Tag Archives: Miriam Libicki

Voices from the Archives: Miriam Libicki on Lost Girls

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Cartoonist Miriam Libicki wrote for HU for a while…but this comment was from before she’d come on board. She’s commenting here on my review of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls. I’ve left punctuation as is.

wow. i was reluctant to read another review of yours, cause so often they just make me feel lousy. but you were so spot on on the points of lost girls which disappointed me, some of which i hadn’t realized myself.

i went in expecting to like it, as moore is responsible for one of my most reliable sexual fantasies (invisible man ravishing his way through the girls’ school? hot. & i never thought of it before, but it could be seen as a perfect mixture of a common hetero male fantasy (lots of sex with lots of interchangeable nubile young chix) & a common hetero female fantasy (sex with a faceless/invisible partner, so that it is all about your body & sensations)), but i was vaguely annoyed &… bored through lost girls, a lot more often then i was turned on.

i knew some of what i didn’t like was the interchangeability of all the parts, & the fact that the characters were so secondary to their sex scenes. i didn’t put my finger on the “women’s porn is about relationships” (to totally overgeneralize), but i think it’s true.

i don’t read romance novels, cause the ones i was exposed to were badly written & had gender roles that were distasteful to me. i am occasionally & guiltily a big sucker for chick-flicks of the romantic comedy type, & i’ve really enjoyed some slash fic.

much of slash fic is about relationships. even if it’s gonzo fucking, the fact that you’re supposed to know who the characters are & how they interact in canon, makes it emotional. & my favourite slash author happens to be a sexually frustrated lesbian, whose stories are all about straight guys longing with great longing for their straight best friends.

so i think you’re also right, & i hadn’t considered before, that unrequited longing is a big turn on (for women, or at least women who are me). that’s why i started off really liking alice, when she seemed like an elderly dyke who could only look at young women & verbally seduce herself. when she started having sex with everything, she became a lot more boring.

the lecturing got me down, too, but it wasn’t as frustrating as why i was so often bored by the sex stuff (yes, it was pretty male-y in the way that penetrative sex was the only sex worth having… i actually dig girl-on-girl, but, you know, more of the dykes to watch out for variety). now i feel like i understand it all better.

so after all that tmi, thanks!

 

more boys vs. girls at san diego comic-con

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So I’m no good at doing peppy little wrap-up posts, but I’ve gotta record for posterity my favourite overheard moment of last weekend.

It was in the women’s bathrooms by the Small Press area, and I was leaving out the door so I have no idea what the women looked like or anything. All I heard was, “I told that costumed guy to ‘beat it, nerd!'”

Kids Comics Roundtable: it’s all good

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Kids’ comics were a giant part of my childhood, and I don’t mean respectable European ones like Moomin or Asterix or Tintin. No, it was pure American corporate-owned, tie-in-toy, sugar-cereal shilling garbage like Mad Balls, Ewoks, Masters of the Universe, Planet Terry, Top Dog, Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, (there were three of us girls, but my brother was the oldest, so it was mostly non-girly stuff. Of course, gender norming even then wasn’t as defensively aggressive as it is now, so there were girly bits to most of the boy comics; I totally imprinted on the girl ewok (Kneesa?) with the pretty pink hood, and somewhat less so on She-Ra and her gang) god I don’t know what else, ALF comics for awhile (did you even know there were ALF comics?). Along with some older standards like Archie and Katy Keene.

What it was was, my parents were hippies, relative to our community, and the biggest gulf between us Libickis and our peers was our lack of television. My father had been somewhat into comics in his youth (I know he owned at least some sixties Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, besides the hidden stash of Crumb comix), and they both wanted to encourage us to read and apparently figured that the comic-book equivalents of those 80s Saturday morning cartoons had enough benefits in with the consumerist brain-rot. So I could still share in the advertising jingles sung by kids in my class, even though I only knew the words and not the tunes (and if that isn’t a metaphor for the introvert nerd’s life….).

