Gaijin Love

I've mentioned before Matt Thorn's great article about why characters in Japanese manga are not, in fact, meant to represent, or even to suggest, Westerners, despite those round eyes.

Japan, however, is not and never has been a European-dominated society. The Japanese are not Other within their own borders, and therefore drawn (or painted or sculpted) representations of, by and for Japanese do not, as a rule, include stereotyped racial markers. A circle with two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth is, by default, Japanese.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Japanese readers should have no trouble accepting the stylized characters in manga, with their small jaws, all but nonexistent noses, and famously enormous eyes as “Japanese.” Unless the characters are clearly identified as foreign, Japanese readers see them as Japanese, and it would never occur to most readers that they might be otherwise, regardless of whether non-Japanese observers think the characters look Japanese or not.

... the notion that the Japanese harbor an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the White West seems to me based on the largely unconscious assumption that non-Western peoples envy the West, and more specifically on the American fantasy that everyone in the world naturally wants to be American. Of course, the scholars and intellectuals who note such tendencies in Japan do not applaud it; on the contrary, they cluck their tongues and wring their hands and wish loudly that the Japanese would shun the temptations of the West and remain true to and proud of their heritage. But the eagerness with which they seek out evidence of a desire to be “white,” and the stubbornness with which they ignore evidence to the contrary, suggests to me that their apprehension of social reality is heavily filtered through an unintended ethnocentrism.

Matt points out, among other things, that the characters in the comic are stylized; they don't look all that much like people of any ethnicity. Definitely read the whole thing if you haven't already. I found it very convincing.

And yet....well, look at this:





That's the cover of Japanese Vogue from January, purchased on ebay by my fashion-magazine-obsessed-significant other. Probably the first thing you'll notice in the picture above is that the woman is clutching her crotch. After that, though, you might observe that she's not Japanese. Furthermore:













All the covers from Japanese Vogue I found seem to feature Westerners. Most of the interior pictures do too.

(And for those wondering, no, all foreign issues of Vogue don't feature Western models. Indian Vogue is mostly devoted to Bollywood, for example.)



Obviously, none of this refutes Matt's argument about manga. And Japan (as my significant other pointed out) is something of a mecca for magazines; there are far more per capita than there are in the U.S., and the vast majority of them feature Japanese models. Maybe Vogue just uses Western models because it has overseas connections, and it helps it stand out on the shelves? Still, it's hard not to conclude that there's some suggestion here that the Japanese are taking beauty standards and beauty cues from Western models. It seems, anyway, a little more thoroughgoing than the Western fetishization of Asian women, which definitely exists, but probably wouldn't be indulged quite so exclusively in an entire mainstream publication.

I don't know. Anybody have other thoughts? Like maybe Bill, or somebody else who, unlike me, actually knows something about Japan?

Update: Pallas in comments points me to this fascinating link by W. David Marx about Japanese fashion magazines. Here's part of what he says:

High-end fashion magazines, on the other hand, mostly feature clothing from European houses and luxury brands, pegging the center of legitimacy in the West. In order to ensure that the presentation harks back to the larger Eurocentric fashion world, magazines like Spur or Ginza — almost without exception — use non-Japanese and mostly Caucasian models. This prevents Japanese female readers from self-association, but that’s the point. Like the old Groucho Marx quote, "I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member," Japanese high-fashion fans do not want to see the clothes they desire on real-life Japanese people. There may be a tad bit of self-effacement in this sentiment, but it generally questions more elite Japanese consumers’ feelings about their own locale. The fantasy, therefore, requires a staff of non-Japanese models.

ViVi and Glamorous‘ overwhelming use of half-Japanese and three-quarters-Japanese models like Fujii Rina, Hasegawa Jun, and Iwahori Seri begs a more pointed question: what does race mean when it’s not a pure reflection of either here nor there? These magazines are not targeting some massive half-Japanese readership, nor do these models look foreign enough to recenter the magazine atmosphere outside of Japan.

Herein lies lingering issues of perceived racial inferiority. I’ve been told numerous times in Japan that "clothes look better on foreigners," by which they mean "white or black people." This is not objectively true (nor subjectively true, in my view), but editors have long used half-Japanese models on this principle to bridge the gap between Japanese self-association and cool "foreign" fashion. A half-Japanese model looks "foreign" enough to enhance the image of the clothing, but close enough to the reader to send a message of commonality. Things are changing, however. Male fashion magazine Popeye previously used only half-Japanese models but moved to more foreigners once readers voiced less need for racial similarity in considering the clothing.

So that would be at least a qualified vote for some level of "lingering issues of racial inferiority." Though, again, that doesn't mean that such lingering issues are reflected in manga iconography, necessarily.

Update 2: I just wanted to point out as well: Matt says that Japan "never has been a European dominated society." That's not true, if Europe includes America. Post-war Japan was absolutely American dominated. It was occupied; it's government was restructured; cultural changes were handed down by fiat; etc. etc. Admittedly, that all took a relatively brief amount of time compared to the experience of a long-time colonial possession like, say, India. Still, it was pretty important, and had long-term consequences, both structural and, I would assume, psychological. To say that Japan was never under Western domination is not a supportable statement, I don't think.

Update: And I've got a follow up post here

The Kathy Kane Syndrome: FCR 6

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.

Batgirl was a librarian who just decided she'd be a superhero. Catwoman at least was a jewel thief and trained to sneak in and out of buildings, but then Frank Miller made her a dominatrix. Wikipedia says Catwoman's latest version has some gymnastics in her background and a sensei who teaches her martial arts; make him a hell of a sensei and maybe  you've got something. But it took a while for her to reach this point. In Batman Returns a secretary gets to become Catwoman just because she goes crazy. She's able to jump from roof to roof, and this is right away, as a given of her new status.

Robins always get trained pretty hard. It isn't enough that they have a circus background; they also get put thru the mill by Batman. The point of being Robin is that you're trained this way, trained by the one fellow whose life is crimefighting. But then there's a girl Robin and she doesn't get trained so hard. I mean Carrie Kelly in The Dark Knight Returns. How much prep does she get before her first battle? Stephanie Brown, per Wikipedia, is another just-decides-to character. 

This pattern -- boys, hard training vs. girls, no training -- continues from decade to decade in the franchise, from comics to movies. Girls are always stuck into the Batman series as a gimmick. The first Kathy Kane was a beard, the new one is a hot-chick lesbian, but either way you get the idea.

I guess what surprises me is how the same rule keeps getting broken year after year. Setting aside all that Batman training is a pretty big gimme, bigger than deciding this person and that person also happened to survive Krypton. It's more like deciding that superness had nothing to do with Krypton, that Supergirl could fly because she was perky. (To me, the equivalent to the lone-survivor tampering would be to decide that the Waynes' murder wasn't just a random act of criminality, that it involved some larger machination. Probably the Batman people have done this at some point or other.)

Eternal Appetite

This review originally ran in the Comics Journal.

Little Sammy Sneeze
Winsor McCay
Sunday Press

If you were a Freudian, you'd have to wonder when Winsor McCay was weaned. Indeed, his work is so obsessively and predictably orally fixated that you almost wonder if maybe he wasn't. In each episode, his longest running strip, The Dream of the Rarebit Fiend featured a nightmare brought about by culinary overindulgence. And Little Sammy Sneeze stars a taciturn little boy with multi-colored neckerchiefs whose mouth yawns open to the size of his entire head before it emits an "ah-choo!" powerful enough to knock down small buildings.

Psychologically, an oral fixation indicates arrested development — an inability to take on adult responsibilities and characteristics. Whatever McCay's own psychological profile, he certainly used the idea of oral obsessions to justify a world in which characters don't, in fact, learn or change or, indeed, even exist in anything but the most notional way. In none of the strips in Peter Maresca's new collection of all the Sunday Little Sammy Sneeze strips does the title character ever make an articulate noise. Instead, each strip follows the same pattern. In the first Sammy says "um," with his mouth closed. In the second he says "Eee Aaa," with his mouth slightly open. In the third he says, "Aah Aww," with his mouth open wide. In the fourth he says "Kah" with his mouth gaping like some sort of bloated underwater fish. In the fifth he says "Chow," and the force of his sneeze causes disaster and mayhem — either he hopelessly scatters the chits in a poker game, or startles the lions in a circus act, or sends Thanksgiving dinner flying into his grandfather's beard. And in the sixth and last panel, he wears a blank expression as he is removed, often with a kick in the pants, from the scene of destruction.

