Motime Like the Present

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Thursday, August 26, 2004

Hey! Speaking of "anti-gnostics"...

I give you... Dr. Roseanne Berry, of We3.

Trendle: Are you alright? You know it's best not to get attached to things.

Berry: But isn't that the point of it all?

I'll have more to say tomorrow, once my syllabus is absolutely finalized...

Good night friends!

David

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, August 26, 2004 02:04 :: link::

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Wednesday, August 25, 2004

The World is Not a Gnostic Oven

(Soundtrack: Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs -- this guy plays Magnapop, 'nuff said!)

Right then--what the hell was Geoff Klock saying about Emerson, a while back? (sure, sure, I know he was actually talking about The New X-Men, more than anything, but give me a break, I haven't read those yet... I will, I promise you!) Oh yeah--he said this:

Emerson's Gnosticism is evident in his remarks about his son. He laments that grief (which occurs at the level of the psyche) cannot get him closer to "real nature"; for a Gnostic everything but the pneuma is unreal, including to a large extent other people. Bloom associates the spark with Genius;[5] it is probably best to think of it as the self that is beyond all categories, catalogues of traits, and definitions.

I feel I must object! Not to the linking of Morrison to Emerson (I've done that over and over again in this space in the past year--and, in fact, I have tended to discuss both of these artists as defiant anti-gnostics), but to Klock's particular slant on the "Sage of Concord". Of course, he's entitled to his opinion--and, as he points out, he's got Harold Bloom on his side!--but still, I just don't recognize this "post-human" Emerson, who sees the world as a "vast prison"! On the contrary, the Emerson I know says things like "let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are" and he sees every blessed moment that we are granted on this planet as an opportunity to make that leap of faith, while we still have ground to run on. Sure, Emerson declares that he cannot "get [his son's] death near enough to him"--but the corollary of that lament is, in fact, that other people are so real (not a part of "me") that, no matter how much we might wish to hold onto them after they are gone, we simply can't! Emerson is not saying that little Waldo didn't matter, he's saying that Waldo was matter. And when the material beings that we love die--or even just withdraw from our lives--it's a reminder--not a rebuke!--of our absolute dependence upon the world we are called to love. Subjectivity is a means, not an end--there's no nourishment for the soul in it!

Now, again, I can't comment on the accuracy of Klock's assessment of The New X-Men (I'm really going to try to get to the books soon, but my time is very limited these days!), and the interpretaton of Morrison's Prof X as a gnostic sounds plausible to me...but there's no way Morrison could possibly be endorsing that philosophy, unless he's changed more than I think he has since writing Animal Man (not to mention The Filth). What do people think? Have others been writing about this? I've been a little out of it!

Good night friends!

Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, August 25, 2004 00:13 :: link::

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Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Letter From An Unknown Frantic One

(Soundtrack: Pop Critical Radio--not nearly as good as Musique du Mouchette, but still a damned site [sick!] better than anything you'll find on your radio dial)

Stanley Cavell describes "the melodrama of the unknown woman" (which he derives from Max Ophuls' film Letter From An Unknown Woman, a paragon of the genre, no doubt, along with the author's other favourites Stella Dallas, Gaslight, and Now, Voyager) as the negation of the "morally perfectionist" "comedies of remarriage". They achieve this melancholy distinction by giving us protagonists who fail (usually through no fault of their own, it's certainly not for lack of trying!) to reach the intersubjective plane which makes the philosophical adventure possible. For Cavell, there are many other types of adventure, and all of them are fuelled by irony (our only defense against "conformity"), but only moral perfectionism staves off the rot into cyncism by (almost magically) preventing the ironists in question from ironizing each other.

(I remain very skeptical about the applicability of this model to real life--and Cavell does acknowledge that it works far better on film, and that, even there, the relationships he prizes so highly are always on the verge of dissolution, or, perhaps more accurately, that the parties to it are continually turning toward and away from each other, as they also turn toward and away from the world--this is called "aversive thinking") (yes, Aaron, these are the kind of questions philosophers ponder--and personally, I find them far from barren inquiries, even if--or perhaps because--they do not yield any specific answers...) As an(other) aside, I must also voice my bewilderment at the fact that Cavell persists in obliviousness to the works of William Dieterle--Portrait of Jennie is a finer instance of the genre in question than any of his pets...and so, for that matter, is Capra's The Miracle Woman...

Anyway, the quintessential/eponymous "melodrama of the unknown woman" revolves around the sending of a letter which, far from bringing its writer and reader together, actually heralds both of their deaths (and even causes one of them). These people die of miscommunication. Lisa has to die in order for Stefan remember/recognize her... Cavell makes a great case for interpreting Henry James' "The Beast In the Jungle" in a similar fashion--the "beast" which John Marcher (and his enlisted lieutenant May Bartram) gird themselves to confront is, in fact, their anticipatory relationship itself! They miss every opportunity to declare themselves "present" to each other, preferring to think of "life" as something that they will confront together, rather than live through, and when the confrontation does come, it is over her dead body... Groundhog Day builds toward a similar climax--and then, magnificently, veers off into "comedy of remarriage" territory.

Now, I ask you: has the "marriage" between Marvel and its readers veered the other way, into "unknown territory"? There are no more letters pages. (besides, its been a long time since anyone at the "House of Ideas" understood how to respond to a letter in the key of Stan or Roy) In their place, we've got message boards. And we all know what a joke they are. As far as I can see, the only person working in superhero comics today capable of upholding the tradition of "serious fun" epitomized by the mid-sixities Marvels ("upholding" is not the same thing as "going retro"--in fact, the two are diametrically opposed to one another--nostalgia is the worst cynicism of all...), is Grant Morrison...which reminds me, We3 #1 is coming out on Wednesday! I'm ready!

Good night friends!

Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, August 24, 2004 02:07 :: link::

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Monday, August 23, 2004

Where Do We Find Ourselves?

(Soundtrack: Musique du Mouchette, has anyone else out there discovered Live365 Radio? It's amazing!)

Just blazed through Stanley Cavell's new book, which I got from the Michigan State U. Library (they've got everything! and, when it comes to comics, I mean everything... even more fascinatingly--to me anyway!!--the curator of the Special Collections, Randall Scott, published citation indexes to the Hulk, Iron Man, and Avengers lettercols in the late seventies... can you imagine my joy? yes, things are good here--except for the fact that the best thing in my life is not--here, I mean... that would be Christine...) But I digress...

Anyway, Cities of Words is wonderful, and very helpful to a comics scholar of my own very particular bent... It's kind of the summation of a career (Cavell is almost eighty) that has, increasingly, zeroed in on an elucidation of a theory of "moral perfectionism" best represented, wackily enough, by Emerson, Wittgenstein, and selected classical Hollywood "comedies of remarriage" and "melodramas of unknown women"... As it happens, Cavell has become increasingly wont to fixate with doddering intensity upon a passage from "Self-Reliance" that I have associated with superheroes since I first read it, a long time ago:

I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.

The idea here is, in part, the fairly common one that the artist must turn away from those immediately near and dear to him/her in order to "open up intercourse" with a larger segment of humanity (by writing something outlandish in a very public place--"Whim"), and (this is where it gets interesting), if you believe Cavell, to both instruct and derive instruction from them (by inscribing a place for imaginative, even transformative, criticism--like Nietzsche's, Thoreau's, Stanley Cavell's, and maybe Grant Morrison's too!--into the text itself)

You mean like a letters page Dave?

You mean that Peter Parker puts on that suit in order to express the "moral perfectionist" sentiment that the "world he converses with [at the Daily Bugle] is not the world he thinks?" and to enter into an adventurous dialogue with the kinds of people who might be similarly dissatisfied with the world as it is (alienated teens and college freshmen? you bet!)?

Oh yes.

And consider the applicability of this statement (from another Cavell book--Pursuits of Happiness--in reference to Clark Gable & Claudette Colbert in Capra's It Happened One Night) to the relationship that Stan Lee and his writer/editors (through the agency of their protagonists and their engaging, conversational narrative style) cultivated with "Marvel Zombies" (they used to call 'em "Merry Marchers") in the sixties and seventies:

What this pair does together is less important than the fact that they do whatever it is together, that they know how to spend time together, even that they would rather waste time together than do anything else--except that no time that they are together could be wasted. Here is a reason that these relationships strike us as having the quality of friendship, a further factor in their exhilaration for us. Spending time together is not all there is of human life, but it is no less important than the question whether we are to lead this life alone.

Needless to say, I have more to say... but I must go now! I've got a week's worth of nine-to-five orientation days beginning in eght hours!

Welcome back friends!

Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, August 23, 2004 00:35 :: link::

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Wednesday, August 11, 2004

I'm Not Really Back Yet, But...

I don't have Internet Access yet at my new home, and so I have not been able to keep up with what my blogopeers have been up to lately (I did, of course, take a peek at last week's Ninth Art, but who cares about that right?) Anyway, I'm not comfortable writing this thing unless I've got the cats gathered round the keyboard and some appropriate music blaring, so I'll just have to wait to say anything of substance until my DSL connection is set up. I'm loving East Lansing, I'm tormented by the fact that Christine is headed back to Montreal in two days, and I'm eager to get rolling on this Doctoral thing! In the meantime, I want to direct your gaze to my friend Maggie's new Victorian-lit focused weblog, which is off to a delightful start (Maggie has never been one to let herself fall into the trap of overspecialization however--and already she has veered into a discussion of the Olympics)

See you next week friends!

Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, August 11, 2004 15:03 :: link::

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Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Greetings From Brigadier Furryface (and other items of interest)

Barack Obama--the keynote speaker's address was equal parts Eugene Debs ("Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth...While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.") and Frederick Douglass (the "outsider" as cultural "insider")--and it adds up to exactly what the Democratic Party should be. Don't you think?

In other news:

If you have any cash to spare, you might want to consider using it to help Rick Geerling reobtain some of his most cherished possessions, which were pilfered from his home last week. Hang in there Rick!

H from The Comic Treadmill presents a statistical breakdown of the lameness of Captain America's run in Tales Of Suspense.

And here's an interesting article by Geoff Klock, author of the excellent How To Read Superheroes and Why--it's called "X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism", and it deals with Millar and Morrison's work on our favourite mutants... I can't say too much about it just yet (I haven't read most of the issues in question--and besides, I'm moving in two days, and there's an awful lot left to do around here!), but I do know that I dispute Klock's Bloomean take on Emerson (and Morrison!)--you can find my own ideas about gnosticism in American literature here.

See you Soon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 28, 2004 09:10 :: link::

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Friday, July 23, 2004

Only Disconnect

John Commonplacebook discusses Alan Moore, who's just been named our "greatest living writer" by Salon.com. Along the way, John quotes Moore on the proper attitude toward information overload:

Connection is very useful; intelligence does not depend on the amount of neurons we have in our brains, it depends on the amount of connections they can make between them. So this suggests that having a multitude of information stored somewhere in your memory is not necessarily a great deal of use; you need to be able to connect this information into some sort of usable palette. I think my work tries to achieve that. It's a reflection of the immense complexity of the times we're living in. I think that complexity is one of the major issues of the 20th and 21st centuries. If you look at our environmental and political problems, what is underlying each is simply the increased complexity of our times. We have much more information, and therefore we are much more complex as individuals and as a society. And that complexity is mounting because our levels of information are mounting.

Personally, I'm much more impressed by John's response to this quotation:

I was thinking about something like this the other day, but I came to a different conclusion. With the astounding proliferation of information around, we have essentially looped back to where we started from, i.e., with very little information that we don't really know how to interpret. Consider the sheer amount of worldviews available to us: we could be Marxists, feminists, Buddhists, occultists, libertarians, cognitivists, Reform Jews, Wiccans, etc., etc. Which doesn't even account for the variations in those worldviews themselves: what kind of feminists should we be, or Marxists, or occultists? There are variations within variations, a network extending to infinity in all directions. This is complexity so extreme it reduces to simplicity just as a lot of little pen-lines crossed will look at a distance like a black mark. We don't know anything.

Exactly!

Thanks to mass communications, we emerge from the birth channel into a position of Socratic skepticism. I have high hopes for the "Internet Generation". Moore, David Icke, Fritjof Freakin' Capra, et al--these guys are still playing by the old rules, assuming that the people need a Shaman to drape the blanket of "coherence" over their scared little bodies, when in fact we are more and more comfortable at the room temperature of "particularity". We are living through a second Reformation my friends.

The "ooh, there's too much information--the sheep are confused" take on postmodernity (for Exhibit A of this line of reasoning, as it pertains to the tiny little world of comics criticism, see Heidi MacDonald) is the pathetic last gasp of would-be experts in a world in which "expertise" has been exposed for the chimera that it always was. Even God would be incapable of following every conversation on the Web. The internet is a powerful telescope zeroed in on human individuality itself. At long last, the dots have overwhelmed the lines that would turn them into false constellations of "meaning"--and the story of the 21st century will be the rise of intersubjectivity at the expense of Moore's "connections".

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 23, 2004 11:10 :: link::

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Thursday, July 22, 2004

Things That Now Are

Thanks to Jess Nevins' generosity, I received Matt Rossi's book--Things That Never Were--in the mail this morning. It looks fantastic! I'm right in the middle of John Dos Passos' massive USA Trilogy right now (which we'll discuss at the final meeting of the reading group I helped to found in 1997 that I'll be able to attend for quite a while...sniff!), and of course I'm about to go (Mid-)West, but I expect to deal with TTNW in detail in a couple of weeks!

Also--I'm still not sure what to say about Seaguy #1-3 at this moment--except that I found it mesmerizing, in a Dead of Night kinda way (and there aren't many better ways, believe me!)

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 22, 2004 13:15 :: link::

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Wednesday, July 21, 2004

"With moral agency comes responsibility"

Keith Burgess-Jackson applies a variant of the spider-maxim to the animal-rights question! (link via Verbum Ipsum) Needless to say, I am in complete agreement with him.

Seaguy #3 Tonight Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 21, 2004 12:03 :: link::

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Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Black Dan'l--The First Superhero?

(Soundtrack: The Minutemen --What Makes a Man Start Fires?)

All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!

Then, pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!
--John Greenleaf Whittier, "Ichabod!"

A long time ago, I pitched my idea that Stephen Vincent Benet's (and William Dieterle's) The Devil and Daniel Webster is not merely "an American Faust", but the American answer to the Faustian dilemma of infinite longing. By all accounts, Webster did have a superpower--he was the greatest orator of the 19th century (how great was he? he actually impressed Emerson--and Emerson's whole philosophy turned upon a refusal to be impressed by anyone). Give Black Dan'l some chains and a shaggier mane and he's Webstar the Speaker.

The real Webster is kind of an anti-hero actually, because the signature moment of his career is the Seventh of March (1850) Speech, in which, mind distempered by Presidential ambitions, he profaned his instrument by joining in on the corrupt pro-Fugitive Slave Act jam-session then in progress. On that fateful day, in the Senate, Webster spoke on his own behalf, not the nation's. Of course, in his private life (secret identity) he had always been as self-serving as any other politician you could name, but (at least in the public's perception--and perhaps in Webster's own) when it came to speechifying, he had, up until then, merely sung the lead part in the hymn to abstract right, as embodied in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

That's history--but the Webster-figure in literature is something else again, thanks to Stephen Vincent Benet. Benet's Webster (who first appeared in 1937--one year before Superman), like the early superheroes, was a product of Depression/Popular Front culture. This Webster still has the ambitious side of his nature in check. We see him comfortably ensconced in his private life at Marshfield, farming, reading, and generally living high on the hog. But he has a great power and, of course, that entails certain responsibilities. For example, he cannot ignore Jabez Stone's plight, since he knows full well that he is actually capable (although not certain!) of defeating the devil himself in a war of words. He wades into the Faust legend in order to prove that human reason (embodied in our contracts with each other) can sometimes overrule the pacts we make with our own worst selves (symbolized by old Mr. Scratch)--it's a socialized version of the Buddhist concept of escaping the wheel of desire. When Webster enters the court of the damned, risking his life in order to further the interests of another (and society), not himself, he is every bit the superhero, even though he does not wear a mask.

I would argue that "secret identities" are not essential to the superhero genre, but dual identities are (and it sounds like Eightball #23 is the latest illustration of this fact). In life, there are certain situations in which moral action is required, and there are others in which a more nuanced, aestheticizing approach is called for. The former is, obviously, the realm of superhero action--a strange place where "the right thing" is fairly obvious (and has nothing to do with what you want for yourself), and what counts is steadfastness of purpose. Incidentally, this is why superheroes cannot kill--it's not because "killing upsets the kiddies", it's because vengeance is always at odds with justice, and superheroics are "adventures in morality", not dramatized power fantasies.

The world of the secret/private i.d. is much more common, of course, and to fail to recognize this is to fail the "Rorschach Test"--but to rule out the possibility of moral action is just as dangerous. In a society characterized by "good enough justice" (as Rawls and Stanley Cavell put it), every one of us is obligated to live in both worlds.

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 20, 2004 13:39 :: link::

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Completely Hostile?

Adam Stephanides was unable to sit through a full screening of Gun Crazy (1949)!!!... This prompts me to wonder: do Adam & I agree on anything?

More soon friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 20, 2004 11:38 :: link::

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Monday, July 19, 2004

My Friend Jamo (who, when we first met in a graduate Lit. seminar, upon learning that I liked comics, assumed that I must know Daniel Clowes--alas, I did not!) on Eightball #23--Enjoy!

After harrassing my favourite comic book store owner for nearly two years, finally another Eightball has arrived. The cover will shake people to the core - a lone red masked figure, surrounded by black background, dressed in costume. The figure is reminiscent of another character from a short strip from issue 18 titled "Black Nylon." Who is this though on 23? What happened to our Eightball? Such a sparse and heroic cover? This is your protaginist, Andy, who like many a Clowes character is cynical, obsessed with his past, and depressed by the present and future because he is unable to find any satisfaction with the world around him. The difference for Andy, the point that separates him from many of in the Clowes' Eightball family of recent years, is that Andy has super powers. Now stop for a moment. You're worried. Is Clowes (gasp) moving into and reinventing the super hero genre? If yes, are comic nerds everywhere about to get the blankets they've been hiding under ripped off to reveal the blazing flashlight that once danced merrily over the panels of the latest issue of X-Men! Can anyone ever say 'nuff said again without grimacing at its insignificance? Stop this thinking people, you have nothing to worry about. Unless of course you live alone, then ask yourself why are you still under that blanket. Get out from under it and run to the store and demand your Eightball medicine.

