THOUGHTS ON JIM SHOOTER

Jim Shooter passed on the last day of June this year. I won't be writing a general overview of his work, given that I only knew his Marvel and DC accomplishments, and almost nothing about his efforts for companies like Valiant. Defiant and Broadway. But I'll cover a few career highlights (and lowlights) here.

 

I'm sure almost every Shooter-obit will mention that he sold his first scripts to DC Comics, via mail, at the age of 14. Shooter became well known for improving the often staid adventures of DC's team of futuristic super-teens, the Legion of Super-Heroes, by crafting more engaging melodramatics and a greater use of action. By the middle 1960s, some long-time DC artists had started using greater dynamism in their stories, such as Gil Kane in GREEN LANTERN and Mike Sekowsky in JUSTICE LEAGUE, probably as a response to the increased popularity of Marvel's action-heavy product. But Shooter brought the sensibilities of a fan-reader to these early scripts: he wrote the sort of things that he, as a teen, liked reading. That included a greater emphasis on battle-scenarios, and even the often stodgy SUPERMAN books under editor Mort Weisinger were improved on that score. I'm sure many obits will mention that Shooter created a new recurring foe for the Man of Steel: the Parasite, who could drain off Superman's powers and then use those powers to beat the snot out of the hero. But I have a nostalgic preference for his script for SUPERMAN #191. In it, the Kryptonian must fight against DEMON, an evil cabal with fantastic weaponry, to keep the agents from obtaining a forbidden artifact. This issue might be the only time long-time Super-artist Al Plastino even came close to rendering the sort of hyperkinetic action one expects from American comic books. 

  Shooter left DC for a few years, and then came back and wrote a few more stories. But he would prove more important as an editor at Marvel, particularly when he rose to the position of the company's chief editor in 1978. All reminiscences of the period seem to agree that Shooter came into Marvel when there was something of a power vacuum, and that the company was losing a lot of money on ventures with dubious commercial potential-- some fan-favorites like the McGregor KILLRAVEN, some unlikely "throw-stuff-against-the-wall" creations like THE GOLEM and GABRIEL DEVIL HUNTER. Shooter imposed a greater editorial authority over Marvel raconteurs for the next nine years, and although he made the trains run on time, many long-time employees, among them Doug Moench, complained of micro-management that limited creativity. Back in the day, I protested the regimentation of the Shooter regime by writing a negative JOURNAL review of the 1984-85 SECRET WARS. Not that my review, or anyone else's. made any difference to the success of that maxi-series. The sweet deal that Shooter or his reps negotiated with Mattel Toys got the comic book promoted on TV alongside Mattel's SECRET WARS toy line-- and so WARS was a big hit for Shooter. (I never knew why afterward Marvel kept adapting toy lines that DIDN'T promote the comics on TV. With the exception of G.I. JOE and maybe TRANSFORMERS, most of the toy-adaptations went down the tubes.)

  Now, in those days, Shooter represented the apogee of mediocre commercial comics to the JOURNAL and its readers. I can't claim I didn't channel some of this virulent anti-Shooterism at the time, but I think I was at least aware that some creators, such as Frank Miller and Walt Simonson, produced good-to-great works under Shooter's editorial aegis. Gary Groth's take was more adversarial-- if a company wasn't producing what he deemed "great art," it was worthless. (Note how, on the JOURNAL cover above. Shooter is getting dubious looks from many characters from "alternative comics:" Rorschach, Mister X, Mister Monster, Zippy the Pinhead, and Ed the Happy Clown, for five.) By the early 1990s, the JOURNAL's devaluing of all commercial comics was so complete I for one quit submitting to the editors, since I believed that a critic had to be able to appreciate excellence in any form.       

    I don't remember finding any excellence in any of the stories Shooter wrote during his nine years at Marvel: not even the excellence of good formula comics, like LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES . However, as an editor he helped deliver the balls-to-the-wall, super-melodramatic conclusion of the "Dark Phoenix Saga " in X-MEN 137. As many fans know today, originally the X-MEN creators Claremont and Byrne had meant to deliver a fairly low-impact, cop-out (IMO) conclusion to the story. Shooter insisted that Dark Phoenix had to pay a price for succumbing to her cosmic killing-rage, and whatever one might think of imposing moral judgments on ficitonal characters, in this case Shooter's instincts were better, for that particular story, than those of Byrne and Claremont. It didn't matter to me then, and doesn't matter to me now, that Phoenix and Jean Grey would be revived many more times, in many more permutations. All that matters now was that the original story delivered a good finish to its dramatic action. Without Shooter, X-MEN fans might not have had that.

And for that accomplishment, I can even forgive SECRET WARS.

              

REMEMBRANCE OF JOURNALS PAST

 Reader YBY wrote in the comments-section of this post: 

I always figured the people who worked [at the Journal] were true believers in the whole "comics should be grown-up and complex" view.

 As it happens, some ruminations on my experiences with the Journal fit in with another topic, so here goes.

On the general subject of making comics grown-up, the Journal didn’t start out with that high-toned ambition when the magazine began in 1976. In terms of content, the early Journal celebrated and criticized the same topics that engaged the greater part of comics fandom: genre-work from the major publishers and old fandom-favorites like EC Comics and the Carl Barks ducks. The Journal wasn’t the first fanzine to have couched its criticisms in a more intellectual tone, but Gary Groth succeeded in finding an assortment of writers who shared his waspish view of the medium-- including me-- which may have only been possible because mainstream fans had become more venturesome in their tastes in the early 1970s. At some point, the news section of the magazine became more adversarial toward the big companies (and some smaller ones), and that adversarial nature made the Journal notorious for its focus on controversial issues. Nevertheless, despite some of Groth’s later pronouncements, the Journal was still a fanzine. For what I remember as a full year, the magazine’s subscription page featured a still from the then-current STAR WARS hit, in which the movie’s characters were made to say something like, “That’s no fanzine—it’s too big to be a fanzine!” Some of the most memorable genre-celebrating essays of early issues included Cat Yronwode championing the mythic aspects of the WONDER WOMAN feature, and Ed Via devoting a long essay to the subtleties of Miller’s DAREDEVIL.

In this essay I provided a snapshot of the shift away from genre-celebration in the 1980s, the same period when Gary and Co. decided to emphasize “art” in the Journal while letting Amazing Heroes deal with all the genre-work. Still, while I was still contributing, I persevered in attempting to analyze the makeup of genre in my reviews whenever possible, rather than dismissing genre as the domain of mere hacks. I give credit to Gary Groth for giving Journal space to my very favorable review of Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS circa 1987, even though various personal remarks made it clear that he Groth abhorred the work. But by the early 1990s, the bloom was off the rose: genre was the enemy, and most of the writers were only too happy to jabber about commodification and similar Marxist fantasies in order to increase the magazine’s alleged intellectual heft.

In various essays I've argued that, in addition to the Marxist cant, many Journal writers subscribed to the Pedagogical Paradigm, claiming that superheroes could only appeal to children and that therefore modern fans were just as a bunch of big man-babies. No doubt the converted choir found this nonsense gratifying to their egos, but none of them had any better concept of what Art was than had the writers of the Frankfurt School, from whom many Journalistas sedulously copied. And yet, the dislike of genre may run even deeper than that.

In Malcolm Heath’s commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, Heath describes the philosopher’s definition of the term “tekhne,” meaning a special level of excellence that a superior member of any profession—artist, philosopher, politician—reaches when he masters his craft. Yet, as if to contradict this emphasis on intellectual assiduity, at the opening of the Metaphysics Aristotle says (according to Heath) that “unreflective experience may produce the same result as ‘tekhne.’ In general, the ability to do something well does not depend on understanding, nor does understanding necessarily imply an ability to do it well.”

Because Art has so many multifarious dimensions to it, I’ve often disputed judgments by various critics whom I found overly dependent on judging Art by some purely intellectual metric. Such critics, while comfortable with a Harvey Kurtzman, had no vocabulary for dealing with the genius of a Jack Kirby, except to call him a “primitive” or something like that. I sought to use the mythic arguments of critics like Frye and Fiedler to argue for a wider perspective, and at one point I even asked Gary Groth if he’d want to print a regular series on “myths in comics.” He did me another favor by refusing the proposal. While I don’t recant anything that I wrote back in those days, back then I hadn’t yet defined what factors were shared by both religious and literary myths—a commonality I would now abbreviate to “poeticized knowledge.” Without a sound definition, my survey of the topic would not have been adequate, and any “myth-essays” I might have written back then would have suffered.