The adults who surround Sammy are barely more sentient than he is. It's true that they talk — but so repetitively that their words seem little more meaningful than Sammy's grunts. In one paradigmatic sequence, two Italian immigrants speak in a nearly impenetrable patois, reiterating again and again how great America is and how "Da Italio man maka no troub he maka no troub for no one. Every ahbody say Italio man maka great excite in dese countries. I don see. I don see it." The racism doesn't extend to WASP characters, of course, but the aphasiac repetition does; if a McCay character says in the first panel that she's afraid of falling on the ice, then you can be sure she'll say the same thing in the second. And the third. And the fourth. Really, Sammy's adults might as well be in a Peanuts TV special — "waah waah waah waah waah, waah waah waah waah waah."

These strips are, in other words, little more than the same slapstick cliché, endlessly repeated. Next to this, even Beetle Bailey starts to look positively inventive. At least Mort Walker had three or four gags. No wonder that, in the introduction to the volume, Thierry Smolderen suggests, rather nervously, that McCay is putting us on, that it's a "parody" which "chuckles at the absurdity of...doing the same thing ad nauseum." McCay's strip, you see, isn't mindlessly repetitive; it's making fun of mindless repetitiveness! Thank goodness! He's a jaded intellectual, just like us!

McCay probably did enjoy doing the same thing over and over. Whether that enjoyment is adequately characterized by a distancing concept like "parody," though, is another question entirely. Instead, the pleasure of McCay's work seems more like that of a small child, who wants his parent to make that face again for the millionth time. It's excessive and infantile, linked, not to a sense of irony, but a sense of wonder. As G. K. Chesterton says in Orthodoxy.

"children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough... It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again," to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again," to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we."

There is certainly something godlike about McCay’s artwork. Sammy Sneeze doesn’t try for the sumptuous fantasy of “Little Nemo”; still, the level of detail when McCay renders for example, a grocery store interior, is jaw-dropping. In the first panel, towers of individual cans and products are shown with a flawless clarity that makes the scene seem more real than life. It’s a tour-de-force in itself — and then McCay repeats it in the second panel, with everything the same except the positions of the customers. And then he repeats it again...and again...and then, with the explosive sneeze, throws everything into a chaos so crisply rendered it still somehow looks like order.

McCay is obviously one of a kind, but his particular take on cartooning is also a product of his era. The Little Sammy Sneeze panels, drawn in 1904-1905, look very much like cells for animation — and, of course, McCay would create his own animated shorts a few years later. Sammy also harks backwards to some of the early experiments in film, especially Edison's 1894 Kinetoscope five-second film Fred Ott's Sneeze, which, like the title says, shows one of Edison's assistants, Fred Ott, taking snuff and sneezing. (A still from this film is reproduced in this volume's introduction, though the caption erroneously identifies Fred Ott as "Ed Ott".)

This collection generously allows us to see how McCay compared to some of his print peers as well. The book includes examples of two contemporary strips, The Woozlebeasts by John Prentiss Benson and The Upside-Downs by Gustave Verbeck. Visually, neither of these is much like Sammy Sneeze . In place of McCay's vivid detail and art nouveau sense of still composition, Benson's and Verbeck draw more on a tradition of cartoonish caricature. Benson's drawings of fantastic beasts, in particular, hark back to Tenniel's Alice illustrations. Verbeck is also influenced by children's illustration. His drawings are deceptively simple; they look sketchy and rough...until you turn them over and realize that upside-down, they show a completely different picture.

Despite these differences, all three illustrators, do have something in common. Their visual orientation is essentially infantile, in the Freudian sense. They're pre-Oedipal, the pleasures they offer have little, if anything to do with the symbolic system...which is to say, they don't much care about narrative or character. In Sammy Sneeze the fun is in watching how each elegantly complicated panel differs from the last, and in the comforting repetition; in The Upside-Downs it's in the ingeniousness of the illustration; in The Woozlebeasts it's the delight of the nonsense creatures, who are described in fairly rudimentary limericks. The stories that are provided are simple and subordinate — in the Upside-Downs, in particular, you get the feeling that Verbeck doodled first and then built the story around whatever random thing he decided he could turn on its head. In none of these is there development, either of story or joke. Instead, the strips provide a kind of optical orality. They're eye candy.

Fred Ott's Sneeze used to be eye candy too; when the film process was just beginning, anything moving on the screen was a source of amazement. Now, of course, what interest it has is historical. Neither can comics these days survive solely on visual wonder; for the most part, you really do need to make some concessions to plot and genre if you want people to look at your work. Nonetheless, some elements of comics' infancy survive. Linda Williams, in her study of pornography entitled Hard Core, points out that both Fred Ott's Sneeze and porn share a common focus on biological ejaculations. Similarly, I think that the emphasis on surface pleasures in McCay and his contemporaries has a later analogue in the cheesecake-inspired drawings of Los Bros Hernandez, and even in the fetish art of R. Crumb or Michael Manning. McCay's eye candy approach also has an echo in shojo and yaoi (where narrative coherence can takes a distant second to flowery compositional bliss), and in Fort Thunder.

Of course, the comics faction that has most embraced McCay is not shojo or Paper Rad or porn, but art comics. Which is a bit strange, because, as far as I can tell, the aesthetic goals of McCay couldn't be more different than those of, say, Art Spiegelman. It's true that Chris Ware has (brilliantly) borrowed a lot of McCay's style, but this only emphasizes how completely different they are as artists. For Ware, visual repetition is not a source of delight, but of existential monotony — effortless creativity is transformed into labored wasteland.

I don't blame Ware for the cannibalization of McCay's corpse — artists take bits and pieces of whatever they can from wherever they can, and they certainly don't have any obligation to remain true to someone else's vision. Still, it's too bad that (to return to Oedipus) the success of the son has so thoroughly obliterated the memory of the father. Which is to say that critics writing about Winsor McCay seem indecently eager to turn him into Chris Ware.

In this regard, the worst sinner in the volume is Jeet Heer. Heer provides an introduction for McCay's Hungry Henrietta, a black-and-white strip produced at the same time as Little Sammy Sneeze (many of the Henrietta strips are reproduced here on the reverse side of the Sammy strips which ran on the same day.)


The early Henrietta strips start out with her as a baby, being fussed over by grotesquely cavorting adults — at the end of each episode, she is offered a bottle, which she drinks with a single tear trickling from her eye. Over the course of later strips, Henrietta ages, and her appetite develops apace — each episode now focuses on her consuming vast quantities of some foodstuff or other, with the last panel generally featuring her fast asleep in peaceful and bloated contentment. Heer's interpretation of this is as follows:

"...while overzealous adults are eager to assuage Henrietta's anxiety, they themselves are the cause of her worries.... By being overprotective, they turn her into a nervous nelly, always whimpering and needing cookies to calm her nerves.... Eventually, Henrietta becomes a slave to her stomach."

So for Heer, Hungry Henrietta is about the tragedy of eating disorder; it's a kind of after-school special.

If this argument is to make any sense, you have to assume that (A) McCay has some passing interest in psychological realism, and that (B) McCay believes that being a slave to your stomach is a bad thing. I don't think that there is any evidence that either of these things is true. On the contrary, the whole point of Henrietta, it seems to me, is not that she experiences some sort of vaguely Oedipal narrative development, but that she doesn't. She gets older, but the joke is she stays exactly the same. In those early strips, she isn't driven to eat by the insensitive adults around her; the adults are insensitive and grotesque, from her perspective — because they won't let her eat. She isn't sad in those last panels where the tear slides down her face. She's crying, yes, but she's calming down — the tear is the last sign of her fading discontent. Anxiety doesn't make her eat; on the contrary, it's the fact that she's hungry which makes her anxious (until she fills up, of course!)

