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Adapting Lovecraft

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Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.

– Supernatural Horror in Literature, H. P. Lovecraft

Comics and its continuities have long been happy receptacles for H. P. Lovecraft and his machinations. Noah’s appreciation of the author’s “ham-fisted” charms can be found in the archives of this site together with a review of a predictably mediocre adaptation, the Eureka Graphic Classics production of H. P. Lovecraft.

The adaptation of The Dunwich Horror by Norberti Buscaglia and Alberto Breccia is a more distinguished example which found its and first and only translation in the pages of the October 1979 issue of Heavy Metal. For the uninitiated or forgetful, the story concerns the mysterious and possibly inbred Whatley family; in particular the newly born, preternaturally intelligent child of unknown paternity, Wilbur Whatley, a veritable Baphomet. Ugly, wicked, and inhuman in anatomy, he is slain mid way through the narrative allowing investigations to begin under a certain Dr. Henry Armitage. Occult books are consulted and cryptograms decoded even as a mysterious force lays waste to the small town, slaying whole families in the thick of night. A final confrontation occurs on the hills of Dunwich where Wilbur’s monstrous twin brother is defeated and  unmasked.

The presentation in the English language Heavy Metal is more than aptly named considering the debasements inflicted on it over the course of the production process.

[Spanish and English editions of The Dunwich Horror]

Yet even in the original, this seems to be a job approached with proficiency by Breccia rather than the excitement and innovation one finds in a work such as Rapport sur les aveugles (Breccia with Ernesto Sábato). Lovecraft’s slow meanderings (the delays, forebodings, and suspicions) don’t lend themselves well to the narrative ease found in comics adhering to classical forms. It must be said though this adaptation was probably never meant as a substitute for the original but as a sort of primer and graphic aide. It may be that even a moderately long short story of this ilk would probably need twice as many pages to achieve its desired effect. Examples of this watering down may be seen on every page. The secret rites practiced by mother and child seem strangely innocuous and are not followed by the ambiguity of a witness’ testimony that the child had:

“…some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or trousers on” and that “Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement of which…always seemed to fill him anger and alarm.”

The occult sharings between grandfather and child found in the original are also omitted, these moments and their closeness suggesting not merely some demon spawn but unspoken incest and a deformed offspring (vehemently denied by Lovecraft as being too innocuous through his proxy Dr. Armitage), a parasite drawing knowledge and lifeforce from his grandfather who eventually dies by the child’s tenth year. Gone is that accumulation of fanciful and misanthropic detail: the cattle paid for in “gold pieces of extremely ancient date” which disappear (presumably consumed or sacrificed) at a prodigious rate; the town consumed by the ordinary rites of All-Hallow’s eve and Walpurgis Night; or the suggestion that “in 1917 [when] the war came…the local draft board….had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men fit even to be sent to development camp” and were “alarmed at such signs of wholesale regional decadence.” There are exceptions of course. The page and sequence showing the final dispostion of Wilbur Whatley is particularly excellent with its rough cut rabid cur and disintegrating form.

It occurs to me that almost all comic adaptations of Lovecraft seem to function best when seen more distinctly as illustration. The central panel on the third page of Buscaglia and Breccia’s adaptation works better than all three panels which follow it at showing Wilbur contempt for his mother, his overbearing presence like some evil Christ; the hills of Dunwich replacing that wedding at Cana and the messiah’s tarrying in the Temple in Jerusalem, an anti-Christ with altars on the high places. What better place to find a depiction of…

“…something almost goatish or animalistic”, “thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears”

….or the corpse of Wilbur Whatley with skin “thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply” —

…or that final epiphany on the hills of Dunwich.

a “grey cloud – a cloud about the size of a moderately large building…Bigger’n a barn… all made o’ squirmin’ ropes… hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything with dozens o’ legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step… nothin’ solid abaout it – all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed clost together… great bulgin’ eyes all over it… ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin’ an openin’ an’ shuttin’… all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings… an’ Gawd it Heaven – that haff face on top…’

Artful homage remains Lovecraft greatest legacy to comics, its practitioners like the aesthetes in The Call of Cthulhu, dreaming dreams and drawing monsters conceived of decades before. From that point of view, the Lovecraft issue of Heavy Metal was only making a point explicit for images from Lovecraft have ever been the center of one of the founders of that magazine, namely Philippe Druillet.

The 6 Voyages of Lone Sloane is an adaptation by any other name but here transferred to the vast emptiness of space and incalculable eons, not unlike his space faring version of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The stories are largely nonsensical but intermittently involve forgotten fairways, secret words of power, cultic allegiances, and old dark gods—not just a testament to Druillet’s limitations as a writer, but also his singular focus on the sense of wonder and awe one finds in Lovecraft’s stories. As China Miéville writes in his introduction to At the Mountains of Madness:

“H. P. Lovecraft is the towering genius among those writers of fantastic fiction for whom plot is simply not the point.”

The imagery here is redolent of the third part of The Call of Cthulhu (“The Madness from the Sea”) in which the crew of the Emma lands on an unknown island, the “nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh” and encounter Cthulhu himself. In not quite the same words and at various points in Druillet’s anthology of tales, we see the pirate ship Alert with its “queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes”…

[Images from Lone Sloane by Druillet and Watchmen by Joe Orlando]

…and then 

“a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth’s supreme terror — the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars” …where ” the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters.”

…before apprehending the very image of Cthulhu himself—mechanical, rampaging, and yet curiously driven away by music.

No other cartooning acolyte of Lovecraft has delineated the author’s Cyclopean landscapes quite as effectively as Druillet, an artist who has yet to show any devotion to moderation, logic or good sense to this day.

[Gail, Philippe Druillet]

Beyond this point, there is the total assimilation of Lovecraft’s innards by Alan Moore, a comic literary criticism not unlike Martin Rowson’s adaptation of The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman. Lovecraft’s madness is resolved to science in Watchmen, the stories distilled to a metaphor for creation itself. Ozymandias’ monster is the product of literature, art, and sound, a psychic wave from the future if not an alternate dimension; driving “sensitives” to distraction or outright insanity; its god-curators slaughtered and forgotten; perhaps an “origin story” for Lovecraft himself.

 

“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes…These responses from esthetes told disturbing tale. From February 28 to April 2 a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor’s delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last.” (The Call of Cthulhu)

Scattered throughout are the pirates beckoning from penny comics, the surfeit of voyages by ship, the mysterious island of genesis, the incipient insanity and death.

At other times, Moore’s concept of worship becomes less rational and reverts to the high places.

[From Hell, Eddie Campbell]

This literary dissection of Lovecraft is played out in earnest in both The Courtyard and Neonomicon, the latter’s title hinting at Moore’s own penchant to see beneath the surface to the genital horror, the unspoken orgies, and the seasoned racism of Lovecraft. Concerning the latter and the members of a New Orleans cult (shot like dogs in The Call of Cthulhu the better to control them) Lovecraft writes:

“…the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than Negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.”

[from The Call of Cthulhu by John Coulthart]

These words finds their counterpart in the works of Herge and the Inca mummy in The Seven Crystal Balls of which Noah Berlatsky once wrote:

“This, then, is really a case where I don’t like the sequence despite its racism and imperialism. As far as I can tell, I like it because of them. The fascination/repulsion Herge feels towards the strange gods of colonized cultures generates real creative frisson. Which makes me wonder if maybe that’s true of racism and stereotypes in general. It seems like, beyond their other uses, they sometimes have an appeal which might be called aesthetic. A certain amount of cultural creativity goes into shaping the person in front of you into a phantom monstrosity, and that creativity can itself be exciting and fascinating. The dream’s appeal is its vividly imagined ugliness; the exhilaration of imposing on the world the gothic products of one’s skull.”

Moore’s reversal of Lovecraft’s xenophobia is patent in Neonomicon, a Lovecraft homage so thick with references that it probably demands a companion book (see The Courtyard Companion and an extensive discussion at Comics Comics). Like the tales which inspired it, the plot is all investigation, exposition, and interrogation. The art by Jacen Burrows is strangely cartoonish like a point and click video game adventure or a Saturday morning cartoon; which may seem strangely serendipitous to some, that coyness being a subset of Lovecraft’s own dread of sexual description.

The main protagonists are two FBI agents named Merril Brears (white, female sex addict) and Gordon Lamper (black male, conspicuously “normal”), the object of their investigation a cult invested in the Old Ones. The Dagon worshippers might as well be gentrified East Village baby boomers, almost everyone white as a sheet and sagging with years of excess, the new Satanism, an antidote to the privileged old biddies lacing Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Where Lovecraft frequently took care to situate his cultists in distant habitations  in deference to their paganism (from the Latin paganus meaning villager or country-dweller), Moore opts for the new heathens in their old squats. The only African Americans in Moore’s comic are investigating officers, a reversal of their position in Lovecraft’s stories where they are invariably abominations.

In chapter 2 of the comic (“The Shadow Out of America”), Merril strips and literally dresses like a whore in front of her black partner, all this without the slightest sexual arousal on both their parts, a counterpoint to a conversation about the “asexual” nature of H.P. Lovecraft. Gordon is duly shot and necrophilically abused once he is brought into the orgone-filled sanctum of the nearly racially exemplary cultists (the group includes an Oriental couple; a nod to the Chinamen and “unclassified slant-eyed folk” so beloved of Lovecraft ). Moore has never been shy about heavy-handed symbolism.

It is of course, stressed repeatedly that Merril is a recovering sex addict. Yet she resists her partner in a kind of temperance aided by racial purity; a chastity which repudiates miscegenation and hides from the conception of “foreign mongrels” (see The Call of Cthulhu). Far better to be coupled to a demon god for that is exactly what happens at the close of that chapter where Merril is raped repeatedly by Dagon—thus a latter day Lavinia Whatley of Dunwich who will bear the incarnation or avatar of Cthulhu.  The protagonist of The Shadow over Innsmouth is of course repulsed both visually and olfactorily by the presence of innumerable half-breeds in that town; his fear of contamination realized in full at the tale’s denouement when he discovers his own mixed heritage (he is of the Deep Ones). [1]

*          *          *

“It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”

If genre is a multi-tentacled monster with a gaping vaginal maw then no one should be surprised at the mucoid sheen of Alan Moore’s countenance. These comics are concentrated deconstructions of everything treading gently on the surface of Lovecraft’s stories, far more interested in evil than mirth; a fact which separates them from metatextural films like Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods.

