Author: Ian Miller

Webcomics

As a longtime webcomics fan, I was very excited to think about the sub-medium for this class. While I thought Bayou and Shooting War were both enjoyable comics, I felt that neither really utilized the medium of webcomic as my experience had led me to expect. Just as Dickens trained his audiences to expect and enjoy the serialized format through his insanely popular magazines, so I’ve become emotionally attached to two distinct styles of webcomic, neither of which are really imitated by either of the readings this week. Furthermore, despite the polish of Bayou’s flash interactive layout, it lacks the brilliant design of Scott McCloud’s experimental “The Right Number” (http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/trn/index.html), which uses flash or a flash-like software to not just imitate turning pages, but transitions you could never hope to achieve in paper and ink, such as multidirectional panel closure, and zooming into an image to the next one.

The two formats I’ve become accustomed to in webcomics are perhaps best exemplified by two webcomics I read fairly frequently: xkcd (http://xkcd.com/) and Marry Me (http://marryme.keenspot.com/main/2007/02/14/page-1-ex-boyfriends/). The former is a decently popular comic for nerds, utilizing a stick-figure aesthetic and extremely narrow cultural and scientific references for humor (when it doesn’t get classy and make sex jokes). The latter is an attempt to attract attention from production companies to make a movie based on the storyline, first published as an online comic page by page, and now available in stores as a trade paperback.

xkcd (the name stands for nothing in particular) epitomizes the idea of the one-off comic – sometimes the updates are only one panel, like a Family Circus cartoon. Each tends to be unrelated to the previous or subsequent update, with rare occasions of a week-long storyline, or occasional recurring characters or events. The webcomic is unified by the sensibility and artistic style. The creator, Randall Munroe, also makes a humorous use of the medium by including a “mouseover” text in each of the strips, which usually elaborates on the punchline or adds a funny remark. While this kind of addition is not nearly as experimental as McCloud’s foray, I think it more creatively utilizes the format of the webcomic than even the slickness of Bayou. Furthermore, xkcd also has spawned a large community, not only on the sites own forums, but also being linked on blogs, facebook, and even inspiring sites which are devoted to antagonistically picking the strips apart. In my mind, part of the appeal of a webcomic is not just the place you read it, but the fact that instead of having to wait to talk about the story or joke, you have a read-made community because the text is automatically online, available to all for free.

Marry Me functions quite similarly to Bayou. Both are basically advertisements for their creators, with the former attempting to sell both the storyline as a film and the trade paperback. The latter clearly intends to hook readers into purchasing the rest of the issues. However, Marry Me utilizes a method of storytelling that Bayou tends to eschew. Because it was updated a week at a time, each page builds to a moment of humor, not always an outright joke, but a miniature emotional climax, which leads to a sense of satisfaction at the end of each page. Bayou is structured more like a traditional print comic, with the climax being restricted to the end of the page sequence. I think the limitations the serialized format places on the creative team really allows them to hone their art, as Dickens did. Actually, I’ve been kind of sad that we’ve not really talked about the effect of serialization on the comics we’ve read – since structurally, serialization is the way most of the comics we’ve read function, even though we read them in one long trade paper or hardback.

All in all, I think webcomics offer hope for the future of comics, as they open up realms of genre not generally published (as Kacy notes about manga). The self-biography study, the slice of life, the fantastic, the mudance, the romantic, the historical, the romantic comedy – all these I’ve found in webcomics with art and writing to rival or better much of the dreck Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, IDW, and their competitors churn out in the superhero and scifi genres. Not that I wish to smack either of those genres – some of my favorite stories have been told in them – but there is so much more to comics than men and women in tights or with ray guns. People create webcomics that mirror their lives, from screencap parodies of nerd culture (Darths and Droids – http://www.darthsanddroids.net/; DM of the Rings – http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612) to dark fantasy stories (Garanos – http://www.garanos.com/pages/page-1/) to absurdist but sweet and often depressing hipster chic (Questionable Content – http://questionablecontent.net/). Here’s to that future.

Religion in Exit Wounds and Waltz With Bashir

(The following discussion focuses on a tiny element of this week’s texts, and I make no claim that the issues of religion are a paradigm-shaping theme in either narrative. However, I do think that the way religion appears or disappears is very interesting as a picture of the artists and the society they portray.)

