Tag Archives: Susan Kirtley

Why I Dislike Betty and Veronica to the Utmost of My Abilities

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Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to use the word “hate.”  I was thus forced to create an alternative phrase and came up with  “I dislike [it] to the utmost of my abilities.”  So let me say this clearly: I dislike Betty and Veronica to the utmost of my abilities.  I feel guilty admitting it; Archie and the gang are just so wholesome, so American, and in recent years I’ve even heard that Archie has developed a decidedly liberal bent, but when I was a child Archie’s main girls Betty and Veronica were the bane of my existence.  I think most of us have guilty pleasures—embarrassing pastimes or pursuits that give us a tingly, happy feeling, but reading about the catfights and hijinks of Betty and Veronica was a guilty obsession that brought me no pleasure; instead these “best friends, worst enemies” only made this girl feel much, much worse.  This is, of course, a very personal reaction, and I’m looking forward to reading Craig Yoe’s upcoming The Art of Betty and Veronica after abandoning the comic in high school.  Perhaps I will be able to gain some distance and a better perspective on the iconic role the pair has played in American culture.

However, when leafing through some old issues of Betty and Veronica from the 1980s, I was immediately overcome with that same strong, repellent feeling from the past as I remembered that, in fact, Betty and Veronica are horrible.  In saying this I mean no disrespect to Dan DeCarlo, an artist long associated with updating the look of Betty and Veronica, and well known for his stylized, sexy, and strangely wholesome female characters.  Rather, it is the stories, the lives, and the characters of B & V that cause immediate distress.  While others might praise the fact that Betty and Veronica remain best friends despite fighting over Archie continuously, I cannot help despising the triangle and the participants in the first place.

Teen magazines frequently asked the question: Are you a Betty or a Veronica?  It was a question that I imagine led many girls to despair.  I, myself, was certainly no Veronica.   Oh yes, she’s gained a cult-like status as a take-charge, empowered female radiating self-confidence and verve, and the comic got a great deal of mileage gently mocking Veronica’s exorbitant wealth and privilege and her lack of real-world knowledge, yet in this playful teasing the stories also served to affirm the great gifts and pleasures of privilege.  I had little of Veronica’s sass and grew up in a distinctly middle-class household, examining the riches of the Lodge mansion with a critical eye, all while feeling a sickening jealousy for the girl who had everything, well, except for the feckless Archie.  Over and over, Veronica’s slapstick romantic battles with Betty brought out the worst in both, and I couldn’t help but wonder—this is all over Archie?  The goofy redhead with the curious, pockmark freckles and crosshatched hair? 

If Veronica represented the unattainable dream of confidence, poise, and affluence, Betty acted as I knew I should.  As a fellow helpful tomboy who got good grades and tried to please my parents, Betty was more relatable to me.  Still (and this likely says something about me), I disliked Betty even more than Veronica: her namby pambiness, her awful subservience, her generic prettiness, and that relentless good cheer.  In her upbeat, serviceable wardrobe, Betty was unceasing resourceful, always lending a hand when Archie’s car broke down or Veronica needed help covering for one of her misdeeds.  Yuck.

Veronica was downright mean, and Betty, well, she was a doormat.  What was there for a little girl to emulate?  What kept me dissecting the pages?  I believe, if anything, it was Dan DeCarlo’s artistic style that kept me returning to the comic throughout my tween years, despite the queasy feeling the comics gave me.  I scrutinized the two female leads intently, studying the perfect hourglass figures, the cutting edge fashions, the upturned noses and wide, perennially surprised eyes as templates for perfection in dark and light.  Yet as time went on I slowly gave up the “realistic” teens, gravitating to the superheroes that seemed somehow more real than Betty and Veronica.  Spiderman, Batman, Rogue, and Wolverine lived with fear and pain and shame, and yet there was a spark of greatness within them.  Somehow, watching these troubled characters make their way, swinging and clawing and punching, felt much more comforting than viewing Betty and Veronica lounge and play on the manicured lawns of Riverdale.  Thanks anyway, Archie, but I’ll take the X-Men any day.  I guess I really do hate Betty and Veronica.
 
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Rogue Mirror

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This first appeared on Comixology.
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Superheroes are power fantasies. This is not in dispute.

The latest testament to this truth was provided to me by U Mass Lowell professor Susan Kirtley, one of the contributors to Craig Fischer’s Team Cul de Sac zine to benefit Parkinson’s research. The zine consists of a number of critics (including me!) discussing their favorite comics.

Kirtley’s piece starts by talking about one day in elementary school when she found an acquaintance, Sean Robinson, “huddled against the brick wall of the school.” Sean huddled over a piece of reading material “which was bright and colorful and quite possibly naughty.” Kirtley demanded to know what he was reading, at which point Sean declared, “‘girls don’t read comic books.'”

