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Boobs Pooter versus Bertie Wooster

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Compare and Contrast Cage-Match to the Death: Joltin’ Johnny Ryan and PG “Wehrmacht” Wodehouse

Ten Rounds!

1. Both men are humourists (duh).*

2. Both have mainly made their living from serialising their work, a standard career-path for humourists in their respective times and markets.

3. Although known primarily for their work for adults, both artists have also produced work for children.

Wodehouse started his career writing allegedly comical stories about various misadventures at boys’ schools — specifically, the kind of not-quite-Eton public school that many of the characters in his later grown-up books would have attended, the kind of school where the upper-classmen have “fags” (younger students who perform menial domestic duties for them, like cooking and cleaning), where in summer the students care only about cricket (rugby in winter), where one student is always trying to cadge a fiver off another since he’s already spent his own allowance for the term betting Smythe that he couldn’t balance three copies of Liddell and Scott on his head while singing “I Do Like To Be Beside the Sea-Side”,** and where the Classics Masters have an imperious eye and brook none of the nonsense that inevitably arises. Wodehouse’s early work is for completists only and, even for them, it’s a struggle. He certainly hadn’t developed his wit in those early years; indeed, it would take more than another decade of writing grown-up humour for Wodehouse to start being even routinely amusing, let alone bust-a-gut LOL-worthy. As far as I know, he wrote specifically for children only at the start of his career; his juvenilia being thus being restricted to, well, his own juvenilia.

Ryan, on the other hand: if he’d written that last paragraph, he would have already made a dozen jokes about “fags” that would certainly not be considered suitable for the eyes of children, at least not by any reputable publisher. Nonetheless, Ryan has drawn gags for the now-defunct Nickelodeon Magazine (nearly every single issue, according to Wikipedia), MAD Magazine, and other kid-oriented outlets. It’s not as outlandishly unlikely as you might first think: just take out all the gags about the Holocaust, the KKK, AIDS, hookers — okay, so maybe it is a bit of stretch. But Ryan is first among his peers in plumbing the lower depths of scatological humour, and that sensibility translates well to kids’ humour. You just get rid of any jokes about “adult themes” like the Holocaust, and replace all the references to dicks and pussies and fucking and shit and piss and all that with references to boogers and farts and spew and, well, you’ve just designed yourself the perfect engine for making kids laugh, the very Platonic Form of What Makes Kids Laugh.

Which, I guess, in a way means that Socrates, having escaped from Plato’s Cave to contemplate the Forms themselves, was contemplating not just the Form of Beauty or the Form of the Good, but also the Form of A Unicorn Dressed in Farts Eating A Booger Pizza.

4. Both men work in a more or less blatantly unrealistic fantasy-world.

Wodehouse’s work is not overtly fantastic — there’s no unicorns riding around in Blandings Castle, not even a unicorn dressed in farts. But Wodehouse’s world is almost as far removed from reality: his characters have no more real connection to the greater world than the characters in Seinfeld. When the plot demands it, one character will have to work for a living, but only as the plot demands it. No one dies in Wodehouse, except offstage and generally some time in the past. Bertie Wooster, for instance, is an orphan but his parents appear to be long dead and of little concern to anyone. There are no serious problems for anyone, no real heartbreak or emotional turmoil or physical disability. When, in reading one of his many, many, many books, I came across a character who had not only served in the First World War but whose service was actually a plot-point, my monocle popped out and my wife clutched at her pearls — this sort of thing, essentially, does not happen in the world of Wodehouse. Even if we grant that Wodehouse’s world is, strictly speaking, a realistic one in the sense that there’s no magic qua magic, we can at least say that his world is not a naturalistic one.

Ryan’s world is much more overtly unrealistic, a world with very different physical laws than our own. Boobs Pooter shoots himself and becomes a ghost; he then invades the body of a woman, and fills her mouth with all-too-unghostly cum and then her breasts with shit. Aliens shoot tentacles down from the sky that enact hideous bodily transformations on humans. A missile-rocket visits a normal suburban family to demand a threeway with the pater and materfamilias — which he gets. A nurse makes a rope out of faeces, which she uses to swing around, hanging from the ceiling, like “Spiderman Woman”. Characters die in one strip to reappear in the next one along. Ryan’s world is the world of cartoons, where all the physical laws of our world always apply, except when it’s funnier for them not to.

Ryan, to be sure, does have some strips without Spiderman shit-rope, masturbating ghosts or even farting unicorns — strips which break no laws of nature; but even those tend to be non-naturalistic. For example, there’s a strip where Loady McGee tricks Sinus O’Gynus into thinking that the hot new look for the season is to glue a kid onto the end of your dick

— by the way, federales, please do not arrest me —

but, actually, Loady is just using a midget actor to trick Sinus. Now, nothing there violates the laws of physics, say, so it “could happen” (philosophers would say that it’s nomologically possible) — but, of course, even if the world could work like that, it doesn’t. I can’t think, offhand, of too many Ryan strips that feature people behaving “plausibly”, in a way that someone might actually behave in the real world. Certainly there are some: for instance a bit in the Jokepocalypse where one paramedic laughs at the other one for having hurt feelings, and the all-time classic 100% Anal Rape — where the whole gag is basically Ryan’s deadpan depiction of the victim’s post-event trauma — but this is more the exception than the rule. Ryan isn’t really interested in making a naturalistic or even realistic strip, not when there’s a (if not strictly unrealistic, then at least highly implausible) fart joke to be made.

5. Each has a very different sense of corporeality.

Wodehouse’s characters might as well not have bodies. They like their food, certainly — a particularly skilled chef plays an important role in several of the Wooster novels. And they occasionally get food poisoning, or sunburn, or a cold, or whatnot, and older secondary characters might complain about aches and pains, but only as the plot demands it. They certainly don’t need to shit, and they don’t need to piss, and above all they have no sexual activities whatsoever. Indeed, they appear to have no sexual desires at all, or even sexual organs for that matter. The idea of, say, Lord Emsworth jerking off is almost literally inconceivable. It is as though someone were to try to describe to you the letter “h” having sex with the number 57 — one feels that something must have gone seriously awry somewhere in his understanding, or his grasp of the English language; he has made a sort of category mistake.

Ryan, of course, would quite happily draw the letter “h” having sex with the number 57, but only if he could also draw Hitler licking the resultant creampie.

(Look it up, kids)

(Hey, speaking of not getting myself arrested: if there are any kids reading this, Jesus Christ, go tell your parents not to let you read this post)

6. Both men get a lot of humour from parodying the banality of their contemporary culture, contemporary narrative art in particular.

Wodehouse is nonspecific in his parody, his targets not so much individual artists and their work so much as general styles — the cliche of sentimental novels, mostly, but sometimes mystery novels or Hollywood gangster movies and the like.

Ryan goes personal; indeed, right for the personal jugular. He abridges Craig Thompson’s much-praised Blankets to three panels: boy meets girl, boy is reminded of “awesome piss-fight” with brother, boy breaks up with girl. [NB: this is actually a pretty accurate summary of the book]. Shitzo taunts Ivan Brunetti to just go ahead and kill himself already. Art Spiegelman’s father owns up that he was never in a concentration camp, and the numbers on his arm are just lotto numbers that have never been washed off. R. Crumb narrates a slideshow for his comics adaptation of The Book of Genesis: “uh…and here you see another drawing of Jews with big beards…wearing robes…” [NB: this is also a pretty accurate summary]; scientists fill a rocket with “liquid who gives a shit!” and blow up Crumb and his audience. And so on.