I dunno exactly what my point is. Maybe that my siblings and I did basically learn to read on comics (we had picture books read to us, and chapter books read to us, but never comics that I recall), and the comics we learned to read on were pure extruded Comic Product, and they did exactly what my parents hoped they would: made all of us lifelong readers, writers, and draw-ers (everybody got over the latter except for me, but everybody drew for pleasure longer than most of our peers). So worry not, parents and librarians. Sometimes crap can do the job just as well as art.

There are even some elements from the comics, whose writers and artists I’ll probably never know by name, that still stay with me: Top Dog taught me about inflation (in one issue, the bad guy’s evil plan is to drop helicoptersful of money onto a city, thus wrecking its economy) and Planet Terry was your generic ‘80s orphan searching the galaxy for his lost-to-memory parents, except his twist was he didn’t have their picture, just their glass picture frame, empty and inscribed to him. I still find that both clever and poignant.

My most treasured learning-to-read memory is out of Planet Terry. I had the hang of phonics down, but I didn’t yet understand a lot of the conventions of English writing. Planet Terry was a pretty overwrought kid, being an orphan and all, and he was having a particularly bad time of it one issue when he is forced to accept that his arch-nemesis is his father, and goes live with him and have a proper filial relationship.

He tries, but when the cognitive dissonance becomes too great, he cries, “B-but, D-dad!” I hadn’t yet come across the rule about how dashes between letters indicate stuttering, so I read this as, “bee butt, dee dad!”

That was my and my best friend’s favourite joke for the next five years. Kids, they’re easy to please.

fandom confession: piers anthony

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I can easily think of things from my youth that I don’t like now as much as I once did, and that other people would consider silly or unworthy: soapy mystery novels (Julie Smith and Martha Grimes were my favourites), Strangers in Paradise (as I’ve discussed before), Wolff and Byrd: Counselors of the Macabre (that’s a unique case, cause I fell all the way out of it, but then met Batton Lash, who is the nicest guy ever, at a con a couple of years ago and fell all the way back in, so now I love it down to its last bad pun, heavy-handed moral, and character missing the back third of their skull), Elton John (I still listen to his albums semi-regularly, but they have nothing like the presence they had in my life when my brother became obsessed with him*), Moxy Fruvous (listening to them now brings up intense feelings of embarrassment, but I’m really proud actually, to have followed an obscure dorky band around as a highschooler, and it did get me my husband)… but even though I’m no longer a fangirl, I can’t conjure up any shame about them.

It’s not even shame I feel about having been into Piers Anthony, and reading almost all of the Xanth books and most of the Incarnations of Immortality books (it was during this series that my enjoyment turned to disgust). I’m not ashamed because, as I’ve found out, almost everyone who’s into fantasy was into those books at one time. So if I don’t judge them, how can I judge me?

What I am, is regretful of the time I spent on those damn books, and of the awful ideas about sex and gender they were allowed to plant in my head. As I recall (I haven’t picked up an Anthony book in fifteen years or so, and I wouldn’t without a substantial cash advance), it was mostly your run of the mill virgin-whore women-have-no-sexual-desire-except-the-desire-to-be-looked-at-by-men (sometimes in a nice, sex-as-reward way, sometimes in an evil-temptress way, of course) blah blah. It was a lot of what you get from the rest of the culture anyhow, but something made it worse in Anthony. Maybe it was because he was a fantasy writer who, if he wasn’t technically Young Adult, certainly had lots of books with adolescent protagonists. And most people who read YA and a good percentage of people who read fantasy are young girls.

Maybe it’s something I’m still repressing that made Anthony worse. Noah here mentions rapey bits, which I don’t recall, except one notable one, and it’s the event which finally pulled me out of the books and made me question who this Anthony guy was and what he was trying to tell me. Early on in the first Incarnations of Immortality book, our hero saves an undead woman from being gang-raped, and she promptly offers to have sex with him, in order to show her gratitude (he declines, being a nice guy and having heard that undead women were trouble).