In other words, McCay simply didn't do literary psychodrama, no matter how much Heer and other arts comics scholars might wish that he did. Rather, Henrietta eats the way that McCay draws; with a simple and tireless delight.

You Know What's Good About the Watchmen Movie?

As noted here, there are a few bright spots (scroll down). Another is this: Apollonia Vanova as Silhouette, specifically the bit in the credits sequence where she steps up to a girl and scoops her in for the great Times Square V-Day kiss.Watching Vanova's five seconds, you get the idea she actually could beat up people for fun; she seems exactly like a piss-elegant, fighting superheroine.  She's got a tiger's stroll, like somebody in Doc Savage. 

I thought Vanova might be a runway model just doing the sort of walk the trade calls for, but it says here she's a mezzo soprano and sculptress and competes as a fitness model (which means working out but not getting bulky). What she wants on her tombstone: "She lived for art."

UPDATE: edited because I didn't like the original

A Link for Your Garden?

Tim O'Neil has an entertaining discussion of Kingdom Come, explaining why having villains kill people is bad for heroes (and for the people killed too, presumably). Plus O'Neil explains what the hell is up with Carnage. I was wondering.

Michael May looks to be blogging his way through every appearance of Wonder Woman in Sensation Comics starting here and continuing here. I'm still thinking about blogging through the Wonder Woman run, maybe starting this week? We'll see....

q99 talks about why she hates misogyny in Wonder Woman comics.

I found the WW links above through When Fangirls Attack which is under new management, and so back to having regular posting.

And because there is a world out there outside of comics, no really:

Ross Douthat argues for fewer prisons and more police as a way for conservatives to reach out to black voters. I'm all for fewer prisons, but I'd suggest fewer police as well. But I guess that just means I'm Oberlin-educated....


My wife's new favorite fashion snark blog. And yes, I think it's pretty entertaining as well.

Sex and the Sensitive New Age Guy

Tom recently sent me an email asking me to explain why I hate contemporary literature and why I care about sexism. Not sure anyone else is interested, and confessional literature is always dicey, but since I've had a special request:

As far as contemporary literature goes, I've explained myself more or less here and here. For a while there I was trying to be a poet and reading a lot of poetry, which gave my hatred for the contemporary literary scene bite and drive. These days I pretty much just avoid it, which makes me happier, but means I don't have quite the same impetus to write at length about it.

For the sexism; I don't know that I am actually any more interested in, or opposed to, sexism than your average everyday liberal, Oberlin educated SNAG. My mom worked full time; my dad, as a professor, had more flexible hours, so he was more or less the primary caregiver. Both of them always made it clear that this arrangement was fine, and that sexism of any sort was wrong. I remember standing up to a couple teachers in high school when they made some cracks about girls not being as smart as guys. The other boys in class were aghast, but I was definitely thinking, "You can't say that about my mom!" I don't know...that's one of the things I've done that I'm definitely proud of, but though I'd like to line up those data points and end up with "Noah Berlatsky: Champion of Women's Equality!" I don't think it would necessarily wash.

As Tom noted, I do write a fair bit about sexism and feminism. That has something to do with my liberal politics, certainly, but it also has a lot to do with my interest in...well, me. In my experience, at least, feminists tend to have the most interesting things to say about masculinity, just as black writers tend to have the most interesting things to say about race and whiteness. If you look at my two longest pieces on sexuality (here and here, they both use feminist theory to talk about masculinity — especially about masculine sexuality, and the relationship between masculinity and desire. Both are me trying to figure out why I get pleasure (of various kinds) from certain genres, and trying to figure out how that plugs into various social and political concerns. (This is true of the Wonder Woman blogging as well; I think my next essay for comixology will make that more clear.)

The above is something of a psychological explanation, and is perhaps unduly demeaning (as psychological explanations tend to be.) I could also explain my interest from a more ineffable aesthetic perspective, I guess; much of my favorite artwork and writing deals with gender and sexuality, and trying to understand it or interact with it has led me to write or think a lot about those topics.

I mean, I don't want to disavow any political commitment. Obviously, I hope when I write about or use feminism that I'm doing something to advance the cause — perhaps by revealing some of the ways sexism works or how sexuality and sexism can be tied together or teased apart in our imaginations. But I guess I feel like women — or anyone really — would do well to mistrust men who claim to be leading the fight or to be acting out of especially altruistic motives. Sex and gender ulimately interest me because, like most people, I'm interested in sex, and, like everybody, I have a gender.

So that's my best effort at a response. If it seems self-indulgent or tedious...well, I would encourage you all to blame Tom.

Just Saw Watchmen Again

I'm doing a column about it for TCJ, so two viewings were necessary. (Here for my first viewing. Here for Noah's thoughts on Laurie.) This time I brought a pad and kept notes, mainly of sound effects and camera movements that annoyed me. They're constant. I'll put it this way: right before the WOMP!! when Rorshach kicks in a door, you get the two-second sheee-ooom of his foot traveling. Every action in the film gets a sting. Close the kitchen door: Wuhmm! Drop a matchbook on the table: Wunnk! The film cannot communicate a moment in any other way. Pretty soon, if you're sensitive, you start to feel a bit teary; the nervous system never gets a moment to reknit. At least this time I knew what was coming and could roll with it.

Another example of how everything in the film gets treated the same way: little Rorshach punching the neighborhood kid who was picking on him. Not only does the punch get the same big-sound sting as an adult superhero's punch, little Rorshach delivers his punch like one of the adults, with the same straight-line trajectory. The punch is treated like a devastator, but the kid is too small to be dangerous in that way. The book's little Rorshach confined himself to the desperate-clawing-away side of the enterprise, which is far more plausible. The movie includes the clawing away but feels that the clawing most be accompanied by a thunder fist. Any fight, in the movie's terms, is an encounter involving thunder blows. 

Worst casting: I'll say it again, Matthew Goode as Ozymandias. He doesn't have the chin or the shoulders, any other considerations aside. Every time he shows up, there's a hole in the screen.

Nice surprise: Ms. Akerman does a decent job in the dinner scene between Laurie and Dan.

Nicer surprise: Jeffrey Dean Morgan is really quite good as the Comedian. He really swings his Keene riot scene ("The American dream came true") and his bedside scene with Moloch.

I saw the film at an 8:15 showing on Friday and the place was nearly full up. Counted walkouts by about a dozen people, including a clump of little kids who'd been in the front row and had enough around when Ozymandias was explaining his scheme. The guy sitting next to me really hated the film and made some asides to his companions about "this bullshit." Once the credits started rolling, people had their coats on and broke for the gates.

Box Office Mojo says that after three weeks Watchmen's world box office is $161,172,305. Budget was $150 million, so okay. The movie still had a huge second-week dropoff, and it's not at all a good movie, but I'd rather Watchmen's film version be sort of a success and not a flop.

What a Bitch!

It's a meeting of titans, Prince Philip and Simon Cowell. They're both pissy, slender men with a lot of money and little patience. But one of them is royalty and the other feels he's been disrespected. In fact he reports that the prince called him a "sponger." Buckingham Palace responds that the prince categorically denies it: "He has said he does not know enough about Mr. Cowell to make any sort of comment."

Conservatives Are Funny

They really are. The right, or large portions of it, has a great sense of humor. But it's a humor that's directed outward. They don't laugh at themselves, they laugh at others, and very well they do it.

Now big names on the right are trying to show they can laugh at themselves. But the only way they can think of doing this is to put on a silly garment and get photographed. Without the garment, one assumes, they would figure there was nothing at all silly about them.

The left is different. They're supposed to be humorless, and it's true they often get pissy about the things the rest of us get up to. But in my experience they tend to laugh themselves. The first time I heard the term "p.c." it was in college, as in "Yep, tonight we're eating real p.c." when the rice and lentils were being served. I was reminded of this when reading Bechdel's big new Dykes collection. So many of the strips make fun of the lesbians just for being left-wing lesbians with left-wing lesbian attitudes, eating habits, etc.