Cartoonists ribbing other cartoonists is nothing new, of course. Witness e.g. Wally Wood’s loving pastiche of newspaper strips in MAD, or Al Capp’s Dick Tracy parody, Fearless Fosdick. There’s probably some cave out there somewhere, as yet undiscovered by archaeology, where some neolithic cartoonist painted bison and hunters in way that totally zinged some other neolithic cartoonist’s painting of bison and hunters.

But Ryan’s parodies, potshots and piss-takes feel different from this. They’re cruel, vicious, bilious — and frequently very, very funny. Perhaps his most vicious swipe at his fellow cartoonists — that is, if you don’t count the already mentioned strip where he encourages the morbidly depressed Brunetti to follow through on the extended suicide note that was Schizo; or his unauthorized sequel to Paying For It, in which Chester Brown dresses up as a “whore” and is beaten, maimed and sexually assaulted, but still comes out of the experience thinking “OMG! Prostitution 4 Life!” — other than these most vicious swipes, and probably a couple of dozen other most vicious swipes, his most most vicious swipe is a strip called The Day The New Yorker Came to Town. In this strip, a take-down of the literary pretensions of art-comix-ers, Art Spiegelman cuts off his own nose to give the New Yorker a blowjob, R. Crumb sticks his adam’s apple up the New Yorker’s arse, Chris Ware gives the New Yorker a “tit-fuck” with his “brain-balls”, Seth (who, earlier in the strip, had pissed his pants at the prospect of a visit from the New Yorker) and Adrian Tomine snack on the New Yorker’s nuts, and poor old Ivan Brunetti, too ugly for the New Yorker, has to settle for sucking off a book of New Yorker dog cartoons.

Now that’s what I call comedy.

8. The main similarity between them is that they were incredibly prolific, with a similar, but not quite identical, effect on the quality of their work.

As it says in the bio at the start of so many of my copies of Wodehouse books, he wrote over 90 books in his life, as well as various plays and musical comedies. I’ve read somewhere between 50 and 60 of them (I’ve lost track, myself).

Ryan has produced hundreds upon hundreds of pages of comics. At times during the 00s, he was simultaneously drawing Blecky Yuckerella — a weekly strip for the “alternative press”, contributing gag cartoons to kids’ magazines, creating his own one-man anthology Angry Youth Comix, and churning out a one-page gag strip on the web each and every week. These last strips seem to have been entirely improvised; they’re often just one non-sequitur after another, as if the result of a game of exquisite corpse played by a gang of toilet-minded imbeciles with Tourette’s syndrome.

Because there’s so damned much of it, a lot of the art created by Johnny Ryan or PG Wodehouse is not very good. Much of it is hackwork. To be sure, due to Ryan’s peculiar sensibilities, his hackwork looks different from what other hacks might produce; but once you’ve seen a dozen vaginas spewing out leprechaun-turds covered in Holocaust-juice, you’ve seen them all. Much of Ryan’s and Wodehouse’s work is not worth reading at all, not even by connoisseurs and devotees.

But, both men, when they’re on, are among the funniest in their chosen medium. I came very close to including Take A Joke, the final collection of Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix (plus miscellanea), in my Top Ten for the Hooded Utilitarian poll — there’s an awful lot of jokes that miss in there, but Ryan has learned the valuable lesson that, if you throw enough of them out there, some of them are bound to hit. And when Ryan hits, he hits hard.

The difference between their prolificity (???) is that Wodehouse is much more consistent. Most of Wodehouse’s books from the mid-1920s on are pretty solid; even when a particular book isn’t hysterically funny, it can be relied on for a couple of amusing bons mots on every page. It’s mostly his early work that is consistently mediocre.

Ryan, on the other hand, is all over the shop. Take A Joke alternates between some of the best humour strips I’ve ever read — e.g. Home Early, The Day the New Yorker Came to Town, 100% Anal Rape, the ending to Graveyard Goofs — and lame button-pushing non sequiturs, like the multi-gag pages originally drawn for Vice.

9. Because they are so prolific, both artists exploit the combinatorial possibilities of rearrangements and variations over just a few basic elements. It would be easy enough to program a random generator to create “new” work by Ryan and Wodehouse by using a handful of variables.

For Wodehouse, the key elements are setting, plot and character. The setting will be [a country manor in a small English village or, much less often, a trans-Atlantic liner/a sea-side resort/New York]; the plot will involve one character who [wants to/doesn’t want to] marry another and who can only do this by stealing [a valuable antique/an incriminating manuscript/a pig], but in their way stands [a jealous suitor/an incognito detective/a rival thief/a hostile prospective father-in-law]; other characters will include [an imperious aunt/a nosy policeman/someone, anyone, in every book, in some kind of disguise/a mischievous but creative interloper who ultimately saves the day with an ingenious scheme].

For Ryan, the variables are: pudenda, impolite bodily functions, non-missionary sex acts, various hot-button topics (9/11, racism, rape…), and a banal or incongruous context. Just throw these together willy-nilly and you’ve got the premise for a Ryan strip, or a one-panel gag, or at least the ending to an improvised strip: a blind date who is half-man/half-shit! Hitler-piss, the only son of Christ! Erotic art-collecting squirrel! Captain America’s juicy pussy, better than Atlantis pussy! Joe Sacco interviewing his own balls about the smell of his farts! God’s giant cock shitting on Louis Riel! Harvey Pekar’s ball cancer running out on him because he and his “fucking friends and […] fucking comics are so boring that [ball cancer] just can’t take it any more!” [NB: this, too, is pretty accurate…] Luba’s haemorrhoid punching a Mexican in the face! A mountaineer riding an off-road tampon! The US President imposing a new tax on baby rim-jobs! A woman so turned on by a passer-by in a shit-wig that she begs him to “do [her] in the butt right now, right here on the sidewalk!!”, but the guy has to go glue his dick back on, at Ye Olde Dick-Glue Shoppe! A giant statue of The Cleveland Steamer! ” Sweet Chubby” Cheeks and Li’l Bloody’s Silly Putty, “made from 100% real homosexual corpse scrotums! So you know it’s good!” A woman indignantly defending her right to breastfeed her beaver as “the most beautiful & natural thing a woman can do!” Martians that love nigger shit, faggot ass and gook splooge (which turn out to be Martian words for, respectively, ice cream, nuts and hot fudge)! Sherlock McRape investigating the strange case of a woman hit in the belly by a jar of jelly while watching Hitler’s robonic testicloids on the TV news! A man on a pogo stick bouncing from vagina to vagina! An “awesome new game” called “Mommy, my faggot has diarrhea!” A Ku-Klux-Klansman stripper jumping out of a wedding cake at a KKK wedding! A man who wakes up married to Retarded Hitler, who in turn goes nuts when offered grape juice because, naturally, he wants to “Exterminate the juice!”. The award ceremony for the 2005 COBBY Funniest Baby-Boner-in-the-Ear Gag of the Year Award! Hopey Glass strumming on Maggie Chascarillo’s electric asshole with her tongue!

You get the picture.

Using a simple structure to generate indefinitely many gags is one thing Wodehouse and Ryan also have in common with another highly-prolific humourist: John Stanley. Stanley created or co-created several thousand pages of Little Lulu and Tubby strips, not to mention hundreds of pages of other comics, and he too worked a million variations off a few basic themes: Lulu tries to join the boys’ gang, Lulu outsmarts Tubby with a dose of his own medicine, Lulu tells Alvin a story about that ol’ Witch Hazel, Tubby tries to impress Gloria and outdo Wilbur van Snobbe… If you want to churn out comedy by the barrel, this is evidently the way to do it.

10. PG Wodehouse is the pinnacle of English-language comedy — his musical dialogue, precision-tuned farce, and above all his inversions and manipulations and play with language and cliche.

