I Am NOT the Beastmaster

The League of Extraordinary Deviants

A FEW WEEKS AGO, Jason Kimble at Trickle of Consciousness posted a very astute analysis of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I've edited, expanded, and re-presented my comments on it here.

Jason's thesis is that both volumes of the comic revolve around its Victorian society's struggles between sexuality and "civilization":

League the first starts with its characters in all manner of un-civilized, carnal pursuits, and it's up to Mina to reclaim every one of them. If I remember correctly, actually, each of the three characters Mina collects is in the middle of some kind of decidedly uncivilized sexual activity: Hyde is raping prostitutes, Griffin raping schoolgirls, and if I'm not mistaken Quatermain himself was covered by girls in his opium den (it's been a while since I read the first series, so I may be entirely wrong on that last).

While a quick consultation of Volume 1 irons out some of the wrinkles in this scheme, I think it also confirms the overall argument. Most of the characters' recruitments aren't the straightforward examples of carnality that Jason suggests, but are highly sexualized nevertheless.

Quatermain isn't covered in women when Mina recruits him from his opium den - he's far too enervated for any activity other than self-destruction. But Mina is assaulted and nearly raped, a truly painful scene as you watch her aura of self-possession flicker and die. The assault happens solely to provide Quatermain with motivation to save her, and when Mina is assaulted again by Hyde later in that same issue I'm left with the hollow feeling that Moore, of all people, should know better.

I'm also not certain whether Hyde has been raping the prostitutes whom he's been killing. That sounds like a meaningless distinction, but consider: Volume 2 tells us that Jekyll is gay (and that Hyde may embody his unrepressed sexuality, viz. his rape of Griffin), yet he is a prostitutes' regular in Paris. Perhaps he's been trying to spark a nonexistent heterosexual attraction by frequenting these demimondes - and then, in the resulting stress when the attempt fails, out comes Edward. These may yet be sexual crimes, but in a fairly complicated way.

So that's one Gentleman detected and caught because of his illicit sexuality - because he tries to contain his (homo)sexuality and fails. Griffin is another, highly obvious example, and Mina herself is a ruined woman, suitable for the League only because of her scandalous encounter with Dracula. Quatermain isn't marked in this way, but then he's the straight arrow of the bunch, more or less.

The really interesting case, though, is the one Jason doesn't address - Nemo. We never see his sexual behavior (or, for that matter, his recruitment), and he seems to contravene the tendencies of most of the Gentlemen. He's the only Gentleman who's still married and who still has a living child. As a nineteenth-century Sikh, he disapproves of Western women and grumbles about having one on his ship, but he nevertheless treats Mina with the utmost courtesy - she refers to him as "my friend" and a "gentleman" and the first thing she says about him is "He has his eccentricities but at least he is courteous." He also seems to be one of the most principled Gentlemen, disapproving of Griffin's and Hyde's actions, taking the initiative in halting Moriarty's aerial bombardment of Limehouse, and resigning over the conclusion of the Martian war.

I would suggest that Moore has crafted a pointed irony in which Nemo, the Empire's "nightmare" who terrifies its schoolchildren, proves to be the most civilized Gentleman of them all - were it not for this scene in part 6:

Here Nemo terrifies Quatermain and Mina even more than Hyde does. Mina suggests this is because "Hyde can be persuaded. Nemo can't," but that persuasion may simply be a function of Mina's unique hold over Edward. Quatermain's horror arises from another place; I wonder if he doesn't find Nemo the greater monster because the captain slaughters Moriarty's men not out of unconstrained passion, but with science and cold, merciless reason.

In issue 1 Quatermain rants about "Nemo the science-pirate," suggesting that Nemo frightens the world with the spectacle of science misapplied. In that sense, the captain isn't wholly unlike Moriarty, the series' ultimate rationalist, ultimate authority, and ultimate monster, but while Nemo still has his principles, Moriarty's intellect is completely unbound by any morality. He might praise "the golden, mathematic logic" of his schemes, but his intended victims, upon working out the elegant details of their disposal, can only wonder that "It's all so calculated." Moriarty's amoral intellect converts MI5 into one of its own enemies, its own shadows; the bat-winged war chariot he builds is no less diabolic than those of the various enemies - Robur, Mors, or the Limehouse doctor - against whom he supposedly protects.

Volume 2 introduces another mad rationalist, Dr. Alphonse Moreau. Jason argues that Moreau's forest of human-animal hybrids represents a forward-looking and stable society, since the doctor "accepts the bestial half of his citizens and indulges it as necessary," namely by allowing Rupert the Bear to have congress with a local gypsy woman. Yet Moreau attempts to "restrain" the hybrids' "animal urges," forbidding them their baser instincts to crawl or lap water; I suspect he allows Rupert the safety valve of the gypsy woman largely for his own self-preservation, lest the bear become "frustrated and aggressive."

We might regard Moreau as a biological imperialist, bringing his experimental subjects the dubious and unsought gifts of human clothes and behavioral codes to which they are ill suited. He's another monster in gentleman's clothing, subjecting his hybrids to punishing and often fatal surgeries and developing bacteriological weapons even as he maintains the sham civility of his vegetarian dinners. (Update: A visit to Jess Nevins' annotations and a quick consultation of issue 5 show that Moreau is serving mice and birds, a violation of his own laws.)

Whether it is carnal or rational in origin, every one of the Extraordinary Gentlemen is marked by the same deviance or monstrosity the Empire would use them to contain. To find that theme we need look no further than the back cover of Volume 1, issue 1: "The British Empire has always encountered difficulty distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters."