That film has been self-described as a loving hate letter to horror movies and a rejection of the torture porn industry. The saviors in Cabin are the classics of the genre—werewolves, zombies, marionettes, the works of Clive Barker and Stephen King et al.—once locked in a labyrinthine glass walled prison like the Minotaur but then loosed upon benighted entertainment industry moguls to the violent cathartic delight of most of the audience. Beneath that cabin and entertainment complex lies an old god destined to destroy the world and the human race. Strange then that this jocular criticism fails so completely in conveying (perhaps intentionally) any of the unease and trepidation which those idolized exemplars so hoped to challenge their audiences with. Horror for Goddard and Whedon would appear to be a place of solace and entertainment not fear, dread, and revulsion. They remain quite unconvinced by that which they write. Not for them is Lovecraft’s suggestion that:

“The one test of the really weird is simply this — whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.”

Moore on the other hand is eager to translate this knowledge of depravity to us, to initiate his readers into the mysteries of authorship and creation. Together with John Coulthart [2], he imagines the Old Ones in a Kabbalistic structure where Dagon is Netzach (astringent kindness, the union of the human and divine) and Cthulhu is Yesod. The Aklo is a drug, the “Ur Syntax”, the transforming proto-human language of theophoric words, allowing us to look within to the sexual revulsion and the racial hatred; the fear of contagion and Syphilitic dementia; the horror of “cosmic sin”. His comics a mirror for the evil within our souls.

Notes

[1]  Michel Houellebecq’s essay titled H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life is quoted by both China Miéville and Tim Hodler at Comics Comics. Houellebecq denies any latent sexual symbolism in Lovecraft’s stories quoting a letter in which he writes, “I do no think that any realism is beautiful.”  Here are some excerpts from the essay:

“Paradoxically, Lovecraft’s character is fascinating in part because his values were so entirely opposite to ours. He was fundamentally racist, openly reactionary, he glorified puritanical inhibitions, and evident found all ‘direct erotic manifestations’ repulsive.”

“Absolute hatred of the world in general, aggravated by an aversion to the modern world in particular. This summarizes Lovecraft’s attitude fairly accurately….if he refused all sexual allusions in his work, it was first and foremost because he felt such allusions had no place in his aesthetic universe.”

“…it was in New York that his racist opinions turned into a full-fledged racist neurosis. Being poor, he was forced to live in the same neighborhoods as the ‘obscene, repulsive, nightmarish’ immigrants…But what race could possibly have provoked this outburst [a racist diatribe describing Lower East Side immigrants]. He himself no longer knew…The ethnic realities at play had long been wiped out; what is certain is that he hated them all…His descriptions of the nightmare entities that populate the Cthulhu cycle spring directly from this hallucinatory vision.  It is racial hatred that provokes in Lovecraft the trancelike poetic state in which he outdoes himself by the mad rhythmic pulse of cursed sentences; this is the source of the hideous and cataclysmic light that illuminates his final works.”

[2]  Presumably a natural extension of the wild utterances of Robert Suydam in The Horror at Red Hook:

“Malone did not know him by sight till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly as a really profound authority on mediaeval superstition, and had once idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted from memory…When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers almost within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing leers such mystical words or names as ‘Sephiroth’, ‘Ashmodai’, and ‘Samaël’.”

Further reading

(i) The French edition of Les mythes de Cthulhu (drawn by Alberto Breccia) – The gold standard for comic adaptations of Lovecraft. One of the greatest artists to grace the comics form. I suspect Breccia’s adaptation of The Dunwich Horror was chosen for translation by Heavy Metal magazine because it is also the most “conventionally” drawn. The rest of the stories in this collection are more experimental in technique. Breccia’s depiction of Cthulhu and the Deep Ones is also typically unusual.

(ii) The Lovecraft Anthology Volume 1 (SelfMadeHero) – This is the PG-rated version of Lovecraft by a host of British artists. Low on evil, mystery, racism, and violence, this is for the Scooby-Doo set.  Give this one to your kids.

(iii) Haunter of the Dark – John Coulthart is the way to go if you’re an adult.

(iv) Yuggoth Cultures – a smattering of Lovecraft ephemera from Alan Moore. Antony Johnston’s Yuggoth Creatures demonstrates what a mediocre pastiche of The Shadow over Innsmouth (and others) would look like.

The Therapeutic Narcissism of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

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“But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There were other senses, too, in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here and a light there, for instance. Her tribute took that form…”

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Those looking for a synopsis and evaluation of Are You My Mother? are directed to a pair of reviews in The New York Times by Katie Roiphe and Dwight Garner, a rare honor for a comic publication. Roiphe is effusive in her praise and suggests that she hasn’t “encountered a book about being an artist, or about the punishing entanglements of mothers and daughters, as engaging, profound or original as this one in a long time.” Her’s is the more detailed and perceptive reading but I am not without sympathy for the conclusions of Garner’s more negative article which suggests an “undistinguished edifice by a builder who forgot to remove the scaffolding.”

The comic can be easily summarized as an account of Bechdel’s relationship with her mother through the lens of psychoanalysis. There is no avoiding the fact that the comic is immensely didactic and in many ways almost a lecture cum case study of her life and relationships. This is a situation which Bechdel has no intention of avoiding, a point which becomes clear when she cites (approvingly) lectures by Adrienne Rich and Virginia Woolf which were later transformed into notable books (Blood, Bread, and Poetry & A Room of One’s Own). There are sections of this book which will prompt distant memories of the “For Beginners” comics series though Bechdel’s comic is considerably more elevated and complex.

Bechdel prefaces her comic with a quote from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:

“For nothing was simply one thing.”

That sentence describes the moment when James Ramsay finally sees that “silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye” for what it is, “stark and straight” and “barred with black and white.” Both images true in their own way just as Bechdel’s overlapping recollections, metaphors, and dreams reveal the shifting facets of her life; the contradictory statements of the Ramsays in that novel (“it will be fine”/”it won’t be fine”) foreshadowing her own work; the same way that the suggestion that she is angry with her mother towards the close of the book is so obvious and yet so impossible to reconcile with the rest of her feelings.

The repeated citations of Woolf and To the Lighthouse invite comparisons between that novel and the comic: the bedtime rituals; the domineering yet strangely dependent father; and (not least) the relationship between the artist, Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay (Lily’s nascent feminism, her depiction of mother and child as a “purple shadow”, how the focus on marriage in the novel compares with Helen Bechdel’s apparent anxiety about her daughter’s lesbianism etc.). I will set aside these connections for now, but the elements of homage and criticism in the comic are certainly ripe for dissection in some college classroom.

Are You My Mother? follows the structure of dream, analysis, and resolution through chapters titled “The Ordinary Devoted Mother”, “Transitional Objects”, “True and False Self”, “Mind”, “Hate”, “Mirror”, and “The Use of an Object”. Where Fun Home framed its narrative with quotation and criticism of myth and literature, the new comic is heavily centered on the science or pseudo-science (I will assume the former since the author holds it in such high regard) of psychoanalysis. This last dilemma is inconsequential since it is merely the foundation upon which a single life is built, a self-contained world with its own rules, “laws”, and reasons; in many ways an expression of the author’s “therapeutic” creativity and imagination

The hardness and scaled down poetry of Are You My Mother? is a subset of this shift in values. The work is highly expository and Bechdel spends considerable time and effort explaining psychoanalytic and developmental concepts and their application in her life. Even so, Bechdel does leave many things unsaid—some obvious, others less so. The early account of a stroll through London by Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott (the paths adjacent but never actually meeting) is ostensibly historical fiction but is clearly a metaphor for the conjunction and distance separating the literary memoir (the Bloomsbury group, the Hogarth press, and hence Woolf and her diaries) and science, connecting the main root of psychoanalysis to the personal analysis she wants to concentrate on.

The therapeutic and relationship diagram seen on page 22 is the true index of Bechdel’s comic which readers will need to refer to at various points in the narrative if only to keep track of the discontinuities and overlap of years. The timeline suggests a kind of mathematical equation even though it exists purely in the realm of the graphic arts with all its approximations. Those looking for a linear account of these relationships will be disappointed for the progress and conclusions are as disjointed as any patient led analysis. It is very much a Holmesian mystery (hence its “comic drama” subtitle) offering the pleasures of a hunt which the author—who at this point has been in therapy longer than she has not—so enjoys.

Fun Home was rife with text-image counterpoint and juxtaposition and while these still exist in abundance in Bechdel’s latest comic, the focus has shifted into overlapping texts which “speak” all at once creating a kind of lexical broth, not only creating a tension between texts but also a conflict between the written and the spoken word

—the romantic language of her father’s letters to her mother contrasting with her mother’s impression decades later that, “[He] was a different person in his letters. He wasn’t like that when we got together.” Not simply a comment on truth but the entire project she has placed before us, for we see her on the very next page in “a peculiar performance” in which she plays both her “mother the reader” and her “father the writer.”

Even with this proviso in mind, I would still suggest that where the former memoir offered possibilities and guess work concerning her father’s sexuality and suicide, this new work advances diagnoses and cures; a move away from the intemperance of the confessional booth and religion to rationality, that sacrament providing no escape for Bechdel’s mother whose depression was only accentuated by her presence at church (“It was hell.”).

Hidden in the title is a threefold question. The most obvious one relates to the uncovering of her mother’s aspirations and depression, that sense of abandonment when she stops kissing her at the age of seven and seems to prefer her male offspring. This tension is reiterated throughout the comic both directly (in the pre-college tiff between mother and daughter) and indirectly (in Donald Winnicott’s “Oedipal revolt” against his psychoanalytic mother”, Melanie Klein). Bechdel’s long one-way conversations (interview, interrogation, analysis) over the phone with her mother are always initiated by herself and she begins to surreptitiously take notes like an analyst dissecting her mother’s psyche.

The second question manifests itself in the transference which Bechdel casually mentions and then elaborates upon in chapter 3. The most overt instance of this is the dream sequence at the start of that chapter which shows her analyst in the guise of her mother, mending her clothes and thus symbolically her tears.  Later Bechdel pulls out a pad to note down her therapist’s suggestion following a breakthrough, thus mirroring her activities during her telephone conversations with her birth mother.