But Wodehouse never drew a parody of Marvel Super-Villain Team-Up starring the Red Skull and Art Spiegelman. Advantage: Johnny Ryan.

***

Final Score: Tie

* For this piece, I’ve passed over Ryan’s more recent work, in which he often turns away from humour into straightforward horror or action. To talk about that material would be another post altogether.

** Self-indulgent autobiographical note: the only thing I got out of reading Bryan Talbot’s excruciatingly boring Alice in Sunderland was learning that the Liddell of Liddell and Scott, that faithful companion of my youth, was the father of Alice Liddell aka Alice in Wonderland. Small world.

Image attribution:

Boobs Pooter sketch, Johnny Ryan at Comic Art Collective

Photo of Ian Carmichael as Bertie Wooster, at Hot Guys in Period Costume

Who Watches the Watchers of Before Watchmen?

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Who's the smartest man in the world now?

So: Thursday 7 June 2012, a day which will live in infamy.

I’m not going to go into why Before Watchmen is an all-round immoral “product”, why the *cough* artists involved are sell-outs and scabs, and why those who buy it are endorsing and enabling exploitation. Others have made that case better than I could — I particularly agree with most of what Noah says here.

And, yes, I do agree with that, in spite of my — admittedly rather dopey, it even says as much in the title — earlier post here, where I detailed in tedious detailly detail just how extensively Alan Moore’s own career has relied on the exploitation of other people’s characters, often in ways that the original creators would find abhorrent. My point there wasn’t exactly a tu quoque — i.e. that if it’s okay for Moore to do it, then it’s okay for Dan Didio and his homies to do it too. My point was that — money aside, and that’s a big thing to put aside — Moore has harmed the interests of (e.g.) Lewis Carroll just as much as Didio et al. are harming the interests of Moore. It doesn’t hurt Lewis Carroll — again, money aside — any less just because he’s dead.

This is because I hold the philosophical view (prima facie very counter-intuitive) that the dead have interests just as much as the living, and that we can harm them or benefit them in similar ways that we can harm or benefit the living. Weird, right? But that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong for Moore to fuck over Carroll, or that it’s okay for Didio to fuck over Moore, because ceteris ain’t paribus here. There’s a benefit to society from letting creators mess with the creations of others, but there’s also a benefit from postponing such messing in favour of some length of copyright. So even though Moore has done Carroll wrong, what he’s done is nevertheless morally okay because that harm is outweighed by a greater good. And contrariwise for what DC is doing now.

Which more or less chimes with what Noah’s said.

But to the extent that my post may have contributed to anyone’s impression, in even the slightest way (I have no illusions about the extent of my online persuasive powers), that Before Watchmen is morally acceptable, then mea honest and sincere culpa.

Now, all that said, I want to move on to a much more discomfiting thought. At least, it discomfited me. And this is directed at all of us who have taken the moral high ground on this “package” and exciting new “development” of the “property”, so other people like Noah, Tom Spurgeon, Dan Nadel, Sean T. Collins, Abhay Khosla, Chris Mautner, J. Caleb Mozzocco, Tucker Stone, et al.. You know who we are.

Um, we know who you are?

Eh, whatever. Anyway, here’s the thought: how much of our moral disdain is due to the fact that we have 99.9% certainty that Before Watchmen is going, as Socrates might have put it, to suck dead dogs’ balls?

Let’s look into our hearts here: hasn’t DC made it incredibly easy forus conscientious objectors to conscientiously object because, come on. J. Michael Straczynski and Darwyn Cooke? Shit, DC, why don’t you make it really tempting for us and chuck in Brian Michael Bendis and Jim fucking Lee? Of all the *cough* artists involved, Brian Azzarello and Jae Lee are the only ones I’d personally piss on if they were on fire; many of the rest of them I’d only piss on if they weren’t on fire.

Not Dan Didio, though. He seems like the kind of guy who’d be into that.

Let’s imagine an alternate universe where the “talent” involved was actually talented. Let’s imagine that, instead of Andy Kubert and JMS, the line-up consisted of Chris Ware, Jim Woodring, Lewis Trondheim and Junko Mizuno. Or Anders Nilsen, James Stokoe, Los Bros, Jason, and Naoki Urasawa. Or a young-alt-star-all-star line-up, drawing six hundred pages of nothing but hardcore yaoi fucking, Dr Manhattan as top and Rorschach as bottom: Johnny Negron! Lisa Hanawalt! Michael de Forge!

Or whoever floats your boat. The particular names don’t matter, what matters is that we imagine a line-up of artists who are actually, you know, good and who would almost certainly produce something that’s actually, you know, good.

In the real world, with the line-up we’ve in reality got, there’s essentially zero chance that Before Watchmen will be as good as Watchmen. Hell, there’s essentially zero chance that Before Watchmen will be as good as The First American.

But imagine — just imagine — that it was probably going to be good. Maybe even great. How loud would our denunciations be then? How many of us would still boycott?

Yeah, lots of us would would still denunciate, lots of us would still cott the boys. But, let’s be painfully honest, lots of us would be slinking off to the LCS to buy it, put it in a brown paper bag please or if you don’t have a brown paper bag could you please hide it in the covers of Pee Soup um I’m buying that for my friend

Uh his name’s Dan.

In other words: while we’re all basking in the warmth of our moral outrage — and I’m there basking too, man, that one place in the sand where there’s just one set of footsteps and it looks like I just nicked off to do my own thing? that’s where I stopped to carry you I LOVE YOU GAIZ!!! — while we’re all there basking, let’s also take a reality check. The reason it’s so easy for us to think DC management are arseholes for publishing Before Watchmen, the reason it’s so easy to think the *cough* artists are arseholes for making it, and the reason it’s so easy to think the readers are arseholes for buying it — that’s not because we are not, ourselves, also arseholes.

We’re just arseholes who, this time, got lucky.

Boringly sensible post-script: Yeah, yeah, some of us would still resist, just as there are some people who find meat delicious but still turn and remain vegetarian. And there are also some people who genuinely do like the artists involved in the real Before Watchmen and are still loudly denouncing it, with David Brothers leading the charge. Good for them.

Second post-script: Come to think of it, an alt-comix tijuana bible/doujinshi sounds like a good idea. Internet, make this happen! Paging Ryan Sands…

Image attribution: Ah, Google. Seek “Watchmen yaoi” and it shall be given. Art by Pond; I hope s/he doesn’t mind the borrowing. I just wanted to build on his/her legacies and enhance them and make them even stronger in their own right.

How do you solve a problem like Diana?

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This is part of a roundtable on Wonder Woman #28.
__________________________________

So there’s this warrior princess, right? Think of her as Xena avant la lettre, only with more lesbian subtext. Although, actually, it’s more than subtext; hell, it’s more than text-text. Anyway, she’s a warrior princess from a hidden island of Amazons, sent out into the world during WWII to teach men and women the joys of loving-submission, spanking and being spanked, playing with ropes, and dressing up in a deer costume that gives me funny feelings in my underpants.

No, wait, she’s just an ordinary superhero and member of the Justice Society of America, even though she’s just a secretary, and not even a glorified secretary.

No, wait, she doesn’t have any powers and dresses suspiciously somewhat exactly like Emma Peel.

No, wait, she has powers again and has to rejoin the boys’ club.

No, wait, she’s reduced to primordial protoplasm and reborn from clay. Then back to being an ambassador for peace from the island of Amazons.

No, wait, she’s a total hard-case warrior, willing to make the hard decisions to do whatever hard things need to be done by hard men and hard women in a hard world full of hardness.

