Fact

Fabian took acting lessons from Leonard Nimoy. This was a few years before Nimoy was cast as Mr. Spock. Fabian was getting ready for a guest spot on Ben Casey.

From I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

Rough Beast Slouching Towards Apocalypse to be Censored

I review Beasts, Lynda Barry's Best American Comics, and a big art book called "Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture" in this week's Chicago Reader. The first line of the review was supposed to be:

"For the latest Best American Comics anthology, guest editor Lynda Barry has selected works that are richly literary, deeply felt, and fucking boring."

Something got lost in the editing process, alas. It's still pretty mean, though, so I guess I can't complain.

On the other hand, I liked Beasts a lot.

Culture 11 No More

Culture 11, for whom I have been doing a lot of writing over the last five months or so, very suddenly went out of business yesterday.

This really makes me sad for a number of reasons. First and most selfishly, the site had quickly become my favorite place to write for. My editor, Peter Suderman, was a joy to work for, and I got to write about a whole crazy range of things, from C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, to gospel music, to bluegrass, to the Indian Cinderella. I was looking forward to publishing an essay on the Friday the 13th series (which should appear somewhere else, I hope) and an essay on the just-released Bob Wills boxset (which will probably never get written) and one on Barack Obama slash fiction (which really, really will probably never get written.)

Second reason this sucks is that the editors at Culture 11 are all out of jobs. They were a smart, thoughtful bunch of people, and I enjoyed working with them and (occasionally) debating them. I wish them all luck.

Finally, I think Culture 11 was just a great site. It was basically a center-right conservative website, but one which was willing to print and engage in conversation with a socialist-pomo-whacko like myself. I really appreciated that. Conservatism in general seems to have been hijacked in this country by a lot of insular hacks (to an even greater extent than is usual in politics.) Having a place dedicated to using conservative ideas to challenge and interact rather than to hunker down and fulminate was, to me, extremely heartening. I was honored to be a part of it.

Sour, Bitter

I'm watching the final round of The Sopranos. The series became more and more sour as it went on, which isn't a bad thing. But I'm surprised the public loves such an unpleasant work. Maybe I'm not as out of step as I thought.

A side point. People keep misusing words, but everyone seems to understand the difference between "sour" and "bitter." I just checked Mac's Oxford American Dictionaries and they back me up (or it backs me up). Sourness does not necessarily involve self-pity; bitterness does. The definitions:

sour -- feeling or expressing resentment, disappointment, or anger

bitter -- angry, hurt, or resentful because of one's bad experiences or a sense of unjust treatment

Offhand, I can't recall seeing someone described as bitter without the implication of self-pity; nor have I seen anyone described as sour when his/her resentment over personal mistreatment was being discussed. "Soured on," yes, but that's different. People understand right off when to use one word and not the other. Which strikes me as remarkable when you think of all the traps people fall into with word use.

That Fucking Shatner

From Star Trek Memories:

"The Devil in the Dark" ... We shot this particular episode, our twenty-sixth, during the first half of March 1967.

Problem: Star Trek did its shooting from May of one year to January of the next. Never in the early spring. "Devil in the Dark" was broadcast on March 9, 1967.

What's remarkable: Shatner says that on the second day of shooting he had to take off because his father died. "My beloved father." But he got the month wrong.

All right, maybe Chris Kreski gets the blame. He's the "with" guy under Shatner's name in the byline. Shatner talked into a microphone, Chris Kreski did a lot of typing and organizing, looked up some dates, and got the shooting month mixed up with the broadcast month. These books about Star Trek people are such murky soup.

But we experience this amazing simulated effect:  A man talks about his father's death, "the tears and the anguish," and he thinks the death happened months after it actually did.

Oh, that fucking Shatner. 

No School for Piper

Mom's got plans, big plans.

Mangafication I

Before the manga roundtable, our Tom Crippen asked why manga adaptations sucked. No helpers appeared with either generosity or bile, just me.

And this is my response, half-answer, half-question. Purely from the stance of what's pleasing, not what's good business, since Japanese cross-marketing is pretty ridiculous. I mean, cow catchers.

First, classic-to-manga. (I'm saving manga-to-movie for another day.)

Like Tezuka's Disnefications of Crime and Punishment and Faust. Both kids' works from the early 50s, they're strange marriages, like the Otto Preminger-Jackie Gleason acid-trip movie Skidoo. Once Groucho Marx shows up as God, you can't stop wondering how such a thing ever happened. There's Faust, cute as a button! There's the devil, a nice doggie!

Worse yet:

Yes, that's him. Thank East Press.

They publish a few books you might know, like Travel and Disappearance Diary. They also do Comic CUE, the flashy, infrequent cousin of the alt-manga anthology Ax everyone's talking about lately.

They been mangafying the classics. Rashomon, War and Peace, freaking Marx, Machiavelli, Hitler. With twice as many books as the last time I looked. They're shameless: the series is entitled, more or less, "Finish reading them with manga!" Since no-one would ever read all those words, certainly not illiterate youths. Cliff's Notes and all that.

I've only read their version of Sakaguchi Ango's essay 堕落論 ("On Decadence") and story "The Idiot." He's a writer I treasure, whip-smart and wry, the first to read Japan's utter failure in the war as a gift. I particularly love his 日本文化私観 ("My View of Japanese Culture"), in which he decimates German architect Bruno Taut for finding "the Essence of Japan" in temples and palaces rather than a piss-stained toilet in the back of a nightclub. (His point's far more nuanced, but you get the idea.)

So his outrage and sense of the absurd might fit in manga. I paid my money and I took my chance.

Ouch. I was going to post about manga's tilt to melodrama, and how Manga-Ango running around screaming would fit better in issue #53 of the Sub-Mariner rather than a version of a classic. About how just drawing a writer this mercurial as a cartoon character, fit for a model kit, betrays his technique. Then I started rereading the source works and wondered if I should write a column about this.

At least the manga has modern-day Shibuya crossing in flames.

So as I see it, the question isn't whether manga/comics/macrame can or can't do nuance. They all can when the artist isn't "Variety Art Works," who takes all blame for the East Press books. The question is, in an ideal world, what do you get from mangafication? More than just quick & easy consumption? Are some things (stats books, LotR, weddings) better-suited to manga than others (wakes, House of Leaves, Georges Bataille)? What in your life should be mangafied, and why?

nightmare on elm street

I've been watching a lot of slasher movies recently. I really like the Friday the 13th series (I have an essay on the box set coming out soon, hopefully.) This one however...eh. It was okay. I know it's supposed to be one of the more critically acclaimed slasher films...and the effects are certainly good...but the eighties synth music really irritated me, and the relatively complicated script really showed up the mediocre acting. Also, the characters are overall too likable; there isn't the tension between wanting them dead and worrying about them that I enjoyed in Friday the 13th. In other words, I think the things that tend to make Nightmare more critically accepted — more complex plotting, less open sadism — are the things that made me like it less.

Not that I disliked it. It was fine. It's just that Freddy is no Jason.

Annals of the Human Mind

Just listened to the dvd commentary for Walk Hard. Those guys actually thought they made a funny movie.

