NECESSARY ANGELS, NECESSARY DEMONS

In OPPOSING GHOSTS I cited one particular PLASTIC MAN story as an exemplar of what I considered to be artist Jack Cole's raison d'etre.  I did so because the late Harvey Pekar's COMICS JOURNAL essay "The Potential of Comics" misrepresented Cole's ouevre by claiming that it was only worthy of notice because it "satirized the costumed-hero idiom."

To those words Pekar added a qualifying phrase, "to some extent." That was a wise move, because if questioned over the matter he could have claimed that only some PLASTIC MAN stories had the satirical elements he deemed laudable.  There may indeed be isolated PM stories that would qualify as satire: indeed, in this essay I myself analyzed a particular PM story to show how it elaborated psychological anxieties into a wild fever-dream of clashing identities.  This story was not satirical or even particularly funny, but I'll admit that it showed an approach not typical of most superhero stories of that period.  All that admitted, I would still say that whatever "satirical" elements Pekar might have discerned in PM are well outnumbered by those that abide by many of the standards of the genre. 

In any case, being that I'm a pluralist, I must object to the critical implication that a superhero story is only praiseworthy when it's on the side of elitism's "angels"-- that is, tipping its hat respectfully to highbrow tropes or attitudes-- and that if it doesn't have these, it deserves to be consigned to the outer darkness of the "demons."

By way of further examining the case of the elitists, I'll look at another of Pekar's examples, one with a bit better grounding than his assessment of Jack Cole.  Of Frank King's GASOLINE ALLEY comic strip, Pekar praises his synthesis of "contemporary fine art and cartooning techniques."  And here Pekar is on stronger ground, for there were a handful of GASOLINE ALLEY strips where King is unquestionably emulating fine art, as in this 1931 Sunday page:

However, as far as his essay is concerned-- whose main rhetorical purpose is to prove that comics can fulfill Pekar's personal vision of creativity-- there's no relevance to the fact that GASOLINE ALLEY's long career is indebted not to a few experiments with fine-art techniques, but to King's mastery of the comparatively lowbrow "family comedy" genre, as seen in this 1933 page.

Possibly Harvey Pekar enjoyed these antics as much as other readers, but one can't tell from his essay.  Throughout this essay Pekar finds nothing to praise in any comics that is not some borrowing from or imitation of highbrow art or literature.  I'm still amazed that he twitted comic book writers for not being well-read in authors like Proust, given that I find it hard to imagine most of Pekar's favored comic-strip authors sitting around flipping through Flaubert.  We don't know why Frank King chose to play around with fine-art techniques for a few Sunday strips.  We do know that it doesn't seem to have been more than a short-lived flirtation, since he didn't continue doing so throughout his association with the strip.  The sitcom-like antics of the intertwined "Gasoline Alley" families seem to have been the thing that earned King his daily bread, but this was apparently too ordinary, too lowbrow, for Pekar to deem it of any importance in his lofty screed on comic-book potential. 

This would seem to be anomalous given that Pekar himself wrote about commonplace events in his own life and in the lives of people he interviewed-- though not that all such events were commonplace, as with Pekar's appearances on the David Letterman show.  But throughout the "Potential" essay Pekar privileges the element of "realism" in comics, and it may be that he regarded "sitcom-antics" as fundamentally "unreal," as formulaic.  One could argue that Walt Wallet and Skeezix experiencing a hallucinatory phastasmagoria isn't "realistic" either, but perhaps Pekar gave Frank King a pass on anything that purported to evoke highbrow artwork.

In Part 2 I'll examine the demonization of the popular arts in more general terms, and the reasons why the elitists' vision of a heaven of artistic angels is just hell under another name.

OPPOSING GHOSTS

I want to explore in greater depth my assertion in THE DEAD-ALIVE HAND OF THE PAST PT 4 that the late Harvey Pekar was guilty of, among other things, "rhetorical distortions."  Having re-encountered Pekar's simplistic take on Jack Cole's PLASTIC MAN and Will Eisner's SPIRIT, I choose to demonstrate that Pekar had, at best, read carelessly when he claimed that these works were good because they "satirized the costumed-hero idiom to some extent."