No, wait, she’s being written by a grown-up actual novelist who’s written, like, real books (!) for grown-ups (!!) and is a chick, besides (!!!).

No, wait, in a shocking twist that will reshape the very foundations of the DC universe for years to come she — you’d better be sitting down for this one — wears pants.

AND — stand up again, so you can sit back down — also a jacket.

No, wait, she who the fuck gives a shit?

***

Pretend for a moment that you could make it through something like this wikipedia entry on Wonder Woman without your eyes rolling back into your skull and your brains dribbling out your ears. If you could do this, you’d quickly realise that Wonder Woman, from all the available evidence, has been in constant need of ‘fixing’ pretty much from the moment that her creators keeled over and stopped working on her — first William Moulton Marston and, eleven years later, H.G. Peter.

Indeed, here’s some pseudo-research I’ve done through Google, when I wasn’t busy searching for crossover fanfic between Twilight and A la Recherche (Team Swann!) or working on my 1100-page spec script for Etta Candy: Year One.

Search for “Wonder Woman”: 27,700,000 results

Superman: 179,000,000

Batman -Arkham*: 1,970,000,000

Okay, so Batman >> Superman >> Wonder Woman. Now try adding the phrase “how to fix” to each of these, and we get:

“how to fix Wonder Woman”: 15,000

“how to fix Superman“: 4,150

“how to fix Batman” -Arkham*: 2,220

[without the extra restriction, the Batman search produces thousands of results about how to fix bugs in a particular series of video games, rather than how to fix the character]

So there are approximately one zillion fewer pages about Wonder Woman than about Batman, but there are seven times as many pages about how to fix her. The internet has spoken: Wonder Woman needs fixing. Luckily there are 15,000 budding writers (sic), comics critics (double-sic), comics historians (triple-sic) and other comics researchers (infinity-tuple sic) who know exactly what she needs in order to be fixed.

***

All right, so everybody and his dog thinks Wonder Woman needs fixing. But why does Wonder Woman “need” fixing?

The obvious answer is twofold: first, the character is a valuable “intellectual property” with a high “Q rating” which can be transformed into desirable “branding” for various consumer items such as little girls’ underwear

HELLO GOOGLERS WELCOME TO THE PRONOGRAPHY

and thereby turned into oblations and offertories for our benevolent corporate overlords.

Second, the people who make superhero comics in America couldn’t sell crack to crackheads, so you can imagine how they struggle selling [obligatory joke: superhero comics suck] to [obligatory joke: fanboys suck].

The result is that, every few weeks, someone at DC-HQ realises that they could replace all the toilet paper in the building with rolls of hundred dollar bills, and it would still be more profitable than trying to sell Wonder Woman comics. So, every few weeks, it’s a Bold! New! Direction! in an ever more desperate attempt to boost her sales to a level befitting the distaff member of the “DC Trinity” (double-infinity-tuple sic). And, every few weeks, sales still suck, and it’s time for another Bold! New! Direction! You can see the flop-sweat on every page.

***

The thing is, this is not an isolated case of DC not knowing what to do with one of their “iconic” characters — i.e. characters that are underwearable because they were once on a TV show. Consider the case of Captain Marvel, created by C.C. Beck, Bill Parker and Otto Binder.

Phenomenally successful in the 1940s, the character — then published by Fawcett — was essentially sued out of the business by DC in the ’50s. Twenty years later, in a move showing all the class we associate with the North American comic book industry, DC actually licensed the rights for Captain Marvel — the character they had sued out of business — from Fawcett — the business they had sued him out of. As the Bard said, that’s

like making a soldier drop his weapon,

shooting him, and telling him to get to steppin’.

Obviously, they came to portion of his fortune

Sounds to me like that old robbery-extortion.

Which, come to think of it, describes the entire business-model of DC (and Marvel).

Anyway, DC’s 1970s revival of the character stayed fairly faithful to the original but fizzled out soon enough. He hung around as a back-up feature until the 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths, and if you don’t know what that is, consider yourself lucky and leave it at that. In the wake of Crisis, DC revamped most of its “intellectual properties” including Captain Marvel. In his new origin, his arch-nemesis Dr Sivana became his abusive uncle. This revamp stuck for only a few years, until journeyman writer/artist Jerry Ordway rerevamped the Big Red Cheese back closer to the original.

This version lasted for another fifteen years or so, until 2005, when DC kills off the kindly wizard Shazam (who gave Marvel his powers). Marvel takes on the role of Shazam and promptly turns into a schizophrenic — literally, he goes nuts and hears voices. Shortly afterwards, his wholesome gal analogue Marvel Marvel gets turned into a Bad Girl. More boring, unreadable shit happens, Marvel loses his powers, then DC rerererererererevamps its comics and there’s no Marvel again for a little while…until now.

The updated Captain Marvel for a whole new generation is to be called Shazam, have a darker origin prominently involving, I don’t know, the war on drugs or something, and wear a hat made from the skins of dead orphans and hookers.

He probably also has a tattoo of some kind.

…

TO THE MAX.

***

Any sane person would look at this weak-ass publishing history and ask herself a couple of questions: Why haven’t there been any decent Wonder Woman comics since the originals? Ditto for Captain Marvel? Ditto for the Spirit; ditto for Plastic Man? Why can’t DC sell comics starring these characters? What’s a Grecian urn? And why is my cat sending me telepathic warnings that “the Jews” are out to get me?

Uh, maybe that last one is just me. But, any sane person, you otherwise ask some good questions. Why do all the other Wonder Woman comics suck? And — since severe suckitude is not now, and has never been, an impediment to popular success — why don’t those comics sell, when (by contrast) DC could print a hundred issues of Batman watching the Batgrass grow, one blade at a time, and still make a mint?

There are, I submit, three main reasons.

1) Pure goddamn chance.

When we try to explain history of any kind, in art or anywhere else, it’s way too easy to spin out elaborate just-so rationales, and overlook the importance of sheer luck. But, pace Grant Morrison, there’s not some ineluctable cosmic law that the World Spirit will lead to, e.g., Superman’s enduring status as an icon, or Batman’s. On the contrary, a lot of that status is due to one lucky break after another. Had things gone slightly differently, there might never have been a popular TV series in the sixties about Batman, and the character might have faded into the same general obscurity as Barney Google, Li’l Abner or Herbie the Fat Fury.

Hell, there could have been a popular TV series about Lil’ Abner instead, and decades later we’d all be praising Heath Ledger’s cross-dressing performance as Sadie Hawkins.

“Christopher Nolan has given the comic strip movie some much-needed gravitas by returning Li’l Abner to his grim and gritty roots as a violent, pig-fucking hillbilly…”

So, to some extent, the failures artistic and financial of Wonder Woman comics post-Marston/Peter really are just accidents of history. They don’t sell for a bunch of different random reasons, and they aren’t any good because…well, to some extent because no one of the caliber of Marston or Peter has given it a shot. I mean, look at the list of people who’ve worked on the comic after them; we’re not talking Kurtzman or Giraud here.

Ditto for Captain Marvel, ditto Plastic Man, ditto your mom.

2) The original comics are fun and whimsical

But since it’s easy to spin out elaborate just-so rationales, here’s one I prepared earlier. The obvious feature that Wonder Woman has in common with Plastic Man and Captain Marvel is that they’re all light-hearted. Certainly, Wonder Woman has a heavy intellectual foundation in Marston’s crackpot unconventional theories about men, women and bondage — and I’m not 100% sure about this, but I have a crazy hunch that Marston’s theories might be discussed elsewhere in the roundtable — but it’s all covered with a giant bouncing castle and fairground. Certainly in all of these comics what’s above the surface is thoroughly unserious — and, for a boring set of boring reasons that it’s too boring to go into here, “fun” superheroes are an exceedingly hard sell in today’s Direct Market. This has got to be part of the explanation for why DC can’t sell comics which return to the original spirit of these characters.