(Why was I listening? I was doing my qi gong and pilates, and the radio is boring.)

Harvey Pekar

I like the stuff he did with Crumb, especially "Walking and Talking," but everything else I've seen  has left me cold. That includes Our Cancer Year and a trade collection of greatest hits. Do people really enjoy his stuff, or is it more that he's respected as a pioneer?

Elephant and Piggie

I have a review of Mo Willems children's books up on Culture 11 in which I compare his use of motion to that of today's comic strips. Here's the obligatory sample paragraph:

Though Willems simple character outlines and neutral backgrounds are obviously derived from animation, the grainy quality of his chalky lines and their inherent feeling of dashed-off imperfection gives the drawings a tactile oomph. That sense of contained movement on a static surface, of personality within the line, is one of the great joys of comic-strip cartooning, and Willems’ mastery of it is, I think, part of the reason his books have been so popular with both kids and parents. For instance, in the Elephant & Piggie book, Today I Will Fly!, Piggie is determined to get herself airborne. Willems illustrates her hapless hopping with energetic thick dotted lines, which trace her tergiversations from right to left across the layout, then back from left to right on the next page — and ultimately, through a short hop and uuuuuuup in a flying leap onto poor Gerald’s much-colonized head. Those dashes are, literally, a physical delight: my son likes nothing more than to trace every single one of them with his finger. If I forget and turn the page before he gets a chance to do so, I’ve got something very like a pigeon tantrum on my hands.

Run from Vampire Batman!

So I was in a comics store today for the first time in a while. LIttle hole in the wall place in Chicago's Logan Square. We went in because...well, it's a cold day, we're trying to find something to do with the little one, and he loves super-heroes -- and his parents like comics -- seems like a good move, right?

Well, not exactly. My wife found some things she liked (Kabuki, the Yoshitaka Amano illustrated Wolverine-Elektra), and we did get a solidly OK comic for Siah -- one of the new super-friends titles, where Bat Mite dresses all the heroes in Bat costumes. It's cute, if not especially cleverly done. But what the hey, he likes it, it's not dreadful, what more can you ask.

Unfortunately, the boy also saw a copy of some horror vampire-batman atrocity. For one reason and another, he managed to look at it without us cutting him off. He seemed fine at the time, but, as he said later, "sometimes it's not scary in the daytime, but then it gets to be night and you're scared." And so he was. I just finished calming him down enough to get him to sleep, but I strongly suspect I'll be in there again at some point in the middle of the night. Lucky me.

Which brings me to super-hero decadence. The back and forth around super-hero decadence in the blogosphere recently seems to be over whether super-heroes should act heroically (Bill Willingham said yes, Steven Grant said maybe not so much, etc.) The argument really seems mostly beside the point to me. The real question is, who is the audience here? Are these characters for kids? Or are they for adults? Is it about funny adventures, goofy plots, and colorful characters? Or is it about sex and horror?

The reason decadent super-heroes can seem so, so wrong isn't because sex and horror are wrong; it's because super-heroes are really meant for kids. There aren't stories where Thomas the Tank Engine turns into a vampire. There aren't stories where the Snoopy is gang-raped. There aren't stories where the Cat in the Hat starts ripping people's arms off. Because, you know, that stuff is for kids, and, aesthetic atrocity aside, you don't want to fuck up the brand.

Of course, Batman *was* kind of scary initially, before the comics code and the TV show made him more for younger audiences. And different super-hero stories have been initially aimed at different age levels (Marvel obviously a little older). But the point about super-hero decadence -- the reason that it is decadent -- isn't the moral ambiguity or that there's sex or violence -- all of which occur in genres that aren't especially dilapidated. The new James Bond films, for example; sex, violence, moral ambiguity -- but that's fine, because sex, violence, and moral ambiguity fit perfectly well in those stories.

No, what makes super-hero decadence decadent is essentially marketing; their branding is completely incoherent. Super-hero comic are either for kids, or they're built around a snickering defacement of something that is for kids. It's thirteen-year olds drawing dicks on Dagwood. It's not boring and icky because it's morally complex or evil; it's boring and icky because it's dumb and obvious. Of course, when the 13 year olds do it, it's also kind of funny -- but it really loses something when you up the production values and pretend to take it seriously.

Anyway, the result of all of this is that, though I don't blame the comic-store owner (my job to watch out for my kid) and while I certainly don't think any permanent damage was done, I'm going to be even more leery now of taking him into a comics store. Which means I'll be even less likely to spend money in a comics store. Which can't really be what comics companies want, you wouldn't think.

Update: Valerie D'orazio linked to me and then connected super-hero decadence to some nut who dressed up as the Joker and stabbed a bunch of kids.

I just want to say...I don't think that art affects people quite that straightforwardly. I mean, if you've got a guy nutty enough to stab kids, you've got a guy nutty enough to stab kids; I don't think it's Heath Ledger's fault that he went out and stabbed kids.

I didn't even like Dark Knight that much, and I thought it's moral stance was overall dumb. But...well, Charles Manson went off on a song about playground equipment....

There's Hype About "Revolution No. 9" ?

I had no idea, but listen to this:

To novice Beatles fans, I warn you not to believe the hype about “Revolution 9.” I’ve listened to it many times over the years, waiting for the light in my head to switch on so I could unlock its mysteries. All I’ve ever gotten out of it is the vague feeling that immediately after listening to it, something is going to rise out from under my bed and butcher me in my sleep.

That's, uh, JBev at JamsBio Magazine. The magazine did a big list of 185 Beatles songs, starting with the ones the magazine disapproves of and working up toward its very favorite ("A Day in the Life").  Good idea, it'll give people something to link to.

I like "Revolution No. 9," though it's not the first song I'd listen to. I go for tunes, especially bouncy tunes. Anyway, I pretty much played the Beatles to death when I was a kid. Back then received opinion held that "Revolution No. 9" was gibberish. But it isn't. It's a sound collage, of all things, and it holds together.

Decades later I check in again and find that "Revolution No. 9" has become a sacred cow. When did that happen? I'm guessing 1995.   

Depression

Back in the '80s, when I was young, I would listen to WCBS fm. It's the big Oldies station in New York. I no longer live in New York, but every now and then I listen to the station again. Still the same music, which I guess is the point of an Oldies station:  Buddy Holly, "Hey, Paula," Herman's Hermits, Motown, "The Logical Song," Mr. Mister, Madonna, just about every piece of crap (or otherwise) that moved a lot of units sometime during the past 50 years. Except the ads used to be mainly for cars and household goods and now a lot of them are for cemeteries and funeral homes. That's the depressing part. 

UPDATE:  An ad for Honda, another for Coors, even Insider.com and DirecTV. Hopeful signs.

Stubbing Our Collective Toes in the Name of Hope

Ta-Nehisi Coates and his commenters are whining that nobody likes the inaugural poem enough and he argues that if you don't read a lot of poetry you should just shut up and sit down. I left a comment which seemed sufficiently mean-spirited to repost here:

To my ongoing sorrow, I have read a lot of contemporary poetry over the years. Elizabth Alexander isn't horrible by those standards...which means, yeah, she's pretty bad. I mean:

"I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see."

