Tag Archives: R. Fiore

Walt Kelly and Me

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“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

 –Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (English translation Harry Zohn; Illuminations p. 255)

 

 Fig. 1

Fig. 1: Clipping courtesy of the Bridgeport History Center at the Bridgeport, Connecticut Public Library

I wonder sometimes if I’m being followed. I can’t seem to escape from Walt Kelly. R. Fiore’s recent TCJ review of the new Hermes Press collection Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics Volume 1, compels me once again to consider the cartoonist, who died in 1973 and lived his formative years in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Park City is about thirty miles south of Oakville, my hometown, and Oakville is just outside of Waterbury, where the Eastern Color Printing Company began producing comic books in the 1930s. Of course, I’d heard of Kelly long before I’d read any of his work. He’s on a short list of Connecticut luminaries, along with Nathan Hale, Rosalind Russell, Paul Robeson, and Thurston Moore, but I didn’t read Kelly’s celebrated strip until I was in my mid-thirties. Several years ago, one of my students gave me copies of two of her late father’s beloved Pogo collections. I know you enjoy comics, she said, and you teach them, too, so I think you might like these: Pogo, the first Simon and Schuster collection from 1951, and The Pogo Papers, from 1953. Covers creased, paper tan and brittle, bindings cracked. Her dad, I know, loved these books, returned to them, left them behind for his daughter, for me. I thanked her for this kind gift, but even then, in the summer of 2007, I neglected them. A year later I was asked to contribute an essay to a collection on Southern comics and I remembered what my student had said: You might need these. I think that’s what she said. I’d like to think so, anyway.

I begin with what is probably more than you need to know about me and Walt Kelly because, like Fiore, I, too admire the artist, and, in the years since my student handed me her father’s Pogo books, I’ve written about his work twice: first, in an essay on Bumbazine for Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted’s collection Comics and the U.S. South (UP of Mississippi, 2012) and again last year for a paper presented at the Festival of Cartoon Art at the Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. In the first essay, which Tom Andrae cites in his introduction to the new Dell Comics collection, I discuss the two scenes Fiore addresses in his review— the watermelon panel from “Albert Takes the Cake” (Animal Comics #1, dated Dec. 1942-Jan. 1943) and the railroad sequence from “Albert the Alligator” (Animal Comics #5, dated Oct.-Nov. 1943). You can read that 2012 essay, “Bumbazine, Blackness, and the Myth of the Redemptive South in Walt Kelly’s Pogo” here or from your local library; the Google Books version does not include the illustrations.

Fiore takes issue with Andrae’s analysis of the black characters who appear in “Albert the Alligator.” While he begins with the suggestion that “Andrae is on firmer ground in denouncing the characterizations in the story from Animal Comics #5,” Fiore then asks that we consider other readings of the narrative:

Once again, however, [Andrae] is sloppy in characterizing [the characters] as “derisive minstrelsy stereotypes.” The conventions of the minstrel show were as formalized as the Harlequinade, and the characters in the story at hand don’t fit them. Further, I believe a more sophisticated and context-conscious reading would come to a different conclusion.

As I read these remarks, I began to wonder, what would a “context-conscious reading” of this sequence look like? And is Fiore correct? Would it reach a different conclusion than the one in Andrae’s introduction?

I attempted just that sort of contextual reading in my Bumbazine essay, in which I trace the impact not only of minstrelsy but also of the rhetoric of the South as redeemer, a concept Kelly inherited from the Southern Agrarians. But any reading that hopes to place Kelly in historical context must take into account the tensions and fractures that exist in his body of work. Kelly is a significant cartoonist not because he was more progressive than other artists working in the 1940s but because he records for us the contradictions in his own thinking and practice.

 Fig. 2

 Fig. 2: Pogo takes on one of the Kluck Klams in a story from The Pogo Poop Book, 1966

Kelly, the child of working-class parents, a left-leaning, often progressive autodidact who, later in his career, would challenge Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Ku Klux Klan, and the John Birch Society, demands our attention because he forces us to ask another question: given his reputation as a cartoonist beloved by students and liberal intellectuals of the 1950s and early 1960s, how could he also have produced works such as “Albert the Alligator,” stories that clearly owe a debt to the conventions of the minstrel stage, and that traffic in derogatory stereotypes? To answer this question, I believe we need to understand Kelly’s nostalgia for his hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut. One of the flaws in some of Kelly’s early work was his inability or unwillingness to interrogate the images and ideas he’d inherited from childhood artifacts such as, for example, Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories. As Andrae reminds us in the introduction to the Dell Comics collection, Kelly’s father enjoyed readings those stories to his son.

 

 Fig. 3

Fig. 3: Image of Bridgeport from Andrew Pehanick, Bridgeport 1900-1960, p. 124

What effect does nostalgia have on us, as writers, as artists, as critics—as fans? When I speak about Kelly, I find it difficult to separate my nostalgia for home from Kelly’s fondness for the Bridgeport of the late teens and 1920s. When I read Kelly now, I am reminded of my childhood in Connecticut, not because Kelly’s comics played any role in it, but because the setting he describes in his essays, for example—the industrial landscape of the Northeast—is also the world of my imagination. By the late 1970s and the early 1980s, however, the brass and munitions manufacturers that had attracted so many immigrants from Europe and migrants from the South were fading. The only traces that remained were signs with names like Anaconda American Brass on redbrick walls of abandoned factory buildings. And the stories, of course, of the men and women who, like Kelly’s father, like my grandparents and great grandparents, worked in those mills.