3) The original comics are good

…And here’s another just-so story. There’s an uncomfortable truth about superhero comics from the 30s and 40s, a truth that’s not generally acknowledged but is thuddingly apparent as soon as you start reading most of them: 90% of those comics are complete shit.

I don’t want to be a troll here, and just baldly make some sweeping aesthetic judgement for which I provide no evidence other than my suave and confident manner. The Hooded Utilitarian is no place for that kind of thing. But seriously, people. Seriously. Try reading five pages of almost any superhero comic from those times. Just try it. I guarantee that, by the time you get to page three, you’ll wish you had a time machine so you could go back to the past and make sure you never started reading it, if need be by shooting yourself in the face.

Superman is shit. Batman is shit. Green Lantern is shit. The Human Torch is shit. Ka-Zar is shit. The Seven Soldiers of Victory is shit. The Angel is shit. The Justice Society of America is shit. The Claw is shit. Daredevil is shit. Sandman is shit. The Newsboy Legion is shit. Captain America is shit. (Sorry, Kirby fans, but it’s true)

Apologists try to gloss over this with a range of euphemisms. These comics are “lively”, “boisterous”, “crudely energetic”, “charming”, “rough and tumble”. Behold the soft bigotry of low expectations. To euphemize thus is to insult the genuine comic artistry that you could find in the funny pages at that time, or the decades beforehand. The 30s and 40s, after all, were a genuine golden age for comic strips; even if we limit ourselves to adventure continuities, there’s Terry and the Pirates followed by Steve Canyon, Thimble Theatre, Prince Valiant, Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy followed by Buz Sawyer, Mickey Mouse, Alley Oop, Dick Tracy, Li’l Abner, The Spirit and probably others that I’m forgetting. Show me a single page from Action or Detective Comics that is equal to anything in any of those strips and I’ll eat my words. Hell, I’ll eat every single word in this goddamn post.

No, 90% of those superhero comics were poorly written and, though it hardly seems possible, even worse drawn.

But there were 10% that were okay to good, sometimes even great. Wonder Woman was one of them. So were Captain Marvel and associated strips; so was Plastic Man; so was Sub-Mariner, at least intermittently; so were Fantomah and Stardust. I don’t know their work well enough to comment, but I’d imagine Meskin, Fine, Wolverton and Powell also did some good work in the genre. Probably a few others. But that’s pretty slim pickings for a so-called Golden Age.

So, Wonder Woman was an island of above-average art in a sea of mediocrity, so what? Why should that mean that almost every later Wonder Woman comic is not very good? Two reasons: regression to the mean, and what I call the BOOS hypothesis.

Regression to the mean is a simple mathematical fact about any set of things that contains variation — comics, bananas, comics about bananas… If you pick one of these items at random and it’s at the extreme in some value or other, the next item you pick at random is likely to be closer to the average. If you’ve got 100 bananas and you pick out the fifth biggest banana, the next one you pick is probably going to be smaller.

Similarly with comics. The Wonder Woman comics produced by her creators were well above the average superhero comic; therefore it’s highly probably that most other Wonder Woman comics are going to be worse.

But regression to the mean can’t be the whole story, because that only explains why subsequent Wonder Woman comics haven’t been as good as Marston/Peter. It doesn’t explain why they generally haven’t been good full-stop.

Which is where I offer — verrrry tentatively — the Benefit Of Original Shittiness hypothesis, or BOOS. BOOS is a hypothesis about comics that (a) were financial successes fairly early on and (b) have since been written/drawn by artists other than their creators. We’re basically talking corporate-owned “properties” like Wonder Woman, Archie, et al., or syndicated comic strips like Gasoline Alley or Garfield.

BOOS, then, claims that the shittier these original comics were, the more likely it is that later versions by other artists will be good. Why have there been good Batman and Superman stories decades after Bill Finger “and Bob Kane”, and Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, in spite of the fact that those original comics are pretty lousy? Why have there been so few good Wonder Woman stories in spite of the fact that the originals are so good? BOOS inverts the logic of those questions: it’s because the original Superman and Batman comics suck that later ones are good; and it’s because the original Wonder Woman comics don’t suck that later ones do.

My thought here — and, as I say, I offer it very tentatively — is that it’s no coincidence that the better superhero comics from the 30s and 40s have had generally shitty afterlives with later artists, but that the most influential and long-lasting comics — viz. Batman and Superman — had shitty beginnings. Whatever it was that made Batman and Superman popular, it was absolutely, utterly, definitely, assuredly, etceterally in no way whatsoever the artistic or narrative skills of their creators. Those guys couldn’t write or draw for shit. (None of this is to deny that DC treated them disgracefully). And that means that later artists working with the same materials can do even better.

By contrast, the original Wonder Woman comics were popular because Marston and Peter were genuinely talented. And that’s a lot harder for later artists to replicate.

Is this all just an extraordinarily long-winded way of saying that Superman and Batman are just stronger concepts or better characters than Wonder Woman? Maybe — but whatever made the original Superman and Batman comics popular need not have been the intrinsic superiority of the concepts. It could have been that they tweaked a certain demographic a certain way, and that demographic still likes to be tweaked in that certain special way even today, you know what I’m talking about

HELLO GOOGLERS

but Wonder Woman doesn’t do that kind of tweaking any more.

But even if we ultimately accept that Superman and Batman are “intrinsically better”, the logic by which we got there was very different from the way “comics scholars” normally do. They usually get there by arguing either (a) the concepts “alien in underpants as milquetoast daydream” and “playboy fetishist beats up poor people” are obviously better than “empowered warrior princess” QED, or (b) the concepts are obviously better because they’ve been more financially and critically successful over the years.

By contrast, I’m arguing that, if BOOS is right, Wonder Woman may not be as “strong” a concept, but it’s not because she can’t sell books, or support great art post-Marston/Peter. I’m arguing that Wonder Woman isn’t as “strong” a concept because the original Superman and Batman comics suck.

***

In conclusion: how do you solve a problem like Diana?

I’m thinking…a jacket — with shoulder-pads.

50 Million Jaime Fans Can’t Be Wrong

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BOSWELL: Why, Sir, it is bruited through all London that Garrick holds the pictorial efforts of our Mr Hernandez in the utmost esteem.

JOHNSON: Garrick, Sir, can go fuck himself.

***

Sometimes people disagree — NEWS FLASH, right? People disagree about politics, science, religion, sports, the weather, what it’s got in its pocketses…and sometimes they disagree about art. Indeed, as you may have noticed, people around here sometimes politely disagree with other people about art.

So what should you do when you disagree with someone about a work of art? I don’t mean “should you call them fanboys?” or “should you call them vaginas?” or “how can you best persuade them that, on reflection, everything you say is correct and everything they say is STUPID?“; forget about what you should do to the person you disagree with. I’m asking how you should treat your own opinion when you find someone who holds a different opinion.

My question isn’t how you should treat the reasons, evidence, arguments, etc. that they might put forward to bolster their opinion. Leave all that aside, too, and just consider the basic fact that they disagree with you. Is that fact, by itself, important enough that it should make you change your mind, if only a little?

Since the mid-2000s, this question has become a hot topic in epistemology — the philosophy of knowledge. Broadly speaking, there are two answers to the question:

(1) Resolution

and (2) Conciliation.

