and, I think, even probable. But it’s not conscious enough to exactly make that reading the point, nor to do anything with it. The end could perhaps suggest something like Crane’s suggestion in the Blue Hotel that believing in stereotypical narratives can make those narratives close around you and destroy you. But E.T.’s motivations are too much of a cipher, and his fate too random, to really sustain that. If the first part of the strip seems to be willing to think about and talk about race, the second just shrugs, abandoning the theme of racial tourism for standard-issue tropes of ghetto violence, sanitized by making the perpetrator a white guy. It’s significantly more careful about racial issues than that Bagboy video. But since it doesn’t seem to want to follow through on them, you do end up feeling, as with the Lamar and Nik effort, that race is here evoked mostly for the sake of controversy.

And then there’s this. (Apologies for the crappy scan.)

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As with most of Berke Breathed’s Bloom County strips, this one is embedded in a lengthy and preposterous narrative. In this case, the Bloom County characters have all gone on strike to protest the shrinking space available for comics; management has hired scab replacements. Oliver Wendell Jones, the strip’s resident child-genius who also happens to be black (and whose picture you can see off to the side in the first panel), has been replaced by a ludicrous rap stereotype.

Part of the reason this strip works better than the other examples here is a function of time. Breathed isn’t working with a 3 minute video or with an isolated gag strip. Bloom County is a daily, and we know Oliver Wendell Jones like a friend. We know him so well, in fact, that he isn’t just a racial marker, as black people too often are in pop culture. Rather, Oliver is a particular person, who, like his dad says, speaks good English and loves astronomy and occasionally crashes the world’s computer networks. Breathed has put in the time to ensure that Jones is not a caricature, and as a result the reader can fully appreciate the travesty of having him replaced by one.

So in part the strip deals effectively with race because it worked to erase race. But that work, obviously, involved seeing race in the first place; making your black character a computer genius is a decision that has meaning. And the joke in this strip, too, requires seeing race, and acknowledging the way it turns individuals into the tropes we expect to see. Even Oliver’s dad, at the en, succumbs, and breaks out into rap, complete with bad grammar. In the meantime, his “son” is up on the roof, looking at the stars, and declaring

Ah seen the moon
All white n’ pretty
Like da hind
O’ Conway Twitty.

I don’t think it’s an accident that a strip about ridiculous totemic blackness ends with a ridiculous invocation of totemic whiteness. The round fat moon hoves into the panel, made visible by both telescope and verse, reminding us, perhaps, that if we must see blackness, the least we can do is remember to see whiteness as well.
 

Jack B. on Johnny Ryan and The Appeal of Bullying

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Jack B. just left this lengthy comment on an old thread. I thought I’d highlight it here.
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This discussion interested me enough that I thought I’d try to revive it, lo these many months later.

Johnny Ryan’s comment about the bully’s perspective being more interesting than the victim’s perspective has always struck me as really insightful, especially as it comes from a guy whose work can be so dumb. There’s something kind of precious and self-pitting about art with a sweet, sensitive narrator/protagonist, whether it’s Craig Thompson in Blankets or Holden Caufield, that you don’t get when the narrator is Humbert Humbert or Alex in A Clockwork Orange (although the latter two characters are self-pitying themselves). I also agree with Ryan that Lucy is a good character—her dual role as the cause of Charlie Brown’s problems and his psychiatrist was one of the wittiest things about Peanuts. Noah, even before his excellent interview with Ryan, made the point that the strip would have been a drag if it had focused only on Charlie Brown and his melancholy, as some alt-comics Peanuts fans seem to do.

Jacob Canfield’s problems with Ryan seem to involve the victim/bully dichotomy in areas beyond art, and I think I might side with Ryan in some of those areas, too. Like a lot of left-leaning internet commentators, Jacob seems to think that “macho” is a bad thing and that straight white men should be very conscious of their privilege. But speaking as the wussiest “beta male” you could possibly imagine and as an upper-middle-class white person with a fair amount of guilt, I’m not so sure that it’s good to be like me. My experience is that self-confidence and male strength, even on the part of straight white males, is looked on favorably by almost everyone, including blacks and women, outside of left-leaning internet circles. I’m pretty sure that most black, blue-collar workers would prefer working with a confident, macho white guy than with a sensitive Caucasian who enjoys discussing his white male privilege, for example. By the way, Jacob’s line, “It makes comics critics look like macho assholes” struck me as unintentionally funny—they might look like assholes, but I doubt that they’ve ever looked macho to anyone other than Jacob.

I definitely don’t want to go too far in aesthetically favoring an “alpha” perspective over a “beta” one, though. P.J. O’Rourke once said something to the effect that Jewish American humor is pro-loser while Irish American humor is pro-winner, and he called The National Lampoon a breakthrough in that it succeeded with the latter for the first time in American pop-culture history. I don’t know if there’s anything to his history or his ethnic breakdown, as plenty of Jewish comics from Groucho on have been more aggressive than self-deprecating, but I will say that I love early Woody Allen and can’t stand what I’ve read of The National Lampoon or O’Rourke (I think I’d hate him even without the stupid right-wing politics). So I’m definitely not in the fratboy camp when it comes to humor.