Fig. 4

Fig. 4: My grandmother, Patricia Budris Stango, second from left, at work in 1941 at the United States Rubber Company, later called Uniroyal, in Naugatuck, Connecticut

As I argue in my essay on Bumbazine, Kelly did not write about the U.S. South. Rather, he told stories in a setting that, for all its southern trappings, looked and felt more like New England. The city of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was, in the early twentieth century, as Kelly describes it, “as new as a freshly minted dollar, but not quite as shiny. The East Bridgeport Development Company had rooted out trees and damned up streams, drained marshes, and otherwise destroyed the quiet life of buttercups and goldfinches in order to make a section where people like the Kellys could live.” In this essay from 1962, Kelly might be describing Pogo’s Okefenokee Swamp: “Surrounding us was a fairly rural and wooded piece of Connecticut filled with snakes, rabbits, frogs, rats, turtles, bugs, berries, ghosts, and legends” (Kelly, Five Boyhoods, 89).

 Fig. 5

Fig. 5: Clipping from the Bridgeport Post, January 14, 1951. Courtesy of the Bridgeport History Center.

Kelly scholars from Walter Ong to Betsy Curtis to R.C. Harvey to Kerry Soper and Tom Andrae have since the 1950s been looking closely at some of these legends. In his essay “The Comic Strip Pogo and the Issue of Race”—along with Soper’s We Go Pogo (UP of Mississippi, 2012), one of the best academic analyses we have of Kelly’s strip—scholar Eric Jarvis points out that Kelly often referred to “his elementary school principal in Bridgeport as a rather nostalgic model of how society should approach these issues with ‘gentility’” (Jarvis 85). Jarvis then includes passages from Kelly’s introduction to the 1959 collection Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo in which the artist again remembers the Bridgeport of his childhood and that principal, Miss Blackham: “Somehow, by another sainted piece of wizardry, she sent us off to high school feeling neither superior nor inferior. We saw our first Negro children in class there, and believe it or not, none of us was impressed one way or another, which is as it should be. Jimmy Thomas became a good friend and the young lady was pretty enough to remember even today” (Kelly, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years, 6).

As Kelly biographer Steve Thompson reminded us at the OSU conference, however, in other interviews Kelly describes the racism and ethnic tensions in the Bridgeport of the 1920s. So, like Jarvis, I am fascinated by the role nostalgia plays in Kelly’s art and in his essays because, after all, as Svetlana Boym reminds us, nostalgia is a utopian impulse, a desire not so much to recover the past as it was lived but to recall the life we wish we’d lived, in a world that never was. But, if it had existed, what would that world have looked like? “Nostlagia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing),” Boym writes, “is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sense of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy” (Boym XIII).

When Brannon Costello asked if I’d contribute an essay to Comics and the U.S. South, I hesitated. My first thought was to write an article on Howard Cruse and Stuck Rubber Baby. Already taken, Brannon told me. Then I asked, What about Pogo? You can’t publish a book on comics and the South without Pogo. A friend later remarked, Why would you write about the South? You lived there for less than a year, and the whole time all you talked about was New England. That’s not exactly what she said. What she said was something closer to this: You hated it there. But, more recently, when I told my friend that I’ve now written two essays about Kelly and the South, she smiled and said, Of course. The more we resist something, the more we are drawn to it. The more I resisted Kelly’s comics, the more I found myself drawn to them and to the South and to the myths of Kelly’s youth—my youth—that I had ignored

So, in reading R. Fiore’s review of the new Pogo collection, I again find myself face to face with Walt Kelly. And I keep returning to Walt Kelly’s early comics not because they transcend discourses of race; rather, I return to them because they include these stock figures and because I believe these early stories, like my student’s gift, offer an opportunity to think and to reflect on how these discourses—how these racist stereotypes—have shaped my life, my thinking, my conduct in the world. I am writing about Kelly because, to borrow a phrase from Walt Whitman, he and I were “form’d from this soil, this air,” and I turn to him because he invites me to dig through that soil, to breath the air again, to remember.

 

 Fig. 6

Fig. 6: The final Pogo collection Kelly published in his lifetime (1972)

It is perhaps too easy to say that these early comics are a record of their time. They are, of course; they demand that we investigate and reconstruct the discourses of the era that produced them. But to deny the hurtful and derogatory nature of the images in Kelly’s early work, I believe, is also to deny his power as an artist. The images in these early issues of Animal Comics are ugly, but there is something in them that will not be ignored. In his mature work—read, for example, Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo, or The Pogo Poop Book, or Kelly’s final collection, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us—Kelly breaks with these conventions. And the image he leaves behind is this one: P.T. Bridgeport, the circus bear, the character who was, in many ways, the real soul of Pogo, now old, tired, but more real and true as he stares at his beloved swamp and sees not a pristine wilderness but a wasteland of junk.  But even here we find a possibility of hope and renewal:

 Fig. 7

Fig 8.

Fig. 7 and Fig. 8: From the last two pages of the title story of Kelly’s We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us (1972) (pages 41-42)

I started this post with a quotation from Walter Benjamin (translated into English by Harry Zohn) not for you but for me, as a way to remind myself of the value of interrogating images like the one of Pogo and Bumbazine sharing the slice of watermelon. If we fail to recognize images from the past as part of our “own concerns,” Benjamin argues, we run the risk of losing them, and their meaning, entirely. But here again I have left something out. Benjamin adds this final parenthetical statement to his fifth thesis: “(The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)”

So, a paradox: we must look carefully, search for these “flashes,” but we also risk negating them and their meaning when we speak or write about them. But to remain in watchful silence offers no real alternative. We must speak of these things, although, as we do so, we are not speaking about the past, not really. We are instead addressing the pain of what it is to live here, now, with each other and with these discourses that continue to blind and disorient us.