Thus encouraged, Kirtley headed over to the “spindly wire rack” the next time she was at the grocery store, got her mom to purchase some X-Men comics…and fell in love. She was especially taken with Rogue…and here’s where the power fantasy comes in. As Kirtley says:

As I began to read the exploits of Cyclops and the team I realized these were kindred spirits. Was I not like the tortured blue Beast, a genius hiding away from the world, unappreciated and misunderstood. I certainly longed to fry some of my classmates (including Sean Robinson) with laser beams that shot out of my eyes. But most of all I adored Rogue, the Southern belle with the green and yellow uniform and unflattering skunk-striped hair, who embodied all my tweenage anxiety…. Unable to touch others without harming them, Rogue was tragic and beautiful. I, with no desire to touch others, thought myself tragic and wished to be beautiful. When I pulled the X-Men comic off the rack at Safeway I did so out of spite, but as a lonely, awkward girl I found something in comics — excitement and adventure, of course, also hope that like Rogue, I could transcend the past and become something more, despite my flaws and a horrible haircut.

Kirtley saw herself in Rogue — not the self she was, but the self she could be, a self that could “transcend the past.”

Kirtley’s description of anticipating her future self through the image of Rogue finds an echo in the work of psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan. In his 1949 essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience,” Lacan discussed the mirror stage: the moment when the child first recognizes itself in the mirror.

This event [the child seeing itself in the mirror] can take place…from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support human or artificial…he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support, and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. [translation by Alan Seridan]

Just as Kirtley sees Rogue and is joyous, so the child sees its future self and is “jubilant”. The mirror stage, the power fantasy, is tied to happiness.

Lacan says that “the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction.” And he adds that, looking in the mirror, the child “anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power.” In other words, the child looking in the mirror is not seeing and recognizing a real self. Rather, she is misrecognizing a fictional self — an anticipatory self. This false self is integrated, functional, whole — a self that is not yet but will eventually reach a “maturation of…power.” Thus, Lacan’s child is happily seeing in the mirror exactly what Kirtley happily sees when she looks at Rogue in the comic; a false future self.

For Lacan, then, every self is always already a power fantasy — every self is a fictional superself. The lonely, awkward Kirtley is as much a misrecognized image as Rogue. Indeed, Sean Robinson sitting on the ground with his comic and his sneering can himself be seen as a super-mirror-image; an anticipation by Kirtley of Kirtley. The main superpower we want, the superpower we are constantly pretending to have, is self itself; a coherent being. As Lacan says, the Gestalt, or spontaneous formation of the image, unites the I, or ego or self

with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion.

Indeed…the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world.

Lacan is saying that the fictional self, or selves, is (or are) a trap. The images of your self you make turn you into a congealed statue, place you at the mercy of ghosts, turn your world into an automaton which grinds you up. Kirtley is Sean, is the awkward girl, is Rogue, and all these false self-images hold and haunt her.

But, at the same time, Lacan suggests, it is these images which allow, or open, the world. He uses the example of pigeons, which (he claims) can’t attain sexual maturity in isolation. An isolated pigeon will not mature normally — unless you show it its own image in a mirror. Fooled into thinking its self is another, it will grow gonads, and become the fully functional pigeon it was meant to be.

Similarly, the future, dreamed-of human self is not a real self, and is in some ways a dangerous myth…but still, without the power fantasy, where are you? Child-Kirtley would not become Rogue, of course. But without the dream of transcending a false self through a false self, she would have had no false self, which is the only self. Misrecognition is the only recognition; the only thing the child sees is the mirror.

If the child sees only a mirror, then what about Lacan? Surely the images of self he sees are also misrecognitions? Or, to put it another way, if the self is always false, then the self declaring that the self is always false is also a power fantasy. Lacan seems to acknowledge as much in this oddly worded sentence:

This event [the child seeing itself in the mirror] can take place…from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror.

Lacan says he has been made to “reflect” upon the spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Lacan, then, is reflecting on, or looking at the infant just as the infant looks at its own reflection. The mirror stage is itself an image; a vision of the self. Lacan’s integrated self, his superpower, is the image of a self split in two. His misrecognized self, which (joyfully?) startles him, is a misrecognized self.

I think you can see this reflected in Kirtley’s essay too. The “I” in Kirtley’s piece, the older-Kirtley, looks at her younger I misrecognizing a super-I that anticipates, but is not, the older-I. Kirtley looks into the past to see a split self, a divided not-her that provokes jubilation. Similarly, I think, what I get from reflecting on the essay is a look at myself looking at older-Kirtley looking at younger-Kirtley looking at Rogue, those beguiling images within images, the super-power that is the me I can’t touch.

Moving Boxes

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I moved recently, a wholly unpleasant but not unexpected enterprise, as I have moved quite a few times in the past few years.  And as a recurring part of the process I once again found myself explaining the many mangled cardboard boxes marked “COMICS”  to the movers.  “Are those really comics?” asked the burly, hung-over moving guy I found on craigslist.  Yes, in fact, they are.

