I Am NOT the Beastmaster

good dogs

A review of We3 #3, by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Jamie Grant, and Todd Klein.  Spoilers follow.

"I just showed you a soul being born."
-T.O. Morrow, JLA #5, May 1997

A number of souls are born in the final issue of We3 as the characters make ethical decisions and develop independent selves.  What's surprising, given the prior issues of this series, is not that the trio of rogue animal weapons are able to form such selves but that so many humans finally, belatedly decide to join them.

The injured 3 confronts Animal Weapon 4 alone; Roseanne Berry gives 1 his name back; 2 finally commits to the disintegrating team and to a fragile but self-willed attempt at a home; a homeless man turns down a reward; and Trendle and the General both compromise their operation to do what they know is right.  Almost every character develops a functioning ethical self in the finale, except for Weapon 4, and there's a good reason for that, too.

The final issue is punctuated with moral triumphs both large and small, not what I was expecting from this series.  The first issue promised a story that could only end in tragedy, with We3 doomed to die without their medication and racing toward a home they didn't know they had been made completely unsuitable for.  The final act continues along that trajectory, subjecting the animals to a degeneration that's uncomfortable to watch, before veering off into a happier ending that's dependent on a convenient plot twist (and a beneficient amnesia as concerns the meds).  The heightened emotionalism has served this comic well, but I wonder if Morrison loves these characters too much to subject them to what should by all rights have been their fates.  I would have thought there was only one way 1 could ever reach the place of "RUN NO MORE"; that was what lent the earlier issues so much of their tragic power.

Fortunately, We3 #3 still packs all the formal punch of its predecessors thanks to Mr. Frank Quitely (aided and abetted by Morrison's visually-conscious scripts, no doubt).  This issue isn't quite as relentlessly innovative as the last two, but Quitely sprinkles the battle scenes with little gems: the drop through a brick wall and onto the next page (something that seems lifted from the bodiless but mechanically linear "ghost cameras" of video games - We3 as the first comic written on the Half-Life engine?), the tiny panels offering exploded details of chaotic and high-speed fights (including a miniscule dog that seems to represent how 1 views himself after a whiff of 4's combat pheromones), the panels that descend like a flight of steps or a bomb countdown simultaneously.  These maneuvers never seem like motiveless stunts, but rather perfect formal expressions of plot points, character perceptions, or the spatial movement of the characters through the setting.  This is a comic that moves, making it exhilarating to read quite independently of its story.

And yet it's also still a Wolverine comic, a cinematic shoot-em-up in which even characters barely capable of speech get action-hero send-off lines.  The cat (who's been set up as the Wolverine of this group, the sullen rebel and amoral killer) gets her moment of fury in a pin-up splash page - complete with vintage Dark Knight Returns lightning bolt arcing in the background.  Like all of Morrison's best work, We3 pivots on the edges of experimentalism and accessibility, using tried-and-true story formulas (action movies, The Incredible Journey) to deliver dazzling formal displays and theories about ethics, subjectivity, and language as a technology of control.

"'Freedom'?  The word isn't even present in her vocabulary.  I should know:  I left it out."
-T.O. Morrow, JLA #5, May 1997

"!1!  The name on your collar was 'Bandit.'  U. R. BANDIT."
-Dr. Roseanne Berry, We3 #3, March 2005

I don't mean to denigrate We3 by comparing it to a Wolverine comic, or to Morrison's previous work on the trend-settingly mainstream JLA.  These comparisons should only demonstrate how appropriately Morrison chooses genre material to accomodate his signal themes, or how flexible those genres are in being so readily adapted.

(By the way, speaking of language as a technology of control, you have no idea how difficult it was to write that last sentence without resorting to some dead and debased animal metaphor:  pet themes, hobby horses, betes noires.  I'd guess Morrison is well aware of our tendency to metaphorize animals until the metaphor is lost and all that remains is a dehumanizing association:  why else, in this of all series, would he use the phrase "fascist pig"?  And note what happens to the only actual pig glimpsed in this series, and what happens to Weapon 4.)

My favorite moment in the final issue is, beyond any doubt, the scene where Dr. Berry restores Bandit's name.  Knowing and accepting the consequences this time, she gives a loyal, unfortunate dog something he desperately needs - telling him where "1" stops and he begins.  It's the only way he can live a life that isn't filled with violence and death, and as such it's far more kind and important than her first, disastrous gift of life and freedom that starts the series.