For those who have been reading Eightball from the start, those veterans of '89 that can still tell you where they were when they first cast eyes on the lovely Tina, Clowes is back from his sojourn into film. He hasn't sold out, man. He's still on our side. Still fighting for all us marginals. But now he's given us a hero. Forget your namby-pamby Spider Man, Fiore, Clowes gives us the undisputed champ, the world shaker, the panel defying...ANDY.

Unlike Spider Man 2, which asks among other questions, is Peter Parker capable of having an identity beyond his super hero persona, in Clowes' Eightball world, Andy is always asking himself can he have a super hero identity. The problem for Andy is that he has super strength (courtesy his scientist father, who passed away while Andy was still a child). What Andy is missing though are those situations that will define him as a super hero both to himself and the rest of the world. He cannot just walk into danger like Spider Man, he has to find them, or what is always the case, create them himself. The likes of Dr. Octopus don't exist, Andy's nemesis is the banal. He has to settle for school bullies, abusive fathers, and insecure best friends. In one instance, Andy's best friend, Louie, swear's a friend of his, Janet, is being beaten up by her father. Andy confronts the man while he is walking his dog late one night. The result is not that Andy has made Janet's life easier, but that while he's beating up her dad, the family dog escapes. Janet's thanks to him: "I pray to god you fucking die!" (21)

The only time Andy ever gets to construct an idealized persona is in his imagination. There are several series of panels of both Andy and Louie, dressed in costumes, jumping across building, flying in a space ship, or watching the Earth from the Moon. These fantasies though are never complete escapes from the real world. The dialogue is grounded in Andy's real world - as he and Louie are swinging through the city sky, their conversation is about the school bully, whose car they both vandalized. A scene that should allow Andy respite from the real world is still trapped in that world, and a moment to see his potential is only a reminder to him of his ordinariness.

Clowes never allows Andy to escape his average life. From the moment "The Death Ray" starts, we see that Andy is mired in the banal. We're introduced to Andy at the mid point in his life, in the section titled ANDY 2004. He states his situation: twice divorced; only friend a dog; and at the end of the second page this statement: "You try to make the world a better place and what does it get you? I mean, christ, how the hell does one man stand a chance against four billion assholes?" Possible the least inspiring words ever spoken by a super hero. Then he retraces, like a great Dick Powell film noir, the events that led him to this cynicism.

Is this Clowes at his finest? A friend of mine hasn't finished it yet. Issue 22 (Ice Haven) was the high point, he says. Clowes has nothing left. This is just retreading over the same material without anything new. If you've already read "The Death Ray", if in anyway you agree with any of these sentiments, don't be insulted baby, but like I said to my friend, you're wrong. What Clowes has done in issue 23 is subvert again his readers' expectations of the tone of an Eightball comic. This isn't a laugh out loud comic like 22. The humour is subtle - there isn't a Pencil Dick or Dan Pussey to make us feel better, or my favourite supporting character Mr. Beard with his wonderful "Glad to see they're still teaching the classics" when he sees David Boring reading a comic at a coffee counter.

Death Ray is upsettingly full of cynicism. Why detail the fall of an optimist, a child, who, with his super powers, has, finally at his finger tips the super powers that only our imaginations allow us? Why end the comic the way it ends? Why be so dark Clowes? The answer, I feel, is one of timing. More than anything else, more than a super hero parody, more than a study of adolesence to adulthood, or the relationship between boys, "The Death Ray" is a critism of America in the present moment. Yes I agree it is about super heroes, about teenagers, about the homoerotic undertones in many male relationships, I won't take that away from anyone who is more passionate about these aspects of the comic, but lingering over Andy's story, is a criticism of America right now and primarily the Iraq war.

Clowes lets his criticism slip into the narrative subtely. He ain't no Michael Moore, in your face, guiding your hand as you fill out your ballot. In the strip called "Sonny," while enjoying a bowl of cereal, Andy tells us: "Really I'm kind of an All-American type -- a modest guy with common sense who knows the difference between right and wrong." In the next panel, his hand over his heart as he listens to the national anthem at a sporting event, he says: "I'm a straight--shooter and a stand up guy. I value honesty, integrity, and above all else, loyality." (24). Wow, if that ain't how Jr. has presented himself over the past four years. Then there's the strip called The United States of Andy (40), a monologue of Andy in the present. Here his identify and beliefs are interwoven with the society he's a product of. Andy shows throughout the story, especially his relationship with Louie, that he is incapable of seeing right and wrong. His decisions are made strictly for personal reasons, not necessarily positive reasons, but to eliminate situations he has clear solution to - the results always emotionally ambiguous for him.

This is an America in which a US soldier rapes his girlfriend every night and who laughs when his dog kills Andy's dog. How does Andy stop a person like this? A evil next door that he can't reason with? Zap him with his death ray and make the problem disappear. Kind of like Jr.'s plan to tear down Abu Ghraib - problem solved because problem gone. Andy's the law, getting rid of who ever he wants, without answering to anyone (cue UN analogy now). And if that's not enough example for you, Andy at the super market reading a paper in line, and what does the cover scream but "Weapons found in Artic!"

I don't want to blast people with political ray guns all day though. Eightball 23 is a major achievement by Daniel Clowes because it isn't just an attack on the Iraq war, that's embedded within in the story as much as the parody of a super hero comic, hey as much as the strip comic. There isn't anything that can be discarded from Clowes story, finally he has found a way to incorporate his love of the set-up punch line comic and a narrative storyline.

My fear, as I read #23. as my hands shook, is when will these beautiful new panels stop arriving. When will the outside forces of Hollywood and big magazine money interfere with Clowes Eightball work? Who is there that can replace him? (My bet right now is Rick Altergott who's new Doofus storyline is soaring within the Raisin Pie covers). Sorry, comic book panic.

Jamie Popowich

Good Afternoon friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 19, 2004 15:03 :: link::

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Sunday, July 18, 2004

Topical Heat

This Sean Collins post brings the week that was into focus, and I thank him for that, because my blogovision has been awfully blurry of late--I've been attempting to spend as much time with the people in my neighborhood as I can, before I have to move...

Two things:

1. on the newest wave of "THIS IS COMICS AMERICA"--personally, I don't think we'll be able to say that the medium has "come of age" until critics can discuss (specific) comics without having to discuss "Comics"/"Comix"/"the potential of the artform"... Fuck the "artform"--the art is out there, so just dig in!

2. on Eightball #23--I haven't seen it yet, but I've been enjoying the discussion. My friends Jamo & Anjo are coming into town for a visit next week, and they're bringing the issue with them, so I should have something to say about it then...

See you soon friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 18, 2004 09:53 :: link::

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Wednesday, July 14, 2004

The Players Are the Thing

I wish I had the time to formulate a proper response to J.W. Hasting's wonderful post on film acting, which features insightful comments like this:

Rather than thinking of good actors as people who can convincingly “be someone else,” I’d argue that good actors are people who can convincingly find themselves in the roles they play.

Yes. Exactly. It's no accident that this statement follows a paragraph on the career of Jimmy Stewart. And I would argue that a director's most important task is to facilitate these inspired "self-insertions" into the text of the film (Stanwyck, Arthur, and Stewart's work with Capra; Hepburn in Stevens' Alice Adams; Hepburn, Rogers, et al in LaCava's Stage Door, etc.)

J.W. deplores the fact that not enough film critics pay attention to the acting in the works they study, and I agree with him (Ray Carney's American Vision--particularly the chapter on "Deeds, Words, Gasps, and Glances"--and Elizabeth Kendall's The Runaway Bride are two magnificent exceptions to this rule!)

J.W. also has some very interesting things to say about Anthony Hopkins' (whom I loved, along with Debra Winger, in Attenborough's Shadowlands, which you often hear discussed as if it were just another damned Merchant/Ivory "ahc-ting" fest, but man, it's not!) varied career, and this prompts me to go completely off the rails in search of your advice, dear blogosphere:

You may remember that Hopkins played fibre impressario Dr. Kellogg in The Road To Wellville...and it just occurred to me that I am on the verge of moving to a location that is within an hour's bus ride of Cereal City USA! My question--has anyone been there? And is it worth visiting? (Keep in mind now that I eat various forms of cereal three times a day!)

Good afternoon friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 14, 2004 15:19 :: link::

comments (5)

Monday, July 12, 2004

Stations of the Ross

(Soundtrack: The Muffs)

Marc Singer offers up some interesting thoughts on the life, death and rebirth of genres (building upon an article by music critic Alex Ross, and this piece by Peter Coogan, who's also been very active on the Comics Scholars Discussion List lately).

Since everyone seems to be using Thomas Schatz as an authority on genre, I thought I would trot out my own candidate for "scholarly precursor most likely to lead comics criticism out of the wilderness of auteur-worshipping babytalk"--yes, I'm talking about Stanley Cavell (whose Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage is absolutely indispensable to anyone who wishes to treat pop culture as something more than superstructural dross).