I will note in conclusion that when critics—in the Journal or anywhere—celebrate works for adhering to some intellectual concerns, they’re just doing what they were taught in school. Anything I learned about HUCKLEBERRY FINN in elementary or secondary school was almost certainly framed in purely intellectual terms, as in, “Twain does XYZ in order to signal his deep revulsion toward slavery.” That’s the sort of simple idea on which that high-school kids can base meaningless essays, in order to show that they at least paid some attention in class. Anything deeper, such as Fiedler’s claim that Huck and Jim represent a homosocial union that divorces both males from the troublesome world of family life, has to come later, when an individual has learned how to deal with abstractions of all kinds, not just with those that serve some narrow “pro-social values.” In fact, if the Pedagogical Paradigm applies to anyone, it would be to all those who avoid the deep waters of myth and symbol in order to content themselves in the kiddie-pool of rationality—

The big man-babies.

THE DARK KNIGHT REBORN (1987): REVIEW EXCERPT

As a preface to my impending review of THE DARK KNIGHT: MASTER RACE, I decided that the short mythcomics review I posted for the 1986 DARK KNIGHT RETURNS was insufficient for my needs. That blog-review was short in part because many years previous I’d already written a longer piece for COMICS JOURNAL #114 (Feb 1987). During that period I was not yet a word processor convert, so I sent the JOURNAL typed pages at the time. If I say so myself, this was one of my best essays for the JOURNAL, as well as being the only essay of mine selected for reprint in a scholarly volume, CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM (also the most remunerative). I considered retyping the original review for a blogpost, but it’s just too damn long. Therefore I’m opting to post only a portion that will tie into the MASTER RACE review.

---------

The heroic role of Batman as a parental protector and spiritual "father" to his children is glibly oversimplified by Cindy Carr's review in the VILLAGE VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT. She parodies the book thusly: "Dammit. Someone has to stand up to the subhuman cretins who terrorize innocent law-abiding citizens." Said review then goes to characterize the first two volumes as "neoconservative propaganda" and Batman as "Rambo in a cape."

This is a significant criticism, not because it is true, but because it shows that Miller did not quite succeed in distinguishing his product from the trashy level of RAMBO, though there are numerous subtleties to DARK KNIGHT that RAMBO and its ilk do not possess. It's hard to see how a critic could label the work "neoconservative," insofar as Book I contains a panel juxtaposition in which a TV interview asks two men-on-the-street for their opinions on Batman and gets a favorable review from a conservative bigot who hopes "[Batman] goes after the homos next" and an unfavorable verdict from a liberal hypocrite, who preaches reforming the socially disadvantaged but would "never live in the city..."

_____

Of course the very concept of a vigilante summons up images of Nazi storm troopers and the Ku Klux Klan, so knee-jerk negative reactions are to be expected. by seeming to identify Batman with such reactionary forces, by not clearly setting Batman apart, Miller has perhaps left himself open to such criticisms, thus obscuring the real essence of his thought-- that is, to provoke debate of the issues, without allowing his personal authorial voice to intrude, by using Batman as a "wild card" who fits none of our standard categories.

END EXCERPT

END NOTE: Since writing the above, I have come to see the RAMBO franchise to be something more than simple "trash." However, there's no question in my mind that Batman is both a better conception and has had a much greater impact upon popular culture.

THE LAST TOM SPURGEON DEBATE

By the title, I mean that, since the passing of the former COMICS JOURNAL editor on November 13-- a JOURNAL obituary appears here-- this post will almost certainly be the last time that I debate anything he said in life.

One-sided debates with Spurgeon on this blog were infrequent but not unprecedented. I had debated him off and on on CBR and THE BEAT, usually in the context of my finding fault with what I deemed elitist pronouncements. I summed this background up in a CLASSIC HORROR FILM BOARD post:

I never met him in the flesh, though I argued with him often on a messboard in the early 2000s. The messboard was later deleted, so all of our arguments were consigned to the ether.
I would say that this essay captures his frequent if not constant ambivalence toward the comics medium, which I think I suggested was more of an ambivalence toward pop culture in general.
Still, I would certainly say he endeavored, on THE COMICS REPORTER, to be as inclusive as a news-blog could be, covering both the perceived "highs" and the "lows" of the medium to some extent. This made the blog a good follow-up to what the magazine COMICS JOURNAL (which Spurgeon edited for a time) used to be in the seventies and eighties, IMO. Believe it or not, coming from me, that's high praise.

So, unlike his many well-wishers, I had no personal connection with him. I think I've mentioned him in various essays here from time to time, but only once did I devote a short series of responses to one of our arguments. I feel reasonably sure he never read the series (and in his place, probably I would not have bothered either). The last contact I had with the man, if one can even call it that, was that I sent COMICS REPORTER a "news item" about my starting a FANTASTIC FOUR blog. I will say that Spurgeon, despite our having had acrimonious words in the past, did carry the item and that the blog did get a bump in publicity before I decided it wasn't going anywhere and so deleted the whole thing.

Obviously I'm not going to pass any judgments on his place in the history of American comics criticism. I will say that he never struck me as being as theoretically doctrinaire as either Gary "Revenge of Theodor Adorno" Groth or Noah "Ask Me About My Marginalized Status" Berlatsky. However, if he didn't suffer from theoretical rigidity, some of his essays were a little too free-form for my taste.

The REPORTER post to which I linked earlier followed Spurgeon's undergoing a serious medical procedure and a lengthy stay in the hospital. Parts of this essay are fascinating-- and then, there's this.

Every person passionately interested in an art form thinks that passion fascinating. In other art forms, however, there's an ease and commercial context to that initial relationship that makes coming to terms with it an answer to a throwaway question on a panel, or the first response in a 10-part interview, the part most likely to be cut and something almost always laughed over. Comics is odd, a medium of heartbreak and musty smells and approximations, and it doesn't have an easy commercial element except for a lucky elite. A very small number of people take to them in that wholehearted way that seems more common to other media. Art comics has a tradition where not long ago its champions fell in love with the form when they had so little access to its history and lived in such artistically fallow times they had no choice but to believe in comics that hadn't been made yet. Like the physical items in many collections, we carry all of it with us, the comics we loved as a kid and all the barely-formed reasons why, the comics that opened our eyes, the comics that we attach to a time and place, the comics that devastated us as adult readers for their skill and insight, the comics that we helped other people enjoy. The model that dominates comics discourse is self-inventory.

This was certainly not the first time Spurgeon showed diffidence about his love affair with comics. I never doubted that he was as committed to the medium as I am, but I find myself baffled by many of the phrases he uses to put comics in some special category even as he expresses that intense connection. What does it mean to say that the afficanadoes of other art forms have "an ease and commercial context to that initial relationship?" Did the "ease" have something to do with the fact that other art-forms, like painting and novel-writing, are validated by majority culture? Or did the ease have something to do with the "commercial context," the idea that a fan-- assuming the fan does not turn pro-- can vicariously enjoy the success of his chosen art-form in majority culture? But surely the rule of the "lucky elite" among art-practitioners applies to the other art-forms as well. How many novel-writers can subsist only on their novels, and how many have to keep day-jobs? And if the "model that dominates comics discourse is self-inventory," then in what way is it different from discourse on abstract art or on commercial film?

Obviously I will never get answers to these sort of niggling questions, any more than I did when I debated Spurgeon on messboards. I can only respond, as into the void, that I never have felt that the comics medium was a thing apart. Since I'm for the most part a Jungian, I think that everything that the medium expresses stems from the same collective psychic reservoir that every other medium draws from-- so that, on an essential level, nothing from the same reservoir can be a thing apart. I might have made some argument along those lines to Spurgeon had I ever debated him on a forum of some sort, and maybe he would have given a more satisfactory answer, given that personal debate can allow for more nuanced discussions. But that's another "might have been" that one can only fling into the void, knowing that there will be no answer.

