ABOMINABLE ACT

 Re: ACT's successful campaign against cartoon superheroes in the late 1960a--

____________

ACT might be considered the stepchild of W(ertham).  I doubt they bothered citing case studies-- even studies as flawed as those of W-- but they shared W's "monkey see, monkey do" attitude regarding audiences.

As a superhero fan, I hated ACT's successful campaign against animated supers back then. But maybe they would have petered out no matter what-- and maybe they took the hit that could have happened to hyper violent Marvel Comics. Despite being more overt about fight scenes than, say, SUPERMAN was even in the early days, I'm aware of no serious anti-Marvel screeds in the sixties, and instead, at least one vaguely friendly estimation from Leslie Fiedler in the 70s. Somehow Spider-Man never seemed threatening to the bluenoses of the time; he may have seemed of a piece with weird new cultural developments-- TM, the British Invasion, and of course "Camp Batman."  Mrs. Grundy still didn't want Spidey cartoons on TV, but nobody seemed to mind Spidey kicking butts in the comics. There might have been protests of the Warren horror mags, but if so nothing ignited a movement. I doubt Wertham could have started one had he tried to engage with Silver Age comics, but it would have been fun to see what he came up with.   

EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD PT. 3

 So in the previous two installments of this essay-series, I've addressed AT-AT Pilot's essential question. "Is it possible for literature to be evil?" Dominantly my response has been, "most if not all evil is to be found in the parts of literature that encourage 'work,' a concerted effort toward a real-world goal." And even then, one must analyze a work's explicit or implicit polemic in order to determine if the goal advocated is evil. 

An obvious example of explicit polemic can be found in the 1915 BIRTH OF A NATION film, which adapted Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel THE CLANSMAN. The film (and, I assume, the source novel) makes no bones about its message: that liberated Black slaves must be kept down by the Ku Klux Klan. Implicit polemic is harder to identify, because so many critics project polemic where none is intended. However, such identification is not impossible and can usually be pegged by the way the implicit type mimics the irrational propositions of the explicit type. 

I have judged J.M. Coetzee's anti-colonialist novel DISGRACE as implicitly polemical due to the mirroring of two major events in the story. In Event One, the viewpoint character, a White South African professor teaching at the collegiate level, is condemned for allegedly manipulating a female student-- possibly but not definitely Black African-- into an affair. In Event Two, the professor's daughter, who runs a farm in South Africa, is raped by Black African trespassers, one of whom impregnates her. But because the rape took place against a scion of colonizers, it's asserted that the woman will eventually marry her rapist and that the land she owns will return to a Black African family. Obviously, some readers did not judge this disproportionate "tit for tat" as evil, in the same way that most readers today would judge the Dixon work and the Griffith film as evil. Clearly, I find them all morally noxious.

But none of the above works fall into the category I've called "play for play's sake," which takes in generally the majority of popular culture, and specifically the KAMASUTRA manga of Go Nagai, with which this discussion began. So far, most of the Nagai works I've surveyed are wild outpourings of sex and violence, with almost no attempts to impose any moral order on the chaos. The closest thing Nagai himself offers as a key to his works is an "ethic of transgression," insofar as he believes human nature is truly one big playground for a bunch of Freudian Id-Monsters. But he never expouses any sort of polemic-- though even in the more permissive country of his birth, Nagai was often criticized for his explicitness.

The majority of censorious critics don't bother to establish even an implicit polemic as I did with DISGRACE above. These critics usually follow one of two approaches-- the "monkey see monkey do" approach and the "projected polemic" approach-- and it just so happens that the two most prominent enemies of popular comics in the postwar years broke down along those respective lines. Frederic Wertham begins with the supposition that children were as twigs that would be inevitably bent by the wrong influences, and that any time one of them did wrong, an evil comic book done made them do it. Gershon Legman had the idee fixe that American culture nursed a vast conspiracy to substitute healthy sexuality with sadistic violence, and he repeatedly "proved" his thesis with endless facile projections. Neither they nor most of their descendants showed any capacity to define evil except in terms of personal self-interest-- which, some may recall, is explicitly rejected in the Bataille excerpt I cited in Part 2.

Oddly, "projected polemic" works both to champion and denigrate works that don't show either explicit or implicit polemic. Many will be familiar with news stories about evangelical groups criticizing J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER series, claiming that its magical content encourages young people to explore witchcraft and/or Satanism. This Wikipedia article chronicles many of those evangelical denigrations. However, the same article also mentions a number of defenses of the Potter series on the grounds of its encouragement of Christian values-- and even though I like the series, I view these positive characterizations to be projections. It's not that there's no moral content in POTTER. But at base I think that Rowling's series is essentially "play for play's sake" as much as most Go Nagai works, even though POTTER lacks the extreme sex and violence of Nagai.

