Alias vs. Jessica Jones

Posted on December 1, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

The verdict is in—Jessica Jones is awesome. I’m sure you’ve read it all in various reviews littering the web. There’s the superb depiction of rape trauma and PTSD, the excellent depression, the fabulous sex, and the best portrayal of Luke Cage both inside and outside of comics. Kyrsten Ritter and the supporting cast—sublime! And what about that snappy dialogue—not bad but maybe not as snappy as in that other show about a “rape” victim-superheroine, iZombie.

But there is one rather obvious problem with Jessica Jones. It’s stupid; massively dumb and bloated to boot. It’s the same old story, the desperation to love something, anything in this Golden Age of TV or at least find some reason to like the latest Hollywood craze—the superhero franchise. The publicity agents have urged us to like, nay love, sex and dragons, rotting flesh, and xenophobic paranoid CIA agents; and now they insist we venerate plain clothes superheroics.

Just like in the zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead, Jessica Jones never lets logic get in the way of thrills, false dilemmas, and homilies about our decadent society. The remarkable zombie franchise embodies the deeply held American fantasy that the last will be first and they will need guns to accomplish this. It is the little people who will pull through and distill the human (let’s just call it the American) spirit to make the Fatherland great again (or least provide glorious entertainment). Certainly not the armed forces which are clearly the most poorly armed and least disciplined of all organizations

In his article at Quartz, Noah insists that Jessica Jones is (and I paraphrase here) a smart show but I think what he meant to say was that it’s a show with something (new?) to say which I guess is kind of an improvement over most things on TV which are generally vacuous, inane or some combination of both. So the “patriarchy” is violent, desirable, all consuming and almost irresistible—the hidden, unacknowledged evil running through society. Does this mean that Jessica Jones is Pilgrim’s Progress for feminists, and frequently just as tedious? Why didn’t they just send me the 1000 word memo Noah wrote instead? It was certainly more concise and less soporific. Oh, I know, it’s because Jessica Jones is meant to be an entertainment.

Noah has spent his binge watching hours screaming at poor Jessica to invest in noise cancelling ear phones or at least some thick cotton wool (answer in episode 10; it’s not the Killgrave of the comics we all know and love). He wonders why Daredevil or a hermetically-sealed Iron Man don’t come round to save the day. The answer to this last question, at least, is obvious. Marvel won’t let them. Or maybe this minor mass murderer is too insignificant for all the mutants, aliens, Inhumans, superheroes, or agents with futuristic weapons living in New York to bother with. And what about the mind control virus responsible for Killgrave’s powers? Probably a few steps down the Chain of Cretinousness from Midi-chlorians. The invention of Superman’s solar powered fuel cells seem like an act of prodigious sagacity by comparison.

Noah like so many others have wondered why it is so hard for people to believe in mind control in a world of galactic invasions and Asgardian Gods come to earth (with mind controlling abilities to boot)? Because if they did, we wouldn’t have this meaningful bash about rape trauma and violent revenge. Because it is all too clear that the makers of Jessica Jones have utter contempt for superheroics and the well tested internal logic which governs them. Which would be a most excellent thing if you weren’t accepting a paycheck from the overlords of the Marvel Universe.

Let’s be honest here—superhero comics are overwhelmingly idiotic. So utterly degraded that Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’ first run of Alias (the comic in which Jessica Jones is introduced) was greeted like manna from heaven when it first hit the stands. Make no mistake, Alias is largely the kind of superhero police procedural Bendis has been fond of since his halcyon days on Powers; instantly forgettable and considerably inferior in almost every respect to the television adaptation. It should be noted, however, that all the central relationships in the television adaptation have been cribbed (and fleshed out) from the comics (Alias #24 to #28, “Purple” Parts 1 to 5).

One rather curious thing about Bendis’ Alias was his determination not to make Jessica Jones a rape victim. One suspects a half-conscious reaction to the plethora of female rape (and murder) victims in the 80s superhero renaissance initiated by Miller and Moore (see Watchmen, The Killing Joke, Born Again, The Dark Knight Returns et al). In fact, the Jessica Jones of the comics makes it a point to tell Luke Cage that she was not raped—in the traditional meaning of the word—though she was certainly made to watch rape and murder, and thoroughly mentally abused in more vivid terms than shown in its adaptation. I doubt if there is another “living” Marvel heroine who has undergone a more traumatic experience than Jessica Jones. The television adaptation is less interested in hideous spectacle and more focused on rehabilitation and recovery, and is much the better for it.

The inconsistencies, incoherence, and tumescence of the television series are all there to provide recurrent inconclusive confrontations as we await Killgrave’s inevitable demise in the final episode (he doesn’t die in the comics). The texture of the cloth seems fine but the presentation is nonsensical and aggravating. You have to be in the mood to give the creators broad license to throw away good sense in the name of preaching for you to enjoy this.

There is, however, one thing to say in Bendis’ favor (I think)—he’s not ashamed of the form. He bloody loves it. Jessica’s first case involves being tricked into spying on Steve Rogers (aka Captain America), and when she gets into trouble it is Matt Murdoch (aka Daredevil) who pulls her out of an interrogation session. Bendis has no truck with inconsistent power levels and Jessica doesn’t suddenly lose her ability to dish out measured love taps to humans without abilities; something which occurs in every other episode of the television series. Killgrave is in jail with lots of other super criminals in the comics and his utter vulnerability to Daredevil made fun of. As for Jessica Jones, it is her shame and embarrassment which prevents her from seeking the help of the Avengers more often (long story) and when Killgrave finally escapes, the havoc he creates is met by a response from the same team. A psychic defense trigger provided by an X-Man (Jean Grey) helps Jones defeat Killgrave.