I’ve been reading comics since I was a girl.  And yes, I am a girl.  A slightly off-kilter one, but a girl nonetheless, and one who has been buying, reading, and collecting comic books and their slightly cooler cousins graphic novels for over twenty years.  The boxes that I dragged from my parent’s suburban home to my college dorm to the scroungy, shared apartment to the slightly better apartment above the gas station and finally to the real, honest-to-goodness house (with a real, honest to goodness mortgage!) contain the texts that accompanied me from braces to bifocals.

The X-Men issue where Wolverine loses the adamantium?  Yup, it’s in one of those boxes.  The Age of Apocalypse series?  It’s in there too, along with Ghost and Preacher and Hellboy and Ghost World and American Splendor and Love and Rockets.  And yet, I am an adult (for the most part).  So why do I keep lugging these boxes from place to place?  I have work to do and people to look after and Top Chef isn’t going to watch itself.  I simply do not have time to open the boxes and read the comics again, but somehow I can’t seem to part with them either.

My books have already been unboxed and placed on the shelves, talismans of hours spent reading “legitimate” literature, but my boxes of comics remain in the basement, lonely and unappreciated.  Some of my friends hauled their boxes of comics out of attics and storage units and donated them to libraries and charities, preserving the comics for future generations and pledging themselves to mature, uncluttered lives.  I applaud and envy these people, and I think that realistically, perhaps it is time to donate my treasure trove.  Yet as I reminisce about what is in those boxes—Rogue and Batgirl and Concrete and Grendel, I get a twisty feeling in my stomach for these friends who have meant so much to me, and I cannot seem to let them go.  So I ask of other comic lovers and kindred spirits, what have you done with your boxes of comics?  How and when do you say goodbye?
 
 


photo by agr

In Praise of Lynda Barry

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I came late to the Lynda Barry love. I wasn’t cool enough to read her in the alternative weeklies in the eighties and nineties, and it wasn’t until I was a graduate student in English and trying to hide a lifetime of reading comics from my colleagues in the ivory tower that a friend introduced me to One Hundred Demons. Soon after, in a fit of rebelliousness, I began to teach Demons in my “Writing the Memoir” class. Ten years later I have become a kind of addict, consuming all of Barry’s works, and there are a lot of them. Barry writes plays, essays, and novels. She created the ultimate chronicle of childhood experience, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, for over twenty-five years. Lately, Barry has been making do-it-yourself writing and art workbooks, and this month, Drawn & Quarterly will begin re-releasing all of her comics in their original format starting with Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything. Get that book. Get all of them.

Why? Well, the writing, to start. Lynda Barry can write, really write. And despite her frequent protestations (and lamentations about spelling) Barry is witty and articulate. Don’t let the wacky penmanship fool you. Who else could come up with the infamous line, “Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke?” Barry also excels at more poignant observations, such as, “We never need certain monsters more than when we are children.” Known as a particularly wordy comic artist, Barry’s expertise with language bears attention with careful reading and subsequent re-readings. Barry’s good friend Matt Groening once commented in a 1991 interview, “Lynda’s stuff is just incredible. It’s about as close to literature as comic strips have ever gotten, and I think she’s really on to something new” (94). Not to quibble with a master, but I think Barry’s oeuvre doesn’t come close to literature, it IS Literature with a capital L—words and works of depth, mastery, and emotion, and my appreciation for her only grows over time.

Barry is certainly known for her text, but then there are the pictures, the somewhat controversial pictures. Can Barry draw? Are the shaky, scruffy characters with their elbowless arms and freckles and blemishes indicative of an inferior artist? Does it matter? (Well, to some I suppose it does matter, so for the record, yes, she can draw…and paint…and sing through her teeth, but I digress. In any case, check out the early Spinal Comics from her college years at Evergreen to see a more representational drawing style.) I would argue that if one is to thoroughly examine Barry’s art across many genres, including painting, drawing, and collage, in addition to the range of styles demonstrated in her various comic art projects, it becomes apparent that the coarse, edgy aesthetic most associated with Barry is a very conscious choice, rather than any artistic weakness. Lynda Barry opts to portray her conception of the world in this particular fashion, and the rough, uneven art reflects her chosen subject matter—our messy, horrifying, and wonderful everyday lives.

Still, apart from any artistic merit, what continues to draw me to Barry’s magical alchemy of words and pictures is that when you read Lynda Barry’s work you feel it, not in a removed, esoteric way, but in a wincing, stomach cramped fashion. When I read Lynda Barry I do not laugh very often, but I do cringe in recognition, and I feel the churning of stomach acid as I witness the kids mocking each other in her strip. Through her work I experience the jerk of adrenaline echoing from my old traumas. Barry is the achy, tender pain of my childhood: skinned knees, bee stings, and too many Pop-rocks. Reading Lynda Barry hurts. I feel the ache and remember I am alive. Again, I urge you. Go get those books. Reading them will hurt and you will be grateful for it.