More Browbeating

J.W. Hastings and David Fiore both respond to my comments on "middlebrow" comics and comics criticism with potent arguments for why they feel the term is best left behind. Their reasons differ, although both object to any pejorative associations of "middlebrow" with "the masses."

But are such associations still active ninety years after Van Wyck Brooks, sixty-five years after Virginia Woolf, fifty years after Dwight Macdonald? If so, how do they translate to comics? For that matter, how do these terms apply even to the examples J.W. provides of middlebrow comics? While his list looks about right at first glance, it raises the question as to what qualities actually make Herge or Schulz or Lee/Kirby middlebrow. If it's simply that they're good as well as popular, then the list replicates the bankrupt assumptions that the lowbrow cannot be well-made, nor the highbrow well-liked. Or if it's their mere production as comics that precludes them from rising any higher than middlebrow at best, well, that's another proposition best discarded.

This is why Rose Curtin's question, "But how do you tell what brow comics are?", looks more and more apt the longer this discussion continues. We might also ask, in a culture that no longer accepts the axiomatic superiority of high culture to low, how do we tell what brow middlebrow is? What exactly is "middlebrow" supposed to mean in the twenty-first century?

J.W. suggests that middlebrow "means simply neither highbrow nor lowbrow," but for much of its history the term meant something far more specific - and not always the same thing. Woolf's mutable (and too precious and not terribly helpful) usage included patronizing culture-industry fabrications of working class life as well as her more snobbish reaction against middle-class aspirations to grandeur. In the nineteen-fifties, "middlebrow" often meant high culture, repackaged and sold to the masses in a condescending diet of intellectual self-improvement. (The classic example would be Mortimer Adler's Great Books, memorably excoriated by Dwight Macdonald.) To Nabokov, writing on kitsch, it was simply sham art. Focusing on Woolf's essay alone may cast "middlebrow" as an irredeemably elitist concept, but the term's many different applications seem most united by their common disgust at the middlebrow work of art as a lie.

The first step in talking about middlebrow should be separating any condescension to "the masses" from whatever else the term might mean. An example from Dave's piece:

Basically, what I'm saying is--I like "middlebrow" stuff, I just don't like the term "middlebrow", because it drags in associations of "intellectualism" "watered down" for "the masses". Good thought is not only "good" in itself, it's goddamn entertaining to boot. You don't have to "water down" nothin'!

All perfectly true, but, let us be honest – there are plenty of works, in any medium and any genre, that offer pretentious, shallow, or thoroughly diluted ideas, whether for the masses or the cultural elite or an audience of one. Take "middlebrow" out of play and we'll actually have to tell you in detail why American Beauty was overrated tripe, and nobody wants that, do they?

The problem, I think, is that negative association of "the masses" with the shallow intellectualism. Remove it, and the rest doesn't seem so condescending – it seems, in fact, suspciously like an acute critical judgment about a particular work of art, something that can be quite distant from concerns of class and popularity.

Dave also writes:

I don't accept the "brow" system, because it leads to the assignation of the term "middlebrow" to something like Giffen/DeMatteis' throwaway parody Justice League. That's not "middlebrow". That's just mediocre.

Duly noted. Somehow over the course of the comments, my use of "middlebrow" slid from talking about the tastes of the putative critics to the comics themselves, and de Campi's chosen favorites meant that discussion would start with some poor examples. So no, Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League probably isn't middlebrow, but any critical aesthetic that would claim it as a height of the genre – especially so it can enforce an embarrassed value judgment about the genre as a whole - just might be.

J.W.'s piece, with its thesis that any criticism of the middlebrow is inescapably prejudiced against the common folk, is far more troubling because it comes perilously close to the argument that any negative judgment about mass culture, regardless of its criteria, is tantamount to elitism, an attack on the audience as well as the work. This is a formula I suspect neither J.W. nor David would endorse, purveyors of fine critical judgments as they are, but it's where J.W.'s reduction of all modernist critique to anxiety and prejudice tends to lead.

This argument begins with two eminently reasonable premises, that "low" culture is not by definition inferior to "high" and that past criticism was wrong to presume it was. These premises are now so widely accepted that I think it is possible to talk about "high" or "elite" or "low" or "mass" or "middlebrow" culture without replicating Woolf's patronizing tone; the values upon which her hierarchy is predicated are all but rejected today. Indeed, for many there's no longer a hierarchy at all, or the hierarchy has been completely upended, with elitism now the only safe object of scorn - and here the troubles begin anew.

Too many writers extrapolate from these sound premises an unsound conclusion, that any criticism of mass culture amounts to a criticism of the masses and, therefore, to this past elitism. This idea finds its apotheosis not in David's friendly engagement with Brooks or J.W.'s repudiation of Woolf, but in the Panglossian market boosters and "cult stud" academics profiled in Thomas Frank's book One Market Under God, particularly in the chapter "New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies from Left to Right."

Frank examines the "populist reflex" of the nineties, noting that both academic and business culture claimed the mantle of popularity for their chosen institutions (cultural production, the free market) as a means of forestalling any critique of them; if you can argue that it's even faintly popular or "democratic" (not synonymous concepts), then its critics (or regulators) must be elitists.

In a troubling elision, these faux populists claim that to criticize a popular work is to criticize the intelligence of the people themselves, who are beyond all reproach. The only proper stance towards mass culture, in such a climate, is to invoke the charming but dangerously ahistorical myth J.W. lays out at the end of his piece:

America is pretty much a middlebrow country. This makes sense: Americans, as a type, aspire to be better than while shunning elitism. Most of our best artists aim for a middlebrow audience. And this is a good thing.

