Rants & Raves

COMIC-CON REFLECTIONS

The convention center in San Diego is a gigantic steel and concrete sea shell washed up on the shore, sprawling like a beached whale along the edge of the bay, bristling with the elbows of would-be flying buttresses, the ribs of a gigantic wrecked and rolled over sea-going behemoth like the sixteenth century Spanish galleon but much much larger. Climbing through the wreckage for four days in July (21-24th) were all the comic book fans and popular culture geeks that the law allows — 125,000 of them bump up against the fire marshal’s limit, but probably there were another 20,000 more if anyone would (or could) do an actual count.

Attendees became a glutenous mob as they milled around and eddied through the aisles of seven adjoining exhibit halls in which were monumental displays for LucasFilm, Lionsgate, Warner Bros, Hasbro, Mattel, Lego, Viz, Nickelodeon, Konami, Phineas and Ferb, Square Enix, Pokemon, Sideshow Collectibles — oh, and Marvel, DC Comics, Dark Horse, Image, and Diamond Distributors. Various special interest exhibit booths were clustered together — illustrators, urban vinyl toys, web comics, small press—and, oh, “gold and silver age” comic books.

It would be a mistake to say the Comic Con International San Diego (to use its official name) is a comic book convention, but it’s preferred designation as a “popular culture convention” isn’t quite right either: it’s too broad. The Sandy Eggo Con (as if it is affectionately known here at the Rants & Raves Intergalactic Wurlitzer) is perhaps more accurately described as a “comic book culture” convention: it embraces that part of popular culture that grew out of or is closely allied with comic books—movies and tv series based upon comic book characters (or that could be based upon comic book characters—like Indiana Jones, f’instance), electronic games embodying comic book titles, toys depicting comic book characters, artists who illustrate so luxuriously the covers of comic books, movie posters, and game boxes; and on and on into the night.

Or maybe, to resort to the argot of the day, it’s just a monster geekfest.

SEXISM IN COMICS IS WITHOUT GENDER BIAS: PART THREE

Maybe the perennial attacks on comics as conveyances of sexist attitudes warrant a little healthy ridicule. The charge of sexism in comics has been around for at least a generation. And I’m pretty sure that in all that time it has had little effect on the way superheroines and other female characters are drawn.

The sexist charge turns on the issue of sex objectification: to portray women as sex objects turns them into sexual playthings, leaving individual personality out altogether. But the sex object gambit is simply rhetoric: in the early years of the feminist crusade, the function of the rhetoric was to draw attention to the gender inequality fostered by our culture. I had a woman friend whose last name was Goodman, and she seriously contemplated changing her last name to “Goodperson.” She didn’t, but if she had, she would have been deploying a rhetorical device to emphasize the extent to which maleness dominated Western culture. And the dominance of maleness effectively undermined any consideration of women as individual personalities.

Useful as such rhetoric may have been at the beginning, it long ago became a threadbare ploy. Everyone realizes—and even admits—that humanity falls into two sexes and that each is attractive to its opposite as a means of guaranteeing propagation of the species. Fashions in wardrobe emphasize those aspects of one gender’s physical appeal to the other. I naturally observe women’s fashions more than men’s, and everything about women’s fashions—not haute couture, but the design of everyday wardrobe—is intended to enhance the female’s appeal to the male. In short, sex appeal.

I observed some years ago that cleavage had returned; and breasts that bounce when their owner walks is likewise a fashion statement about sex appeal. And that is the way it should be. What shouldn’t be as a result is gender inequality in social or political or occupational realms. But surely we’ve progressed beyond sex object allegations as the means by which the inequality can be noticed and, perforce, remedied.

To the extent that there are other worthwhile things in life than sex, so should women (and men) be seen as something more than sex objects. And that requires a cultural maturity that goes beyond mere rhetoric. Those who criticize comics as sexist are charging into battle against sexism with out-dated weapons.

In short, some things deserve to be laughed at as a way of moving beyond them. So maybe my joke wasn’t in such bad taste as all that.