And of course, when it comes to real life, siding with bullies over victims is pretty horrible. I would imagine that one of Johnny Ryan’s main influences is Howard Stern, and Ryan drew this poster of the regulars from The Howard Stern Show: http://www.flickr.com/photos/18176432@N00/990828987/in/photostream/. Those who are not familiar with Stern—or, as I prefer to call him, “Fartman”—may wonder about some of the people depicted on the poster, such as “Gary the Retard” and “Wendy the Retard.” These are actual mentally retarded people that Fartman has had on his show to make fun of; mocking disabled and generally fucked-up people is a major aspect of the show (there used to be a gigantic Wikipedia article describing this aspect in excruciating detail, but it’s been truncated into a tiny one at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wack_Pack). I seem to be alone in this, but I find it extremely disturbing that a guy who has publically picked on mentally retarded people to their faces on the air as an adult has gained Fartman’s level of mainstream acceptance. Whenever a coworker mentions liking him, I actually feel kind of queasy, as if they’re admitting that beneath a veneer of adult civility, they’re much worse than the most vicious junior-high bully you could possibly imagine. Beyond that, I really believe that the relatives of “Gary the Retard” and “Wendy the Retard” should have the legal right to murder everyone, including Johnny Ryan, who has publically fucked with their loved ones. On the other hand, I’m a big Eminem fan, and he’s made plenty of shitty jokes about Christopher Reeve and other unfortunates, so maybe I’m just a big hypocrite.

Some final thoughts on Ryan—maybe I shouldn’t have called for his murder, because I actually like his art a lot and find some of his comics extremely funny. I have to say, though, that I don’t think his overall batting average for comedy is so great. For example, I just looked through a bunch of his altered Chick tract covers (at http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts), and the vast majority of them didn’t make me laugh. However, looking through them was definitely worth it, as the ones that did make me laugh, like “The Letter” (http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts/115761), “The Contract” (http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts/115762), and one that suggests my favorite rapper will not go to Heaven (http://www.vice.com/read/johnny-ryans-chick-tracts/115796) made me laugh an awful lot. Batting average aside, he really hits a joke way out of the park every now and then.

Well, those are my thoughts. If no one finds this incredibly lengthy post worth replying to, I’m going to be extremely embarrassed.

 
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Private Dick in the Hole

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In a recent post on Philip Marlowe, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that Chandler’s misogyny is (too) intimately tied to his vulnerability, or fear therof. Coates points to the way that Marlowe turns Carmen Sternwood out of his bed while sneering out lines like “It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible.” Marlowe’s imperviousness to feminine wiles is connected both to his manliness and to his contempt for femininity.

Coates goes on to say this:

I think to understand misogyny one has to grapple with the conflict between male mythology and male biology. There is something deeply scary about the first time a young male experiences ans erection. All the excitement and hunger and throbbing that people is there. But with that comes a deep, physical longing. Whether or not that longing shall be satiated is not totally up to the male.

Erection is not a choice. It happens to men whether they like it or not. It happens to young boys in the morning whether they have dreamed about sex or not. It happens to them in the movies, in gym class, at breakfast, during sixth period Algebra. It happens in the presence of humans who they find attractive, and it happens in the presence of humans whom they claim are not attractive at all. It is provoked by memory, by perfume, by song, by laughter and by absolutely nothing at all. Erection is not merely sexual desire, but the physical manifestation of that desire.

Men hate women, therefore, because men are supposed to be in control, and their plumbing prevents that control.

I think this is perhaps a little too pat; biology-as-truth is, after all, its own mythology, and one that can (and is) also often put to misogynist ends. But putting that argument aside for the moment, I think Coates is in general correct that manliness is defined by control, and that that control is often structured in terms of control-over-biology, or the body, which is then itself always feminine, or threatening to drag one down into the feminine. Manliness is cleanliness is control is unbodiedness, so that the only real dick is the dick that is secure and private.

If Philip Marlowe read Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit, you have to think that he would, therefore, be horrified not by its violence or its sadism, but by its messy embodiment — and, therefore, by its unmanliness.
 

 
Ryan’s work is, of course, generally thought of as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of frat boy masculinity. Prison Pit is a hyberbolic, endless series of incredibly gruesome, pointless, testosterone-fueled battles with muscles and bodily fluids spurting copiously in every direction. It is as male as male can be.

And yet…while Prison Pit is certainly built out of male genre tropes, its vision of masculinity and of masculine bodies is — well, not one that Raymond Chandler would call his own, anyway. That image above, for example, shows our protagonist as his disturbingly phallic left arm oozes up and off and devours his head. Far from being a private dick, that’s a very public and very perverse act of masturbation — and one that is hardly redolent of bodily control.

This sequence, while vivid, isn’t anomalous. Bodies in Prison Pit are always gloriously messy, both in the sense of excreting-bodily-fluids-and-coming-apart-in-hideous-ways and in the sense that they are gratuitously indeterminately gendered. Thus, the three-eyed monster named Indigestible Scrotum sports not only his(?) titular spiky scrotum, but also what appears to be a vagina dentata (or whatever you’d call that.)
 