Criticize the middlebrow? Yer criticizin' America! Where we shun elitism but never get around to shunning the elites.

I exaggerate; there are two proper stances towards mass culture, and adopters of the second – America as a heterogeneous culture comprised of resisting readers, diverse and contentious and creative audiences, John Fiske Raymond Williams Madonna yada yada – would no doubt dismiss the first as representative of the false consensus-oriented culture of those dreaded 1950s. Ironically, both of these accounts end up at the same point; whether they applaud a fictive homogeneity or an all but meaningless audience resistance, both decline to talk about mass culture in any but the most celebratory terms, and both find the specter of elitism behind anyone who says otherwise.

But changing the values of "popular" and "elite" doesn't mean a term like "middlebrow" loses all its other referents. Not only can the middlebrow still exist in such a climate, it can also run in a new direction, quite opposite old Mortimer Adler - no longer the mass commodification of elite culture but the cultural elites' veneration of mass commodity. Into this breach step the academics and the intellectuals, pseudo- and echt, all too willing to parrot the prevailing economic and cultural discourse by disdaining elitism while still, amazingly, maintaining their elite stratifications.

We can find a perfect example of these pretensions to antipretentiousness in the Ninth Art piece – and I do hope this will be my last mention of an article that has already received more attention than it really warrants - which makes its gestures toward populist inclusion (She digs Giffen/DeMatteis? A woman of the people!) only so that it might more credibly offer its absurd dichotomization between American/superhero and European/independent comics. This is a piece with a clear and utterly arbitrary demarcation of what constitutes "high" and "low," and what values might be placed on each, pitting one against the other, buying into the very hierarchy we're all supposed to be so far above now.

We might also find the same impulse at play in a few recent comics. Not Giffen and DeMatteis, no, but consider Planetary, which seeks through its mini-treatises to bestow upon various genres of popular culture a dignity they either don't need or already possess. Ellis's munificence doesn't conceal his transparent shame at his sources. (As John at Commonplacebook writes, "I see very little fondness for the old material he's working over; it's all reductive and bilious.") And we might wonder about Ultimate Fantastic Four, a comic so embarrassed by its original that it can't even leave Victor Von Doom's name well enough alone.

What is "middlebrow," in the end, if not a pretense to a higher station in some hierarchy of taste than the work - the work, not the audience - actually merits? If that hierarchy should be already out of fashion, that has often been the lot of the middlebrow, and at any rate today's hierarchies extend in both directions. We're as likely to see middlebrow interlocutors of the lowbrow as of the high; just turn on your cable.

"Middlebrow" has its problems, no doubt. I don't like that the term too easily confuses questions of production and audience and class with questions of aesthetics and critical judgment, and David and J.W. are right to point out those dangers. But it may have other important uses in denoting not only the traditional pretenses to content and quality, but also the pretense to populism that now serves the greatest beneficiaries of elitism. In a nation where the defenders of caste privilege posture as its most ardent foes, where our selection of one of two Yalies as our next President may well be decided on the frightening criterion of which one can better pose as a "regular guy," middlebrow and its lies might be an important concept to keep in mind.

Lo, There Shall Come... The Curmudgeons

And now, at last, that announcement I promised a few weeks back.

A group of old Usenet veterans, myself included, has started a new comics blog, the Howling Curmudgeons. While the cat was let somewhat out of the bag last week (by my own post on Busiek's JLA/Avengers), we're now fully ready for the public. Stop by and check us out.

Tilting at Windmills

This week, Ninth Art brings us new features, new columnists, and the same old pseudointellectual blather. In this column, writer Alex de Campi finally steps up and takes the bold stance that indie and European comics are smart (like Hamlet), mainstream superhero comics are stupid (like... Don Quixote, apparently no longer a satire).

All this would be perfectly common and therefore pretty well ignorable, but de Campi is exceptional even in her rote invocations of the current Team Comics zeitgeist. In what I can only hope is an accident of timing and not an ill-conceived gesture of solidarity, de Campi praises "Micah Wright's truly excellent bit of civil disobedience over the past couple of weeks."

What the hell - oh, she's referring to his attempt to hype his cancelled trade paperback, not his attempt to pass off his fabrication of Army Rangers service as an elaborate form of media critique. The timeliness of her comments aside, I have to question whether de Campi can truly with a straight face call Wright's neverending carousel of self-promotion a "bit of civil disobedience."

I suspect this is one of those lines that's designed to communicate more about the author than its nominal subject matter. Most of de Campi's comments read that way, in fact, and in that sense she's written the perfect Ninth Art piece:

Trendy but substanceless invocation of comics trends as indicative of American geopolitics, check; public shedding of tears over the cancellation of Wildcats andStormwatch, check; faux economic analysis of German sales statistics and comparative story-to-ad ratios, check; expressed preference for the trade paperback, check; simultaneous determination to "buy the singles" as a form of comics activism, check; confusion of purchasing for activism and self-promotion for civil disobedience, check and check plus.

Sadly, there wasn't a bad idea for a column here - DC's and Marvel's current retrenchment does look like it will produce fewer interesting comics, and the factors behind it may well be political as well as economic. But any political commentary is drowned out by the frantic and constant attempts to be seen adopting the proper stance towards all facets of the industry.

This isn't even Team Comics. It's Team Me.

Playing Osama Some Chin Music

"I wouldn't mind seeing a comic about superheroes dealing with the current world climate. I also don't think a book with a guy in a pervert suit playing Osama bin Laden some chin music is the way to go."