In the meantime, as we muster forces with newer weapons, we can still pause to celebrate the eternal feminine, which I do here. We don’t want the summer to fade away forever without a swimsuit issue; herewith—:

 

SEXISM IN COMICS IS WITHOUT GENDER BIAS: PART TWO

Do I really believe that drawing boobs and buttocks acts unconsciously as a rebellious attempt to assuage internal tension brought on by obeying the commandment to emasculate superheroes? No. But it sounds fairly convincing, cloaked, as it is, in the contextual robes of academic theoretical language. And in the context of often far-fetched theories, my analysis even makes a sort of rough sense. Perhaps, even, as Bernard Shaw has claimed, “every jest is an earnest in the womb of time.”

In perpetrating my jest, I seem to be ridiculing academics and their seriousness of purpose. And, of course, I am—the deadly seriousness but not the purpose. In fact, I was motivated by mixed emotions. Comics have enjoyed nearly overwhelming academic attention in recent years. Seriously purposed tomes have been coming forth regularly for over a decade—more with each passing year as “comics studies” achieve a kind of intellectual legitimacy in the ivied halls of academe.

All the attention makes me a little uneasy. I keep thinking of Bernard Shaw’s adamant refusal to let any of his plays be published in American literature anthologies for use in classrooms. He thundered that American attempts to teach Shakespeare had ruined the Bard for generations of readers/audiences, and he didn’t want his plays to suffer the same vandalism. (And as long as he lived, none of his plays were included in literature textbooks.) By the same token, I don’t want enjoyment of comics to be destroyed by academic excesses in well-intentioned but often misguided attempts to enhance our appreciation of the medium.

On the other hand, academic interest in motion pictures fostered the notion of film as an artform. Without the attention that the professorial legions lavished on studying movies, motion pictures might never have achieved status as art. In like manner, the academy’s embrace of comics has undeniably helped in raising the cultural status of the medium. I suspect, however, that a burgeoning fandom, beginning in the 1970s—demanding higher quality “European-like” reproduction in comics products—had an even larger role in the levitation. And once comics specialty shops staked out turf for the medium thereby defining a market, publishers took notice and began to produce works that appealed to that market. Still, interest manifest in the ivied halls of academe can’t hurt. Unless Shaw is right.

Pinioned by the horns of this dilemma, I surrendered to temptation and committed my joke in Part One of this diatribe. I probably shouldn’t have done it. (Then again, I’m probably attaching more importance to my foray into satire than anyone else does.) (I may even be seeing satire where no one else does. It wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve been subtle to the point of vague.) Or maybe — (continued in Part Three).

SEXISM IN COMICS IS WITHOUT GENDER BIAS: PART ONE

Among the traditional criticisms of superhero comic books is that they are sexist because of the way women were depicted — typically in scanty or skin-tight attire that emphasizes healthy protrusions for breasts and lustily rounded mounds for buttocks. As you can readily imagine, this criticism is more that I can sit still for. And so, squirming in my chair, let me propose a short safari of exploration and, if we’re lucky, discovery.

We start out at a familiar domestic crisis—one that has been going on for as long as there’ve been toilets — when, at the very onset of every marriage, the wife insists that her husband remember to put the lid down. Every wife launches into wedded bliss with this demand. Oddly, no husband that I ever heard of has ever complained to his helpmate that she never leaves the lid up.

No, and thus the fundamental inequity that distinguishes the relations between the sexes is re-established with every nuptial bond, and the same injustice is perpetuated throughout society at large in all its cultural venues. And so it is that men are forever reconstituted as the compliant gender. And because we are the compliant gender, we never complain that the charges of sexism in comics always conveniently neglect to mention the emasculation represented in the visual ravages committed on male anatomy.

I refer to the way superheroes are depicted. In many of these images—particularly those full-frontal poses with legs akimbo—it is obvious that something is missing. Spider-Man, Superman, Iron Man and all the rest do not appear to be equipped with the usual male package. They have no genitalia. They have all been completely, and thoroughly—and literally—emasculated. The artists who draw Spider-Man and all other superheroes dutifully obey the laws that govern comic book illustration and deliberately eschew making pictures that hint at male genitalia. But not without unintended consequences.