Her therapists by proxy are also ever present in the text, and she makes the transference explicit in a statement regarding Donald Winnicott (“I want him to be my mother.”)

While some of the conclusions Bechdel reaches with her therapists may seem trite, the solace she gains from their words of affirmation (“I like you.”) are more disturbing [1].

The third question is directed at her readers for there is little doubt that Bechdel is taking the talking cure with her readers in a one-sided conversation. The memoir as a means of catharsis is of course repugnant to some but Bechdel clearly thinks otherwise and cites To the Lighthouse as an instance of one such (temporary?) success. One presumes that she expects them to report back with their findings and in a sense they already have.  Perhaps, the ultimate expression of this relationship would be an analysis of her self-analysis. Bechdel never fails to emphasize her dependence on this tenebrous and fickle approval, a chimeric cycle of ambition and reinforcement which the author seems to think is (in part) healthy though painful—like a neurotic child throwing a tantrum.

The title of Bechdel’s comic recalls, of course, P. D. Eastman’s children’s book of the same name, the cheerful tale of a baby bird’s search for its mother and its failure to imprint. Bechdel does very much the same throughout her memoir with interspersed anecdotes on her mother’s failure to breast feed her as a child. On at least four occasions, she shows her father disrupting the bond between mother and child. Hence the aforementioned confusion of progenitors.

These developmental disruptions are rationalized through the work of Winnicott and Alice Miller. Yet they also place her firmly in the position of a child in relation to her interlocutors, this despite her full grown size for most of the comic. The only other prominent psychoanalytic text in Bechdel’s book is Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. This emphasis can be easily explained by a statement found in the opening pages of Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child which suggests that:

“…every childhood’s conflictual experiences remain hidden and locked in darkness, and the key to our understanding of the life that follows is hidden away with them.”

In the same chapter, we find some “basic assumptions” concerning a child’s need for a “legitimate” and “healthy narcissism”. Miller states that “parents” (and presumably individuals in general):

“…who [do] not experience this climate as children are themselves narcissistically deprived; throughout their lives they are looking for what their own parents could not give them at the correct time—the presence of a person who is completely aware of them and takes them seriously, who admires and follows them. This search of course, can never succeed fully since it relates to a situation that belongs irrevocably to the past, namely to the time when the self was first being formed.” [emphasis mine]

Bechdel provides herself as a frank and unhesitating example of this formulation at every stage in her book. One might say that even the metatextural moments in the comic are a subset of this condition, the “scaffolding” left out for all to see in the interest of full awareness.

Of these moments, some are patent while others are hinted at. The two page spread (pg 32-33) showing her discovery of a set of baby photos is an example of the latter. The table top is shown littered with the detritus of creation and falsity, the images presumably photo-referenced but still at least a step removed from the originals, just as Bechdel’s comic will always remain a land of half-truths and potential “lies of omission”, of fiction and autobiography. The section in question is preceded by an earlier panel:

“I’ve always been fascinated by this snapshot of the two of us. But I didn’t realize until relatively recently that it was one of a sequence.”

And later,

“I don’t have the negatives, so there’s no way to know their chronological order but I’ve arranged them according to my own narrative.”

This pair of pages can be seen as a simple analysis of a moment in time but also of the comic as a whole, the chapters of which are easily disgorged and rearranged to suit the moment and desired meaning. Is there any reason, for example, why that final image in Bechdel’s sequence should not be placed first? Bechdel’s arrangement sees her mother as helpless before her father’s misanthropy; the alternative suggests a more successful comforter and protector.

Analyzing every facet of Are You My Mother? would be an exhausting process both for me and any potential readers. Bechdel’s traditional approach to drawing and cartooning obscures an obsessive approach to structure and recurrence in her narrative, making it one of the densest comics reading experiences of the past few years. On the most basic level, this amounts to linear exposition though sometimes separated by the entire breath of the book. For instance, on the very first page of the comic, Bechdel recounts a dream in which she is trapped in a dank cellar, the only way out being a “small, spidery window” which she forsakes upon the sudden materialization of a door.

Her first sentence upon falling back to reality is, “Mom.” The spider’s web appears again in a dream initiating the second chapter of the book. Nearly 300 pages later towards the close of the comic, we learn of her mother’s arachnophobia which was triggered by the sight of seeing a grasshopper being entombed in silk as a child. Then a chance reading of a biography of Winnicott reveals his analysis of an arachnophobic patient in his twilight years:

“I think that somewhere in your early development…when you hadn’t quite separated out from your mother…you hallucinated her. That is, you hallucinated the subjective object, the breast or whatever, expecting to be met. But you weren’t. There was a gap…And then it became a spider and you became afraid of it.”

This analysis and its accompanying forebodings suggest that both Alison and Helen Bechdel are caught in a vicious cycle of narcissistic deprivation, the end result of which is described by Miller:

“…a person with this unsatisfied and unconscious (because repressed) need is compelled to attempt its gratification through substitute means. The most appropriate objects for gratification are a parent’s own children.”

And later,

“…she [the mother] then cathects him narcissistically. This does not rule strong affection. On the contrary, the mother often loves her child as her self-object, passionately but not in the way he needs to be loved. Therefore, the continuity and constancy…are missing…from this love. Yet what is missing above all is the framework within which the child could experience his feelings and his emotions. Instead, he develops something the mother needs…but it nevertheless may prevent him, throughout his life, from being himself.”

On the next page, Winnicott’s final moments are revealed; the date, one month before Bechdel started keeping her diary. In that diary, a single episode is highlighted, a case of food poisoning with the vomitus taking on the shape of a spider, the “dark lack” and “absence” which Winnicott was just remarking upon just a page before. And thus it continues with Bechdel layering image over image and word over word.

The chapter, “Mind”, is another case in point, with its repeated references to birth, death, and the womb.  Woolf, in transforming an episode from her childhood into a scene from To The Lighthouse where a boar’s skull is covered with a shawl, is Bechdel’s exemplar.

The womb is echoed in a jumble of details and associations: her special cramped office in her childhood home; her drawing of a gynecological examination as a child; Donald Winnicott’s analysis of a child who describes the darkness of the womb…

…the uterine-shaped plexiglass dome of a Dr. Seuss book about sleep…

…and hence to her mother’s decision not to kiss her while she is lying in her womb-like bed. Her mother’s back turned from her and hence as expressionless as the thin silhouette she casts in the mirror across the hallway; the map of the world hanging over her bed now half-shrouded in shadow and uncertainty (see first image above); the child’s face half in darkness and half in light.

This paramount failure to connect (reasserted at various points in the comic) is echoed in the final pages of that chapter where Bechdel is enveloped in darkness in her room, the black full page bleed being the very substance of dreams in the vernacular of the comic (here applied to firm reality).

The final image of that chapter is almost quotidian by comparison showing Bechdel’s old dorm room telephone ringing, the room from which she moved out just before her father died, a door knob preceding this on the page, these points in the darkness highlighted by their proximity to the captions (“And another. And another.”).

A lifeline and a doorway between worlds. A breast and an umbilical cord. The severed communication resounding through the pages of the chapter just as the ring stretches across the breath of this final panel.

Earlier in the chapter, there is a scene where Bechdel asks her mother for an extension cord (“I don’t know, don’t bother me,” her mother replies) before mirroring her mother in this desire for isolation, setting up an “inviolable” area of creation.

Just a few pages before this near the start of the chapter (pg 123), her therapist asks, “The phone is literally a lifeline. But who’s the authority you’re appealing to?” The question is asked in relation to the chapter’s opening dream which sees Bechdel trying to call the police on an “intra-campus phone system” to absolutely no effect. Bechdel interprets her punching of the phone keys in the dream as an act of writing and points to her therapist or her “authorial voice” as the authority she is appealing to.

Her final answer seen in that missed phone call from her mother at chapter’s end—a phone call advising impending divorce (and soon death)—is direct but unexpected. The progress is distinctly logical but the overall effect, with its chronological jumps and uncertainties, quite impressionistic. It is an impressive feat of storytelling and the chapter a high point in the comic. The rest of Are You My Mother? is less consistent. The magic starts, skips, and stops; the art wavers in consistency but occasionally soars; the text demands recursions; that balancing act always precarious, the battles sometimes lost; for all its faults a book well worth reading.

Notes

[1]  From Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child: “True autonomy is preceded by the experience of being dependent, first on partners, then on the analyst, and finally on the primary objects.” [back]

 

Further Reading

The marketing power of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is something to behold and there have been a slew of articles by the mainstream press. This may well be the most extensively reviewed comic of 2012 with the press being overwhelmingly positive. Here are some of the more detailed articles:

(i)  Meghan O’Rourke’s review at Slate is probably the best review of Bechdel’s comic online:

“What Winnicott—and Bechdel—was interested in was what happened when this crucial mother-child mirroring broke down, and the child became precociously attuned to the mother’s needs instead of her own. Likewise, Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child chronicles the kinds of abuse children suffer at the hands of narcissistic parents, particularly mothers.”

(ii) Interviews and authorial revelations: Hilary Chute at Critical Inquiry, Heather McCormack at Library Journal, Shauna Miller at The Atlantic, Peter Terzian at the Paris Review

 

Jerusalem, Nothing Special

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The cover to Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem shows him sitting at the edge of a Muslim cemetery on the Mount of Olives facing the Golden Gate, the gate through which the Messiah is expected to enter the Holy City. One could see this image as a conjunction of faiths and a metaphor for all that Delisle encounters: the Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) in their graves; the door closed to any true understanding of the situation; the cartoonist sketching furiously in the foreground; all of them awaiting salvation.

Delisle presents himself as a blank slate, as devoid of any information as the doodle with which he represents himself; a surprise considering his comic travelogues through Shenzhen, Burma, and Pyongyang. At one point he even seems perplexed that while Israel and many of its citizens view Jerusalem as the capital, most countries only accord Tel Aviv that honor and situate their embassies accordingly. It’s almost as if television, the internet, and the Arab-Israeli wars had never occurred. In many ways, he’s like the guy sitting next to you on your bus tour of Israel, the one who knows next to nothing about the place he is visiting. Unlike most tourists, he has months to rectify his ignorance. How one feels about this is a matter of perspective and depends on what we expect from a reading experience.