When I first read these two stories, both dealing with the impact of wars with significant religious inflection, I was surprised to find so little exploration of the actual beliefs and subsequent behaviors of the combatants and victims. Waltz With Bashir particularly mentions that the perpetrators of the massacre which drives the protagonist’s search for his own actions are Christians, even mentioning that they carved crucifixes on their victims as a precursor to the massacre, but no real explanation of their position or beliefs other than the simple label “Christian Phalanges” appears in the novel. While such an omission could be merely because these facts would be apparent to anyone reading the account in Israel or Palestine, I think that combined with an earlier scene, the unspoken method of presenting religion without explanation actually mirrors the way religion is perceived by the artists.

On page 31, the soldiers in the tank debate over what to do. One offers up the suggestion that they pray, while another argues that shooting is more effective, and that you should pray while you shoot if you have to pray at all. Importantly, no mention of what belief system the prayer would fit into appears, nor do we see any praying soldiers, merely apocolyptic streaks of fire as the soldiers reject appeals to spiritual authority and instead become the life-and-death authorities. Despite this attempt to control their own situation, the powerlessness of the authority taken appears in the very next scene, as the desperate soldiers drive up to an point where death has taken over, and the soldiers merely take charge of the remains of anonymous corpses.

Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds, though it presents religion as much more present, seems to regard it again as merely a superficial covering of a person’s behavior, rather than any significant influence for changed life patterns. Numi makes some very bitter and political statements about the exclusion of unidentified bodies from Jewish cemeteries, and Kobe’s father Gabriel appears to have embraced the appearance of Judaism for the sake of his new wife, but neither of these actions appears to have any weight for Kobe, and, since the values Kobe represents don’t seem to be significantly different from the narratives’ themes (though naturally he undergoes change, as all traditional protagonists tend to), I generally take his view of his father’s religion as that which the narrative presents as fact. In that view, Gabriel’s piety becomes a complete sham, a shell he uses to hide from his wife the fact that before (and perhaps even during) their marriage he pursued sexual relationships with several women, some of them very young like Numi, some women his own age who were married to other men – all of them profoundly unethical, involving multiple betrayals. In light of this kind of relational viciousness, Gabriel’s facade of religiosity appears as nothing more than a sop for his overly gullible wife, who also seems to have her sincerity undercut by the anger she displays when Gabriel is late while Kobe waits.

All in all, the appearances of religion seem very similar in these graphic novels to the elusive “truth” that both portray the protagonists searching for. Whether it is the guilt one has no high power to absolve one of, or the pain from absence that is part of no providential plan, religion offers no comfort for the characters. Often, instead, it exacerbates the problems. However, the authors’ attitudes towards religion leaves the underlying motives behind this treatment difficult to discern. Since they provide no real presentation of the beliefs which motivate the atrocities, whether massive in scale or subtly emotional, the result is a world which functions on a surface level on the spiritual plane, using labels and images (such as the crucifix or Star of David) as an excuse or condemnation rather than exploration. The lack of curiosity here displayed does rather interest me, even though I cannot really say I have a conclusion to the issue presented by the two texts.

Stretch and text: In My Darkest Hour

Two things stayed with me after reading In My Darkest Hour: how the images were constantly distorted, like a television set not adjusted to the right aspect ration, and the walls of text, ranging from Courier New typeface to spiral-arranged handlettered chaos, covering or forming the backgrounds to entire pages and sequences. Both of these unsettled (and truthfully, annoyed) me – and I think that is the desired effect. In his interview, Santiago notes that Omar is drinking in every panel – a state of mind often conveyed through visual distortion of images in film. The sharp use of digital tools to mimic other filmic techniques (such as the blurry/sharp focus pull effect when Omar and Lucinda face each other on the stairs) makes me think that Santiago probably drew his figures relatively “normally” proportioned, and then used the tools in whatever software he created the book in to distort them as he saw fit. However, none of the images necessarily required this two-step process (at least, from my perspective). The difference in creation process leads to the question of why would one choose to draw then manipulate over simply drawing already distorted. The former, as I noted, mimics the process of film, while the latter roots itself firmly in the world of draftsmanship. While not an unequivocal answer, I read Omar’s photographic habits and the splicing/collage use of actual photos as an indication that Santiago is deliberately copying techniques of film – probably, as John notes, as a reflection and commentary on our own viewing of the world through television and film (and to a somewhat lesser extent pictures in other media).