Anyway--here's a Cavell quote that speaks to the point Marc raises, and which has heavily influenced my own thinking about the development of superhero comics (i.e. while Miller + Moore work overtime to isolate, reify, and deconstruct the genre, Morrison and Gruenwald elaborate upon it, with far more interesting results--in my opinion, of course!):

To assess my claim that the Hollywood sound comedy of remarriage begins with It Happened One Night, in 1934, one will have to know more definitely what I mean by a genre and what I mean by its having a beginning. I have already said that my date may be off--an earlier film may present itself for consideration, or it might be argued that It Happened One Night is not a true member of the genre, so that it only begins later, say with The Awful Truth. But I have also said that I am not writing history. My thought is that a genre emerges full-blown, in a particular instance first (or set of them if they are simultaneous), and then works out its internal consequences in further instances. So that, as I would like to put it, it has no history, only a birth and a logic (or a biology). It has a, let us say, prehistory, a setting up of the conditions it requires for viability; and it has a posthistory, the story of its fortunes in the rest of the world, but all this means is that later history must be told with this new creation as a generating element. But if the genre emerges full-blown, how can later members of the genre add anything to it?

This question is prompted by a picture of a genre as a form characterized by features, as an object by its propoerties; accordingly to emerge full-blown must mean to emerge possessing all its features. The answer to the question is that later members can "add" something to the genre because there is no such thing as "all its features". It will be natural in what follows, even irresistible, to speak of individual characteristics of a genre as "features" of it; but the picture of an object with its properties is a bad one. It seems to underlie certain structuralist writings.

An alternative idea, which I take to underlie the discussions of this book and which I hope will be found worth working out explicitly, picks up up a suggestion I broached in Must We Mean What We Say? and again in The World Viewed, that a narrative or dramatic genre might be thought of as a medium in the visual arts might be thought of, or a "form" in music. The idea is that the members of a genre share the inheritance of certain conditions, procedures and subjects and goals of composition, and that in primary art each member of such and such a genre represents a study of these conditions, something I think of as bearing the responsibility of the inheritance. There is, on this picture, nothing one is tempted to call the features of a genre which all of the members have in common. First, nothing would count as a feature until an act of criticism defines it as such... Second, if a member of a genre were just an object with features then if it shared all its features with its companion members they would presumably be indistinguishable from one another. Third, a genre must be left open to new members, a new bearing of responsibility for its inheritance; hence, in the light of the preceding point, it follows that the new member must bring with it some new feature or features. Fourth, membership in the genre requires that if an instance (apparently) lacks a given feature, it must compensate for it, for example, by showing a further feature "instead of" the one it lacks. Fifth, the test of this compensation is that the new feature introduced by the new member will, in turn, contribute to a description of the genre as a whole ...So while the genre may not care, so to speak, in what order its instances are generated, a book about the genre is affected at every turn by the order it imposes upon itself. The essays [in Pursuits of Happiness] are quite different from one another and it is clear to me that each of the readings would bear a different countenance had its order in the composition of the essays been different. Does this impugn the objectivity of my readings?

Gotta go!

Bonjour les amis!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 12, 2004 12:47 :: link::

comments (2)

Sunday, July 11, 2004

Questionnaire For Fire
(Courtesy of Milo George)

--What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

America's Next Top Model

--Where would you like to live?

I wish I could just stay here in Verdun.

--What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Just being here is pretty good.

--To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Sloth

--Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?

Miles Coverdale, Pierre Glendinning, Eugene Gant, the Continental Op, Peter Parker, Buddy Baker, Mr. Pickwick, Linus Van Pelt, Syd Orr.

--Who are your favorite characters in history?

Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Eugene Debs

--Who are your favorite heroines in real life?

Anne Hutchinson, Margaret Fuller, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn, Kathleen Hanna, Corin Tucker.

--Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?

Dorothea Brooke, Hester Prynne, Milly Theale, MJ Watson, Lucy Van Pelt.

--Your favorite painter?

Edward Hopper

--Your favorite musician?

Well, my favourite band is Sleater-Kinney.

--The quality you most admire in a man?

bemused compassion

--The quality you most admire in a woman?

ditto

--Your favorite virtue?

compassion again

--Your favorite occupation?

veterinarian

--Who would you have liked to be?

nobody else but me

--Your most marked characteristic?

inability to forget anything

--What do you most value in your friends?

the way they make me feel

--What is your principle defect?

My inability to progress (I'm attempting to turn that into a virtue)

--What is your dream of happiness?

cats with much longer life spans, free access to Cracklin' Oat Bran

--What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?

if human callousness cannot be eliminated

--What would you like to be?

maximally aware

--In what country would you like to live?

again--wish I could stay right here, but Rome beckons, and that'll be interesting too...

--What is your favorite color?

green

--What is your favorite flower?

Sunflower

--What is your favorite bird?

Whippoorwill

--Who are your favorite prose writers?

Hawthorne, Hammett, Jean Toomer, Thomas Wolfe, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Dickens, Henry James, Stephen Vincent Benet, Dawn Powell, Paul Auster, Robert Benchley

--Who are your favorite poets?

Frank O'Hara, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Emily Dickinson.

--Who are your heroes in real life?

I don't have any heroes--oh, maybe Frank Capra, just because there's no question about filmmakers...

--What are your favorite names?

Jefty, Pyewacket, Dashiell

--What is it you most dislike?

the food chain

--What historical figures do you most despise?

Machiavelli, Robespierre, Andrew Jackson, Pope Pius IX, Hitler, Stalin

--What event in military history do you most admire?

none

--What reform do you most admire?

the advent of rights discourse

--What natural gift would you most like to possess?

the ability to get by on 1 hour's sleep a night.

--How would you like to die?

Is that some kinda threat?

--What is your present state of mind?

Michigan

--What is your motto?

"Yes, you can eat cereal three times a day."

Enjoy the rest of the weekend friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 11, 2004 04:24 :: link::

comments

Thursday, July 08, 2004

How To Brood

(Soundtrack: Public Enemy -- Revolverlution)

"Tell wind and fire where to stop--don't tell me!"
--Madame Defarge, in A Tale of Two Cities

"If you want to fight the power you have to be the power."
--Chuck D

Tim O'Neil has some very interesting things to say about Mark Gruenwald's Captain America run, and promises to discuss Quasar shortly! Sounds good to me! As some readers may remember, I did tie in one Filth-post to the cosmic Avenger's adventures, but I haven't done anything else with the series, because (as in the case of Doom Patrol) I'm missing way too many issues...

But to get back to Cap--I wish to apologize to Tim, because I completely misunderstood his point yesterday, when he argued that the character, ideally, should never "brood"... Here's the paragraph that cleared it up for me:

Gruenwald's Cap didn't brood. He thought a lot, yes, but he had those thought balloons sticking out of his head while he was doing stuff – riding his motorbike or clobberin' baddies or something like that. I think I recall a few times when Steve Rogers was laying awake in bed and thinking, but that's hardly brooding. Brooding is sitting atop of gothic Gargoyle and musing about how you will never have a healthy sexual relationship because you keep thinking about those pearls around your mother's neck when she was shot and where oh where is my sidekick in the shortpants? I don't like this whole girl Robin thing because they aren't anywhere near as sexy as prepubescent boy-children.

Exactly. Cap's problems are never personal (although, mid-way through Gruenwald's run, the protagonist's relationship with Diamondback did explore a very important question--i.e. is Steve Rogers' "old-fashioned" liberal individualism truly universal, or is it hopelessly tangled up with a middle-class, white, male identity?) However, this doesn't mean that Captain America always "knows what's right"--or that Gruenwald makes things as easy for him as Tim implies. Sure, blatant law-breakers cross Steve's path fairly often, and Cap never hesitates when lives are in danger, but you always get the sense that these altercations are the easy part of his job.

An analogy: I happen to have very strong--bordering on maniacal--animal rights sentiments, coupled with a horror of imposing my will upon others. I spend an inordinant amount of time just wishing more people would agree with me--and I take every chance I get to express my feelings on the subject in unconfrontational language--but if I happen to see my neighbor beating his/her dog, I'm going to stop them. What a luxury! To confront a situation that allows one to act purely on principle! Doesn't happen often, does it? Well, traditional superheroes get one such opportunity to cathect their moral sense every month--and maybe they need it! After all, I hate hunting with a blind passion, but I know that I can't stop it singlehandedly. If I could, there might be some Squadron Supreme-style trouble in the boreal regions of North America. Unless, of course, I had some way to let of steam by stopping certain even more obvious offenses.

That's what superhero fights are--these characters don't restrict themselves to the capture of criminals in order to "perpetuate the status quo", they do it in order to save the dream of sustainable, popularly-based progress from their own supermoral radicalism.

I liken superheroes to Calvinists because it seems to me that they face exactly the same set of choices that Protestant sectaries do. The extreme right-wing Puritan's (theocrat's) sole imperative is to align the world with the Word as he/she conceives it. Setting the house in order, if you will. The extreme left-wing Puritan (antinomian), on the other hand, wishes only to proclaim the Word--even if in doing so they set the house on fire. In reality, most American sectaries (and most superheroes) have adhered to a middle course between these two poles. But they're all radicals (they are all concerned with pushing society toward some Ideal state)--and the interesting thing about American radicalism is how moderate it has been when compared to its European analogues.

Most superheroes--and Gruenwald's Cap preeminently--have tendeded toward "come-outerism". In issue #336, Brother Nature (a sympathetically-portrayed superpowered eco-terrorist) and the newly defrocked Steve Rogers engage in a struggle that results in the destruction of the very Redwoods that the ex-forest ranger had been trying to save from developers. All of this leads to a very characteristic page of Gruenwaldian introspection (which, as Tim rightly points out, leans heavily upon the now-verboten use of thought-balloons):

Rogers (thinks): This man's situation parallels mine in certain respects. We've both devoted ourselves to higher ideals...he, the sanctity of nature--me, the American Dream! "Brother" found he could not accomplish his goals within the legal system, so he went outside of it. Way outside, to hear him tell it... In my case, the government I once worked in harmony with made it so I could no longer work with them! The question is...do I follow Brother Nature's route--become an outlaw--a guerilla--in order to further my ideological pursuits?