The intention one suspects is to allow both Delisle and his readers to set off on a journey of discovery together—no back tracking, no overarching narrative omniscience, no real meaning—the gentle meandering rhythms of expatriate life distilled to several semi-significant and ordinary moments in time. The idea here being that what best signifies any city (even Jerusalem) is not its monuments, its festivals, or its tragedies (though these are give some space) but its commonness; the quotidian lives of its citizens—the parties, the daycare hang-ups, the shawarma encounter, the transportation stories, and the amusing anecdotes about Arab women. In place of discernment, Delisle offers affirmation and comfort, a year in the life of a cartoonist house husband whose partner is working with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). What little information we get is conveyed at a slow pace and is quite disconnected, taking on the fabric of directly recorded experience with little heed to the editorial mindset. It is very much an unvarnished journal comic, certainly not a guided tour or an essay much less an encyclopedic account on specific areas of interest. The author’s prose style, cultivated through years of travel writing, is plainer than his drawings: short, unpoetic, and unexamined.

His first substantial political encounter comes 38 pages in (there are a number of minor instances before this) when he visits a border crossing  and the West Bank barrier with Machsomwatch, an Israeli women’s peace movement. At the crossing, the crowd is large and slow moving, the Israeli guards fully armed for war and happy to allow their pictures to be taken. Almost inevitably, there is a misunderstanding and then tear gas and stone throwing. In attendance, the television crews and Delisle; both hopping on the same media treadmill (their’s faster, his slower) we’ve seen re-enacted over the years; the artist’s eye paralyzed, the reader’s mind and emotions unengaged—the bulk of these experiences freely available all year around to the tourist looking to cross from an Arab country into Israel. It made me wonder why he didn’t visit the duty free shop while he was there (I guess there wasn’t one at the crossing).

To be sure, Delisle is not opposed to painting himself in a bad light. His reaction to the arrival of his cleaning lady is irritation as she tips his blog creating activities into disarray. He throws a small tantrum and makes a frustrated phone call to his wife.

The comic under review is of course that “blog” or rather the result of that year of engagement; conveying all the daily grind of perpetual enforced communication in a tone strangely shy yet smug.

Jerusalem works best when Delisle’s art meshes with his subject matter in the kind of light social observation you find in his earlier comic, Aline et les autres. The denouement of his hunt for the perfect bowl of cereal ends to sort of interesting effect when he sees bag-laden “Muslim women” leaving the settlement supermarket he has chosen to boycott.

There’s a little homily in a playground about mothers, children, and racial harmony (I grant that the reader’s cynicism will need to be checked in at the point of purchase).

There’s the part where he compares an “all-male” Arab wedding to a comics festival…

…and also some girls in bikinis with a hookah.

His embarrassment and exaggerated spinelessness can also be charming at times.

Most of it, however, reminds me of a photo album with commentary, the kind of ritual myth making experienced when a friend returns from his travels. A tale of gold-lined domes made on the backs of mercury poisoned death row prisoners is tucked in, as is his displeasure with a Zionistic Israeli tour guide (recognizable at least). And as with all such tales, there will be the travel disasters to punctuate the proceedings. In the case of Delisle, the multitude of El Al-related airport hassles and a lengthy sequence concerning the loss of some car keys down a lift shaft. Always amusing when the canapes are being served. The only problem being that Delisle isn’t your friend, and you’re not terribly interested in his family life and travel pics. Unless of course you are, in which case Jerusalem and his many other comics might be just what you’re looking for.

Even so, the reader is advised in advance that this is not a book to be read all at once, the banality of the insights here engendering feelings similar to those encountered when reading a large collection of cartoon dailies in one sitting. The off-days on the strip accumulate, its charms disappear, the limitations in drawing style are accentuated, the anonymity of the locales depicted become obvious, the jokes fall flat, life in all its disjointedness and directionless comes to the fore. Delisle has a dogged commitment to this aesthetic even taking time to relate how he fails to complete a visit to the three holy places of Jerusalem (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall and the Temple Mount).

His ploy to get through by pretending to be a Muslim is not entirely without credit but there it stops. He neither speaks to these people at length nor inquires into the situation. The lack of curiosity is patent, the superficiality immense. There are short returns later in the comic but to little effect. The Holy Sepulchre is precisely what every oblivious tourist sees—the famous balcony ladder, the Orthodox-Catholic division of space in the church, the photo mad crowds (though strangely none of the religious fervor)—as short and indescript as a one line summary and just as educational.

Not surprisingly, the religious naiveté on display beggars belief. Ten months into his trip and Delisle still has to be told what a Messianic Jew is (perhaps its an act of pretense to encourage conversation). And did it really take him that long to find out that merchants rent out crosses for pilgrims wishing to traverse the Via Dolorosa (there are sometimes stacks of them near the Holy Sepulchre)? Earlier in his comic, a sectarian fight in the church seen on television is a moment for hand wringing and a lame joke, not dissection or historical analysis:

Perhaps Delisle isn’t talking about the same religion which sanctioned the sack of Jerusalem during the first Crusade. Could it be some other sect that has been living under the Status Quo for over a century and which continues to see brawls and property disputes on a yearly basis? Apart from this, there’s a frankly emaciated discussion with a member of the Franciscan order and a couple of prods at dispensational fundamentalists clearly meant as comic relief. Good for a polite guffaw provided one hasn’t heard the same joke done even once before.

There are occasional reprieves from this rampant shallowness. The author’s recurrent trips to Hebron are of some interest, in particular his guided tour with Breaking the Silence.

Delisle can be heavy-handed in his juxtapositions but, to his credit, never descends to the level of crass exploitation. The observations in Mea Shearim are also reasonably sharp considering the episode lasts only 4 pages. Most of these vignettes occur towards the tail end of the book and there’s little doubt that Delisle’s narrative improves as soon as he runs out of the usual things to say.

The rest of the long aimless middle section is almost too painful to relate. The return to the Temple Mount with a picture of the Dome of the Rock is of less interest than the most token tourist photo (the Al Aqsa mosque gets slightly better mileage).

Delisle’s depiction of a Samaritan Easter (Passover) celebration on Mount Gerizim only makes us yearn for a proper photojournalistic account. The picture post card trail to Bethlehem, Massada, the Dead Sea, and Jordan is little better.

Delisle’s shtick is to tease out truth from the commonplace. He never does what you would never do in the same situation, hardly thinks an improper thought and almost never tells you anything which you don’t know yourself. Jerusalem is the playground viewed absentmindedly for a moment through your house window, as innocuous as people dying on a television screen—never close, never real, no scars, no blood, and never painful. Seldom does Delisle push pass this point. An instance of this occurs at the moment of departure when his housekeeper tells him that her house is about to be demolished. The episode is only two pages long but for once, it’s personal.

The graph which Delisle’s produces mid way through his depiction of a Gaza bombing campaign (a central event in his journal comic) is eerily representative of much his delivery. The prose apeing the art in a consistent blank drone with neither the vocabulary nor technique to elevate the text. His pedestrian interview with Cecile is as close to fine journalism as he gets, the 10 year veteran of MSF dissolving into an insignificant collection of lines and shade spouting words from the left border of each panel. Some will see this sequence as an attempt to let the words speak for themselves. In which case, I must ask, why comics?

The narrative’s positioning in the arena of the trivial and everyday is no excuse for poor art. Consider the following amateur photography project by Still Yang. A simple set-up with a long zoom facing a bus stop situated in a Jewish orthodox community; the shots taken at the discretion of the photographer. The truth is that I found more humanity and insight in this simple project than much of Delisle’s comic. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s something like Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Biography—written in an entertaining style but with immense erudition and an all encompassing but popular intent. It begins with mythical history and ends on any morning at 4am in Jerusalem: the rabbi of the Western Wall at his prayers; Nusseibeh, the Custodian of the Holy Sepulchre knocking on those “ancient doors”; the Ansari Custodians of the Haram supervising the opening of the gates of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa.

Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem has neither the concentration nor sweep of the art and ephemera which have preceded it. The cracks in the artist’s craft were hidden in his adaptation of Pyongyang, the rigidity, the stunted acumen, the plodding pace, the bland discursions all feeding and reinforcing received conceptions of an authoritarian North Korea. These flaws are laid bare in Jerusalem which is morally earnest but sadly leaden and inconsequential.

 

Further Reading

Noah Berlatsky on the vaunting tedium of Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem

David Leach’s review is my token “positive” inclusion if only because he goes into detail about what he likes. He praises Delisle’s use of the anecdotal story form and singles out the chapter on Ramallah for praise.

S. I. Rosenbaum on Delisle’s political and social obliviousness.

 

Old Wine in New Wineskins: Hisashi Sakaguchi’s Ikkyu

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Appropriated from text scans of The Comics Journal #241 (April 2002). As such typos and grammatical mistakes will be numerous.

Images read from right to left. English translations of Ikkyu’s poetry taken from Stephen Berg’s Crow with No Mouth, Jon Carter Covell’s Zen’s Core: Ikkyu‘s Freedom and John Stevens’ Zen Masters.

 

One pause between each crow’s

Reckless shriek Ikkyu Ikkyu Ikkyu

As a child, and already showing traces of his life-long distaste for all things hypocritical, Ikkyu Sojun was noted for his precocious intelligence and worldly wisdom. As a monk, wandering the cities and countryside of medieval Japan, he was known both as an ascetic and a libertine, a paradox which has dearly fed his reputation during modern times. He was a poet capable of the profundity of a work such as Skeletons (Gaikotsu; his most famous work concerning a philosophical discussion about Zen and life with a group of skeletons) and the uninhibited passions displayed in his more earthly verse (“A beautiful woman’s hot vagina’s full of love; I’ve given up trying to put out the fire of my body”).

He was a monk who deprived himself of various amenities and honors throughout his life, and yet drank to excess and felt no shame in having a tumble in bed with a comely woman. At the age of 77, he met and fell in love with the Lady Shin, a blind 25-year old minstrel; elevating her by his words and poetry to hitherto unknown heights in the history of Zen. He is considered by many to be Japan’s greatest Zen master.

The name, Ikkyu (which literally means “one pause”), indicates the space between conception and death and thus “this lifetime.” In his 1000-page graphic novel, Hisashi Sakaguchi melds history, legend and spectacle with more subtle matters: religious devotion and the moral and spiritual dilemmas in the creation of art. This amalgamation of fact and fiction is important since the life of Japan’s most famous Zen master has been clouded by tradition and time.