Now let’s just sit back and think about this for a while. Can you imagine how stupid (not to mention impractical from a commercial perspective) all this would be for a “serious” TV show? You’d need a Class A creative mind to make all this work and also be intellectually stimulating, which is why something like Watchmen has become the perennial bat used to whack all comers who would label it undoable. How do you make a story about “real” life if there are superheroes and vigilantes running amok throughout America? The answer to this is quite simple—you can’t. They why they call it fucking fantasy, an altered reality in which all commonsense reactions to and explanations for everyday trauma go out the door. Contrary to what Noah writes in his Splice article, superheroes do in fact “change the world;” in myriad ways both harebrained and inventive. They just don’t do it on Jessica Jones.

Melissa Rosenberg’s debilitated answer to all this is a tincture of powers, the spoonful of fantasy to help the hard medicine of psychological stress (and the sermon of the day) go down. Because no one is going to binge watch a 13 episode series about a rape survivor but superheroes—they’re hot. If only we could make them more “serious.” The recipe involves choosing one or all from the following triumvirate, the foundation stone of this Golden Age of TV:

(1) sex (2) sexual violence (3) violence

We can forget about the superpowers and the superheroes whenever it becomes inconvenient for our agenda of earnest meditation on the unhumorous. Well, how about this for a suggestion—why bother making the damn superhero show at all.

Don’t hide your candle under a bushel, Mr. Frazetta. (NSFW)

Posted on November 9, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

“The internet is a toilet.” …..Plumb away!

Background: There’s a hugely anticipated Frazetta auction due in early December 2015. Some nudie art could not be included in the printed catalog (and online) on the advice of the auction company and its lawyers. The chattering classes were rife with rumors and speculation. What could possibly be so disgusting that it could be auctioned but not included in the printed catalog? Surely nothing as pathetic as cunnilingus, female ejaculation, or facials. So perhaps bestiality or necrophilia? Don’t those horrible Europeans also sell Crepax doggy art? What’s wrong with that? As it turns out, it was nothing quite so gross, just a “simple” case of white slavery (+/- rape).

I wanted to preserve these on HU since the site is periodically interested in such things. I mean both Frazetta and the obvious.(The below is NSFW, if you hadn’t figured that out already.)

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The “For Sale” signs were added by Roy Lichtenstein and Edward Ruscha in 1998.

Here’s the description from the blog that first published these images (link is temporary):

“Frank has always had a strong interest, a fetish of sorts, in black sexual stereotypes. Why would he spend so much time extolling the virtue of black sexuality if he disliked blacks? Makes no sense. What is his intent? The joy and delight inherent in sex. One must see the totality of these stories to appreciate fully their intent and idiosyncratic approach. He has other erotic art dealing with just whites, no blacks. A superficial and prosaic understanding is really worthless in appreciating this material.”

I don’t think this statement needs to be dismantled in any sustained fashion except to say that if you think Thomas Jefferson must have liked blacks because he had sex with Sally Hemings, then this art is for you.

My first thought when I saw these newly revealed images was why people needed to see them to realize that Frazetta had real problems with Africans (and perhaps blacks in general). The white slavery/inter-racial trope is a small corner of the porn world and usually presented in the spirit of fun and games; a fetish which Frazetta would no doubt have approved and appreciated. These new images, on the other hand, bring to mind Robert Crumb’s “When the Niggers take over America,” a work which has been interpreted with diminishing amounts of charity in recent years.

The illustration below, for example, is widely considered one of Frazetta’s greatest pen and ink works.

There is nothing subtle about the content here which makes its wide acceptance altogether more distasteful. The Frazetta “porn” is a shameful business which we can all collectively shake ours heads at but the same worldview was ladled out generously in much of his oeuvre.

The Tarzan of the comics (let’s forget about Burroughs for the moment) was, of course, deeply invested in white supremacy and purity; with the great apes afforded an even greater status than the Africans who appeared in them periodically. Hal Foster certainly couldn’t escape the siren (and, yes, racist) call at the core of the Tarzan narrative when he famously drew the character in the newspapers back in the 30s.

His acolytes like Frazetta could be seen trafficking in similar imagery in the pages of Thun’da towards the latter half of the 20th century. Russ Heath in the story, “Yellow Heat,” is yet another famous exemplar of this trend in adventure and horror comics. If there is any desire to heap praise on the laughable civil rights comics of the EC line, then one can look no further than these comics for their counter examples.

The standard defense for these images is that Africans “really” were that way—in that they really sharpened their teeth and really ate people. And, yes, were generally crowd surfed by white people (metaphorically speaking of course). Presumably, the images on display in Frazetta’s porn stash will be diagnosed as an acute insight into black sexuality or at the very least a liberating moment of self-revelation and self-parody; a plumbing of the very depths of the human soul. On this last point, at least, I think we can all find some space for agreement.

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Update: In comments, Frazetta’s images above have been compared to the tradition of Asian erotic temple art of which the most famous example must be the reliefs at Khajuraho. I guess there are worse ways to insult the Indians.

The Tragedy of Adrian Tomine

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

The tragedy of Killing and Dying isn’t that the collection is focused on hopeless men and their supportive spouses. Rather, it resides in the fact that Adrian Tomine hasn’t produced a comic of any real significance in years; perhaps over a decade. He is, for all intents and purposes, living on past glories, now precariously holding on to that faint promise of a youth filled with sketches drawn from an affable and compassionate realism.

