Tag Archives: Voices From The Archive

Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on Ghost World

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Caro’s been busy with real life things, so hasn’t been about here much. We miss her though, so I thought I’d reprint this comment about Ghost World. I think it’s from about the first thread she ever commented on.

So I got home and read Ghost World through again, looking specifically for three things: disaffection –> emotional maturation/emotional resonance, the gaze of the adult male, and the unreliable Nabokovian narrator. (Google sends me to Comics Comics quoting Clowes referencing the latter in TCJ #233 in relation to David Boring so we do have evidence that he knows the phenomenon.)

A lot of people here have pointed out that dynamic between disaffection and really tumultuous emotional moments as what makes the book resonant for them. My recollection of Enid had been “archetypal disaffected grumpy teen.” I actually didn’t get that much at all this time, and I think it’s the way the conversation here has underlined the distinction between Barthian disaffection – which is really a kind of psychic paralysis that bears only a metaphorical relationship to “real” experience – and pop-cultural ironic distance, which is a pretty common subject position. I admit the latter is there, but it didn’t feel “disaffected” in that light. It’s more a cultivated disconnection –“this thing that matters to them? It so does not matter to me,” – and it felt entirely self-protective rather than truly detached. She didn’t feel like she was “searching for an identity” and coming up “nowhere.” She felt like she was fearing adulthood and coming up adult anyway.

I was looking for unreliability, and suddenly it was everywhere: is she really detached, or is she just pretending to be? Did that thing really even happen or is she just making it up? Her stories were always obviously, well, embellished, but this time, looking specifically for places where her narrative might be unreliable, suddenly they felt even more fictional. The trick seems to be that if it happens in dialogue with Becky, we’re probably supposed to think it happened. If Enid tells it, maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. The images give us clues what to hang onto and what to read as hyperbole … from there, Enid’s propensity to exaggerate and overdramatize seemed to be the thing she outgrows over the course of the story, not her ironic detachment or disaffection. She stopped protecting herself with stories, hanging on to the way when you’re a child you can fabricate imaginary events, escape into your imagination in a way that you can’t do as an adult.

But maybe it’s more unreliable than that. Maybe the scenes with Becky really aren’t the tell: Melorra by all conventions SHOULD be lying (“I’m in a commercial”, OMG Carrie’s face) but both are backed up by my previous logic, so maybe instead that Lynchian grotesque moment when you see the tumor actually is the moment where you’re supposed to say “oh, wow, all that stuff is unreliable.” Maybe there’s a level of unreality that we’re not even touching on.

Either works to some extent, and both are kind of fun, – but is not being sure whether the narrative is true or imagined really what it means to have an “unreliable narrator”? I guess it is, in a simple sense. But it’s more than a puzzle in the best literary fiction that uses the device: it’s a veil that can’t really be lifted to ever determine what’s true and what’s not . The unreliability stays in play and becomes a metaphor, often, for fiction itself, for how narrative and belief get tied together with merely some typographical characters on a page. Here it could become a metaphor for how narrative and belief get tied together with typography and image, but instead it’s really just a metaphor for adolescence itself. Whether or not Enid’s telling the truth about ANYTHING, the issue resolves when she grows up. You still end up with this basically sweet story about letting go of childhood (bracketing Noah’s reading for now), and the only real difference is at the level of close reading and whether Mark thinks I am making things up. (Pfft.) The jury’s still out on whether unreliability becomes a metaphor for the work that comics do in David Boring: it seems intuitively on tonight’s first ever quick read-through of that like it might.

 

Voices From the Archive: Dirk Deppey on Lost Girls As Reactionary Art

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Dirk and various Utilitarians had a long discussion about the manga YKK. By the by, Dirk wrote this brief discussions of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls.

Indeed, Lost Girls itself strikes me as a reactionary work of art. Moore clearly approached its pornographic goals from an almost Calvinist left-wing-Anarchist perspective that viewed the enormity of sex through an inflexible set of rules and dogma that would have made any bondage disciplinarian proud. He further piled all of the sexual imagination’s strawman-style villainies upon the characters who Don’t Share Our Values — the bit about soldiers secretly wanting to fuck each other wasn’t exactly what I’d call a nuanced observation. Lost Girls seemed less like an exploration of Dionysus than a series of checklists ticking off the Various Correct Ways To Think About Sex, intent on bringing order to chaos with a determination that Cotton Mathers could only dream of maintaining. Modern porn and its appeal to our baser instincts — this is the future that Moore fears, and he damn well means to roll it back. You could practically feel his anus clench as he plotted Lost Girls out.