Without this new act of mercy that life won't be long at all, and a danger to other lives.  1 will briefly think of becoming a "BAD DOG" after the tragedies that befall his team, but once he runs into the real thing the difference between them is clear.  He returns to helping his teammates and protecting civilians - successfully this time, unlike the harrowing rescue scene in issue #2 - finally becoming a "GUD DOG" only after learning that he has an identity independent of his erstwhile status as a government killing machine.  Language and a name will ultimately set him free, unlike Weapon 4, who can make speech balloons but can only fill them with the solid blacks of rage.  No souls will be born there.

Despite the surprisingly, disappointingly happy ending, We3 is still far and away the most exciting comic I read in 2004 - and quite possibly in 2005, as well.  I can't wait until the collected edition comes out.

For more commentary on We3, see Jog, Ian Brill, Abhay Khosla, Johanna Draper Carlson, Johnny Bacardi, Jef Harmatz and Peiratikos.

ICAF and Library of Congress Join Forces in 2005

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The International Comic Arts Festival (ICAF) is proud to announce it will hold its tenth anniversary conference at the Library of Congress in 2005.

ICAF is an international summit for scholars, creators, and enthusiasts of comics and cartoon art. The three-day event includes academic papers, chalk talks by distinguished cartoonists, and lectures by scholars from around the globe. While ICAF has been held in the Washington, D.C. area since its inception in 1995, ICAF 2005 marks the first time ICAF has joined with the Library of Congress.

ICAF 2005 will take place from Thursday, October 13 through Saturday, October 15, at the James Madison Building of the Library of Congress, with the generous support of the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division and the Caroline and Erwin Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon. The Swann Foundation, administered by the Library of Congress, supports the study, interpretation, preservation and appreciation of cartoon art from around the world, and has frequently sponsored lectures and exhibits related to comics.

“We’re very excited about holding ICAF at the Library of Congress, and grateful for the support of the Library and the Swann Foundation,” says ICAF Chair Charles Hatfield. “Working with the Library gives us a rare opportunity to encourage the serious study of comics and cartooning. The Swann Foundation is a perfect partner, and the Library the perfect place to bring together scholars and the general public – a historic venue known for its great collections and its support of important research, not to mention its beauty and its great location.”

Dr. Jeremy Adamson, chief of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, notes, “Few people realize that the Library is home to one of the world’s great collections of original cartoon art, encompassing virtually the entire history and scope of comics. Recognizing the scholarly significance of cartoons as potent vehicles of social and political commentary, and spontaneous expressions of contemporary fashion, values, and attitudes, we are pleased to support ICAF 2005.”

ICAF is currently in the process of soliciting paper proposals and inviting distinguished guests for 2005.

ABOUT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CARTOON COLLECTIONS
The Library of Congress houses the Caroline and Erwin Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon, the Swann Gallery, and one of the world’s most extensive and diverse collections of comic strips, comic books, and cartoon drawings. Learn more about the Library’s cartoon-related collections at their official Web site.

ABOUT ICAF
The International Comic Arts Festival is an annual conference dedicated to promoting the scholarly study and public appreciation of comics from around the world. ICAF aims to foster the recognition of comic art, to encourage collaboration between academics, independent scholars, comics professionals and the wider public, and to provide an accessible, public showcase for innovative comic art and comics scholarship.

In addition to presentations by renowned comics storytellers, ICAF offers many shorter academic presentations. These panels form the backbone of ICAF, giving scholars from many countries a forum to present their work to a diverse audience, and allowing the general public to sample the rich and varied work currently being done in the academic study of comics. Learn more about ICAF at their official Web site.

Contact:  Marc Singer (ICAF Executive Committee)

Mysteries

As promised (threatened?), here’s the schedule for the class that will be occupying a good deal of my intellectual energy this semester, and hopefully generating a good deal of it as well - a graduate class on modernism and postmodernism as apprehended through the detective story.

The class is technically an open-topic course designed for readings in American literature, although I broke that when it came to Conrad.  If I had more time - the Monday night classes only meet thirteen times this semester! - I would have liked to include Borges’ “Death and the Compass,” some Conan Doyle stories, and perhaps Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, but I’m very pleased with what I was able to accomodate.

ENG 662, Studies in American Literary Thought (3). The Graduate Catalogue describes ENG 662 as “A consideration of the intellectual, social, political, economic, and historical trends which have strongly influenced literary and popular thought.” This course focuses specifically on modernism and postmodernism, two closely related intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and historical movements that shaped the twentieth century and continue to shape the twenty-first.

We will examine these movements by pairing some of the most influential and perceptive critical studies of modernism and postmodernism with a series of detective novels and films. As many critics have noted, the detective story is one of the most perfect popular expressions of the modernist impulse to organize a chaotic world through heightened perception. By examining how this genre intersects with the tenets of modernism, and how it is revised or altered by postmodernism, we will see how these two movements have structured our understanding of the modern world.