ANGRY SNOWFLAKES

No, not yet finished venting about the matters discussed here.

I was never able to convince the posters on CBR of my credentials as a classic liberal, probably because they were so unaware of political history that they believed their current form of ultraliberalism defined the entire spectrum.

Nevertheless, I had been a good liberal since I was old enough to vote. I believed that most liberals were working to correct the problems of society, and I voted Democratic in every election. Even when I had disagreements with idiots like Eldridge Cleaver, or, much later, with the COMICS JOURNAL's conversion to full-blown Adornite Marxism, I believed that liberals were working for the betterment of all Americans, and that the Right was just devoted to protecting the rich and starting B.S. issues like "the war on Christmas," allegedly started by Bill O'Reilly in 2004. When George W. Bush was in the White House from 2000 to 2009, I refused to listen to Fox News, since its multiple untruths were exposed (or so I thought) by books like Al Franken's LYING LIARS AND THE LIARS WHO TELL THEM. 

But in time, the Left collectively became dissatisfied with taking the high ground. Political correctness had been growing in power since the 1990s, and indeed, my first post here under the "politics" rubric was this 2009 essay, which took issue with Alan Moore's laughable views on the character of the American people. But during the eight years of Barack Obama's tenure, the intransigence of the Republican majority in Congress evidently exacerbated the Left's ability to produce coherent arguments. Even though Franken's book is at least partly a satire, his points are always cogent and not made in the service of some overblown ideology. Such was not the case when I engaged the fuzzy thinking of ultraliberals on Comicon.com, Sequart and the Hooded Utilitarian. None of the people I contended with were able to define their terms, and for me to even ask for a definition for terms was sometimes taken as "hate speech" in the service of the Right.

In my opinion, ultraliberals during Obama's presidency were fit to be tied by the Right's refusal to validate Obama's entire program, and in retaliation, they began to go nuts about defending every quasi-liberal cause, from the issue of the Big NastyTaboo Word no non-black person can speak, to constant criticisms against "straight white men," as exemplified by the best-selling Michael Moore book, 2001's STUPID WHITE MEN.

Political correctness, the attempt to control political discourse with extremely divisive ideological rhetoric, has finally turned me against the Left. I feel no desire to vote for Trump, should he be the candidate in 2020. But it seems to me that a vote for the Democrats would have no less noxious results. So, in 2020, I'll probably leave voting to the ideologically pure.

DEATHBIRD DESCENDS

On the passing of Harlan Ellison this week, I wrote:

_____

I never met Ellison, though I saw him when he spoke at a local convention, maybe in the 1980s. He worked the crowd really well, saying that everyone in our city was "bug***k*, which got great applause, though I'm sure he said the same damn thing anywhere else he spoke. He read his story "All the Lies That Were My Life," which I didn't care for, but his reading was riveting. I saw him a couple more times at San Diego Comicon, usually teamed with Peter David, with whom he had worked out a cute routine of pretend animosity.

DAVID: "I'm just being puckish."

ELLISON: "Well, puck you."

His sixties classic tales made a big impression on me, particularly "Deathbird" and "Repent, Harlequin." I was still writing occasional reviews for COMICS JOURNAL when he and Gary Groth were sued by Michael Fleischer because of remarks Ellison had made about Fleischer in a JOURNAL interview. Personally, I think Fleischer was less offended by what Ellison had said than by the fact that a JOURNAL reviewer had just torpedoed Fleischer's prose book CHASING HAIRY around the same time. I felt like I had a ringside seat as Groth and Ellison became deadly enemies after Fleischer's suit was dismissed. The feud was incredibly convoluted, involving other players like Peter David and Charles Platt, and the magazine GAUNTLET devoted a long, well-researched essay to the mutual bad behavior of both parties, though all that took place before Ellison sued Groth to block the publication of a book touching on their involvement.

I disagreed with a lot of what both Groth and Ellison wrote, though I sympathize with Ellison's love of popular fiction. He was also an unapologetic "comic book guy" at a time when his compeers in fantastic fiction would not dream of being associated with that tawdry medium. 

I'm tempted to sum up his career with the words, "Not always deep, but never dull."

MYTHCOMICS: COYOTE #1-16 (1983-86)

In AN ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY I gave pride of place to the first two issues of Steve Englehart’s Epic-published COYOTE series. At the time I wrote that, I hadn’t given the rest of the Coyote-tales a close reading: either the seven installments that appeared in ECLIPSE MONTHLY magazine or the remaining fifteen in the Epic series. I only remembered that after the first two solo-feature issues, in which Englehart’s script was beautifully realized by artist Steve Leialoha, both story and artwork fell off drastically in quality. Yet, given that I’ve said it’s possible to have a significant symbolic discourse even when other qualities are lacking, I decided to re-examine the full Coyote series.

I found no reason to change my opinion of the ECLIPSE MONTHLY stories, which I touched on briefly in a review for COMICS JOURNAL #85 (1983). This sequence introduced Coyote, a hero named for the Native American trickster-god. He possessed shape-shifting and dimension-crossing powers, the heritage of a meandering and confusing backstory. With almost no motivation, the hero began clashing with his principal adversaries: a secret organization called the Shadow Cabinet. These assorted spy-jinks led me to label the Eclipse series as “American Werewolf gets a shave and plays James Bond.”  I also noted that collaborator Marshall Rogers was guilty of “cardboard figures and meticulously cluttered panels.” At best the Eclipse stories rate as near myths.

The sixteen Epic issues, however, do manage to realize a “density of discourse” that raises them to the level of “good myths.” Englehart had established in the earlier stories that Coyote got his supernatural powers as the result of being raised in a society of eldritch beings: a were-coyote foster-father and a vampire foster-mother. But in the Epic series, Englehart deepened the protagonist’s connection to Native American lore and culture. Though Coyote’s “origin-story” is laid out without a lot of attention to motives or consistency, it does establish that Coyote, a mortal man, was actually chosen by the Native American coyote-god to help drive out the Europeans who conquered the lands of the red men. This revised origin didn’t come to much in terms of plot, but it allowed Englehart to intermingle two forms of narrative: the modern-day, superspy-like adventures of his hero, and vignettes about the original coyote-god’s adventures in the world that existed before the Caucasian invasion. I don’t know to what extent Englehart’s vignettes derived from real Native American folklore, although some of the details are certainly provided by the writer himself. The significance of the vignettes is that Englehart emulates much of the earthy humor that characterizes authentic Amerindian folktales. One outstanding vignette, possibly the height of the Englehart-Leialoha collaboration, deals with Coyote’s creation of the Milky Way by his impulsiveness.

And what of the main story concerning the hero? Well, in 1983 I wrote that he was one of several contemporary heroes who were more concerned with “maintaining personal freedom” rather than expousing total altruism (I was big on the theme of altruism vs. selfhood back in the 1980s.) Coyote, having much of the nature of his trickster-god, is full of youthful self-confidence, contempt for those of lesser attainments, and just plain horniness. Indeed, whereas James Bond of the Movies often got to bone at least two women per film—albeit separately—Coyote is a true “harem fantasy,” in which he hooks up with two sisters (one white, one phenotypically black) and later with a third hottie, a female Russian assassin. Issue #16 concludes not only with Coyote’s victory over the Shadow Cabinet, but also his success with getting at least two of the hotties to remain in his personal seraglio. I’m not sure if any modern American comics-creator would even be able to pitch, much less have published, such a politically incorrect male fantasy.

Further, Englehart does manage to tie together Coyote’s current enemies with the mythic past of the folklore-Coyote, for the Shadow Cabinet is largely run by magical beings called:”Crows.” Native American folklore has its share of crow-gods, but it’s not clear if these are gods, though in one of the past vignettes the Crows are seen as the persistent adversaries of the coyote-god. At the very least, the presence of the Crows keeps the Shadow Cabinet from being just another globe-spanning secret organization.