 
As this suggests, in Prison Pit, sexual organs are less markers of gender than potential offensive weaponry, whether you’re hurling monstrous abortions from your stomach cunt:
 

 
Or blasting monstrous sperm from your sperm-shooter
 

 
You could argue that turning sex to violence like this is just another manifestation of a denial of vulnerability, I guess…but, I mean, look at those images. Do those creatures look invulnerable? Or do they look like they’re insides and outsides are always already on the verge of switching places?
 

 
This is, perhaps, Marlowe’s hyperbolic anxiety come to life; sex as body-rot and degeneration; desire as a quick, brutal slide into chaos.

It’s telling, I think, that the one actual act of sex in the first four volumes is a multi-level rape. The protagonist has his body taken over by the slurge — that repulsive creature attached where his left arm used to be. The slurg-controlled body is then kidnapped by another (male? genderless? neuter?) antagonist, who fits him (it?) with a mind-control computer helmet and cyborg penis.
 

 
The mind-raped protagonist is then commanded to rape the Ladydactyl, a kind of monstrous feminine flying Pterodactyl.
 

 
The robot-on-atavistic-horror intercourse produces a giant sky cancer which tears the Ladydactyl apart. The protagonist finally regains his own brain, and declares, “That fucking sucked.” Which seems like a reasonable reaction. Rape here isn’t a way for man to exercise power over women. Rather for Ryan everybody, everywhere, is a sack of more or less constantly violated meat, to whom gender is epoxied (literally, in this sequence) as a means of more fully realizing the work of degradation.

In Prison Pit, Marlowe’s signal virtues of honor and continence are impossible. And, as a result, Marlowe’s signal failings — fear of bodies, fear of losing control, misogyny, homophobia — rise up and vomit bloody feces on themselves. Whether this underlines Chandler’s ethics or refutes them is perhaps an open question. But in any case, it’s enjoyable to imagine Philip Marlowe dropped into Ryan’s world, his private dick torn out by the roots to expose, quite publicly, the raw, red, gaping, and ambiguously gendered wound.

Frankenstein Babymen

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“From the very first, children are at one in thinking that babies must be born through the bowel; they must make their appearance like lumps of faeces.” That’s Freud from his Introductory Lectures. I found the quote in an essay by John Rieder called ” Frankenstein’s Dream Patriarchal Fantasy and the Fecal Child in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its Adaptations”. Like the title says, Rieder’s essay argues that the Frankenstein monster can be seen as a fecal child — literally, a piece of crap. Mary Shelley’s book is an elaboration and/or a critique of a patriarchal fantasy in which men dispense with women, creating fragrant, mottled life from their own blessedly demonic bowels.

Frankenstein doesn’t much like his shit baby — but that’s just another sign that he’s a weirdo. Most kids — boys and girls — like their poop. Or as Rieder explains:

When Jehovah looks at his handiwork he sees that it is good, and Freud tells us that children at the stage of development in question are far from feeling disgust at their own feces. On the contrary, they take pleasure in manipulating them and are apt to express pride and affection for these “children.”

Rieder goes on to suggest that it is normal for adults to express disgust at fecal creation — but is that really the case? Fecal children — those Frankenstein monsters — are, after all, readily analogized to that other marvel of sterile birth, artistic production. If Frankenstein’s monster is his poop, it is also his art — and who among us of whatever gender has not glowed proudly at our own glorious, smelly glob of suchness? Who has not grabbed friends and relations alike, hauled them to the glowing receptacle, lifted the lid and declaimed with pride, “Look what came out of me!”

If you are looking for gratuitously giddy anal celebration, you cannot possibly do more gratuitous nor more giddy than the amazing Axe Cop adventure, “The Ultimate Battle,” reprinted in the first Axe Cop trade. Axe Cop is a web comic phenomena drawn by artist Ethan Nicolle and written by his (then) 5-year-old brother, Malachai (or Micah.) Like most kids, Micah is a lot less chary of indulging his fecal obsessions than his adult peers, and “The Ultimate Battle” could not be much more frank in its fascination with what comes out of our bottoms. One of the comics best set-pieces involves Babyman (and yes, that’s a grown man dressed in a baby outfit), who flies by passing gas, chasing a duck which shoots exploding eggs out of its rear.
 

 
Later, Babyman and a young similarly dressed ally (Babyman Jr.?) chase a giant monster made of sentient candy who excretes tiny cars which grow into big cars and then when people try to drive away with them they explode. And, finally, a whole team of Babymen chase a giant egg with feet which poops out phones that ring and then people answer them and…well, you can probably figure out what happens next.
 

 
But if you think grown men dressed as babies dodging exploding poop is some bizarre Oedipal scatology…well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The climax of the story involves the evil Dr. Doo Doo, a giant sentient piece of poop with a gaping mouth and a monocle. When he shouts “Poooooooh!” Micah says, “instantly everyone in London has an accident in their pants.”
 

 
The turds they poop turn into evil human-sized turds armed with swords, each of which quickly murders its progenitor, setting the stage for an ultimate battle between superheroes, ninja moon warriors, and good-guy zombies on the one hand and evil sentient poop on the other.