In contrast to the clear development of filmic techniques to both add visual sophistication to the work and assist in audience participation in Omar’s state of mind, the prominent positioning of text militates against the kind of smooth, quick reading I genearally associate with both filmic grammar and sequential art narratives. The constant jerk from combining small text balloons/captions to trying to take in what amounts to a complete page of prose, often in obscuring fonts/lettering and shaped/angled/spiralled out of comprehensibility frustrated me as a reader, and led me to posit two conclusions about Santiago’s goal in this technique. The first is that most readers wouldn’t scan the text pages, instead catching key words, the emotional state of the writer (from the font/lettering style), and the place the words have in the point of view of Omar. The second would be that Santiago actually does expect readers to scan instead of skim, rapidly changing pace in their information/page intake, perhaps contributing to the identification of Omar’s disjointed, constantly changing perspective and feelings about the world around him. For me, the former is an interesting and somewhat effective experiment, while the latter seems far to self-involved and arrogant. Though my own perspective on this is clearly based on my own reading habits, I would argue that knowing how to successfully navigate physical reading pacing shifts is an admirable skill, while deliberately piling up text like bricks in front of a train indicates a mentality I find difficult to admire or sympathize with.

I suppose I ought to have been as forthright as Lindsey and mentioned that both the style and character of In My Darkest Hour deeply irritate me, not necessarily because Omar is a misogynist (though I believe he is), but because Omar teaches me nothing about what it is like to feel worthless (a trait I believe he shares with the similarly apathetic, abused, and deeply misogynistic Jimmy Corrigan – and possibly several of Alan Moore’s Watchmen). Though there is a modicum of happiness/hope at the end of the story, Omar’s journey seems to be cyclical rather than teleological, merely revolving around his naval instead of walking towards a better life.

Love in the Fun Home; also in this issue – Vocabulary!

1. Love in the Fun Home

I was fascinated by the way Bechdel chose to resolve her graphic memoir/tragicomic. By starting with the seemingly final act in her relationship with her father – his killing himself – she allows her narrative to find joy in a construction of her life in which a memory becomes a dominant portal to how she approaches that relationship: an image, overlaid with complex literary analogies and meditations, of herself as a young swimsuited girl, jumping off a diving board into her father’s arms. The final panel is a large, 2/3 page square, with the text in a voiceover: “But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I lept.”

In my brief exploration of the love between Alison and her father, I am approaching her own reverse narrative from the end, reading her relationship with the final panel and text as the hermeneutic. I work my way backwards, noting her real affection in the drawings of her father and the activities they shared – the exuberant joy of their piano playing, both leaning heads forward, his in quiet but open happiness, hers bent forward and eyes closed in fierce concentration but with a open-mouthed grin of happiness. Even the excruciatingly awkward conversation in the car, represented by a mosaic of similar, very small, panels in which Alison and her father revisit past events and seemingly come to no real resolution, the stern, obsessive face of her father, with its almost perpetually downcast eyebrows, seems to me to beg for understanding and affection, which Bechdel as artist gives in her lines.

With these images of awkward but intense love, the first chapters, with their melancholic fury at her father’s distance, appear new to me. Instead of merely blaming, the stark depictions of the unhappiness her father spread are like mourning. Well, obviously the whole book is something of an elegy, but it appears in a light not untinted by love now.

2. Vocabulary

Bechdel said (I feel like a prig saying that, but I was really excited about seeing her and really appreciated much of what she had to say) that she was in love with words, and her editor had to pull back many of her flourished vocabulary. Something I want to connect with that is her stated goal of trying to avoid duplication – letting words and images become inextricably intertwined, so that you cannot have one without the other. For Bechdel, words aren’t merely exposition of events, times, and places. They convey the richness of character and relationships. When Alison asks her father for a particular shirt, he responds “We’d have to measure your…appendages” indicating her puberty and subsequent breast growth. However, instead of saying “Your breasts make fitting such shirts awkward,” Bechdel allows us to see both her father’s reticent, repressed personality and the corresponding confusing effect it has on Alison and his relationship. Similarly, Alison’s character appears as both highly literate, perhaps a bit arrogant, and yet honestly finding joy and meaning in literary reference when she describes her actions in forcing her brother to call her Albert to avoid awkwardness with pornography-displaying workmen: “My stratagem strikes me as a precocious feat of Proustian transposition—-not to mention a tidy melding of Proust’s real Alfred and his fictional Albertine.” The erudite nature of this observation contrasts with the childish coercion of the young Alison’s actions, diversifying our reactions to include the resonances and valences such references evoke (rather like the overly ornate vocabulary of this final sentence displays my own obsession, fascination, and ego in using words).

Postscript: I am extremely excited to hear Bechdel’s next project will be her relationship with her mother, as I found the portrayal of her mother in Fun Home to be one of the most intriguing characters in a sea of already complex, incredibly corrupted yet still somehow ennobled figures.

