Tag Archives: Kim O’Connor

The Effect of Living Backwards

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This is part of a Blog Carnival organized by Women Write About Comics.The entire round table on Censure vs. Censor is here
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Cold open on the Oxford English Dictionary: two words that kinda sorta look alike. Part of me wants to drop them at the top like a 10th-grade English essay. I could ask a whole high school to write about the difference between censor and censure and see nothing half so stupid as the conflation of the two we see in comics discourse today. You’d think the solution would be so simple as to point out the mistake—to say this isn’t that. What I’ve come to understand over the last year or so is that trying to talk to people about freedom of speech in comics is like trying to reason with your drunk uncle about racism: appeals to logic simply aren’t going to work.
 

alice

‘I know what you’re thinking about,’ said Tweedledum: ‘but it isn’t so, nohow.’ ‘Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t it ain’t. That’s logic.’

 
The last person here at HU who explicitly addressed the difference between censure and censorship was Jacob Canfield, who pointed to an inversion of logic: people defended Charlie Hebdo’s right to free speech by (falsely, absurdly) deriding its critics as proponents of censorship and even murder. The post went viral in mainstream media, garnering Jacob a lot of racist blowback—not just from people who disagreed with his ideas about racism, but also from racists who disapproved of him personally. One of the most amazing “critiques” he received along these lines was from a right-wing troll with a super silly avatar: a Bulbasaur with a Confederate flag superimposed on its face.

“The meat of the article was focused on the disgustingness of me as a not-quite-white-person,” Jacob wrote. “It was funny to read the stereotypical ‘get out of my country’ shit directed at me, coming from Confederate Bulbasaur.”

bulbasaur

Man oh man. Months later, Confederate Bulbasaur is *still* cracking me up. Much like this guy I wrote about at Comics & Cola, he has made my Internet a happier place. Now all racist commenters, including outspoken atheist Patton Oswalt, are Confederate Bulbasaur to me. Jacob’s anecdote resonates because writing about racism and sexism on the Internet can be as funny and absurd as it is depressing. Confederate Bulbasaur is emblematic of the particular maddening and comical experience that is writing about those issues in comics. A rich symbol, he also represents futility. There’s really no use in arguing with a guy like that; if he can’t see what makes him ridiculous, there’s no way that anyone is going to be able to explain it to him.

In lieu of definitions, let me tell you something that might not be immediately obvious given how many people keep quacking about it: Censorship in American comics is a dead moral question. Yes, yes, I know CBLDF is out there fighting the good fight against conservatives who want to ban books from libraries and so forth, and kudos to them for that important work. I’m not talking about anything that involves the actual law. I’m talking about the fact that no one speaking from within comics today is a proponent of censorship, de facto or otherwise; it is unanimously decried by all of us. The pro-censorship side of the argument simply does not exist.

And yet, censorship is an accusation frequently hurled at “politically correct” liberal-leaning members of the comics community. The accusers are, like, Tinfoil Hat Bulbasaur, sometimes even using words like self-censorship and thought police to describe what most of us would call a conscience. We’re through the looking glass, where the people with the most power and the loudest voices are the ones who worry most about being silenced. Potent industry figures like Gary Groth are waging an imaginary war against opponents (“opponents”) who have no actual interest in stripping artists of their freedom of speech. So let me say it once, loud and clear for all the turkeys in the back: Expressing an opinion—even a harsh one—is not equivalent to arguing for censorship. It’s not even close.

So why does a dead moral question carry so much weight in comics discourse today? First and foremost, cries of “Censorship!” are an effective way to quell uncomfortable conversations about sexist racist garbage comics. (Anti-censorship is an easy position to defend because it doesn’t need defending; everyone already agrees with it. If someone were to explicitly defend bigotry, well, that’s a tougher sell.) This agenda dovetails nicely with the values of people for whom the most real and salient moment in comics history is not now, but decades ago, in the underground’s resistance to the Comics Code Authority. And finally there’s the lived experience of older white men (and, occasionally, older white women), who are so accustomed to speaking freely, and so unaccustomed to having people challenge their views, that they’re fundamentally incapable of understanding the difference between being forcibly silenced and being called an asshole.