On one comics-forum I elaborated:

Take the notion that the best way to do superheroes is to be "unserious" about them. Pekar wasn't the first to claim that Jack Cole's PLASTIC MAN was a parody, or even a satire, of superheroes. Since I've read the first five ARCHIVES collections of the Quality PLASTIC MAN, I beg to differ. Cole and a handful of other raconteurs used a lot more humor in PLASTIC MAN than you might find in certain superhero features. But one can find a fair amount of humor in 1940s BATMAN and SUPERMAN stories too, which were after all dominantly aimed at kids. Now, if Pekar et al wanted to say that the humor in PM was better and more sophisticated, that would be a subjective judgment, but it wouldn't distort the facts. But Cole's PLASTIC MAN is not some MAD sendup of superheroes. Some of the villains are goofy or peculiar, but Cole is serious about the hero's need to bring them to heel, in a way that Kurtzman never could be. There's nothing funny or satirical about the scenes where villains commit cold-blooded murders; IMO Cole wants the reader to see PM deliver justice, just as the writers of BATMAN played to the same theme.

I think it sounds more "respectable" to say that Cole was being "unserious:" then guys like Pekar can claim Cole as one of their own.

On one level it's impossible to disprove Pekar's assertion because it's so spongy and insubstantial.  We don't know what elements of SPIRIT or PLASTIC MAN he considered "satirical," so it's impossible to demonstrate that he misinterpreted those elements.  All I can do is look at what I deem a representative Cole story with the character and show that, while it may possess humor, its primary purpose is not to satirize superheroes.

In the essay RAPT IN PLASTIC, I observed that Cole seemed "fascinated by violent and transgressive materials."  On a superficial level this may sound a great deal like the dominant attitude of the undergrounds that Pekar praises so fulsomely.  However, unlike most underground comics, Cole usually channels this transgressivity into his villains, which is by and large one of the most prominent tropes in "the costumed-hero idiom." 

Take the example of the villain Kra Vashnu, whose one story has been reprinted here by Cole-fan Paul Tumey on his blog Cole's Comics.  There's a certain amount of humor in the story of this mad mentalist, given that he can anticipate Plastic Man's attempts to capture him.  However, I would defy anyone to find satirical intent in this page:

There's not a lot of subtext here.  Kra Vashnu is a mean little twerp, who gruesomely finishes strangling his cheating wife in the first panel of the next page (rendered in shadow to reduce the grue).  EC stories of spousal murder sometimes cracked wise at the American ideals of the happy family and the Gospel of Getting Ahead, but there's only one level to the crime involved here: a murderer must be caught.  Plastic Man investigates, giving Kra the benefit of the doubt up to a point.  When the hero finally has the evidence he needs, he attacks Kra.  Again, there is comedy in the way the villain makes a monkey of the elastic avenger-- but no satire.

Most memorably, Plastic Man turns the tables on the escaping murderer by using his plastic powers to publicize the villain's distinctive face.  He then lures Kra into a second encounter, finds a way around his mental powers, and sends him to jail.  The story ends with a sort of gallows-humor, as Kra foresees the death-sentence, and the hero smugly remarks, "And that's positively the last time Kra Vashnu will perform in public."

As I noted above, it's my finding that Pekar has attempted to see the stretchable superhero story as something more than mere pulp entertainment, the better to claim the excellent work of the artist for the side of the angels.  In my next essay, I'll show why it's much better to find ways of seeing both the angels and the demons in all creators.

THE DEAD-ALIVE HAND OF THE PAST PT. 4

It happened that I got into an argument about my low opinion of Harvey Pekar on a forum, so I hauled out a copy of COMICS JOURNAL #123 to peruse his essay "The Potential of Comics" for ammunition.  The essay appeared in 1988, which is, FWIW, about a year before I grew frustrated with the JOURNAL's intransigent elitism and quit submitting anything to the magazine.  In my view, Pekar's essay marked a lot about what was wrong with the JOURNAL: sloppy reasoning, self-aggrandizing elitism, and rhetorical distortions.  I wrote a LOC refuting Pekar's essay back in the day, but I have purposefully avoided rereading it, to keep this analysis from being determined by whatever response I made in 1988.