"Playing Osama bin Laden some chin music." What a beautiful phrase. Why, oh why, aren't we all still talking like forties private eyes?

That line is taken from one of Pete Milan's comments on the American Power post. That thread has generated some awfully interesting exchanges (you should go check all of them out), particularly once Ken Lowery and the inimitable Joltin' Jeff McCoskey raised the inevitable question: what separates American Power's cover from the classic World War II numbers in which Cap gives Corporal Shicklgruber a good right to the jaw?

I think Pete's take is exactly right, and I also think Pete is exactly right when he talks about the differences between Captain America (or the Escapist, for that matter) clocking Hitler and the Gimp punching Osama being more about differences between the wars than about our relative levels of "sophistication" then and now. Whether we're more sophisticated or not (in many ways, I think not), we know the politics this time around aren't that easily reducible. (And we also know that, because of its author, American Power was likely to reduce them in the service of a political ideology that ultimately has nothing to do with Osama Bin Laden.)

Pete also says there were no mitigating factors back then. One might just as easily argue that there are no mitigating factors, vis-a-vis Osama Bin Laden, now - that it's just as imperative that we hit back at him, to prevent future Al Qaeda attacks and to bring them to justice for past ones, as it was that we hit Hitler in 1941. I wouldn't disagree with that.

Yet the two wars, and the two covers, are profoundly different. First of all, no matter how widespread the patriotism was back then, no matter how easy it was to jump on the wartime bandwagon, printing an image of a superhero punching Hitler in 1941 was a lot ballsier than printing one of Osama is today. For all they knew back in '41, Hitler might have won. Surely Kirby and co. had to be wondering, if the war didn't work out, if they'd be lined up against a wall somewhere and shot for printing that. Then again, as they were mostly Jewish, they were probably already wondering that anyway... and that too points to the much higher consequences. Publishing an anti-fascist comic book may have been no less easy then - at least, post-Pearl Harbor - but it was far more brave.

American Power is another beast entirely, and oddly enough, I think it's for reasons that have nothing to do with Bin Laden or Sept. 11th. It's impossible to read that cover and the book's concept without thinking about the most recent exercise of our American Power in Iraq, and Iraq is what belies all of Dixon's assumptions about how great it is to flex our muscles.

The Bush administration has spent the last three years running around like a humiliated child, milking our wounds for its political gain while simultaneously picking fights with the easiest target possible - despite, or, perhaps, because he posed no imminent threat to us - in order to reassert its manhood, to convince us that we didn't get our dicks cut off on September 11th. There's nothing noble or brave about that kind of petulant flailing; there's not even anything particularly powerful about it. You only do it if you're afraid you're weak. (To put it another way, beneath every Grenada, there's a Beirut.)

This, then, is ultimately the thing I find most troubling about American Power; it's not a display of American Power at all, but of American geopolitical impotence. You only need to draw a picture of the Gimp punching Osama Bin Laden on a comic book cover WHEN YOU CAN'T DO IT IN REAL LIFE.

Or rather, when you can do it, maybe could have done it already, but your leaders have (to quote Dick Cheney on his Vietnam War non-service) "other priorities."

(No comments for this post - but do join the discussion already in progress.)

They Have Awakened a Sleeping Gimp

All spring long, the "comics blogosphere" - including this site - has been having great fun at the expense of American Power, CrossGen Comics' crass and blatant attempt to cash in on a hopefully now-dead wartime jingoism. The series was cancelled before it ever saw print (thus depriving me of a future Worst of the Worst entry, I suspect) but that hasn't stopped the laughs. If you read any comics weblogs or news sites at all, you probably saw this much-derided cover, in which an Osama Bin Laden lookalike is getting decked by a guy in, to use the preferred term, "a gimp mask."

In issue number 2, Muqtada al-Sadr gets beaten up by a Furry.

One criticism in particular that's been getting a lot of attention recently was delivered by another CrossGen writer, Ian Edginton, in this interview with Rich Johnston. And Edginton's comments put me in a difficult position. Because while I really don't like American Power, I don't much like the reasons he objects to it either.

I asked [Bill Rosemann] that if in the light of recent events, it was in questionable taste publishing a book that could be read by the husbands, wives, and more importantly, the children (it is a comic after all) of the victims of 9/11 and the Atocha station bombing? He said CrossGen intended it to be controversial hence the provocative cover and copy for the prequel. I added that since this book would not have been able to happen if 9/11 hadn't itself happened, that CrossGen were in fact cashing in on those people's deaths. He said no. I finally asked him if, human being to human being, he didn't feel at least a twinge of morality or conscience? He said, everyone's entitled to their opinion.

Except the poor souls who died in 9/11 and at Atocha.

Everyone should pay close attention to this quote, since it's rare evidence that liberals can be just as shamelessly ghoulish about invoking the silent dead to endorse their arguments as can conservatives. But this is the line that really slays me:

I added that since this book would not have been able to happen if 9/11 hadn't itself happened, that CrossGen were in fact cashing in on those people's deaths.

Of course! And since Guernica would not have been able to happen if the Spanish Civil War hadn't itself happened, wasn't Picasso cashing in on those people's deaths? And since Maus would not have been able to happen if the Holocaust hadn't itself happened, wasn't Art Spiegelman in fact...