Here at HU, I sometimes write about people when they act like assholes, not out of personal animosity, or even hope that I’ll change their minds, but because the live issues I perceive in comics discourse pertain to forms of silence other than censorship. Some are borne of power differentials I can name, like the phenomenon of punching down, or refusing to listen. Some stem from cowardice, like the unnatural quiet that descends across prominent platforms when someone important behaves badly. Many others are more difficult to articulate. How can I effectively describe the silence of someone who’s been rendered mute by anger or frustration? Or the silence of people who are just too tired of this stuff to bother speaking up? What is the word for the kind of silence that comes from disgust, or out of the fear of being treated poorly?

By definition, silence is not something I can present to you as evidence, but these people are not hypothetical; they’re real, and they are effectively rendered invisible. Their voices are profound in their lack. Some are lost and some are lurking and some are just plain gone. Some never even existed, quelled before they could be found. Some are mermaids, singing each to each in the vast and mysterious ocean that is Tumblr. Obviously I can’t speak on behalf of these missing persons. I find it hard to even speak about them since they’re so abstract. Instead I focus on my anger, which is huge, and the comedy of it all, which is not inconsiderable. I write about the voices I hear and the things I see, and I’m blown away by how much of it is total fucking nonsense.

Censorship, though—for this we have a word with a meaning. Look it up and write it in your notebooks, friends, because its constant misuse has real-world ramifications. From comics to comedy to videogames, people who invoke this dead moral question to demonize political correctness are either straight-up stupid, or acting in service of something else (usually nostalgia, fandom, white male supremacy, or some combination thereof). No one in American comics today—no creator, no fan, no publisher, no marketer, or critic—is actually arguing about censorship. The next time you see someone sling that word around, ask yourself what, in fact, he or she is fighting for.

Progressive Comics Can Leave Me Behind

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Nuance is what Comics calls for when a white guy does something really bad. To begin to form the basis of an opinion about each and every blatant awful act requires deep investigation, consideration, and care. You’ve gotta hear both sides, or so I’m told.

Here is what I know about Chris Sims. Under duress, he confessed to harassing a woman. The woman he harassed, Val D’Orazio, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder; she has described its effects, including financial strain, suicidal ideation, and professional hardship. It was such a blight on her health that it drove her out of comics blogging. These are indisputable facts.

Indisputable, except this narrative has been framed in two ways. A man, Chris Sims, has changed for the better, and there’s the sense that we should focus on that. D’Orazio has changed too, but for the worse. That’s not so uplifting. Not as easy. Not a point to rally behind as we move forward.

Indisputable, except that Comics calls for nuance. Despite Sims’ clear admission of guilt, some want to pry open this cold case and review with their own two eyes ancient blog posts, comments wars, and semi-relevant tweets. Cool, here’s thousands of words on someone’s personal impression of a bygone comics blogging milieu. This is how it always goes, this call for nuance, where even glossing some comics controversy requires sorting through so much ephemera that it quickly begins to sound like a whole lot of nothing. These petty piles of “evidence” begin to elide the unpleasant, indisputable truth: Chris Sims harassed a woman, and he made her very sick. Makes her sick, present tense, today, some five years after the fact.

D’Orazio had a big mouth and Sims had his burgeoning career. Claire Napier described how he built that career on his mistreatment of her, and I’d add that he’s now trying to build his persona as an ally on it too. Sims says all of this explicitly in his apology—offers it up like that’s a thing that makes sense, a thing that I’m supposed to understand. Sims found his voice in comics by harassing a woman, and now that he’s reformed he crows about his own sensitivity, which she helped him find, too. Good for him! (Bad for her.) Hey, thanks for sharing, Val. Your shitty fucking experience helped Sims become the compassionate man he is today.

Real progressives, we’re told, should rally behind Sims 2.0. “Chris is not the man he was when he directed his vitriol at Val D’Orazio,” says ComicsAlliance. Helpfully, Sims has offered a thoughtful analysis of his own campaign of harassment in the guise of two apologies. What a prince. Clearly he has come to realize that harassment is very, very bad. “Chris understands this now, and has understood it for years,” says CA. The point you see is not what Sims did; the point is what he now knows. Now that he understands, now that he’s better, now that he’s made a name for himself, some would-be hooligans, some riffraff, some GamerGate types, want to tear him down. To undo all the progress he’s made for all of us. For Comics!