I was like, um. I have never been nearly-gang-raped myself, but I am pretty sure that, having just emerged from such a trauma, I would probably not want to immediately have sex, with a random stranger no less. What kind of person thinks your average woman would? (curiously enough, this scene was repeated exactly, except for the undead business, in the contemporary Batman and Robin film. Pretty much the only thing I still remember about those two pieces of… art).

Thinking about it, that scene is the NiceGuy fallacy in a nutshell. Men who act with basic human decency toward women deserve sex as a reward and an incentive, and any woman who accepts any sort of help from a man better pay up in sexual favours, or it’s her own fault when NiceGuys are forced to go bad in order to get any.

This is sample bias, but I get the feeling that nerd/geek culture is especially susceptible to the NiceGuy fallacy (because girls who consume western nerd/geek culture are presented with more opportunities to empathize with fictional and actual nebbishes, at the expense of empathizing with, you know, themselves). Presenting it again (and I doubt my remembered example was the only time, and the “polemics on rape” Noah mentioned are probably even worse), in fun, slightly risqué YA-ish adventures, makes Piers Anthony an evil bad man, and makes me want to smack that book right out of my poor twelve-year-old hands.

Which I can’t really say about Billy Joel, no matter how many trees he crashes into.

*my totally straight, currently ultra-Orthodox brother. His gay-ass taste in music is one of his saving graces.

defining mary

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We’ve just begun our Mary Sue roundtable (Noah here, Tom here) but it’s already clear in the posts and comments that we’re working from several overlapping definitions.

I surf around the fringes of the sci-fi and fanfic internets, so I’d been hearing the term for several years, as well as where it originally came from (Star Trek fan communities). But my personal working definition is not the strict-construction fanfic one, rather one alluded to best in Leigh Dragoon’s tips on breathing life into your characters (written for a sci-fi, fantasy and fanfic reading audience who wanted to branch into writing original fiction), specifically tips 3 and 4:

3. Don’t love your characters too much!

It’s important to love your characters, but try to love them the same way you love your family: don’t be afraid to acknowledge their faults. Everyone wants readers to like their characters, but it’s very easy to make your character a little too likeable. At that point, you are well on your way to creating a Mary Sue. Also, when you’re handing out those flaws, make sure you add in a few good ones! Avoid the Playboy Pin-Up Characterization – eating dessert and watching R-rated movies are not really flaws.

4. That said, avoid Mary Sue/Gary Stu’s siren song. “Luke, it’s a trap!”.

Mary and her male counterpart Gary will pretend to be your best friends. They will lie to you like there’s no tomorrow. The lie they tell most often is, “The more perfect you make me, the more everyone will love me!”.

First off, how many perfect people do you know in real life? I’m willing to bet not a one. Perfect people are boring! Nobody wants to read about someone who is physically flawless, never makes a single mistake, and is loved by the entire supporting cast for no real reason. I’ll be the first to say that it doesn’t help that so many actual published novels and comics are peopled with Mary Sues. A prime example of a “canon” Mary Sue is the hero of Mercedes Lackey’s “Magic’s Price” trilogy, Vanyel Ashkevron, a classic Emo Stu.

In my estimation, Mary Sues happen when the author becomes concerned with making her protagonist likable to readers. Symptoms include overcompetence, unearthly beauty, and other characters taking time out to admire the protagonist’s awesomeness. I don’t think a Mary Sue has to be the author’s self-insertion in the sense that Mary has anything in common with the author, and if the test is “created with likability too much in mind, to the point where the opposite results”, that covers Snapper Sues just as easily.