According to the resolute view, disagreement ain’t shit — you don’t have to do anything when you find someone who disagrees with you. You’re perfectly entitled to maintain your own belief exactly as strongly as you did before you learned that somebody disagreed with you; in other words, you can stand resolute. According to the conciliatory view, by contrast, disagreement is shit — it should make a difference to your belief. Exactly what difference, and how much, is up for grabs among philosophers who hold the conciliatory view; but they are united in believing that disagreement should make you at least a little less confident than you were before. (Stick with me; we’ll get to talking about comics eventually)

Here’s one way to think about what conciliation means. Picture all your thoughts as a big list of sentences written in your mental notepad. They might include:

2+2=4

The Earth revolves around the Sun

Caesar crossed the Rubicon

Barack Obama will win the 2012 US election

The moon is made of green cheese

2+2=5

and so on.

Some of these things you believe, and some you disbelieve. You believe some really, really strongly — like 2+2=4 — some less strongly — like, perhaps, the belief about Barack Obama; and similarly for the sentences you disbelieve. So now imagine that next to each sentence is a number between 0 and 1. 0 means “I think it’s definitely false”, 1 means “I think it’s definitely true”, and values in-between correspond to varying degrees of confidence. Now the list might look like this:

[1] 2+2=4

[0.999999] The Earth revolves around the Sun

[0.9995] Caesar crossed the Rubicon

[0.6] Barack Obama will win the 2012 US election

[0.0001] The moon is made of green cheese

[0] 2+2=5

On this picture, people disagree when they assign different numbers, or credences, to the same sentence. So maybe in my mental notepad, the sentence about Barack Obama has the number 0.6 next to it, whereas in Noah’s notepad it has the number 0.8 next to it. This would mean that I am less confident than Noah that Obama will be re-elected.

What conciliatory views say, in essence, is that when Noah and I discover our disagreement, we should revise our credences towards one another. Noah should be less confident about Obama’s chances, and I should be more — OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL. (We’ll get back to this caveat shortly).

Another name some people sometimes give to the conciliatory view is the Correct View. And by “some people”, I mean “me”, and by “sometimes”, I mean “right now”. I call it the Correct View for the simple reason that it is the correct view.

The basic motivation for holding the Correct View is this: when you find someone disagreeing with you, and you have no reason to think you’re in an epistemically better situation than they are — i.e. you’re not any smarter, or more informed, or less drunk, etc. — then you really don’t have any reason to think you’re more likely to be correct than they are. So the mere fact that someone like you has gone through the same process of reasoning and come to a different conclusion, that fact just by itself is some evidence that you might be wrong. It may be very weak evidence, and you may not have to “adjust your credence” — i.e. become more or less confident — very much, but it is some evidence, and you should adjust your credence to some extent. (As I said, just how much is up for grabs)

Here’s a hypothetical example: suppose Gilbert and Jaime are sitting at the table, trying to add up their joint profits from the most recent issue of Love and Rockets. (I told you we’d come back to comics)

Now, further suppose they go through their calculations separately, but using the same information and each using his own electronic calculator. And, finally, suppose that, at the end of all this, each brother arrives at a different total. Before they share their results with one another, each brother is fairly confident in his own calculation. But what happens when they share their results and realise that they disagree? According to the Correct View, each brother should become somewhat less confident in his own calculation.

And since, by definition, the Correct View is correct, this is just what they should do.

It’s important to remember that OTHER THINGS should be EQUAL when deciding how to react to disagreement. If Jaime knows that he is better at maths than Gilbert, then Jaime should not take Gilbert’s result as seriously, and hence should not reduce his own confidence as much (if at all); and vice versa. Similarly if Gilbert knows that Jaime’s calculator is broken; or Jaime knows that Gilbert forgot to count all the money; or Gilbert knows that Jaime wasn’t really paying attention; or…

The point being that you shouldn’t react to all disagreements in the same way. You should revise your confidence, down or up, only when you find that you disagree with someone who is in at least as good (roughly) an epistemic position as you — someone who is your epistemic peer. That’s why you don’t have to start believing that the end is nigh whenever you pass a religious fanatic on the street, or that global warming is a hoax when you watch Fox News, and so on — because these views arise from people in worse epistemic positions than you (or the proxies from whom you ultimately derive your opinions).

If you’ve followed me so far, you can probably see where this is going. As with opinions in general, I submit, so with opinions about art. In short: if you think a particular work of art is a piece of shit, but lots and lots of your epistemic peers think it’s the bees’ knees, you should seriously consider the possibility that you’re wrong. And maybe you should do this even if they can’t point to any convincing evidence in their favour.

Actually, this aesthetic conciliatory view follows from the Correct View only if we make a few extra assumptions. First, we have to assume that aesthetic sentences express propositions — or, to put it in English, that a sentence like “The Love Bunglers is one of the greatest comics of all time” is actually trying to describe how things are, rather than merely giving voice to your tastes. The former is like saying “I hurt my foot” or “I like ice cream”; the latter is like saying “Ow — my foot!” or “Ice cream — yum!” The former can be true or false, and even debated, but the latter cannot.

The second assumption is that the propositions expressed by aesthetic sentences are not entirely individualistic — that their truth does not depend solely on your reactions during the act of experiencing the art. If “The Love Bunglers is one of the greatest comics of all time” was merely a statement of how you felt about it, then, again, there’d be no room for disagreement. One person — let’s call him “Jeet” — could assert it, another — let’s call him “Noah” — deny it, and both could be speaking truly; just as one could truly say “I like ice cream” and the other “I don’t like ice cream”.

In other words, whatever makes some aesthetic opinions true and others false, it had better not be something that is entirely peculiar to whoever holds them.

Here’s one way aesthetic truth could depend on facts outside the individual: maybe the sentence “The Love Bunglers is one of the greatest comics of all time” is true only if The Love Bunglers properly reflects the Metaphysical Form of Beauty, which exists outside time and space, and doesn’t depend at all on what we humans think about beauty, trapped as we are in Plato’s cave.

Or, since that’s patently preposterous, maybe not.

Here’s a picture of aesthetic truth that is slightly more plausible. You have a set of preferences, values, likes and dislikes when it comes to art — let’s call them your tastes. Tastes are not permanently fixed, but they are usually stable over the short- to medium- term: if you like horror films today, then you’ll probably like them tomorrow. They can be very narrow or very broad: you might like films that are satires; and you might also like films that feature a combination of bicycles, conga lines, and references to Dante — in which case, have I got a film for you… And, crucially, although tastes vary from person to person, they are not entirely unique to each individual; you can share, to a greater or lesser extent, your preferences with other people. When you share your tastes with other people, we can say that you belong to an aesthetic community with those people; since you probably won’t share your tastes exactly with anyone else, you’re probably part of many different, partially overlapping communities.

This, for instance, is considered a thing of great beauty in some communities:

Aesthetic claims, in this picture, are made true by (1) the properties of the artwork in question and (2) the appropriate aesthetic community. The community sets the standards for judging the artwork, and the artwork itself either meets or fails to meet those standards. Which community is appropriate depends, basically, on who is considering the claim. So, in some communities, the sentence “Alex Ross is a great cartoonist” is true; in others, it’s false.

When a critic makes an aesthetic claim, then, it doesn’t make sense to ask whether it is true-full-stop (“true-period” for our benighted Yankee cousins). What must be asked, rather, is whether it is true given the standards of the appropriate aesthetic community. The advantage of this picture is that aesthetic claims turn out to be relative, but not solipsistic; their truth can meaningfully be debated between members of any particular community.