Unfortunately, your average Buttman video is almost certainly a far more accurate vision of the libido — certainly the male libido — than is Lost Girls. Sex isn’t a series of wholesome, socially liberating poses; it’s the monkey part of our brain in its purest essence, with all the good and bad that this entails, which is precisely why we have so many taboos surrounding it. Lost Girls had no sense of surrender to the Animal Inside Us, a necessary component of good erotica/porn, as well as an essential part of the explanation for why men and women alike so often do things in the pursuit of sensuality that strike others as utterly insane.

Lost Girls had all the eroticism of a Presbyterian sermon on the joys of the marriage act. Nevermind the catalog of kinks and positions that Moore assembled; the story’s biggest flaw is that his sense of imagination never left the missionary position. Lost Girls is a retreat into rigid dogma, which makes it reactionary regardless of the fact that said dogma is left-leaning in nature.

(Adding insult to injury, Lost Girls is also a virtual catalog of unquestioned assumptions once you stepped outside of Moore’s need to present sex correctly. I especially loved the way that Dorothy fulfilled every hick-farmgirl stereotype available to Moore at the time. Kinda dumb? Check! Jacked off a horse? Check! Fucked her dad? Check! I’m surprised that she didn’t come right out and state that her mom was also her dad’s cousin before marching off to lynch her some neegruhs while she was at it. I’d call Lost Girls any number of things, but “progressive” is the last term I’d use.)

 

Voices From the Archive: Kurt Busiek on Why Batman Is Not Green Lantern

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Way back in 2009, Tom Crippen asked why Batman wasn’t given the poewr ring instead of Hal Jordan. I suggested that this showed that the whole shared world concept was idiotic. Kurt Busiek took the opportunity to explain the pluses and minuses of DC’s shared world.

[Noah]:My point is just that the whole continuity/shared world aspect of the big two’s output has some real downsides; it’s kind of ridiculous and incestuous and can lead to a lot of idiocy. I think Tom’s question gets at that. The real question, for me, at least, isn’t so much — why doens’t Bruce Wayne get a ring? As, why is it a good idea to have this kind of fan-fiction shared world in the first place?

Because it’s fun to have the characters meet.

It’s fun to have Batman stories, and it’s fun to have Superman stories, but it’s fun to have Justice League stories, too. It’s not really any more complicated than that. It’s entertaining.

The stories are the cake, and the shared-universe stuff is frosting. Things tend to go horribly wrong when people start to think the frosting is more important than the cake, and then get better when they remember that it’s about the cake after all.

The real answer to questions like, “Why doesn’t the Flash clean up Gotham City, too?” is “It would make Batman’s cake lousy. People read BATMAN because they like crimefighter stuff where Batman’s cool, and don’t really want to see Superman or the Flash or Green Lantern mess with that particular cake.” On the other hand, people who like stories where Batman and Superman and Green Lantern work together have the JLA cake, and some people like both kinds of cake.

But if you start to tie it together with logic foremost rather than entertainment, then you need to explain why Superman doesn’t help all the other heroes almost all the time, and why aren’t the crimefighters turned into SF-type heroes to make them more effective, and you end up with everything being JLA cake, and no solo Batman cake left. Or you come to the conclusion that it doesn’t work, so Batman shouldn’t be in the JLA, which maybe preserves the Batman cake, but it messes up the JLA cake.

So in the end, the answer to all of these questions is: Don’t mess with my cake.

Batman cake, when well done, is good. JLA cake, when well done, is good. But if you pay too much attention to the frosting, the cakes all start to taste the same, and that might be logical, but it’s boring.

This is also known as the Go ‘Way Kid, You Bodda Me school of comics continuity. Shared universes are fun as long as they make reading comics more fun, and not fun when they start to tangle things up and mess with the individual series concepts. When that happens, you can either go with it even though it messes things up, in the name of logic and continuity maintenance, or you can sweep it under the rug and look the other way.

Much as I love continuity, I’m a big fan of sweeping it under the rug and looking the other way. If it serves the X-Men series better to let Kitty Pryde age while it serves FF better to have Franklin age a lot slower, then that’s good — that’s cake, and both the FF cake and the X-Men cake should be good on their own terms. You just don’t have the characters talk about how they’re aging at different rates.

And if Batman could solve most of his cases by getting on the JLA communicator and asking Superman or Rip Hunter or someone to use time-travel or super-powers to solve the mystery, then you ignore it, because that’s frosting, and the important thing to do is make it a good Batman cake. He can do all that stuff with Superman or Rip Hunter in the other cakes, where those flavors enhance the story rather than messing it up.

[Noah:] But that’s probably just me…

Not really. But just like readers who don’t let it bother them that Nero Wolfe was 40 years old for 40 years straight, or that Linus was in kindergarten when Sally Brown was an infant, and later they were in the same class, there gets to be a point where you decide whether you want it to be strictly logical, or you want it to be fun.