Clean vs rough; also in this issue – Superman

1) Clean vs rough

Something that really struck me about Chris Ware’s work was that not only was it incredibly detailed, colored with clarity and taste, and given to unconventional layouts (as I mentioned in the Twitter conversation, the panel configuration gave me fits for some time, as I kept reading left to right, instead of realizing the “small panels in their group first, then the big panel” pattern), but one of the most rigidly clean examples of draftsmanship we’ve seen this semester.

The hyper-normative straightness of the lines, their extremely uniform thickness, the precise angles, curves, and shapes which Ware uses to construct his narrative emphasize the digital nature of his creative process. The razor-edged houses and compass-perfect circular heads and wheels make it obvious that Ware didn’t draw the finished product on a paper and then scan it in and ink it. However, I thought back to last weeks reading, and found the fact that Baker drew Nat Turner similarly entirely digitally (as indicated by the note which mentioned that the one-volume edition was colored directly from the digital files) fascinating. Both Ware and Baker utilize digital capabilities to their limits – Ware to create a seemingly sterile, utterly clean world of lines, angles, and monotone colors (note that there is little to no shading on objects, though often shadows will appear on the ground and walls), and Baker to facilitate the illusion of a rough pencil or charcoal sketch (the nature of his lines makes me wonder how this effect was accomplished) while seamlessly incorporating photographs and other artefacts which he did not draw (most obviously his alteration of the historical image of Nat Turner, and every time a gun appears).

Such a dramatically diverse approach to the same tools makes me wonder the thematic purposes behind such choices. Baker clearly emphasized the violence and uncontrolled nature of his narrative through his chosen methods, while Ware seems to indicate the claustrophobic, disconnected, overly-polished life of his severely damaged main character.

2) Superman

I kept noticing how ugly every appearance of Superman or a Superman figure was. The book opens with Jimmy’s mother being seduced by the seemingly genial Superman actor in a rather sordid vignette. Later, Superman leaps to his (still very clean) death as Jimmy watches from his office, an action Jimmy later contemplates. Part of me wishes Ware had made more of the comic book conventions and fixations on superheros. As it is, I am disturbed by Ware’s use of the figure of a costumed hero, but not terribly enlightened on what insight he has into the idea.

Will

One thing I found interesting as I read through “Nat Turner” was Kyle Baker’s use of stock types and situations to fill in the gaps left in the sparse narrative which makes up “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” From the beginning, when he posits the origins of Turner’s mother in a narrative conflating many stories of African slave raids (reminding me of a much more violent version of the Newberry award winning children’s novel “Amos Fortune, Free Man”), to the end, where lens flares halo around the martyred Turner’s head as the grotesquely evil crowd (gap toothed girl, apple-chewing woman, and slavering man included at no extra charge) is struck dumb at their own sin, tropes abound in Baker’s construction.

The trope I found most powerful and simultaneously most disturbing, however, was the figure of Will – the most violent and strongest of Turner’s original band. In the original text, he is mentioned as saying “his life was worth no more than others, and his liberty as dear to him. I asked him if he thought to obtain it? He said he would, or loose his life.” Additionally, Turner (in Gray’s words) attributes the first and largest individual number of deaths to Will. From these clues, Baker builds up the character of the brute, a man of generally sunny disposition who wholeheartedly gives in to the frenzy of killing when roused, and at the last gasp is still the most fearsome of the rebel slaves.

Starting with chapter III: Freedom, Will takes an arresting role. The sunny side of his nature appears as he chops wood and waves to a smiling tiny boy, though Baker utilizes image-juxtaposition with the axe in the forground of the smiling white boy as a stock situation of foreshadowing, creating a kind of sick tension. As Turner begins his rebellion with a failed hatchet swing and his first victims awake, a now-hat-wearing Will is the first to strike, revealing Baker’s conception of Will as Turner’s lieutenant. From there on, Will proves himself the most effective, ruthless, and perseverant of Turner’s men – volunteering to kill the forgotten infant, and then most iconically (because it occurs in a splash page) backhanding the little boy’s head off cleanly as the child runs smiling towards him.

The horror of this image is that which militates most strongly in Baker’s favor for me. I detest the sentimentalized description of Turner as a superhero in the preface, am rather sickened by the caricatures and martyr-images of the final scene, and unconvinced by the “literacy” message of the opening and closing images. But here, Will presents a character of great complexity. What he does is clearly absolutely evil – though the child would no doubt grow up to be as horribly exploitative an owner as his parents, he currently loves the slaves and trusts them, making Will’s action that much more horrible. And yet Will remains somewhat admirable, both because of his sunny initial appearance, and his dramtically fitting exit, rising from his apparent death and facing a circle of rifles with bared teeth. This final scene struck me as very Frank Miller-esque, reminding one of Batman rising from his beating at the hands of the mutant leader.