1/24 Introduction: Why mysteries?

1/31 Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter”
Sean McCann, Gumshoe America pp. 6-15

2/7 Pauline Hopkins, Hagar’s Daughter
Stephen Soitos, The Blues Detective ch. 3, esp. 52-76
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, ch. 1

2/14 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, “Modernity and modernism”

2/21 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
The Maltese Falcon, dir. John Huston
McCann, Gumshoe America pp. 88-91, 167-171

2/28 Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem
Soitos, The Blues Detective ch. 5, esp. 142-163

SPRING BREAK

3/14 Film noir
Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles
Double Indemnity, dir. Billy Wilder
Joan Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”

3/21 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, “From modernist to postmodernist fiction”

3/28 Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey ch. 6

4/4 Chinatown, dir. Roman Polanski
John G. Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films”
Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” pp. 16-25

4/11 Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, and David Mazzuchelli, City of Glass

4/18 Miller’s Crossing, dir. and prod. Joel and Ethan Coen
The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen
Paper drafts due

4/25 Paper workshop

5/2 Final Papers due
Final Exam due

As the fella says, persons attempting to find unaltered reflections of culture in these narratives will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find authorial intent will be banished; persons attempting to find allegories will be shot.

Kingdom Come: Dull Reflections

Kingdom Come is the last comic I thought I'd be writing about when I started this blog, but one of the comments on the last post raised some points that merit a longer response.

Kingdom Come had a fair amount of commentary about the comics industry in the early/mid 90s.

From that, one could argue that comic books, and by extension Kingdom Come, were a reflection of the times in general.

[...]

If one approaches Kingdom Come from the above angle, then it could be taught in a politics course.

I'm not we can or should make the leaps from commentary on the comics industry (which Kingdom Come has in spades) to "reflection of the times in general" to the conclusion that Kingdom Come must therefore have something interesting to say about politics (especially about real-world geopolitics in the manner Comic Book Politics presents it).

Just because Kingdom Come advertises an overt comics-industry allegory doesn't mean it comments meaningfully on any other parts of its culture - especially since in 1996 the direct market collapse was already well underway and comics were rapidly detaching themselves from any relationship with the larger non-comics reading public. That doesn't mean a comic written in the mid-90s can't respond to circumstances outside the comics industry, but Kingdom Come would make a particularly poor test case for such readings. Like Marvels before it, it was one of the first works to coddle an inwardly-turning fanboy audience in the manner that's come to dominate superhero comics today - and Kingdom Come targets an audience so ingrown that it actively rejects other, newer fanboys and their style of superheroes.

I'm also personally wary of using what's sometimes derisively referred to as "the reflection theory" to direct the study of popular works. The shorthand version of the argument runs something like this: popular works reflect the times they're written in; any popular work can be proven worthy of academic analysis by showing how it reflects, without any invention or commentary, some contemporary social or political development. The exact mechanism for this reflection is never explained; any authorial agency tends to disappear in these readings.

An illustrative digression: I saw exactly this argument at work in an MLA panel on comics at the conference last December. It wasn't a bad panel overall, with an excellent paper on Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers - a presentation that almost made me rethink my disappointed reaction to that work - but the Spiegelman presentation and the paper on women in superhero comics showed a telling difference in methodology. The Spiegelman paper assumed In the Shadow of No Towers was the work of an auteur, with formal properties and rhetorical strategies that result from conscious decisions by its writer/artist. The superhero paper, however, didn't mention a single creator, even when it would have helped the argument. The genre comics might as well have arisen fully-formed from the ocean froth or the skull of Zeus - or from "the culture," which they were busily reflecting. The result was a profoundly incomplete paper; it made some interesting assertions about superhero comics confirming "postfeminist" myths about the end of gender discrimination, but it was completely unaware of the modes of production that created those comics, and completely unwilling to consider that such comics might create their own statements about gender.

Ultimately, "reflection theory" arguments tend to boil down to a simple and unenlightening claim:  comics and other popular works reflect back whatever something else in the culture is already saying, but they don't comment or invent.  The reflection theory isn't interested in finding any readings of the comics that cannot be attributed to some collective cultural unconscious.  In the end, art only says what everybody is already thinking anyway - and this is somehow supposed to justify it as an object of study.  I don't find that a particularly productive approach in my own work or in the classroom.

The most important thing to look for in any reading (comics or other) is the writer's intent.