Instead of an apology, ComicsAlliance went with frantic spin. Taking Sims’ lead, they chose to focus on the narrative of redemption. Along the way, CA invoked a cabal of anonymous haters who seek to sow discontent in the world of Progressive Comics, where all is well, clearly, la-la-la. “Someone was targeting Chris not out of a sense of justice, but because they wanted to destroy his success,” they wrote. Because, let’s face it, that’s the absolute worst crime you can commit in this town: to bring a good man low when he doesn’t deserve it.

Comics calls for nuance when a white guy does something really bad, especially when Comics knows that guy personally. Laura Hudson described factual reports of Sims’ harassment as an “anti-progressive campaign” trying to “actively dismantle progressive voices in comics.” Hudson is someone I admire, and it was uncomfortable to see her describe Val D’Orazio as a “skeleton” from Sims’ past to be wielded as a weapon against him, and against progressive voices. Who are the living breathing beings in that construction? Who isn’t? This is what nuance looks like in comics controversies: choosing to value one person’s humanity over someone else’s. Who dares to wave a bunch of old bones in the face of vital progress? Progressive Comics just wants to move forward. And what reasonable person doesn’t want that?

David Brothers wrote a powerful essay about cowardice in comics, explaining how, to white people, “racist” is an unspeakable slur. Accusations of racism and sexism are always given far more scrutiny and consideration than the offenses themselves. If you want to speak out, you’d better have your ducks in a row, because sure as shit someone will be there calling for “nuance.” Nuance is what Comics calls for when a white guy does something really bad. And that nuance is always and forever in the service of understanding him–the complex, well meaning white dude. To the rest of us it means antipathy, scrutiny, and straight-up hostility. There are consequences for whoever had the gall to speak up. It can ruin your day or your week. It can even make you physically ill. There is always a price.

Nuance dictates who receives the benefit of the doubt. Many, many comics controversies ago, when people accused Jason Karns of being a racist piece of shit, Tom Spurgeon explained he’d have to study Karns’ oeuvre before leveling such a serious accusation. Contrast those measured words with Spurgeon’s emotionally charged, intuitive “snap choice” to change his Twitter avatar to a racist caricature in the wake of Charlie Hebdo. I offer this example, not because Spurgeon is the worst or only offender along these lines by a long shot, but because it so plainly embodies a rampant attitude in Progressive Comics. It delineates what deserves careful consideration and who is most deserving of empathy. It is entirely oblivious to bias. It says, “I will think long and hard before I call someone a racist. And I will think very little, if it all, before I myself commit a racist act.”

Comics controversies have a short half-life. Time enough for everyone to write two or three angry tweets. Everyone cares and they CARE and they care really hard, and there’s very little time to absorb and reflect before another white guy does something really bad and there’s a renewed call for nuance, another pile of tweets to parse before we throw them into the void.

Here’s the thing: I fail to see the nuance in Sims’ story. He was a bad man, and now he’s a good one. Has he reformed, for real, deep in his heart? It’s entirely possible. I confess I don’t care.

Now that he’s one of the good guys, Sims is helping to lead the march forward for Progressive Comics, such as it is. Ever onward! That’s his story. But I’m more interested in the other side of the narrative, the one that belongs to D’Orazio. It’s with her experience—not Sims’ success—that the path to progress starts. Progress is not desperately pushing forward as though you’re running away from something. This is not Jurassic Park or a Cormac McCarthy novel where we’d better keep moving. Real progress sometimes requires standing still and taking stock.

So let’s take stock. A man bullied a woman. She’s still dealing with the ongoing implications of his bad behavior. It makes her sick. Years after the fact, the bully is finally dealing with the fallout. It makes him look bad—the worst thing that can happen to a man in this industry. And guess what? Making a man in this industry look bad is nearly impossible. They have nuance. It’s complicated.

I don’t question why white guys like Sims behave badly. I don’t give a hoot, and even if I did, I doubt I’d understand. Their rationale, if you can call it that, is entirely beside the point. Nuance is what Comics calls for when a white guy does something really bad, and it’s long been used to redirect negative attention. It ignores what is actually at stake.