In the end, I am mostly unmoved and frustrated by Baker’s work in “Nat Turner,” but in his conception of Will I see the strength of his manipulation of familiar figures and circumstances, bringing out both the evil and the good of the rebellion in a nuanced way.

Now/Then, Yes/No/Many – postmodern comicism

Hillary Chute’s analysis of Maus presents a truly admirable, rigorous, complex yet unified look at how the form Spiegelman chose creates the narrative (and by narrative I want to combine not only the bare meaning of “sequence of events in time” but also the connotations of comprehension by placing events in a framework, relating events to each other in a causal manner – the creation of meaning through storytelling, in other words). She explicitly rejects the facile acknowledgement of form by previous critics (remarking that there’s much more than mere connotations – just because Spiegelman is telling an unbearably serious story in a medium dominated by unserious things doesn’t mean that’s a particularly significant aspect of why Maus is important).

However, I think in her conclusions, which I believe are basically that Spiegelman’s work presents a multivocal/discursive/anti-closure narrative (historical and otherwise, though the focus is primarily on historical given the central comic) fail in their attempt to champion this view of meaning.

Chute (and, she implies, Spiegelman) rejects the idea of closure, of one voice telling a story and one interpretation or meaning for all events. However, I think she doesn’t deal with several factors which undercut this reading of Maus (and the underlying philosophy of her analysis).

In her analysis of Maus, Chute relies/supports her claims heavily by quoting Spiegelman. Given that comics criticism is still quite nascent, or at least nascent in respectability, the intentional fallacy inherent in this use of Spiegelman’s interviews is understandable. Additionally, such use is given much weight when the work itself is completely suffused with Spiegelman’s voice, telling us what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling, what he’s trying to do with this formal device. However, such a strong, univocal presence in her text (and Spiegelman’s, if Chute’s interpretation of his goal is reliable) contradicts the idea of a multiplicity of voices presented with equal weights.

I must acknowledge that Chute does include a loophole by arguing that the effect of the devices employed by Spiegelman is combinatory – that any new effects can be added to the ones she described – but she spends too little time considering alternative or contradictory interpretations of the devices used. She could get around my own reading of the diaphragm frame around Vladek’s younger self as he begins his exercise on the bike as a Hollywood or theater spotlight, derived from the Sheik references in this chapter by saying that this doesn’t contradict her own (and Spiegelman’s) purposes in seeing it as a static wheel, an eruption, and many other things – but the fact that her pronouncements on the effects of the formal devices are so final leaves me with strong doubt as to the practicality of the underlying claims of openness. Even her rejection of the facile critics (mentioned above) seems rather at odds with her final position.

Chute’s real target, however, is not the unsophisticated in comics analysis critics, but the idea of closure – of one monolithic meaning, imposed on a narrative (or all narratives). Such a concept is small, Chute implies, one man or group of men (like the Nazis) imposing their morality (a word she uses to mean absolutism) on others, opposed by ethical (the idea of communal values, instead of absolutist ones, it is implied) comics which present the world as packed with multiple layers of meaning and experience.

And indeed, a univocal approach to meaning can be terrible, as Spiegelman portrays in the German’s final (and only) solution – the ultimate closure for six million Jews. I believe that these dangers are raised whenever a claim to absolute meaning appears in a person’s mind – because we are finite, limited by our own experiences. But I also believe that reality makes most sense when understood as absolutely meaningful. Instead of seeing this absolutism as small, narrow, selectively imposed by one man or group of men sharing the same views, I think that the absolute meaning of reality (and reality as portrayed in comics) is too big to be comprehended by one perspective. The multiple perspectives present initial, superficial contradictions, to be sure, but I believe that attempts to resolve them are neither futile nor unhelpful. Instead, reading a work like Maus, which uses its form so brilliantly to present the layers of past and present as an experience unique to its telling helps me understand both the dangers and beauties of living in our universe.

[I though long and hard, and eventually rejected this title. But I really like it, so I’m including it in the text here. “Down the Chute: Comic’s Postmodern Rejection of Absolutism”]

Who is Maus Speigelman?

“Maus” is the second graphic memoir I’ve read this month about the torturous relationship between a father and a child.  Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” and “Maus” both powerfully display the impact a father’s actions have on their daughter/son’s lives, for both good and ill, as well as the adult child’s attempts to understand their own reactions and feelings towards the now dead father.