 Fig. 9

 

Fig. 9: Two gifts.

 

References

Andrae, Thomas. “Pogo and the American South” in Walt Kelly, Walt Kelly’s Pogo: The Complete Dell Comics Volume 1. Neshannock: Hermes Press, 2014. Print.

Andrae, Thomas and Carsten Laqua. Walt Kelly: The Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo. Neshannock: Hermes Press, 2012. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Shocken Books, 1968. Print.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Print.

Curtis, Betsy. “Nibble, a Walt Kelly Mouse” in The Golden Age of Comics. No. 1 (December 1982). 30-70. Print.

Fiore, R. “Sometimes a Watermelon Is Just a Watermelon.” The Comics Journal. April 3, 2014. Web Link.

Jarvis, Eric. “The Comic Strip Pogo and the Issue of Race.” Studies in American Culture. XXI:2 (1998): 85-94. Print.

Kelly, Walt. The Pogo Poop Book. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Print.

Kelly, Walt. Ten Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959. Print.

—. “1920’s.” Five Boyhoods. Ed. Martin Levin. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1962. 79-116. Print.

Pehanick, Andrew. Bridgeport 1900-1960. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2009. Print.

Soper, Kerry D. We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. Print.

Thanks to Mary Witkowski and Robert Jefferies at the Bridgeport History Center for their assistance in locating materials included here from the Center’s Walt Kelly clipping file. Also, I talk a little more about the Walt Kelly panel a November’s OSU conference here.

Fear of Wertham. And Possibly of a Black Planet.

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Earlier this week R. Fiore wrote a post at The Comics Journal defending the honor of Walt Kelly from the suggestion (made by Thomas Andrae in the introduction to Walt Kelly’s Pogo The Complete Dell Comics: Volume One) that maybe, possibly, you could see something slightly racist in the fact that he used blackface caricatures.
 

Pogo2

 
Fiore’s piece is a graceless performance. He spins and sneers, insisting that this image of a black child with a watermelon is not playing into racist jokes about blacks and watermelons because Kelly isn’t malicious and the black kid is portrayed positively so the watermelon must have ended up in there totally by accident, really, it could just as easily have been grapes. There’s no substantive engagement with, or really even mention of, the fact that Kelly’s cartoon blacks are based in blackface iconography, nor any effort to grapple with what that means.

The really depressing thing is that there’s an interesting article struggling to get out from behind Fiore’s special pleading. Jeet Heer, in the comments to the post, argues that (contra Fiore) Kelly did use blackface iconography but that (as Fiore says) Kelly’s depictions of blacks were in fact better than those of some of his contemporaries. Brian Cremins, who has written in an academic context about Kelly, also suggests in comments that the minstrel tradition was very important to Kelly’s art and humor, and that that’s something to be investigated rather than denied or fled from. I’m not a fan of Kelly’s especially, and haven’t read many of his comics, but it’s clear that there’s a discussion worth having about his relationship to race and racism. It sounds, in fact, like Andrae was engaged in such a discussion.

But Fiore isn’t having it. Kelly cannot have been touched by racism — or, if he was, that only goes to show how utterly awesome and virtuous he really is.
 

At the outset, we must presume that Walt Kelly was more enlightened than Thomas Andrae, or you, or me. This is because unlike Walt Kelly’s, our enlightenment is socially assisted. Walt Kelly had to come upon his all on his own. Now, any of us might have been one of the enlightened people in those days, and all of us think we would have been one of the enlightened persons in those days, but the odds say otherwise, and in the actual event Kelly was. We simply embrace the conventional wisdom of our time. Kelly swam against the tide.

The suggestion that you or me or Fiore have reached some level of enlightenment which puts us beyond the touch of racism, and therefore beyond moral censure or praise as regards racism, is perhaps the least of the idiocies in this paragraph. The vision of Kelly as great artist, achieving his goal of perfect equality and watermelons without any input from anyone, inventing anti-racism out of whole cloth, without the intervention or help of any actual black people anywhere, is, for its part, familiar in import. Anti-racism here isn’t really a goal in itself; reading Fiore’s piece, it seems fairly clear that Fiore couldn’t possibly care less about racism, or about black people. Anti-racism is just a accoutrement of (white) genius, like a punchy prose style or a pleasing ink line. Fiore admires Kelly’s humanism; if that humanism is compromised, so is the admiration. Ergo, the admiration being fulsome, no racism can exist. QED.

Fiore’s a longtime TCJ hand, and here he manages to embody some of the least enlightening aspects of old school comics fan culture: its hagiography; its crippling insularity (racial and otherwise); its smug distrust of academia; and most of all its defensiveness.

The last couldn’t be more counter-productive. A critical establishment that reacts with panic and dyspepsia to the suggestion that obvious blackface iconography is obvious blackface iconography is not a critical establishment that anyone beyond the most hard-core nostalgists is going to find welcoming. Join Team Comics! We were using watermelons in a totally non-racist way 70 years ago, pat us on the back! If you want to make your art form look clueless, ridiculous, and not a little repulsive, this would be the way to do it. Fiore’s handwaving doesn’t so much distract from the racism of comics’ past as it raises embarrassing and painful questions about the racism of comics’ present.
________
Update: Brian Cremins has a lovely piece about Pogo, race, and nostalgia here.

Not Best, Mostly American, Comics Non-Criticism

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Hate fest is over, but hate is ever new. So I thought I’d reprint this review of Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism which I posted at tcj.com a while back. The piece was part of a roundtable: you can see all the other pieces at the following links:

Opening contributions from Ng Suat Tong, Noah Berlatsky, Caroline Small, Jeet Heer, Brian Doherty and BACC editor Ben Schwartz; responses from Caroline Small, Ng Suat Tong, Jeet Heer, Noah Berlatsky and Ben Schwartz.