No, no, I can't even finish typing that sentence. (Besides, I think Ted Rall's already gone there.) Edginton otherwise makes a lot of valid points about the crassness of American Power, but this one seems to imply that any artistic response to a tragedy is an exploitation of that tragedy. Obviously, some are - I think American Power probably would have been, given its writer, and given CrossGen's seizing upon it as the solution to their financial troubles like a drowning man clutching at straws. But plenty aren't.

Also, while we're on the subject of insulting arguments, let's all stop pretending that a work is insensitive or "of questionable taste" just because it could potentially be read by victims or survivors or, especially, the children!!! That way lies the complete muzzling of art and, even worse, the infantilization of the public. Joan Didion, in her (disappointingly slim) book on September 11th, calls this "a troublingly belligerent idealization of historical ignorance," but it's also an idealization of us as being ever so fragile.

Besides, if you're really worried about children reading something, the best thing you can do is to publish it as a comic book in the direct market. HEY-OH!!!!!!!!!

Look, I don't doubt for a second that American Power would have been obnoxious, exploitative trash. But if you're going to criticize it, criticize it for what it really gets wrong; take issue with its moronic politics, and its shameless attempt to cash in on its moronic politics, instead of its potential audience.

The Worst of the Worst

What is it that makes, not simply for a bad comic, but for the worst comics?

Last week, in a shameful attempt to get readers to update my weblog for me, I asked for nominations for the worst comics of the twentieth century. All the suggestions were genuine stinkers, many of them of the amusement-posing-as-derision, remember-this-loser variety. Which was what I'd initially been going for, to be honest, but as more and more of the geek nostalgia candidates rolled in, I began to wonder: Is that all there is? Shouldn't the worst comics be... well, worse?

What should qualify something as one of the worst comics of the century? Is it just artistic incompetence? If so, the legions of the damned are too many to mention, but it's nearly impossible to separate any one bad comic out from its equally insipid peers.

Is it artistic incompetence from somebody who should know better (in which case Neal Adams's Skateman probably does take top honors), or from somebody who doesn't know any better but is inexplicably popular anyway (hello, McFarlane's Spider-Man and Rob Liefeld's hideous Captain America)? Still too wide a field.

Is it a particularly odious story development, something that not only results in a lousy comic but spits on the past efforts of more gifted creators? Fans have become notably more irate about this class of comic since the 1990s (I'm not sure if this is because the stories got worse or because the internet has preserved a lot of conversations that would otherwise have died stillborn on the floors of the comic shops where they belonged), but often it's too hard for the unfamiliar reader to notice the problem. Some character's retconned history or pointless death may indeed produce a spectacularly bad comic, but usually only if you're already reading the thing - and half the time, you shouldn't have been anyway.

Is it an offensive ideology, a disturbing moral implication, or a just plain vile view of the world? Once again, so many comics have promoted offensive ideas - some more acceptable in their own time, like the 1940s war comics, others atavistic embarrassments from the moment they were conceived, like the 90s Bad Girls - that their profusion probably keeps us from singling out any one of them. (That being said, I'm sure there are a number of incompetent, grotesque, bitterly misogynist or just plain misanthropic Bad Girl, bondage, and porn comics out there that deserve to be on a list of the Worst of the Worst, but I have no interest in surveying them to find out who's at the bottom of the pile. And happily, none of my readers seem to have any, either.)

So I've looked for comics that go above and beyond the aforementioned call of duty. Comics that aren't just stupid or offensive but are willfully so, comics that fail not in one or two areas but in all of them. Here, in no particular order save perhaps that of ascending scorn, are five of the Worst Comics of the Twentieth Century.

TOD HOLTON, SUPER GREEN BERET

Matt has already covered this one in detail, but a few of its more obvious crimes bear repeating. This comic covers all the bases, from the total creative bankruptcy of its Captain Marvel rip-off (I think the kid's even mugged Billy Batson and is wearing his sweater) to the more disturbing spectacle of watching a pre-teen boy slaughter dozens of Viet Cong with his bare hands while calling them "sawed-off monkeys." Yes, this one's got it all!

RON MARZ'S GREEN LANTERN

This is the one fanboy bete noire I'd include, albeit not for the reasons it usually gets panned. Some fans objected to Marz's tenure for the undignified way he and editor Kevin Dooley disposed of previous Green Lantern Hal Jordan ("rather the classic model," as Grace Brannagh might say). Other readers took issue with the endless parade of autofellating stories in which Kyle Rayner, Marz's all too transparent fanboy-projection vehicle, met with and was proclaimed "the one, true Green Lantern" by a new DC hero every month, each of them apparently as smitten with Marz's creation as he was himself. Both features made for some pretty lousy comics, but neither would lift this comic above (or drag it below?) the mass of equally uninspired superhero comics of the 1990s.

But one thing set Marz's run ahead of the pack. Kyle Rayner had a nasty habit of sleeping with women who would then either kill themselves or get murdered; or rather, Marz had a nasty habit of mandating their suicide or murder. Again, this is hardly unique; Marz was neither the first nor the last comic book writer to gratuitously off his female characters. But one death in particular - Kyle's discovery of his murdered girlfriend inside his refrigerator - was so vile, and such a signature of Marz's work, that it has since coined the name for an entire website devoted to chronicling dead superheroines (despite the fact that Alex herself was never a superhero), and become the industry standard for pointless misogyny.

Poke around on that website and you can find Marz's defense of his totally gender-blind writing technique:

Take Gwen Stacy, for example (even though it's a example more than two decades old). Her death was a tragedy, obviously, but it also served as a tragedy in Spider-Man's life; a case of a supporting character's death being used to adversely effect the life of the main character. Since most main characters are male, a way of introducing tragedy into that character's life is to have something adverse happen to a woman in his life.