I've read my share of right-wing prose and I've known a few conservatives in my time (some fine people, some not), but I can't remember ever hearing a conservative make fun of himself/herself for being a conservative. They might say there's nothing funny about conservative beliefs because (in their view) conservative beliefs make so much sense. But left-wingers take their beliefs seriously too. I would guess it's the matchup between the person and the belief that strikes left-wingers as funny. All these sweeping principles about the earth in balance and the global revolution of the poor, and what they come down to is serving lentils. Whereas conservatives, at least our modern-day variety, tend to feel that they and their principles make a fine match. Turning the course of history from collectivism to freedom -- why, sure, that's right up my alley (my theoretical conservative says) and it does me credit that I take on the job.

When I was in Florence, I was struck by all the people who wanted pictures of themselves standing next to Michelangelo's David.  Without them, they figured, the photo would be incomplete. Reminds me of conservatives. 

Stan's Babe-o-Dome, b (FCR addendum)

I was writing about Stan Lee's hot-chick covers of the 1940s and mentioned P. G. Wodehouse. I see some resemblances between the two fellows. They're cheery and upbeat and they see their job as entertainment, pure and simple. In person Wodehouse was very shy; no one could call Stan shy, but he is fairly private. The Raphael-Spurgeon bio tells how, back in the 70s, Stan decided he would take the guys at Marvel out for drinks; once at the bar, Stan realized he had nothing to say to them and slipped away. The reason he took them out drinking was that he heard that Carmine Infantino would take the fellows at DC out to dinner once a week. I don't think anyone would call Infantino especially charming, and Stan is especially charming. But Infantino liked being with the gang and Stan, from appearances, would much rather be with his wife and daughter and, these days, his grandkids.

Stan and Wodehouse also showed a certain difficulty in coming to grips with unpleasant facts. Mike Ploog tells a story of his Marvel days when he asked Stan for a raise and a regretful Stan explained how in the current economic climate, etc., and then Stan began showing pictures of his latest fancy sports car. Ploog made the obvious point that there was a degree of unfairness here, and an abashed Stan immediately saw he was right. I would guess that, for the brief moments that he looks back, Stan really wishes he had stuck up for Kirby about the art and that he hadn't been so quick to bill himself as "creator" of all his Marvel co-creations. Wodehouse certainly wished he hadn't made those broadcasts on Nazi radio, and my only excuse for bringing Nazis into this is that Wodehouse actually did make such broadcasts and they were as harmless as broadcasts on Nazi radio can be. But as actions go it was beyond dumb. It was unthinking, and the same (in a very different arena) for Stan's complacency about how well he was making out when others at Marvel were not being treated nearly so well. 

Turning out happy, happy entertainment, entertainment as happy and carefree as a Wodehouse book or one of those babe covers, may require a certain temperament: not just good cheer but a sharp disconnect from reality. A decent tv sitcom is grittier than Wodehouse or Stan at his most Stan-ish. The problems get wrapped up, but at least they're there. (Which isn't to say Wodehouse is somehow inferior to How I Met Your Mother. Wodehouse is great. At what he does he is inferior to no one, and what he does is worthwhile. But it's a very specialized stock in trade. Stan's babe covers aren't really so great, but whatever.)

This disconnect from reality, when I consider it, feels to me as if it were connected to the unsocialized aspect of Wodehouse's and Stan's personalities. That's why I used the phrase "Babe-o-Dome" in the head, emphasis on "Dome." The larkiness in their works makes you (or me, anyway) think of isolation just because it's so air weight, so free of anything at all that might run counter to larkiness. Stan's babes capture the one moment of joy you feel at the sight of a pretty girl. What a bright moment that is, and what a small moment it is compared to everything that comes after.  

The Keys to the Batmobile

Zhinxy is threatening to review the entire Knighfall saga. Don't know if she'll manage it...but I hope so because, because....

Everybody will run in different directions when I snap this rod. Whoever finds and captures the flag first will get first crack with the pieces of said rod at the giant, looming paper-rose cowl pinata pictured above my head, while the others sing a song of their choosing.

Should the flag-finder NOT break the pinata and scatter the goodies inside - Which include the keys to the Batmobile, passwords to the Bat-Computer, and no Smarties, on my honor - We go in order of How Many Times You've Been In The Cave. Should NONE break the pinata, the next goer will be determined in a round-Robin paper-rock-scissors battle...

It's even funnier with the picture. So click over there why don't you?

FCR 4ish: do men with unisex names write better women?

Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise was one of the first “alternative” comics I read when I was a teenager getting tired of Marvel (I bought it after reading the preview in Cerebus). I picked up around the middle of “I Dream of You,” I think, so fairly early in the run. I followed the series faithfully all through high school, painted Katchoo on my graduation mortarboard (and got the photo published in the lettercol!), angsted and argued over the characters, and decided with my best friend that she was Katchoo (but taller) and I was Francine (but gayer).

In short, it was the perfect graphic addiction for the kind of teenage girl I was. Later, I grew up, started hanging out with comic snobs (you know, the kind of horrible people who write for The Comics Journal), and found out my SiP love was stupid and misguided and didn’t I know Moore stole everything he knew from Jaime Hernandez?

I have to confess, I never read any bros Hernandez until last year or so, when another comics snob (allright, so I’ll name-drop) lent me the whole run of those giant Love and Rockets phonebooks, two by two, over the space of a year. The comic snobs may have a point with the ripoff thing. Hopey is Katchoo but moreso, and Francine has Maggie’s daffiness, voluption, and super-heterosexuality-with-one-teeny-exception. Both storylines could be called an exercise in fanny, in that they’re well-realized women in a women’s world, created for straight male gratification (at least the creators themselves are clearly getting off on drawing so many and varied hot women). And no one could dispute that Hernandez has it all over Moore in terms of artwork.

But I don’t really know that Moore is just a poor man’s, or middlebrow girl’s, Hernandez. If I had to pin it down, I would say Locas (if that’s the term for the Jaime parts of L&R) is better fanny, but SiP is better chick-lit.

One of the notable things about SiP is that it always had a very large female following, and those women, going by the lettercols and my own experiences, were disproportionately the type who “didn’t read comics” except of course Archie when they were little. Even today, SiP will always be one of the first works mentioned in message board threads of “what comics can I get my girlfriend into?” (of course, responders almost never follow up with “what kind of books does she like to read?” as if women were, you know, individuals, with divergent tastes. But I digress.)

I'm too lazy to google, but I don’t recall that L&R comes up in those threads more often than most popular comics do (because anyone who knows a woman who’s liked a comic, or is a woman who’s liked a comic, will mention that comic, and the list inevitably and logically ends up all over the map). I think the height of L&R’s popularity was before my time, but by the time I was aware of it, its boosters were all Comics Journal reading types who want to educate me about Important Comics.

Now, I never would have read and loved L&R if not for those people, and I am a sucker for anything anyone tells me is Culturally Important. But we run an iconoclastic blog here, and suburban Archie-reading housewives will always win out over comics scholars, at least until Archie moms make up the majority of our readers. So why does Moore capture that demographic better than Hernandez?

Mostly because SiP is a straight-up soap opera, whereas Locas is only an homage to soap operas (of both the telenovelistic and professional-wrestling varieties) among other things. Maggie and Hopey have a semi-fraught relationship, where Hopey expresses frustration and jealousy over Maggie’s straight crushes and Maggie is hurt when Hopey viciously puts her down as a cover for her feelings of love. But those moments are very by-the-way, and usually played for laughs rather than drama. They do fall out and get back together occasionally, but it doesn’t really seem to matter why.

SiP was, what, fifteen years of will-they-won’t-they, while Maggie and Hopey’s sex life is more do-they-don’t-they, serving the cause of male titillation rather than suspense. You don’t ache for the women’s relationship to go to the next level, cause implicitly it has, and it was no biggie…. you just kinda hope Hernandez will get around to drawing the nitty-gritty. You want Katchoo and Francine to have sex because, the way the story’s set up, it will change everything.