Francois Truffaut said, "Taste is the result of a thousand distastes," and what many critics label as evil is often more a reaction against something they find unpleasurable. They often impugn the artist, as if he were showing them unpleasant things for some sadistic or politically motivated reason but have little appreciation for another Truffaut observation: that artists are not endorsing everything that appears in their works. All art is founded on conflict-- Bataille would say "transgression"-- and every fictional conflict conceivable can potentially trigger someone in terms of a taste-reaction. I try as much as possible to frame all of my critical downgrades in terms of analyzing a work's explicit or implicit polemic. But I'm sure there are some works I just don't like for reasons of taste, too, as with my generally unfavorable critiques of Mark Millar's comics. I certainly don't think he's guilty of any more polemic than is Go Nagai-- but I find Nagai creative and Millar boring in terms of their violently transgressive content. So even a critic who refutes taste-based criticism can't help but be influenced his own "thousand distastes." Probably the only time I'd denounce "play for play's sake" as evil would be when I think it's boring.

CURIOSITIES #36: ["KERRY'S LITTLE LECTURE"], KERRY DRAKE #10 (1948)

 

This one-page item appeared on the inside front cover of a comic book devoted to reprinting the Sunday pages of KERRY DRAKE, a patent DICK TRACY imitation. One interesting aspect is that though the lecture appears in a comic book, the complaining citizen is actually irate about violent crime stories in the newspapers, which for her set a bad example for the young. Prior to this, I hadn't seen much documentation of calls for comic-strip censorship, and indeed Wertham's SEDUCTION largely gives the newspaper comics a pass. According to Jay Maeder's history of the DICK TRACY strip, Chester Gould constantly dealt with complaints about violence for the entire history of TRACY. I imagine KERRY DRAKE might have caught some of the same criticism, though from what I've seen DRAKE was much tamer than TRACY. This proposition is strengthened by the fact that this lecture is signed by DRAKE's creator Alfred Andriola. Of course, some other artist might have ghosted the one-pager in his style. But if Andriola had been the victim of real citizen complaints, then there's no reason he would have refrained from using the interior of a reprint comic book as a "bully pulpit" to argue his case-- especially since he could not do so in the various newspapers that circulated his comic strip.

As an added amusement, the comic-strip continuity reprinted in issue #10 concerns illegal drugs, a topic which would be forbidden for comic books following the Comics Code. There never was an official Code for newspaper comics, but I imagine the existence of the Code might have had a chilling effect on, say, the depiction of various topics in the strips during the late fifties and the following decade.

NEENER, NEENER, CBR

 Just a quick notation of this podcast by Clownfish TV to the effect that Comic Book Resources is in the process of major restructuring, laying off several employees, one of whom reportedly had been there for ten years.

Now, while I'm not precisely glad about anyone losing a job, it strikes me as the logical outcome of a business that chose to pursue only Radical Leftist fans as their base. I've mentioned here that I had several experiences with rabid Lefties while I was a member there, and that eventually I was banned for no stated reason, presumably for saying something that offended some snowflake. In the cited article from four years ago, I even quoted Clownfish as calling CBR a "dumpster fire," though Kneon and Geeky presumably had their own reasons for that observation, possibly very different from my own.

Clownfish TV doesn't draw the comparison I did, to the restructuring of CNN months ago for analogous reasons. That's not to say that it's any more profitable to court only conservatives either, though at present some FOX shows are doing better in terms of viewer-numbers than those on CNN. 

However, the big difference is that CNN does have an alternative; to return to a model of non-advocacy news. My earliest experience with CBR was from the days when individual artists had their own subgroups, and I gravitated to the Gail Simone subgroup only because a few people there showed a little knowledge of comic book history. But later, the Janelle Asselin suit and the Comicsgate controversy moved CBR firmly to the Far Left. I found that the Lefties were just as verbally abusive as the Comicsgate fans about whom they constantly complained. But in the minds of the ultraliberals, their abuse was OK, because they were supposedly defending the oppressed. I tend to doubt that most comic-book journalists know what non-advocacy journalism for comics would even look like, because of the sites are either Left-leaning or Far Left.

I don't know why any viewers with conservative or even middle-of-the-road sentiments would bother with CBR ever again. But I suppose I might be surprised, WAY down the road.

AFTER THE TORRENT, THE FLOOD

It's been over a year since I wrote A TINY TORRENT OF CENSORSHIP, in which I mentioned two unrelated incidents in which I'd made posts on two forums-- CBR and SUPERHERO HYPE-- that were censored, in one case, with a post-deletion, in the other case, with a locked thread. (I also mentioned an incident on THE BEAT, but it wasn't my post that was deleted.) This year, the "flood" has struck, in that in the past week I was banned from both CBR and SUPERHERO HYPE.

Such forums, of course, are always dictatorships, distinguished only by whether or not the dictators are permissive or stringent. This in turn depends on the POV of the person making the judgment. Based on my experiences with these two forums, I would say HYPE was pretty stringent while CBR at least displayed some desire to be seen as permissive. This is ironic in that CBR rebooted its forums in 2014, theoretically in response to the Janelle Asselin business, for reasons that remain unclear.