Ironically, in 1983, I wrote just the opposite, stating that I thought the Cabinet was meant to be more than “SPECTRE or Hydra;” that it was a metaphor for Englehart’s view of the “grasping-and-taking aspect of American business.” I no longer think Englehart applied this metaphor to the Cabinet itself: now I think it really was just another SPECTRE, albeit with overcomplicated origins (including aliens!) Yet throughout the sixteen Epic issues, Englehart adroitly contrasts the anal-retentive tendencies of Anglo culture with the more freewheeling spontaneity of Amerindian ways. He also works in interesting commentaries on the three “Religions of the Book”—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all of whom appear as minor players in the pagan conflict of Coyote and the Crows.

On a side-note, Marvel’s publication of the Coyote series also gave Englehart a venue inn which to publish his four-part collaboration with Steve Ditko, “The Djinn.” Only one installment of the series had seen previous publication, but Marvel published the whole series, much to the delectation of Ditko enthusiasts, since the series featured some of the artist’s best eighties work. Englehart also worked the continuity of the “Djinn” story into Coyote’s mythos reasonably well, but over time the writer created too many wild subplots, so that the series came off as belonging to the “everything plus the kitchen sink” school.

Issue sixteen concludes with the words, “James Bond is problematical, but—Coyote will return!” it takes a special kind of nerve to claim that your comic-book character has a better chance to return than that internationally famous superspy 007. But in this Englehart proved a better writer than a prophet, for Coyote hasn’t turned any new tricks in the comics since 1986.

NEAR ACQUAINTANCE, NEARLY FORGOT

I was a bit surprised to find among my recent stats a link to this address, which turned out to be the recrudescent web-presence of Dirk Deppey. This individual enjoyed a sizable rep in the comics-blogosphere through his online zine JOURNALISTA, which he terminated in 2010. As soon as I saw the stat-link, I was 99% sure what it referenced, since Deppey and I only had one web-encounter, and that one was fairly minor for both of us. Nevertheless, since he linked to me, even if it was only to footnote one encounter in his varied career, I'm more or less obliged to return the favor here. Later I may even be able to build an essay from one of his archived posts. if time permits.

As I expected, he linked to this essay, in which I disagreed with his definition of "superhero decadence," which was in turn a rethinking of a phrase popularized by comics-artist Bill Willingham. To the best of my knowledge, Deppey never responded to my critique in any way except to link to it with words like, "Gene Phillips really, really disagrees with my take on superhero decadence."

The response wasn't precisely satisfying, but since neither of us was likely to change one another's mind, it was probably the best response. I disagreed with Deppey's statement of the aesthetic problem involved in any sort of "decadence," but it wasn't an overheated misrepresentation / outright lie of the type I've been fighting here for years, whether propounded by Noah Berlatsky or the even less impressive Colin Liar.

This also may lead to some meditations on my past experiences with the Comics Journal, though again, only if time permits.

TURNING A HUNDRED

This week I should produce my hundredth formal "mythcomics" entry. I've provided one entry each week since the first week of July 2015. These weekly postings were also supplemented by 32 earlier posts on diverse myth-analyses, as explained here.

Since it's now a year and two months since the official project started, I'll admit that there's not much chance that I'll ever reach 1001 full entries. I still think there are probably enough mythic stories out there, many of which have gone unheralded by ideological critics. But time and tide being what they are, I suppose I'll be lucky to make it to 500-- especially since the online fan-press won't even notice this particular milestone.

I wondered if I ought to choose something "special" for post #100. On reconsideration I decided that it wasn't enough of an event to do so, but I decided to post some thoughts on what might be deemed a "really significant" mythcomic.

A lot of superhero references tend to focus on origin-stories, and while many of these succeed in capturing the complexity of mythic discourse, there are just as many that qualify only as "near myths"-- notably that of Batman, which I plan to scrutinize at some future date.

A notable exception-- and the one candidate I originally deemed possible for "Number One Hundred"-- is FANTASTIC FOUR #1. I won't do FF #1 this week, but my reasons for considering it are as follows.

The ideological critics worked with might and main to conceive a model for the comics-medium that stood independent of the image of the superhero genre; one that could in theory stand as a canon of mature, worthwhile comics. as with COMICS JOURNAL's 1999 list of the best English-language comics. Thus this list was heavy on works that possessed, or appeared to possess, lofty intellectual credentials.

It's my considered opinion, though, that the constructions of the intellect always arise from the primary foundation of the imagination. The intellect needs the imagination for depth, while the imagination can get by without the intellect, though it's arguably more successful with a sense of direction provided by intellect's discursive nature.

FANTASTIC FOUR #1, while just as directed toward juvenile audiences as SUPERMAN and BATMAN, is one of the first mythcomics in which the imaginative elements are being subtly guided by the intellectual concerns. These concerns were dominantly those relating to thinking about the image of the superhero and how it might function in a more melodramatic context-- one dealing with romance, money troubles, and so on. The actual story of FF #1 has been described as opening the door of the routine comics medium into a new world, and I would agree. The best war stories of Kurtzman were no better than war stories in prose had been; the best horror stories of EC Comics might rank alongside the best prose horror-stories, but they couldn't exceed that level.

Comic-book superheroes technically belong to a wider spectrum of combative heroes in many different genres, ranging from THE MARK OF ZORRO to THE LORD OF THE RINGS, but the narrow genre of superheroes, while it had been imitated in other media, had never been exceeded by those media. When the Fantastic Four came up with a new model for the superhero genre, it provided not just a door, but a gateway-- some would say a "gateway drug"-- to deeper potential in the genre.

Whatever I choose in the next two days for #100, it will be indicative of that potential.

ASSORTED STAN AND JACK STUFF PT. 2

I've been meaning for some time to get back to one particular issue I have with Abraham Riesman's muddled meditations on "Stan Lee's Legacy." particularly with respect to Jack Kirby's famous allegations that he did all the plotting work and that Stan Lee did nothing but write the dialogue afterward.

[Roy] Thomas had an experience any comics fan or historian would kill for: He walked the offices of Marvel in the mid-’60s, when Lee and Ditko were working together on Spider-Man and Doctor Strange stories and Lee and Kirby were working together on nearly everything else, including The Avengers, The X-Men, and The Fantastic Four. Here’s the problem: It’s extremely unclear what “working together” meant....Kirby, from the time he left Marvel in 1970 until his death in 1994, swore up and down that Lee was a fraud on an even larger scale: Kirby said he himself was the one who had all the ideas for the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, and the rest, and that Lee was outright lying about having anything to do with them. What’s more, he said Lee was little more than a copy boy, filling in dialogue bubbles after Kirby had done the lion’s share of the conceptual and writing work for any given issue. “Stan Lee and I never collaborated on anything,” Kirby told an interviewer in 1989. “It wasn’t possible for a man like Stan Lee to come up with new things — or old things, for that matter. Stan Lee wasn’t a guy that read or that told stories.”

At no time does Riesman suggest that Kirby might be exaggerating his claim to near-total creative input. Riesman does credit Lee with coming up with inventing Marvel's "shared universe" approach and with changing the game for all mainstream comics in terms of spoken dialogue, but he makes no argument against the verdict asserted by Kirby's longtime friend and confidante Mark Evanier:

“Unfortunately, from day one, Jack was doing part of Stan’s job, and Stan was not doing part of Jack’s job,” says comics historian Mark Evanier, who worked as Kirby’s assistant and has worked on and off with Lee since the 1970s.

So according to Kirby, he got a raw deal because Lee didn't share the writing-paycheck with him. According to an interview with Roy Thomas (to be identified LATER), Kirby invoked this injustice when he came back to Marvel in the 1970s, claiming that the only way he Kirby would collaborate with a writer would be if the writer wrote full-script descriptions of the stories, so that Kirby would only contribute the art. As most fans know, Marvel's editorial department consented to let Kirby write and draw all of his titles during his second contractual stint with Marvel. I suspect that Kirby knew that the Marvel editors valued his ability to draw vividly, without full-script constraints, and that his demand would lead, as it did, to his finally being able to collect both the artist and writer paychecks that he thought to be his due during the first contractual stint.

I don't begrudge Kirby that privilege, and even though I find little of his 1970s work palatable, from a historical perspective his solo work gives modern critics considerable information about the way he formulated stories when not interacting with another creative presence. What I do cavil at, though, is the idea promulgated by Kirby-- and championed by most anti-Lee writers, including Riesman-- that what Lee was doing was unique in the history of comics, or even Jack Kirby comics.