On the other hand...  Contrary to everything I just said about the importance of reading authorship, autonomous expression, and conscious design in popular works, I would never reduce the interpretation of literature solely to the matter of divining an author's intent.  Authors can be notoriously silent, deceptive, contradictory, paradoxical, or disingenuous.  Often when readers claim they're looking for the author's intent they're really just working from the text, which is usually all we have to work with anyway and is, from my formalist biases, exactly where we usually ought to begin.  But regardless of one's position on authorship, the primacy of authorial intent has been in dispute for at least a century; there are too many competing models of interpretation out there - good, well-tested models with serious theoretical work backing them up - to make flat declarations like the one above.  Even if you agree with the sentiment, it simply isn't something you can assert without acknowledging the serious contests to that claim.

In any case, I suspect that readings of Kingdom Come, especially politically allegorical readings, would fail abysmally under an approach that privileges authorial intent.

(I do agree with Dominic on one point - a class that's had its appetite whetted for allegorical interpretations may be just as likely to hunt for them everywhere as to wait for the professor to reveal them like a magician explaining his tricks.  That I instinctively went for "passivity" rather than "paranoia" probably says more about my experience teaching Ellison last semester than about teaching allegory in general.)

Kingdom Come: A Clog in the Plumbing

Abu Aardvark directs our attention to Comic Book Politics, a thoughtful blog for a one-month-long college course of the same name.  It looks like a great class, but unfortunately, despite the counsel of the solons of the blogosphere, the syllabus at Comic Book Politics includes Kingdom Come.

I'm predisposed to like any post on Kingdom Come that begins with the apt title "Plumbing the Shallows," but the instructor reads the comic through a method of interpretation I just can't support.

Take Superman. What exactly is he supposed to represent? Can he be read as standing in for the United States geopolitically speaking? Not clear. Could be a warning against isolationism - if America turns its back on a world consumed by horrors, then the world will fall apart (as it does when Superman goes into seclusion). Maybe.

In my opinion, these are exactly the wrong kinds of questions to be asking, especially at the start of any interpretation.  The questions make two highly debatable assumptions:  that the text has a coherent political theme and that this theme is expressed primarily through allegory.  Then the reader has to troll through the text, casting each major character or incident in light of the supposed political allegory to support the presumption of its existence.

I'm not simply denying that Kingdom Come is sophisticated enough to offer such allegories, although that's no doubt a part of my reaction.  I have the same response when students attempt to interpret, say, Invisible Man in this fashion, and that's a text that at least advertises a range of sophisticated metaphors and allegories and invites such interpretations.  But I don't think approaching texts as codes waiting to be broken leads to productive engagements with them - especially when the reader starts by picking out a "key" more or less at random and then filtering everything through it.  Decide that Kingdom Come must represent something political and you will eventually find a political reading of every item in the text - this is tautology, not interpretation.

When I teach Invisible Man I try to wean my students away from pre- (and over-) determined allegorical readings and encourage them to focus on the text first.  What signals is it sending us?  What questions or dilemmas seem to preoccupy it?  What recurrences or comparisons or contrasts demand our attention?  Once we've identified the parts that appear to work through some theme, then we can start worrying about what they "represent" (although even then, I stress that metaphoric or allegorical representation is only one of many types of meaning at the writer's disposal).  That way, we aren't presuming the answers before we even ask the questions.

It's a difficult struggle with Invisible Man, which courts symbolic interpretations at every turn.  It should be much easier with politics in Kingdom Come.  Mark Waid and Alex Ross loudly tout a number of allegories - allegories for the comics industry and a particularly blunt, yet almost content-free, appropriation of apocalyptic religious imagery.  But the politics in Kingdom Come are so vastly oversimplified (all political institutions are unproblematically reduced to the United Nations, which can apparently authorize unilateral nuclear strikes) that any more sophisticated political readings would have to emerge against the grain, in spite of the comic's overt thematizations.  Comic Book Politics makes a good game of it, but while we can certainly read the internal politics of any narrative (his post, for example, examines the reasons why Superman loses his leadership position), those readings won't always translate into a neat allegory about geopolitics.

I think the cart is driving the horse here.  This teacher wants to teach Kingdom Come in a course about comics and politics, goes looking for interpretations that support the claim that Kingdom Come is "about" politics, finds them (some quite interesting, some forced), and, to his credit, reaches the only reasonable conclusion, namely that the politics in Kingdom Come are underdeveloped and superficial.  I have to agree - which is why I think Kingdom Come probably shouldn't be taught in a course about comics and politics in the first place.

Between Comic Book Politics and Dave Fiore, though, I'm tempted to do some academic blogging of my own.  Maybe I'll post the syllabus for my grad course on modernism, postmodernism and the detective novel after I wrap it up.

Will Eisner, 1917-2005