Author: Lars Garvey Laing-Peterson

Is “Shooting War” embarrassed to be a web comic?

It’s difficult for me to think about war reporting without Michael Herr’s Dispatches quickly coming to mind. Seeing as Herr’s account of Vietnam inspired elements of Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, and that Herr helped write the screenplays for both films, it’s not difficult to see how my fondness for Dispatches played against “Shooting War.” Where Herr’s Dispatches viscerally displays the horrors of war, with the author himself changed by the events he lives through, Jimmy Burns’ emotional register seems rather limited — he sometimes looks scared, looks bored a lot, drinks a bit, shoots off a few snarky remarks, lusts after women, and that’s about it. In many ways, Jimmy is not very different from the soldiers continuing the wars he claims to be against. Because of his detachment and distance, the horrors of war are little more than background noise (a remark the character himself basically makes when talking about sleeping in the hotel in the green zone, how the blast shields keep out a lot of the noise, but not the mortar blasts and gunfire), unpleasant detours and interruptions, and so on. With the authors and artists choosing to mix brutality with satire, parodying almost everyone in the text, including Burns, it’s difficult to see “Shooting War” as anything but a doomsday scenario played out by vaudevillian actors, none of which I particularly cared about.

The medium of the web comic seems to have led to many of the creative decisions behind “Shooting War” — the focal character of a web comic is a blogger, the archetypal detached, snide rabble-rouser or hipster “douchebag.” The fact that we quickly see Jimmy on television screens and on the covers of magazines is interesting, almost as if the creative forces behind the web comic still see older, established manifestations of mass media as “more authoritative.” (It’s also difficult to ignore the constant advertisements for the print publication of “Shooting War,” a text that allegedly offers the narrative a life it couldn’t find online, with “important story & art changes” that I shouldn’t miss.”) The web gives birth to both “Shooting War” and the journalistic career of its focal character, yet the story moved to the “established,” “respected” medium of print, a medium in “Shooting War” that eventually claims Jimmy is impotent, unable to “get it up” in the world of television journalism. A web comic finds an audience and jumps mediums; a blogger stumbles into a journalistic career, but fails to connect with anyone but “sluts” who want to have his baby. What is “Shooting War” trying to tell us about the internet? Is it really just a place to watch porn and bitch about movies, to paraphrase the once-humorous filmmaker Kevin Smith, and not a legitimate medium for the expression of ideas? It’s interesting that the longest web comic we read seems almost ashamed to have started out on the internet.

The Subjective Portrayal of Passing Time

Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth wonderfully plays on the ideas of perspective, objectivity, and subjectivity, as well as the author’s and audience’s distance to the story and its characters (as Bedehoft argues, using the “cut-outs” in the text as examples), to emphasize how one’s experience of passing time is often interrupted and affected by history, memory, and fantasy. In Jimmy Corrigan, these interruptions make up a significant portion of the text, suggesting that Ware sees time not only as the passing of seconds, minutes, hours, and days, but as the moments we daydream staring out the window, thinking back upon our past experiences, worrying about our futures, fantasizing about opportunities that await, wincing at embarrassments from adolescence, dreading horrors lurking in the shadows of an unknowable future, and so on. Time not only passes Jimmy by, but is filtered through him — the minutes can pass slowly and awkwardly, with other characters trying to engage the socially inept Corrigan, or these minutes can seem like hours in which robots watch their younger selves from the deck of airship, only to wake and shed their metal plating (and in this moment between dreaming and waking, being next to a peach tree and under a bird, with peaches and birds being two of the numerous leitmotifs Ware uses throughout Jimmy Corrigan) on an airplane headed towards Michigan to meet an unknown father.

As Bredehoft notes in his essay “Comics Architecture, Multidimensionality, and Time…,” the historian Hayden White “describes one of the central understandings of contemporary historiography as suggesting that ‘events must be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occurrence but narrated as well, that is to say, revealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence” (Bredehoft 886).