Most importantly, SiP is both plot-driven and episodic in exactly the way TV soap operas are. The proportions of love triangles, scheming villainesses and flawed heroines and how they will all be changed forever drives every issue. This is great for getting a devoted, strongly identifying readership. But like soap operas, it gets really boring and repetitive and forced when it becomes clear that the creator is too attached to his characters to let them go. Which is why I quit reading years before, apparently, Francine and Katchoo Did It (and my sister insists that in her universe, SiP ended after “I Dream of You”).

Locas is a weaker soap opera, but ultimately a much more satisfying work to read straight through, because Hernandez doesn’t seem very invested in What Happens Next. He likes the locas, he likes their friends and surroundings, and he likes writing stories about them in all sorts of genres. He creates plot arcs, but he’ll nonchalantly scrap them (Maggie loves Rand Race, Hopey has a baby, etc.) when he gets bored of them, and may or may not revisit the continuity years later (note, of course, that I read all of the phonebooks of Locas together, one time, rather then following each issue over ten years like SiP, and this colours my readings). Background figures become stars and then fade out again, settings and tone drastically change around the characters.

On a superficial reading, it seems like Hernandez is just exploring whatever interests him, but what interests him ends up being more interesting than will-they-won’t-they, will-this-change-everything-forever. On the downside, the sheer virtuosity of Locas, and the people who recommended it to you in the first place, can give you the impression that there must be something else going on, something symbolic, or Literary. Maybe you’re supposed to be Learning Something from the characters, rather than lusting after them.

What a drag, man. Bring on the busty bisexuals in denial.

(disclaimer: i'm all strung out trying to finish drawing an issue, so please forgive all the hysterical italicizing and the Portentous Caps.)

Because We Needed A Woman — FCR 1c

I've already posted a couple of entries to the female characters roundtable, so I should no doubt stop — but....

I've been thinking again about the Jeff Parker Marvel Adventures Avengers series — mostly because my son has me read them to him over and over and over. For those not in the know, this is an all-ages title, featuring an alternate Avengers meant for maximum marketability. Most of the major Marvel properties are on the team: Wolverine, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America, Storm, and Giant Girl.

I know what you're saying...Giant who? Giant Girl is the only new character created for the team; in this reality, Janet Van Dyne, the wasp, decided that growing big would be a better way to fight crime than getting teeny. (Which does make a certain amount of sense.)

This is, as I said, an all-ages title; there's no sex at all, precious little romance, and really little differentiation by gender at all. The women aren't sexualized; their costumes are skin tight, but so are the guys'. Storm's look seems somewhat toned down from the classic X-Men comics actually, and Giant-Girl's costume is as nondescript as a skin-tight purple costume can be. Storm is co-leader along with Captain America. As far as gender dynamic go, you'd be hard pressed to find anything at all objectionable.

Except maybe that the women are kind of boring. Most of the other people on the team, after all, are there because they're popular, and they're popular because they're entertaining. Wolverine is a cranky bad-ass; that's entertaining. Spider-Man is a wise-cracking jokester (and surprisingly intelligent -- he saves the day a very high-percentage of the time) — that's entertaining. Hulk is super-strong and out of control — fun. Storm, on the other hand, is straight-laced and just sort of there. Giant-Girl doesn't even really have as much personality as that (she seems touchy about her appearance on occasion, I guess.) If Wolverine's the mean one, and Spider-Man's the funny one, and Cap's the moral-compass leader, Storm and Giant-Girl are the — well, they're the women, right?

Admittedly, Iron Man is relatively unpersonable as well. And Parker does set up a kind of mother/child, straight-woman/goofball relationship between Storm and Hulk which is quite entertaining (especially when they switch brains, so you get to see Hulk try to call down lightning on his foes while Storm is running around atempting to uproot trees with her bare hands.) But it's hard for me to imagine that any kid is going to read these things and come away saying, you know, I really want to be Giant Girl rather than Wolverine or Spider-Man or Hulk.

This is something of a perennial problem with super teams. The Fantastic Four: Johnny's the hothead; Reed's the super-genius; Ben's the crusty strong man with a heart of gold — and Sue's the woman. Or Grant Morrison's Justice League — Flash and GL are the young, impetuous hotheads; Batman and Aquaman are the brooding bad boys; Superman's the moral leader; J'onn is the thoughtful voice of reason — and Wonder Woman is the woman. It's just hard to get beyond the tokenism.

(Not that it's impossible. The X-Men have distinct female characters (including Storm, who has more of a personality in that title than in the Marvel Avengers.))

Anyway, my point is: Elektra. They should have put Elektra in the Marvel Avengers comic. You can't go wrong with a ninja, right?

_______________

Also in this series: Tom talks about Stan Lee's women of romance and Bill talks about perfect girlfriend's in manga. Miriam is fighting valiantly against a ravenous deadline, but hopefully she'll be posting later today as well.

Update: And here's Miriam's Post a cage match between Jaime Hernandez and Terry Moore.

Cultural Difference

The American press tends to get the small things right and the big things wrong. The British press just makes shit up.

Via the Plank and Alex Massie, a long-headed British observer describes the brewing Democratic revolt against President Obama. 

Bad Back-Cover Copy

A small-time publisher puts out a book that's about Beverly Hills from 1930 to 2005. The publisher already put out a book about Beverly Hills' founding and first few decades. So:

Nowhere on Earth are sequels and the success that fosters them more apparent than in Hollywood's bejeweled bedroom, Beverly Hills. This continuation of the history begun in Arcadia Publishing's ...

Yes, Beverly Hills is evidence of sequels. You look about and say to yourself, "Sequels have been here." 

All right, the success that fosters sequels is evident. I'll grant that. But what an odd way of dragging success into the conversation. A hit film can have a sequel. Therefore, the copy treats "sequel" as a synonym for movie success. But it isn't, so the writer then has to think of a way to mention "success" directly ("the success that fosters them"). And the whole time the writer knows he/she is being clever because the book is a sequel and "sequel" is a movie term.

The Perfect Girlfriend (FCR Next)

One of the manga conventions that came up in discussing YKK was the Perfect Girlfriend. The first volume presents Alpha as the sort of single girl readers might desire, though later volumes might shoot me down. Either way, she fits the ideal: demure, bright, beautifully plain.

This type shows up enough in manga for males, often played for romcom laughs. Boy meets girl through wizardry, tear in reality, adminstrative fiat. They spend a lot of time together, and boy thinks to himself, "it's almost like we're a married couple" as his nose erupts with blood. Video Girl Ai, Oh My Goddess, etc etc... I think it's an 80s/90s trend, though the teenage wish, "If only everyone else in the world were wiped out in a cosmic explosion, then she'd have to love me, or just have sex with me, I'm not picky," that's probably eternal.

The sexual dynamics are usually very 50s, the plots wish fulfillment. So the chief pleasure's in seeing wishes unfulfilled as the genre's twisted into new shapes. The strangest shape of all, and the preemptive last word, Minami's Sweetheart (南君の恋人) appeared from 1985-87 in Garo and elsewhere. The first work by Shungiku Uchida (内田春菊), it hints that she would become a key feminist author of comics like We Are Reproducing and the autobiographical novel Father Fucker. In Dreamland Japan, Fred Schodt profiled her work and unconventional personal life-- each of her children has a different father, none Uchida's lover.

Minami's Sweetheart, her first major work, takes the fantasy for what it's worth, more or less. Minami's a high school senior and nerd with a six-inch girlfriend.

They live together in his room "like a married couple," he says, as his would-be wife's mother-in-law yells at him to study harder. Chiyomi, his sweetheart and several years his junior, shrank for no good reason one day. Now he keeps her in a doll house by his bed, sneaks her food when his mom's not looking, and takes baths with her. For vague reasons he keeps her a secret; I'm not sure if her family's contacted Missing Persons.