Obviously, an ultimate battle between superheroes, ninjas, zombies and poop stands on its own merits. But the diabolically summoned/involuntarily produced sentient turds which kill their father-mothers and take their places also works as a nice analog for Micah’s own precocious, volcanically natural artifice, which revels in conquering/befouling the world all the more joyously because he’s not even trying. Even Dr. Doo Doo’s poop command seems to mirror the collaboration between the brothers Ethan. Micah, says, “pooh!” and Ethan miraculously creates pooh by the buttload.

Not everything in Axe Cop is pooh-based — but everything does have that magical sense of being hauled out of the creators’ asses. People in Micah’s world are constantly transforming and morphing from good to bad or from dinosaurs to dragons or from unicorns to dinosaurs to dragons to cops or from weird hybrid thingees to other weird hybrid thingees. This trope reaches a quintessence of preposterousness in a sequence where Lobster Man (who we learn later used to be part dog) rubs his face in zombie blood so he can turn into a zombie. Then he gets his companions to dump good zombie potion on him so that he can go undercover with the zombies and eat his evil zombie sister’s dog brain.
 

 
In a world where creation is as easy as pooping, it makes sense that each self should excrete a new self like the phoenix springing newborn from its own bowels. Reality is a mushy mass to be formed and reformed, sculpted, smeared and flung in a gloriously manipulable mass.
 

 
Which is why the artist that Micah reminds me most of is Johnny Ryan. Where Axe Cop’s drawing is cartoony and clean, though, Ryan (as the above image shows) embraces the messiness of his scatological obsessions, As I said in an earlier post:

In Prison Pit each body is a busted toilet whose stagnant water births some mangled abortion dragging its placenta over the edge of the porcelain to flop wetly on the cold tiles. Tentacles erupt from vaginas, vomit spews from sentient arms, and dripping things that should not be tear open their mothers in an orgy of violent polymorphous ichor. Black blood drips like ink off the mechanical penis of Ryan’s protagonist and then pools in scratchy pen lines, half-formed half-assed nightmares drawn on the back of a middle-schooler’s history notebook.

 

Aligning Johnny Ryan and Micah Nicolle complicates them both, I think. If Ryan is like Nicolle, then he’s not just a simple shock jock” — and if Nicolle is like Ryan, then he’s not, perhaps, quite as innocent as we like to imagine 5-year-olds as being. Frankenstein building that monster — like Mary Shelley writing that book — is both an exuberant wallowing in the glorious Godhead and an ugly stain upon the divine prerogative. If the creation of art makes us human, then we are our own foul progeny — monster Babymen sculpting monster Babymen, like diapered Frankensteins.

Subversion, Satire, and Shut the Fuck Up: Deflection and Lazy Thinking in Comics Criticism

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This is an essay about the criticism surrounding contemporary “subversive” and/or “satirical” comics, particularly those of Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. Before I get into any of that stuff, though, I want to talk about a movie that I consider to be one of the greatest satires ever committed to film. That film, of course, is RoboCop (1987).

On its surface, RoboCop is pure machismo – a power-fantasy in which an everyman protagonist is transformed into the unstoppable, deadly RoboCop by the ominously named Omni Consumer Products. In short, he loses everything, becomes invincible, kills the bad guys, and regains his humanity. Pure pulp trash: enjoyable, violent, and light. What lies below the surface, however, is a remarkably tragic story of an individual’s loss of humanity. The care with which director Paul Verhoeven depicts the sadness of RoboCop’s circumstances, and the insane, simplistic, cold war environment he lives in, is truly subversive. Couched in the brutal excesses of a violent genre movie, Verhoeven hides an unresolved and surprisingly harsh story about the loss of individual humanity.

One of my favorite elements of the film, and I know that I’m not alone in this, is a television show which the citizens of future Detroit watch devotedly. The show comes across as a Bizarro Benny Hill, in which an unattractive protagonist named Bixby Snyder revels in sight gags and sexual scenarios, gutturally shouting his ubiquitous punchline, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” Several times throughout the movie, characters are shown watching this program, and laughing as hard as they possibly could at its non-humor. It’s uncomfortable, and represents a different dimension of excess than does the obvious violence so present in the rest of the film.

Critics have suggested that RoboCop is a commentary on America’s declining industry, and Verhoeven himself has stated that he intended RoboCop specifically as a Christ metaphor. Critics have also called it a fascist movie, and some have suggested that it is highly dismissive of female characters. There is clearly complexity in the film, more than a brief plot synopsis could provide, and more than a macho recommendation could imply. It would not be difficult to recommend RoboCop with simplistic criticism – “A movie where a man’s limbs are shot off and he’s turned into a deadly revenge-robot can’t be bad!” or “Any movie where a man is hideously mutated by toxic waste as revenge for trying to kill a robot policeman can’t be boring!” Such criticisms fundamentally miss the point, though – they’re not wrong, per se, but they would be rightly criticized as shallow for not investigating the material more deeply.