My review is below.
_____________________________

Ben Schwartz begins his introduction to Best American Comics Criticism with an anecdote: one day at a mall he heard two young girls arguing about what to call graphic novels. For Schwartz, this was a “definitive moment.” Comics used to be for nebbishy, perpetually pubescent, socially stunted man-boys — but that’s all over. Superheroes are dead, replaced by the teeming offspring of anthropomorphic Holocaust victims. Nowadays everybody from New York Times editors to real live tweens are enamored of the sequential lit. From a niche product for mouth-breathing microcephalics, comics have become our nation’s primary containment vessel for deep meaningfulness. Open them and feel your world expand.

But while comics may have generously embraced tween mall rats, the same cannot exactly be said for The Best American Comics Criticism. Schwartz’s keyboard lauds the heterogeneous appeal of comics, but his heart is still in some back alley, cheeto-smelling direct market basement, lost in a rapturous fugue of insular clusterfuckery. You’d think that if you were editing a tome focusing on comics criticism over the last 10 years, and if you further began your tome by genuflecting towards tween girls as icons of authenticity, you might possibly feel it incumbent upon you to include some passing mention of the 1,200 pound frilly panda in the room. Not Schwartz though; if he’s ever heard the word “shojo,” he’s damned if he’s going to let on. The only manga-ka who defiles these pristine pages is alt-lit analog Yoshihiro Tatsumi — and he only makes the cut because he was interviewed by that validator of all things lit-comic, Gary Groth.

The almost complete omission of manga (and the complete omission of online comics) isn’t an accident. Schwartz deliberately set out to produce a work which would appeal only to his own tediously over-represented demographic which would focus on the triumph of lit comics over the years 2000-2008.

Now, you might think that it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to title your book Best American Comics Criticism and then, deliberately collect a sampling of essays related to one particular strand of comics that happens to interest you and your in-group. You might think that in these circumstances your title seems, not like a description of the contents, but rather like a transparent marketing ploy. You might think that craven, and I would agree with you.

It’s only once you get over the fact that the book’s cover is a lie, though, that you can really start to appreciate the purity of the work’s cloistered lameness. Yes, only one female critic (Sarah Boxer) is included. Yes, Schwartz compulsively returns to the same writers again and again — three essays by Donald Phelps, two pieces by Dan Nadel, two by Jonathan Lethem, two by Dan Clowes. And yes there are not one, not two, but three interviews by Gary Groth, the book’s erstwhile publisher. But the most audacious moment of collegial nepotism is a pedestrian essay about Harold Gray by — Ben Schwartz himself! Even better, if you read the acknowledgements you learn that Schwartz wanted to include another of his own essays, but was prevented by rights conflicts. Really, it’s kind of a wonder he didn’t just put together a book of his own writings and slap that Best American title on it. After all, he’s the editor. If he thinks Ben Schwartz writes the best criticism in explored space, who’s to gainsay him? (It’s possible that Schwartz wanted to include the other essay instead of the piece he used… which means that he printed his second best as one of the top essays of the decade. If that hadn’t worked, would he have gone to his third best? His tenth? His grocery lists?)

To be fair, I’ve actually quite liked some of Schwartz’s writing over the years. A piece by him about Paris Hilton which ran in the Chicago Reader is one of my favorite things to ever run in that publication — I still remember its concluding paragraph clearly seven years later. And while using multiple essays by a handful of writers seems like a gratuitously ingrown way to structure a best-of book, if the results were provocative and enjoyable, I wouldn’t kick.

Unfortunately, the results here are… well, they’re really boring, mainly. Part of the problem is, again, the insular air of self-satisfaction. The worst in this regard is probably the Will Eisner/Frank Miller interview excerpt, in which the participants both pat themselves on the back so vigorously that they seem to be in some sort of contest to see whose arm will fracture first. In terms of abject sycophancy, though, the David Hajdu interview with Marjane Satrapi is close behind. “Like her work, Satrapi’s apartment is a mosaic of Middle Eastern and Western, high and low — a willful testament to cultural and aesthetic heterogeneity.” What is this, Marie Claire? Compared to such celebrity puff-piece drivel, the merely grating mutual admiration on display in the Jonathan Lethem/Dan Clowes interview seems positively tolerable. Sure, Lethem actually claims that what he and Clowes are doing is somehow “dangerous” while they’re both sitting on a podium in front of a herd of maddened, man-eating elephants — or are those rapturously respectful undergrads? Either way at least he doesn’t opine that Clowes’ bow tie is a sartorial sign of nostalgic doubling. You take what you can get.

When the book isn’t oozing complacency, though, it’s giving off an even worse miasma — anxiety. As any alt comics confession will tell you, the clubby smirks of the knowledgeable hobbyist hide a desperate desire to be accepted. The book is one long grovel, as if Schwartz hopes to win fame, fortune, and mainstream acceptance through sheer power of toadying. This is most visible in the egregious reliance on “name” authors. Ephemeral book introductions by John Updike, Dan Clowes and Jonathan Lethem all read like exactly what they are — celebrity endorsements. Alan Moore’s disjointed interview transcription about Steve Ditko is interesting but slight, while Seth’s essay on John Stanley seems padded out with an overdetermined breezy musing that is, I guess, supposed to be redolent of whimsical genius. “I’m sure when [Stanley] wrote these disposable comic books he could never have dreamed that, half a century later, grown adults would still be looking at them. It’s an odd world.” Or maybe it’s a clichéd world. So hard to tell the difference.