First line, big cliche; second line lax waffling vague imagery bordering on cliche; third line -- what, did she bash her nose in the dark? This is lazy, uninteresting crap; vague inspirational jeremiad. Blech.

I think it's an extremely good sign that people are willing to come out and say that this stuff is dreck. One of contemporary poetry's most serious problems is the fact that people feel so alienated from it that they don't even bother to dislike it. A little (or a lot) more healthy disdain would go a long way towards making poetry more viable, both aesthetically and (dare I say it) commercially.

Marie-Eve to Have Child

My buddy Marie-Eve, the lovely star of the northern skies, told me today that she is expecting. She and the proud father, the gregarious and engaging Joris, believe the child may be delivered on July 4. 

UPDATE:  Marie-Eve and Joris were quite tickled about telling me the July 4 due date. In response I suggested naming the child Obama, though I would never actually expect anyone to name their kid after a person in the news. It's just that I get a kick, at least every now and then, about being an American among the Quebecois. It gives me a touch of the exotic and distinctive, which my personality needs.

A generalization that I came up with: English Canadians tend to dislike Americans more and the United States less; French Canadians tend to dislike the United States more and Americans less. The idea is that the Quebecois tend to be more left wing than English Canadians but not to get worked up about Americans' alleged arrogance, insularity and stupidity.

The generalization is based on the usual, meaning lint. It was useful in sorting out my impressions of my first year or so up here. But whether it's true is beyond me. At any rate it has felt a good deal less true for quite a while. During the stretch from 9-11 to the Iraq invasion, I stopped running into the old cattiness and griping. Maybe Bush served as our lightning rod, in which case I have to thank him. 

Blogging Like It's 1999

So we at the Hooded Utilitarian are, at least in theory, going to start making use of high-tech label functionality. We'll label each themed roundtable, so you can click on the label and read all the posts. We'll also label with our names, so you can read posts by individual authors. Unless, you know, we forget to do it, which could happen.

I'll also post the blog roundtable links on the side over there so you can click on them and read them for all posterity. (I have retro-labelled, and added our earlier roundtables on the side so you can read the blog forums of the past...today!)

And, hey, I even remembered to label this post. So far so good....

All Right, I'm Using Photobucket

How do you get this thing bigger? Photobucket's small, medium, and 15-inch settings all produce the same results here.

Best New Headline at a Liberal Blog

"About That CBO Report"

Manga: What is the Point, deluxe edition

One of the fun things about Bill's post is that it puts chip-on-the-shoulder manga defenders like me in our place. I mean...why do you need to defend manga anyway? From what? Certainly, manga in Japan is facing a lot of challenges right now, but those challenges just can't be said to include moderate skepticism — or, for that matter, outright hatred — on the part of some American consumers.

So, having admitted my defensiveness is kind of ridiculous, I'll proceed with it anyway. One thing Tom said in comments kind of bothered me:

On the pacing issue ... to me the problem isn't so much fast pace, since I like speed in comics, just the idea that on any page of manga all you'll get is picture-word balloon-sound effect, with the word balloon constrained to hold not much at all. For example, I like the caption-picture juxtapositions Moore and Gaiman used to do in the 80s. I gather that in manga such tricks are impossible and so are any other word-picture gimmicks/innovations a clever writer or artist might come up with. Yikes.

I don't think that's right. Yes, manga is designed for faster reading, and uses fewer words than American comics. But I think that manga-ka use a lot of thoughtful word-picture juxtapositions. In comparison, I think a lot of Moore's tricks (using quotations to comment on different action sequences, juxtaposing image with image to fade from one scene to the other, etc.) are pretty clunky (though I often like the clunkiness; Moore's heavy hand is its own kind of pulp sublime.)

Anyway, I thought I'd look at a couple pages from one of my favorite series, Let Dai by Sooyeon Won. It's from Korea, so it reads left to right. I chose these pages more or less at random. Here's the first:





Here the characters are looking at a series of pictures of a friend. So the panels here become the photographs. The upper-left image is very detailed, suggesting the sharpness of the memory. The rest of the images are distributed around the page, like photos spread out. One of the pictures on the right is actually cut off by the page edge. So you go from a very vivid memory to a sense of diffusion or loss; of a memory cut off and lost. The text at the same time is questioning the memory, "Inside this picture, there's something more than...sadness and pity...guilt...and sympathy" and then on the other side of the page, "If you had pushed through the crisis of that moment just like the sprout...maybe you'd be here with us right now, Eunhyung." The text, in other words, is encouraging you, not to fast forward through these images, but to look at each picture of her face to try to understand her, and why she is gone -- an understanding which can, of course, only be partial (again emphasized by the fact that the pictures are partial and in one case actually cropped off.)


Here's the following page:



This is less daring, obviously, but there's still a fair bit going on. I like the way, on the second page, the conversation shifts to being more philosophical, about love and uncertainty, and so the image turns to just designs and filler; a sort of celestial, indeterminate test pattern, I also like the move to hyperdeformation in the middle of the second page. "The more I look at him, the more amazing he seems" thinks Jahee (in the baseball cap) and this sort of goofily childlike idea visually infantilizes him.

I mean, obviously everyone isn't going to like this. You might not like the melodrama, or, like Miriam, the art may not do it for you. But I think it's pretty clear, even in just these two pages, that the creator is attentive to how words and images go together, and that she uses various techniques and resources to combine them and tell her story. Certainly, she's got more going on than this stuff, where the pictures and story both go happily on their way as if completely unaware of each other:



I'm just sayin', is all.

Going back to Let Dai for a moment, Miriam asked in her post:

Can you take a really good shojo or shonen manga, and read it several times, and see different shadings or interpretations each time? If not, then I guess I'm not the target audience for shojo manga, much as I love romance and heartbreak and interpersonal intrigue and all that stuff.

I haven't read Let Dai over, not because I don't think it could take it, but because I'm not sure I could -- reading it the first time kind of reduced me to a weeping wreck, and I'm not ready to go there again. But...yeah, the manga series I've loved have totally held up on rereading. For what that's worth.

Update: Hey, look, something on the Internet that pisses me off! Katherine Farmer responds to Tom's post by throwing herself at her high horse, missing, and bashing herself in the head.

What's more, it irritates me intensely when people stand up and say "I am ignorant; educate me!" when, frankly, the resources are out there for them to educate themselves if they cared to put the effort in. I considered making a comment to Crippen's post, but decided against it, because hey! I don't actually give a damn if he likes manga or not, and it's not my job either to do his homework for him or to defend the honour of manga. Manga needs no defence, from me or from anyone else.

Okay. But then why do you go on and on snarkily defending it? Why brag about how you didn't leave a comment because you don't care and then write a gigundus post about how much you care?

It's a freakin' conversation, not an exercise in moral climbing. Take a lude. And stop making me embarrassed that I like this stuff, would you?