Their interactions teeter between sweet nothings and adolescent drives. He cares for her, makes her clothes (including an Iowa State sweater, go Cyclones!) and at one point thinks of her as his kid. Then they get into an argument because her breasts are growing and she wants a bra. His fantasies of them as equals make do when he's not fretting about the tactical impossibility of sex. When it gets really bad and everyone's asleep, he sneaks in some "onanie," the Japanese-via-German-via-Genesis 38:9 loanword for masturbation. His real trouble, though, is not his tiny girlfriend: it's that he's awful with the ladies. When faced with a much cooler couple who talk of marriage after graduation, he squirms. Back home, Chiyomi greets him cheerfully, far from the complications of a the adult world.

Its complications include his mother, always hidden behind a nagging word balloon, and Nomura, a sensual classmate who toys with him. By comparison, Chiyomi is his very own toy. In fact, he imagines her as a doll in an early nightmare, pulling her limb from limb. Later, he says "you're my toy" while thinking out loud. She agrees, teasingly calling him a pervert.

This is a female character roundtable, and at first glance Chiyomi's not much of a character. She's quite two-dimensional, just as Minami would imagine her. And the trick is that he's imagined by Uchida. Men often enough have trouble writing believable women; here Uchida writes an adolescent boy who's kind of pathetic with great sympathy. She lets him create Chiyomi, a Perfect Girlfriend so perfect reading about her is almost viscerally painful-- since I'm convinced she's his elaborate way of avoiding real interactions with real women.

In the ending (yes, I'm ruining it for you), Minami ventures out into the world with his sweetheart. They hop the train for the hot springs. Chiyomi, happy and bright, peers out from his shirt pocket at the view. A series of older women wonder why this kid's walking around talking to himself. After they climb a mountain, a car of young punks rounds the bend and knock him off the road. You can fill in the details. On the last page, some time later, he walks past a young mother with her kid, asking why her pet bird died. "Because it was small."

I read somewhere that Uchida wept on drawing the last chapter. Reading the blog reviews and so forth, most people read it as a "Pure Love" story, which is how I guess the two TV versions played it. Others in the genre feature young lovers whose feelings stay pure forever thanks to the sweet embrace of tuberculosis, war, etc. The only tragedy in Minami's Sweetheart is adulthood. Put away childish things, like a boy's elaborate fantasy of a doll that's his girlfriend. Still, you could read it as a magical romance, though what a strange one it is. The story's strength is that Uchida never commits either way, never judges.

Dovetail: The name of Uchida's first baby? Alpha.

***

Update: the critic Adam Stephanides drops by in the comments (scroll past all the Victorian lit), and notes his own fine review of Minami's Sweetheart.

Shinbone!

I make a lot of noise about that damn Ted Hughes and that sillyass Sylvia Plath, and then in comments Aaron White coolly deflates me:

Tom, this is like the third or forth time I've noticed you expressing a desire to hit someone for the crime of annoying you. Just pointing it out...

Yeah, well ... okay. Yeah, I do that. And there'll be more to come. A guy's got to do something and I don't want any situations where I might get hurt. So there'll be more imaginary violence.

In my defense I can point to a man far more clever than me who also wanted to smash. Mark Twain once said he could never properly criticize Jane Austen. Why not? Because he kept being distracted:

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Yes. I've known so many smart people who love books and love Jane Austen, and so many decent writers who look up to her, and she is so dreadful, such a ninny-prinny, self-serving, shallow travesty of what a decent social observer should be. She has the greatest subject on earth, that of people talking to each other, and all she can do is remind herself over and over of how silly they are. That's some sense of humor! Well, Jane Austen, you're silly, okay?

And I Was Wrong

Specter is voting no on Employee Free Choice. (Failed prediction here.)

Stan Lee Presents: Welcome to the Babe-o-Dome (FCR part 2)

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.

The extract focuses on Mary Jane and her sad history, with attention to her roots in Stan's Atlas humor comics. Before getting to the extract, which I promise is down below, I'm going to talk a bit more about the babe covers Stan dreamed up for Atlas. He loved them; coming up with those things suited him down to the ground.

Let's start with an example (Atlastales.com guesses it was drawn by Ken Bald):

The covers are kind of sweet, in that the point is simply how swell various guys find the featured girl -- outlandishly swell. The girls transport them the way Frankenstein's monster scares hell out of Lou Costello. But the focus is different, in that Frankenstein's monster is there an excuse for Costello to do his doubletakes -- the real point of the scene -- whereas the guys are there to underline how wonderful Venus is (or Millie or Hedy or whoever).

From what I've seen, and I have looked thru many piles of Golden Age comics, the "ga-ga" approach to teen humor was not too widespread. Lots of comic books featured pretty girls doing silly things, but usually the gag had nothing to do with how delirious they made the average joe feel. Usually the joke came from the girl getting jealous or skimping on her homework or possibly falling on her ass while she was out for a skate. That last cover has a panties flash because it's for a Fox title and Fox was put on earth to make Atlas look like it had class. Al Feldstein worked on the series in question, called Junior, and did a series of odd covers that combined smirkiness with very stiff drawing. It was like seeing busty cigar store Indians wearing wigs and lipstick and getting molested by gusts of wind. Those sweaters got molded very tight but around inhumanly definite body parts; just the sweater folds looked like they could hurt you.

Stan, by contrast, seemed to operate on the idea that there was no such thing as sex. He wasn't hinting at the forbidden; he didn't have a clue about the forbidden. Consider:

A given feminist might dislike Stan's covers more or less or about the same as any other good-girl cover from the period. Stan's approach wasn't feminist, it was just Stan: candy colored, high spirited, and cut off from entire realms of pressing, everyday facts, such as the obvious followup to kissing a powerful older man who can give a gal a job. (Side note: Kind of surprising to see sandles on a 1940s Hollywood director, or any Hollywood director; didn't realize that was ever part of the stereotype.) Stan took a boosterish approach to good-girlism. Everything was upside, no problems in sight. Betty and Veronica and Archie had problems, though trivial ones. Hedy and Millie and so on mainly provided an excuse for Stan to give a hip-hip-hoorah.

I hated the way Stan and Jack presented Sue Storm, and it's rare that comic book sexism gets a rise out of me. But the childish way they made her act was really irritating. Millie and Venus and so on are also infantalized, but I don't mind them. My guess at the reason: Sue was part of a working team, and her playing the fool provided an occasion for Reed to be the grave, authoritative man in charge. The scenes reminded me of the shoddy way men tried to con themselves into thinking they were manly (capable, authoritative, adult) by pretending that women were tit carriers with boop-a-doop brains. (I use the past tense, "tried," because at that point the dodge had yet to be challenged  and therefore was more widespread; I don't mean that it has died out.) But no one is an adult in those Stan covers. It's a baby universe, as if someone had figured out a way to get swimsuit models and necking into a P. G. Wodehouse story. 

Mary Jane is the follow-up to the Stan Lee good girls of the 1940s. I think she's great, the crown jewel of the collection. But she became progressively less great the longer she stuck around. You can pretend for a very brief while that the notion of a knockout girl who loves a good time has nothing to do with sex. But Mary Jane was around for more than a brief while, and therefore her problems began.

And now, from "Face It, Tiger":

 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.)

The big engine behind necking, and teen romance, and giddiness at the sight of a bombshell girl, is sex. Industry rules don't allow any follow-up for that sort of thing. As a result Stan's approach to romance works best for one-offs, like cover gags or Mary Jane's doorway moment. Mary Jane emptied a full bolt of glory her first time out and then it was 40 years of decline. J. Jonah could stay funny because he had the full range of motion needed for his schtick; as seen recently, he can go all the way to heart attack. But if Mary Jane wasn't going to have sex, there wasn't much else for her to do. In the '80s, Marvel stuck her with a TV-movie backstory that said her larking about was just a defense; she'd put it on because of her lousy father's drinking. So everything specific to Mary Jane turned out to be an act. The reason, presumably, was that her schtick had worn a bit thin and she now needed explaining away. At this point, Mary Jane became the girlfriend, then the wife. She didn't do badly in these roles, but no one can do especially well in them. She was on hand. She helped buck up the hero; she provided relationship tensions. But she didn't do anything interesting. She dressed louder than the other superheroes' wives/girlfriends. I guess she also had more spunk, for what that's worth. Differences in spunk among this bunch get to be like IQ shadings at a high-price computer camp. All the girls have spunk, if they don't go crazy.