The actual narrative of the contemporary Jimmy in Jimmy Corrigan could be easily laid out, revealing a tragic tale of a shy, emotionally stunted man meeting his father for the first time in adult life, laying the first tentative foundations of a relationship with his adopted half-sister, only for his father to die as the result of a car accident and his half-sister literally pushing him away in a moment of suffocating grief. But Ware does not present this story alone — instead, Jimmy, who is almost incapable of expressing/presenting himself (or the ‘order of meaning’ of the passing events that make up his life) in his own words, is expressed/presented through his dreams, daydreams, nightmares, and imaginative currents. In many ways, Jimmy Corrigan‘s narrative and pictorial presentation are indebted to works like Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, where the present is constantly interrupted, diverted, colored by and juxtaposed to past recollections and daydreams. In these works, time is never transcended, but is presented as subjectively malleable — a watched pot never boils, as my mother used to say to me.

Instead of presenting the passing moments of time between when the oven is turned on the water boils within a pot — be it the life of the younger or older Jimmy Corrigan — Ware allows us a glimpse inside of their imaginations, dreams, and nightmares, the interruptions that fill their heads as the water heats up, and demonstrates, as Bredehoft points out in his essay, how time and history unknowingly connects the characters, as when “Jimmy unknowingly looks through a window installed by his own great-grandfather, literally inhabiting a space once filled by his ancestors” (879), or pictorially represented in the history of the torn photograph Jimmy keeps in a drawer — a page which not only seems to condenses time and history, and demonstrates how the past is always entwined in the present, but interestingly links Jimmy’s window frame with a billboard outside, connecting Jimmy’s (lonely) home and existence with that of the city outside, even as it retreats from the wider shot of the city into the deadening emptiness of Jimmy’s home (877).

“The style of warfare… in the Bible”

Kenneth S. Greenburg’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner: Text and Context” may be one of my favorite supplementary texts we’ve read for this class — extremely well versed in the world in which Nat Turner lived and rebelled, and wonderfully fitting Turner, Gray, the rebellion, and the text into the world we now inhabit. While the piece consistently impressed me, one section particularly struck me: the idea that the “indiscriminate slaughter” (Greenburg 20) that filled the first phase of Nat Turner’s rebellion (the latter phases never came to be) “was consistent with the style of warfare Nat Turner must have read about in the Bible” (20; italics mine).

While much is made of Turner’s faith and belief that he was given a “special purpose” (1) in this world by forces from the next in Greenburg’s piece and both Gray’s and Kyle Baker’s Confessions, only Greenburg seems to attribute not only Turner’s “purpose” to Christianity, but his violent methods. Often the Bible is thought of a book of redemption and salvation by Christians, not as a book where one can find some form of justification for “indiscriminate massacre” (20). Perhaps it is as simple as the distance in years between the Bible’s conception and our world today, but I feel it would be difficult to imagine anyone arguing now that images such as can be found on page 135 of Baker’s text should be discussed in any way as having their justification, footing, or roots in religious scripture, yet Greenburg is quick to point out the prophet Ezekiel telling his followers to “Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women…” (Greenburg 20) if they are non-believers, thus somewhat linking Baker’s horrific image of a child having his head removed by an axe with a religious narrative — Ezekiel told his followers to slay “those who had broken faith” (20); Turner tells his followers to kill all the whites they encounter as the first step in a religiously ordained “holy crusade” (16-7).

I am sure I am far from the only one who is unsettled by the idea of Nat Turner as a hero (Baker calls Turner “my hero” in his introduction (Baker 7), somewhat coloring the text for me) as well as the central figure of an “indiscriminate massacre,” but I am also rather unsettled by Greenburg’s rather keen observation that Turner garnered his violent plan from the pages of the Bible. Baker directly confronts this issue, depicting Gray asking Turner, “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?”, to which Turner replies, “Was not Christ crucified?” (189). Turner believes that his actions are ordained by God, that his “style of warfare” taken from the Bible is just and righteous, and that his hanging will cement his place as a religious prophet and figure, paralleling himself and his actions to Christ’s own.