Antony and the Johnsons

I have a review of their new album The Crying Light in the latest Chicago Reader. Here's the first paragraph:

According to stereotype, people of idiosyncratic genders and sexualities congregate in cities. Their cabarets and fabulous performance events happen indoors and at night. For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, you probably wouldn’t expect to stumble upon Marlene Dietrich in hip waders serenading salmon in the midst of a rural waterway. Queer artists—and often, prejudicially, queer people in general—tend to be associated not with naturalness and authenticity but with artifice and camp.

Manga: What IS the Point? Part 4

I'm batting cleanup. & I think Tom, Miriam, & Noah are perfect just as they are. So no suggestions for what they just have to read (outside every manga column I've ever written for TCJ).

Just three bunts, written listening to Animetal Lady:

The Point of Manga Is...

...to cocoon. Not just in shelves & shelves of 40, 50, 100 volume series-- in character goods, posters, costumes, movies, soundtracks. Pencil boards, cel phones, cow catchers. You can use the new Kramers Ergot as a pup tent, but all of Dragonball could build the Great Wall.

The rest of it could fill the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

On land, people cocooned in manga cafes, even living them. Hikikomori, humorously presaged in Otaku no Video, who fear the sun. It's all rather urban, where life's a series of little boxes. Like the model-builder in Otomo's Domu, the best comic on Brutalist architecture.

Also like the great wall of Mao's Little Red Books in La Chinoise. But for fantasists, not ideologues. Otaku don't conceal & carry.

...to Globalize the Youngsters (aka "The Daihatsu and the Olive Tree").

If the 21st Century City is Asian, at least 20th Century Pop was American.

Every other country just imitates our pop culture, or at least they did. (I'm sure someone will comment me down. Knock yourself out, but give specific examples of a non-American pop scene that has spread worldwide like syphillis. What've you got, Godard? Scandinavian metal? Okay, Brits have a point if the Beatles leapt whole from Chuck Berry's skull.)

The few robust pop pockets-- Bollywood-- usually traveled only with the diaspora. Anime & manga, though, had precious few immigrants to spread them. So foreigners stepped up.

They did well: you can find manga-style pop everywhere from Kuala Lumpur to Krakow.

I don't know what the next non-American All-World pop culture phenom will be. My money's not on Eurovision. I do know that there will be one. If it's like manga, following it will take a big commitment-- it's two full-time jobs keeping up with translations and nobody's hiring. It will have its own language and rules that make it seem exclusive. It will be modern but not Western, just like Japan.

And it will be some kind of sexy.

All of which explain part of Western manga/anime fandom. I always thought the point was to get all the non-prom kids to dress in notional wisps of spandex and pack them in steamy hotels at the height of summer. Good for them!

The only problem is, they'll teach their kids to like Japan better than the US of A, so when Taro Aso shows up and peels off his skin to reveal the Reaper, we're doomed. Unless we got a new president yesterday and our foreign policy's changed.

Finally: the point of manga is best explained by Asian Steve.

He's subtle Yin to blackasthenight's husky Yang. He has a radio show on a college station somewhere in the sticks. He plays K-Pop, though I doubt he's from Incheon.

I caught it in the car, not long after a stint working on farm in Kurume with a trio of Korean college kids who belted songs at the pears all day. They spoke of Boa, so I called the station.

"This is Asian Steve."
"Hi, Asian Steve.  Do you take requests?"
"YES!  YES!  What do you want to hear?"
"Boa?"
"Which album?"
"I don't know!"

Then Asian Steve and I rocked to Boa as I drove into the sun. You weren't invited, but we preferred it that way. Soon I arrived at the gent's club, where I toasted in High Latin as we all tried to forget we're surrounded by tobacco fields planted with crystal-meth users.

Conclusion: manga breeds Asian Steves. Great explainers, evangelists. But their chief should have the Christian name of Ron. "Manga Ron." Get it?

漫画論! I'm hilarious.

Anyway, that's part of the point, right? Finding your own private ecosystem and then explaining the biodiversity within is a joy. Of course, that perspective dates me. Many readers younger than me don't see the divisions, I think. And a handful of cartoonists, like Hilary Florido and Laura Park, effortlessly mix influences. They both lift from manga stuff that suits them, ditch the rest, and draw with a sense of Western cartoon history in their lines.

Sweet. Global culture, here we come.

Chris Ware, Bifurcated

This image apparently got left out of the Comics in the Closet essay I wrote for TCJ 295. So I'm putting it here, in case anyone was missing it....

Manga: What is the Point volume 3

I saw the Akira anime first (in 2002, at a boyfriend’s house, so I wasn’t aware of its context in Japanese or American geek culture), and loved the art so much I started buying the big Dark Horse volumes.

They became, alongside Cerebus, the set of phonebooks that changed my life forever. I don't know if I ever knew for sure what was going on, but I loved the character designs -- I mean, is there anything so simply, beautifully creepy as aged decrepit children? Also, instead of the boys looking like girls, the female lead looks like a boy! I loved the panel layouts, which seem a lot closer to the western grid model than the shonen/shojo model, in my limited experience with the latter. I loved how iconic the big panels were (see below if you doubt the sincerity of my flattery). and I especially freaking love the way he drew architecture. I'm not a person who usually appreciates backgrounds or buildings, or straight lines, but his architecture made me feel things (I later read Domu, and saw how he learned to make anonymous modernist architecture so alive). Otomo is the artist who made me invest in a t-square, for good or ill.


Sometimes I Feel Like a Nuclear Bomb, 2005, oil on canvases

So, that’s manga. But all other manga I've tried has been exceedingly… you know, all right, I guess. I have tried: Astro Boy, Lone Wolf and Cub, Good-Bye, Steady Beat (an oel shojo manga), Beck, and just this month, Nana. None of them have really transported me, as in, made me identify with the characters and feel immersed in the settings. I’d probably pick up further installments in all of those series/oeuvres if they were lying around, but I'm certainly not running out to buy them.

In shojo and shonen (Beck is shonen, right?) manga, I have never been able to get past the character design conventions. It’s not really the big eyes that bother me, as much as the barely-there noses, the acute-angle chins, and the fact that characters’ (this is especially jarring on adolescent characters) heads are reeeeally small in proportion to their bodies. I know it’s just a cultural thing, and I'm fine with western-comics-style stylization which is no less stylized, and the failing is in me, etc. but I can’t get over it. Nana additionally, has the fashion-illustration-inspired style of everybody at least ten heads tall, and less than a head wide (well, it would be so if their heads weren’t inhumanly small and narrow) and I haven’t been able to suspend my disbelief (or, perhaps, suspend my body-image issues) past that over the course of two volumes.

I also think I have issues around the idea that Zoey brought up in comments to this post, about manga being meant to breeze through on the train. That ethos seems to be connected to the visual shorthand that puts me off, where people are always exploding with sadness or happiness or anger or lust, to where every explosion looks the same (and I haven’t learned to tell whether a certain violent outburst actually happened or not… this was worst in the oel series, perhaps oddly).