(A panel reveals the extent of the destruction)

Brother: Oh mother! Look what I did! Look what you made me do!

Steve: Don't blame me for your actions! You didn't have to lose your cool like you did... I don't have the power to disrupt nature--you do. Everyone is responsible for the consequences of their own actions, regardless of circumstance!

Brother: You're right man! I blew it! I did the very thing I was trying to prevent!

Steve: That's the danger of crossing the line and becoming a renegade. There's no telling how far you may be obliged to go to accomplish your wnds. You might even end up harming that which you most want to protect!

Steve (thinks): In my case, if I were to wage war against the commission for the right to be Captain America, I too may have to go so far that I would hurt the ideal I serve. No matter what the personal cost. I must not declare war on appointed officials of my nation's government!

It sounds like the hardening of a protean respect for process into a quietist creed. However, this is not Steve's final thought on the matter by a long shot... The thing I love about Gruenwald's Cap is that he is always more concerned with the dreaming than "the dream". Idealism must remain molten--fired by a respect for other minds... And let's not forget that we're headed for this!

Good Day Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 08, 2004 15:00 :: link::

comments (1)

Wednesday, July 07, 2004

"Was it grown up to come to the realization that oneself did not matter, that nothing mattered but a kind of consciousness of the wonder of life outside oneself?"
(Sherwood Anderson, A Storyteller's Story)

I've been awfully busy of late--prepping myself and my feline friends for the journey south, but if Sherwood is right, then linkblogging is a sign of maturity! One thing's for sure--there is plenty to wonder at out there on the web:

Spider-Man 2 has generated quite a bit of intelligent commentary already, most notably by Jim Henley, starting here. Once you're done with Jim's high-octane posts, you would do well to check out John Commonplacebook's quiet rumination upon the chocolate cake scene (and I agree with him that it's a standout!); Dave Intermittent's treatment of the famous Spider-Maxim as the beginning of a discussion, not the end of one; and Henry Farrell's speculative foray into Spider-Man 3 territory (also, in the comments, a guy named "Moleman" argues that the Peter-MJ relationship loses a great deal of the nuance that it has in the comics without the fact of Gwen Stacy's death--and, I would add, her resurrected clone!) There's a lot of other stuff out there too, of course, and a lot of it is very interesting... Oh yes--and I doff my cap to Sean Collins for using a picture to express his negative sentiments about the film, rather than wasting a thousand foul words on the subject! (I'm serious--if you really dislike something, it ought to be enough to just say so...nothing interesting ever comes of criticism unless the critic is able to form a symbiotic relationship with the aesthetic object!)

Also--Tim O'Neil has an excellent piece up about superhero continuity and "template runs" + an essay about Robert Morales' recently concluded Captain America run which features some statements about the character that I disagree with quite strongly, largely because, for me, the Cap "template" is Mark Gruenwald's tenure on the series... and, of course, this means that I'm looking forward to the post-Morales era. Steve Rogers should brood! After all, it's not easy being the ideal private individual, unless your handlers simplify your life by sicking Nazis and other fascists on you all day long! America doesn't "become itself" in these struggles--it loses itself in them... A true liberal-democrat never thinks of anyone as "them"--and there's no "us" in "U.S.".

In other news, Adam Stephanides is back on the Bendis beat, and he makes his fair share of good points in part one of his reply to critics of his initial critique of Daredevil #56... personally, I'm just going to sit back on enjoy this one from now on--I had no business butting into this discussion in the first place, since I haven't read the comic in question (the only Bendis I have read is Powers #1-6, which did not interest me in the least...)

Last, but not least--I wish to express my gratitude to H and Mag at The Comic Treadmill--their selection of this blog as "July pick of the month" means a great deal to me!

Good Night Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 07, 2004 03:34 :: link::

comments (1)

Sunday, July 04, 2004

Call and Response

(Soundtrack: Public Enemy -- Apocalypse '91)

Rick Geerling got things started:

So every writer - hell, almost every person - has that bookshelf. That one. The one where all the favorites and good picks and really cool looking books go. Mine is right on top of my desk. I got out of bed this morning, looked over at it, and thought...well, what better way to get some insight into a person? We're always doing favorite movie lists and favorite CD lists, but no one ever just talks about what they've got lining The Bookshelf. I'm going to jump out into the pool a bit and do mine and we'll see where it goes from there. Remember - no cheating and grabbing the cool books that aren't on your shelf, no saying you have books on there that you don't...it's okay if you haven't rearranged it in a while and have some crap on it. I do. That's just how it goes.

I know exactly what Rick is talking about here--in fact, for the past week, my mind has been almost wholly given over to the problem of how to transfer "the shelf" to Michigan... The way I see it, there will be room in the car for three boxes of books, and here's the packing list:

The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Modern Library)

Mosses From An Old Manse -- Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library again)

The Complete Novels of Dashiell Hammett (Library of America)

Winesburg, Ohio -- Sherwood Anderson

Selected Writings of Stephen Vincent Benet

Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway (Finca Vigia edition) -- more on my mind than ever, especially "Hills Like White Elephants" and "Snows of Kilimanjaro", which features the original Gwen Stacy Clone moment, "outside the regence"!

A Moveable Feast, The Sun Also Rises, and The Garden of Eden -- Ernest Hemingway

Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte

Pierre; or, the Ambiguities -- Herman Melville

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade -- Herman Melville

Of Time and the River -- Thomas Wolfe

The Web and the Rock, You Can't Go Home Again, and The Hills Beyond -- also by Thomas Wolfe

Cane -- Jean Toomer

Up in the Old Hotel -- Joseph Mitchell

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson

My Ears Are Bent -- Joseph Mitchell

The Midnight Raymond Chandler -- contains a number of the best stories, plus the two most important novels (The Little Sister and The Long Goodbye

My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew and The Benchley Roundup -- Robert Benchley

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men -- James Agee

Native Son -- Richard Wright

The Selected Writings of Jonathan Edwards -- edited Harold P. Simonson

The Omnibus of Crime (1929), one of my proudest possessions--featuring "The Gioconda Smile", Aldous Huxley's finest hour!

both volumes of The New England Mind, Errand into the Wilderness and Nature's Nation -- Perry Miller

The American Transcendentalists: An Anthology (1950) -- edited by Perry Miller

American Vision -- Ray Carney, the only great book ever written about Frank Capra

Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage -- Stanley Cavell (where neo-Kantian philosophy and romantic comedy meet!)

The Runaway Bride -- Elizabeth Kendall

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman -- F.O. Matthiessen

The Works of John Keats

The Viking Portable Joseph Conrad

Woman in the Nineteenth Century -- Margaret Fuller

Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and his Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850 -- Aileen Kraditor

The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History -- edited by David D. Hall

Novels of Dawn Powell, Volume One and Two (Library of America)

The Pickwick Papers, Christmas Books, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, American Notebooks For General Circulation -- Charles Dickens (I'd like to bring it all, but let's not get crazy!)

Cakes and Ale -- W. Somerset Maugham

Seventeenth-Century American Poetry -- edited by Harrison T. Meserole

The Annotated Milton

The Wings of the Dove, What Maisie Knew, The Sacred Fount, The Bostonians, Autobiography -- again, I'd like to take all of Henry James' books with me, but no dice

A Sub-Treasury of American Humor (1941) -- edited by E.B. and Katharine S. White

The American Mystery: American Literature From Emerson to Delillo -- Tony Tanner

Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln -- Daniel Walker Howe

The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700 -- Stephen Foster

The Puritan Origins of the American Self -- Sacvan Bercovitch

The Flowering of New England -- Van Wyck Brooks

The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon -- Washington Irving

Pragmatism and Other Essays -- William James

The Fireside Book of Christmas Stories -- edited by Edward Wagenknecht

The Mammoth Book of Victorian & Edwardian Mystery Stories -- mainly for Richard Harding Davis' magnificent "In The Fog"

The Poetry of Robert Frost

Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Major Works -- S. Taylor Coleridge

Poetical Works -- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Gothic Tales -- Elizabeth Gaskell

The Age of Federalism -- Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick

Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and its Contexts -- edited by Charles Capper

Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life -- Charles Capper

Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery -- Thomas R. Mitchell

The Trials of Anthony Burns -- Albert J. Von Frank

Complete Stories -- Dorothy Parker

My Bondage and My Freedom -- Frederick Douglass

Animal Man #1-26 -- Grant Morrison, Chas Truog, etc.

The Essential Spider-Man, vols 1-6 + Amazing Spider-Man #138-151 -- Ditko, Lee, Romita, Conway, Kane, Andru, etc.

The Essential Dr. Strange -- Ditko and Lee

Dr. Strange: A Separate Reality -- Englehart and Brunner

X-Men Masterworks, nos. 22-31 -- Thomas & Roth

The Filth -- Morrison and Weston

Captain America #307-383 -- Gruenwald, Neary, Dwyer, etc.

The Flash #275-350 -- Bates, Heck, Infantino, etc.

Suqadron Supreme -- Gruenwald, Ryan, etc.