This brings me to the problems I have with the criticism surrounding contemporary alt comics artists like Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. It is my opinion that there is dishonesty present in the criticism and promotion of “controversial” alt-comix, a dishonesty which not only damages the credibility of comics criticism as a whole, but leads to a hyper-defensive maintenance of the status-quo. While I single out a few critics by name in this article, it is a trend I have noticed frequently in comics criticism circles I respect. Much of my focus in this article is on criticism I have noticed in The Comics Journal, which I don’t think I’m alone in considering one of the most highly respected institutions of comics criticism today.

Jesse Pearson begins the Johnny Ryan Interview for The Comics Journal with a phrase that epitomizes the kind of criticism surrounding “subversive” cartoonists:

Ryan, over the course of his career, has acquired a significant amount of skeeved-out detractors along with an army of hardcore fans. And that’s fine. Squares wouldn’t be squares if they weren’t freaked out by what Johnny does.

This immediately established dichotomy between “fans” and “squares” is reinforced throughout the interview. In the following paragraph, Pearson suggests,

[Johnny Ryan’s comics can serve] as an acid test to see if someone is one of us or one of them. Find out where any of his fellow artists stand on Johnny’s work, and you might be able to see that artist’s own insecurities reflecting back at him or her.

In these first sentences of what is supposed to be an in-depth look at one of the more controversial cartoonists working today, the reader has learned two things. First, if you don’t like Johnny Ryan’s comics, you’re a hypersensitive square. Second, maybe the things you don’t like about Johnny Ryan’s comics are actually things you don’t like about… YOURSELF. Before the interview has even begun, Pearson is covering all of his bases. “If you disagree with anything I write from this point on,” he seems to be saying, “you are a reactionary idiot who wants to mindlessly censor anything that challenges the norm. If you agree with me, though, you’re a pretty cool guy.”

After establishing this “one of us” and “one of them” dichotomy, Pearson proposes his theory about Johnny Ryan’s satirical nature. I think it’s better for me to present the whole block of text unedited, and then deconstruct it afterwards.

Pearson writes,

I also believe that Johnny is the only true satirist at work in comics today. There is other satire—fine satire—out there. But it’s safe. Johnny is the one artist who continues to push satire into increasingly dangerous places, and that makes him a true satirist because to satirize is to tell a truth, and to tell a truth is to take a risk. Conscience and satire seem to me to be linked. Do I want to take the space to go into that much more here? Probably not. But consider that conscience is the inner voice that tells us our subjective rights and wrongs, and then consider that satire is one way to put conscience into action. Then look at Johnny’s Comic Book Holocaust series of strips and zines, in which he lampoons everything from indie heroes to classic funny-papers staples. The satire in these stories is so utterly disgusting and base, the drawings so ham-fisted and ugly, that it’s almost a satire of satire. Johnny, you see, is smarter than he’d like people to think.

When I first read Pearson’s interview with Johnny Ryan I had not read much of Johnny Ryan’s work. As a result, Pearson’s assertion that the bulk, if not all, of Ryan’s work is “satire” seemed plausible to me – the things I’d read were the parts that weren’t obviously satire, then. As such, the assertions about risk-taking and truth-telling were reasonable to me. What slowly dawned on me as I read the rest of the interview, though, was that the assertion of “truth telling” was never backed up; the context of the satire was never particularly examined The only contextualization of Ryan’s satire that Pearson offers is that it’s not “safe” – again letting the reader know that if he/she doesn’t like Ryan’s work then he/she is a wimp.

The part of that paragraph that infuriates me the most has to be the smug phrase “…it’s almost a satire of satire.” This is presumably the point at which the people who “get it” all implicitly understand exactly what Pearson means, and the squares all shit themselves in fear and disgust. It is unthinkable to me that Pearson so casually suggested that Johnny Ryan’s art is a “satire of satire” and then absolutely failed to back up that statement in any way, because the implications of that statement are staggering. Johnny Ryan comic you like? Satire. Johnny Ryan comic you don’t like as much, due to its disgusting art and content? JOKE’S ON YOU, ASSHOLE! IT’S A SATIRE OF SATIRE!

Joking aside, here’s my problem with the idea of Ryan’s work being called a “satire of satire,” or even being called “satire.” I’ll start by assuming we’re all using the conventional definition of satire here (satire is when “vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement.”) That definition seems to hold up to Pearson’s ideas about conscience and truth telling being related. So given that definition, how is Ryan’s infamous “69-11” drawing satire?

What shortcoming is being mocked by this drawing? If the figures were of George Bush and Rudy Giuliani engaged in furious 69ing I would buy the satire (their cyclical, masturbatory exploitation of national tragedy for their own ends) but as the drawing stands, I cannot see satire in it, really. And before someone says, “he’s mocking our society’s sensitivity, man!” I have to ask, is he? I get that he drew this specifically to make people mad, but if the sole end of the drawing is to make people mad, that’s not really satire, is it? Nobody’s shortcomings are being held up here, really. This is just trolling and potty humor, as far as I can tell.