I’m tired of hearing about Chris Sims. I don’t care about his reputation, or his heart, or his alleged victimization at the hands of some hater cabal. I don’t care about his success or his rehabilitation or his vision for the future. I care least of all about Progressive Comics. They are more than welcome to leave me behind.

I’m writing today because I care about the story of Val D’Orazio. In doing so I feel no sense of forward momentum. I know it won’t be long before I hear this story again.

The Unwitting Supremacist

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

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

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

*  *  *

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

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

lichtig

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human Behaviour

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Like comics, folk tales and fables are sometimes mistaken for children’s stories. The pretty palette and cutesy end papers of First Year Healthy belie enough abandonment, blood, and weird sexual situations to match the original Grimm brothers’ tales. That’s not to say it comes stocked with shriveled villains and plump children with rosy cheeks. There’s a baby, I guess, but it looks like the kind of thing you might find on a dusty shelf, in a jar. A quintessential Michael DeForge character, you probably wouldn’t want to touch it without latex gloves.
 

baby_1

 

The fuck is up with this baby.

 
Question number one: what is this thing, anyway? Not the baby, I mean, but the book. I suppose in terms of genre it falls somewhere between faux folk and modern myth. Is it, as the synopsis on the back suggests, a “parable about mental illness”? I’m not sure that captures its central paradox, so let’s say a sinister fairy tale, or an inscrutable fable. Horror-barf meets early Björk.
 

 
DeForge’s specialty is drawing charming things with a palpable sense of disgust, a sensibility that particularly suits First Year Healthy. A slender story with big illustrations and short typed paragraphs of text, it’s reminiscent of a Little Golden Book. Plot-wise, of course, we’re pretty far afield of the poky little puppy. This is the story of a troubled young woman—our narrator—trapped in a hostile landscape filled with joyless sex and uncaring neighbors. Her chief interests seem to be wound care and walking on thin ice. Mm-hmm, literally.
 

ice

“My hobbies include anything that sounds like a huge bummer.”

 
Our girl has recently emerged from an extended stay in a mental hospital. For what, we do not know, though we learn that her absence was long enough for her brothers to get married and have children to whom she has not been introduced. (Or is it possible she’s confused?) Her present-day life is full of intrigue, but it’s not exactly fraught. In fact, there’s something uncanny about the calm way in which she tells us her incredible story, which involves an orphan, several gangsters, and an enormous magic cat. All her observations seem to occur on a delay, as through a thick layer of static. Her flat affect hints at severe depression or even schizophrenia—or maybe she just doesn’t GAF.

The writing is well paced and strong, and the tension between it and the format, along with the wordless sequences with the magic cat, are probably what I would point to if someone were to get all Well, actually… about this book being not-comics. So far as I can see I stand alone in finding DeForge’s work aesthetically uneven. To me he’s at his best when he finds organic outlets for his inventiveness, like with the nightmare baby or the gray-faced gangster. The latter is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.
 

man

 
I like the artist’s weirdness less when it feels like affectation. Take, for instance, the opening image, an aggressively strange composition of some gore in a fish shop, or just the protagonist in general, whose inverse Cousin It situation is a bit much. (There are a million less ridiculous hairstyles that could’ve established a visual connection between the woman and the cat, who is—bear with me a moment—more or less her murder dæmon.) DeForge is more consistently successful with his use of color. While his tones here are earthy and muted compared to his penchant for neon, frequent shocks of pink and orange suggest that some things in our narrator’s world burn a little too brightly.

While it’s never clear how much of the story takes place in the narrator’s head, First Year Healthy doesn’t interrogate reality. The huge magic cat that silently lopes through these pages undeniably is. Many texts that explore mental illness are built around the anxious question of what is or isn’t real; that tension, and when and if it’s resolved, is what drives the plot. Remarkably, First Year Healthy is not about mental fragility. It is, rather, the story of a woman whose mind takes on a life of its own. It stalks her, but then again it eats her enemies. Is it a hallucination? Supernatural? Scary? Protective? DeForge’s answer seems to be whatever, and his utter lack of judgment is one of the things that makes this story so great.