Kim O’Connor is correct in suggesting that Killing and Dying doesn’t showcase a ‘complete’ writer. If an artist finds himself utterly incapable of inhabiting and recreating the life of women he might, with the years, drift away from such representations. This seems to be the case with Tomine even if there are notable exceptions to this in his oeuvre. He was, of course, drawing long form nominally women-centric stories since as early as 1996 in “Dylan & Donovan” (from Optic Nerve #3), a typically morose but trivial tale of two sisters navigating sibling rivalry and a comic convention.

The early Optic Nerves were characterized by workmanlike tales of loneliness, ennui, and urban paranoia. The influence of Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes was worn proudly, and the author’s calling card in those days seemed to be melancholic depictions of young love and relationship dramas, a topic which he revisited with some variations in 2007’s Shortcomings; here mildly enlivened by a foray into the sexual proclivities and hang-ups of Asian American males.

The high point from that period was probably “Hawaiian Getaway” from Optic Nerve #6 (1999), a story which refines and assembles Tomine’s themes into a satisfying whole.

Is Hilary Chan from that story a recognizable female human being or the kind of misanthrope (with a sex-change) so beloved of the alternative cartoonists of the late 80s and 90s? I’d say probably a bit of both. The Asian parental nagging she experiences is familiar but entirely plausible, as is Hilary’s reticence. This study of loneliness seemed groundbreaking for the young cartoonist at the time but now appears somewhat less epiphanic. Nor does it now carry the weight of expectation, for where others artists of his generation appear to have settled back into the comfortable settee of the cartooning gerontocracy, Tomine has largely remained in the background—a “known” artist who really doesn’t have any central work to his name. This despite being regularly included in various “best of” and bestseller lists over the years.

“Hawaiian Getaway” is filled with the juxtapositions which inform so much of Tomine’s work. Chan is a phone operator for a mail-order clothing company who finds it nearly impossible to open up in physical interactions. When fired from her job in the opening pages of the comic, she turns to telephones and other electronic devices to vent her frustrations and translate-record moments of intimacy. Almost all of her aggression, sadness, and distress is communicated through one end of a receiver. The phone device is obvious without being distracting; the ending filled with a kind of foreboding hopefulness; the significance of the story’s title hinted at but with a touch of ambiguity; a layered portrait of a person with an affinity for solitude which is at odds with the demands of modern human existence.

The merits of this story present a harsh reminder of the variable and uncertain trajectory of art and an artist’s career, especially when compared to the dry and ineffectual works which fill the pages of Killing and Dying.

The title story of the new collection is composed on repetitive 4×5-panel grids to add a quick fire rhythm to the exchanges between the members of the family, and to mimic the repartee of a stand-up comic. The symmetry of the layout of these pages is meant to create connection and meaning between both the home and the stage—to forge tension between the unspoken tragedy of a mother’s sickness and death, and the act of dying on stage; the stunted family conversations alternating with acerbic comedic one-lines.

The daughter (Jesse) “kills it” on stage during her amateur comedy night just as (one assumes) cancer and chemo is killing her mother. The absent (presumed dead) mother of the latter half of the story is played alongside Jesse’s own failings at improv. At every point we see the husband-father’s failings, his helplessness in the face of both physical and artistic ruination, a portrait of the rigidity of old age and the tenacity of youth (and in some respects women). The half-figure drawings which populate the panels seem alienated from reality, as if watched from a height like the intentionally gridded floor plan which closes the story. The approach is playful yet academic; the effect devoid of emotion.

As in the first story of the collection, “A Brief History of the Art Form Known as ‘Hortisculpture'”, Tomine’s rather enervated formalism seems to drain rather than instill meaning. In “Hortisculpture”, the gentle use of comic strip formalism is used to evoke the familiarity of the daily punchline but here tied with the bitterness of failure or perhaps existence in general (an approach widely used in Daniel Clowes’ Wilson). The vignettes are slight and might be seen as Tomine’s attempt at kind of levity which he is hardly known for or at least poorly practiced at. The artist’s benevolent attitude towards his characters, his kindly yet pensive hand when etching out their lives, is a poor fit for the strictures of the “weekly” strip. It has neither the harsh abruptness of Clowes’ Wilson (which I account a failure) or the tender simplicity of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. The figures remain unrealized ciphers of no consequence filling us with neither disgust or compassion.

It should be noted that the overriding failure of most of the dramas in Killing and Dying is as much that of narrative finesse as that of plot. The barest of plot informs the best story from this collection, yet in leaving completely his comfort zone of insistent dialogue, Tomine manages to achieve something which stands out quite starkly.

“Translated from the Japanese” begins with the opening page of a journal written in Japanese script, the translation of which marks the first page of Tomine’s illustrated story. We see this journal again turned faced down on an airplane tray 3 pages into the story proper, a ballpoint pen resting on its back cover, this information apprising us that the entry we are reading was written very close to the moment. The impact and meaning of the narrator’s emotions and actions are thrust on to seeming abstractions and inconsequential objects which drift into her line of sight: her anxiety is connected to a storage cabin; her solitary meditation to a lock on a lavatory door; an ambiguous and conflicted reunion to two symbolic bags on a carousel.

This story of only 8 pages is broken up at three points by long establishing shots of the Tokyo skyline, a tranquil depiction of commercial airliner in flight, and a nightscape of San Francisco—each being the narrator’s act of envisioning her “location from a long distance…something that always gave [her] a feeling of vitality.” It is a story which begins in the brightness of day before taking flight and descending into a glowing darkness; an entire life transcribed and bounded by moments of equanimity yet otherwise filled with the drabness of passage and taciturn resilience. The flavor of Tomine’s text gives the distinct feeling of translation which is further advanced by the evident culture of restraint. The lack of overt trickery serves him as well here as it once did in “Hawaiian Getaway.” The convulsions of black humor may be consuming Tomine’s writerly senses at present (at least on the basis of this collection) but it his mastery of discretion which has always served him best.