But maybe that was the wrong drawing to consider. Here’s a more straightforward Ryan “satire”:

 

Alright, I can buy that there’s satire here. The problem that I have with it, like with many other Ryan cartoons, is that I don’t think it’s particularly good or interesting. Remove the shit and blood from the detainee in the chair, and you have a standard Johnny Hart or New Yorker type cartoon. With the blood and shit, though, what’s added to this drawing? The viewer isn’t confronted with the horror of a torture chamber, particularly – Ryan clearly gets off on drawing the gore, and everything is abstracted past the point of losing its impact. Pearson talks about the anger behind the drawing, but honestly that doesn’t come through to me either. Ryan’s style is terminally cold, and his figures so generic and disposable that the reader is hardly motivated to care about them.

Given my feelings about this drawing’s failure as satire, it’s worth considering whether it is “satire of satire.” Is this a parody of Hart or the New Yorker cartoonist who would draw a clean, sanitized torture scene, and attach a stupid punchline without considering the humanity of real torture victims? It’s a valid question, and I am going to again say, no. What this drawing lacks, that a good “satire of satire” would have, is context. If Ryan was engaging in a Colbert-type mock identity, like The Onion’s cartoonist does, that would be context. If a character in one of Ryan’s comics misguidedly produced this cartoon, that would be context. What does context add to satire? Simply, context adds the target of derision necessary for satire. “Too Much Information” in the context of The Onion becomes a critique specifically of hack cartoonists. I could actually see The Onion publishing 69-11 (it’s not like they don’t publish intentionally controversial artwork), but they might publish it under an “alternative cartoonist” alter ego, which would provide context. Effective satires, like Black Doctor or Colbert or All in the Family or California Uber Alles or I’d Buy That for a Dollar! are effective due to their contexts.

Johnny Ryan’s saitre, if you can call it that, seems to be generally proving a single point: “Our values and beliefs about the world are constructions!” So, for example, offense about 9-11? It’s constructed, man! Political correctness? Where’d that come from? And why does everyone get so offended when I mock rape victims? Johnny Ryan says,

If I come up with an idea that makes me think, “This is going to fucking piss people off,” it excites me. I don’t know what it is, but irritating people is fun. [laughs] It’s fun to hit those targets that are sacred or that are so innocent. People are like, “Why are you picking on this person?” … There are certain people that I feel like they get it, and mostly it’s guys that get it. But there are exceptions. There are women that get it. I find it surprising that some people are so sensitive.

If that’s the satire everyone is so crazy about, I again have to say that it’s not good or effective satire. The point of satire is not pissing people off solely to piss them off, it’s to do it to prove a larger point, and there really doesn’t seem to be one beyond “our society is too sensitive!”

Without the context necessary for me to call Johnny Ryan’s cartoons “satire,” what are they? You’re left with lowbrow humor and throwaway plots, which aren’t necessarily a bad thing. It reads like The Beano, but with poop jokes! Why do people constantly insist on calling it “satire” anyway?

Oh, right. Because without “satire,” Johnny Ryan’s cartoons come across as disgustingly racist,

Misogynistic and violent against women,

 

And a whole lot in-between.

“Satire,” it turns out, has been adopted as the perfect defense against people who take issue with the content of Ryan’s comics. Of course, it could be a legitimate defense if it were backed up in any way. I have respect for well-composed arguments that make a legitimate effort to show the satire in something. Here’s what I don’t have respect for: “People need to chill out, it’s satire and it’s just too much fun to really take offense!”

I’m not asking for anything more than a better defense of the word “satire” when used to describe Ryan’s comics, and an openness to actual critical discussion about them. Right now, it seems mostly like people work backwards when reviewing his comics. “Here’s a Johnny Ryan cartoon I think is funny, but it’s racist. Johnny Ryan cartoons aren’t racist, so it must be satire!” “Here’s a Johnny Ryan cartoon that I don’t understand. It’s not really satire, but Johnny Ryan isn’t a bad cartoonist, so it must be a satire of satire!” Instead of always needing to be part of the ‘cool crowd’ who ‘gets it,’ it should be ok to ask critical questions. And when interviewing Johnny Ryan, maybe it would be better to be a bit critical then to have this infuriating exchange:

When is it ok to start making jokes about something atrocious like 9-11?
Well if it didn’t happen to me, then we can do it right away. [laughs]
I think I agree.

“I think I agree.” Wonderful. Way to “get it.”

Now, I’m not getting upset over this in a vacuum, and I don’t want to direct all of my frustration towards poor Jesse Pearson. Look at almost any review of Ryan’s books, and you’ll find someone calling his satire a triumph, and his comics hilarious. Hilarious is a matter of personal taste – just because I find Ryan’s comics excruciatingly boring doesn’t mean everyone should, and I can’t begrudge people for enjoying things I don’t. What I don’t care for is the aggressive assertion that I should find Ryan’s cartoons hilarious or fuck right off. And I especially don’t care for it when, rather than being told to fuck off by anonymous google reviews, I’m told to fuck off by The Comics Journal and other cartoonists who should know better.