The girls aren't all that different from one another. Put them in a situation and they'll say the same things. And of course, their job pretty much is to be put into situations, the terrible jams facing their boyfriends/husbands. In One More Day, the love interest speaks: "Peter? Is something —" Also: "Peter, what's happening?" Resolute: "They'll have to come through me first." That's Mary Jane — not much was left at the end. One More Day has a two-page spread intended as a grand summing up of her glory. (This is just as the demon Mephisto undoes her marriage to Peter in return for letting Aunt May live.) After 41 years of print existence, you'd think there'd be plenty of material, but apparently not. She and Peter ride a bike together, just like a Pepsi ad from the 1970s. MJ sits on a couch with Aunt May, and they're watching TV. The only bit that shows character and flair is the survival from '60s-era MJ. There she is, wearing a Romita-designed tinfoil dress and dancing on a table. Good for her! Her final words trail into the ether. You know what they are. "Face it, tiger," they begin, and so on.

At least she'll be around. Her costume is fancier than most girls', and she says "Tiger" and "Pussycat." So the markings have been preserved, even if now they're stuck on a superbeing. But she isn't what she was. The old Mary Jane had a power, and that was to whip men's eyes about in a way that deeply impacted the nervous system and left the subject feeling happy and grateful. No wonder she always had to be so giddy ("With the brain of a mosquito," in the unkind words of Not Brand Echh). It was because she made us giddy; she represented the principle of giddiness, all-out fun. She doesn't have that role any more: She's another cape with a slightly different line of patter. Mary Jane's essential purpose was to be fun. Jackpot's essential purpose is to be Mary Jane. It's all a bit thin and derivative.

Moore Girls (Female Characters Roundtable 1b)

After I wrote this post about Laurie Juspeczyk, I got to thinking about Alan Moore and female characters more generally. And it occurred to me — is there a male writer in any genre out there who has written about such a diversity of female characters, and with such thoughtfulness, as Moore has? From army grunts to policewomen to monster-lovers to cavewomen to spies to cab drivers to mystic saviors... I'm sure there are people out there who have a comparable record, but examples don't exactly leap to mind. (Jack Hill, maybe...though his career was so short he didn't really get a chance to compile a comparable record. Charles Schulz in his way, perhaps.)

It would be one thing if it were just the main characters — Halo Jones, Laurie, Abby, the women in From Hell, Promethea, Evie, and on and on. But the thing about Moore is that more often than not he's got a whole cast of female characters in each work. Virtually every character in Halo Jones is a woman; you can only see Laurie as the token women in Watchmen if you ignore her mother, and Joey, and Joey's girlfriend, and the Comedian's Vietnamese girlfriend, and the Silhouette. Top 10 has a ton of major female characters, from lesbian cops on the prowl to conservative Christian cops to the main baddy of the original series. Even "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" — there's Lois, but there's also Lana, who actually gets to sacrifice herself to save Superman, a nice, and even moving reversal.

Not that every female character is brilliant, and he's perfectly capable of stumbling over the odd misogynist trope or stereotype. Shooting Batgirl in the stomach to add to her dad's angst was a low point, (and one Moore has since expressed regret about, I believe.) And the more erotic stuff he's done in recent years hasn't worked out especially well; Mina Harker could have been a lot more interesting if Moore hadn't gotten obsessed with having her screw and screw and screw...and the less said about Lost Girls maybe the better. But when you look at his work as a whole, you really get the sense of someone who respects and cares about women. He doesn't idealize them, he doesn't turn them into guys, he doesn't constantly point out how clever he's being in treating them like people (as Brian K. Vaughn is prone to do.) Instead, he just has all these really interesting, complicated, fallible people, who can surprise you and themselves (as the bitter, tough-as-nails Sally does in loving Eddie Blake, for example, or as the noble Halo Jones does in coldly murdering her lover.)

Of course, women write intelligent, rounded male characters all the time, so it is somewhat grading on a curve, I know. But with that caveat, I'll admit it; I find Moore's willingness and ability to not write women like idiots kind of inspiring. It's like he's single-handedly trying to prove that American (and or British, I guess) comics by men don't have to be synonymous with misogynist douchebaggery. Maybe he doesn't always succeed, but, as a guy who spends way too much time thinking about comics, I really appreciate the effort.

Update: Several folks in comments point out that my sweeping condemnations are too sweeping, citing the Hernandez Brothers, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison as other male writers who have created a range of interesting female characters. I'll accept that..

Ted Hughes ... What a Fucking Douche!

Did you know that Ted Hughes left Sylvia Plath with two little kids when he walked out? I guess most people who care about Sylvia Plath would know that. But I don't care about Sylvia Plath, so it was news to me. Jesus Christ, Hughes was a fucking douche. You'd have to be to make me sympathize with the spindizzy who wrote The Bell Jar.

In other news, their son just killed himself "forty-six years after the suicide of his mother." Oh, the sad harmonies of time. He was a marine biologist at the fucking University of Alaska but had quit, or taken a leave of absence or something, "to make pottery in his home studio." He was really depressed, apparently. I can't say I blame him, considering his fucking mother killed herself in the next room when he was two or something.

Hughes's next wife, the one he left Plath for, also gassed herself. Instead of just leaving a couple of little kids without parents in a cold London winter, she took that extra step and actually killed her little daughter while killing herself.

Here's what Plath wrote about her little boy at some point before offing herself: "You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn." Well, Jesus. If my mom said that about me, I'd slap her face. But she's got class and a sense of responsibility. I'm lucky to have her, taken all in all.

Fuck, how much does it take not to be some kind of poetic fucking asshole?

UPDATE:  And my mom tells me she thinks Sylvia Plath was actually a good poet. Score one for human complexity.

Watchmen and Peter Greenaway

Jog has a pretty hilarious post imagining Watchmen directed by Peter Greenaway.

Personally, the Watchmen I want to see is a BBC miniseries version; maybe 24 episodes, great acting by decidedly uncomely actors, campy, embarrassing costumes, bad special effects, poorly blocked fight scenes — basically Watchmen as Dr. Who.

I'm probably the only one who finds that idea appealing, though....

Stop Hating on Laurie Juspeczyk! (Female Characters Roundtable Part 1)

There were lots of things to hate about Watchmen the movie, but for me the most revelatory was what was done to the Silk Spectre. As I noted here and here, the Watchmen movie thoroughly disemboweled the character of Laurie Juspeczyk, replacing her with a standard-issue brain-dead supermodel in latex.

The fact that Snyder chose to lobotomize the main female character wasn't surprising -- that's Hollywood, after all. But what did startle me was how much I minded. When I was 16, first reading the Watchmen books, my favorite character was undoubtedly Rorschach, both for his cool-as-shit bad-ass violence and for his traumatized, tragic commitment to a noble, if nonsensical, moral code. Somewhere in the intervening twenty years, though, Rorschach got a lot less interesting, and watching the movie from which she had been excised, I realized that Laurie had for some time been my favorite character in the book. You don't know how much you'll miss someone till they're gone, I guess.

I got a second shock on seeing the reaction to the Silk Spectre character in the reviews. Pretty much everyone noted that the character in the movie sucked. But I've seen a lot of people argue that Laurie in the comic was lame as well. For example, in
comments, looking2dastars said:

...not only was the part of Silk Spectre II not given much to do but the character was probably the worst developed out of the next generation of heroes. It was the same way in the comic, where the main thrust of Laurie's story is that her entire identity has never been her own. Her mother tried to turn her into a younger version of herself and when Laurie began to rebel against that, she defined herself entirely by her romantic relationship. Even after she breaks free of John, she immediately falls into the same pattern, attaching herself to Dan.

Or, as another example, Spencer Ackerman argued that:

Laurie is the most functional character in the film, where in the comic, she's one of its most broken. Laurie Juspeczyk resents her mother, is desperate for a father, and is unable to function as a normal human being.