Here's an interesting aside on the way Kirby worked with another writer, taken from Mark Evanier's KIRBY: KING OF COMICS:

Kirby could do CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN without [Joe] Simon, and he did. A writer named Dave Wood provided scripts, which pretty much meant sitting with Kirby, hearing him spin off a plot, and the going home and typing it up. Jack rewrote whatever he was given anyway."-- KIRBY, page 101. 

Evanier does not cite his source for this view of the Kirby-Wood collaboration, but it's likely that his information came from Kirby. This narrative is probably as accurate a description of a 1957-59 working-relationship as anyone's likely to get after sixty years, but what I find most fascinating is that Kirby's creative process on CHALLENGERS, prior to any significant 1950s collaborations with Stan Lee, was essentially "the Marvel Method." This method meant that the writer simply discussed the plot very generally with the artist, after which the artist created his own version of the story, which might or might not owe anything to the writer's intentions-- at which point the only thing left to the official writer would be the dialogue.

So the question occurs to me, "Let's say that Jack Kirby did the lion's share of the work on CHALLENGERS; then where were his complaints about Dave Wood getting a full writer's paycheck?" I strongly doubt that Wood took anything but the full writer's check; no writer back then would have wanted to work with Kirby for less than the going rate, nor would DC Comics, whose relationship with Kirby was less than amenable, have made any special dispensations for Kirby.

And my answer is a cynical one. Kirby may have harbored some resentments back in the 1950s, but they never surface as they did with respect to Stan Lee for one simple reason: the Challengers were a penny-ante project that never showed-- and I suspect, never will show-- the potential to make Big Money in other media. By the time of Kirby's COMICS JOURNAL interview, there could be little doubt that the work he'd created at Marvel had such money-making potential. I surmise that even though Lee had no more rights to these properties than Kirby did, Kirby inflated the false issue of not getting paid for co-plotting, without mentioning that it was clearly the way he preferred to work.
In fact, though Riesman doesn't spot the discrepancy between what Kirby said he wanted and how he actually worked, Riesman sings the praises of the Marvel Method in terms of freeing comic-book artists from the tyranny of full scripts, and he quotes John Romita Sr, expressing sentiments that may well have mirrored those of Jack Kirby, at least back in his salad days:

“I realized that comics from a script was absolutely paralyzing and limiting,” says John Romita Sr., an artist who worked extensively with Lee in the ’60s and has remained a close friend ever since. “When you had the option of deciding how many panels you’d use, where to show everything, how you pace each page out, it's the best thing in the world. Comics becomes a visual medium!”

In the world of abstract moral judgment, maybe it was wrong for Kirby not to get co-plotting money for both his DC and his Marvel work. However, in terms of real-world interaction, I find it unlikely that any writer would have worked with Kirby under that arrangement-- and as I've said before, I don't think Kirby was capable of producing profitable comic books without writer-input, in any decade whatever.

I don't doubt, as I've said many times before, that Stan Lee has also made claims about his contributions that also lack substance. But when I see Kirby protesting his Marvel treatment with no perspective on how greatly the Stan Lee collaboration boosted his reputation in fans' eyes, I think that he, more than Stan Lee, may need to have his legacy more thoroughly interrogated.

THE SPIRIT KILLETH THE MYTH

I don't imagine that Will Eisner's THE SPIRIT occupies as much importance for younger comics-fans as it did for my generation.

Even in the salad years of THE COMICS JOURNAL, few critics could avoid making some assessment of Eisner's seminal SPIRIT work, consisting of weekly comics-stories-- usually seven or eight pages in length-- which were published from 1940 to 1952. Though a portion of these stories were ghosted, particularly during Eisner's military service, Eisner is dominantly credited with bringing a level of craft to the comic-book short story of the Golden Age.

From the elitist view of most Journalistas, most Golden Age work was crude and uncompelling save for a few occasional gems. Eisner sometimes promoted himself as a lone crusader for stylistic creativity amid the pedestrian trash represented by most genre-fiction of the time, particularly the superheroes. Though the Spirit was clearly modeled after the example of other masked mystery-men, Eisner avoided most of the tropes associated with the genre and made his domino-masked crimefighter into a sort of genre-dilettante. The great majority of the SPIRIT stories are crime stories that take equal inspiration from the tropes of the "gangster drama" and of the "hardboiled dick," with a modest sprinkling of some more fatalistic tales resembling postwar "films noirs." In addition, the Spirit also wandered into the genre-terrains of the horror-tale, science fiction (usually Earth-based, though one sequence took the hero on a space-voyage), romance, farce, and even a little satire. Eisner showed an uncanny chameleonic talent to reproduce almost any genre-aesthetic he set out to emulate. If he had a parallel to any of the great directors of Hollywood's Golden Age, it would probably be Howard Hawks, who showed a similar ability to shift across a variety of genres.

However, most SPIRIT stories were done-in-one episodes, and even when Eisner extended a sequence over several weeks, each episode was still constructed so that readers didn't necessarily need to read any other segments of the overall story-arc. This emulation of the short story's tight construction had its strengths, for it allowed Eisner to provide a level of what I've called "lateral meaning" beyond the abilities of most Golden Age practitioners:

Most readers quite logically are concerned with lateral meaning, which takes in both "the function of sensation" and "the function of feeling"-- RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT.

In the series THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, particularly Part 3, I expatiated on the many ways in which the comic strip's physical limitations limited its ability to expand into the realm of super-functional symbolic discourse, a.k.a. "mythicity." Comic-book stories, even short ones, seemed to display more potential than comic strips in this regard, if only because the former could deliver a coherent "beginning, middle and end," and because symbolic complexity functions best against such a developmental background.

Now, though I've enjoyed dozens of Eisner's SPIRIT stories, I would say that their main appeal is the aforementioned "lateral meaning." Whereas many Golden Age stories were almost entirely about sensation, Eisner could usually bring out a wide variety of feelings-- comic, tragic, adventurous and even ironic-- in a manner comparable to the best Hollywood directors. This facility with genre-tropes led some critics, notably Gary Groth, to devalue Eisner even as Eisner devalued his fellow laborers in the comic-book vineyards-- a definite case of "what goes around comes around."

Eisner's space-limitations didn't inherently restrict his ability to infuse a genre-tale with a deeper symbolic underthought, as one may see in my analysis of his story "The Curse." However, very few Spirit-stories seem to traffic in matters symbolic-- and even in "The Curse," the Spirit himself is a figure of low mythicity in a story dominated by his one-shot "guest stars."

In this 2009 essay, I noted that even though the Golden Age BATMAN comic lacked the dramatic heft of the SPIRIT stories, BATMAN was the superior feature in terms of "evoking mythopoeic fantasies." Part of this may be due to what I perceive as Eisner's disinterest in the superhero's "rogue's gallery." Characters like "the Octopus" and "Mister Carrion" had their visual appeals, but they tended to be rather flat as myth-characters.

The only myth-trope which Eisner exploited with great ardor was that of the femme fatale. Some of these were fairly ordinary types, like the first major female foe, the Black Queen:

However, because Eisner had the chameleon's gift for facial expression, he could evoke in his female characters more emotional intensity than one found in the works of most Golden Age comics-artists.

While many of Eisner's genre-tales lack any significant underthought, the "femme fatale" tales-- regardless of setting or plotline-- form a consistent symbolic motif in the SPIRIT tales. "The Curse," indeed, is predicated on the unpredictability of the female heart, and such characters as P'Gell and Silk Satin often displayed the same sphinx-like aura of mystery.

This is rather a long preface to this week's myth-comic. But the body of Eisner's work, whatever its shortcomings, deserves a little more attention to sort out the priorities of the artist who most deserves the sobriquet of "the Howard Hawks of Comic Books."

STRIP NO-SHOW

I addressed some of the problems with finding strong mythic discourses in comic strips in the three essays of the series THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, beginning here.  In addition to the LITTLE NEMO analysis that I posted this week, I have a couple more comic-strip candidates in mind for future installments. However, there won't be a "Bizarro version" of the NEMO strip this week. Since NEMO managed to pull off a consummate myth while remaining within the restrictions of the form, I felt that any "bad example" ought to be another comic-strip, but one that failed to consummate its discourse. But though I could find a lot of strips that were inconsummate in other ways, it was tough to find anything that worked for me. (If I was looking for comic strips that were inconsummate with regard to the thinking function, I could pick pretty much any MALLARD FILMORE strip.)