As Freud established long ago, a repressed impulse always seeks a way to express itself—as water will always seek a downhill path. Prohibited from depicting that part of the male anatomy that Anthony Weiner has lately brought into prominence, artists unconsciously seek respite from repression by drawing boobs and buttocks on female characters. They exaggerate these obvious attributes of the sex, focusing on them. The explanation for this preoccupation is simple: hooters subconsciously substitute for weiners. And so what so many observers see as sexism of a supposedly anti-feminist persuasion is actually a perverse manifestation of the male’s unconscious aspiration to equality between the sexes.

THE ESSENTIAL DYKES TO WATCH OUT FOR

Before Alison Bechdel splashed into the national consciousness with her 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home, she drew a weekly comic strip for alternative newspapers called Dykes to Watch Out For. She drew it for 25 years, from 1983 to 2008, and then on May 10, 2008, she discontinued the strip, putting it on indefinite hiatus in order to complete another graphic memoir, Love Life. The roundly applauded Fun Home doubtless suggested that she should devote her creative energies to a form that was more convivial to her talent than a weekly comic strip.

The strip was one of the earliest ongoing popular culture representations of lesbian life. The dust jacket flap of The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (415 8x9-inch pages, b/w; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardback, $25) reports that it has been collected in award-winning volumes, syndicated in fifty alternative newspapers and translated into many languages. And although Bechdel was adept at the episodic serial narrative form, in the long form Fun Home she could invest her story with nuances and literate allusions that are easily lost from week to week in a serial vehicle, and she undoubtedly discovered that she enjoyed exploring the long form with its great array of possibilities more than weekly comic stripping. Love Life, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t out yet; but while we’re waiting, we can enjoy The Essential Dykes.

Notice that the book is entitled “the essential dykes,” not “the complete dykes.” For 25 complete years of a weekly strip, we’d need a tome of 1,300 pages; this one has just a third of that, but it’s a highly representative third.

The collection begins with strips from 1987, not 1983. In the early years of the strip, its title more accurately reflected its content than it did later on. For at least a few of the first four years, Bechdel produced a sort of guide book. Few of the weekly installments were continued from week to week. Instead, strip titles alerted us to The Unrequited Crush (Lecture No. 3), The Joys of Couplehood, It’s Depression!, Great Romances That Never Were, Guide to the First Sleepover, Are You a Real Jock?, Look Out for Luppies (Lesbian Urban Professionals), Summer Grooming Tips, Straight People to Watch Out For, and so on.

After a few years of this, some of the personages in the strip began coming back for encores on succeeding days, and Bechdel started naming them, and they developed personalities—and lives. And relationships. And with that, Dykes graduated from guide book to novel, “a wittily illustrated soap opera”—or, as Bechdel says, “half op-ed column and half endless serialized Victorian novel” about the lives, loves and politics of a cast of characters, most of them lesbian, living in a midsize American city “that may or may not be Minneapolis.”

The Essential Dykes carries on the soap opera from 1987 to 2008, culling 15-20 one-page strips from each year. We watch Bechdel’s graphic style mature: by the early 1990s, her line is more confident, her anatomy surer, her deployment of solid blacks and shading textures more dramatic and strategic. The strips treat of the sex lives of Bechdel’s counterculture cast with candor and understanding, but in the later years, while the verbal candor remains, the visuals are less explicit. Nudity is mostly avoided, and outright sex is rarely depicted (if at all). But that’s okay: by this time, Bechdel is delving into complexities that deserve attention, and overt on-screen love-making could be a distraction from more important matters.

One of her heroines starts living with a man, and they have a child. Another woman gets breast cancer and endures surgery and post-operative chemotherapy. They all bemoan the dubious politics of the GeeDubya Years. They change jobs, fall in and out of love, cope with aging parents—“in a serial graphic narrative ‘suitable for humanists of all persuasions.’”

The volume is introduced by a 12-page autobiographical comic strip account of how Bechdel became a cartoonist. On the first page, she exclaims, suddenly, “Good God—I forgot to get a job! I’ve been drawing this comic strip for my entire adult life,” she goes on. “How did that happen? Let’s try and retrace our steps, shall we?”