I start to feel cheated out of subtext, or subtlety, or characterization, even, sometimes (everyone gets embarrassed the same way, etc.). If everyone is blowing up all the time, what does blowing up even mean? Can you take a really good shojo or shonen manga, and read it several times, and see different shadings or interpretations each time? If not, then I guess I'm not the target audience for shojo manga, much as I love romance and heartbreak and interpersonal intrigue and all that stuff.

So if manga is boundless and limitless, readers, and you’re finding stuff for Tom already, this is what I’d like: a non-bleak, interpersonal drama with strong, complex characters (especially female characters, bonus if the POV character is female) who don’t explode every other page… and drawing like Katsuhiro Otomo.

I was gonna say more, about the implicit rivalry between manga and everything the English speaking world could ever produce, and my relationship to that as an English-speaking creator, but… I'm on a deadline with my humble English-speaking creation, and I really can’t slack off more, tonight.

Question for Kurt Busiek or Mark Evanier

If Batman is the best because he makes himself the best, and if the Green Lantern Corps' special rings are fueled by will power, then how come everyone gets to be a Green Lantern except for Bruce Wayne? He ought to be the greatest Green Lantern of them all.

It bothers me that nobody else has thought of this.

And on a More Positive Note

Hey, we've got a president again.

So Long, Loser

Yes, the headline of this post is directed at everyone's favorite Republican. But before I am a citizen, I am a copy editor. As our own Kaiser Wilhelm shuffles off to let us deal with the fruits of his truculence, ignorance, laziness, ineptitude and rampant need for ego compensation, the world press has been echoing a phrase from the well-respected center-right news publication The Economist. The problem is that, as far as I can tell, the phrase makes no sense. Here the phrase is:

Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America's reputation since World War II.

Ok, we know about the current, ongoing collapse in American reputation. But what collapse in American reputation is associated with World War II? Does The Economist mean the time that the country was caught in a men's room outside Boulogne with that French kid and some chocolate bars? Or, to be more charitable, maybe The Economist has in mind some collapse in American repute that happened before WWII. But that makes no sense either. We had our problems -- the Civil War, race -- but nothing that made the rest of the world think so badly of us. We were the big young country that was up and coming and kept on being up and coming.

As far as I can tell, the only serious pre-Bush blow to America's standing was the one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate. The morbid can debate whether that mess was worse than our current mess. But we can all agree it came after World War II.

 So, Economist, what the fuck are you talking about?  

Manga: What Is the Point? -- Do Over

Same thoughts as here, but differently presented. First time around I tried being sprightly and provocative, like a British op-ed columnist fussing about how actually the French can't cook or TV game shows teach you about life or some other bogus, dumbass lifestyle issue. This time I'll be straightforward.

So here we go:

I don't get manga. I look at a page and want to look away. Reason: the stylization of figures appears to me to be highly uniform, and it's not a particular stylization I like. Solid black hair, googly eyes, the kids who look like adults, the adults who look like kids, etc. The look turns me off. Further, its kindergarten feel makes it hard for me to believe worthwhile stories could be told using this stylization, or at least told to their advantage.

Because my aversion to manga is so sharp and immediate, I have never given the comics a chance. If you ask me about pistachio ice cream, all I can say is I don't like the taste. But manga ain't just an ice cream flavor (title of my forthcoming Young Adult novel). Manga's look is what I react to, but there's more to manga than its look.

Which is the missing piece from this post's old version. I should have asked straight out: What am I missing?

Noah has already started to answer the unasked question. Point one: the googly eyes, etc., belong to just one style of manga. The girls' stuff, apparently. There are lots more out there. Other looks.

One observation I'll stand by: manga emphasizes high-speed, all-out forward movement of the reader's eye. US superhero comics have also started to do so, but manga does it more and seems to lack any other approach to word-picture combination. Pleasant as the effect can be, having just one item on the menu seems like a drag. Noah says US superhero stuff is wordy -- well, sometimes, because every flaw on earth can be found there except overerudition. But at least a few different verbal-visual gears are available. In manga it seems like there's just the one.

But hey, maybe not. The fellows will tell me.

All right, I guess that's it. Xavier, thanks for the links and info. You too, Anonymous -- you're ok. Richard, thanks for the joke. Bill, thanks very much for laughing at my jokes, because somebody's got to. Blackasthenight, thanks just for being you.

Manga:What is the Point volume 2

Tom posted yesterday to say that he really doesn't like manga at all.

All that solid-black hair, those pie-shaped googly eyes and triangle mouths (with rounded corners!), the stunted pseudo-children, the skimpy few words stranded in fat balloons. And never anything in view but more black hair, googly eyes, and a lonely sprinkling of words against white space. Page after page, book after book, truckload after truckload. Manga makes me feel claustrophobic.

He adds:

manga, all manga, carries to an extreme the formal trend followed by US mainstream comics over the past few decades, which is to streamline word-and-picture arrangements so that the eye is always pinging forward with as little drag as possible, even if a concomitant of drag might be better dialogue or more detailed drawing.

That second quote is interesting, because it's got the formal influence exactly reversed. That is, manga isn't carrying a U.S. trend anywhere; the influence goes the other way. To the extent that there has been cross-fertilization between manga and American comics over the last decade, most of it's gone Japan to America, rather than the other way around, I think.

That aside...Tom's not really making, or attempting to make, an objective argument here, so refuting it is in some sense kind of pointless. If you hate manga art, you hate manga art; I can't make you like something you don't.

Still, there are a couple of ways to go with this argument I guess. In the first place, the formal elements you object to seem to be derived mostly form looking at shojo -- comics for girls. As Tom somewhat reluctantly noted towards the end of his post, there's actually a lot of manga out there that looks rather different.


Gon, by Masashi Tanaka


Lady Snowblood, Kazuo Koike and Kazuo Kamimura


Lone Wolf and Cub, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima


Parasyte, Hitoshi Iwaaki





I'm sure Bill could come up with more and better examples, but I think you get the general point; dismissing all manga is like dismissing all American comics...or, more, like dismissing all American movies. It's a huge medium; if you felt like looking, you could probably find something that you liked.

As for shojo -- that's actually a genre I like a lot. To answer your objections in turn:

1. Stylization — If you don't like stylization, you don't like stylization, I guess. If most of the enjoyment you get from art is based on realism and anatomical fidelity, then, yeah, shojo isn't necessarily the place to be looking. If, on the other hand, you really appreciate patterning, layout, and surface detail, shojo can be amazing.


Amaterasu, by Suzue Miuchi



Forest of Gray City, by Jung-Hyun Uhm




I just hardly see anything, ever, in mainstream comics, and precious little in alternative comics, that gets me the way drawings like the above do.

2. Too few words — American comics are extremely wordy. Manga in general (and shojo in particular) are much less so. You seem to see this as a failure on the part of manga. For me it's the reverse. Manga is extremely good at visual storytelling; in comparison, American comics writing seems extremely tedious, tending to state the obvious over and over and over again. This afflicts superhero comics..but it's also the case for things like Maus, which goes on and on and on and on and on, almost fetishizing the fact that the pictures are so unnecessary to the story.