Since I believe that I have a pretty fair knowledge of the best-known comic strips, I find myself asking the question, "Is it possible that I'm not finding much because the restrictions of the comic strip form actively mitigate against the functions of thought and poetic intuition?"

In Part 3 of REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE I posited that these functions are secondary in a developmental sense to those of sensation and feeling. I won't get into the frightfully complicated schema Carl Jung provided for the four functions in PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES. I've mentioned that he even subdivided his functions into "concrete" and "abstract" aspects, and that's further than I want to go at this time. I suppose I'll just say that all of the functions I address probably fall into the abstract aspect and leave it at that.

As every comic-reader knows, American comic books developed out of comic strips. The best known comic strips were syndicated in nationally distributed newspapers and were often used as attractions with which to sell the paper as a whole to a predominantly adult audience. A number of the strips were overtly aimed at children, but the only way that the kids could get them was if their parents, or some similar authority, either bought every paper every day or subscribed.

In contrast, American comic books were largely aimed at kids from the first, since individual comics were so cheap that they could be purchased with pocket money. In the early days some features aped the "continued next time" structure of comic strips, which would in theory force the buyer to purchase the next issue as well. For the most part, however, comic books of the Golden Age soon evolved away from the newspaper model-- suggesting to me that although subscriptions was possible with some titles, the majority of the juvenile readers wanted their comics "done in one" so that they wouldn't have to worry about purchasing the next issue.

Based on that quick comparison, one might think that the comic-strip form, being aimed at the adults, would be the more "advanced" medium, if one accepted the priorities of elitist criticism. Comic strips were allied to formidable syndication organizations, so they generally attracted the most formally accomplished artists. Throughout the run of the COMICS JOURNAL print magazines, its editors and raconteurs almost never ceased the sing the praises of the great comic-strip artists-- Caniff, Foster, Raymond-- and to devalue most comic-book artists, aside from a favored few like Eisner, Cole, and most of those associated with EC Comics.

What the elitists missed, however, was that comic strips, even at their greatest levels of excellence, were always hampered by the factors of serial progression. Certainly Sunday pages like NEMO and PRINCE VALIANT could get away with a somewhat "painterly" approach to comics-narrative, but they were the exceptions. Most story-strips, whether they appeared only on weekdays, on Sundays, or in a combined form, chose to pursue a straightforward linear narrative-- again, one designed to seduce the readers into regularly partaking of the newspaper that carried the comic. Caniff may have been the paradigmatic figure here, in part because one can see him channeling the "invisible style" of most Hollywood films of his time.

This linear narrative, in essence, followed the same association I've outlined for the sensation and feeling functions. The visual part of a given strip communicates what kinds of sensations that the characters are experiencing, and the verbal part gives it feeling-context: whether the reader is supposed to be happy or sad when a given character is killed.

Because this was the most efficient means of communicating narratives in a medium that was serial by nature and truncated by form, even the best artists tended to follow the "invisible style."

The comic book medium largely began by reprinting re-arranged comic strips, but as soon as it was evident that an original feature could make big money-- one guess which feature provided that proof-- most comic books began to rely on original material.

But this eventuated in a change in narrative strategies. The comic-creators might have a limited space to tell his story in each comic. But even a 4-page story allowed the creators to expand on narrative aspects that a comic strip could rarely indulge. It's true that the great majority of comic book features in the Golden Age were formulaic-- but they, unlike the best comic strips, possesses the power to expand into the realms I've called "thinking" and "intuition." On the whole most Golden Age comics did not encourage a lot of thinking, with the obvious exception of the EC books. But they could venture more deeply into the realm of intuition and its mythic images-- and they did so, though often only on a sporadic basis. I've commented that a lot of PLASTIC MAN stories aren't well written in terms of any function, but then, there's the one from POLICE #43 that I analyzed here.  I suggest that because Cole felt free to slap down any kind of wild fantasy that occurred to him-- a freedom denied to the Fosters and Raymonds of the "big time"-- he was sometimes able to come up with a fascinating psychological myth like this one.

Possibly next week I'll work on some of the other fascinating myths of the Golden Age, since most of these stories are utterly ignored by current comics criticism.

THE RETURN OF THE DIMINISHING RETURNS

I stated elsewhere that I was sure THE HOODED UTILITARIAN would give me more grist fot my critical mill. I didn't expect Noah's leaky ark would so soon venture back to the same dead waters it had explored in the post I discussed here. But yes, J. Lamb, not content with having HU link to his elitist and over-politicized reading of the superhero genre, has written his first essay for HU, a 5-12-15 essay with the usual portentous title, "Figures of Empire: On the Impossibility of Superhero Diversity."

I have not yet waded into this Sea of Dead Thought, but I can predict a lot of things I bet I'll find in it.
The mention of "empire" in the title immediately suggests that the author has decided that superheroes represent the extension of the policies of colonial imperialism into post-colonial times, and that this in and of itself taints the superhero beyond all redemption. This means, as discussed in BLACK LIKE ME (HE SAYS), that any person of color who wishes to see himself reflected in a genre made for and by white men is at best self-deluding, at worst similarly beyond redemption.

I will also predict that once again, just as Lamb's earlier arguments did not provide any reason as to why superhero narratives *in particular* required "Whiteness" to function, this one will be the same. There will be no discussion as to why Luke Cage, Superhero, is more inherently demeaning to black people than Shaft, Private Detective or Will Smith's version of James West. Lamb, like his editor, knows that the main readers of HU are comics-fans, not fans of detective stories, westerns, or espionage, so there's no rhetorical advantage in accounting for the other genres. When I tried to point out that lacuna this was a major hole in Lamb's argument, Lamb simply did not answer, while NB simply did what he always did: changing the subject by saying some silly-ass thing about how the other genres were racist too.

A little history lesson:

Back when THE COMICS JOURNAL was a magazine, there was a similar, set-your-clock-by-it condemnation of the superhero genre.  Most of the JOURNAL's anti-superhero arguments were just as superficial as those that have appeared at HOODED UTILITARIAN, and as a onetime contributor I was appalled that Gary Groth, given his claims of intellectual superiority, would accept-- and sometimes write-- such tripe. I couldn't help but assume an ulterior motive. Gary Groth was publishing his own direct-market comic books. The superheroes dominated that market, and so formed Groth's most strenuous competition. Therefore, superheroes were bad.

Yet, given that Fantagraphics did publish several meritorious comic books (EIGHTBALL notwithstanding), I have to say that Groth's elitist tub-thumping may have served a good purpose, even if the essays themselves were full of crap. They were "bad theory," but they made for "good practice," because they galvanized a handful of readers to buy into Fantagraphics' self-adulatory view of its critics as tastemakers. Without Fantagraphics' particular brand of elitist hype, it's quite possible that the company would not have held on to its miniscule niche during the formative years of the direct market.

What "praxis," however, is served by Lamb' simple-minded denunciation of superhero diversity?  In the comments-section to which I linked in BLACK LIKE HIM, Lamb stated that, "Black hero-myths do not inform the superhero concept at all, and that people of color are more than welcome to develop modern narratives from those hero-myths. I'm confident, though, that the characters developed from that process would not be recognizable as superheroes."

Compared to Groth's savage attacks on a genre that he thought impeded the realization of "comics as art"-- an ideal to which he was dedicating his own time and money-- Lamb's ideological position comes off as insupportable pie-in-the-sky (that is, if the pie was filled with ordure). Does Lamb have an example of an ideologically pure Black Hero, or does he have the ambition that he might be the first to create Such a Hero? I think a third possibility the most likely: that Lamb is proposing an unrealized and unrealistic goal simply for the purpose of doing a superiority dance. "Mainstream superhero comics made me feel uncomfortable and marginalized because they always make Luke Cage look like a big dummy, so I'm gonna say that all superheroes are linked to post-imperialist politics, and something no self-respecting person of color should trifle with."