So, let’s go back to the issue of disagreement, with these two assumptions granted, namely: (1) aesthetic sentences can be true or false; and (2) their truth or falsity depends on more than just individual taste. As we saw, how you respond to disagreement depends on whether your disagreer (so to speak) is your epistemic peer. How you respond to aesthetic disagreement further depends on whether your disagreer is your aesthetic peer.

That means that, when you’re confronted with aesthetic disagreement, you need to ask yourself two questions. First, is my disagreer in a better position than me to appreciate the artwork, a worse position, or a roughly similar one? If the answer is “worse”, then you can safely ignore them; alternatively, you can publicly call them out in a blog post.

What sort of thing would determine your relative position to judge the artwork? Any number of things, including (but not limited to): who’s more familiar with the artist’s other work; who’s more familiar with other examples of the same genre; who knows more about the particular techniques involved; who’s wasted more years on a fine arts major; who can cite more passages of Lacan; etc. etc.

Anyway, if you decide that your disagreer is at least no worse off than you from an epistemic perspective — in terms of knowledge, expertise, intelligence, etc. — you can then move to the second question, viz. Is my disagreer addressing what I think is the appropriate community? Naturally, the answer to this depends on what you think the appropriate community is — and, equally naturally, this is a vexed and contentious decision.

Many online folks who talk about comics restrict themselves (knowingly or not) to addressing a very small aesthetic community. And if you don’t care about that community, then you can just ignore their proclamations about, say, the greatest cartoonists of all time.

Breathe a sigh of relief — I just validated your life choices.

More interesting are cases where you and your disagreer see yourself as sharing membership in at least one community. That’s where disagreement bites – – you’re now disagreeing about how the artwork in question (say, “The Love Bunglers”) lives up to, or falls short, of your shared tastes. And you can point to this or that feature in support of your opinion.

But — and here’s where we draw it all back together — if the Correct View is correct —

and it is, by definition

— then you should consider changing your mind even without being shown the opposing “evidence”. Because the fact that a member of the relevant aesthetic community has had one reaction to an artwork, and formed a particular view about it, that fact itself is evidence that your own view is mistaken. It’s evidence that, in fact, the artwork has a different relation to the community’s standards than the one you think: that it’s the bee’s knees, rather than a piece of shit. Or the other way around.

So, in conclusion:

Jaime rules, just because we said so.

Also:

DON’T JUDGE MY LIFESTYLE

—————————————
The Locas Roundtable index is here.

Garth Ennis: Anti-Messiah, or just a very naughty boy?

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At first glance, Garth Ennis’ writing on Preacher appears to be edgy and heterodox, at least for a Direct Market comic from DC. And not just in the superficial stuff that makes for a ‘Mature Readers’ label –swearing, ultraviolence, loyal canine sidekicks. No, it appears to be edgy – at least for its cultural context and intended readership – at a deeper level of content and theme. The Catholic Church is portrayed as venal and corrupt. There’s a savagely funny send-up of the idea of a messianic bloodline, as made famous in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (and even more famous in The Da Vinci Code).

Oh, and God is a narcissistic, selfish prick.

So, yeah, Preacher seems to be pretty ‘far out’. But a closer look reveals that Ennis’ morals are, in fact, deeply conventional. At its heart, the book is a sort of love story, and an effectively sweet one at that. And Ennis endorses in Preacher the same old-fashioned kind of masculinity that he valorises throughout most of his work, represented here with only a moderate dose of irony by John Wayne. A man, Ennis as much as out and tells us, should be strong, self-sufficient and upstanding. He should treat his lady right, do good by his friends, keep his word, and look after them critters what can’t look after themselves.

Excuse me while I ride off into the sunset.

There’s nothing wrong per se with this kind of conventionality, I think. Stated thus baldly, the book’s morality is prima facie unobjectionable.* And the book itself is easily my own favourite among the long-running series published by Vertigo.

(Suck it, Sandman and The Invisibles! And seriously don’t even bother, Y and Fables)

What is worrying, however, about Preacher — and it’s another theme that runs throughout Ennis’ work — is its conventional, even reactionary, sexual morality. Time and again, Ennis reveals that he is fundamentally uncomfortable about any sexual activity outside a very limited range. Time and again, he attributes to his villains sexual proclivities outside this range. Time and again, he uses sexual perversion as a shorthand for moral perversion.

Consider: the book’s secondary villain Herr Starr, who wants to give Margaret Thatcher a golden shower, and can eventually only reach sexual satisfaction through liberal application of a strap-on.

Or: Jesus DeSade, whose unbridled hedonism leads to pedophilia.

Or: T.C., whose unconstrained libido matches his moral and intellectual savagery.

Or: Miss Oatlash, the dominatrix and Nazi apologist. ZOMG! The uptight professional woman is secretly into BDSM – smile, you’ve just been Shyamalanned!

Or: Odin Quincannon, the evil businessman who…well, no, I won’t spoil that gag for those who haven’t read the book.

Or:

[CASSIDY SPOILER!!}

 

That the depths of Cassidy’s decline are marked when he’s coerced into giving his drug dealer a blowjob.

 

[END CASSIDY SPOILER!]

By contrast, there are only three occasions when the main good guys – viz. protagonist Jesse Custer and girlfriend Tulip ’Hare – engage in anything remotely kinky. First (chronologically at least — it occurs in a flashback), Jesse idly considers asking Tulip and her best friend Amy to join him in a threesome. He decides against it, not wanting to jeopardise his relationship with either of them—incidentally, this could well be the smartest thing Jesse does in the whole series.

Second, Tulip handcuffs Jesse to a bed, leading the poor sap to think that they’re going to get their kink on. But no such luck; it’s just revenge for one of Jesse’s misdeeds. Tulip just leaves him there while she goes out drinking with Amy.

Finally there is some suggestion, later in the series, that Jesse and Tulip do eventually use the handcuffs in the manner intended, viz. very mildly kinky sexual practices. So even when the good guys do get down and dirty, it’s about as vanilla as you could imagine.

Now, to be fair, Ennis rarely presents any of the villains’ sexual deviancies as evil in themselves (with the obvious exception of DeSade’s pedophilia). Their perversions are funny, not wicked. We’re supposed to laugh, not boo. And Ennis is under no obligation to proselytize for sexual adventurism.

But Preacher does deliberately set out to undermine some central parts of Christian morality — in particular the value of faith, and the doctrine that God deserves our worship. So it’s a bit of a let-down to find that Ennis’ views on sexuality are barely more liberal than that famous neologism, Rick ‘man-on-dog’ Santorum. And it’s even worse that Ennis perpetuates the myth that only bad guys like to get kinky.

Preacher may be a good comic but, when it comes to sexuality, it brings to mind what Homer Simpson once said about the bible: talk about a preachy book!

 

* but maybe not, uh, seconda facie. A while back, someone called ‘moose n squirrel’ accused Ennis of fascism, in a comment thread at Tim O’Neill’s whenwillthehurtingstop.blogspot.com. (Because I, evidently, suck and am stupid, I can’t find the post or comment now) Among the evidence was the fact that Ennis almost always presents weakness as contemptible, meriting either scorn or ridicule or both, while the good guys are almost always adept at chewing bubblegum and kicking ass. But it’s for good, of course, not for evil, so that’s A-OK. I find this a persuasive reading of Ennis, in Preacher as much as anywhere else. Those who favour a more charitable interpretation carry a heavy burden of proof, or so it seems to me at any rate.

Not that fascism would necessarily invalidate Ennis’ work, even if it is there. I like all kinds of comics with dubious ideological contents: e.g. Dave Sim, Harold Gray, Raymond ‘boo hoo nuclear holocaust somebody call a waaambulance’ Briggs etc.