In many ways I can understand how the horrors of slavery could drive an enslaved person to violence. What I am having a problem with is the fact that not only is Turner presented as a Christ figure by Baker (a reflection of Turner’s own presentation of himself as a Christ figure, though Gray’s misrepresentation of Turner should also enter this debate), but that in order to accept this portrayal, one must also accept Greenburg’s idea that Turner learned his style of violence — an indiscriminate massacre that targets every white person, not only slaver owners — from the Bible, and that this kind of violence has any place, be it in the pages of scripture or in a southern Virginia town near the North Carolina border as a result of “man’s inhumanity to man.” It is here that I have a difficult time accepting Turner as a “hero” or as a Christ figure for I can’t understand any way, not even through paralleling Turner and his actions alongside those of violent episodes depicted in scripture, that Turner’s actions reflect a true hero or Christ figure, not at least as I have come to understand those terms in today’s world.

As a flawed man, I can understand Nat Turner and his actions; as a hero, as Baker claims early on in his text to conceive Turner as, I cannot — I don’t feel Turner’s actions, even if they are understandable, are in any way heroic.

The Artist’s Signature

Inspired by Ian’s post on Chute’s essay, which put a lot of my jumbled feelings about “The Shadow of a Past Time” into words, I’ve decided to take issue with Chute’s reading of the final panel of Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began.

While much of Chute’s essay demonstrates her grasp of the text and the ideas she posits are within Maus, many of her points — most of which can be boiled down to a sentence or two, as Ian does succinctly in his post — are so exhaustively argued that the essay leaves very little breathing room or space for other avenues of thought. While focused on the final panel of Maus, “the penultimate punctuation” of the text, Chute seems completed alluded by one of the simplest, yet most profound observations: Art Spiegelman’s signature is just that, an artist’s signature, a demonstration of Spiegelman’s ownership and responsibility for Maus, something he struggles with earlier on in the second volume.

Others have strongly pointed out the more meta-fictional properties of the second volume of Maus. Indeed, entire sections of the graphic novel are composed of Art Spiegelman’s doubts and concerns about the project he has undertaken, playing not only with Spiegelman’s mice/mask metaphor, but with the full visual potential of a graphic novel — here I am thinking of the pictorial depiction of Spiegelman being reduced to a crying child, not only emotionally, but physically within the confines of the text. While Maus is in many ways Vladek Spiegelman’s life story, the narrative of Maus is actually of the artist creating Maus: interviewing (and, as we see numerous times within the text, pushing his father to recount, perhaps traumatically relive, the horrors he survived) the subject of the story, creating animal masks for his the characters that populate Spiegelman’s rendering of not only his father’s story of survival, but his own story of an artist in the process of creation, and so on.

While I do not necessarily think Chute is completely off the ball with some of her thoughts on the final panel, the idea that she could not see, as I did, an artist saying, “Maus is the story of my father’s survival, but it is my version of his story/history,” perplexed me, especially given how often Spiegelman seems to question his ability and choice to take on a project such as Maus. I felt this panel was not only a tribute to his parents, but a clear cut sign that what we have just read is a story by Art Spiegelman, artist and writer, narrative and pictorial shaper of another person’s story which is paralleled alongside his own subjective account of being an artist in the process of creation, of being a flawed son to a difficult father, of being a husband and father himself, and so on.

Is Spiegelman “buried” by his parents’ history? In many ways, yes, but I do not feel that this is the reason the signature rests in the white, empty space below his parents’ grave — perhaps I would feel differently if the graphic space seemed filled, not only with soil and caskets, but with history, or if I could honestly believe, as Chute appears to, that the panels on the page actually travel “upwards” — when my eyes fell on the gravestone, they stopped. Also, artists’ signatures are typically at the bottom of their work; while I do think that there are points to be made about the signature’s placement and proximity to the grave stone, I don’t think these points should be made at the expense of the obvious.