Or at least, I'm predicting that this will be the sum and substance of Lamb's argument. I suppose I'll try to force myself to delve into the discussion soon. But I'll have to hold my nose before I do.

On a side-note, by chance I came across a fascinating condemnation of one of the Hooded Utilitarian essays, written last January. I may force myself to read the original essay under attack as well, though everything that blogger Franklin Einspruch says about the HU writer in question echoes most of the complaints I've been making here about HU's Merry Marxist Marching Society:

someone who doesn't bother to question whether his particularly American and politicized interpretation of the cartoons is correct.

 Unfortunately, the modern tendency in politics is to establish a narrative, presume its truth, and proclaim accordingly. This was perhaps articulated best by Karl Rove when he famously disdained the reality-based community, but liberalism depends on this kind of narrated indifference to evidence as well.

You have revealed grandiose regard for your own interpretive powers, and they have betrayed you. You have demonstrated neither research nor reflection above that would indicate that you ever considered the possibility that something you wrote isn't true. Your political expression is so disengaged from anyone else's actual claims as to be masturbatory. 

ELLISON AND ELITISM PT. 2

"As John Gardner said in his book ON MORAL FICTION, there is room in the world for trivial art, but it is only because high art exists and is recognized and is worshiped and honored that the world is safe for triviality."-- Harlan Ellison,"The Harlan Ellison Interview," TCJ #53 (1980).

As I've not read the Gardner book in many years, I can't say if Ellison has fairly summarized that author. I do seem to remember thinking that Gardner didn't offer much logical proof for his artistic judgments.

Judgment is a key factor here. Ellison is certainly not the person one would go to-- today or in 1980-- for a reflective analysis as to what makes one work good and another bad. What's interesting about this 1980 quote is that so little has changed after 30 years. To this day, would-be critics in any medium rail against trivial works as if they were direct threats to the survival of the "good stuff."  Few critics stop to ask whether or not the same audience that wants to lose itself in what Ellison chooses to call "shit" are likely to ever be attracted to what any elitist, be it Ellison or someone else, considers to be "high art."

One irony of Ellison's excoriation is that, in contrast to his interviewer Gary Groth, the author seems to cherish his memories of "trivial art." On one hand he sneers at mainstream comics for putting bad work out there just to fill pages and meet deadlines. Yet he speaks of his passion for the character of The Shadow, which was certainly framed by the same pulp-adventure aesthetic one sees in comic books. I doubt that I've read as many of the Shadow's adventures as Ellison, but what I have read strikes me as not only trivial art, but bad trivial art. The Shadow is IMO a classic character, but most of the actual pulp adventures strike me as dull mysteries that are just barely redeemed by the hero's supernal presence.

Later, following Howard Chaykin's less than reverential treatment of the Shadow for a 1986 DC Comics limited series, Ellison was irate with the artist for profaning the character. Suddenly, trivial art was important, because it was something Ellison liked. In a radio show for HOUR 25, Ellison commented, "At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths?'"

It may be that for Ellison, calling the Shadow a myth is no more than empty rhetoric. Certainly it would seem to contradict his statement above. If trivial art is only redeemed by the existence of high art, then how can any example of trivial art stand on its own enough to be a "myth?"

In my Jungian-Campbellian view, of course, the Shadow is a myth not simply because I like it; it's a myth because it incorporates dimensions of Campbell's four functions: the psychological, the sociological, the cosmological and the metaphysical.  The depth with which a pulp-character comments on these aspects of life may be much more limited than that of whatever Harlan Ellison deems high art-- which, going on the TCJ interview, would seem to include Michael Moorcock-- an inclusion that might have raised the eyebrows of John Gardner.  But the salient fact is that even "trivial art:" can sometimes incorporate serious content, just as some "high art" is capable of moments of extreme triviality. This would include petty roman à clef  attacks on one's real-life enemies, for example-- which just might appear in some of the works of-- Harlan Ellison.

ELLISON AND ELITISM PT. 1

A recent forum-post reminded me of the momentous 1980 Harlan Ellison interview in COMICS JOURNAL #53. I hadn't read it for a while, and my memory was that the first time Ellison slagged the work of artist Don Heck, he was doing so in the mistaken impression that Heck had done the art to the 1970s comic NOVA.

Instead, as I reread the interview, it turned out that the NOVA reference came second. In the course of the interview Ellison was ranging all over the place, holding forth on his personal gospel of artistic excellence vs. journeyman mediocrity. On page 76, Ellison has just finished exulting in his own escape from the hell of network TV: "...they get you to write this shit and they corrupt you and writers are turned into mere hacks. I won't do it any more but there are plenty who will..."

Slightly later he makes the caveat that in some cases the willing hacks don't even have talent to start with, which brings him to an excoriation of the total worthlessness of all mainstream comics then current. Ellison asks interviewer Gary Groth to name the "worst artist in the field," and Groth names Don Heck.  When Groth also mentions that a particular publisher once praised Heck, Groth assumes that the praise was for Heck's ability to turn the work in on time. For Ellison this is tantamount to compromising the integrity of the work for a paycheck. Somehow it never occurs to Ellison that this contradicts his earlier point: if Heck had no talent to begin with, then, one may reason, how can he compromise the work?  But then Ellison is off again, touting Neal Adams as a conscientious professional who respects the work over the demands of the industry. After opining that "five thousand Don Hecks are not worth one Neal Adams," THEN he remembers how much he disliked the art of NOVA. He wonders if Heck was the artist on that work; Groth agrees that it was terrible art (as do I, incidentally) but neither remembers that Sal Buscema committed the crime against great art.

Four JOURNAL issues later, the magazine's lettercol carried several responses to Ellison's tirade, one of which came from Steve Gerber. Gerber praised some of Heck's work, not coincidentally work on which Heck and Gerber had collaborated. Then Gerber asserted parenthetically that Heck had suffered some personal tragedy in his life. In his response Ellison did not retract his opinion on Heck's work, but he did admit that in some situations "one should watch one's mouth."

Strangely, I recall reading an interview with Heck-- who passed away in 1995-- in which he denied that he had experienced any personal tragedy that had interfered with the quality of his work. In fact, I recall that Heck claimed in said interview that the story had taken on "urban legend" status in his field, where dozens of fellow workers believed it but no one knew precisely what had supposedly happened to the artist. But since I cannot at present remember where I read this, readers are advised to take my recollections with a grain of salt.

Next up: examining the roots of an elitism from over thirty years ago.

GENDERIZATION GAP PT. 2

MAGGIE: "We are the masters of our own dreams and fantasies..."

PENNY: "Maggie's right. There is no such thing as the dream police. So you can think all the dirty, sick, evil thoughts you desire..."

HOPEY: "Acting on them is another aminal."

--- Jaime Hernandez, PENNY CENTURY #6  (1999) 

On 4/15/14, Heidi MacDonald posted a closed-to-comments essay on THE BEAT entitled, "What is it like to be a man in comics?"  The essay responded to the experiences of Janelle Asselin, who critiqued the cover art of the forthcoming TEEN TITANS #1, and who also received assorted rape-threats in response to her observations. In part 1 of my response I noted that Asselin made her points "cogently enough," though I disagreed with some of them. Though Asselin didn't address only matters pertaining to genderization, there's no question that she gives special attention to the representation of the female character Wonder Girl:

Let's start with the elephant in the room: Wonder Girl's rack. Perhaps I'm alone in having an issue with an underaged teen girl being drawn with breasts the size of her head (seriously, line that stuff up, each breast is the same size as her face) popping out of her top. Anatomy-wise, there are other issues -- her thigh is bigger around than her waist, for one -- but let's be real. The worst part of this image, by far, are her breasts. The problem is not that she's a teen girl with large breasts, because those certainly exist. The main problem is that this is not the natural chest of a large-breasted woman. Those are implants. On a teenaged superheroine. Natural breasts don't have that round shape (sorry, boys).

Asselin's deprecatory take on artist Rocafort's depiction of breasts resulted in the huge quantity of comments on her thread, getting close to 600 as I post this; it's plain even from a perfunctory look at those comments that next to no respondents cared about Asselin's observations about anything else about the cover.