Schwartz pulls out a host of other gimmicks too — a fascimile of the court decision giving Siegel and Schuster back their rights in Superman; an Amazon comments thread about Joe Matt; a meta-cartoon by Nate Gruenwald, comprised of annotations upon a fictitious old school cartoonists “classic” strips. The first seems needless, the second is blandly predictable; the last actually has a lovely expressionist/modernist feel, though I think it probably lost a good deal in being excerpted. All of them, though, seem to come from the same place of nervous desperation. “I know no one here really wants to read criticism,” Schwartz seems to be saying. “So, um… here! Look! Bunnies!”

Schwartz does seem to prefer bunnies to criticism — perhaps because he has only the vaguest idea of what criticism is, or of why anyone would be interested in it. Specifically, for a critic and a supposed connoisseur of criticism, he seems to have a marked aversion to anything that might be considered an idea. Most of the pieces in the book say little or less than little. John Hodgman’s essays, for example, tells us that Jack Kirby thought of his Fourth World series as a long completed work… and now folks like Brian K. Vaughn also think of their series as long completed work, and ain’t that something? Rick Moody says Epileptic shows “this relatively new form can be as graceful as its august literary forbearers.” R. C. Harvey assures us that Fun Home is “Serious literature for mature readers for whom sex is only part of adulthood;” Jeet Heer insists that “Whatever he might have drawn from his personal memories, the emotions that Frank King explored are universal;” Donald Phelps emits his usual fog of avuncular gush; Paul Gravett bounces up and down in the backseat while chattering on about how “lots of people, writers, artists, editors and readers, are in this for the long haul, for however long it takes for the graphic novel to achieve its possibilities.” This is knee-jerk boosterism, platitudinous bunk intended to sell me crap, not to make me think. For Schwartz, it seems, the best criticism is marketing copy. Maybe he should edit an anthology of beer commercials.

There are some enjoyable pieces. In his review of comics commemorating 9/11, R. Fiore sounds like the ignorant blowhard at the end of the bar (Terrorism doesn’t work, Robert? Really? The KKK will be surprised to hear that Jim Crow never happened then.) But at least he has some personality and something to say, no matter how asinine. Sarah Boxer’s essay about race in Krazy Kat has moments of interpretive élan. Ken Parille’s dissection of Dan Clowes’ David Boring is so passionate about its obsession that it’s fascinating reading even for someone who, like me, really hates David Boring. And Dan Nadel’s evisceration of the Masters of Comics art exhibit is perhaps the strongest piece in the volume, not least because it hits so painfully close to home. “So, if the curators really want comics to be examined as a serious medium, the first step is not to establish a bullshit canon, but rather to be serious — avoid silly stunt-casting, attempt to provide rudimentary information, and for heavens sake, try not to commission an exhibited artist’s wife to write about another exhibited artist. Y’know, act like real, grown-up curators! Good luck.” Schwartz, man — that had to have left a mark.

But a few pleasant oases don’t make it worthwhile to cross the wasteland. The irony is that, in the end, this book proves exactly the opposite of what Schwartz intended. Best American Comics Criticism doesn’t give us comics as an engaged, vibrant medium, connected to ideas and to the broader world. Instead, Schwartz’s comicdom is a cramped little shanty, from which, every so often, a tiny face sticks out to lick the nearest boot or shout in a quavering voice, “I am somebody!” before diving back into the hovel. If you believe this volume, comics between 2000 and 2008 went precisely nowhere. They’re still as boring, still as self-involved, and still as desperate for approval as they ever were. I don’t actually believe that Best American Comics Criticism is an accurate reflection of the best in comics or in writing about comics. But if it is, we all need to give the fuck up.
 

Everyone Gets Into the Fight

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The Fiore vs. Berlatsky kerfuffle was so much fun other folks threw some punches as well. I thought I’d do a brief roundup of some of the more entertaining/enlightening blows.

Mike Hunter, in a comment over at the mainpage, did an extensive fisking of R. Fiore’s fisking of me. Here’s the first bit:

R. Fiore:
The reasonableness of the West is demonstrated by its relative freedom from religious warfare. It is a case where a problem that bedeviled mankind for centuries was solved by human agency. It is one of the greatest achievements of human history.
——————
Indeed a great achievement! But what we need here are more qualifiers, such as “The reasonableness of the West in this area“; for, does the West not indeed support the most corrupt and exploitative dictatorships for the most cynical of reasons?
That there are plenty of tyrants trampling their people without our aid hardly excuses our keeping others in power.
——————
R. Fiore:
The Danish Jyllands-Posten, lulled into a false sense of security by a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe dating all the way back to 1945, published their suite of cartoons featuring Muhammad on the assumption that no one was crazy enough to sacrifice their lives and liberty or commit horrible crimes over a drawing.
—————–
(?????!!!!) The Jyllands-Posten is a right-wing publication which wanted to show what a bunch of berserk nutsos all Muslims were by doing a deliberately provocative action which it knew perfectly well Fundamentalist members of the faith world predictably go apeshit over.

Caro, to no one’s surprise, had a really insightful take.

It seems to me the most telling sentence in the second piece is this: “The reasonableness of the West is demonstrated by its relative freedom from religious warfare. It is a case where a problem that bedeviled mankind for centuries was solved by human agency.”

This idea that social problems are ever “solved” is, at the risk of melodrama, dangerous. They go dormant, conditions obtain at a given period of time when the are less of a problem, but that doesn’t mean they are solved, like some utopian science fiction novel.

This is precisely where Fiore’s “cultural materialism” is insufficient: you might be able to explain the past in cultural materialist terms, but you will not be able to imagine how the past might “return” to inform the future, because by denying the dialectic you leave yourself no mechanism for examining how that past is immanent in the present.