But you could say that creating a character whose primary purpose is to win readers’ love and adoration is a self-insertion, because Mary is a stand-in for the love the author himself wants to receive. That’s why I find folks like Chris Ware’s, Dan Clowes’ and Adrian Tomine’s self-insertions (either straight autobiographical personae or your standard white*-guy comic-reading loser protagonist) to be just as insufferable Mary Sues in their own way; I’m gonna make this guy such a loser that you’ll hate him because I hate myself so much.

I am, for obvious reasons, very interested in (semi-)autobiographical protagonists as Mary Sues. I think the key to avoiding them is to make a character that doesn’t desperately radiate either “love me!” or “hate me!” vibes, but just manages to be a compelling character among compelling characters. Phoebe Gloeckner’s Minnie is my prime example of this, and as Noah notes, Ariel Schrag’s Ariel pulls it off as well. Schrag herself mentions Art Spiegelman as an influence. I think Maus does it well, but in the new Breakdowns there’s way too much of both love me (do you see now how much of an innovator I was?) and hate me (I’m still a neurotic loser despite my success!).

Speaking of Clowes, it’s been awhile since I’ve either read or seen Ghost World, and neither of them really affected me deeply. But to weigh in on the comic Dan Clowes/movie Steve Buscemi character debate going on in comments here: the way people describe it, in the book he’s not a Mary Sue because 1)he’s not the protagonist and 2)he’s shot down and ridiculed by the protagonists. In the movie he’s not a Mary Sue because 1)he’s not the protagonist and 2)… I saw the movie before I read the book. So the first thing I thought when the Buscemi character was introduced was, “Hey, that’s R. Crumb.”

I didn’t think Zwigoff had him in there because Zwigoff wanted to sleep with teenage girls, rather Zwigoff wanted to be a zaftig teenage girl so he could sleep with R. Crumb. I thought Zwigoff’s earlier, celebrated documentary about Crumb was an amazing story, but the hero worship is palpable, especially as concerns Crumb’s sexual prowess. Aline Kominsky-Crumb has certainly expressed exasperation with that aspect of the doc in interviews.

And as long as this post is just a big mash of comment responses rolled into one… I don’t think, per Tom’s post, that a merely super-confident, super-cool character who garners widespread respect is of necessity a Mary Sue. There are a lot of stories that make use of inhumanly competent characters for non-mary-sue reasons. The one that always comes to my mind is Corwin in Nine Princes in Amber (any other fantasy geeks in the house?). He’s stupidly resourceful because it’s thrilling to watch his resourcefulness, not because it’s just awesome how awesome he is. An overcompetent character can escape sueishness by having flaws or mistakes that cost him as much (or almost as much) as his genius gains him. If Michael Corleone has a downfall, and if the downfall is his fault at all (no, I haven’t read the books, or even seen the movies, shamefully), then he’s not a Mary Sue by my definition.

Hopefully I’ll write a more cohesive post on the theme soon. Or I’ll just keep dredging up arguments from comments. In the game show we call: “Mary Sue or Nary Sue?”

*ok, so in Tomine’s case, he’s vaguely ethnic.

MR3 Part Too Late: the devil wears lancome

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Firstly, as a non-manga-reader undergoing continuing education in these blog series, I want to agree with Tom that the Okazaki’s artwork shocked and thrilled me at first glance. Her art looks more gestural than any other manga I’ve seen, and the thickish lines and largish facial features were much more relatable, for me, than the pin-thin perfect lines i’m used to seeing from our eastern brethren.

When manga characters elsewhere are composed so meticulously and in such delicate detail, it seems weird that their faces and bodies look all flat, whereas here, the flatness is right, cause they’re just shorthand sketches (I think it’s an important connection Tom makes to Andy Warhol: these characters strongly suggest 50s American gag and advertisement cartooning, which is a lot of why they felt so warmly familiar).

Of course, after the initial glow of recognition, Helter Skelter gave me the same problems I’ve had with most manga, namely the diffuculty of telling characters apart and the difficulty of distinguishing men from women. At first, I thought the makeup artist and the ingenue personal assistant turned sex slave turned hitwoman were different people, then I thought they were the same person, then at the end of the book I again thought that they were two people, and the makeup artist was in fact a man (reading Nana I learned to check for neck girth to determine a character’s sex, here that doesn’t work). But, I am still an outsider to the art form, and people have said my characters are hard to tell apart, so.