Both of these powerful stories share another quality: I know very, very little about the authors themselves after reading them, despite the fact that it was all written in the first person, with representations of the authors in both words and image constantly staring up at me in their beautifully economical ways.  When I was priviledged to meet Ms. Bechdel, I was honestly surprised by how shy she seemed.  Her intimate, intellectual, frank, smooth prose didn’t prepare me for the way she seemed uncomfortable among so many strange, eager people (not that I blame her at all – I wouldn’t want to have to talk to me without meeting me first either :-)

To begin trying to explicate why I have this feeling about Maus, I’d like to draw attention to two pages – one the final page of Maus volume one, the other the final page of “Prisoner on the Hell Planet”

The degree of difference in self-revelation is enormous.  Even just one frame – his expresionistic eyes as his mother closes the door – is more self revelatory about how Speigelman sees himself and expresses himself than the little glyph of a slashmark brow over the dot eye in the mouse face representing his fury at his father’s destruction of his mother’s journals.  While still very much symbolic, connotating rather than denotating the eyes and the emotions behind them, the connection to individual humanity is so much stronger in those brief four pages, or even that one frame.

Is there a universalizing, collectivizing goal behind his choice here – to try to mask the individuality for such an important, universal story?  Does Speigelman not value his own personality enough to display it (a refreshing lack of ego or an annoying false modesty?) I find this question interesting when comparing my reaction here to my response to the first appearances of Dream in The Sandman, which I am still convinced are thinly veiled portraits of Gaiman himself.

The universalizing quality of using animal cartoons (a term I use to convey my sense of the level of detail and mimetic quality of the images, rather than derogatory) also seems correlated to the universal, bland nature of Speigelman’s own actions and desires.  These seem like things anyone could imagine themselves doing or feeling – irritation and anger at the demands of his father, frustration at the situations his father puts him in with Mala, annoyance at the manipulations his father constantly practices on him.  I get no real sense of why Speigelman is an artist, either in his life story or what he finds rewarding about this particular medium as he works on Maus.

Even his non-father relationships are oddly cipher-like.  I have no real sense of why he married his wife, though the awkward/sweet/meta conversation that opens the second volume is ingenious.  However, even that uses expository/behind-the-scenes intellectual excitement to distract from the fact that still we don’t know much or anything about their relationship.  In contrast, his father’s dialogue tends to be very self-revelatory, without being very aware of how vulnerable he is being.  The accent, syntax, and constant self-image form an image of Vladek that is a least ten times stronger than the image I have of the storyteller himself.

Death, live and in person

Sandman is a series where death is frequent, horrifying, casual, shocking, and yet strangely benevolent.  The obsession with the event or action of dying begins in the very first issue, “Sleep of the Just,” in which selfish magicians attempt to capture “Lord Death” – rather humorously believing that Death is both capturable and male.

Dream, rather irked after his seventy-year captivity, politely informs his gaolers that they should “…count yourself lucky for the sake of your species and your petty planet that you did NOT succeed…that instead you snared Death’s younger BROTHER” (49).  Such a forboding connotation attached to D/death seems confirmed by the next arc, in which the demented Dr. Dee casually, horrifically, and frequently murders many, many people, only to be stopped by his own greed (and perhaps Dream’s cleverness – an ambiguity taken up in the final arc of the series, The Kindly Ones).

And yet, when Death first appears, live and in person instead of the fearsome reputation, she is but a chalk-skinned, wild shock of black haired, ankh-wearing girl, seemingly in her late teens or early twenties.  Her body language is casual, and she frequently smiles.  Though she angrily informs her brother that he is and idiot for trying to solve his problem alone, her temper stems from her deep love for him.

All in all, a rather interesting portrait of the anthropomorphic personification of Death.

Terry Pratchett, collaborator and friend of Gaiman, created a similar conceptualization of Death, sticking to the traditional image of Death as a skeleton on a pale white (bony) horse (though named Binky).  Like Gaiman, however, Pratchett’s death displays intense care for those under his care – often battling against the forces of indifference, bureaucracy, and auditing for the value of the small, the useless, and the chaotic – in other words, for the value of life and meaning.

Which brings up a fascinating point: Gaiman’s death, for all her engaging personality (easily one of the most winsome characters in all literature, in this particular work sharing that title with her sister Delirium and the crow Matthew, both introduced in later volumes) remains a supporting character.  Is there something about the nature of a perfectly content, perfectly self-sufficient, happy character that makes them unsuited for a story’s central figure?  Though I find Dream an incredibly sympathetic character (an uncommon experience, apparently – I do tend to enjoy the duty-driven, introverted, complicated, emotionally stunted yet intense characters), I find myself intrigued by and yet unable to envision a “Reaper” comic.  I doubt Death has a lack of conflict – after all, despite the way all her meetings end with acceptance in “The Sound of Her Wings,” I’ve no doubt some people refuse to accept her comfort.  Not to mention the foolish magi who attempt to capture her.  But what would Death learn?  Unlike Dream, she has already changed significantly (as revealed in the short story volume of the Sandman series, she was originally an arrogant, detached character).  An intriguing possibility.