Not for nothing, First Year Healthy is not just a portrait of mental illness; it is also a portrait of faith. Technically, it is a Christmas story (and therein are some iinteresting parallels), but what I see above all is a woman who is herself the most real and palpable thing in her universe. Her connection to the external world, and the people in it, is tenuous at best. Her closest personal relationship is with her boyfriend, who she refers to as “the Turk” in lieu of a first name. Her anonymous neighbors and nameless brothers barely register as beings in the story at all.

First Year Healthy’s focus on the narrator’s complex interiority makes it an interesting companion piece to the relentless biology of Ant Colony, DeForge’s full-length graphic novel from last year. Ant Colony’s glowing critical reception paid a lot of lip service to the young cartoonist as the next Great Pumpkin, but evidence of his genius in that volume was, to my mind, scant; its fresh look and flashes of humor couldn’t mask its Flea-grade nihilism and fundamental lack of depth. First Year Healthy is much shorter and sweeter, but beneath those trappings are big thoughts and surprising sophistication. Put another way, are we all just insects, fucking and fighting and oblivious to our own insignificance? Or is there meaning and magic in this hostile world for those who seek it? Of course the honest answer is a bit of both, but the latter makes for a more compelling story.

DeForge’s worlds are always weird but recognizable. They’re universal in that you’re meant to see yourself in them, but they’re always also Other. By design, Ant Colony explores the human condition from a sort of cold and alien vantage. First Year Healthy, which is set in the world of actual humans, is more warm-blooded. While its narrator is in many ways a familiar folk heroine—willful and self-reliant in the face of constant peril—her emotional detachment has a thoroughly modern feel. She’s brave but never spirited. Melancholy. Awkward. Alone. The strangeness of her life, which escalates quickly over just 30 pages, never fails to resonate. Like David Bowie, DeForge takes every flicker of sadness, self-doubt, insanity and total fucking loserdom you’ve ever felt and turns it into something unassailably cool.

Last month I went to see a Bowie retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was called David Bowie Is—a perfect title, I thought, until I came to understand that the organizers approached the artist’s identity as a construct to be deciphered and explained. In breaking down Bowie’s influences, his context, and his impact, the exhibit failed to find his human heart. He is this, they told me. He is that. But the entire point of Bowie is that he can’t be reduced to a series of personas. He has always transcended any label you might wish to apply. To some degree the same is true for the rest of us mere mortals, perhaps especially when it comes to mental illness.

It’s one thing to make an old idea look new, or to make a new idea look old. It’s another to craft something unique out of what has been there all along. From David Lynch to Haruki Murakami, the weirdos who mean the most to me transform everything into something else—something other—the whole of which is greater than the sum of its parts. After weeks of thinking about First Year Healthy, I’m still not so sure what it means. Whatever. Should I someday come face to face with my own magic cat, I can only hope my first instinct won’t be to dissect it.
 

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Aesop’s Comics

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The Old Man and Death

A pale old man, bent low from a burden he carried upon his back, walked along the path that led away from what remained of his village. The old man’s burden was a large sack of garbage, the fact of which became more pronounced as the day (a real scorcher) wore on. Of course there was the smell, but the sack was also unwieldy, and as the old man walked it kept knocking against other people on the path.

“Sir, please” one woman implored, rubbing a lump that was beginning to rise on her head. “I would never suggest that you abandon your…garbage treasure, but might you be more mindful of how it impacts your fellow travelers?”

The old man shook his fist and screamed at the sky. “I can bear these rubes no more. Death, I beseech Thee, take me now!”

A skeleton stepped softly from the shadows.

“Ugh,” said Death. “You are literally the worst.”

The Ass and the Lapdog

There once was a farmer who had an old hound and a donkey. The hound was well loved by his master, but in the town he had a certain reputation. The beast barked and barked and barked and was always rubbing its privates on the townspeople’s legs. When they complained, the farmer felt a sense of deep satisfaction. “Oh, he does that to everyone,” he’d say. But in truth the hound never bothered anyone who looked like his master.

One day, in the barn, the nasty old hound fell asleep in the farmer’s lap. Sensing an opportunity, the donkey broke loose from his tether and began prancing about in imitation of the hound. “Look at me!” the donkey cried. “I’m going to perpetuate racist stereotypes, and…like…” The donkey bit his lip, thinking hard. “Shit on some titties, or something.”