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

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Part I.

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

Marvelman 1954. Mick Anglo

Swamp Thing 1971. Bernie Wrightson, Len Wein

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

The basic premise 1976. Stephen Knight

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

The Avengers 1963. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

Spider-Man 1962. Steve Ditko, Stan Lee

Doctor Strange 1963. Steve Ditko, Stan Lee

The Hulk 1962. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

The Fantastic Four 1961. Jack Kirby, Stan Lee

Captain America 1941. Joe Simon, Jack Kirby

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

 

Superman 1938. Joe Shuster, Jerry Siegel

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

seriously? okay [deep breath]

Mina Murray 1897. Bram Stoker

Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde 1886. Robert  Louis Stevenson

Allan Quatermain 1885. H. Rider Haggard

The Invisible Man 1897. H.G. Wells

Captain Nemo 1870. Jules Verne

Sherlock Holmes 1887. Arthur Conan Doyle

Professor Moriarty 1893. Arthur Conan Doyle

Fu Manchu 1913. Sax Rohmer

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

Dr Moreau 1896. H.G. Wells

Orlando 1928. Virginia Woolf

Prospero c.1610, according to wikipedia. Francis Bacon

James Bond 1953. Ian Fleming

Bulldog Drummond 1920. “Sapper”

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

The cast of the Threepenny Opera 1728. John Gay

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

…and, while we’re at it:

Wold Newton 1972. Philip Jose Farmer

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

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

Plastic Man 1941. Jack Cole

Various Standard characters 1940s. various creators

Assorted Lovecraft nonsense 1928. H.P. Lovecraft

Wendy Darling 1904. J.M. Barrie

Alice 1865. Lewis Carroll.

Dorothy Gale 1900. L. Frank Baum

Part II.

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

Part III.

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

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

Part IV.

Well, Baum might have been, anyway.

(All images ripped off comics.org)

The Wire Roundtable: Cherchez la femme

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The Wire may or may not be the Greatest TV Show Of All Time, Now And Forever, In Any Language And Genre, In The Whole World, And Throughout The Whole Extent Of Spacetime — but one thing’s for sure. It’s definitely The Most Praised Show Of All etc. Time, Entertainment Weekly and the Guardian have all labelled it the greatest, as have lots of other folks with and without column space. Metacritic.com assigned the fourth season an aggregate score of 98%, which is higher than the rating for God Himself; more strikingly, it’s even four points higher than the score for Kanye West’s most recent album.

The Wire‘s legion of enthusiasts regularly point to a couple of features that merit especial praise: the show’s realism; its panorama of an entire society at every level; its giving voice to the marginalised and disempowered. Realism: swearing! Panorama: Drugs! Unions! Politicians! Schoolkids! Settling old grudges Journalists! The marginalised: Black people! Gay people! Gay black people!

In interviews during and after the show, creator David Simon consistently claimed the highest ambition for the show and its themes. In particular, the show would

with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.

First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components.

Throughout the whole show, however, there’s one group of marginalised and disempowered that is not given proper representation; one type of individual that gets eaten by institutions but is not explored; one group which has historically faced, and continues to face, massive inequalities of opportunity.

That’s right: I’m talking about the ladies.

Simon identifies The Wire‘s great theme as “institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them”. And throughout all five seasons, the show develops this theme in detail, in a variety of institutional contexts and with a variety of individual players. Institutions fuck over McNulty, Daniels, Bubs, Wallace, D’Angelo, the Sobotkas, Bunny, Randy, Bodie and plenty more besides.

But, from Snot Boogie’s sad demise at the very start to the much-exploited homeless guy at the end, The Wire is singularly unconcerned with how women fare in these institutions, the fates they face, the options open to them.

Consider: by my count, over the course of five seasons, thirty-seven cast names appear in the opening credits. Of these, four are women. These are the actors playing Beadie, Kima, Pearlman, and (!) Alma Gutierrez. Beadie is in the credits only for season 2, despite playing a sizable role in the final season too. Shardene and Snoop never make the credits. By contrast, Burrell, Rawls, Sydnor, Clay Davis, Clarence Royce, Maurice Levy and Chris Partlow do.

Chris Partlow makes the cut and Snoop doesn’t.

(This gender imbalance is presumably, totally unrelated, in any way whatsoever, to the fact that ten out of the eleven writing credits throughout the show are men)

Or consider: of those thirty-seven cast members, the relationship status of three of the women are plot points. Pearlman fucks McNulty and then Daniels; Beadie fucks McNulty; Kima struggles with her (de facto) wife and child. Alma gets nothing, but that’s only because she has no internal life to speak of or, really, any kind of life to speak of, beyond learning at the feet of the great David Simon Gus Haynes.

Sure, much is made of who the guys are fucking, too — McNulty and Omar in particular. (And, of course, if Pearlman is fucking Daniels, then Daniels is fucking Pearlman too). But, for a lot of the male characters, it’s simply not an issue. They may be married or have a girlfriend, but it doesn’t matter much to their character. Prez has a wife onscreen for all of one scene, as I recall; Bodie, Herc and Carv take dates to the movies and that’s about it; Marlo and Avon are mostly asexual; Rawls’ sexuality is a throw-away gag (well, two gags, if you include the graffiti in the homicide toilets); and who the hell knows about Royce, Davis, Burrell, Levy, Sydnor et al. The point isn’t that the show isn’t interested in who the guys are fucking; it’s that the show is much more interested in who the women are fucking.

And once you get beyond the “main” cast — even if you include a couple of extra characters not in the opening credits, such as Shardene, Snoop, Prop Joe, Jay Landsman and the like — it gets even worse. Most of the tertiary female characters are WAGs, would-be WAGs, one-night stands, or mothers. Going down the cast list, if we skip the few women who actually do appear in the opening credits, we get: Snoop; Marla Daniels, who’s fucking Daniels at first and then she’s not; Cheryl (you know, the one with her coupons); Theresa D’Agostino, who fucks McNulty and then tries to fuck Carcetti; Grace Sampson, who used to fuck Cutty; Donette, who fucked D’Angelo and then Stringer; Elena McNulty — look, it’s too depressing to go on.

The biggest missed opportunities comes in season four, with the introduction of the school. Here you have an environment with a lot of women and a lot of girls, the powerful and powerless. Maybe they couldn’t fit in a new major character as a teacher, given that they already had Prez undergoing his learning journey and growing into his new role. Maybe there wasn’t any need. But surely — surely — they could have made one of the four kids that we track a girl?

For the point of season four is, in part, to show the options available to black children in marginal environments. Randy, the budding entrepreneur who ends up traumatised by his glancing contact with crime. Michael, the child of abuse, who’s recruited to crime by way of protecting his family. Namond, who’s too weak for the streets and lucks into a way out. And Dukie, poor Dukie whose fate seems sealed from the moment we see him.

We see what the boys can do, what can become of them, what few roles are offered by the system — the systems — that surround them. But what are the fates for girls? Do they become dealers, junkies, citizens? What specific options do they have that the boys don’t have? Questions not answered by the show; worse, they’re not even asked.

The show isn’t altogether clueless on gender. There’s a nice bit in season four when all the neighbourhood mothers converge on Cutty, as one of the few eligible bachelors going. Or the bit in season one when D’Angelo lets his casual misogyny slip to Shardene. And the instigating incident of season two — the dead sex slaves — suggests a show not entirely uninterested in how women are used by power. But is that enough for a show that aims to reveal an entire society, and how that society grinds down its members? Is that enough for the Greatest TV Show Of All Time?

Or, to quote the great Bunk Moreland: Happy now, bitch?
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The entire Wire roundtable is here.