Some of the most famous stories concerning Ikkyu have arisen from various anecdotes about his childhood in Ankoku-ji, a Zen Buddhist temple. For brevity’s sake, these have been combined into single tales by Sakaguchi. One notable episode occurs in the courts of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, who asks the young Ikkyu to bind a tiger depicted in a screen painting. In response to this, Ikkyu asks for some rope and when given these implements promptly requests that the shogun drive the tiger from the painting for his feat to be accomplished.

This oft-related tale is united with another story (not usually involving Yoshimitsu) in which Ikkyu is presented with a dish of fish and vegetables which he readily begins to devour. When rebuked for consuming the fish, Ikkyu responds that his mouth is like the Kamakura Highway upon which all beasts travel freely. Angered by his comment, the shogun draws his sword and, pointing it at Ikkyu, inquires how its blade would go down. Ikkyu replies that the sword is not permitted passage down his mouth since he cannot allow dangerous items to pass through his mouth (this being the very orifice by which he asks Buddha for peace and safety).

This fabled meeting is of some importance, as tradition has it that Ikkyu was the first-born son of the emperor Go Komatsu and his favorite concubine (said to be a daughter of the southern senior imperial lineage). By the time of Ikkyu’s birth, the Ashikaga shoguns had manipulated the situation such that the Northern junior imperial line was in the ascendant and a child with blood from the defeated Southern line was no longer politically acceptable. As such, Ikkyu’s mother was removed from the imperial palace and gave birth to Ikkyu in the confines of a private residence. Ikkyu’s bitterness concerning this abandonment is a theme that recurs throughout his poetry even in later life.

*          *          *

The first part of Sakaguchi’s tale is played out against the backdrop of the Muromachi period, an era characterized by the reopening of trade with China, a flourishing of the arts, and the erection of various architectural masterpieces, including the famous Kinaku-ji (Golden Pavilion). Sakaguchi takes care to ground his work in the rich historical framework of the times, creating a web of connections between Ikkyu and some of Noh’s pre eminent practitioners. Zen permeates the characters’ lives; their personalities reflecting the author’s thoughts concerning the preservation of a certain honor and truth, as characters become mired in disputes over artistic and religious integrity.

The interweaving of Zen with the cultural and the political lives of the Japanese elite is not an invention on Sakaguchi’s part. The organization of the main Zen monastic complexes into the Five Mountains (gozan) administrative system towards the beginning of the Muromachi period allowed a significant extension of Zen’s cultural influence. Two other eminent Five Mountains monks, Zekkai Chushin and Gido Shushin, were also important political advisors and tutors to the shoguns of their time (including Yoshimitsu).

With specific relevance to the manga, the Muromachi period has been noted for a flowering of Noh theatre. Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443), classical Noh’s finest playwright, lived during this period and his triumphs and misfortunes are intertwined with those of Ikkyu in Sakaguchi’s series.

In the manga, Zeami and his son Motomasa are always depicted wearing their Noh masks, whether onstage or in conversation with their peers or patrons — their lives becoming a stage upon which art and politics are discussed. Zeami is usually seen wearing the mask depicting an old man. The main exception to this occurs when he is reminiscing upon the past and his first performances in front of Yoshimitsu where he is seen wearing the mask of a young man.

This narrative device goes beyond a utilitarian depiction of advancing age. Thomas Blenman Hare (writing in Zeami’s Style) states that in Zeami’s list of six typical plays in the Aged Mode, “in all but one of these, the old man is actually a god in disguise; only one of Zeami’s ‘old men’ is actually a man.” Hare, quoting an old Zeami manuscript, indicates that the Aged Mode “produces an air of divinity and utter tranquility,” words which perfectly describe Zeami’s final state in the closing volume of Ikkyu.

On’ami (Zeami’s nephew and Motomasa’s nemesis in the manga) on the other hand is invariably seen wearing the mask of a demon (oni). It has been suggested that he preferred such plays and excelled at them where Zeami slowly began to renounce such roles. Hare writes that Zeami had “come to reject entirely the role of the true demon-hearted demon” in later life, and with regards demon Noh, he quotes the famous playwright and actor as writing, “This is unknown in our school of Noh.”

Noh presents itself as a perfect mirror for the unspoken mysteries upon which Ikkyu’s life turns. The two cornerstones of Noh are monomane (“an imitation of things”) and yugen (meaning “mystery and depth”), aspects which reflect the very real political intrigues of the manga and the half-hidden wonders in which Ikkyu periodically partakes. There is even reason to believe that Sakaguchi’s work as a whole is partially constructed on the principles of Noh, with the story of the main character (the shite, in this case the Ashikaga shogun and, at other times, Zeami) being clarified and deepened by the philosophical and personal interrogations of the waki (the secondary character, in many instances a traveling priest which fits the description of Ikkyu).

The parallels Sakaguchi suggests are not extravagant. Critics point to the Zen influence in Zeami’s Kakyo, which the author describs as “a summary in six chapters and twelve articles of what I myself have learned about the art.” He is also said to have had encounters with a number of prominent Zen priests during his lifetime. Better documented is Ikkyu’s relationship (recounted in the manga) with the Noh actor Komparu Zenchiku, Zeami’s son-in-law and one of Noh’s great aestheticians. Ikkyu wrote at least two poems in praise of Zenchiku during his lifetime and there is correspondence demonstrating a close relationship between Zeami and his son-in-law. In this way, the separate paths traveled by Ikkyu and Zeami — delineated with exquisite care by Sakaguchi in his manga — are brought to a partial resolution in the person of Zenchiku when he encounters and debates an arrogant yet visibly confused On’ami in the closing volume of the manga.

 

Filled with shame I can barely hold my tongue.

Zen words are overwhelmed and demonic forces emerge victorious.

These monks are supposed to lecture on Zen,

But all theye do is boast of family history.

Ikkyu left Ankoku-ji (following a short period at Mibu temple) in 1410. Disgusted by the political machinations of the masters of the Gozan monasteries of Kyoto, he left behind the verses above depicting his frustrations with the corruption and unctuousness of his fellow monks; feelings which he would carry with him throughout his life, for Ikkyu is known for his disdain of Five Mountains Zen.

Soon after leaving Ankoku-ji, he begins to train under a new master, Ken’o, who he meets after meditating on his life while staring at a lotus flower. This occurs a few pages after Zeami is seen doing the same while contemplating his own treatise on Noh [1]. Ikkyu first chances upon Ken’o as he is distributing food offerings to the children of a shanty town. He later finds him at a ramshackle hut (defiantly called a temple) outside Kyoto. Life under Ken’o proves to be one of ceaseless toil compared to the comforts of Ankoku-ji. Apart from the spartan lifestyle, he is mysteriously chided for getting up in the middle of the night to meditate. When seeking solitude for the same in the countryside, Ikkyu is disturbed by some mischievous children, which he takes as a distant rebuke by his master for committing the same “error.”

Upon returning from this period of solitude, he is roundly beaten by his master who, noticing the mud on his robe, realizes that his pupil has been disobeying his orders. It is only at Ken’o’s deathbed that Ikkyu discovers the reasons for his frequent beatings. Ken’o explains that he has been disciplining his intemperate state of mind. Together with his master’s passing, this revelation causes Ikkyu to sink into a deep depression. Wandering aimlessly through the countryside, he soon resolves to put an end to his life by drowning himself in Lake Biwa. He decides against this on remembering his mother and the sorrow this would cause her.

The second volume of Ikkyu follows upon this aborted suicide and contains a detailed look at the young monk’s life under a new master, Kaso Sodon, who belonged to the harsh Daito tradition of Zen. Ikkyu endures a week-long wait at the gate of Kaso’s austere Lake Biwa retreat in order to prove his determination to become his disciple. The longest and most lyrical passages in this section of the manga are devoted to two significant moments of realization and enlightenment.

In the first instance, Ikkyu pierces a zen koan from the 15th case of the Gateless Gate (Mumonkan) involving an exchange between the monk Dongshan Shouchu and the Chinese Zen Master Yun-men Wenyan. Ikkyu penetrates the zoan upon hearing a blind minstrel singing a song from the Heike Monogatari, namely the tale of Lady Giyo and the general, Taira no Kiyomori — a tale of betrayal and unfaithful affections which exposes and expunges his long-held recriminations against his father, the emperor, for abandoning his mother amidst similar court intrigues. Upon presenting his solution to the koan to Kaso, Ikkyu is finally presented with the name by which he is known to this day (he was previously known as Shuken).

Ten dumb years I wanted things to be different furious proud I still feel it one summer midnight in my little boat on Lake Biwa caaaawweeeee father when I was a boy you left now I forgive you

The other key moment in Ikkyu’s life under Kaso is found while he is meditating in a boat by Lake Biwa. In contrast to his first satori — which is depicted as a sublime moment of tranquility and self-awareness — this second important spiritual juncture is depicted as a cry heard through dense dark night, single and distinct and stretched across two pages.

Sakaguchi’s interpretation of this moment unfolds through a conversation with his master and reflects the feelings he expressed in a poem written in response to this moment of enlightenment:

For ten years I was in turmoil,

Seething and angry, but now my time has come!

The crow laughs, an Arhat emerges from the filth,

And in the sunlight of Chao-yang, a jade beauty sings

The crow’s cry chases away all memories his bitterness over his mother’s (the jade beauty) expulsion from the royal court, leaving him free to feel at one with his surroundings.

Life is like a dream and goes with the speed of lightning.

It is like a dew-drop in the morning;

it soon falls and is broken …

 

“Here are shown the struggles and the sins of mortals, and the audience, even while they sit for pleasure, will begin to think about Buddha and the coming world on Oni-No or the Noh of Spirits” – from the Kadensho or Secret Book of Noh.

The third volume of Sakaguchi’s manga segues into the rivalry between Motomasa and On’ami (presented to us in the mask of a demon and who the audience of the time sees as Zeami’s heir). This drama carries implications beyond mere questions of succession.

On’ami’s fortunes began to rise (as Zeami and Motomasa’s declined) during the reign of the shogun Yoshinori (one of Yoshimitsu’s sons). By 1429, both father and son were excluded from further appearances at the Sento Imperial Palace, and in 1430 the musical directorship at Kiyotaki shrine was taken from Motomasa and given to On’ami.