The farmer reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of sunglasses, which he unfolded carefully. Slowly, deliberately, he placed them over the pair he was already wearing.

“Not bad,” he said finally. “I’m going to give you a book deal.”

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse

Weary of dreary old London, the town mouse bought a Groupon and embarked on an exotic holiday. She was having quite a time until she saw something very strange indeed: a country mouse in traditional garb. What a sad sight, she thought. How thoroughly unmodern.

Overcome with pity for the poor creature, the town mouse stirred herself into action. “Sister, you don’t have to be so unfashionable!” she cried. “Come with me to the city and I’ll show you freedom.”

The country mouse felt a sadness so deep and familiar she couldn’t even call it sadness, really. It was just another part of her heart. But she had been dying to see the Alexander McQueen exhibit, so she took the town mouse up on her offer.

Back in London, the pair had just sat down for tea when the country mouse heard something strange. The sound was coming from the attic, and it was unmistakably rude.

“Oh! That’ll be Mister Crumb having a wee fap,” said the town mouse. “It’s a bit of a bother, I know. But I believe in free speech, you see.”

“LOL,” said the country mouse. “I thought The Beat was supposed to be open-minded and forward-looking comics journalism.”

The Mouse and the Hawk

Three mice were standing around in a field. One held up a picture he had drawn. It was a black woman depicted as a monkey.

“Oh no!” said the second mouse. “That looks super racist.”

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said the artist. “Allow me to explain to you its context. You see, the target of this joke is other racists.”

The third mouse nodded vigorously. “Sounds legit.”

But the second mouse wasn’t convinced. “This image doesn’t degrade and dehumanize racists,” he said. “It degrades and dehumanizes the black woman who you depicted as a monkey.”

Suddenly, a hawk swooped in and gobbled up the artist mouse. It was awful.

Horrorstruck, the second mouse turned to his companion, who was quivering with rage.

“You’re glad that happened,” the third mouse spat. “You think he had it coming.”

Said the second mouse: “Um, no.”

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

The Old Gray Farm had hired a boy to watch over a flock of sheep in the nighttime. They didn’t pay very well, but the boy knew the flock was counting on his keen eyes to pierce through the perilous dark.

The first night, the boy watched the chickens. His boss was surprised to find him asleep in the coop when the sun came up. “Say, why did you do that? I hired you to watch the sheep!”

The boy spent the second night farting around on his iPhone. This time his boss was incredulous. “Why?” she said. “Why are you so bad at this?”

Something something Twitter dot com, the boy mumbled. Something something artistic integrity.

His boss rolled her eyes. “Listen, kid,” she said. “Most of these sheep don’t even have smartphones.”

The boy was sacked, of course. Six months later, he cried wolf.

The Wise Mother

A mother sat with her small son in the park. Far over their heads, a flock of pristine white birds flew into the glorious sunset.

“What are those, mama?” said the boy.

“Sweet child, those are racists,” his mother said. She kissed his forehead and stroked his soft hair.

The birds flapped their wings, seemingly oblivious. Beautiful. Except—wait—this one bird in the back that flew all crooked and kept snapping at the empty air. Was it angry? Confused? The boy wasn’t sure.

“What’s that bird doing, mama? Is it a racist, too?”

The mother paused for a moment, contemplating the mysterious universe.

“No, honey,” she said. “That’s Ted Rall.”

Shhhhhh (for the Love of Comics)

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Comics asks that you join it in observing a moment of silence.

Comics is staunchly anti-censorship. We shall discuss this in due time, after the moment of silence.

No, not yet. Hush, now. For freedom. For Comics!

Comics isn’t sure about the kids these days, to be honest.

Comics worries the next generation might not read the right things. Sometimes Comics can’t sleep at night, for all the worrying.

Comics wonders if you plan to wear a sweater. It’s supposed to get chilly, you know.

Also pack some extra socks. It’s good for Comics.

Comics has put together a big book of newspaper clippings for posterity. Comics someday hopes to print and collate corresponding threads from the most essential message boards.

What’s a Tumblr, Comics wonders. It sounds stupid.

Comics respects women. Obviously.

Why? Because Comics says so, that’s why.

Psssh. Comics is not racist. Because satire.

Comics says maybe YOU’RE the racist. Did you ever think of that?

