In a much talked-about essay, Peggy Orenstein has speculated that Facebook denies to young people “an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness”; it makes it harder for them “to establish distance from their former selves, to clear space for introspection and transformation.” Maybe it also eases — or hides from us — our displacements, and creates, etc., etc., etc.,
Looking at this, you’d think it was Cuba that had the embargo on the US, not the other way around. But what a deft way of drawing Obama: the moment is so winning. We see again Oliphant’s gift for fantasy based on characters from the news. (Previous Oliphant installment here.)
UPDATE: Matthew, my leg man in Oliphanting, points me to the latest: 1) Cheney the torturer and 2) the epicene cowboys of Texas secession. And, yeah, those are two freaky cartoons.
The Cheney cartoon takes a big, simple point (Cheney’s a nasty guy who defends torture), lobs in some clutter to put you off balance (the long legend on Cheney’s apron, the Prussian gentleman standing by in his helmet), then sneaks in for the kill with a final touch that is tiny, unobtrusive, complicated and inexplicable. Who is that little guy on a bicycle? Why is he tearing off for the distance? Why does the bike have training wheels and why do the training wheels look so much like legs and feet? Why does the man’s head look like three knuckles? Why is he so blase about torture and, finally, why are we hearing from him? Traditionally, an editorial cartoon will show someone in the news saying something that the cartoonist has put in the person’s mouth, and then there may be some little figure piping up with the cartoonist’s personal wry commentary on the situation. Here we have a third party, a man with a three-knuckled head and a special bike, and he’s popping up to say what he thinks too. Damn, it’s weird, and yet it takes up so little space. It’s a dab of condensed insanity.
Matthew says maybe the little guy is Obama: thus the training wheels and, I guess, the three-knuckled head (big ears). My guess, if it’s anyone we know, is Bush. Bush was always working out and Oliphant drew him with big ears. Oh, the hell with it.
All right, the epicene cowboys of secession. Here’s how I figure Oliphant’s logic chain: Texas wants its federal money like anyone else, so therefore this secession talk is bullshit; the secession talk takes place at tea party rallies or in front of crowds who might turn up at tea party rallies; the British drink tea and are very courtly about asking each other if they want one lump or two; therefore, to express the posturing hollowness of the secession talk, one portrays the Texans as mincing little Percys with tea cups in their hands.
One gets the horrible feeling that Oliphant actually thought his way toward this conclusion. The deranged vision didn’t come to him in a flash; he put on his thinking cap and worked with lunatic clarity to reach his goal.
UPDATE 2: Now Sam and the sharks, again because Matthew brought it up. Clear point, a bit simple but intelligible, and nothing actively weird in the drawing to throw you off.
Matthew mentions how well O draws the sharks, and it’s true. He also draws a lot of them. This brings up a big point about Oliphant. He is so much better at drawing than most of his colleagues that his facility gets him into visual trouble. In the old days, when he was at the top of his game, he created images with a density of detail and complexity of composition that allowed them to take over the reader’s eye. Now he doesn’t manage his detail, he just lets it roll out from his pen, and composition be damned.
The problem isn’t too bad in this latest. But Uncle Sam does get a bit lost among all those sharks; the overall situation takes a few extra seconds to register because Sam, who is its center, has to be tracked down by the reader’s eye. The Cheney cartoon suffers a lot more; even without the little mystery man on the bicycle, the picture is a mess of one thing after another.
Nobody can stand the guy. And it’s not like he’s mean and slashing; he’s just a drag. You can imagine him in conversation with his pompous beard wagging from side to side and the long uhhhhhh‘s between sentences as he dredges up his points.
When I say “nobody,” I mean this: 20 years ago a coworker read Denby’s review of Gorillas in the Mist and said, “He’s always so overblown,” and she hadn’t even seen the movie — it was just his voice, the way he wrote. Eight years ago, trying to define “douchebag” for another coworker, I said, “Like David Denby” and he said, “Oh God, yeah.” Three days ago my mother said, “That David Denby is such a jerk.” And whenever I look at The New Yorker and see his name I think, “Too bad,” whereas when I see Anthony Lane’s byline I think, “Well, there might be some good jokes.” Of course there might not, but the sight of Lane’s name doesn’t in itself make me turn the page.
Via Andrew Sullivan, Reason Online reviews Denby’s new book, Snark. Apparently Denby is trying to shame “douchebag” out of the national discourse. I would too, if I were him. The review says Denby downgrades Tom Wolfe — disturbing if true — and that he doesn’t have much use for Maureen Dowd. The second point is also disturbing, because it means Denby can’t be entirely bad. Of course, Reason may disagree: “the reader comes close to simply telling him to lighten up, rather than explaining that Dowd is a satirist, not a sexist political scientist.” Hah, no. Maureen Dowd is a twit.
The big problem with snark isn’t that it’s mean or shallow, it’s that the people who want to be snarky are inferior. The word sprang up when trying to be snotty and clever became a national passtime. Everyone swarmed in and only a very few had any sort of gift for the assignment.
The guy still baffles me. Here we have him commenting on the queen and Mrs. Obama. It’s a fun strip, but it’s based on the idea that the queen herself was affronted by Mrs. O’s friendly hand on the shoulder. Whereas, in real life, the queen had no complaint and actually touched Mrs. O first; Buckingham Palace even issued a statement to let everyone know things were okay.