As for the rest of the collection, the less said about “Amber Sweet” and “Go Owls” the better. The former reads like a parody of the genre (see Kim’s review) and the latter is as edifying as watching someone dig the dirt from under his toe nails. It is in “Go Owls” that Tomine manages to mimic most closely the sheer poverty of imagination in so much modern American literary fiction.

It seems abundantly clear why many of these lesser stories exist. If one surveys Tomine’s oeuvre from the 90s to the late 2000s, it is not difficult to see the author settling into a kind of comfortable formula: the cultural arguments which reveal deeper insecurities; the young people mingling and touching in assorted diners, bedrooms, and bars. In terms of number of pages drawn, Tomine’s comic output is minuscule for a career which has spanned two decades. Yet the collective effect of viewing these works as a whole is a kind of worn familiarity. Killing and Dying seems both an acknowledgement of his age and a decisive attempt to get out of this rut even if it is largely a miscarriage.

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Further reading

(1) A long and detailed interview with Adrian Tomine at Guernica magazine conducted by Grace Bello.

(2) And another interview at Salon with Scott Timberg.

The Fade Out: Hollywood Meh

Posted on October 26, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

A Review of The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser.

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Synopsis: 1948 Hollywood. Charlie Parish wakes up from a drunken stupor to find a dead starlet in the room next door. He covers things up and later finds out that the studio is making things go away with a story about a suicide. Parish has writer’s block but he’s aided by his blacklisted writer-mentor, Gil Mason—a loose cannon who will soon turns things upside down for him. At the edge of Parish’s vision is a Hollywood fixer-producer in the vein of Eddie Mannix. A new star is cast and it seems like the couch really sucked way back then. Movie execs—they suck (and seem to have a thing for kids)! Actors—they like sex and porn! Orgies, sex communes, violence, the red carpet, bar fights, homosexuals in car accidents (seems like a Van Johnson reference)…etc.

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Some people told me to read this. And I’ve seen it recommended to semi-retired comic readers returning to the fold; just like you would, say, hand a copy of Maus to your friend the sniffy English Literature/Media Studies professor (but not Watchmen presumably).

It’s as if these friendly comics evangelists hadn’t read a single noir novel, watched Chinatown (or Farewell, My Lovely, or Sunset Boulevard or whatever) even once, or been apprised of the assorted falsehoods of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Because you don’t need to be an aficionado to realize that almost everything on display here is as old as the Hollywood hills—the drunken pool side orgies, the black list, the abused ingenue, the darkened rooms where the wretched eke out their meager lives on typewriters, hard liquor, and shadows from louvered blinds. It’s as if someone went to some Hollywood noir buffet, stuffed himself silly and then purged himself in both directions with the vigor of a water cannon.

And, hey, didn’t I see this one on Ray Donovan just the other day? I mean the whole waking up beside/near/on top of a dead woman thing. He like sorted it out in about 10 minutes after smacking some people around, which is about the maximum amount of the time I can tolerate this nonsense. Dead women and tortured writers—they go together like horses and carriages in Hollywood apparently; like pineapples and Mai Tais—the men being the hard rum and the women the delicately sliced garnishings. What we need is more broody depressed women waking up beside dead men for a change (kidding).

So a tiresome retread then.

If not for Sean Phillips photo-referenced studiousness, this would be almost unreadable. It is Phillips’ art which carries the comic’s sense of time and space. Every other character seems to be scraping by on the barest of plots (sexual deviance, pedophilia, your common or garden listlessness) and headlines cribbed from crumbling newsprint—Wars! Scandal! Commies! The smattering of period history smothers any sense of suspense or urgency. This isn’t the “real” world; it’s lousy, meaningless research (and I’m not talking about the photo reference which is fine).

On the other hand, did women’s panties really look like men’s briefs back in the late 40s?

Now there’s a trick when you’re too lazy to do the work—it’s called just making things up. Frank Miller had a firm grasp of this principle in The Hard Goodbye (the first Sin City story). There’s a dead woman in a heart-shaped bed in this one as well but Miller isn’t interested in ladling on the “reality.” The only thing that concerns Miller in Sin City are his sexual fetishes—his deep conviction that every woman really wants to be a stripper and/or a whore, and every man a pimp and a bouncer. The first Sin City, at least, is essentially one long act of masturbation, and the characters and situations fully coherent within that setting. The Fade Out wants the regurgitateded noir tropes with the historical reality and succeeds at neither. The women don’t fare much better either, mostly fucking and sucking to get by; occasionally beaten up and then dying.

Otherwise, housewives (okay, there’s a lady publicity agent in there as well but maybe she’s the murderer). It’s all in the Hollywood scandal playsheet. I always knew that Father Knows Best gave us the whole truth about American life.

Now I have nothing against homage and there’s quite a bit of that going on in The Fade Out. It’s cute when you have Otto Preminger turn up as the exemplar German film noir director or when you see a skewed version of Gun Crazy filmed later in the series. But what I do find utterly tedious is the rehashed war traumatized, guilt-ridden, would be writer-detective stumbling his way through a Hollywood conspiracy thingamabob. And of course he falls in love and gets to have great sex with the Veronica Lake lookalike. I mean, why wouldn’t he? It’s called motivation. The sex, as always, is a call to action, and there’s also an important plot point which turns on the fact that she has been told to shave her pubic hair. This only happens in the real world.

I think we’ve just about sucked the marrow dry when it comes to stories Hollywood tells about itself. And yet a surfeit of vanity and forgetfulness means that we will never see the end of these projects. With cinema now the new religion, it seems only natural that comics should pay deference to this modern Moloch. You should be careful that he doesn’t eat your brains though.