Comics will try to speak more slowly so you can understand.

Actually…Comics.

Merica. Krazy Kat. Comics.

Comics says this is not the time or the place.

Comics says watch your tone.

Comics says that you just want attention.

Comics can’t hear you. LA-LA-LA

You are not the boss of Comics.

Comics has made a list of 500 things we can all do to improve Comics. 1. Always listen to Comics.

Comics. Comics!! COMICSSSSS

Comics had a black friend in middle school.

Homophobic? Comics has two words for you: Alison Bechdel.

Transphobic? Listen, Comics doesn’t even care about that stuff!

No, seriously. Comics doesn’t give a fuuuuuuck.

You know what Comics does care about? Art. Unlike some certain people.

You just don’t understand Art. Or history. Not like Comics does.

Comics only wants what’s best for you. Someday you’ll understand.

Anyway, this isn’t about you. It’s about me. I mean, Comics.
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Only Connect

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Before I read The Hospital Suite, I was only vaguely aware of John Porcellino as a sort of folk hero. He packed up and left Chicago near the turn of the century (around the time I moved here myself), and some 15 years on still seems to be the patron saint of comics in this city, or maybe the Midwest in general. Cartoonist laureate of a Carl Sandburg poem. Any place where folks work hard and make the best of it.

Paul Bunyan had an ox. John Porcellino, a cat. Her name was Maisie. She’s been memorialized in no less than three Sufjan Stevens songs—more if you count the b-sides. I recently learned that a cabal of suburban mail carriers named her a minor deity. They want to get her on a stamp. They say that on clear winter days, at first light, you can feel the spirit of the cat making copies of out-of-print comics at the Wicker Park Kinko’s. I met some guy at Quimby’s who claims he communed with her there. Three beers in he admitted she had to correct his pronunciation of Kukoc.

I don’t know, I guess you read comics. You probably know the lore. But all I really knew up until I read The Hospital Suite was that Porcellino has a pure punk heart and a 90s-era webstore, and I confess that my more cynical side wondered if that wasn’t, on some level, super fucking ridiculous. I’d like to be the kind of person who buys mail-order zines, but the truth of my life is that I read celebrity gossip magazines and persist in ordering almost everything from Amazon even though I know it’s evil. I truly wish I cared.

In any case, I’m grateful to the good people at Drawn & Quarterly for publishing this work in a format that feels accessible to jerks like me. While I could see Porcellino’s appeal from page one, there were moments early on when I worried The Hospital Suite was another “good patient” story. I also found the current of what I’d reluctantly call spiritual comics to be a bit much—not a deal breaker, but always off-putting. (I love Ron Regé Jr, but there is no plane to which I could ascend where I would be inured to the hilarity of his wizard robe.) Slowly, though, it dawned on me that I was reading something rare and real and special, and not at all ridiculous, and by the end of The Hospital Suite I felt for Porcellino a sort of affection that is a rare sensation in reading comics, or really all of literature, or maybe life. I’d compare it to how I feel about David Foster Wallace or Lynda Barry. I mean to say he shines a light.
 

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Autobio is a crowded category, not just in its number of practitioners but also in its sensibility. It’s often a jaundiced genre—frenetic, claustrophobic, uncomfortable. Neurotic. Obsessive. Tortured. Overwrought. Within The Hospital Suite, there are traces of all the classic themes: ambivalence toward the responsibilities of adulthood, depression, masturbation, being broke. The chief difference is, despite a grueling fight for his life and nigh on a decade’s worth of catastrophic diarrhea, John Porcellino somehow seems to be the least miserable bastard in comics. Of course—and this is critical—he’s not quite happy, either. He’s something else. And whatever you want to call it, it’s a breath of fresh air.

There is a palpable sense of calm conveyed by Porcellino’s simple aesthetic. I gather that’s just how he draws, but it suits the subject matter here very well, offsetting the intense distress he depicts throughout The Hospital Suite. I’ve heard him say that his drawing is sometimes referred to as bad. I find that astonishing, but it certainly sounds like something my dad would say. Of course anyone who has aspired to minimalism in any area of life, artistic or otherwise, will recognize the sophistication required to draw stripped-down pictures like these. It’s advanced iconography—a very high level of graphic design—and that Porcellino manages to pack so much charm into drawings this spare is remarkable, if not unheard of (cf. Allie Brosh). Occasionally he flashes his chops in a cool composition, like this scene from his sickbed that captures the whole Starship Enterprise vibe of being in the hospital.
 