In the manga, this dispute mirrors Ikkyu’s exclusion from the mainstream of Zen thinking and provides a secular reflection of Ikkyu’s own conflict with Kaso’s chief disciple, Yoso, over their master’s legacy. Their conflict encompassed corruption, ambition, women, sexuality, and other contentious ideas concerning Zen. Discussions of carnal and romantic love would seem out of place in a story concerning a monk but they are central to any understanding of Ikkyu and his interpretation of Zen.

Each of Ikkyu’s encounters with women in the manga contains stepping stones to further enlightenment, each meeting offering both temptation and sustenance. There is a moving episode involving a young prostitute whom he befriends while she is quietly offering herself in the window of a brothel, selling her body to feed her family. In another instance, he meets and is sexually tempted by a girl who helps him after he has been beaten up in an encounter with a spiritually corrupt monk. Another encounter with a dying prostitute prompts a moment of deep introspection.

All this is played out in the light of Yoso’s somewhat abusive and pecuniary attitude towards women. Over the course of his rise to prominence as chief abbot of Daitoku-ji temple, Yoso is seen propounding on the unclean nature of women and their inability to achieve enlightenment.

Ikkyu was of the opposite opinion. Sakaguchi illustrates this by recounting his encounter with some nude women bathing in a pond. On chancing upon the stunned women, Ikkyu bows reverently towards their genitalia and proceeds along his way. When pressed for the reasons for his actions, he gently chides the popular views earlier recited by Yoso and further suggest that women represent a great and unparalleled treasure, as all humans — however great or lowly — proceed from them.

In his short biography of Ikkyu, John Stevens relates the story that furnishes the source material for this scene, providing a more direct response by Ikkyu with regards this eccentric view of women:

Woman are the source from which every being has come.

including the Buddha and Bodhidharma.

Jon Carter Covell (Zen’s Core: Ikkyus’ Freedom) in explaining Ikkyu’s relation to the “red thread” of passion puts it thus:

“If, from childbirth, man is already entangled with the feminine, his violent denial of it later shows a lack of enlightenment.”

Sakaguchi further elaborates upon this important element in Ikkyus’ beliefs in his poetic verbal duel with a famous courtesan. Their relationship is consummated in an abandoned house a stone’s throw from where his fellow monks are accumulating earthly offerings as a form of veneration and worship. Juxtaposed against the chanting of the monks from the temple, their sounds of sexual ecstasy resound across a Zen garden.

Covell suggests that “sex had almost become a religious ‘rite’ to him”. With respect to his experiences with prostitutes, Ikkyu once opined:

When as a rakan I “rose above the dust,”

I was still not in the (real) Buddha Land;

But once I entered a brothel, tremendous wisdom occurred.

Of all the women Ikkyu encounters, Sakaguchi devotes the greatest space to Lady Shin, the object of his passion in the final years of his life. When Shin is first seen by Ikkyu in the manga, she is seen kneeling while playing a small hand-drum in homage to a famous double portrait commissioned by Ikkyu himself (now found in the Masaki Museum in Osaka).

It was a love both romantic and carnal. In “Watching the Beauty Shin in the Midst of Her Siesta”, he writes:

The most elegant beauty of her generation.

Her love songs for a banquet are the newest.

She sings so naively, it pierces my heart; a dimple appears in her cheek.

Shin is like a begonia in the “Heavenly Treasure” period.

In “If My Hands Were Like Shin’s,” he writes with unabashed frankness, “When my ‘jeweled stalk’ is weak, she makes it sprout.” In the manga, the moment in which Shin finally expresses her love for Ikkyu is presented almost as a moment of enlightenment, the pacing of this sequence adopting a tone similar to that of his second satori.

The couple are seen in the midst of a bamboo grove with the wind rustling through the branches as if in physical and pictorial demonstration of the concept of furyu (meaning “wind flow”), an aesthetic ideal which permeates Ikkyu’s art and a term which he used to praise those persons with whom he was most intimate.

Ikkyu’s non-conformist ways extended beyond his unapologetic enjoyment of sex, meat, and wine. Sakaguchi joyfully depicts a host of his exasperating ways, from urinating on a roadside stone Buddha to burning a revered wooden Buddha figurine in order to keep the Buddha in his heart” warm. 

Ikkyu is seen taking food offerings from gravesites (a pointless gesture in his view) and, in instructing a deeply religious samurai who is stumped by a few words from some Buddhist scripture, suggests using the name of his favorite food in place of the words he cannot read. It is this freedom and irreverence that has endeared him to late twentieth century readers.

*          *          *

 Born in 1946, Hisashi Sakaguchi was a one time assistant to Osamu Tezuka and was known for his work on animation projects such as Astro Boy and The Jungle Emperor. He died soon after completing Ikkyu, his masterwork. His other manga include a science fiction story called Version (available in English) and the much-praised but slightly melodramatic Flowers of Stone (sometimes called Partisan), which concerns the partisan action in Yugoslavia during World War II. The latter book is of particular interest being an early example of Sakaguchi’s attention to historical detail both in dress and architecture.

In Ikkyu, Sakaguchi navigates a meandering path through childhood tales of wisdom, initiations into homosexuality, political and cultural intrigues, and sexual and romantic love. The work presents itself as pure narrative, but is also held together by a number of unifying threads.

One motif that repeats itself throughout the novel can be seen in its early pages, where a drunk and irreverent Ikkyu is juxtaposed with wartime massacres. An ambiguous integration is forged between these horrors and the songs and chants of wandering monks.

 

One of Ikkyu’s responses to the seemingly endless cycle of famines and natural disasters during his lifetime was to write one of Japan’s most famous books on the subject of death, Skeletons. It was written in the vernacular (as opposed to his usual classical Chinese poetry) in order to appeal to the common man, the better to instruct him on mortality and Zen. Ikkyu is seen drawing Skeletons in the fourth volume of the manga and is later seen in a dramatization of a famous print in which he is seen carrying a pole with a human skull at its tip. 

The landscape of corpses and skeletons which populate Sakaguchi’s novel are both a reflection of the seeds of Ikkyu’s famous work and a dramatic depiction of the very real situation of uncleared and unburied bodies which lined the streets of Kyoto.

There are also dear parallels drawn between Noh and the narrative of the manga. By signposting significant periods in Ikkyu’s life with short “performances” of Noh, Sakaguchi allows us to seek parallels between the demarcations in the manga and the prescribed arrangement of plays in a day of Noh performances.

Such a performance begins with a Shugen, or congratulatory piece, followed by the Shura (battle-piece), the Kazura or Onna-mono (“wig-pieces or pieces for females”), an Oni-No, a fifth piece “which has some bearing upon the moral duties of man,” and ends with another Shugen, “to congratulate and call down blessings on the lords present, the actors themselves, and the place.”

Another way of understanding the thrust of Sakaguchi’s presentation can be found in Covell’s book, which illuminates Ikkyu’s life in relation to “The Ox-Herding Series” (the ox representing the “Buddha-mind … for which the ego searches”). The series follows an ox-herd on a metaphorical journey from the initial sighting of the “ox” (painting one in the series) to satori (painting eight in the series, represented as white space within an empty circle) in which the seeker understands the “oneness of all phenomena.”

Painting nine concerns “life after satori,” where the enlightened man begins to fully appreciate all the beauty that surrounds him, which “means not only the beauty of flowers but also the beauty of women.” The tenth and final stage is called “Returning to the Marketplace” or Entering the city with Bliss-bestowing Hands” and shows a child encountering Hotei, the rotund god of good luck, who “by his transforming presence brings to all the awakening of their own Buddha-natures.”

Covell quotes Kuo-an’s commentary on the tenth picture stating,

“He is found in company with wine-bibbers and butchers; he and they are all converted into Buddhas.”

Sakaguchi’s understanding of Ikkyu’s life preserves this core of truth; the essence of Ikkyu’s teachings. In the manga, Sakaguchi deemphasizes Ikkyu’s elevation (at the age of 80) to the position of chief abbot of Daitoku-ji by the emperor Go Tsuchimikado, and the massive undertaking of the reconstruction of the temple that had burned down over the course of the Onin War. Instead, it is the very human aspects of the crazy Zen man which are of most interest to the artist.

The manga is faithful to his relationships with the common man and his distinct influence on Japanese culture. In his lifetime, Ikkyu encountered warriors, generals, artists, prostitutes, inn keepers, merchants, thieves, and kings, altering each in his own unmistakable fashion. Ikkyu’s student and Japan’s first tea master, Murata Shuko, would develop — some say in direct collaboration with his master — a new approach to the tea ceremony, one which incorporated a heightened understanding and awareness of Zen. Shuko would also design Zen gardens on which “the love letters which sing of wind and rain, snow and moon,” could be observed; gardens which revel in the wabi aesthetic propounded by Ikkyu. Two other pupils, the renga poets Sogi and Socho, would later develop haiku poetry. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that Sakaguchi must have counted himself a slightly removed student of the master. Dense with historical fact and passionate artistry, Sakaguchi’s forthright and yet mystical work is possessed by the essence of the man and is a testament to his intelligence, spirituality, and artistic vision.

*          *          *

[1] In the first volume of Ikkyu, Zeami is depicted working on the seventh and final chapter of his seminal and most famous work on the theatre, Fushikaden; a book that has been described as partly a meditation on the teachings of his illustrious father, Kannami. In the chapter in question, Zeami dwells on the aesthetic ideals of Noh, which Hare explains “depends on its existence on the creation of what Zeami terms ‘the flower,’ an effect which is achieved through technical skill and intellectual understanding.”

 

 

Best Online Comics Criticism 2012 – 1st Quarter Nominations

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(Honoring online comics criticism written or published in 2012. A call for nominations and submissions.)

Regular readers of The Hooded Utilitarian will remember a semi-annual event celebrating the best online comics criticism. Last year’s survey sank like the Titanic due to sheer lethargy on the part of all involved, most notably myself. For those of us who find it hard to get out of bed for the latest and best comics criticism, allow me to commiserate.

On previous occasions, I would ask the various judges to select quarterly nominations from which the entire group would vote at the end of the calendar year. This proved useful in the sense that it brought in nominations on topics and from sites peripheral to my usual areas of interest, but also limiting in that it was dependent on the variable submissions of the judges for that year. Even worse, when busy lives came to the fore, there were no nominations to be had. Clearly, reading comics criticism can be a tiresome business.