Maybe the errors of fact arise from this too: how would the families of the victims of Srebrenica feel about the notion that the West has solved the problem of religious violence, or even that Europe and “the Muslim world” have diverged in the first place? (His use of the word “Europe” to mean “Western Europe” is really irritating.) Or the European religious philosophers of the 17th century feel about secular pluralism as the cause for the advancements of Western civilization, since it ignores the religious pluralism on which secular pluralism is based? (I want to include the statement “Radical…Islam is not a remedy” here but I can’t figure out what he’s saying it’s not a remedy for…)

Fiore thinks in terms of cause and effect rather than in terms of “conditions of possibility” and I think that’s why Fiore’s essay feels so wrong to us: he treats history as something completed, a riddle to be explained, rather than as a powerful immanent presence that we have to engage with. His inability to perceive religion as anything other than an adaptation is probably why he can’t perceive History in this way: immanence was originally a religious concept, and if you take a strict materialist approach to religion it’s hard to exhibit the forms of mind necessary for imagining things that are temporally infinite. Fiore, imagining history as as series of finite cause and effects rather than an ongoing process that he is part of, sets himself outside history. I guess that’s the binary that I see informing this piece the most.

And in what I think is the closest thing we’ve gotten to a defense of Fiore, Andrei Molotiu chastised me for my second response to Fiore.

Noah, whatever one might think of Fiore, this is not a response, it’s a trolling post. It makes you sound like JF Ronan in his prime. It’s the kind of post that makes me not want to check HU as often anymore.

I think Fiore may well be sick of the back and forth, so this may be the end of the brouhaha. Thanks to all those who read and commented…and to R. Fiore himself, for engaging as long as he did. I hope we’ll get a chance to fight again soon.

Shorter Fiore

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I am not world weary and cynical, I am just Machiavellian. The west is not more reasonable than Islam, except that it is more reasonable than Islam. You can see this because of the reason and good fellowship that has prevailed in European countries such as Serbia. Regimes like Iraq were openly hostile to us until very recently which is why we armed them when they fought Iran. Also, Noah Berlatsky coddles terrorists, nyah nyah. I understand how Christians ought to act better than Christians do, which is why I can say with assurance that if Martin Luther King Jr. were a real believer, he would have advocated nuclear annihilation for commies. The fact that atheists and believers sometimes act alike shows that faith is only relevant to someone’s actions when I say that it is. Also, I’m a fucking materialist existential hero; please join me in weeping aloud for me in my tough-minded tragedy.

 

 

And hey, let’s hear it for this gem:

“Cultural materialism is the theory that there is a Darwinian process in the selection of social forms, and that therefore for instance no religion that is adopted by large populations for generations can be arbitrary or irrational, but rather must serve some purpose for its adherents.”

Translation:
Look, I dropped Darwin’s name, and concluded that religion must serve some purpose! Unlike lame-assed, half-baked, clichéd, swaggering cultural materialism, which is handed down from God…whoops! I mean from my own pure, indomitable brainstem! Which by coincidence I pulled yesterday out of my own indomitable ass.

 

 

If you missed it, here’s Fiore’s original post and my response to it.

Worshipping Nothing

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R. Fiore has a recent article up about the South Park censorship brouhaha in which he takes a brave, world-weary stand against cowardly corporations, crazy Muslims, and simplistic theists. As always with Fiore, it’s stylishly written…and as sometimes with Fiore, it’s pretty thoroughly vapid. He’s got that just-plain-common-sense-man-on-the-street approach, which involves repeating things everyone already knows, retailing banal prejudices as shocking insights, and patting yourself rhythmically on the back all the while.

Fiore’s argument is basically that we’d all get along better in this old world if we acted as if we didn’t believe anything. Or as Fiore says, “What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way.” For Fiore, the South Park incident shows the eminent reasonableness of the Western world, and the fact that reasonableness is essentially useless in dealing with nutzo Islamist thugs:

The Danish Jyllands-Posten, lulled into a false sense of security by a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe dating all the way back to 1945, published their suite of cartoons featuring Muhammad on the assumption that no one was crazy enough to sacrifice their lives and liberty or commit horrible crimes over a drawing. The response of the fanatical end of Islam was, in effect, yes as a matter of fact we are crazy enough, and if that wasn’t sufficient please let us know and we’ll be crazier still. The position this places the would-be blasphemer in is that you can visually depict Muhammad, but only if you’re willing to see blood shed over it. Courage will allow you to express yourself, but it won’t prevent the violence. The net result is that the fanatics get their way and the only cost is to brand millions of completely innocent Muslims as murderous barbarians.

I think my favorite part of that quote is the nostalgic harking back to “a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe”, coupled with Fiore’s utter lack of historical or intellectual curiosity. Presuming that this period of reason and good fellowship did exist for a moment — why did it end, precisely? What caused the Muslims to suddenly jump the shark? Is it immigration into Europe that’s the problem — which would lead to certain policy positions that I strongly suspect the carefully enlightened Fiore wants nothing to do with.

Or…as an alternate possibility, could it be that, from the Muslim perspective, there was in fact no “period of reason and good fellowship,” but rather decade upon decade of Western-supported dictatorships, quasi-imperialism, repetitive humiliations, and (in the case of Afghanistan, at least) vicious, unending warfare? Fiore muses with an air of non-plussed good humor at what could have possibly led some Muslims to set themselves against South Park so:

The Mafia is an appropriate comparison because the threats made against South Park are in some ways more akin to extortion than conventional terrorism. A typical terrorist campaign attempts to achieve an absurdly ambitious goal with an absurdly miniscule amount of force. For example, in 40 years of terrorism after 1967, Palestinian terrorists managed to kill something like 2100 Israelis. No one is going to surrender their country to avoid this level of casualties. A modern army can kill that many non-combatants in an afternoon by mistake. The campaign against depictions of the prophet Muhammad on the other hand brings to bear an absurdly disproportionate amount of force to stop something most people in the West don’t have the inclination to do in the first place.