Sam Zabel or How the pen became mightier than the penis

Posted on February 19, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

Sam Zabel is suffering from a terminal case of writer’s block. He also thinks, not without reason, that he is a talentless hack churning out inferior versions of late Golden Age superhero comics to the strangely obliging masses. If only he was as accepting of his lot as the other hacks who have prospered mightily at the offices of Marvel and DC; if only he was able to earn a living doing comics like Pickle, one time home of that classic of alternative comics, Hicksville.

The panacea to this obstruction, that pill for renewed creativity (as in Hicksville), is other comics. The “magic pen” of the title is merely an excuse to explore and retread (selectively) the history of comics—from the innocent sexism of the non-superhero golden age to the somewhat more sexually liberated climes of an all-female pirate comic (a kind of Paradise Island with eye patches and peg legs). Mayhem, fight scenes, and assorted lessons on creativity are all offered up with a sense of harmless fun and deference to easy readability.

The conceit here is that a number of comics of differing vintages and genres have been drawn with a magic pen. These comics if given the breath of life draw the reader into them, allowing them to inhabit their fantasy worlds. Zabel finds just such a comic in a used book shop, unattended and unloved but seemingly placed there for the singular purpose of reinvigorating his person and artistry. By tale’s end, we are gently apprised—as with all fantasies about the creation of art—that all pens are magic and we need only put them to paper to concoct these “inhabitable” worlds.

Horrocks seems as eager as Scott McCloud once was to syncretize and reconcile the comics form with the long history of art itself. In one of the final scenes in the book, the protagonists of his tale are brought back to the “the beginning”; to the first pen, a finger dipped in red ochre doodling on a cave wall and hand stencils produced by spitting pigments on to an outstretched hand—all this as it once was in places like Cueva de El Castillo and Chauvet cave.

Horrocks affection for the comics form is well known but Sam Zabel also reveals his boundless passion for the naked female body. The first world that Zabel gets sucked into is that of a comic called, The King of Mars —a kind of third-rate Barsoom where the inhabitants are expecting a god king-creator. As such, they quickly latch on to Zabel as the most likely suspect. The women here are all green and sex-starved. To some this will seem unexpected and liberating, to others almost interminable in its execution. And while opinions can differ, there is something to be said for the idea that “less is more.”

But this too might be part of Horrock’s divine plan, that jumble of suffocating nakedness being a metaphor for the excess that extinguishes creativity. A pity then that the nudity here is so unalluring, so lacking in temptation and passion. Seldom have so many naked women been deployed in the service of a comic so thoroughly unerotic.

All of this is a function of Horrock’s far greater gifts as a writer than as an artist. In Horrock’s survey of the exquisite prurience of pre-Code comics, his almost unvarying line and its distinct lack of sensuality is a very great handicap. At one point in the comic, Horrocks does appear to be attempting a different style…

…which gives the reader some hope that a Jungle Girl will appear with all the skill of the illustrators of old (or at least the crudely rushed pen work of the early Sheena) but this is not to be. Horrocks doesn’t have the ability to emulate the line of an Alex Raymond or even an Iger Studio artist. Nor is this the kind of bravura display of cartooning where one might expect to find “normal” characters inhabiting the worlds of a Fletcher Hanks; which means that any sense of mystery or delight in the archaic remnants of a different age rest solely in the minds of the reader. While Horrocks attempts to emulate the compositions and use of negative space of rough drawn horror manga classics, Miki (Zabel’s Japanese school girl guide through the “magic pen” comics) is never quite convincing; she will never look like that cross between Sailor Moon, Doraemon and Astro Boy which she is supposed to be.

The fantasy worlds of the comics Zabel is drawn into are as flat and unexciting as the dumpster truck he finds himself in when ejected from those worlds. If an “eyeball” seems like an interesting mode of interplanetary transportation, its actual deployment on the page leaves something to be desired. One need only compare the fertile world building creativity found in the likes of the reinvented Prophet comic or Farel Dalrymple’s Wrenchies to notice the lamentable gap in accomplishment.

While Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen works on a certain level as a reassuring tale of a mid-life crisis expunged, it also creates a simplistic notions of right and wrong fantasies, or at least divisions between fantasies which are generally safe and those which are dangerous.

In this schemata, the John Carter-Buck Rogers-Flash Gordon fantasies of old are of the generally harmless variety while the hentai worshiping otakus are not to be trusted—and are perhaps even to be blasted into a reformed Jungle Girl comic to get their asses whipped. It is an easy formulation since it conforms to popular taste and morality in such matters. It is the hentai otaku who hides his wares on a subway train and not the fan reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. I suspect that most people would much rather be caught reading A Princess of Mars on the train then the tentacle rape fantasies of Hokusai and Kuniyoshi.

At one point in the comics, Horrocks presents one of the foundations of his comic, that…

“even a comic book can shape the real world, contributing to the culture, encouraging attitudes and assumptions…”

Not for Horrocks then are notions that we are all predestined products of familial and genetic destiny. How art actually shapes culture and attitudes is, however, altogether less certain and barely broached in the pages of the comic; all we can gather on this issue from Horrocks is incidental and second hand. Suffice to say that the villain of the tale is a cartoonist who has tipped pages of his deranged rape (?) fantasies into several more sedate and juvenile manga. He is, in other words, a sociopathic sexual deviant the likes of which we see every other week on American primetime TV.

Which leads one to wonder which ideas have the greatest influence—the sexual fantasies of a marginalized group of readers or the vastly more popular works of the golden age of pulp; the embarrassing sexual fetishes of a select few or the John Carter stories of the 21^st century —like this one, which makes plain the colonial template upon which the Martian fantasies were based.

Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen could be described as a post-modern, vaguely autobiographical meta-comic, but it also remains safely conventional —I suspect more by accident than through any concerted planning. Thus the exoticization of manga—the short skirts, school girl uniforms, panty shots, and general deviance – is less the result of xenophobia then of simply reaching for the easiest examples at hand. The effortless rehabilitation of the sexist Kiwi cartoonist of the early twentieth century is contrasted with the irredeemable villainy of the hentai reader and fantasist simply because every story needs an explosive climax and a moral. Horrocks challenge to this easy equation is that Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen is a veritable hentai comic in itself, a phallic object with a PG-13 label—innumerable pairs of naked breasts are on display but only one dick-sucking scene as far as I can tell.

It seems that a sizable number of white male confessionals of this modern age tend to lead back to Portnoy’s Complaint—that “disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.” The impotency of Philip Roth’s protagonist is replaced by Zabel’s writer’s block. We can add to this the defiant sexuality often of an embarrassing nature (if one considers fantasies about fucking several Orion slave girls at once to be embarrassing) and other assorted masturbatory revelations. There are no prostitutes in the comic but cradle snatching is elevated to its preeminent place in our great sequential art form. All this mixed in with a few snippets on the artistic impulse and various ethical considerations.

The main difference would appear to be that where Portnoy remains self-pityingly pathetic, Zabel finally gets to reunite with his family. Where “Portnoy” gets to write a famous novel, Zabel/Horrocks finally has a new long form comic after years of silence. After all, isn’t this the way all pulp fantasies end—happily ever after?

_______

Further Reading

From an interview at Paste Magainze:

“The central question, in a way, is asked out loud by Sam halfway through: “Do we bear a moral responsibility for our fantasies?” The book sets out to have a conversation about that question.”

“I’m totally fascinated by wish fulfillment fantasies: how they work; their strange familiar contours; the weird mix of yearning, pleasure, embarrassment and shame we feel about them; what happens when they become “property” — a franchise or brand. Obviously, that’s a big part of the history and landscape of comics, but I think it’s also an underrated element in so-called “literary fiction” and “serious” art.The Magic Pen gave me an opportunity to unpack some of my own ambivalence about wish-fulfillment fantasies, but it also helped me find my way back to their power and joy.”

“The big shift for me was to stop giving myself such a hard time about my work. I had spent years feeling very uncomfortable with my drawing, because it was so clumsy and inept. I tried to draw like other people; the first issue of Atlas (Drawn & Quarterly, 2001) is full of my attempts to draw like Edmond Baudoin, Blutch, Tibor Gergely and other artists I admire. But it’s kind of a mess. The reality is, I can’t draw like other people, I can only draw like me. Luckily, no one else can draw exactly the way I do, either.”

Best Online Comics Criticism 2014

Posted on January 26, 2015 by Ng Suat Tong

2014 was a pretty bad year for comics criticism. On the basis of my simple survey there was hardly anything of note from the first third of 2014 as far as comics criticism was concerned (though things did pick up in the latter half of 2014). So if you find me clutching at straws in some of the entries below, well, you know the reason why.

Apart from the perennial issues of racism and sexism in superhero comics (or maybe in general?) there weren’t many critical controversies in 2014. I can’t say that this failure to engage with fellow critics and their ideas is a positive sign of health; especially if this reticence is symptomatic of intellectual torpor or a lack of breath in comics thinking.

[Your annual Comics Criticism Metaphor]

Needless to say, the selection below is incomplete and careful readers of comics criticism (?) should list any notable articles they’ve read in 2014 in the comments section.

(1) Listed by author in alphabetical order.

Merve Emre and Christian Nakarado on architecture in the comics of David Mazzucchelli and Chris Ware.

Brian Cremins on transcendental style in the comics of Julia Gfrörer and Jessi Zabarsky. Or consider the first part of his lecture on “Comics Books and Visual Literacy”; both of which are related to his long term work on nostalgia and comics. Or consider his “How to Read The Curse of the Werewolf.”

Julia Gfrörer – “Shadow Puppets”

R. C. Harvey – “Understanding Barnaby”. This may be the most comprehensive analysis of Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby available online.

An alternative selection might be Harvey’s piece titled, “The Perversion of the Graphic Novel and Its Refinement” This one is about comics biographies and a reiteration of Harvey’s version of “comics fascism” (i.e. the essential nature of visual-verbal blending). His most notable target in the past has been Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant but he hasn’t rehearsed this pet peeve in quite a while. Here he is on a stumbling block in comic biographies:

“Generally speaking, a biography’s impulse is to include all the chief details of the subject’s life. As we see in SuperZelda, the effort to include all such matters in graphic novel form effectively destroys the form. Unless the biographer expands the number of pages in his/her work to gigantic dimension, the natural impulse—the best way to achieve a manageable length—is to resort to words for telling the story, and in obeying that impulse, the biographer inevitably uses pictures only to make the pages look pretty. As a result, the pictures don’t add any narrative content. The comics form works best as a form when it can portray at some length an incident or event, an impossibility if the over-all objective is to cover all the chief events in a person’s life in as few pages as possible.”

Jeet Heer on Herblock’s legacy and deification in a new HBO documentary. Or consider part of his ongoing work on Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie.

Adrian Hill – “Falling into Place.” On Malcom Mc Neill and William S. Burrough’s Ah Pook is Here.

Ryan Holmberg – “Matsumoto Katsuji and the American Root of Kawaii.” Or his article on Enka Gekiga: Hiyashi Seiichi’s Pop Music Manga.