Used to be, things sold better when they didn’t tie in too much, and nobody asked why the Avengers didn’t show up to help out with Galactus or where Spider-Man was that day. Nowadays, it seems like you can’t do a big story without it sprawling over most of the other books in the line, and that’s selling well…for now. But next year, or five years from now, who knows?

Maybe the individual cakes will be more important. Or maybe it’ll be mostly frosting, and Batman _will_ have a power ring.

Kurt has several other comments on that thread, so be sure to click through. Also, I discovered while putting this post together, Kurt actually collected his comments together on his own blog here (and that’s where I got the nifty image below by Joe Quinones.)
 

Voices from the Archives: Miriam Libicki on Lost Girls

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Cartoonist Miriam Libicki wrote for HU for a while…but this comment was from before she’d come on board. She’s commenting here on my review of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls. I’ve left punctuation as is.

wow. i was reluctant to read another review of yours, cause so often they just make me feel lousy. but you were so spot on on the points of lost girls which disappointed me, some of which i hadn’t realized myself.

i went in expecting to like it, as moore is responsible for one of my most reliable sexual fantasies (invisible man ravishing his way through the girls’ school? hot. & i never thought of it before, but it could be seen as a perfect mixture of a common hetero male fantasy (lots of sex with lots of interchangeable nubile young chix) & a common hetero female fantasy (sex with a faceless/invisible partner, so that it is all about your body & sensations)), but i was vaguely annoyed &… bored through lost girls, a lot more often then i was turned on.

i knew some of what i didn’t like was the interchangeability of all the parts, & the fact that the characters were so secondary to their sex scenes. i didn’t put my finger on the “women’s porn is about relationships” (to totally overgeneralize), but i think it’s true.

i don’t read romance novels, cause the ones i was exposed to were badly written & had gender roles that were distasteful to me. i am occasionally & guiltily a big sucker for chick-flicks of the romantic comedy type, & i’ve really enjoyed some slash fic.

much of slash fic is about relationships. even if it’s gonzo fucking, the fact that you’re supposed to know who the characters are & how they interact in canon, makes it emotional. & my favourite slash author happens to be a sexually frustrated lesbian, whose stories are all about straight guys longing with great longing for their straight best friends.

so i think you’re also right, & i hadn’t considered before, that unrequited longing is a big turn on (for women, or at least women who are me). that’s why i started off really liking alice, when she seemed like an elderly dyke who could only look at young women & verbally seduce herself. when she started having sex with everything, she became a lot more boring.

the lecturing got me down, too, but it wasn’t as frustrating as why i was so often bored by the sex stuff (yes, it was pretty male-y in the way that penetrative sex was the only sex worth having… i actually dig girl-on-girl, but, you know, more of the dykes to watch out for variety). now i feel like i understand it all better.

so after all that tmi, thanks!

 

Voices from the Archive: Alison Bechdel on Fun Home

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Alison Bechdel commented briefly on Tom Crippen’s Fun Home review.

Tom, I think you’re spot on about my dad and his experience with grad school. I don’t think he had a nervous breakdown, but he certainly freaked out when faced with stiffer competition. I definitely did not follow that path to its proper end in Fun Home. At the time it seemed just too complicated, like it would drag the narrative off track. But of course that’s probably an indication that it was worth pursuing.

And thanks for corrective critique, Noah et al. Really. The praise gets a bit wearing. I’ve been rather surprised that no one called FH pretentious before.

The description of me as a one-armed tennis player is eerily apt—I often feel like that. And lemme tell you, it’s fucking exhausting.

 

Voices From the Archive: Robert Boyd on TCJ and the Mainstream

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Robert Boyd an editor of The Comics Journal, wrote in HU comments about why TCJ was so anti-superhero while he was there.

I was at TCJ in the early 90s and I guess I represented the POV that you speak of as well as anyone. I loathed mainstream comics. I made serious efforts to read the ones people said were good, like Animal Man, and found them terrible. For the most part, I still hate mainstream superhero comics. Gary can answer why he thought about them they way he did, but I think a lot of it was political–they were assembly line product produced by uncaring corporations. But my main complaint was that they weren’t interesting to me. (Obviously I could go deeper than this, but my interest level isn’t all that high…)

But here’s one thing that you have to remember–just how freaking dominant superhero comics were–in sales, of course, but also in visibility. Going to a comic convention was painful–and the certainly was nothing like SPX or TCAF back then. Wizard celebrated the worst artistic values imaginable and was he single largest comics publication (it outsold the comics it covered!) there was a general feeling in the office that they had their media, their conventions, their movies, their stores, etc. TCJ would be for “us”–and it felt like it was the only thing for us.