Are some of the other points Chute makes about the final panel worthwhile, even if only as the beginnings of worthwhile conversations? Again, yes. It would just be easier to take many of her readings in stride had she not missed one of the most obvious and important aspects of an artist’s signature, especially at the end of a text about an artist’s father’s story of survival, a project the artist has struggled with and been humbled by. I think the conversations that could be prompted by the idea of Spiegelman taking responsibility and ownership for Maus are far more interesting than the ones allowed by Chute’s analysis of that final panel.

[Again, riffing off Ian, I was pretty close to titling this post “Chutes Too Narrow.” Yeah, I know. I’m a dork.]

“He is, after all, just a human… What could possibly go wrong?”

Years ago, when my brother finally got me to read the first volume of The Sandman by letting me know that John Constantine, a favorite comic character of mine, appeared early on in The Sandman‘s history, I was worried how Gaiman — typically a less dark writer than Preacher‘s Garth Ennis and some of the other writers who contributed to Hellblazer‘s pages — would portray Constantine. Then, as now, I was impressed.

Gaiman’s attention to detail, his obvious love of characters from a number of genres, and his ability to fit these characters, even if rather briefly, into the development of his own character, Morpheus, is something to behold. Gaiman demonstrates a considerable knowledge of the characters he weaves into Sandman, one of my favorite instances being the humorous aside of J’onn J’onnz’s/the Martian Manhunter’s on p. 147: “Come, Scott Free; let us hit the kitchen. I have a secret stash of Oreos of which you are welcome to partake.” Throughout his take on Constantine, Gaiman references key parts of Constantine’s own history: on the first page we see Constantine, we first have a shot of a pack of Silk Cut cigarettes (82), the brand Constantine smokes roughly 30 a day of; Constantine’s “relationship” with London is shown on p. 83; Constantine’s old punk rock outfit, Mucous Membrane, comes up on 84; and, to avoid making too long a list, Newcastle — one of the major trauma’s that repeatedly haunts John Constantine early on in Hellblazer — is wonderfully woven into the final page of his cameo, 104.

More tellingly than the details sprinkled throughout Constantine’s role in Sandman is the use of Constantine himself. Not uncommon for John, someone has helped themselves to something of his, something often that Constantine himself has no urge to mess around with. And in complete harmony with Constantine’s dark world, it is an ex-girlfriend and a junky who has taken Morpheus’ bag of sand and is using it as a drug, killing herself in the process. The ending of Constantine’s chapter demonstrates Gaiman’s respect for the character: Constantine, bastard that he often is, cracks a little, demonstrating that there is a human heart (though with demon blood pumping through it) and human emotions (though wrought with trauma) within him. And, again a major trope of Constantine’s own title, he loses a friend; the best he can do for Rachel is ask Morpheus to allow her to die peacefully, not painfully.

Interestingly, even keeping with what Freud wrote, it is through John’s perspective that I felt anything close to the uncanny. Despite Morpheus’ and Constantine’s worlds being rich with magical, animistic elements, there are still things that frighten John, and when Morpheus tells us that Rachel’s father’s house is not safe for humans, we know he isn’t lying. By following Morpheus into the darkness, we get a fine take on Constantine — his love of his friends, ones he often puts directly in the way of danger, his past, and the adrenaline rush he often gets from being involved in dark matters — and we get a slight uncanny sensation: we may know there are monsters in the dark in Constantine’s world, this isn’t a feeling or thought process we’ve “surmounted,” yet we don’t know what these monsters will look like or what they can do. The shot of the house having become a living creature is well done, demonstrating something that perhaps we knew, but didn’t want drawn into the light.