Illogical Volume on Pax Americana – “An Experiment in Assisted Re-Viewing.” Or consider David Uzumeri‘s annotations for the same comic.

Domingos Isabelinho – Chester Brown as a Gothic Artist.

Etelka Lehoczky on S. Clay Wilson’s Pirates in the Heartland.

Joe McCulloch on Recidivist Vol. IV.

Tahneer Oksman on Julie Delporte’s Everywhere Antennas.

Ken Parille – “Don’t Move: The Still Life of Peter Morisi”

Megan Purdy – “Love Is Far, You Can Wait for It”

Abraham Riesman – “The Secret History and Uncertain Future of Comics Character John Constantine.” I don’t know if this article offers a tremendous amount of new insights into the character but it’s probably as good an overview of the character in toto as you’ll find online. I’m going to guess that it was the editor who decided to put the words “comics character” in the title of the piece (maybe even the words “uncertain future”).

Jonathan Rosenbaum – “Peanuts, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” (this was published in 2013 but only appeared online in 2014).

Nicole Rudick on Julia Gfrörer’s Black Is the Color.

Joanna Scutts – “War in Panorama” (on Joe Sacco’s The Great War).

Matt Seneca on Richard Maguire’s Here.

Bob Temuka – “Superdeath”

Nicholas Theisen on Hannah Miodrag’s Comics and Language.

Paul Williams on Martin Vaughn-James’ The Projector. This one comes from a new-ish blog about 70s comics. There really isn’t much writing on this particular comic out there.

Matthias Wivel – “The Cage Stands As Before: The Comics of Yvan Alagbé”

(2) Notable Guest Articles on The Hooded Utilitarian

Brian Cremins – “Walt Kelly and Me”

Shaenon Garrity on Bloom County – “The Truth, Steve.” This is a nice summary of Bloom County‘s place in the comic strip firmament. I liked it better than Calvin and Hobbes back in the 80s anyway.

Michael A. Johnson on the ethics of war photography in War Photographer.

Kate Polak on empathy in J. P. Stassen’s Deogratias. In relation to this, also read Michelle Bumatay‘s review of La Fantaisie des Dieux: Rwanda 1994 which is published at her personal blog.

Pogo Watermelon

(3) Notable Controversies

R Fiore on Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics: “Sometimes a Watermelon is just a Watermelon.” Also see Noah’s reply here and Brian Cremins article noted above.

One of those pieces which I expected to elicit more discussion but didn’t. Part of the problem is that almost no one has read or has any interest in the earliest incarnation of Pogo. The comments section remains interesting however.

As comics criticism has gained sophistication over the years, it’s become easier to identify the politics of various “heritage” comics critics. Fiore, for example, falls somewhere along the spectrum of Neo-Liberal to Neo-Con. Which generally marks him out for ideological disagreements with the editor of this blog and many of its contributors. Noah would no doubt find it disgusting that some people find Fiore’s piece worthy of consideration for a place on this list.

The discussion surrounding this piece also demonstrates the sharp divide that has occurred in the last decade or so. Fiore is venerated among many old time readers and writers of comics criticism but he’s quite the unknown among the younger set. His views frequently come across as old fashioned and conservative within the “art” comics community and they are often given short shrift and scant respect. In one corner we find the TCJ stalwarts who consider Fiore “one of the ten best writers to ever cover the medium“, and in the other a progressively engaged community which finds his thoughts increasingly out of touch. This could be taken as a sign of (comics) critical health.

Snowpiercer and the Last Messiah

Posted on October 13, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

(Spoiler alert: The endings of both the comic and movie are spoiled utterly and completely)

Films are quite often acts of misreading and miscommunication. The presence of fleshy humans and life-like movement have a tendency to lull audiences into passive acceptance, to turn metaphor into reality. If some people have enjoyed Bong Joon Ho’s adaptation of Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s Snowpiercer, it appears to be on the basis that it is an action movie with a few micrograms of grey cells ladled on top of it; those grey cells taking on concepts such as class and inequality, all somewhat lost in the shuffle of blood and bullets. In a sense, this seems an acceptable trade-off if only because I enjoy watching action movies.

The comic upon which the film is based is fragmented (possibly due to its roots in serialization in À suivre), almost meaningless in its connections, and has a Heavy Metal-style, Eurotrash obsession with naked women and whores. Yet it is intellectually more coherent and concerted in its purpose than the adaptation. The central device of a self-sustaining train (named Snowpiercer) as a metaphor for society is of course intact though Lob and Rochette’s description of it is impossibly large and thus purposefully absurd right from the onset. In both instances, the arctic apocalypse which has driven humanity to this mobile refugee camp appears to be man-made. Apart from this, there are other minor callbacks to the comic: there is the greenhouse carriage seen as a mini-wonderland within the close confines of the train; the glass observation cradle from which the protagonists view their metal world (reduced to a shootout in the film); and the sentient blob which is poked and sliced to produce food for the masses.

Bong has the money to feed his audience’s vicarious voyeurism, and the poverty and misery is laid on thick throughout his adaptation. There are fleeting glimpses of 20th century famines and assorted other tragedies. The (in)justice meted out in this hermetic society is medieval and the removal of body parts serve as compensation for sins committed—not an unfamiliar trope in Asian costume dramas. Their presence here reminds us that we live in an oligarchy if not an absolute monarchy. The minutes are filled with Tilda Swinton’s somewhat satisfying manic performance, as well as considerable forward momentum and violence. In the final reveal, the entrenched social hierarchy is seen to be the product of collusion between John Hurt and Ed Harris, the religious figures of the poorest and richest members of the locomotive. Perhaps a meditation on false consciousness and the complicity of the poor in their subjugation. Thus the film adaptation becomesan almost straightforward call for revolution. More, this particular revolution has a happy ending, one ignited with explosives which derail the train. Chris Evan’s pilgrimage to the front of the train is a success (though he does not survive it)—he is, in the end, a martyr, savior of children, and messiah. The survivors of the train wreck—a black Adam and Korean Eve—look out on to a barely hospitable winter landscape and life in the form of a polar bear. The world is saved; life will continue.