Like Noah and Tom, divasploitation doesn’t read as particularly feminist to me, or particularly new. Okazaki does a lot of telling-not-showing, in the form of the voiceovers, the quotations, and then the burning-tiger lsd scenes, that she’s getting at something bigger, deeper, more meta, but that part never really intrudes on the divasploitation enough to matter.

It’s funny, though, and probably telling of our different gender-coloured perspectives, that I had a different conviction from my co-utilitarians of where this awfully tired and predictable story was going.

Tom says, “Hana was there to be a doormat and let us see what a beast Ririko was. The cop was there to delve into the dark doings behind Ririko’s creation, to bring about justice at the end of the story, and in the meantime to give us some relief from Ririko’s twisted bitchiness and that of her milieu.” Cause I was sure that the cop was just an expositional device and a looming threat, whereas Helter Skelter would really be Hana’s story, the old “innocent, better-than-that girl is tempted by shallow beauty & riches, almost succumbs, but manages to triumphantly turn her back on it in the end” (hence my title). I really thought that’s where the Lancome-loaning scene, in particular, was going. (“No, Hana! She’ll get you hooked on the devil makeup!”)

But even though Ririko does talk about harming other people because she has been harmed, and refers to Hana in that context, she never actually harms Hana in the same way that she herself had been harmed. The makeup scene is actually just about Ririko’s bait-and-switch affections; Hana never gets designer clothes or a makeover, let alone surgery (Ririko encourages her sister to get surgery, but it reads as misguided empathy rather than cruelty). She uses Hana for nonconsensual but mutually enjoyable sex slavery, and for inappropriate errands up to and including grevious assault, but she never tries to remake Hana in her own image.

But that’s exactly what our conquering hero, the detective, does to Ririko. He renames her (it’s interesting how men in literature who set out to objectify, remake and possess a woman often start with assigning her a new name… was Lolita the first or just the most famous example?), stalks her all over and announces they were feathers together in a past life, before (as Noah so powerfully pointed out) tearing down her whole life, ruining her body’s chances of survival, and leaving her no recourse.

He’s as bad as “Mom,” maybe worse, because he’s an outsider who gets to lecture smugly as he objectifies, rather than being down in the beauty trenches (“Mom” reveals offhand that she’s surgically generated herself, so she is harming Ririko exactly as she was harmed). This is a feminist parable?? (This isn’t really undone by the darkly happy-ending epilogue, which goes against all the established rules about the sinister abortion surgery.)

Sigh. I might as well conclude with some more clueless-outsider bitching about manga. Okazaki pays lip service to it’s-bad-to-starve-yourself-to-get-supermodel-thin, but then every default female character has the same figure as Ririko, minus the breast implants and a couple of inches of height. Why aren’t we concerned about how all of them, by extension, are starving themselves? All the highschool girls we occasionally cut to, absorbing bad values from their fashion magazines, already look like fashion models (the only women with any fat on them, are the women whose fat is integral to the plot). That’s what happens when you draw a whole world in fashion illustration style, and that’s what all shonen and josei manga i’ve ever seen does.

Also, how every woman shown having sex has to explain at least once that she’s Not Really Into This Sort of Thing. Maybe it’s the innocent 50s romance referred to in comments, back before they discovered the female sex drive, or maybe it’s just another culture’s gender norms, which who-am-i-to-say are more fucked up than ours, but the good girl who has to be coerced is so not a turn-on for me. (That was one of my favourite things about Nana, even though it has the fashion-illustration crap in spades: it seemed to not share the above sexual hang-up at all. The good-girl-naif is actually shown to be pretty promiscuous in high school, and it’s just not a thing.)