In hindsight, Death’s being perfectly suited for her job may be why Dream gave his tormentors his ominous warning – without someone to take loving charge of the souls of the departed, the world would either fall into everliving destruction, or the agony of lost souls would throw the world’s happiness completely away.  I’m inclined to think the latter is the case, since Dream and Death’s brother Destruction forsook his job, and the forces of Destruction continue without him.  But in either case, Gaiman argues (along with Pratchett) that our conceptions, our stories we make about ideas (for what is an anthropomoriphic personification based on collective consciousness/belief but an elaborate metaphor or story?) are what make life worth living, and in the end, dying.

In conversations, some people have mentioned that the artwork seems less important in this story than in Watchmen or The Dark Knight.  I’d disagree – without the varied yet centrally consistent interpretations of Death, she’d merely be interesting, perhaps slightly amusing.  But with her extravagant hand gestures, her casual body posture, mobile features, and distinctive coloring, I think she wouldn’t be the indelibly, incredibly winsome character Gaiman and his collaborators finally created (despite the significantly varied quality of the artists who contributed to the series).

Superheros as Nazis? Also in this issue: Laurie and Bechdel

Reading Watchmen is a difficult experience for me.  On the one hand, I am relatively unmoved by the supposedly groundbreaking plot, thematic, and character moves – superheros without astonishing powers (whether supernatural or supertraining), an alternate history in which the prominent actions of masked adventurers  radically shapes how it differs from our own, the moral ambiguity of vigilanteism, superheros with seriously deranged psyches – all of this is old hat to those who grew up reading Bruce Wayne: Murderer, Marvel’s Civil War crossover event, or even J. Michael Straczynski’s run on Amazing Spider-Man.
On the other hand, despite my unshaken belief that Alan Moore is pretentious (claiming and attempting grander achievements in his work than I can actually discern), his writing and Dave Gibbons’ art are both extremely high-quality.  There is an believability to his dialogue and depth to the ideas he choses to explore which are worth considering.  Furthermore, Gibbons’ art, while certainly of its period, lasts very well compared to comparable superhero art of the 80s (and, I would argue, Miller’s style, though that’s much more subjective and they clearly had different ends).
One of the things which is brought out in Watchmen, and in most subsequent critiques of the superhero genre, is that the whole idea is fascist.  Whether it’s a rather farcical attempt to connect Nietzsche’s Ubermensch with Superman or a serious attempt at pinpointing uneasiness with the idea in general, the accusation is often taken for granted that “fascist” is an acceptable assumption (for example, the last paragraph of this review of The Dark Knight: http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2008/07/dark-knight.html)
According to the Oxford dictionaries, “fascism” is “an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization; extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices.”  While Rorschach certainly fits the labels of “right-wing” (though not on a party line, as his hatred of Nixon shows), and “intolerant,” he is very much against the ideas of “authoritarian” or “government organization.”  I think too many critics of the superhero idea fixate on the ideological absolutism of the heros – their conviction that their opponents are wrong and they (the heros) are right, and that they have the right/duty to deal out punishment to those who disagree with them.  However, the anti-social nature of their activities – the individualistic, shunning public recognition of their true identities seem to indicate a collapse in the analogy between fascists (or Nazis, as Watchmen repeatedly draws) and the masked adventurers.
Furthermore, Moore’s own expectations that we will be horrified, if not by the motivations, at least by the actions of Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandias, and Rorschach require one to have a certain amount of moral absolutism in itself.  Otherwise, why not accept, as Dan and Laurie do, that the only thing to do is keep living for yourself and those close to you?
Lastly, the connection of vigilanteism with the historical abuses of fascism seem like the logical fallacy of “poisoning the well.”  While certainly there is some merit to the denotative application of the term “fascism” to the attitude behind vigilante actions, I think there’s also a connotational baggage which is often intended to silence questions of the term’s use.
Laurie and Bechdel
The comic artist Alison Bechdel, who we’ll be reading later this semester, popularized a famous standard or rule for movies:
A) it includes at least two women, who B)  have at least one conversation about C)  something other than a man or men.
(found here: http://alisonbechdel.blogspot.com/2005/08/rule.html)
While Moore’s work in Watchmen might qualify due to Laurie and Sally’s conversation, his two women still tend to act as merely secondary characters for the male characters – propping up, comforting, or reacting to the male character’s actions.  Rarely do either of them act purely out of their own desires and future plans.  I believe that this passivity is what keeps me from fully engaging with Laurie as a character, despite my enjoyment of the idea and the character who she was reportedly based on, Dinah Laurel Lance, the Black Canary (most appeallingly written by Gail Simone in Birds of Prey).