As someone interested in non-superhero comics, I feel like there is an infrastructure that I can tap into to enhance my enjoyment of these books. I can easily read reviews of just about any comic I want to. I can go to the Brooklyn Comix & Graphics Festival., etc. but in the early 90s, TCJ was my life raft. (one that amazingly helped pay my salary.)

I think this context is important.

And here’s a second lengthy comment.

If a reader didn’t like the editorial position of the Journal, I can understand. After all, magazines can’t be all things to all people. But the accusation of forming a clique seems silly. Let’s say the Comics Journal did cover superhero comics in the early 90s in a more inclusive way. Could you then say that it was ignoring newspaper strips. And if it included newspaper strips, couldn’t it be blames for not covering Japanese and European and Latin American comics more closely? And if it covered them, how can you excuse it for not covering other art forms–instead of just catering to the comics clique. In short, a magazine has to have some kind of focus. Non-mainstream comics was our focus.

Instead of clique, consider the words “constituency” or “market segment.” Magazines have an idea of their ideal reader, and this ideal reader evolves over time. Under editors Greg Baisden, Helena Harvilicz and Frank Young, that ideal reader was someone who had little interest in (and even antipathy for) superheroes. It was someone who liked the comics that were bubbling up from below, from the Xerox machines of the nation (which is why I started my column “Minimalism”). It was a reader who was looking for a new history of comics that was a counter to the then prevailing superhero-centric notion of comics history = “Golden Age” to “Silver Age” to “Bronze Age”. We weren’t totally consistent, and the hostility expressed towards Superhero comics was over-the-top, but since hardly anyone was paying attention to the kinds of comics we LOVED, we felt justified in making them our near-exclusive focus. If in doing so, we were shutting out the super-hero fans, so what–99% of the comics industry was devoted to catering to their tastes already. They had loudly and repeatedly proclaimed they didn’t need the Journal–or alternative comics.

Indeed, the basic feeling of the entire American industry at the time–the shops, the conventions, the distributors, the fan magazines, and most of the fans themselves–was a desire to see us (the people who read and produced and wrote about alternative comics) just go away. Larry Reid had a word for the comics stores that supported us–”The Fantagraphics 50.” Our existence as a publisher and the existence of the comics we liked was utterly precarious and dependent on the Direct Markets stores that for the most part loathed anything remotely alternative(there was no bookstore distribution at that time, really).

There are two ways to deal with that kind of environment. One is the MLK integrationist approach, and the other is the Malcolm X separatist approach. For a relatively few years (the time I was there before Spurge joined up), we went the Malcolm X route. It may have been a mistake, but our feeling was that we didn’t want to join a club full of people who hated our guts.

And in our clumsy way, we published a magazine for people who felt utterly alienated from the mainstream-superhero world. I can’t speak for everyone involved in the Journal at the time, but I think it was a necessary move. We had to build up this alternative art history of comics and stake a claim for all the cartoonists working outside the ridiculous conventions of the mainstream. It lead us into a somewhat extreme position (temporarily, I’d argue), but it helped give space for a lot of non-mainstream talents to develop and receive attention.

The original post by Robert Stanley Martin is here. Robert Boyd’s website is here.
 

Voices from the Archive: The Comic That Broke Tucker Stone’s Heart

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Most of us think of Tucker Stone as a comics critic whose super-power is being a cold, unfeeling bastard. But it wasn’t always thus. There was a time when he was weak and worthless and filled with fluids, just like the rest of us. And then…then…well, then came Justice League Detroit. Tucker revealed his secret origin in an old HU comment thread, certain that that was the best way to keep it secret. But now…it can be told!

I still might revisit the Detroit stuff later on–I actually took it pretty hard when Steel was dead. The thing that got me was part due to the comic, but mostly due to that I didn’t understand at the time that they were still publishing Justice League comics. I just assumed, because of the only store I went to only had back issues, that was all that existed. I thought all the stories were already published, that no new Justice League existed beyond that final issue with Vixen on the cover.

I didn’t think that for long–a little bit afterwards, I got the current (at the time) issue of the Justice League–something in the 30?s, I think–it had the old Starman throwing a membership card at the reader. I couldn’t understand why there weren’t any of the characters I remembered. Martian Manhunter was, and the people that I already knew existed like Batman, but it was all too confusing.

After I filled in the gaps, I saw the issue where Despero finds what’s left of Steel and destroys it–that was when it got me. That was the last time I actually “gave a shit” about what happens in a super-hero comic. Since then, I just don’t care if they get raped, turned into monkeys, ret-conned. They got me, but never again.

You can read the original post which inspired Tucker’s confession here.