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But I think Porcellino is at his best when he keeps things simple. He has developed an idiosyncratic shorthand to convey outsized feelings—the good, the bad, and even the ineffable. Probably my favorite thing about the book is the little hearts he draws to convey all the love he feels in the universe. He seems to tap into it almost everywhere, including the post office.
 

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Reader, I don’t know about you, but this does not even remotely resemble any interaction I’ve ever had with USPS.
 

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Or possums?     ~~oO{:>     ……..(/*o*/)

Structurally, The Hospital Suite isn’t quite sound. On one hand, Porcellino does an excellent job of distilling a narrative from an incredibly complex system of mental and physical illnesses that span a long period of time. On the other, we have the book’s clumsy division into three distinct, but overlapping, sections, plus several wholly unnecessary appendices. The central paradox of Porcellino is that his stories are very processed—aggressively reduced and refined—but feel entirely organic. Untouched. In sharp contrast, the section breaks feel artificial and distracting, and it messes with the magic just a little. One of the advantages of comics as a medium is the ease with which they can accommodate more than one timeline. These stories should have been stitched together with more care.

Overarching the structural concerns is the book’s lack of dramatic tension; the terror of the Mystery Illness is offset by the reader’s sure knowledge that Porcellino did in fact survive this experience. Even when emotions run high, the stakes feel low. Some stories are so engrossing that you feel “worried” even when you know the outcome, but The Hospital Suite never quite manages to transcend its own inevitability. I don’t know, it might be unfair to expect a Zen Buddhist to ratchet up the drama.

Admittedly, this is where we brush up against my limitations as a critic: the places in the text where I wondered if its “deficiencies” were areas in which there was real room for improvement, or just a different way of looking at the world. Often I admire Porcellino’s clear perspective. (Even when he’s talking about the shame spirals of obsessive-compulsive disorder, his gaze is cool and level.) But sometimes I get the sense that he simply hasn’t done the hard work of what Justin Green has described as presenting the self as a “specimen.” The world of The Hospital Suite is a place in which things happen to John Porcellino. There is no real sense that he assumes any agency in life.
 

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Whether that lack of agency is a personal problem, a spiritual belief, or a syndrome borne of years coping with a debilitating, unpredictable illness is difficult to discern. (Maybe it’s all of those things.) I’ve read that the events in The Hospital Suite span two divorces and three relationships—something that wasn’t quite clear to me from reading the book. It’s understandable that Porcellino didn’t want to delve into the particulars; these are real women in the world, after all, and in some ways the dissolution of those relationships seems tangential to the story he’s trying to tell. But I found myself giving him the side eye, hard, in some of the sequences about his first wife.
 

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I wonder if, as an autobiographer, the decision to do what was best for his cat instead of his relationship was something that Porcellino could have delved into more deeply.
 

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But no one’s perfect, you know? And as much as I love autobiographical comics, they tend to celebrate imperfection in a way that’s slyly self-congratulatory. They relish rolling around in the shit. Whatever flaws are in The Hospital Suite, the author seems to come by them without ego or agenda. Which all sounds rather humorless, doesn’t it? He’s very funny, though.
 

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I’m not a spiritual person, or the kind of girl who has easy access to all the love in the universe. Frankly, I’m more disdainful and suspicious of those things than I’d like. As much as I wish I were a special disgruntled snowflake, this perspective is, increasingly, a cultural norm. From the milieu of autobiographical comics to television’s recent obsession with antiheroes, drama isn’t really about Good People right now. It’s hard to make them seem compelling, or even believable. As a creator, it’s all too easy to explore the nuance of being a garbage person. It’s also easy, from a reader’s point of view, to sigh in relief that someone else in the world is just as bad (or, better, worse) than you are.

It’s more difficult and brave, I think, to make art that takes people outside themselves and shows them something larger. More than craft or even sheer likeability, it is that reach that makes John Porcellino’s comics remarkable. It’s a quality I can’t quite hope to convey in these 1,500 words. This is where I’d draw the heart.