Strangely enough, Lob and Rochette’s comic hardly ever shows the degradation of the carriage slums, the final links in that chain of humanity. Most of it is communicated in words. We assume a multitude of deaths, cannibalism and what not. The decadence of the aristos is completely middle class and late 20^th century Western Europe. They are ourselves and not distanced by the exaggerated efficiency of Tilda Swinton’s effete bureaucrat.

The protagonist, Proloff, is seen from the start in a carriage near “third class” being interrogated by soldiers who have caught him sneaking past his social station through a lavatory window (a meaningful escape). Adeline, his female appendage, is very much in the pre-feminist tradition of science fiction (see 1984’s Julia). She’s a social activist from third class hoping to alleviate the suffering of those crammed in the ghettoes of the nether carriages. She’s the innocent; the reader’s protective object and conscience; yet still possibly of more utility than her facsimile, Yona (Go Ah Sung), in Bong’s movie.

As with the film adaptation, Proloff also reaches the front of the train after a series of trials. The pair confront el Presidente who has hitherto been seen shouting orders to his henchmen down a microphone while monitoring the serfs on his mobile estate via closed-circuit television. But there is no comeuppance here; the President seems very much alive at the end of things. Proloff lets him go without any attempt at rectifying social injustices or enacting lethal vengeance. When Proloff offers his gun to Adeline, she turns around and refuses to do the same.

And since this is a comic very much in the French tradition, one assumes an implicit rejection of the values of that more famous revolution of 1789—no murderous rampage, no guillotine, no reign of terror, and certainly no cleansing Napoleonic wars. Then again, since the name of our protagonist has a Russian-Slavic ring to it, one might evince some connection to the Russian revolution of 1917 which ended with even more dead bodies than the French one. The links are purposefully uncertain—the cramped suffocating cabins of the comic and desperate crowds milling in front of the carriages certainly bring to mind Holocaust transportation; the shaven heads of our protagonists every form of concentration camp and gulag.

Proloff is characterized by his haphazard planning and inaction at critical junctures. In fact, his only act of volition in the closing pages of the comic is to shoot out the windows of the next to last carriage he has found himself in—the carriage just before the main engine room of Snowpiercer—thus condemning both Adeline and himself to a quick icy death; an act which he regrets almost immediately since he realizes that his nihilism isn’t shared by Adeline.

So dies Adeline—the Marianne of Lob’s tale—so dies idealism and reason. The winter which envelops her is not the welcoming, livable land of Bong Joon Ho’s film but quite incompatible with life. Proloff’s subconscious attempt at suicide is to no avail since he is saved by Alec Forrester, the father of the (near) perpetual motion engine which drives Snowpiercer, a haven which is periodically referred to by some cultists as Saint Loco.

The train is the universe in seemingly unending motion, yet gradually and imperceptibly losing its momentum—the Big Freeze beckons, all of space doomed to snuff out with the whimper of heat death.

“Across the blank immensity of an eternal winter, from one end of the planet to the other, there travels a train that never stops.”

The aging engineer, Forrester, is a sickly but calm mad man. He is obsessed with the survival of the human race and civilization, yet so alienated from his fellow humans that all he desires is complete isolation—a misanthropic humanist. He may seem like a balding Ancient of Days but is anything but.

This is not to say that misanthropic humanism represents the highest ideal of our society, but it does appear to be the central driving force behind it (according to Lob). If anything, the engineer (this impetus) is depicted as an object of ridicule—a petty man behind the curtain, a diseased Wizard of Oz. The creator of the train is unnecessary for its running. He is the absent watchmaker voyeuristically spying on the train’s lesser beings, tirelessly speaking to a rumbling machine which makes no response.

The train(s) keep on running but for no objective reason except the act of reproduction, occasional tenderness, and countless instances of inhumanity. This is the sum total of everything that has preceded this point in the story. Antinatalism would seem the obvious solution but is summarily rejected. The single memory which Proloff recounts to his interrogators at the start of the comic involves the act of providing a birthday present to a “sweet and quiet” old man “loved” by everybody. That gift is an hour of solitude which the man promptly uses to hang himself.

And that is probably the central motivation of Snowpiercer. Proloff’s entire journey to the “front” of the train (to the “front’ of society) is a quest for solitude to die with dignity, to kill himself in the luxurious confines of first class. As Varlam Shalamov writes in Kolyma Tales, “There are times when a man has to hurry so as not to lose his will to die.” In this allegory of life, the next to last carriage before meeting “God” has been christened death. The tragedy of Proloff’s tale is that even this simple extravagance is forbidden him. A similar kind of stoicism is found at the denouement of Max Ophul’s Lola Montes where Lola’s precipitous dive into an impossibly small tub does not lead to her death but a dull, humiliating existence; a kind of unwanted life after death.

At the close of the comic, a mysterious plague is carrying all before it from the back end of the train; its source unknown, possibly disseminated by Proloff himself, his nihilism reeking havoc on everything he touches. Only Proloff’s isolation from the mass of humanity protects him from its effects. He has “lost his right of residence in the universe” (Peter Zapffe) and in solitude waits out the end; not the last Messiah, just the last man.

__________

“…he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability. But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologico-cosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.”

The Last Messiah, Peter Wessel Zapffe

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