In order to facilitate matters, I’ve decided to take over the nomination process myself and also open it to the HU readership (which I presume is wide enough in its taste). Web editors should feel free to submit work from their own sites. I will screen these recommendations and select those which I feel are the best fit for the list. There will be no automatic inclusions based on these public submissions. Only articles published online for the first time between January 2012 and December 2012 will be considered. I have not selected any articles from the HU site for obvious reasons but invite HU readers (not contributors) to send in their recommendations.

If all goes well, we might actually have a nomination list to vote on at the end of the year. At that point, a small group of jurors will be invited to read the long list of nominees and select the eventual winners.

The following list consists of articles of note and others which I personally find uninteresting but which have attracted considerable notice online.  The object of this listing is to be inclusive without excessively compromising quality.

(1)  Robert Boyd on Kramers Ergot #8 and the Art School Generation.

(2)  Gio Claival on the art and comics of Dino Buzzati.

(3)  Craig Fischer on Jiro Taniguchi’s The Walking Man.

(4)  Edward Gauvin on David B.’s The Littlest Pirate King.

(5)  Bill Kartalopoulos on Joost Swarte’s Is That All There Is.

(6)  China Mieville on Tintin and censorship. I feel compelled to list this here to forestall any complaints of its lack of citation. Mieville’s piece is certainly criticism (about Tintin, racism, and censorship); a breezy, informative and well written article for newbies but of slightly less worth to the average person informed about such matters. In a famine, even the local burger joint looks like haute cuisine.

(7)  Amy Poodle on Superhero Horror.

(8)  Daisy Rockwell on Craig Thompson’s Habibi. (Full version available at her blog). I have reservations about recommending this review. Lord knows my feelings about Habibi. A truly remarkable review would find a way to make a strong case for the intellectual strength and positive aesthetic value of Habibi. I have yet to read such an article online.

(9)  Khursten Santos – The Tale of Three Tezuka Ladies.

(10)  Matt Seneca on Guido Crepax’s Valentina.

“There’s a fundamental problem underlying all erotic work done in the comics medium, one even more difficult to get past than the lack of audible sound and visible motion bedeviling the action-oriented material that dominates the form’s American market. How does one create art that reproduces a physical sensation created by bodily contact without being able to reach out and touch one’s audience? It’s the same problem that faces makers of pornography in any medium, but in comics it’s especially difficult.”

Even though the initial premise as stated in the opening paragraph is entirely false — if the difficulties faced by comics pornography were so dire, where would that place the reams of exalted illustrated smut over the centuries — this remains Seneca’s best piece so far this year. The usual Seneca traits of overwhelming love and earnest exaggeration (in this instance Crepax is compared favorably to Herriman, Joyce, and Picasso) are all on display but here sharpened by his obsession with Crepax’s Valentina.

(11)  Kelly Thompson (She Has No Head! – No, It’s Not Equal). I’ve put this here because it seems to have found a place in a lot of people’s hearts, not least HU’s own dictator for life. This is a creditable article on that age old issue of women in costumes but somewhat tiresome if one has spent more than a few months reading superhero criticism — the absolute nadir of that cesspit known as comics criticism. If I was judging criticism on the basis of moral virtue, this would probably get top marks but it has little to add to the current thinking about superheroes.

(12)  Kristy Valenti on Frank Miller’s Ronin.

 

(13)  At The Comics Grid:

Kathleen Dunley on Ben Katchor and What’s Left Behind.

Nicholas Labarre on Art and Illusion in Blutch’s Mitchum.

Peter Wilkins on Pluto: Robots and Aesthetic Experience

 

(14)  And at  TCJ.com:

R. C. Harvey – Johnny Hart to Appear B.C.

Jeet Heer on Gahan Wilson’s Nuts.

Ryan Holmberg on Guns and Butter.

Jog on Franz Kafka’s The Trial: A Graphic Novel.

Bob Levin on Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & the New Land.

Seth on his work on The Collected Doug Wright.

Matthias Wivel on Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes.

 

This list is limited by time and my own personal taste and habits. As such, I would encourage HU readers to submit their own recommednations in the comments section of this post.  Alternatively I can be reached at suattong at gmail dot com. The lack of manga criticism in this list is particularly telling and I would be grateful to receive potential nominations in this area — reviews or essays which go beyond mere text-image summary or even textural history and which place a work into the context of real world experience and broader aesthetics, writing which pries open the hidden depths of a work

*          *          *

If the quality of the criticism which an artform attracts provides a glimpse at its health, then surveying the landscape of comics criticism can only be a a sobering experience. The patient while not exactly pallid looks distinctly moribund; sitting idly on the couch shoveling down crisps while shouting epithets at the latest pamphlets.

One is not so much concerned by the proliferation of sites obsessed with the marketing and economics of comics, nor the innumerable sites devoted to the idolization of cartoonists .  These will always be with us and may in fact be signs of a healthy fanbase. Rather it is the stagnation of sites and writers devoted to the serious consideration of comics that should be of concern.

This may be best symbolized by the resurrection of TCJ.com – a site which is finally making an earnest attempt to emulate its illustrious print predecessor. The steady flow of interviews, reviews, and long form essays has seen the masses flocking back to the once fallen giant. This is both comforting to its old adherents and yet a standing rebuke suggesting how little has changed in comics criticism since its emergence into adolescence in the 80s and 90s.

The implication here is that the comics world is so bereft of writers of quality and of a pioneering spirit that there remains little room on the internet for more than a few sites of “serious” comics criticism, and even less that offer an alternative narrative less beholden to fandom. The hope that the internet would lead to a surge of self-publishing and hence sites consistently promulgating quality reviews and essays on comics was nothing but a pipedream. If anything, what we have is consolidation and  a return to the mean. The Comics Comics project now subsumed to the new TCJ.com. The Panelists dead and now absorbed by the same. Even Sean T. Collins, Jog, Chris Mautner, Ken Parile, and Tucker Stone are now writing a significant proportion of their long form criticism for the site. Robin McConnell of Inkstuds hosts occasional critical discussions with the usual suspects listed above. The writers of The Comics Grid continue their quiet, scholarly course. There are few other umbrella organizations of note in North America as far as serious comics criticism is concerned.

This is certainly no fault of Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler who have crafted a site which has attracted the best talents to its shores. In a field where money is of secondary concern, it is the prestige, professionalism, community, and readership (the numbers and quality) which count the most. Both Nadel and Hodler should be commended for their dedication to preserving the legacy of the print Journal (with all the longstanding deficiences intact I should add).

The one bright spot in this age of digital publication is that The Comics Journal no longer holds a monopoly on the best long form reviews available on any particular comic. This situation is certainly preferable to the one in the late 80s and  90s when The Comics Journal was virtually the only game in town. That position has since been displaced by a host of blogs and newspaper websites. Think of any of the marquee comics of the past year and one will be pleasantly surprised to find that the Journal no longer holds “exclusive rights” to serious and informed discussion of those books.

What is missing however is any concentration of this talent to rival a single website like TCJ.com. Without this, and despite the efforts of a dedicated pool of link bloggers, many of these articles will remain unread and unloved. More significantly, it suggests a level of homogeneity seldom seen in other artforms (at least at this end of the spectrum). That no other site or community of critics has come close to challenging TCJ.com in attracting writers of note is a testament to the lack of depth (in numbers and intellectual concerns), diversity, and vision of purveyors of criticism; a problem exacerbated by a shrinking or stagnant comics readership.

 

The Not So Transgendered World of Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight

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[Images read from right to left. Wikipedia synopsis of Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight (1953) here. It’s a fairy tale romance for kids folks!]

 

*               *               *

In the cloud strewn halls of heaven, the sexual fate of a  group of cherubic “souls” are decided through a lottery of colored hearts. The consumption of a blue heart produces a boy child while the consumption of a red heart produces a girl. When the nascent Princess Sapphire is accidentally fed hearts of two different colors, her sexual fate is thrown into doubt (the covers to the Vertical edition of Princess Knight cleverly highlight this dichotomy). In order to rectify this disastrous turn of events, the supreme deity dictates that her blue heart must be extracted if she is in fact born a girl.

To be sure, this game of hearts has little to do with any real determinacy when it comes to sexual orientation or desire. Rather it is a foreboding of the future course of Sapphire’s life, a premonition of years of chaste crossdressing. The heavenly mix-up is not a recipe for hermaphroditism but for an individual fully at ease in the world of masculine (sword fighting, horse riding, wall climbing) and feminine (pretty dresses, fixations on princes, cat fights) activities.

When Sapphire is born a girl, she remains comfortable with and desirous of her femininity. It is her political circumstances which dictate her need to adopt masculine ways and this she does with a degree of reluctance but with utmost decorum. Her sexual orientation is never in question. As with much children’s literature, this is a world where secondary sexual characteristics like breasts are clearly on display but genitalia never spoken of. Sapphire’s enemies are unable to discover her true sex because she doesn’t have a vagina (nor do Tezuka’s men have penises for that matter) — this constraint undoubtedly due to the age of Tezuka’s readership but also accidentally suggesting that sexual divisions are a cultural product and not predicated on sex organs (hormones not withstanding).

Sapphire is forced to be a prince in public due to the careless birth announcement of a lisping doctor. The swift rectification of this mistake is impossible due to an arcane law which, like most fairy tale legislation, doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny.

When we first see Sapphire as a young girl, we are swiftly apprised that she likes frilly things. Her transformation into a “prince” is a terrible inconvenience which she has come to accept over the years; an act of subterfuge which has caused such youthful bewilderment that she sometimes forgets to discard her heels in favor of more princely boots.

She is otherwise the consummate professional. Her mastery of disguise beggars that of Clark Kent and Diana Prince with their obfuscating spectacles and boring business suits. Her prince charming is blind to the wiles of his “flaxen” beauty the moment she discards her blonde wig and billowy ball gown. It’s either that or the magic of make-up, you never can tell.

Early on in the story, Sapphire reacts violently to a series of entrapments by a deceitful courtier who attempts to expose her femininity through a woman’s “natural” passions for sewing and cuddly animals.

Yet it is the feminine calling of a beautiful gown that she secretly yearns for.