She started drawing as a child, but as she grew up, she thought she might try being a writer. Eventually, after her written work earned numerous rejection slips, she realized: “I wasn’t a writer or an artist. I was a writer and an artist.” In short, a cartoonist. She decided, then, to draw cartoons about lesbians. The first appeared in the 1983 Lesbian Pride issue of the local feminist paper. (And it is reproduced in this introductory autobiography.)

“Readers seemed to like it, and this egged me on,” she reports. And then she finds her mission: “by drawing the everyday lives of women like me, I hope to make lesbians more visible not just to ourselves but to everyone. If people could only see us, how could they help but love us? I mean, seriously! Lesbians are so awesome! Free thinkers! Vegetarians! Pacifists! At the forefront of every social justice movement.”

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For is an essential lesson in the comic strip narrative arts. Get your own copy. I’m getting mine.

PostScript: Bechdel, by the way, edited, with Jessica Agel and Matt Madden, the currently available Best American Comics 2011, an anthology of the year’s cartoon storytelling from graphic novels, pamphlet comics (that’s comic books, kimo sabe), newspapers, magazines, mini-comics and web comics.

SPIDER-MAN A BROADWAY SUCCESS

The Spider-Man musical has the last laugh, says Nick Allen at telegraph.co.uk. Troubled with gadgetry that didn’t work quite right, flying actors that fell from the ceiling, and a flock of mocking reviews, Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" has been turned around and has become successful at the box office. More than half a million people have now seen show. The $70 million production, the most expensive in Broadway history, took in $1.7 million a week over the summer. As evidence of its continuing success, “producers of the musical, featuring music by U2's Bono and The Edge, announced that the star Reeve Carney, who had been scheduled to leave in November, has extended his contract until May. Said he: "I am thrilled to be on stage nightly as Peter Parker/Spider-Man. I can't imagine a more wonderful, harder-working company than my mates on Broadway."

THE SUNDAY FUNNIES

Veteran archival publisher Russ Cochran is going back into the reprinting industry with a vengeance, saith Scoop. He recently announced the launch of another publishing effort, this one designed to showcase historically important comic strips. The Sunday Funnies will be a 32-page, monthly comic section which reprints the best Sunday comic pages from the late 1890s through the 1950s. Each issue will contain 32 full-page, 22"x16" Sunday pages in full color. Included in the line-up will be Gasoline Alley, Little Nemo, Polly And Her Pals, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Alley Oop, Terry And The Pirates, and many more.

The Sunday Funnies No. 1 will be available November 2011, with a retail price of $10. Subscriptions will be offered, but comic shops can place their orders for this historic first issue through Diamond.

MR. CRUMB SENDS HIS REGRETS

Robert Crumb was scheduled to appear at the Opera House in Sydney, Australia, during the graphic arts festival there August 20-21. He was to take the stage “In Conversation” with Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth, whose part in the conversation would be, chiefly, asking Crumb questions. But when Murdoch’s Sunday Telegraph took a look at some of Crumb’s big bootied broads and what Crumb’s comics did to them, it screamed in outrage—“Cult Genius or Filthy Weirdo”— and rolled out “professional pearl-clutcher Hetty Johnston,” a campaigner on behalf of victims of sexual assault, who objected to the “depraved thought processes of this very warped human being. These cartoons are not funny or artistic,” she ranted on, “they are just crude and perverted images emanating from what is clearly a sick mind.”

Then a spokesperson for the federal Attorney General’s department said Crumb’s work could probably not be shown in Australia unless the cartoonist submitted his drawings for classification—and, most probably, they would be refused classification. Some sort of bureaucratic moral green card, I assume.

On August 9, Andrew Tijs at The Enthusiast chimed in: “Anxiety and neurosis are hallmarks of Crumb’s work, but we in Australia know Hetty Johnston is nothing more than a headline grabber and toothlesss crank, wheeled out when writers want to inch closer to the front page of tabloids by using ‘shock,’ ‘outrage’ or ‘sick’ in a three-word 72-point screamer headline.”

But by August 13, Crumb had endured enough of a continuing bombardment of outraged Aussie sensibility and cancelled his appearance. In an open letter posted at the Sydney Morning Herald website, he explained that the fevers engendered by the furor suggested that he might be physically attacked by the morally outraged if he showed up. His wife feared for his life and persuaded him to cancel. 