“It’s hilarious, fuck you” isn’t a sentiment limited to Johnny Ryan’s comics. Matt Seneca’s interview with Benjamin Marra for The Comics Journal and the subsequent commentary that arose from it again fall into this trap of assertion. Throughout his review Seneca blends assertions of satire and hilarity with the other overwhelmingly common trend in alt-comix criticism, which centers around a type of hyper-congratulatory mock masculinity. From Seneca’s opening paragraph:

Once you meet the artist behind the gloriously pulpy action-crime pamphlets published by Traditional Comics, you wonder how you ever felt you understood his work before. Benjamin Marra’s gregarious, genuine, and permanently enthusiastic personality has become inextricable from his art for me. In an alternative-comics milieu which prizes creations that foreground their creators’ deepest neuroses, comics like Night Business, Gangsta Rap Posse, and Lincoln Washington are the antidote we never realized we needed: brash expressions of unfettered Americana and masculinity, an earlier breed of comic-book storytelling reincarnated to take advantage of the modern medium’s disdain for content restrictions. Ben’s comics are explosive orgies of blood and sex and fire, but the hand behind them is probably the surest in the game at the moment, the product of a rigorous art-school education that pulls inspiration from the chapels of pre-Renaissance painting and highbrow modern art as well as the trash bins of comics history.

Seneca’s first sentence comes across as wildly defensive to me. “You think Marra makes racist comics?” it asks, “well your opinions are invalid because I’ve met him, and wow, he’s such a good guy.” What happened to the death of the author? This problem exists in the Johnny Ryan interview as well (and any time any cartoonist is criticized harshly, it seems like) – “Come on, guys! Cartoonist X is so nice, why do you have to attack him/her?” I’ll put my feelings towards it this way: if a reader has to know your life story, your intent, and how nice a person you are in order not to dislike or “misinterpret” your story, you have failed as a storyteller.

Back to the opening paragraph! Seneca goes on to hit the usual target – the universally hated, whiny, autobio comic – and informs us that Marra’s comics are the antidote we never knew we needed, a callback to pre-comics code pulp and violence! OK! Great! And what do these comics look like?

 

Well, it looks to me like gratuitous, almost fetishistic violence against women, and some horrible racial stereotyping! Marra says,

Comics should embrace the idea of being exploitation. Low level, gutter-trash entertainment. That’s what I was trying to make with Night Business. If you’re trying to make a gritty comic, have fun making it as gritty as possible. As nasty and gory and sexy and filled with the most base human emotions as possible. Don’t try and make it reflect come (sic) kind of reality, like they do in these superhero books.

Alright, so Marra, by his own stated purpose, is just trying to make comics that will be fun and fucked up. No sign of satire, really, especially when he says, “Night Business was all about power, all about revenge. The main characters don’t have any kind of doubt … I want [to be the fantasy of what I could possibly be in my dreams, you know?” That’s fine, and attaches a kind of earnest sincerity I appreciate.

That said, it does open Marra up to some obvious criticisms. Why do you consider violence against women “fun?” Why do you think comics are a solely exploitative medium? Why do you defend your racially charged comics as ironic, but stand behind your hyper-macho white-people comics as sincere?

Instead we get this question:

SENECA: All right, so then you came out with the first issue of Gangsta Rap Posse. Did you conceive of that, and your Lincoln Washington comic too, as highly racialized comics from the beginning, or did you just want to do fun riffs on black culture and N.W.A.?

Alright, Seneca. That’s trying too fucking hard to be forgiving. What, may I ask, is the difference between a “highly racialized comic” and “fun riffs on black culture” when we’re talking about Benjamin “low level, gutter-trash entertainment” Marra?

Marra’s answer is almost as infuriating as the question itself. He attributes his wanting “to do an N.W.A. fun thing,” to a VH1 Behind the music documentary he and his friends watched, which is possibly the least personal reason to do anything. The really irritating part comes when Marra sets the tone for the rest of the interview by preemptively making excuses for why he’s allowed to be racially problematic.

I don’t think you can really do [comics about gangster rap] without it being really racial, because that (sic) what it’s about. And I knew if I was gonna do it — it’s the same lesson I learned as a developing artist, you just can’t censor yourself in any way, especially when it comes to that kind of material. I just knew I had to do it as honestly and as… it’s weird to say respectful of the material, but that content demands that kind of outrageousness. I felt like if I had done anything different it would have been weak and dishonest and insincere. … Also, if I have these story ideas, I can’t censor myself or else I won’t do them, because I won’t think that it serves the artwork in the end if I try to water it down based on this illusion of how I think people will react. That’s not a viable gauge to base decisions on, because it’s not real. It’s only real after. I can’t imagine what people are going to say, I just have to do it and see what happens. To me it’s about serving the work, and gangsta rap is gangsta rap. There’s nothing that’s in the comics, I think, that isn’t so outrageous that it’s not already in the lyrics.

The concept that Marra can believe a work of art is racist (or at least racially problematic) but that his “respectful” riffs are somehow absolved of all responsibility or criticism is gross. The idea that he can’t censor “in any way” is bullshit – as Nate Atkinson pointed out in his earlier HU piece, it’s intellectually lazy to claim no responsibility for one’s actions while simultaneously thinking critically about how to lay out a story. What, a reader might wonder, is his goal with these stories? Why does he make such intentionally inflammatory comics?