Essential Avengers, vols 1-3 -- Lee, Kirby, Heck, Thomas, Buscema

Doom Patrol #19-63 (with a few gaps!) -- Morrison & Case

Cerebus, vol one -- Dave Sim

The King James Bible -- various

I hope all of it fits!

Good Day Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 04, 2004 14:58 :: link::

comments (6)

Friday, July 02, 2004

Crossing the Threshold

(Soundtrack: Everclear -- Sparkle and Fade)

Considering the way Spider-Man 2 ends, I couldn't help revisiting Elizabeth Kendall's wonderful book on Depression-era romantic comedy, The Runaway Bride. What, for instance, do you make of this passage's (from the chapter on Capra's It Happened One Night) applicability to Raimi's film?

The runaway bride is one of the most joyous, kinetic, and rebellious images produced by mass culture in the Depression. What she signifies is the end of the extravagant, wasteful, snobbish life of the upper classes of the twenties. In rushing away from her wedding, [Ellie Andrews] is unclassing herself to join with Peter Warne in a new kind of unit held together by something besides class. The last image of the movie, the "walls of Jericho" falling down, refers to the real meaning of their marriage--not social but erotic, private. Here is one of the only moments in Hollywood's history when a proper wedding stood for something undesirable: six or seven years later, when war threatened, on-camera weddings would regain their sentimental power... It Happened One Night makes a cross-class love affair between two consenting adults, begun on a bus, stand for a renewal of democracy.

The strong-willed lovers that peopled Capra's neo-weepers with Barbara Stanwyck had survived, comicalized, as the leading characters of a movie fable that was custom-made, through trial and error and brilliant cinematic instinct, to speak to the anxieties of the Depression audience. It Happened One Night contained profound cultural resonances at the time it was made. As the lovers negotiate equality across the gulf of class and gender, they are metaphorically healing the painful divisions in American society. But, though they match each other by the end in self-knowledge and goodwill, it is still the woman who controls the action. She is the one who had set the plot in the motionat the beginning and the one who saves the romance at the end. It is true that the male protagonist, Gable's Peter Warne, is asked to take a stand at a crucial point in the movie: he must choose between the heiress and a life of debauchery. His choosing the heiress, however, doesn't generate the movie's climax. That comes when Colbert's Ellie Andrews realizes that she too has a choice. One of her suitors offers her upper-class status; the other offers her sex--and companionship, adventure, and good cheap fun. She chooses sex, which all Americans had potentially in common, over class, which they didn't.

Now, for good or ill, class-conflict is no longer a major theme in our cultural climate--but that's less important than it seems, because, in American art, "class" has typically been just another existential (sometimes very powerful) barrier to intersubjectivity, not a term of sociological analysis. What's important is Ellie's decision to choose something perceived as "real" over another thing perceived as "easy". We need only look at the history of romantic comedy since the Depression in order to assess the importance of class conflict in creating an atmosphere in which brave choices could be made. We live in an era with very few social taboos--and that's good!--but it makes things tough on the storyteller in search of a "transgressive correlative" that is up to the task of conveying the "lunge at otherness" which is at the heart of romance.

Without Peter's Spider-powers and his commitment to using them to fight crime, this love story isn't much more interesting than Can't Buy Me Love, or any of the numerous awful, derivative romantic comedies that fans of the genre have had to suffer through in the past fifty years... The "cool person" chooses the loser/nerd instead of another cool person--again, in real life, that's great; however, in a film or novel, where the protagonist has such a marked epistemological advantage over the other characters, it's hard to make "loving the loser" seem like a difficult choice. But what's braver than saying you love someone enough to risk being killed by the Green Goblin every day of your life?

I think that Kendall's most important point--that Ellie Andrews is required to make the hardest choices in It Happened One Night--is equally relevant to Spider-Man 2. We know that Peter isn't going to give up being Spider-Man, but will MJ accept life with Spider-Man? It's a damned hard choice to make--and, as I mentioned in the comments for the last post--one of the glories of the Spider-Man comics is the fact that it took her (and a bunch of different writers) 22 years to come to a decision on this matter! Although, to be fair, Gerry Conway did put together a complete blueprint for their relationship in his three year run on Amazing Spider-Man... what he did, in essence, was cast MJ as "Midge" (Barbara Bel Geddes's character in Vertigo) to Peter's "Scotty", and then turned the story into a romantic comedy, which necessitated remaking MJ/Midge into a much more forcefully decisive character (unheard of in a Hitchcock woman, with the single exception of Teresa Wright's Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt)

Alright, I'd better go--not that I don't have a lot more to say about the film... particularly about the overwhelming resources available to an action filmmaker and what that does to the notion of Spider-man as crime-fighting comedian--i.e. all of that Elfman and high-decibel bashing renders the stakes in the fight scenes much too high, as far as I'm concerned--there's no room for Peter to call anyone "bunkie" (in a film, fight scenes must either be all-out festivals of pain or "camp"--in a comic book they are free to be neither...)

Also, check out Rick Geerling's new candidate for memehood. I'm planning to respond over the weekend, and so should you!

Good Day Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, July 02, 2004 12:02 :: link::

comments (5)

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Webswingin'

I like this little piece by Gardner Linn (no permalink?), which argues that films can do superhero action better than comics, but cannot match the latter medium's capacity to convey the ironized melodrama which is at the core of (for instance) Spider-Man's appeal. Can you imagine a film version of the Gwen Stacy Clone Saga? It would be almost impossible to do properly. (That said, I'd love to give that screenplay a whirl!)

Dave Fiore vs. Ninth Art--The Rapprochement? (with the notable exception of Antony Johnston, who prefers to remain aloof!
Johnston: "Did you just call me a loof, you rude little fucker?")

You've all seen Jim Henley's piece on Englehart and suicide bombing, right? If not, get over there--it's interesting!

Speaking of Englehart--I really want to discuss his work on West Coast Avengers soon, particularly #17-24, which the author himself has described as "the most complex time travel story ever done"! Not only do I agree with this humble assessment--I also think it's a very fine example of "historiographically aware" superhero writing.

Oh yes--and check out this Forager piece on "the intentional fallacy fallacy", in which JW claims that critics like yours truly, who tend to write the author out of the picture when dealing with a text, have ulterior motives for doing so. No question about it--he's right!

Spider-Man 2 tonight!

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, June 30, 2004 12:02 :: link::

comments (6)

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Now and Gwen

(Soundtrack: Frank Black --Black Letter Days)

Okay. Back to Spider-Man. And historiographic reading--specifically J.M. Dematteis' rather facile resolution of the Peter-Gwen-MJ dilemma, which has been reprinted as the epilogue to the Death of Gwen Stacy trade paperback.

I'm not a fan of this story (entitled "The Kiss") at all, but it's extremely pertinent to my discussion of the Conway Amazing Spider-Man run (which began here, and left off here).

I interpret the entire clone saga as an inspired exploration of Peter Parker's guilt complex. The story assesses the costs of identity-formation through narrative-building.

Time and again, Gwen Stacy had been identified as "the only girl Peter had ever truly loved." And, like a lot of alienated teens, the young man's ideas about romantic love are lifted straight outta Schlegel's Lucinde (i.e. a "pefect love" can make up for the loss of a perfect God). However, it was also becoming dreadfully apparent, as Stan Lee's tenure on the title wound down, that the Peter-Gwen relationship was in neutral. Neither Peter nor the readers were prepared to deal with this fact, and the lettercols pleaded for a way out of the dilemma. Gwen dies so that the relationship doesn't have to. It was really the only way. A perfect love, by definition, cannot disappoint--but it can be "stolen"! Enter the Green Goblin.

This is standard melodrama fodder, and it's always powerful. The tree of "spiritual growth" is watered by the (metaphoric) blood of those we've loved--and super hero comic books, as Marc Singer has argued, get a lot of mileage out of the literalization of certain ideas that, in life and in more realistic stories, must be dealt with metaphorically. In this, again, they show their kinship with romance narratives like Moby Dick--in which "evil" becomes not merely a bedeviling concept, but an actual thing that can blow your ship to smithereens.

And so it is with Gwen Stacy--doomed to become "the past" incarnate. Until the Jackal brings her back--as a different person. The original Gwen--the one that Peter has spent a couple of years erecting his new, adult identity upon--is still dead. But the new Gwen isn't aware of any of this, and she's ready to slide back into the old routine. This threatens to drive Peter mad, because he had just settled into a nice little routine of his own, which permitted him to wallow in the memory of this particular "water under the bridge" without drowning in it.

And now, all of a sudden, he is pressed into service as a lifeguard--to rescue "Gwen-in-herself" from the quagmire of his own romantic appropriation of her memory! Amazingly, he is able to do so--and, in Conway's last issue, the reborn woman sets out to make a life for herself outside the confines of the series. It's an impressive non-resolution to the problem. "The past" as it was remains buried in Gwen Stacy's grave, but "the past" as it is lives on, free of Peter's tendency to romanticize.

I've gone on too long now, and I've hardly said a thing about DeMatteis' story, in which Peter reflects upon his life as a series of stills in a photo album, thinking to himself: "as time passes, I see that the greatest gift Gwen gave me in her short time on this Earth, was the courage to love..." No way! The only gift a person can give to anyone else is themselves. The rest is appropriation. "Emotional growth" is a crock of shit. People are more than fertilizer.

Gotta go!