Wrote Crumb: “Aline and I went round and round about this thing: should I go or not? Ultimately, she could not shake her feeling of ominous dread. I knew that if I went, that she would be in a state of anxiety the whole time I was gone. She'd be praying for me, I know her. I couldn't do it to her. Finally, I told her I wasn't going. She broke down and wept as I held her. ...

“Sorry, folks. I do feel bad, as I hate letting people down. But I decided I'd rather bear the pain of letting people down than subject my long-suffering wife to a 10-day period of dread and anxiety for my well-being. She's been awfully nice to me since I told her I wasn't going! She baked a chocolate cake even!

“I know, I know,” he continued, “it's galling to give the Sunday Telegraph sleazeballs the satisfaction. ‘Ha ha, we scared him off.’ But they have already got what they wanted out of me anyway, which was to use me to make the City of Sydney look bad.

“The worst part is the apparent irresponsibility of these cynical media hacks. What if I'd gone there, and what if some Mark Chapman-type person who'd read that article decided the world needed to be cleansed of scum like R. Crumb? (Mark Chapman shot John Lennon.) This possibility worried Aline deeply.

“Did it occur to the people at the Sunday Telegraph that they might be stirring up such dangerous passions? Do they care? Their article showed a profound lack of integrity and social responsibility. And unfortunately, I was made the object of their hateful Machiavellian tactics. One wonders if they would have published more such anti-Crumb articles if I'd showed up in Sydney, or possibly even orchestrated some sort of public demonstration against me! Yipe!”

Footnit: You can read Crumb’s complete letter here.

DC "RELAUNCH" SELLS OUT

DC Comics’ stimulus plan to ramp up sales by starting all over with a brand new generation of Number Ones is working better than anyone imagined. Every No. 1 of “the New 52" titles is selling out within hours. Retailers raised their orders for these titles but not enough. "I thought ordering five times my normal DC numbers would have been enough," said John Robinson, co-owner of Graham Crackers Comics, which has nine locations in the Chicago area. "I needed to think more like 10 times."

DC went back to the presses almost at once, ordering second printings of the first round of releases. On Monday, September 12, reported Scoop, the company announced that 12 titles would receive second printings, due in stores on October 5; then on September 13, they announced that week’s full line-up would be reprinted, due on the shelves October 19. And on September 14, DC announced that Action Comics No. 1 and Batgirl No. 1 have sold their second printings and were scheduled for third printings, out October 12.

CHARLES G. BROOKS, SR.: 1921-2011

Editorial cartoonist Charles Brooks died Thursday, September 29; he was 90. Michael Cavna at the Washington Post’s Comic Riffs called Brooks “a fixture of Alabama journalism, commenting on local and international politics from his Birmingham News perch for nearly 40 years, until 1985.”

Brooks received the National Sigma Delta Chi Award for editorial cartooning in 1960; he also received 13 Freedom Foundation Awards and was a past president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC). Wikipedia asserts that his cartoons for the Birmingham News championed the American character, an attitude that led him to attack the Ku Klux Klan and similar abuses.

But beyond the reach of the News, Brooks was best known as editor of Pelican Publishing’s annual round-up of the Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, a compilation that enhanced the profession of political cartooning by giving its practitioners greater visibility than they otherwise enjoyed at their home papers. The first of the Brooks volumes was published in 1972; the last, including cartoons for 2011, will be published early in 2012.

Editoonists were solicited every fall to submit five of their best cartoons, and Brooks selected from those submissions. The selection of cartoons was somewhat flawed by Brooks’ conservative warp. “I am very conservative,” he said in a recent interview with Capitol Weekly (Calif.). “One of the best compliments I ever received was from President Richard Nixon, who said that I was their Herblock.”

In later years, the profession’s view of this annual anthology was that its editor’s conservatism effectively barred the more radical liberal cartoons, so few (well, none) of Ted Rall’s stripe are included; and some of the profession’s top flight cartoonists do not deign to participate in the process.