When manga (or shojo specifically) doesn't work, it can be well nigh incomprehensible; I wouldn't deny that. On the other hand, when it does work, it fuses word and images in a way that's really sublime. Nana and Let Dai, two of my favorite shojo series, have incredibly nuanced and thoughtful characterization and relationships, much of it conveyed through visual expressions and body posture, just as you would see in, say, a movie or on stage. In comparison, something like Fun Home seems to me incredibly thumb fingered, in every sense -- constantly harping on the obvious, much less fluid storytelling, art with a lot less emotional heft, etc.

I'm kind of not the best person to be defending manga, maybe...I haven't read a ton, and I'm certainly nowhere near being an expert. But in my limited explorations in the genre, I've found a number of series that are funny, touching, thoughtful, cool as shit, beautiful — all the things I look for in art, basically. So that's the point of manga to me.

Or you can read Tucker's take; first review at the top.

Update: Tom does over his post. His rejiggering of his discussion of manga pacing made me thing more about his point, which in turn made me not quite get what he's talking about. Tom says manga is all very fast forward movement. I don't get that at all. On the contrary, people like Ai Yazawa or Sooyeon Won or even Clamp seem much, much more in control of pacing than their Western peers. In Nana especially, the story can bounce along quickly...or it can be slower and more contemplative...or it can freeze in a moment of emotional intensity. It's true the text is less heavy than in American comics, but there are other ways to slow down the story -- close-ups, expression, levels of detail, and so forth.

I guess it's possible that what's happening for Tom is that he's so alienated by the art that he's not able to pick up on the pacing cues? Anyway, for me, super-hero comics seem to be much more frantically paced...Grant Morrison's cyberpunky stuff especially often seems just jam-packed with stuff without almost any effort to do visual pacing. Most of the manga stuff I see is very aware and capable of using space for pacing....

Manga: What Is the Point?

UPDATE:  Fuck it, I screwed up. I'm redoing the post here. Meanwhile, Noah's response to the original version is here. 

Now the old version:

We at HU are having our second round of "theme" posts. First time we talked about our comics discoveries of 2008. This time we're talking about manga: what is it, why is it, why do I hate it so badly I can't look at more than a page? "Hate" is a strong term, but it's true that my brain and eye shut down as soon as I encounter a manga specimen. All that solid-black hair, those pie-shaped googly eyes and triangle mouths (with rounded corners!), the stunted pseudo-children, the skimpy few words stranded in fat balloons. And never anything in view but more black hair, googly eyes, and a lonely sprinkling of words against white space. Page after page, book after book, truckload after truckload. Manga makes me feel claustrophobic.

Mind you, I haven't read any. I'm starting off the round robin because perfect ignorance and unreasoning dislike provide a striking backdrop for the informed and authoritative. My colleagues will soon be along to provide some intelligent content. In the meantime, I'll suggest the following: manga, all manga, carries to an extreme the formal trend followed by US mainstream comics over the past few decades, which is to streamline word-and-picture arrangements so that the eye is always pinging forward with as little drag as possible, even if a concomitant of drag might be better dialogue or more detailed drawing. [ Preceding sentence is not clear. To Noah it sounded like I was saying manga was imitating new-style US superhero comics. I just meant the two show the same tendency and manga takes it further. ]

Another observation: All the above, right down to my closing suggestion, places me in the same class as some fellow turning on the radio in 1968 and deciding that Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, the Beatles, the Young Rascals, the Four Tops, and the Velvet Underground are all pretty much the same because they have that damn beat and the electrified instruments. So, having set myself up, I now await my education at the hands of those who know better.

UPDATE:  Wait a second, is this manga? Maybe I should rewrite. Nah ... double down. Time for the big guns.

For example, over on some message board a guy called  blackasthenight breaks off from frotting his pimples and declares:

ok now honestly, who has ever seen anyone whoes head, eyes, mouth, ect. is shaped like that? to me this just appears as a lack of willingness to studdy anatomy.

and whats with this gay stuff. half the time i see this crap its two dudes about to get it on. i mean wtf japan? also why do 80% of the dudes look like girls? and all the people with tails and stuff? and extra ears???

Yeah, Japan -- wtf? 

Dang

Nobody says that, except prospectors in old cartoons and characters in new cartoons written by women. I have in mind the work of Alison Bechdel, Linda Barry and a young woman doing a webcomic that I saw recently but whose title I forget. (Not a bad webcomic either, but my memory isn't sharp these days.)

All right, possibly men do use "dang" in their cartoons, but I haven't caught them at it, just three women. Three's a trend and I'm calling this one.

Come to think of it, it's interesting how people nowadays treat expletives. My vague sense is that the following observation applies to men and women, though Bechdel provides the only example I can think of. Here it is: Dykes to Watch Out For shows people waving dildos about and hollering in bed, but the hollering is all #?!@*!!. Which is one of those decisions that are hard to explain but make sense in practice. I haven't seen much in the way of dildos, yet I don't mind sex toys in Bechdel's strip. On the other hand, I curse all the time but suspect I would be annoyed and distracted if "fuck," "shit," etc. kept popping up in cartoon dialogue -- though not movie or tv dialogue. So, you know, go fucking figure.

I Know That Guy; Or, Oh Dear

Bill was talking about comedy, and Matthew J. Brady referred in comments to a Daily Show segment about "the asshole who equated community organizers with crack dealers."

Here the segment is. More to the point, I knew the fellow in question. Years ago I was a copy editor at the newspaper where he worked as a reporter. I tried bragging about this connection when the segment aired, but nobody much cared. Still, I knew him. 

The fellow was ... well, how can one put it? I can't say he meant well. He didn't; he was the sort of winger who lives to insult liberals. But I can say he didn't quite know what he was doing. He didn't process that insulting people inspires dislike, not affection. He seemed to operate according to this syllogism: "If you act as if someone is stupid, that means he is stupid; if one person is stupid, that means the other is intelligent; if a person is intelligent, he is admired; if a person is admired, he is liked; so if you act as if someone is stupid, he will like you." Yes, the fellow was a treat and we all looked forward to working with him.

And all the while he thought he was scoring a hit. He knew he was being obnoxious, I guess, but he didn't know what being obnoxious means. Or, at least, he didn't know the basic facts about the topic that everyone else knows.

Now there he is on The Daily Show, trotting out his party piece about Osama bin-Laden being a community organizer (hey, like Francis Marion! or Captain America!) and having no idea that John Oliver and The Daily Show will not be charmed by his little jeu d'esprit. Oh dear, the timid, confiding half-smile with which he reveals that those poverty activists were mean to him! Oh dear, the sadness of life.

Who Is More of a Man: Superhero or Samurai?

I have an article up on comixology about the age old debate. Here's the first paragraph:

Nerdy schlub schlubs his way through life, kicked by men, mocked by women, and generally whumped by the blunt end of life. Then, one day he is irradiated, blown up, lobotomized, and pickled. Also, his father dies. Suddenly he's big and strong and improbably muscled. He flies (or, bounces, or swings) his way through life, kicking men and pushing from him all the women who can't possibly understand his agonized and lonely quest. And yet, beneath that muscled exterior, does not the pale schlub still tragically and silently schlub?