It goes back to how I think about comics and what I think they should to. I was on a panel recently with Johnny Ryan and we were talking about controversial comics, horrific things in comics. Someone asked what he thinks about comics these days, don’t you think they go too far… I can’t remember exactly, but his response was really great, he said he didn’t think comics go far enough. Because nobody pays attention to us anyway! The only way that anybody would pay attention to comics is if they actually had a story that people wanted to talk about. But they don’t! I mean, people in the comics community wanna talk about them, but it’s very rare that anyone else does. At least, that’s my perspective.

The lack of logic on display here is horrifying to me. Let me get this straight, Marra and Ryan don’t think comics get enough attention. They’re marginalized. So, their plan to get people to pay attention to comics is to make the most alienating niche comics possible? How does that make any sense? Even if their goal was accomplished, and Ryan or Marra’s comics achieved Piss Christ-level notoriety, don’t they think that would hurt alt-comix in the long run?

It’s not a question we’ll ever get an answer to, because Seneca doesn’t want to be a buzzkill. Instead we are treated to increasingly desperate rationalization from Marra, increasingly dubious claims that he’s really not responsible for anything he says or does. Marra says,

Gangsta Rap Posse is underground comics, it’s not on a lot of people’s radar, but the things is, I’ve never gotten anything but a positive reaction to it. I’m sure if it was distributed to a much wider audience it would get a really negative response, if people took it seriously — not as satire, not as a comment on myself as a white suburban artist making a comment on black urban culture from a specific time period. I think people might react negatively.

Ah! So there is our satire. Gangsta Rap Posse is a comment on Marra as a white, suburban artist making a comic on black urban culture from a specific time period. It’s satire of satire! It’s satire of satire of satire! As long as I’m not a racist, ok? When I make comics about white people, they’re earnest and cool power fantasies, and when I make comics about black people that read almost the same, but have the N-word a lot, those are satires. It’s OBVIOUS.

Sorry, do I sound bitter? Maybe it’s because after Marra said that, Seneca didn’t call him out. Seneca, in fact, asserted that Marra is “doing it from a positive place,” as if that means anything. Maybe it’s because Darryl Ayo wrote maybe the mildest condemnation of Marra I could imagine, and was dismissively mocked on The Comics Journal’s site in response. Maybe it’s because pretty much every criticism of Marra and Ryan has been met with the statement that people need to learn to take a joke.

What do I want? I want Benjamin Marra to own up to the fact that he has created comics that could be viewed as racially problematic. Just own it. And I want Johnny Ryan fans, and Benjamin Marra fans to own it, too. They don’t have to stop reading Johnny Ryan, they don’t have to stop reading Benjamin Marra, they don’t have to stop consuming media that I consider racist or misogynistic or homophobic. They just have to own it. “Yes, I like comics that I’m able to enjoy from a position of privilege.” “Yes, I think these comics centered around extreme violence against women and children are hilarious.” Don’t bullshit me with your claims of satire until you’re able to back them up, because satire isn’t a magic word that makes critical thinking disappear.

Ultimately, I think criticism along these lines hurts comics. It makes comics critics look like macho assholes, and it gives lazy artists an excuse to make “shocking” comics that are as intentionally hurtful as possible without any critical thinking. I bought both issues of Suspect Device, recently, after reading KC Green’s submission, and I was thoroughly disappointed. Those slim volumes contained simultaneously some of the most revolting and boring comics I’ve ever read. And it’s our fault, everyone’s fault, for continuously reinforcing the idea that political correctness must be not only avoided, but willfully destroyed, that the uglier and grosser and more shocking you can make something the more brilliant it is. Ultimately, we’re going to end up with a lot of really boring comics. Look, it’s ok to get excited that Al Jaffee likes Johnny Ryan’s comics, but think about it – Ryan’s comics are pretty much Al Jaffee comics with a little shit and semen sprinkled in. I’d rather see something new.

It’s important to reiterate that I don’t think Johnny Ryan, Benjamin Marra, or any other artists should stop making controversial or “edgy” comics. I believe they have every right to make comics, and don’t think their comics should be banned or censored. I also believe, however, that any reader of their comics is entitled to a response. In my introductory paragraphs I made a lot of assertions about RoboCop, and it would be entirely within another reader or critic’s rights to call me out on any of them. And hell, I’ve written sloppily and told stupid jokes in my time, and it is anyone’s right to call me on that. That’s how good criticism functions – when it’s part of a larger conversation, when readers don’t simply accept sweeping statements bluntly presented as capital F “Facts,” and authors are open to the possibility that they aren’t as clever as they think they are.

When Marra treats black culture as a playground he can detachedly plunder at will, or when Johnny Ryan jokes about ice cream being referred to by martians as “nigger shit,” it doesn’t take a critic to point out that it could be problematic. When Johnny ryan’s punchlines revolve around women being violently raped, and Marra devotes an entire page to lush and detailed drawings of a woman being slashed by an attacker with a knife, it doesn’t take a “hyper-sensitive” reader to want to delve deeper into the narrative and/or contextual motivations of the author. What happens, though, is that a reader or critic raises the question, “is it actually funny?” or “why is this satire?” and is shut down quickly and brutally by the greater comics community. This needs to stop. We’re better than this, and I thought we were smarter than this. If we’re going to be taken seriously, we need to take comics seriously and stop excusing lazy and hurtful thinking.