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, June 29, 2004 17:19 :: link::

comments (3)

Monday, June 28, 2004

A Marvel Zombie Hath Reasons For Reading X-Men That de Campi Knows Nothing Of

(Soundtrack: The Bobby Fuller Four -- Live At PJ's Plus!)

In the newest edition of Ninth Art, Alex de Campi declares:

I suppose it just goes to show that on a big franchise, the title is all. Unless they're uber-stars like Joss Whedon or Jim Lee, artists and writers don't seem to matter that much. They didn't to me when I was a kid. When I was 11 years old and buying X-MEN, I could go into nerdy, ridiculous depths about the details of Wolverine's back story, but I don't think I could have told you who the writer of the series was. I hope this means I was an unusually ignorant child, but I doubt it.

Now, I didn't read comics when I was 11, so I can't even participate in this poll, but what I would like to know is: if you did, did you pay attention to the credits? (as a side note, I would like to know: how many 11 year olds are buying Marvel comics anyway? I thought the "problem" with tha Big Two these days was that kids don't dig on 'em no more?)

I'll lay my cards on the table--every superhero fan I've ever met seemed extremely (even pathologically) interested in the creators of the books they read. Alex sees 117 thousand sales for Grant Morrison's X-Men and 107 for Austen and she infers that this happened because people don't care who's writing the book.

I disagree.

My assumption is that people who loved the Morrison run bought the next one just to see how differently Austen would handle the characters. That's what I would have done back in 1989.

In the mid-eighties, just before I discovered Grant Morrison's Animal Man, my favourite superhero series was Gruenwald's Captain America (my other big favourite was Cerebus), and I became obsessed with buying up back issues of the title, even though I had problems with many of them for what they were in themselves (Cap as a hard-charging patriot, instead of the symbol of the "infinitude of the private individual"? what the hell is this?), simply in order to keep track of how drastically the author had changed the character.

The exercise was valuable to me, because I approached these texts "historiographically" (or, as I've put it elsewhere, I was building up my "awareness of the tradition"), and I think this practice is fairly common amongst superhero readers.

Am I off my nut?

Please do let me know!

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, June 28, 2004 11:55 :: link::

comments (9)

Saturday, June 26, 2004

"Hey Hey JJJ, How Many Spiders Did Ya Slay Today?"

Just checking in briefly to muse upon a subject first raised by Adam Stephanides:

superhero comics don't just implicitly say that we should place our trust in powerful heroes, they explicitly say that if you mistrust heroes [as characters like JJJ, the man who financed the construction of the Spider-Slayer robots, and Bolivar Trask, inventor of the Sentinels, do], you're either a bad guy or being duped by the bad guys.

The Howling Curmudgeons have been thinking about JJJ a little bit too, and Mike Chary asks the same question I would--namely, is JJJ a villain? I've never thought of him that way. In a Silver Age Marvel story, the hero is a person who attempts to use their power responsibly, and the villain is a monster of lust bent upon abusing his/her power over others. But where are the folks whose intentions are fundamentally decent, but who nevertheless use their powers irresponsibly? That sounds like JJJ to me. Ditto Bolivar Trask. The publisher of a New York paper has a lot of influence, and the temptation to use it in ignorance--especially when one is thinking of winning the puiblic's approbation--must be powerful indeed. JJJ and Charles Foster Kane have a lot more than a job in common. And here, again, we have another argument in favour of the secret i.d.--you have a much better chance of using your power judiciously if you know that no love can accrue to you through its application to the problems of the world.

There's a lot more to say on this topic, of course, and I hope some of you folks will take up the baton! (I'm a little distracted right now--we saw Moore's Fahrenheit 911 last night, and I'm still trying to figure out what I thought of it... Clearly, I sympathize with anyone who wants to get rid of Bush, but I don't like political discourse which centers on "corruption"... Bush is bad 'cause his ideas are bad--not because he's "corrupt". All politicians are corrupt. It's a given. In Canada, we may be about to take a massive step backward into right-wingery simply because the Liberals got caught with their hands in the till! What the Hell are these poll-respondents thinking: "Yeah, that Paul Martin abused our confidence, and all of a sudden, you know, I think gay people are bad, just like that nice Stephen Harper"? What the fuck? Anyway, I'm not gonna be much help to the Liberal party either, because I'll be voting NDP on Monday, just like I always do...)

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, June 26, 2004 14:20 :: link::

comments (3)

Thursday, June 24, 2004

A Memory is Never Finished

(Soundtrack: Sleater-Kinney Call The Doctor)

We saw a sneak preview of Before Sunset last night and then rushed home to revisit its precursor--Before Sunrise--on video. I can sum up the appeal that Linklater's diptych holds for me in a few words, spoken by Julie Delpy's character in the first film, which both works live by:

You know, I believe if there's any kind of God, it wouldn't be in any of us. Not you, or me... but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something... I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but... who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt.

(you can read the whole script here, if you're in the mood--although I wouldn't recommend that; in general, it's not the matter of these conversations which is so compelling, but the manner in which they are conducted--and you've gotta watch the film to experience that!)

In keeping with my preference for revisiting the old, rather than scratching vainly at the scab of "absolute originality", I liked the second film even more than the first. Or perhaps I should say that the second has added lustre to the first. And a third, if made in the same spirit as these two, would undoubtedly have a similarly intensifying effect. This is, of course, why I love corporate comics so much--I truly do believe that, the more you think earnestly about anything you ever loved, the better it gets. These films stake out a philosophic/aesthetic position which is in direct opposition to the one that Charlie Kaufman puts into the mouth of "wise fool" Donald, in Adaptation:

I loved Sarah. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want. You are what you love, not what loves you.

No way! A memory is never "yours". It must always be rebuilt through narrative. And a story is always told to someone else--even if that someone else is an idealized projection of your own mind. You aren't "what you love", you're a part of whatever you help bring to light through interaction with others. Implicit in Donald's statement is the idea that the artist's task is to nail down the way he/she feels about the world--capturing objects in the treacle of love like flies trapped in amber. I can't agree with this at all. I prefer to see art as the attempt to create "a soundtrack, magnetized, out of sync, to the filmstrip of the (intersubjective) Sublime".

Near the beginning of Before Sunset, Delpy asks Hawke why he wrote an entire novel about one night that happened nine years before the events in the sequel. After hemming and hawing his way through a bunch of stock responses, Hawke finally admits that he wrote the book in the hope that she would see it, read it, and show up to discuss it with him. In other words, it was an attempt, as Hawthorne would put it, "to open up an intercourse with the world." He gets his wish--and the discoveries that these two make about what "really" happened to them in the first film expose the proprietary theory of memory for the sham that it is. Our lives don't belong to us. We rent them to each other at sympathetic rates.

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, June 24, 2004 14:47 :: link::

comments (3)

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

We Are All Liberals Now--And We Always Have Been

(Soundtrack: Joey Ramone -- Don't Worry About Me)

Okay--since three of my favourite people (John Commonplacebook, Marc Singer, and erstwhile guest-Motime columnist Jamo) saw fit to question my confident assertion that Fascism "can't happen here [in North America]", I think I owe it to them (and to myself!) to clarify my position a little bit...

When I say that we are all liberals, well, I'm exaggerating a bit, of course. There will always be Jim Kalbs out there, trying to pass their crusty Medieval rhetoric off as something indigenous to the New World--but these people will never make much headway in America, because their love of hierarchy renders them absolutely unfit to participate in the debates that will continue to define the culture. Forget Jim Kalb. Forget Fascism--that kind of thinking grows out of an organic conception of the state, and North Americans (outside of Quebec) just don't think that way.

However, Neocons are something else again. These are classical liberals. Their conception of society is just as atomistic as mine is. They're just letting Original Sin get them down, that's all...

As I've often stated, my understanding of American culture grows out of an obsessive engagement with Puritanism, and it owes a great deal to Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch. The crux of the matter is this: Right and Left don't mean the same things in North America that they do in the rest of the world.

When you get right down to it, radical Protestantism, which is just another name for Puritanism, is only concerned with one thing--the individual's relationship to God. Ethnic ties, the rights-and-duties associated with feudal hierarchy, the connection of a people to the land--all of these things were anathema to the Puritan mind, from the most extreme theocrat (the right-wing of the movement) to the wildest Quaker (the left-wing). The Puritan "Errand" was a quest for a place in which individuals could act out the drama of their own salvation or damnation without interference. That's America. Everyone gets a chance to hear "the Word". If they're schedueled to be saved, well, good for them. And if not, at least they can't say they never had a chance.

In a later, more secular, age, this would be redefined as the "pursuit of happiness". Thoreau expressed the same desire when he set out to "corner life"--whether it proved to be sweet or "mean".

Everyone wants the chance to pursue happiness, whether they're destined to attain it or not. But the question then becomes--what does it take to ensure that everyone gets this chance? I happen to believe that people require free access to education, medical care, and a moderately comfortable existence before they can even begin to figure out whether they're "saved or damned". The state cannot grant happiness to its citizens--but it can (it must!) ensure that all of the preconditions to happiness are met. That's the rationale behind an "economic Bill of Rights".