Miller, impossible reversals, and masculinity (also in this issue: splash pages)

1.

I must confess.  The only Frank Miller I’ve really been able to enjoy is Batman: Year One.  Reasons for this disconnect no doubt abound, from the objectification of women and sadism that pervade All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder to the deliberate discursiveness and unanswered continuity questions of The Dark Knight Returns, from the sheer brutality of his pencils in 300 to the bizzare nature of the coloring in The Dark Knight Strikes Again.  However, I believe one of the most fundamental problems I hit consistently is Miller’s consistent portrayal of the impossible reversal, and the clearly heroic masculinity idealized in this recurring device.

This device occurs four times in The Dark Knight Returns.  An emotional version appears (pp. 17-20) when Bruce Wayne recalls the the genesis of his obsession with the image of the bat.  His first battle with the Mutants leader fleshes out the structure in physical, brutal life (pp. 77-83), as does the battle between Batman and the Joker (pp. 143-151).  Lastly, the fight with Superman somewhat subverts the trend, albeit with an even more impossible reversal in the form or chemically faked death and resurrection.  Miller’s fixation on this device as an indicator of heroic masculinity appears in the Sin City story The Yellow Bastard, in which the main character saves himself from being hanged by tensing his neck muscles after the hanging has actually taken place.

The two middle battles, with the Mutants leader and the Joker, present the most solid embodiment of the trope in The Dark Knight Returns.  In both, Batman faces defeat at the hands or plans of his foe.  Despite being for all intents and purposes defeated, he pushes through the pain and wrestles victory into his grasp (all narrated quite grimly in Miller’s trademark neo-noir monologue).  The connection I make between these impossible reversals and Miller’s idealized heroic masculinity come in the word choices and imagery chosen to go along with the action.  In the battle with the Mutants leader, the monologue constantly drips with almost sensual joy in combat –  “A BEAUTY to his SOLAR PLEXUS,” “BONE bites into my KNUCKLES” – not to mention the aggressively (and in my view sadistic) domineering view Batman takes of the fight.  His focus on the fight is forcing his opponent to take his orders – “I make him eat some GARBAGE—-then I help him SWALLOW it,” “SHOW me EXACTLY how MUCH it takes to BREAK YOU,” “Least I can do – is shut him UP,” “Teach him brand-new KINDS of pain” – all creating a hypermasculine view of a hero who teaches evildoers that they cannot act as they want in HIS world.  Combined with the overmuscled, triangular torsoed Batman images which continue to dominate the panels, Miller’s hero in The Dark Knight Returns emerges as a physically perfect (not to say impossible, considering Batman’s ostensible age at the time of the story), paternalistic pedagogue who delights in pain both to himself and others, considering it the mark of a true, manly hero.

Though I’m not sure I can completely assimilate Alan Moore’s vision in Watchmen (and apparently, he doesn’t either, since he went on to write Tom Strong and other extremely idealistic versions of superheros), I find his depiction of Rorschach acting out the same basic pattern on taking impossible amounts of pain and overcoming them as suicidally insane, rather than heroically masculine a less troubling portrayal.

It does occur to me that in the two instances I examine here, Batman actually requires saving from his situation from the petite, female Robin.  So it’s possible (if unlikely in my mind, given the other instance of the trope in Miller’s other work) that Miller is actually attempting to subvert the trope.  I remain unconvinced and unallured.

2.

Looking at The Dark Knight Returns for recurring formal elements, I noticed the consistent placement of splash pages (a page in which the panel is either the whole or almost the whole of the page) on the left side, in a consistent pose of heroism which often contrasts with the actual narrative point, such as Batman holding the suicide general wrapped in a flag, the pose and colors superficially suggesting honor to a fallen soldier, the details pointing to Batman’s contempt instead.  The image of Robin hugging the wounded Bruce Wayne confuses with the combination of tenderness of action and harshness of pose (mitigated somewhat by Wayne’s small smile, without cruelty for once), and most of the panels with Superman (unsurprising, given Miller’s take on Superman as a naive sellout) which undercut his pose with the real meaning of his action, or a metaphoric commentary, such as the image of him lifting the tank suggesting the taint and burden he bears of all the war and death cause by his acquiescence to the powers that be.