The Mafia analogy carefully obscures the clear conclusion — Muslims have little if any way to address their political grievances to the foreign powers that repetitively kick them in the teeth. Terrorism is largely, as Fiore quite rightly notes, useless. So when you can’t do anything about the big insults, you naturally focus on the small ones. Surely segments of the Muslim world sees depictions of the prophet by the infidels not as the first insult, or the fifth or the 200th, but rather as part of one, long, sustained insult by a bully who has kept his foot on their throat for half a century plus.

Threats against newspaper publishers or television networks are petty and stupid and despicable, obviously — but they’re neither incomprehensible nor evidence of some sort of disconnect between religious thinking and rationality. Given the relationship between the west and the Middle East, the threats are, on the contrary, entirely comprehensible. That doesn’t mean that they should be condoned. In the first place, as Fiore points out, the whole brouhaha definitely makes things worse, not better, for Muslims worldwide. Moreover, while it isn’t as bad as the Taliban’s systematic oppression of women or al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks, threatening to kill innocents for drawing pictures does seem to me to be a fair definition of evil. Still, we can take comfort in the thought that we’ll go tit for tat or better in the near future, whenever the next American drone strike takes out the next Afghani wedding party.

Fiore’s a lefty too, and I doubt he supports the Afghan war any more than I do. But he doesn’t want to talk about it in too much detail because to do so would mess up his nice little binary; rational west as powerless, peaceful victims; nutty religious dickheads as powerful, violent thugs. To give Fiore his due, though, he is willing to follow his simplistic analogy wherever it takes him, no matter how idiotic the end location is. And so in the last paragraph we get this gem:

What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way. After all, if you truly believed that those who follow the wrong religion will be subjected to eternal torment then you’re doing them no favors by allowing them to do so. For instance, during the Cold War, if you believed as Jesus told you that death is an illusion, and the atheistic regimes of the Soviet bloc were depriving millions of even opportunity to save their souls from eternal damnation, then you would be honor bound to not only risk nuclear war but to engage in it. After all, eternal bliss would compensate the just for any suffering they endured.

To call this a strawman argument is to cast scurrilous aspersions on the structural integrity of straw. Which Christians exactly is it who want to start a worldwide nuclear holocaust for the sake of the souls of atheists? Would that be the many Christians who, on quite good scriptural authority, believe that Jesus enjoined them to pacifism? Would it be the Catholic Church — still the largest Christian denomination — which holds to a just war doctrine that declared the Iraq war anathema? The Niebuhrian realist tradition, which stresses a humane concern for human life and justice? Hell, even wacko Protestant Christian right-wing apocalyptic fantasies like the Left Behind series doesn’t advocate genocide-for-Jesus as far as I know.

There are nutcases everywhere, obviously, and I’m sure there’s the random Christian out there who wants everyone to die in a fiery man-made holocaust — but to suggest that this is especially a hallmark of religious thinking as opposed to the rational atheist philosophies of, say, Pol Pot or Mao or Hitler…it’s nonsense on its face. And that’s to say nothing of our own lovely, rational, harmless, hapless capitalism, which can’t stand up for South Park, but which has, nonetheless, shown itself capable on occasion of a certain ruthlessness, as Chileans, Cambodians, and, for that matter, Native Americans would no doubt be willing to attest.

“What the West has learned is that even if you do sincerely believe in God, if you want any peace you can’t act that way.” I’ve quoted that twice already, and I’m quoting it a third time because it’s central to Fiore’s argument — and, I believe, to his belief. Because it is a belief, right? It’s certainly not a fact. Where, after all, is this peace we’ve found by acting as if we don’t believe in God, precisely? The U.S. is more religious than Europe, certainly, but by world-historical standards we’re a pretty secular society — and, by world-historical standards, we have probably the biggest military of all time. China’s fond of playing with weapons too, and they aren’t noticeably religious last time I checked. And, you know, on the other side, I was under the impression that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi both drew the inspiration for their non-violent resistance movements from their faith. Or does Fiore think that MLK was somehow acting as if he didn’t believe in God?

Fiore ends with a really tiresome roulette wheel analogy which I don’t have the heart to quote. But it’s telling that such vacuous modernity can only end by seeing faith in terms of gambling, money, and yes, capitalism. Fiore believes that believing in nothing will save him…but the truth is that nothing has its own rites and rituals, its own insanities, its own cruelties, and even its own genocidal impulses. The world isn’t divided into believers and non-believers, or into the sane and the insane. The only ones here are us chickens — or, if you prefer, us poor sinners, a long way from home.
_________

Update: R.Fiore has an extremely long response here.

And my short reply to Fiore is here.

Changing the World One Apocalypse At a Time

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R. Fiore has an essay up on tcj.com about the Watchmen book and comic. He argues, in part that the movie’s weaknesses are those of the book.

the entire movie depends on an idea that became obsolete within a few years after the book came out, which is that nuclear war was such an imminent absolute threat that the only decent course was non-resistance to totalitarianism. What this in turn depends on is a failure to understand the difference between nuclear war and every other kind of war, which is regardless of who was left hobbling, the respective high commands could not hope to personally escape the consequences. Even if they were sheltered during the blast, all the comforts and riches of their capitols would be blasted away. But what really makes the whole idea empty is the belief that conflicts between peoples aren’t genuine, and that they could all be swept away by an imaginary bogeyman. This is an idea as juvenile as any that ever appeared in a comic book.