See, ladies, it's not that comics writers (and I am not singling out Marz alone here) hate you, it's just that they know your deaths are wonderful sources of tragedy for the men in your lives. Your needless slaughter gives our tears meaning.

Surprisingly, in the course of defending his decision to kill off one female supporting character, Marz brings up his decision to kill off another female supporting character:

In the case of Marvel's Nova, she died at the hands of a villain during my Silver Surfer run. Mainly, she died because she had been the current herald of Galactus, and I personally could not justify how a human being could willingly serve the world-devourer. Since she had been shown doing this happily for a number of years, I thought a sudden pang of conscience would come out of left field. And I wanted to give Galactus a truly amoral herald, one who actively enjoyed his job. There were secondary reasons for Nova's death, including illustrating how truly despicable that new herald was. But her death had nothing to do with her gender. Had a male character been willingly and currently serving Galactus, I would've knocked him off as well.

"Not because I'm a misogynist. Because I'm a fucking hack."

I'm not sure I buy his argument - he killed Nova because she was too amoral and so he could give Galactus "a truly amoral herald"? - but even if we do take it at face value, it just shows that repeatedly killing female characters due to artistic impoverishment is scarcely different from doing it out of hate; the net result is the same. Killing women for shock value is a staple of far too many comics, but Marz has become eponymous for it. Which is probably the only sort of accolade he deserves.

SAMBO AND HIS FUNNY NOISES

The title alone tells you all you need to know about this one. Racism has never been a stranger to comics - even The Spirit wasn't untouched - but this early comic strip existed purely to promote racist caricatures (and to make a cheap buck from them). Happily, scholar Ian Lewis Gordon reports that stereotypes like Sambo actually didn't go over well in national syndication, and by the end of 1914 the strip was cancelled. Gordon also makes the interesting argument that, while Sambo is long gone, his brand of antics live on in marginally deracinated animal characters like Felix the Cat or, perhaps, Mickey Mouse.

There's a direct connection between Sambo and Felix, by the way. This site provides all the details. When "Sambo" creator William Marriner died in 1914, his assistant Pat Sullivan took over the strip. After Sambo's cancellation, Sullivan went into animation and created "Sammy Johnsin," a Sambo character with the serial numbers filed off for copyright purposes. A few years later, Sullivan asked his partner Otto Messmer to create Felix the Cat.

Why the gap? That Felix the Cat page explains it all:

In 1912 Messmer had met Anne Mason at Midland Beach on Staten Island, a happy marriage that lasted for fifty-nine years. But Pat Sullivan was not as fortunate, and on May 10th 1917 he was arrested for the rape of an underage female. He made a quickie marriage to Margaret (Marjorie) Gallagher on May 21, 1917 and was indicted the next day of rape in the second degree.

Hey, you know who was really not as fortunate? That underage female! (Are you paying attention, Ron?)

So let's see, we have an ugly, racist stereotype, who inspired an equally ugly, racist cartoon character, and who was drawn by a convicted rapist.

Sambo - you're in the Comics Hall of Infamy!

VICA AU PARADIS DE L'U.R.S.S.
VICA CONTRE LE SECRET SERVICE ANGLAIS
VICA DEFIE L'ONCLE SAM

Just to show that Americans hardly have a lock on repugnant ideologies and lousy comics, we now present two foreign series for your perusal and dismay. I only know about this one because of a paper that Clare Tufts presented at ICAF last year. Granted, it's an incredibly obscure set of hard-to-find comics from over sixty years ago; I couldn't even find a web image to show you. (And really, that's a good thing.) But I think you'll agree that Vica merits a special place in all our hearts - a place of unmitigated scorn.

Vica appeared in the French children's newspaper Le Temeraire back in the 1940s. He's a ruddy-cheeked sailor, a rough-and-tumble potbellied fellow, a basic happy-go-lucky Popeye type.

He's also a Nazi.

Well, he's not a Nazi per se, in much the same sense that Marshal Petain was not a Nazi per se. He just happens to hate the Soviets (and their evil masters, the Jews), the English (and their evil masters, the Jews), and the Americans (and their evil masters... why yes, how did you know?). There's no evidence that the occupying Germans directly created or controlled Le Temeraire or the Vica comics, although they did tolerate them... and allow them to print... and choke all of their competitors out of existence with strict paper rationing. Oh, and apparently they shared the same address. But other than that, these comics were the products of Frenchmen (or in Vica's case, Vincent Krassousky, a Russian emigre), willing subjects who were just dying to tell the children of France that their Aryan masters had finally arrived.

"But wait a moment," you may be wondering. "I'm sure the Nazis had lots of cartoon propaganda. For that matter, I'm sure many odious philosophies and dictatorships have developed cartoon spokesmen. What sets this Vica character apart?"

Well you see, he's a Nazi and he's French.

SENSO-RON (ESSAY ON WAR)
TAIWAN LUN (ON TAIWAN)

This discovery I owe to my colleague Jeffrey Miller (who, incidentally, is running for Congress in New York). Jeff's clearheaded but scathing criticism of On Taiwan appears in the same issue of the International Journal of Comic Art as Clare Tufts' piece on Vica. That's the International Journal of Comic Art, volume six, number one... your one-stop shopping for articles about racist shit comics.

Jess Nevins has already mentioned "those really atrocious Japanese comics from the late thirties and early forties." If I had any more familiarity with them I'm sure you'd see some of them here. But what do you say about someone who's promoting the same repulsive messages - only 60 years later?