I also talk about Freud-gnomes. So good times.

Can't Sit Down

So I took the various recommendations for stand-up comedians (thanks to all who commented), but I'm left (mostly) feeling like Noah with Achewood. Mostly obvious jokes delivered with the assumption that being on stage is a virtue. Demetri Martin, Zach Galifainakis, pretty flat I thought.

Even Patton Oswalt, who's likable enough, seems to base his routine on statements of obvious facts? Like his 80s metal bit-- metal has always gleefully parodied itself. His descriptions aren't as funny as the music videos.

I liked Jim Gaffigan, though. His routine doesn't seem like an audition for a sitcom. And it's intricately designed for the stage, which I appreciate.

More generally-- he also seemed like the only comedian not just taking shots at people. He layers it so he's often the butt, or you can't tell who's the butt. But Patton Oswalt just seems like this guy who makes fun of people different than him (getting back to what Miriam said) while standing above it all.

I could be wrong, as I've only watched three or four clips for each. But I can say it's a trend in American humor. The Daily Show, say, does a lot of media commentary, but on slow news days they humiliate civilians on the street. I think it's rather American-- I recall an essay in the English film journal Sight & Sound about a rash of American indie docs that ridicule their subjects. (American Movie, Michael Moore, anything set in the rural South, the camera loves rubes and freaks.)

So the comedian/filmmaker's in control and unassailable. Feh. I'd rather watch them suffer as the fee for my attention.

So, Downtown.

Japanese comedy duo, did manzai standup until '91, now mostly variety shows. Brilliantly inventive & cruel variety shows.

I like their "No Laughing" year-end specials. Like 2007's "24 Hour Absolutely No Laughing Hospital," with punishment games if someone laughs. Plenty of ridicule and humiliation, but all aimed at the show's hosts, who dress as nurses and get whipped whenever they laugh.

Scores of comedians gang up on them to make them laugh. Elaborate gags, huge production numbers, random appearances by Black Jack. What's not to like?

Comics connection: early in the show, UMEZU Kazuo, author of The Drifting Classroom and Cat-Eyed Boy, shows up as part of the hospital's Special Rescue Team. The training drill requires him to sprint to a dummy & revive it. (He's in his 70s.)

While running, he falls into a concealed pit. Hilarity ensues.


Then, a bunch of black-clad nurses show up and beat the hell out of the show's four stars who laughed at this poor guy. That's comedy!

You Will Believe a Man Can Crawl

A Bush jackass over at the Justice Department wrote a snotty e-mail about Mary Frances Berry, who is black and a longtime pillar of the civil rights movement. The snotty e-mail came to light because of a government inquiry into the jackass's suspiciously political hiring practices. So, as a side-effect of all the other trouble he's in, the jackass had to write Ms. Berry a letter explaining what he meant when he said that he liked his coffee "Mary Frances Berry style -- black and bitter."

And, courtesy of Talking Points Memo, here the letter is.

UPDATE:  Berry gets a laugh out of the business, this item also via TPM.

2nd UPDATE:  No, the suspicious hiring was done by the boss of the jackass, not the jackass proper.

Hewlett Packard Scanner Bleg

I just plugged the thing in, my first scanner. After you do a scan, where do you find the scan that you've done? When I look at the menu item for Open Project (I think that's the term), it's all grayed out. Yet I know I've done at least one scan. I lined up a picture on the flatbed, the picture showed up on my screen, and I clicked Accept. The Help files says that's what you do when a scan is ready to go. I even did a Saveas and gave the scan a name. But now ... gone and nowhere for me to look.

No instructions in the box, and the Help files I downloaded have no items about finding saved files.

Fuck. I know the answer is something simple, but this still pisses me off.

Gene Roddenberry's Favorite TV Show to Watch

Barney Miller. He used to be a cop and found the show true to life.

I was happy to hear he liked it. Barney Miller has always been one of my favorites. That and Married ... With Children are two superior tv shows that earned followings but never got much media fuss.

From Inside Trek: My Secret Life with Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry by Susan Sackett

Useful Definitions

Years ago, on my first job, I had to write an obit of the man who invented Twinkies. Since I worked for a reference publication, I included a definition of Twinkies for future generations: "a tan, cream-filled cake roughly the shape of a cylinder." That caused people around the office to laugh at me.

Now the political publication The Hill defines rickrolling, though to slightly less absurd effect:  

37 seconds into the video, though, viewers are RickRoll'd, which is when a copy of the music "Never Gonna Give You Up" by 80s musician Rick Astley surprisingly appears instead of an image the viewer was expecting

The viewers in question are watching Speaker Pelosi's try at rickrolling, a very tame sample. The finest specimen I've seen is here.

A Pulp Haiku

Since Noah's a poet, so am I. I wrote this years ago during a quiet moment on the Bond Buyer copy desk.

A Pulp Haiku

"Get your goddamned hands

where they can do me some good,"

she said gustily.

Twentieth Century Boy

Since we've been talking about comedy and humor, and since I've been sneering at Achewood, I thought it only fair to show what happens when I try to be funny in a creative context. This was published a while back at Poor Mojo's, but I think I forgot to link to it. Anyway, I've reprinted it here, in all its scatalogical, metrically confused, and pointlessly erudite glory.

If there's a lot of enthusiasm for this, I may reprint my filthy parodies of CCR songs. So, you know, comment at your peril.

***************************

Twentieth Century Boy

I took the road less traveled and ran into a ditch.
Robert Frost was there already so I fucked that bitch,
on and on, ‘cause my genius is for lovin’;
He whinnied, “Are you Yeats or is this the second coming?”
Santorum spread like wisdom
Wisdom spread like kitsch,
I pounded him like Ezra till his modern jism twitched.
A canto is a canto but my manwhich is for real;
I manipulate my Mandarin so hard your cheeks’ll peel,
and my daring manifesto bears the Manischewitz seal.
No ideas but in things,
no things but in your butt,
abstractions are distractions from the traction of my nuts,
and the friction of my diction gets me deeper in the cut —
“Is this your lost generation?”
“Nah, my shit is just backed up.”
You’ve got to keep it regular; you need a complex structure,
and my foot-long has the footnotes that’ll help your bowels rupture.
My allusions are protrusions that pry you ever wider;
I’m going to show you fear in a handful of fiber.
You’re the casement; I’m the cannon;
you’re the system; I’m the thinker;
you know it cause you feel aesthetic movements in your sphincter.
The pains increase, you sue for peace, call in the League of Nations;
You’re whinin’ cause you say I owe your hymen reparations.
You got a pact? It’s wack.
I’m not half through being fractious;
just look the other way and I’ll slip up like parapraxis,
And there are you,
the six millionth Jew.
impaled upon my axis.
W.H. was an odd one, Wallace was an even
I’m going to show you thirteen ways of looking at my semen.
My consciousness is streamin’,
My epiphanies are peein’,
Just a taste of my waste and your life’ll lose its meanin’.
You think April’s cruel? Then watch this mother breedin’!
“The horror! The horror!” My Kurtz steams up your Congo.
Your inferior interior is throbbing like a bongo.
My craft begins to quicken.
My Lord Jim’s in your riggin’.
More dusky booty than Gauguin — I’m an atavistic brigand.
I stole the plums out of your icebox —
my thumbs up in that nice box —
my wheelbarrow’s in your chicken as Depends fall on the sidewalk.
My free verse is plain and simple like a lumpen rake or hoe.
This No Man’s Land is fallow and I’m waiting like Godot,
for your skanky bum to put out with the existential flow.
You’re farting like you’re Sartre; there’s no exit to the loo;
the atmosphere gets plaguey like I’m sittin’ by Camus.
You think that I’m dissuaded? Hell, filth is my milieu —
a clean crack is the one crack I do not go gentle through:
Let’s all rage, rage, against the wiping up of poo.
The fragrant asses of the masses fire up my five-year plan;
I’m building up my industry in your Uzbekistan;
I’m developin’ like Oedipus all randy in his pram:
I put the sex back into complex and the oral in exam.
Finnegan’s steak is the text and I’m ready to cram:
this is a portrait of the artist as a battering ram!