Now, Asselin's comments about male breast-fantasies in comics are pretty much of a piece with hundreds of others before her column, so I have no clue as to why anyone would react so vehemently to them, as Heidi MacDonald details:

This is MEN’S PROBLEM. I know most internet trolls are teenaged boys who don’t know any better, but this is MAN’S THING. This is something you men need to figure out and condemn and deal with. There should be MAN RULES about it, like how you’re not supposed to go into the urinal next to another guy, that kind of thing. Belittling, embarrassing, threatening and shaming women should not be some kind of masculine rite of passage. It should be the opposite of being a real man.

 There's a partial truth in this, but keep in mind what MacDonald says a few paragraphs down:

In closing, I would like to salute the bravery and professionalism of Janelle Asselin. She put her opinions out there knowing what kind of response she would get and she still did it, in hopes of perhaps getting people to think and to shed light on matters that are not discussed enough. Just because these things are hidden does not mean that men do not have this problem.

I don't doubt that Janelle Asselin called things like she saw them. Yet the phrase "knowing what kind of response she would get" sticks in my mind.  I don't entirely concur with MacDonald's picture of Asselin as a selfless crusader, precisely because the paragraph I reprint above is set up to "poke the bear" as much as possible. Worse, it takes the position that fidelity to the real proportions of the human body is the only possible good in comic-book art, and that deviations from said proportions are ipso facto bad art.

I don't condone, any more than I understand, why even ignorant teenaged boys would use Asselin's comments-- which to me are nothing new-- as a excuse to attempt shaming a female writer. I also freely admit that this probably happens more when males object to writings attributed to females, though I have seen-- and experienced-- some instances in which male posters attempt to degrade their fellow males in terms of sexual references.

However, MacDonald's comment about "what it's like to be a man" seems rather self-serving, especially from the essayist who penned these golden words in 1-31-08, and cited here:

The question is how much the artwork resembles Superheroines Demise. Because if it looks like that, there may be some kind of ulterior motive....So next time you claim your interest in superheroes is completely innocent and devoid of fetishistic aspects, well…you’re going to have to PROVE it!

In my opinion, MacDonald takes a pretty long step to get from "dumb teenagers taking advantage of the Internet's anonymity" to a "masculine rite of passage."  Freud famously observed that men often told degrading jokes about women in all-male groups, but some studies suggest that this trait appears in both genders:

Mitchell's research and similar studies clearly show that men and women both know and appreciate jokes of an aggressive or sexual nature... but their jokes do not serve the same psychological or interpersonal functions.

Though the rape-threats printed by Asselin aren't jokes as such, I think it likely that if any of the threat-makers were called to account for those threats, those posters would probably justify their remarks as a nasty species of humor. I strongly doubt that any of them would defend their statements based on the right of men to rape women, whether as a right of passage or for any other reason. The exception to this generalization would in my opinion be anyone who had actually committed rape, which does invoke the sort of elaborate explanation MacDonald claims.

Let me return to the quote with which I opened this essay. It's a quote with which I agree; that stories in all media should be allowed, in the right circumstances, to indulge in "evil thoughts," be they stupid rape-jokes or Superheroines Demise.  In a curious reversal, though, Fantagraphics, the company that published PENNY CENTURY has never advocated overall freedom from the "dream police." The editors and writers of THE COMICS JOURNAL only advocated that freedom for an elite cadre of "quality authors," while all others were condemned as seducers of the innocent.

Janelle Asselin's complaints about "an underaged teen girl being drawn with breasts the size of her head" may be entirely sincere, but they are also in the JOURNAL's tradition of bear-poking. Unlike MacDonald, I don't think Asselin's comments "shed light on matters that are not discussed enough;" I think they're no more than preaching to the choir, though a bit more cogently than some of the critics I've assailed here.  No one but the members of that choir are going to care about Asselin's carping at unnatural breasts on a teenaged girl, and the result, as seen in the comments-thread, is a farrago of sniping and two-bit comments. Of the comments I read, many evinced a familiarity with the topic, so Asselin's original essay brings no fresh insights to the matter. It's just the same old song, and I don't think the tune would have been any different if Rochafort had been a more exacting artist.

The "evil thought" of picturing females with breasts bigger than their heads may well be a male thing that women will never get. But one answer to MacDonald's question about "what it's like to be a man in comics" might be not taking seriously the comments of those who make much of such petty evils. Dumbasses who make rape-threats, even those with no teeth in them, are, as MacDonald says, "fucked up." But the freedom to indulge in fantasies, even stupid ones, is a freedom that all men and all women deserve, in comics or in any other bailiwick.

A TOPIC IS BEING BEAT-ED

The following is a reprint of my post on the BEAT regarding those ole debbils elitism and exceptionalism.  I may further develop these thoughts on the status of comics criticism later on.

____________________________

Larry Vossler said:

"As a recent “writer” for comics, the biggest problem is not the message (that is a problem no doubt) but who is reading the message and how it can be seen. While TCJ, CB, Factual, and HU have and continue to put out some great criticism, they’re mostly being viewed by the people who know about it. Instead of reaching to a bigger crowd in the States, the big two crowd, the message is mostly being spoken to the choir. And that choir is somewhat small compared to the mainstream comic crowd. And it’s that crowd that criticism should be aiming to get their attention. So it can A. expand their horizon B. Introduce new great works from other countries and from here C. To make them think differently when reading comic and apply that to their superhero comics and maybe in the process enhance the superhero genre."

I would agree but IMO the only way one can do so is with a synoptic approach; one that sincerely sees positive things in the superhero genre that are not "different in kind" from the positive things in the indie corpus of works.  In other words, it would have to be an attitude 180 degrees from the one expressed by Gary Groth when he recently explained that Fantagraphics did not publish its X-MEN COMPANION book because the publishers had a deep abiding love for the X-Men.  This bottom-line insincerity-- "we'll bring 'em in with appeals to the mainstream in order to introduce them to the good stuff"-- has had at best a checkered record, and not only with Fantagraphics.

How might a synoptic approach be synthesized?  Well, first it would help to know something about a few of academic criticism's efforts in that respect.  Of course I can quote Frye and Fiedler all the livelong day and it won't mean anything: critics have to make their own discoveries to form their own syntheses.  But the WILL to make such connections has to be there.

Noah said in response to Larry:

"Larry, I don’t really see HU’s mission as trying to get people to stop reading mainstream comics, or to tell them those comics are bad. We just had a long appreciation of Dan Slott’s run on She-Hulk, actually."

I can see how this would seem an adequate answer to the problem Larry raises but it really is not sufficient, any more than when TCJ's editors used to answer accusations of anti-mainstream sentiments by citing lots of positive mainstream reviews.  As long as the dominant attitude is one of elitism and exceptionalism-- that a given reviewer pays attention only to SHE-HULK or WONDER WOMAN when they reach some exceptional heights-- then that reviewer and his cronies will continue to project the aura of the aforementioned "self-jerk circle."

My argument should not interpreted as some sort of anti-exceptionalism: an apologia for bad work.  There is however a middle ground for which critics like Fiedler might be instructive-- and I'll leave it at that, as the vision of Tumblr afficianados trying to pore over LOVE AND DEATH IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL seems improbable even to me.  That sentiment about covers my pessimism about the possibility of the current indie creators-- or the mainstream ones, for that matter-- mustering enough chutzpah to write organized criticism.

ADDENDUM:

Adding in a second observation I made as the discussion, as always, tailed off into nothing much:

Osvaldo said:
“All this mainstream vs. “indie elitism ” talk seems so strange to me, if only because, until my recent interest in online criticism most of my critical reading on the topic of comics was in a variety of academic journals, surveys and anthologies, which seem to be just as likely to talk about The Falcon as Fun Home as Superman as Maus as Scrooge McDuck – though that is anecdotal experience and not based on any kind of rigorous examination of what’s been printed and the attitudes expressed.”


Correct, Osvaldo. It’s not that there are no elitists in academia, but the line between the popular and the literary/would-be-literary is not as firm as it used to be. It’s amazing to me that so many comics-critics have chosen to act as if they lived back in the 1930s, and ignore all the meritorious work that’s been done analyzing pop culture, from Robert Warshow to Gaylyn Studlar.