In many ways, Tezuka is less interested in gender identity (as a crossdressing protagonist would seem to imply) than in a kind of old school female empowerment. Unlike other fairy tale princesses, Sapphire drops a knife and not glass slippers. She is always “correctly” and heterosexually attracted to her prince charming and the aforementioned lavish dresses, yet fully capable of defeating her opponents in single combat — an antediluvian Lara Croft without the pneumatic breasts. The 6th century Ballad of Mu Lan had similar concerns but less reservations about the strength of women.

It is only in the second volume of this new translation that Tezuka begins let his guard down. When Sapphire’s female heart is extracted by the nefarious Madame Hell, she struts around in male fashion and rejects the advances of her prince lover.  A more conservative approach is adopted when her angel guardian reverses this magical surgery and replaces her male heart with a female one — she becomes a wilting flower…

….a stance Tezuka swiftly dispenses with in light of his mildly feminist agenda. What’s an adventuring heroine to do if she can’t wield a sword? Even the emancipated ladies of the court use brooms to engage some invading soldiers.

 

Despite its long standing tradition of being the castrato of the comics world, North American comics have had an endless fascination with the transgendered lifestyle. Many of these are almost monkishly respectful while others posit rape as the first instinct of a male-female body swap (see Skin Tight Orbit; an erotic fantasy written by Elaine Lee). The latter device is a common trope in transgendered pornographic fiction.

The transgendered stories surrounding Superman are perhaps the most entertaining from a historical perspective, but the canonical text in the genre must be Al Feldstein and Wally Wood’s “Transformation Completed” (Weird Science #10, 1951).

Here the unwitting fiancé of the female protagonist (androgynously named Terry) is transformed into a woman by her jealous father. Two constraints are at work here. Firstly, the bugbear of the homosexual lifestyle which can never be in a children’s comic and, secondly, the EC line’s own penchant for the “shock” ending. Both of these factors ensure that mere lesbianism will never be an option as far as the couple’s fortunes are concerned. On the final page of the story, Terry injects herself with her father’s gender change drug and becomes the groom to her newly female bride.

This kind of slow, forced feminization and simple gender reversal is a mainstay of transgendered literature (pornographic or otherwise), and satisfies both male-to-female and female-to-male desires and fantasies. We can see something similar at work in the operative female perfection achieved in Almodovar’s forced feminization horror-fantasy film, The Skin I Live In. Here the possibility of a lesbian romance is held up as the final shred of hope after years of sexual abuse at the hands of Antonio Banderas’ surgeon-torturer.

Needless to say, Tezuka will have no truck with any of this. The manga is question is for kids afterall. The taboo of abandoning the straight and narrow of the female lifestyle is suggested by no less than a minion of Satan (Madame Hell) and is rejected outright. [Sidenote: the female reincarnation of Tristan in Barr and Bolland’s Camelot 3000 is offered a similar bargain by Morgan le Fay but finally opts for lesbian love with her Isolde]

Readers prone to detect the lesbian frisson in the performances of the Takarazuka revue (said to be an influence on Princess Knight) will be left bereft by the heterosexual mores and desires of the protagonists in the manga. Sapphire’s potential bride (as seen in the penultimate chapter of the series) is left weeping at the altar once she is apprised of her groom’s substantial bosom; a Shakespearian moment further emphasized by the translator’s choice of priestly complaint (“Oh, this is sacrilegious, so much ado for nothing.”)

Considering its worthy progenitors in the field of literary transvestism, one might say that the most surprising aspect of Princess Knight is not its crossdressing heroine but the author’s need to contrive a celestial accident for a woman to be skilled at athletic and martial activities. What little “feminism” we see on the page soon gives way to escapades not dissimilar to what you might find in the adventures of Zorro, The Prisoner of Zenda, or a movie starring Douglas Fairbanks. One assumes that this presents an advance over the usual position of women in comics during the 50s and is to be commended.

Nevertheless, this is a manga to be read more out of a sense of duty than anything else. Its historical importance as far as manga directed at girls is concerned is indisputable, but the romantic dilemmas on show are uninvolving. The tiresome and largely unimaginative plots will prove a chore for most. It is undoubtedly virtuous in intention but also averse to do away with childish things even if only for a moment — a product of its time with all the limitations that implies. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the death of Sapphire’s father which is not so much a terrible moment (see Bambi or Charlotte’s Web) but a simple plot development and an exercise in frantic cartooning.

There can be little doubt that Princess Knight remains a perfect example of that safe, asexual entertainment people have come to expect from comics.

The Sadomasochistic Protestant

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In Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Yambo, the brain damaged protagonist, trawls his childhood home at Solaro finding an attic of dusty, mildewed memories — magazines, newspaper clippings, knick knacks, and comics. The eponymous comic strip for which Eco’s novel is named has sadly dimmed with time, now clearly seen as nothing more than a faded talisman and one of the “most insipid” tales “ever conceived by the human brain.” Yet age has not withered his attraction to Alex Raymond’s most famous strip…

Flash Gordon Sunday 1935 (from the collection of Rob Pistella)

…the memory of its hero lodging itself into his dying dream towards the close of the novel, informing every childhood reminiscence and fleeting recollection; this final immersion retaining the wild discursions of a child’s mind now uncomfortably snared to the adult penchant for structure, nonsense, and logic.

There is the nefarious Ming, the sense of camaraderie among our intrepid adventurers, the grand staircase leading to heaven like something out of Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death…

___

…or, perhaps, Hal Foster’s Egyptian sequence from Tarzan which is referenced throughout Raymond’s early years on the strip — the same obeisance to that dark god of masculine virility and white supremacy.

 

Tarzan 6-26-1933, Hal Foster

 

Flash Gordon 6-10-1934, Alex Raymond

 

And, of course, there are the fantasias on the female form in which Raymond immersed himself once his skills and reputation allowed for it. This world of scantily clad women with welcoming bosoms and teardrop asses. That vision of the cold, domineering princess ready to do every form of evil in the name of jealousy, but who is redeemed by her willingness to melt in the arms of her “true” love. These figures coyly praised by Al Williamson in his introduction to the first volume of the Kitchen Sink reprinting of Flash Gordon and ignored altogether by Bruce Canwell (in an article found in the recent IDW reprint) in favor of the contributions of co-writer Donald Wynkoop Moore and a few apologies for the lackadasical scripting on the strip. The latter’s decision not altogether unexpected I should add, the topic in question being tiresome, obvious, and puerile.

The Sunday (of June 2nd 1935) in which Dale pleads desperately for recognition from the brain-washed Flash before being ill used by her tormentors is perhaps the most glorious representation of Raymond’s barefaced fixations.

One can only imagine the sweat trickling down the heroine’s immaculate body as she holds herself taut in anticipation of the reader’s gaze, delighting in her exquisite torture. Raymond allows not one inch of readerly terror. There is only delight in this display of the draughtsman’s pleasure in pain. There are also the cat fights which take on the fervor of lesbian mud wrestling, the depraved domesticity…

…the conjoined torment at the pole of blissful brutality.

There can be little doubt that Raymond’s Flash Gordon is a textbook example of that perverse quality (and sexuality) which is marked by the way “in which violence, aggression, and pain become vehicles for other things — for staging dramas of suspense, supplication, abandon, and relief that enhance or substitute for sexual acts…its way of not ending in coitus, its lack of subordination to a genital goal of discharge or end-please.” (Linda Williams)

And so it is in Yambo’s (and presumably Eco’s) meditation on his childhood comics where “neither the femme fatales nor the satanic males (think of Ming with Dale Arden) ever sought to ravish, rape, imprison in their harems, or know carnally the objects of their lust. They always sought to marry them.  Protestant hypocrisy of American origin, or an excess of bashfulness imposed on the Italian translators by a Catholic government waging a demographic battle?”

 

Perhaps we should add to this not only the desire to marry and possess in the most virtuous of traditions but also the desire to whip and demand submission. Quite unforgotten by the producers of the film adaptation as evidenced by that fan favorite, the whipping of Aura, and certainly well appreciated by Eco in his jaunt through Raymond’s strip — yet elided here because of that tone of innocent nostalgia which must persist. Whatever may be the case, one might see in Yambo’s comment either a call for a certain logical consistency to aid the suspension of disbelief or mere misogynistic nattering.

I think it would be fair to say that we are inundated with these images from the realm of pain on a far more regular basis than the average reader of the Sunday funnies in the 30s.  Presumably, we are living in a more enlightened age. Indeed, we find Linda Williams enumerating the various approaches towards these perversions towards the mid-section of her chapter on “Power, Pleasure, Perversion”, recounting everything from Laura Mulvey’s vision of such products as “avenues of escape for phallically threatened male viewers”; to Gaylyn Studlar’s suggestion that “cinematic visual pleasure is not sadistic but rather masochistic” partaking of the “pre-oeidipal pleasures of merger and fusion rather than oedipal issues of separation and individuation”; and hence to her own extension of the ideas of Mary Ann Doane where…

“…a female spectator” confronted with such scenarios “may not identify with this woman as pure, passive vicitim, for…in these scenarios…the tortured woman has arranged to play the role of suffering woman, to put on a show of suffering the better to enjoy her pleasure.”

What is clear though is that the comics have held fast to that old time religion of Protestant decorum. Undoubtedly, lapsing into indiscretions on occasion before being flogged back into submission.

Where once Marston and Peter dreamt of strong women trussed and bound up [1], we now merely have strength and role models.  Where once curvaceous women and brawny men surrendered themselves to the whipping pole  we now have Dilbert and the faithful PrinceVal. And who is to say this is not the better course, the cartoon strip fading into irrelevance but not falling into impurity, like St. Anthony assailed by demons and rushing into the warm, ascetic glow of the desert.

 *          *          *

[1] From Bound to Blog #3, Noah Berlatsky

“And, hey, you know what? Good for Marston, really. False consciousness arguments are pretty dreary, not to mention condescending…I think it’s generally worth acknowledging that when people acquiesce in oppression or discrimination, they generally have some motivation that can’t be reduced outright to stupidity. It’s not wrong to want someone to take care of you…though obviously you’d want to be careful about the person. Marston’s feminist diagnosis isn’t coherent — it’s a contradictory mess of false consciousness, legitimate emotional goals, fetishization, and pro-lesbian radicalism. That doesn’t make it precisely wrong, though.”