on the comparative silliness of sf fandom & sports fandom

A story about the completely embarrassing nerdiness of sports fans.

who wants your life, anyhow?

Noah’s recent post on Achewood (especially the comments) and Tom’s recent post on Judd Apatow writing a William Shatner sketch for Saturday Night Live, are making me think about a certain kind of humour.

People on the Achewood thread are talking about standup-style humour, at least the kind we hate, and what it is, and why we hate it. A couple of years ago, my husband got satellite radio, and had a phase of listening to the standup channel on long drives. Until that experience, I had thought I liked standup. But during those long drives, I got to thinking, “Man! Standup comedy is just a societal tool for enforcing conformity, isn’t it?”

Outside of comedy geniuses, standup seems to be all “Men are like this. Women are like this!” “Black people are like this. White people are like this!” “Straight men are like this. Straight men better not be like this if they know what’s good for them!”

Which brings us to Apatow having Shatner shit on his fans: both those guys make their living primarily off of people who are nerds, losers, you know, people who escape through fantasy, who at least have the image of themselves as people who fail at romance, or are socially awkward or immature. People who need to “get a life,” because the one they have is not the one they’re supposed to want.

So is it a self-deprecating kind of joke, and we're supposed to think Shatner and Apatow are also losers who need to get a life (except not because being a geek is fun)? Are they trying to appeal to the cool kids who are not Shatner (or embryonic Apatow) fans, to convince them that Shatner and Apatow are really better than those trekkie losers? Or is it just making sure as many people as possible feel vaguely insecure that they aren't measuring up to standup comedy stereotypes, and fall in line and/or, you know, buy something?

Who Wrote the "Get a Life' Sketch?

Judd Apatow, actually, with Bob Odenkerk. Saturday Night Live had the two of them as writers back in 1986, when Shatner did a guest-host appearance.

The sketch is famous because Shatner yells at a bunch of Trekkies for being such losers: "Move out of your parents' basement!" and "You, you must be almost 30... have you ever kissed a girl?" As we know, Apatow would do a lot more about losers later on.

BONUS:  Wikipedia has an entry for the Get a Life by Nadine Gordimer but not the one by William Shatner. I would never, ever have predicted that.

Source: Get a Life by William Shatner, with Chris Kreski

*Cough* — Manga — *Cough*

Valerie D'Orazio whines that nobody buys female super-hero comics.

The next step for women in mainstream comics is to translate our hopes and dreams and talents and superheroines we love into comic book sales. Past the idealism, past the blog posts, past everything -- we need to sell these books. Nobody fucks with JK Rowling, and there's a good reason for that.

Of course, D'Orazio is talking about stuff like Wonder Woman and Hellcat (how many of you bought the Hellcat mini-series? she asks plaintively.)

Here's a tip or two for those wondering about super-hero comics:

1. Supporting titles as an act of socio-political charity may get you an unread copy or two of Hellcat, but it's not going to prevent the series from getting cancelled.
2. There are a number of extremely successful female super-hero comics. They just aren't put out by Marvel and DC.

Number 2 is probably going to leave the fangirls scratching their heads. Where are these successful super-hero titles with woman they ask? Why haven't I seen them?

Well, the titles I'm thinking of are things like Buffy, and Sailor Moon, and Cardcaptor Sakura. Stuff that doesn't look like super-hero comics; that comes out of a manga genre or crosses over with horror/goth. These titles have all the hallmarks of super-herodom — someone with extraordinary powers runs around saving people. But they forswear the kind of tights/double-identity/clubhouse continuity crap that is there to appeal to 25-35 year old guys.

In other words — you want super-hero comics for women? Then don't go begging to the fans to support you. Instead, write fucking super-hero comics for women. Lots of women. Not just the very small number of women who care about the super-hero-genre-as-sold-through-the-direct-market. Because you know what? There aren't enough of those women to support a title. There's never going to be enough of those women to support a title. It's just not going to happen. Especially in a fucking recession.

And, let me add, it's not clear why it should happen. There's lots and lots of product out there. Why do women need to run around trying to appreciate a genre that has never, and will never put them center stage as consumers? The fun bits of super-heroes for women can be picked out and put in other contexts — and, indeed, they have been. So why deal with the rest?

Now if you want to blame mainstream comics for promoting an insular, unimaginative approach to their product and marketing — hey, I hear you. But blaming women (or anybody) for not buying this crap? Color me unimpressed.

Update: Edited to correct spelling of D'Orazio's name. Sorry about that Valerie!

Update the second: Well, to no one's surprise, I didn't actually read all the back links before I posted...but now I have (sort of.) Josh Tyler started things off with a kind men are from mars, women are from venus argument about why women don't like super-heroes; then Heidi has a round-up of various folks taking him to task because women do too like super-heroes and he's sexist.

I think Josh is right that women and men have different genre interests. I think his accusers are probably right that the way he parses those genre distinctions (women like romance; men like things that blow up) is simplistic enough to verge on lad mag territory (which is to say, it's kind of sexist.)

Josh's argument is in the context of movies; he's arguing there aren't many super-hero movies and there never will be, and that's fine. But, of course, and again. there are heaps of female super-hero movies. Lara Croft, Buffy, Underworld (or whatever the hell that's called), the Terminator, Alien -- just lots of tough women onscreen performing super stunts in the interest of saving people. Oh, right...and Kill Bill and The Matrix has that too...and Charlie's Angels, and...well, the list goes on. A lot of these are aimed at guys, obviously, but it's hard to imagine they don't have a bigger female audience percentage-wise than DC and Marvel do in general. Again, it's not that women don't like super-heroes; it's that, within the limits of corporate fan fic, the aging stable of female characters owned by the big two just isn't all that appealing to a broad audience. I mean, could you take Wonder Woman, give her a gun and a vampire boyfriend and...I don't know, a horse, a cool car, anything except that fucking stupid invisible plane and the weird-ass lasso -- and have her suddenly be popular? Maybe. But once you've done that, why call her Wonder Woman?