This perspective — that Laurie is uniquely dysfunctional and uninteresting, and that her character is uniquely defined by her relationships with others — is so far from my own experience of the character that I have trouble believing that we all read the same comic. In the first place, to say that Laurie is "among the most broken" characters seems to be willfully blind. Of the six main protagonists, Rorschach is a sexually stunted homicidal nutcase, completely trapped by his childhood trauma. Adrian is a megalomaniacal mass-murderer. The Comedian is a vicious amoral rapist, thug, and murderer. Jon is isolated and cripplingly passive — if there's anyone who's defined by others, it's him. He lets his father choose his career for him, not once but twice, and when his girlfriend leaves him, his mature, adult reaction is to *go to Mars*. Moore suggests pretty strongly that Dr. Manhattan's alienation and passivity can be read as psychological; he's that way because that's who Jon Ostermann is, not because of his super-consciousness. Next to these folks, Dan and Laurie's garden-variety neuroses seem like pretty small beer.

Along those lines, it's certainly true that Laurie is seen interacting with others more than, and that those relationships are more important to her than, is the case for most of the other characters. But that's because she's *normal*. For most people, human relationships are a big deal. It's only for sociopaths like Rorschach and the Comedian and Adrian that other people don't matter.

That's not to say that Laurie's relationships are all healthy. She has an extremely tangled relationship with her mother, complicated by an absent father, and her story in the comic is very much about coming to terms with that and figuring out who she is and who she wants to be — in accepting responsibility for her own actions. Or, to put it another way, *Moore* doesn't define Laurie by her relationships, but *Laurie* often does. Most conspicuously, rather than admit that she rather likes being a super-hero, she blames her mother for forcing her to dress up against her will. There's a lovely scene in which she tries to pull the same thing on Dan, telling him she put on the costume to help him out with his sexual and personal frustrations — to which he replies, with great amusement, that she's full of shit.

A lot of Laurie's character is tied to her absent father. Her stepfather, she notes, was mean to her and constantly bullying. She notes that that's "probably why I'm edgy in relationships with strong, forceful guys...;" but it's also why she seeks them out. Jon is pretty clearly the ultimate father-figure; the great blue god who will make all the troubles go away. Laurie's reaction to stress is often to wish for someone to make it all okay — Jon functions as a kind of super-protector, teleporting away everyone who makes her uncomfortable, swooping in to pick her up when she's depressed after the jail-break. He's the surrogate, all-powerful parent she never had...or that she did have, considering his distance.

The trick with Laurie is that, what she's hiding from herself, what she wants Jon to protect her from, isn't her weakness, but her strength. She clings to an image of herself as wounded and needy, but there are lots of indications that that's not really who she is at all. On the contrary, the Laurie who comes across throughout much of the book is absolutely able to take care of herself — she's a tough, take-no-bullshit fighter, with a nasty mean-streak. She walks out on Jon, for example, for exactly the right reasons; he's treating her badly, and she's sick of taking it.

She also, incidentally, has a wicked sense of humor. There are lots of funny moments in Watchmen, but Laurie is one of the few characters who is actually, consciously, and repeatedly witty. When she's rescuing the tenement dwellers from the fire, and one of them asks her if she's with the fire department, she snaps out, "Listen, I'm smokey the bear's secret mistress. Now will you please just move or throw yourself over the side or something?" Her byplay with Dan about how "Devo" he looks is laugh-out loud funny, too. Moore seems to have loved writing her dialogue, which sparkles throughout. After Jon leaves earth and the military tosses her out, and Dan suggests she go to her mother, she tells him, "Oh, she'd love that. I'd sooner sleep on a grating. Nah, I'll get by. It just burns my ass to be so damn disposable." It's just a throw away, but I love the mix of profanity, self-awareness, and self-revelation. (And incidentally, when she goes to the Red Planet, the line is supposed to be "Oh, shit. I'm on Mars" — which suggests disbelief and an almost resigned wonder, not "Oh wow, I'm on Mars" as in the movie, which suggests that the character sees interplanetary star-hopping as a kind of amusement park ride)

Of course, it makes sense that Laurie is funny. She's the Comedian's daughter. It's interesting that, in the handful of comments I've seen accusing Laurie of being dependent on other characters, nobody has pointed out how, throughout the book, we subtly and poignantly see her father in her. Laurie's earthiness and her no-nonsense attitude echo her father's; during the roof rescue, it's Dan who's the calm and reassuring one; Laurie's busting people's chops for their own good — mirroring the dynamic between Dan and the Comedian when they handled the '77 riots . Laurie's smoking also links her and her father. In one flashback, we see her Dad helping her to light a cigarette. After she mistakes the flame-thrower button for the lighter and nearly sets his basement on fire, Dan tells her that the Comedian made the same mistake. And then there are visual echoes, like this:






Finally, in her final panel in the book, Laurie is shown speculating about getting a new costume with protective leather and a mask, and perhaps a gun. She also says "Silk Spectre" is too girly and she wants a new name. The implication is that she's going to become the Comedian.

I guess you could use this to say that she's just racing to another father figure; defining herself in relation to someone else, etc. etc. But the point here is that she's not *going to* a father figure. She's becoming a father figure herself -- or accepting the part of herself that is strong, like her father. In discovering who her father is, Laurie seems able to let go of her anger that he wasn't there for her growing up, and at her need to be weak in order to draw him (or someone like him) back to her. In doing so, she's able to forgive her mother...or perhaps to realize that there isn't anything to forgive. "You never did anything wrong by me," she tells her mom. Directly, she's telling her mom that sleeping with Eddie Blake was okay -- but she's also saying that she's not mad at her mom for pushing her to be a super-hero. A few panels later, Laurie's telling Dan that she's not going to have kids until she's had some more adventures. Accepting her parents, she's able to love her Mom, and be (at least in part) her father.

She's also able to sleep with somebody who really has nothing to do with either of them. It's true that at times Laurie turns to Dan for comfort and help -- notably after she's seen the destruction of New York, and she asks him to make love to her. But he also turns to her; it's she who makes the first move in their relationsip, and she who figures out a way to aleviate his malaise; she saves him by putting on her costume. You could see it as a typical wish fulfillment nerdy loser guy - sexy girl dynamic, I guess — except that Dan, while a nerd in some ways, is hardly a loser — he's incredibly physically tough; he's a scientific genius, he's wealthy, he's caring and thoughtful, and while his fashion sense is not ideal, he's quite good looking ("why Mr. Dreiberg, you're ravishing.") You can totally see why she likes him, as well as vice versa. I think it's definitely the case, too, that she is in a lot of ways more butch than he is...though he can be kind of commanding and domineering as well. Ultimately, it doesn't seem like either of them has to wear the pants (or tights or whatever) in the relationship; they seem like partners and friends. I don't think it's any more correct to say that she's defined in relationship to Dan than it is to say that he's defined in relationship to her. That is, it's somewhat correct for both; they're a couple. They've chosen to be together. That's not a sign of weakness or a lack of character development. It just means that, in contrast to Rorschach or even Adrian, they're adults.

Laurie convinces Jon to come back to earth by demonstrating to him the improbability of human life; the unlikelihood that this man would love this woman, and so produce this particular child. For Moore, in other words, the miracle of human life is a miracle of *relationships.* That's why Jon smiles when he sees Laurie and Dan sleeping together at the end; love and the way people create one another is, for him, the beauty of life. People are miraculous because they are made of, or come out of, other people. In accepting her parents, in admitting how she is connected to them, Laurie is able to accept herself, and make choices about what she wants to take and leave from each. Finding that she's not alone, she realizes that she doesn't need a savior, but can instead be the hero she was pretending not to be all along.


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This is the first entry in a roundtable on female characters in comics. Tom, Miriam, and Bill will be along with posts on the topic as the week goes along.

Update: I have a follow-up post on Alan Moore's female characters here

Update:Looking2dastars feels I mischaracterized his comments. His objections are here.