You say "He's an asshole," and if you're saying it about Japanese cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori, you'd be right. Kobayashi is part of a right-wing revisionist group that seeks to expunge all references to Japanese atrocities during World War II from history textbooks. (He's also famous for his work with legendary international criminal Keyser Soze... no, no, no.) Essay on War, part of Kobayashi's series Goman-Izumu Sengen (which translates, I shit you not, as "Declaration of Arrogance"), does the same thing as a best-selling comic book.

And because one attempt at erasing historically documented crimes is never enough, Kobayashi followed it up with On Taiwan, which throws up a smokescreen of lies to deny the Imperial Army's enslavement, forced prostitution, and murder of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of "comfort women" during the war. These comics don't even have the "we didn't know any better" or "I was just following orders" excuses (or non-excuses) of the last couple of winners, and thus they have truly earned their place at the very bottom of this list.

War, jingoism, propaganda, racism, misogyny, denial... This wasn't very funny, was it? But that's what you get when you really start looking for rotten comics - a set of works as disturbing as the times and events that produced them. The Worst Comics of the Twentieth Century.

Here's to the Twenty-First.

I Love My Work

Every now and then a genuinely interesting opportunity comes my way - and, contrary to the field's general respectability within academia, it usually comes my way because of my work with comics.

Yesterday, as I got home from work, I received a letter from the CNBDI and the city of Amadora, Portugal, inviting me to submit my choices for the hundred greatest comics of the twentieth century as part of a survey for the next Festival Internacional de Banda Desenhada. I'm truly flattered, even if my list will end up being shamelessly Anglophone and shamelessly comic-book and graphic-novel (rather than comic-strip) oriented.

But I see this as a tremendous opportunity. Now, at last, Lady Death, Youngblood, and American Power can take their rightful places among the comics elite of the world.

(Speaking of which, here's Paul O'Brien on the latter debacle: "With AMERICAN POWER, their intended contribution to Free Comic Book Day, which may not see print, CrossGen have surpassed themselves. Not only have they come up with a comic that they literally can't give away, but they have proved HL Mencken wrong. You can go broke underestimating the taste of the American public.")

So I thought, by way of commemorating this great honor, I would ask you, Dear Readers, which comics least deserve these accolades? Which ones should not only not appear on any list, but should be rounded up and burned in a Bonfire of the Idiocies? Which transcend their merely poorly-written, badly-drawn, ineptly-conceived peers and truly sink below the field? Which, in short, are the serious contenders for the 100 Worst Comics of the Twentieth Century?

Comments, please.

UPDATE: Despite what Dave Fiore says, I have no intention of actually submitting any of these comics to the Amadora conference. I don't think list-making is a particularly productive field for scholarship (canon-formation may be, for a nascent field like comics studies, but the two are not the same), but I wouldn't screw with somebody else's project, and at any rate I certainly wouldn't nominate any of these vile, vile comics under my own name. Fiore's, maybe. But not mine.

The comments provide a wonderful survey of crap, but we haven't quite hit bottom yet (though one or two of you have come awfully close). Final honors will be handed out on Monday.

They Keep Pulling Me Back In

I promised I wasn't going to do this, I know, but every now and then I read a comment so spectacularly stupid I just can't help myself. From a Comics Journal Message Board thread started by that instigator Dave Fiore:

One poster cites a web interview with Chester Brown, in which both interviewer and interviewee make the mistake of assuming that works of art can only convey meaning through metaphor. But the real kicker is when Chester decides that since he doesn't "mean" anything in his genre writing, nobody else must either - not even Alan Moore:

He's a smart guy, and I'm sure there was a metaphoric level, I'm not denying that, but let's face it: the main reason he was doing [Watchmen as] a super-hero comic was because he was working for a super-hero comic book company. (Laughs)

To which another reader offers this cogent agreement:

Point being I suppose that if he had been working entirley under his own volition he would not have used a superhero setting to convey his metaphores.

Ah, yes. Alan Moore, who has said that Superman was the single greatest moral factor in his young life, who almost singlehandedly revived superheroes in a British publishing business where they'd long been eclipsed by science fiction, who by the 1990s could have written whatever he wanted for whomever he wanted and decided to go work for Image. Clearly the poor boy has been forced, forced to write those undignified superheroes! When will he finally be able to write something of his own volition?

I'm sure if he'd only had that kind of creative freedom on Watchmen he would have worked in some other, more innovative and artistically rewarding genre like historical fiction or semi-autobiographical reflection. Surely a writer of such talent would never choose the superhero genre to convey his critiques... about... superheroes... Irony powers... fading... can't... maintain...

Folks, this non-debate has surely reached its cold, dead end if the genre's would-be critics are now pretending that superhero creators are browbeaten into their work. If anything, I'd say exactly the opposite is true: there are too many creators who want nothing more than to create superhero comics identical to the (frequently lousy) ones they read last week, and too few like Alan Moore who have aspirations to say something beyond that, or even just to refine their craft in new and interesting ways.

"This Man, This Metaphor!"

The world of comics bloggers has been consumed, of late, by an ongoing debate over the merits of the superhero genre. I've tried to stay out of that - I cancelled the one post I was going to write on it when I realized I was commenting only on other bloggers' methods of argument, not the substance of their arguments, usually a sign that a debate is ready for the mortician. (Although I will note that Dave Intermittent offers a couple of great summations and responses on his site; I especially appreciate the invocation of Pynchon, Rushdie, et al.) Since this topic ultimately boils down to matters of taste, I wonder if there's really any substance to argue at all.