Yet the Oliphant cartoon is quite neat, not a commentary on reality but a fun sitcom spinoff from it.
UPDATE: In Comments, Matthew points me to a couple of other recent weirdies by the man, and I’ll throw in another here. Coincidentally, I just saw a post by the liberal blogger Hilzoy that gets at the Oliphant experience. Her topic was battered wives, so I’m hijacking her words to make a much more lighthearted point:
There are things that are comprehensible parts of the world, even if they’re rare, like having your car stolen; and then there are things that are unexpected in a completely different sense, like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes: things that make you wonder whether you’re completely crazy.
Reading Oliphant, this experience is actually quite salutary. Frustrating as it is to see his brain twitch, you are left in a slightly different world than you inhabited before looking at the cartoon. Of course, the effect is overwhelmed when he does something borderline racist or anti-semitic, such as showing Israel doing the goosestep. (Yet the way he draws the shark/Star of David is brilliant.)
It took Batman his whole life to become Batman. That’s the point of his story: to do what he does, you have to spend your whole life getting ready. But Kathy Kane became Batwoman because she felt like it. She used to be a circus performer and that was pretty much all the prep she needed. Maybe she had some refresher trampoline sessions and bouts of microscope study (“criminology”). But it wasn’t a lifetime’s training. The same with the new Kathy Kane-Batwoman. From what I saw, she chose the career on a lark and maybe took some kickboxing lessons.
Noah’s been conducting the FCR Roundtable by himself and doing a good job of it. My contribution is an extract taken from “Face It, Tiger,” a column I did for TCJ last year. It’s about Spider-Man’s Brand-New Day relaunch, including the cold-blooded decision that Mary Jane could no longer be part of the series as Mary Jane, wife and long-legged gal; now she has to be Jackpot, a superhero who has no claim on Peter but can swing around the rooftops with him.
I remember being a kid and seeing my first Spider-Man issues, and the presence of Mary Jane and J. Jonah Jameson made substantial, roughly equal contributions to my belief that these were the right stories to be reading. I was under 10 and we’re talking, mainly, about early ’70s reprints of the Lee-Romita, Lee-Ditko stuff from the 1960s, emphasis on Romita. That’s when JJJ and Mary Jane laid down their groove. They were civilians, but they had oomph, like Spider-Man did in fight scenes. Instead of being heroic, one was funny and the other was sexy, but they were human exclamation points, the way superheroes are. Which is to say that the Romita-Lee Mary Jane stood in relation to period romance/teen-humor heroines in the same way a Marvel fight scene stood in relation to Green Lantern fiddling with yellow trees or the Flash running about in tight little circles. She was designed for just as much impact as audience age permitted. Getting fancy, I’d say she celebrated the idea of impact, the fact that nowadays our fun-time media really had the freedom to work us over.
Mary Jane talked the way Stan Lee wrote captions. She was a perfect expression of Stan-ism: pizzazz as a way of life. If you’re into hero comics, her first appearance counts as a touchstone. I mean the panel everybody has seen, the one with Peter’s jaw hanging open and Mary Jane standing in the doorway. She says, “You just hit the jackpot.” After saying, “Face it, tiger,” because it was a one-two punch. The moment was just boy-meets-girl, no special effects, no powers. As far as I know, this is the only civilian touchstone in the entire superhero mythos. The point of Clark Kent is that he gets to change into Superman. The point of Peter Parker, at the moment shown in this panel, is that he gets to look at Mary Jane. She’s the show. J. Jonah Jameson is the only other civilian to pull that off, in his different way — the man does a hell of a turn. Whereas Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane and Happy Hogan and Alfred and Pepper Potts are more like curios and familiar faces, tchotchkes bunched around the star. Maybe Superman is unimaginable without his guys, but that’s the only reason they matter. Look at Perry White. He may be indispensable, but he’s useless.
Stan Lee had been building up to Mary Jane for years, through all those teen-humor books he liked writing so much. He never did a lot of Simon-and-Kirby-style romance, the kind with moon-faced women pondering the hazards between them and married life. Stan wanted covers with a knockout girl blazing forth her power as a knockout. Men walked into each other, fish jumped into her boat, the football player wanted to tackle her. A dork bystander might be on hand as counterpoint, to radiate cluelessness. He’s looking at the screen, his buddy is looking at the girl usher. The dork: “Wotta production!” The buddy: “Ya can say that again!” The dork bystander didn’t know fun when he saw it, and that was the joke. You could just dive in and have a good time, grab a girl and do what comes naturally. But the poor fool wouldn’t; he would never catch on that life can be fun. (If you want to hear Stan speaking with disdain, catch him on DC. It’s the same principle at work.)
Bill made up a cartoon sketched on a series of tea leaves. What I have is a set of pages that were not published as part of the Absolute Sandman series. Neil Gaiman, hitting the crest of his early comics career, did not contact an aging Jack Kirby and, in a fit of sentimentality and cross-talent brand promotion, persuade him to illustrate the gala fiftieth issue of Sandman, which was not titled “Uneven Hills” and did not concern Morpheus fallen among the Amazons and embarrassed by his long-ago affair with Hippolyta, Wonder Woman’s mother, with implications for Lyta Hall’s eventual vendetta against him.