But Brooks’ passion for cartooning is beyond question. "All of my life,” Brooks told Capitol Weekly, “I have been interested in reading the newspaper and keeping up with what was going on in politics. As long as I can remember, I have always wanted to draw. While other kids played at Cowboys and Indians, I would draw and dream of being a cartoonist."

After two years at Birmington-Southern College, Brooks studied with two-time Pulitzer winner Vaughn Shoemaker at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. During World War II, Brooks enlisted and served in the combat engineers, seeing action on D-Day and at the Battle of the Bulge.

Brooks hoped to get a comic strip syndicated when he got out of the miliary after World War II but had no luck. When he noticed that the News was running syndicated cartoons, he applied for the editorial cartooning job and got it. Among his first targets was the KKK, for which affrontery at midcentury in the South, he earned numerous threatening letters.

The annual series of Best Editorial Cartoons came about because of Spiro Agnew, Brooks explained. Milburn Calhoun, president and owner of Pelican Publishing in Gretna, Louisiana, liked what he saw of Brooks’ work in the Birmingham News and asked to illustrate with cartoons a book he was publishing about Agnew, then a darling of the conservatives.

“After finishing this job,” Brooks said during his interview with the Capitol Weekly, “I suggested to him that he publish an annual book of best editorial cartoons. For years, I had seen such a book of gag cartoons [probably the Best Cartoons of “Year” series edited by Lawrence Lariar for Crown Publishers, 1942-70], but none of editorial cartoons. He agreed, if I could get the okay of editorial cartoonists, and they would have to agree not to charge for their cartoons. He explained that he could not make a go of it, if he had to pay large sums for individual cartoons.”

At the time, Brooks was president of the AAEC (1969-70),  and he put the proposition before the membership: if the cartoonists would forego payment, Calhoun would donate some of the money from book sales to AAEC. “They voted unanimously to try the book. We started the book, thinking it would be a good history of the year in editorial cartoons. It has proven to be exactly that, and is used widely in universities and schools as a teaching tool.”

Brooks’ favorite editoonists include Vaughn Shoemaker, Daniel Fitzpatrick, John T. McCutcheon, even Herblock, Bill Mauldin and Paul Conrad; among contemporaries, Michael Ramirez, Mike Luckovich, Ed Gamble and Nick Anderson—the last three much more liberal than the first. Among comic strip cartooners, he likes Charles Schulz, E.C. Segar, Chic Young, and Mort Walker.

Looking back over the last half-century, Brooks thinks editorial cartoons have changed in at least two ways. First, there are fewer labels these days, and he feels that’s an improvement, but he was critical of editorial cartoonists who strived more for humor than for making a forceful political point.

“Many cartoonists now go in more for humor than trying to push political philosophies,” Brooks complained. “The spot on the editorial page is too important for just humor; what is needed is a hard biting cartoon saying something about government. [When cartoons are highly partisan politically], they are better cartoons, when they show what the cartoonist believes and wants the reader to believe. That is the essence of an editorial cartoon. It is an editorial in graphic form. The lead editorial on the editorial page propounds the opinion of the editor, and the editorial cartoon presents the opinion of the editorial cartoonist.

“When I believed very strongly in a certain issue,” Brooks went on, “I would draw several cartoons showing three or four different reasons why I'm for it. I spaced them not too close together but days apart; I feel this is a good way of encouraging the reader to think as I do—by repeating the same message from different angles. I don't think cartoonists should hesitate to make fun of politicians with whom they disagree. Looking back, some of my cartoons that I think were among the best was where I took words right out of a politician's mouth and hung him with his own words. It's a waste of space on the editorial page to just pat a politician on the back for doing the right thing. That's what he's paid for.”

In selecting cartoons to the Best book, Brooks told the Capitol Weekly that he looks for “a pungent message, [something] easy to understand and well-drawn, with humor if possible. We always try to represent the complete spectrum of political opinion in the book, so the reader has a cross-section view of cartoonists nationwide and in Canada.”

"Chuck lived a life we all wish we lived," memorialized Chicago Tribune political cartoonist Scott Stantis, who was befriended by Brooks when Stantis joined the Birmingham News in 1996. "He met and was admired by the great and the average."