Then, of course, there's the matter of "national security". People aren't gonna be doing much soul-searching if the borders aren't secure. American expansionism is always about creating a stable situation for the individuals within the polity. That's where it differs dramatically from the "test-your-nationhood" expansionism espoused by breast-beating Fascist theorists. Of course, you can still do a lot of harm whilst fighting to "make the world safe for democracy" (even, or maybe especially!--if you are sincere), and we're seeing a fine example of this in Iraq. The right-wing Puritan's greatest fault is the tendency to place so much emphasis upon strengthening the polity that the original point of the Errand is forgotten. That's what Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme is all about--and I think I'm going to begin discussing that series very soon. It's not really a Lord Acton scenario--absolute power doesn't corrupt absolutely, but it certainly furnishes those who wield it with the opportunity to make terrible mistakes. On the other hand, left-wing Puritans (like me--and Kirby's Forever People, right J.W.?), focus upon the Word to the exclusion of all else, and thus run the risk of being trampled...

Another quintessential American problem has arisen out of the hubristic belief, on the part of some of the country's citizens, that they possess the ability to recognize "the unregenerate" when they see them. Skin colour, ethnicity, work ethic, sexual preference--none of these things have anything to do with a person's status before "God", and yet all of them have, at times, been interpreted by fools as markers of "sainthood" or "damnation". This is why I disagree with Marc Singer when he argues (by implication) that Americans have accepted the idea of a hierarchy in the past. Americans have always been, and always will be, radical egalitarians. However, they have very often been guilty of arbitrarily excluding huge numbers of people from the social contract (reducing this noble idea, in the process, to a pathetic "Gentleman's Agreement" between "Visible Saints"--a far cry from what it was meant to be: a covenant which enables every individual to work out his/her destiny before "God"), based upon an untenable inference of moral superiority on the part of those in power. Again, for reasons of "national security", some steps must be taken against those (murderers, rapists, etc) who pose an obvious threat to the majority's pursuit of happiness--but this calls for the nicest possible judgement on our part, because no human being can tell for sure whether another person is a member of "the Elect" or not. I prefer to believe that they are--it makes life a lot more pleasant--but the point is that I don't know for sure, and neither do you (and neither does "God" for that matter--there is no God--so don't tell me God inspired you with the knowledge that all "lazy/gay/whatever people are going to Hell"! Stick with the program here son!)

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, June 23, 2004 16:30 :: link::

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Tuesday, June 22, 2004

More Power, More Responsibility

(Soundtrack: Live --The Distance To Here)

Okay. Here's why the "superheroes are fascist" argument is ludicrous:

1. the genre is uniquely American

2. As Louis B. Hartz has demonstrated, quite convincingly I think, American culture was "born liberal"...

3. Fascism cannot take root in a culture that has never embraced the concept of hierarchy... In North America, the only example of this type of society is my own home province--which still has metro stations named after Nazi-boostin' cleric Lionel-Groulx and Ultramontane pro-slavery pontiff extraordinaire Pius IX...

This is why the shrillest complaints about the authoritarian implications of superpowers have tended to be voiced by Europeans. As Milo George points out:

All this [talk about Fascist superheroes] may sound silly to us, but that's mostly because the only Fascist dictators we've ever personally encountered were our parents when we reached our teens and maybe some really really strict teachers in high school.

So much for that.

However, this is not to say hyper-individualistic societies don't have problems of their own, or that superhero comics can't help us to think about them!

Take a look at this passage, by Stanley Elkins, one of the most important American historians of the twentieth-century:

...Transcendentalism was quite unable to "transcend" its culture and its age at all: far from revolting against the age, Transcendentalism embodied, in aggravated form certain of its most remarkable features--its anti-institutionalism, its individual perfectionism, its abstraction, and its guilt and reforming zeal. Moreover, the intellectual features of the reform movement most relevant to this inquiry--abolitionism--very strikingly duplicated those very features just enumerated, particularly guilt and its counterpart, moral aggression.

Sound like any characters we know? Elkins' betes noires are "intellectuals without responsibility"--maverick moralists like Garrison, Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, etc. who refused to moderate their rhetoric or work to find institutional solutions to the problems of the Antebellum period. Basically, he blames these folks for the Civil War. Personally, I don't think the conflict could have been avoided, but more about that later... For now, I just wanted to point out that Spider-Man, Animal Man, and, perhaps most importantly, Gruenwald's Captain America, are perfect examples of this American type--for whom "great power" brings a "great responsibility" to act out upon their convictions which, from a certain point of view, can actually seem irresponsible!

I'm not a fan of Elkins--and, since I'm a supporter of PETA, I'm sure you can guess which side of this argument I fall on!--but he must be dealt with. We can just forget about the fascism stuff though--it's a "red harangue"...

Alas, I must be off to work!

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, June 22, 2004 12:46 :: link::

comments (5)

Monday, June 21, 2004

Come Out and Pray

(Soundtrack: Ramones Leave Home)

I'm pretty excited! On Friday, I received my teaching assignment for the Fall:

130 Writing: American Radical Thought

Involves drafting, revising, and editing compositions derived from readings on American radical thought to develop skills in narration, persuasion, analysis, and documentation. Instructors can organize course readings around any combination of topics: conquest and revolution, natural rights, socialism, technology and its problems, radicalism of the 1960s, and capitalism and expansionism. The course will examine the assumptions and positions of radical thinkers and organizations as well as assess their impact and influence on social change and policy.

Plan "A" is to build the course around a discussion of the abolitionist movement. Plan "B" (which would be plan "A" if I was certain of being allowed to do it) is to base the whole thing on Animal Man #1-26.

Naturally, I did a lot of thinking about "American radicalism" over the weekend. Is there anything distinctive about it? Well, yes and no. It's really just "bourgeois radicalism" (which can be found in any Calvinist-based culture), only purer, because undiluted by the traditionalist Medieval hangups that people like Jim Kalb want to retcon into the origin story.

In Europe, radicalism has tended to run on a rhetoric of "class consciousness"--although, of course, even there, most advocates of the "Proletariat as Revolutionary Class" were not workers themselves... In America, this rhetoric has been conspicuously absent from successful campaigns against oppression. While John Brown, the IWW, Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X made their feeble attempts to "fight the power", their more enlightened comrades busied themselves with the task of yanking the mittelamerikan heartstrings... Sustainable progress is never forced upon society by an oppressed minority, it is conceded by an embarrassed majority, through the agency of a miraculous rejection of class interest. In the nineteenth-century they called this "Come-Outerism". More recently, it has gone under the alias of "liberal guilt"--and it was a wonderful thing, before Reaganites labeled it "malaise" and declared it bad for morale... Of course it's bad for morale! The "city on a hill" is no vacation spot, it's a panopticon--proximity to God brings a more intense scrutiny upon inevitable abuses, not a divine "attaboy!"

Does this have anything to do with superheroes? Is it a coincidence that the purest bourgeois culture in the world produced this unique genre? Of course not! The superheroes that I'm most interested in (those in the Ditko-Gruenwald-Morrison tradition--with Superman as a precursor) explicitly reject the idea that their powers ought to be used to satisfy any of their personal needs (including the Batman/Wolverine/Punisher-style need for vengeance/personal aggrandizement...) I should add, as a corollary to that statement, that this is why the ol' secret identity chestnut is so crucial to the genre. When Peter Parker puts on his costume, he's saying: "okay, this has nothing to do with me and what I want anymore--this has to do with my power to help others" It's like a middle-class person agreeing to pay taxes in order to help ensure that everyone has access to medical care. It's not "charity", it's a duty--and, just to insure against any confusion on that point, it's best that the benefactor remain anonymous... In this way, superheroes obey Dickens' ("Bourgeois radical" extraodinaire) famous directive: "It is required of every man that the Spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and [webswing] far and wide..."

Of course, this doesn't apply to characters (like Batman) whose secret identities are merely hiding places and offer no resistance to the hero's restless spirit. We called this "failing the Rorschach test", and I would agree that their stories yield easily to the "fascist critique". Is it any wonder that this type of character enjoyed an overwhelming surge in popularity during the eighties--when the "liberal guilt" model of democratic citizenship went into eclipse? Again--this is why Morrison and Gruenwald are so much more important than Miller and Moore: the latter pair inadvertently helped drive a Reaganite stake into the heart of profoundly liberal genre, while the authors of Captain America and Animal Man gave us superheroes as fragmented subjects instead of willful monoliths!

Tomorrow, I'll start looking at some of the problems with "come-outerism", beginning with Stanley Elkins' celebrated theories about the limitations of bourgeois activism!

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, June 21, 2004 14:35 :: link::

comments (7)

Saturday, June 19, 2004

Get Out on the Links!

Matt Rossi is investigating Superman's iconicity! There are two parts so far--and there may be three by the time you get there pilgrim! It makes for fine reading!

Steven Berg has rounded up most of the recent batch of posts on the alleged fascism inherent in the superhero genre for your convenience...

You can add Adam Completely Futile to the list Steven--I'm not convinced, but I'd like to see Adam follow up on his brief discussion of figures like JJJ, who serve to defuse charges of fascism against the hero by quarantining that opinion in the poisonously denunciatory word balloons of "villainous" characters...

Also--if you haven't read the most recent "Grim Tidings" column by Graeme McMillan, on the subject of his passion for The Invisibles, you're missing out! I know Graeme's got quite a reputation as the snark-master, but really, I don't know why he bothers when it's clear from items like this that he actually has a great deal of substance to say! (Is it just fear of sounding like a "fanboy"? Listen--if feasting upon a work of art and loving it is "wrong", then I don't want to be right!)

We're off to see The Big Lebowski at the good ol' Cinema Du Parc!

Good Afternoon Friends!
Dave

posted by goodkingwenceslaus, June 19, 2004 19:05 :: link::

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