So first, I don’t think Watchmen is pro-totalitarianism (V is another story). Ozymandias and his final solution are undercut and questioned repeatedly, both by other characters and by the narrative itself. Rorscach and Dr. Manhattan both suggest, for different reasons, that destroying New York may not have been worth the candle, and the final page of the book indicates that the fate of the world hangs, not on Ozymandias, but on some moron with ketchup on his shirt. (If you want to see me natter on about this topic at greater length, you can read this and also this).

I have problems with several of Fiore’s other points as well. For example, if I understand his argument aright, he seems to be under the impression that, because nuclear war would kill everybody, the people in charge of the nuclear buttons would never actually press them. The whole cold-war paranoia thing was just a big dumb mistake; nobody was ever in any danger, since mutually assured destruction was absolutely fool-proof. The lesson of the end of the Cold War was that we never had to worry about the Cold War to begin with.

Fiore’s correct in some sense — if our leaders were rational, we needn’t have worried about nuclear war. The problem, of course, is that they weren’t particularly. I’ve read a bunch of accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis (most recently one by Garry Wills) and I’m pretty convinced that John F. Kennedy was enough of a preening prima donna that he would have sooner destroyed the world than lose the news cycle. Thus, avoiding nuclear holocaust depended on…Khruschev. As it turned out, Khruschev was more level-headed than even a glass-half-full, turning-dog-turds-into-lemonade, off-to-join-the-Peace-Corps-and-frolic-with-the-happy-natives kind of optimist had any right to expect. But just because things worked out doesn’t mean that people weren’t right to be a little nervous.

I also disagree with Fiore’s contention that Watchmen misunderstands history and people. I mean, yes, obviously, the fake-space-alien-uniting-the-world is not especially probable. Among other things, the plot in the comic relies on the existence of psychic powers broadly distributed among the populace. And a guy who can catch bullets. And the existence of teleportation technology. Watchmen is many things, but a realistic narrative it is not.

But Fiore, obviously, is talking about more than that. He’s arguing that it’s ridiculous and childish to believe that conflicts between people can be swept aside by “an imaginary bogeyman.” He’s saying that miracles not only can’t happen, but wouldn’t work anyway because people are too set in their ways. Ultimately, Fiore seems to be skeptical not just of miracles, but of change.

Like Fiore, I don’t really believe in miracles, and I have my doubts about change. But I’ve been reading Terry Eagleton, who, as a Marxist, has a certain commitment to miraculous social transformation, and he does make you think. In his memoir The Gatekeeper, he discusses at length a Carmelite nunnery where he served as altar boy as a child.

What was most subversive about [the nuns], however, was their implacable otherworldliness. There are tough-minded types who believe that this world is the best we can muster, some of whom are known as materialists and the rest as conservatives. Whatever they call themselves, the hard-nosed realists who claim that there is no need for another world have clearly not been reading the newspapers…For [the nuns], the flaw of the world ran so deep that it cried out for some thoroughgoing transformation, known in their jargon as redemption. Short of this, things were likely to get a lot worse.

Fiore is one of those realists; he thinks the world is what it is. Moore, on the other hand, is suggesting that transformation is possible through a kind of apocalypse. Not Marxist revolution or Christian salvation, but something analogous; a global scale cataclysmic event, killing millions and shifting earth’s concept of its own place in the galaxy.

Contra Fiore, I think that such a massive event would actually really shake people up. 9/11 wasn’t as transformative as some like to claim, but it did succeed in concentrating a lot of minds. And the even Moore suggests would be much bigger — many more dead, and the sudden revelation of a hostile alien race. The only comparison would be the first European encounter with the Americas, which had massive psychological, spiritual, economic, and political consequences, to say the least. If you don’t think a bogeyman on the scale Moore propounds would be enough to change the world, it’s hard to say what would. Certainly, if you’re that assured of stability, it’s hard to see why you would think (as Fiore seems to) that George Bush could have made much of a difference one way or the other.

Moore does suggest that his particular miracle would require gallons and gallons of blood. His willingness to look at that unflichingly and unsympathetically is why Watchmen doesn’t end up endorsing violence or fascism. The revolution may really not be worth it; utopia isn’t necessarily grace.

The funniest thing about both sides of this argument, maybe, is that we know now that both Fiore and Moore are too pessimistic. Fiore argues that the cold war conflict was intractable; Moore argues that it could only be worked out by piling bodies like cordwood. And what happened instead (as Fiore at least should know)? The Cold War ended very rapidly and with (as these things go) little loss of life. Of course, the world isn’t all hunky-dory (and Moore didn’t say it would be.) But things do change, and not always for the worse.

Watchmen is, among other things, about the possibilities and perils of radical political change. It’s not a political treatise; it doesn’t present solutions to the problems it raises. But I don’t think it’s wrong in arguing that those problems could, perhaps, require transformative change, and in further suggesting that, for better or worse, such changes do occur. Fiore says that the plot of Watchmen is hard to believe, but, as Terry Eagleton notes the story of humanity is itself “grossly improbable.” The cynical view that tomorrow will be like today is in fact the most hopeless naivete — more naive, even, than trusting in our leaders not to kill us, or in believing that the fears of our parents were unreal because they no longer happen to be ours. Things do change, in large ways and small. The future is like the past only in being different from the present. Moore got that, which is why, even though its yesterday and tomorrow aren’t ours, Watchmen still seems up to date.