But I have seen one claim, made by both sides of the debate and with increasing frequency, that's worth addressing. It's the idea that superheroes are (or are not) a worthwhile genre because they are (or are not, or sometimes are but often are not) metaphoric.

Which raises the question: metaphoric of what? But it begs an even more important question: do they have to be metaphoric to be good?

The question reminds me of Slavoj Zizek's book on popular film, Looking Awry, which offers a reading of Hitchcock's The Birds that might prove particularly illuminating for all this discussion of superheroes and metaphor. (As an aside, I cannot tell you how much I despise having become one of those academics who begins his comments with a trendy invocation of Zizek. Especially since I'm not even drawn to his work that much. I promise you, it used to be worse; about four, five years ago you couldn't talk to an English grad student or professor without having them mention Zizek in tones once reserved for Shaun Cassidy or Davy Jones. But I do like Looking Awry.)

Zizek notes that many critics interpret the birds' assault as a symbolic reaction against Tippi Hedren's stimulation of the male protagonist's sexuality, awakening him from his stifling, mother-centered family life... or something, it's been a while since I've either seen the film or read the book, okay?

Anyway, the point is that Zizek argues The Birds isn't, from a certain psychological perspective, symbolic of anything at all - the birds' assault is terrifyingly real, a literalization and not a figurative metaphor of the movie's suppressed emotional state. In a tour de force passage, Zizek speculates on what the film might have looked like if the birds were strictly symbolic - if the movie were a Tennessee Williams or William Saroyan play, or some other comfortably tepid midcentury work. He cites, in this Birds that does not exist, the multifarious avian symbols of awakened sexuality and threatened maternal repression that might litter such a movie: the birds bought as a gift (actually in the movie), the taxidermic mounting on the mantelpiece, and so on - none of which ever get around to attacking the humans and giving us BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD.

Zizek's point is that Hitchcock doesn't bury these emotional subtexts in figurative tropes; he makes them real, exploding them across the screen in a torrent of wings. The birds don't symbolize a psychological outburst; they are a psychological outburst unto themselves. And the result is a much more gripping, powerful narrative than the wan middlebrow alternative Zizek imagines.

As in Hitchcock, so in the superhero comics. Superman doesn't symbolize the immigrant's split impulses between assimilation and cultural tradition; he is that split impulse. The Vision doesn't symbolize artificial intelligence and the borders of simulated humanity; he is them. Cliff Steele doesn't symbolize the Western dichotomy between mind and body; he is an extreme test case of that dichotomy, a readymade vehicle only occasionally exploited for that purpose by a Grant Morrison type - but even there, Morrison doesn't make Robotman a "symbol" of the mind/body split because he doesn't need to.

To add another example, Animal Man isn’t symbolic of "animal rights" or any other such thing – at best, he might provide a convenient free-floating vehicle for talking about those issues, but such talk will most likely happen in a surprisingly literal, not figurative, manner. (This is not necessarily a bad thing.)

But he does become a metaphor once Morrison starts using his status as a comic-book character (and a decidedly second-rate one at that) to start wringing out some real ontological tragedy for another class of beings quite different from Buddy Baker. Buddy is a hapless victim of the cruelest, most irreversible of circumstances - he's been created by sadistic, senseless, and ultimately inferior beings who destroy his world and his loved ones for no discernible reason beyond, perhaps, their own amusement. And the author-figure who torments him, like the animator in "The Coyote Gospel," is a stand-in for a particularly bitter vision of God; Animal Man, in other words, becomes a metaphor for us.

That's a particularly rich use of superhero as metaphor, but it's also a fairly rare one. What I'm suggesting is that superhero comics - or fantasy genres in general, perhaps - operate primarily through what Hayden White might term metonymy, not metaphor. They offer a literal substitution or stand-in or test case for the larger idea, not a figurative replacement. And this is potentially amazing, because the genre's conventions - oh, those much-derided genre conventions - allow it to metonymically represent concepts and dilemmas and emotional states normally representable only through figuration, symbol, and metaphor. W.E.B. DuBois had to imagine a veil to talk about double-consciousness and the fracturing of racial self-identity, but most superheroes actually are split identities - and a few shrewd creators have figured out how to use the latter to talk about the former.

Most superhero comics don't do this, of course; many don't even realize they can. And when lesser creators do attempt to locate some kind of larger meaning in their superheroes, they usually botch it up by aiming straight for the metaphor rather than letting these real embodiments work for themselves.

Don't think I'm knocking the hack writers here; the artsy fellows are, if anything, even more prone to this mock profundity. Ang Lee and James Shamus fell for it in their screenplay of The Ice Storm, and I suspect this upcoming Vertigo book about Superman has bitten into it hook, line, and sinker - which is just one reason why I'll be avoiding the godawful thing like the plague. (Said plague being the semi-autobiographical wankery plague that's run rampant through prose "nongenre" fiction and now apparently has its sights set on the spandex.)

I'll take a shlocky, if well-realized, superhero story over that any day, and not only for its more considerable visceral pleasures. Why (to jump back to my Thanos rant) would you try to make a supervillain a metaphor for the death-drive implicit in autocratic conquerers when you could just have him try to fuck Death? On one level, of course, a character named "Thanos" might seem to be just about the most metaphoric one in comics, but on another level he works precisely because the fantastic elements of the genre allow him to embody that death-drive in a horrifically literal manner.

That's why I think some superhero fans are looking to dignify their genre in the wrong places. Don't defend it because it's metaphoric; defend it because it doesn't even need to be.