Now, precisely because HYPE locked one of my threads unfairly, I barely posted there in the last year. As for CBR, I changed my mind since writing, in the aforementioned Asselin essay, that I didn't think that I'd join the new CBR community. I did join, but since I didn't get the sense that I shared any of the tastes of the posters re: pop culture, most of the time I hung out on one or two Politics threads. Occasionally I took forum-posts made on CBR and made them into blogposts here. 

Given that the majority of posters on CBR were ultraliberals, the only attraction of posting on CBR was to bait said ultraliberals. Now, unlike most persons of this political persuasion-- and presumably ultraconservatives as well, if I could find any-- I don't consider "baiting" to be the same as "trolling." I'm aware that in some quarters "trolling" is defined as the activity of expressing an opinion that runs contrary to the opinions dominating the forum. Generally, this is not the meaning most posters communicate when they use the term "troll." They mean, rather, that the poster is putting out some opinion that diverges from the dominant one because the individual poster is attempting to sow strife and toxicity. "Baiting," however, has a longer and nobler tradition that predates Al Gore's invention of the Internet. and has more to do with voicing opinions based in differing premises. CBR actually put up with my baiting of toxic ultraliberals for over a year, and since I didn't break any rules for the forum, it seems likely that some snowflake poster made a complaint, the better to make the political threads into an echo chamber wherein everyone agrees.

So what did I get banned for? In both cases the ban was permanent, so I can't access the forums from my normal IP address. I assume that I could see CBR if I used another IP address, but I have not yet done so. I'm sure that there will be no explanation of what rule I supposedly violated, but I'm reasonably sure that I didn't post anything different from what I'd been posting for a year. I recall that one poster had just accused me of being a white supremacist, so it's probable that this was the rationale that the moderators used to get me off their backs.

I did look at HYPE through another IP that I'd never used for that board. All I noticed was that one of my posts had been completely deleted, but it wasn't even particularly inflammatory-- except to ultraliberals. One poster had been going on about how American Neo-Nazis were the lowest form of life, and that they automatically inherited all the sins of the Holocaust. I did not defend Neo-Nazis in any way, but I pointed out that the imputation of transferrable guilt did not make any sense. I stated, as a reducio ad absurdum, that it made about as much sense as saying that modern Muslims were responsible for the deeds of archaic Muslims who made slavery into Big Business. In retrospect I wonder if I would've been banned had I used a different argument, like finding American Communists responsible for the deeds of Stalin. But it's a moot point.

I've now sought out the political board DEBATE POLITICS to see how that one works. I've been a classic liberal for a long time, and still deem myself one. But I depart from most of the positions of current Leftists, particularly their descent into incoherence when anyone challenges their belief-system.

ADDENDUM: I was amused by this 2020 podcast--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiKQa8YOxpY

--in which one podcaster calls Comic Book Resources a "Tumbler dumpster file" because of yet another ultraliberal essay about how Hollywood oppresses female superheroes. I'm not surprised to hear that the site has gone even farther down the rabbit hole of idiocy than was previously the case.

A TINY TORRENT OF CENSORSHIP

Any one who's read this blog for any length of time will have noticed that I've often complained about having some of my cyber-remarks deleted or censored. By some divine irony, it's almost always been by persons who take the political position of liberals, which may say something about the intellectual wherewithall of current liberals, at least in the comics community. This last week, however, brought in a bumper crop of three, though I was only tangentially involved in one of them.

The tangential one appeared on this BEAT post. The substance of the original post was to record how some conservative pushback had appeared against using comic books in schoolrooms due to a perceived "liberal agenda." Most of the posters assumed a fairly liberal stance in response to the topic, but one fellow, whose longlong name I'll abbreviate to "Eor," made two posts of a more or less conservative tone. The second post contained two very short remarks, arguing (as I recall) that the liberal notion of "sexuality is a social construct" was no more objective than many conservative notions. I agree with the latter topic, and just wrote, "Good one." Then Heidi deleted the second post and it looked like I was agreeing with Eor's sole remaining post.

I also decided to test the depth of the intellectual waters at the Superhero Hype Board by reprinting THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES there, sans the title. I flatter myself that it should be clear that it was not an overarching defense of the Southern cause-- yet the dozen or so responses to the thread were concerned only with condemning the Confederacy as the Ultimate Evil. On top of that, someone asked for the thread to be closed, and so it was. So much for enlightened debate there.

Much less surprising was the deletion of two posts on a "pro-LGBT" thread on CBR Community. While I had never posted on said thread before, I'd been something of a gadfly against the knee-jerk ultraliberals for some time, so I imagine that some moderator was simply over-reacting against an innocuous post. On the LGBT thread, someone used the phrase "straight privilege" as if it were a self-evident thing. My two posts requested a definition or citation of what the poster thought it meant. No one responded, except the moderator, who after deleting my posts penned a self-righteous screed in which he thought it was dumb for anyone to question the existence of straight privilege. I didn't say it didn't exist, and I wasn't necessarily planning to debate anyone on the subject, but the moderator just didn't want to deal with heavy matters like definition of terms.

So I guess I'll be looking for new forums in future for debate potential. I suspect the ones with "comics" in the title have all been played out.