Before I address the Pekar essay, though, I will say that I've made this part of the "DEAD-ALIVE" essay-series because the other two subjects of my analysis, Noah Berlatsky and Julian Darius, make an interesting contrast to Pekar.  I've argued that both of these critics are overly invested in ideological readings of texts, but both show some appreciation for genre-comics if those works display some desirable content.  In the critical terms that I advanced here, this makes both of them what I've termed "content elitists." Pekar, however, is a "form elitist," in that he can only praise a genre-comic if it meets some criterion that he associates with the forms of highbrow art/literature.

Pekar's essay, a call for greater variety in the comics-medium, begins by assailing a quote by Charles Schultz.  In an interview Schultz pushed Pekar's buttons by saying, "Our medium will always hold us back.  The same way as a burlesque comedian can never be Hamlet."

Now, if Schultz's somewhat muddled argument was that the comics medium could approach no heights greater than those of a "burlesque comedian," then I would agree that the creator of PEANUTS was wrong about that.  Nevertheless Pekar attacks Schultz like a pit-bull, claiming that Schultz should have blamed his own limitations and that Schultz "trivializes his own insights" by incarnating real-life problems in the forms of "cute little kids who are drawn extremely simply."

I'll pass over the fatuity of this judgment, which was answered by various critics back in the day. Pekar then attempts to disprove Schultz's offhanded dismissal of the comics medium by presenting his own mini-history of the comics-medium, starting with "fine art" figures like Peter Breughel and William Hogarth and eventually working his way to the early comic strip-medium.  In keeping with his rhetoric, Pekar finds early comic strips typified by works that show the overall potential of the medium.  Pekar does not mention those extremely popular strips whose appeal lay the kind of simplicity Pekar dislikes in PEANUTS: there's no MUTT AND JEFF or BLONDIE in this mini-history.  Instead Pekar mentions only those strips that he believes "were aesthetically successful even judged by pretty rigorous standards."  Pekar does not expand on these "standards," but the strips he cites include most of the darlings of the form elitists: POPEYE, LI'L ABNER, GASOLINE ALLEY, and LITTLE NEMO, with a few dark-horse entries like ALLEY OOP and MOON MULLINS.

Now, many of these praiseworthy strips clearly owe their legacy to popular idioms, particularly LI'L ABNER, which was spawned by the hillbilly-humor subgenre, and POPEYE, a comedy-adventure strongly indebted to the burgeoning adventure-strips of the period, particularly WASH TUBBS.  But what Pekar is praising is those strips' apparent aspirations toward minority art, as when Pekar praises Frank King for his synthesis of "contemporary fine art and cartooning techniques."  Without such tony appeals to highbrow form, though, a comics-work holds no importance in Pekar's ledger.  This priority shows itself clearly in Pekar's overall dismissal of early comic books, because they did not follow such literary luminaries as "Melville, Dostoevski, Proust and Joyce," but pursued rather pulp authors like "Edgar Rice Burroughs, Zane Grey, Dashiell Hammett and Sax Rohmer."  Frankly I rather doubt that most of the comic-strip creators whom Pekar lauds knew Proust from a hole in the ground, any more than did the average comic-book creator. But comic strips gave the superficial appearance of being in tune with the highbrow arts, and so such comics serve as a rhetorical device for Pekar's views on the potential of the medium.  Notably, the only Golden Age superheroes Pekar praises are Plastic Man and the Spirit, because "both Cole and Eisner satirized the costumed-hero idiom to some extent."

To be sure, Pekar does trounce some of the sacred cows beloved of elitists, as when he finds the EC writers inferior to some of his favorites-- Elzie Segar, for one-- though he does not choose to cite any specific reasons for the latter group's superiority.  From the 1950s Pekar leapfrogs to the "mid-60s," focusing purely on the growth of underground comics.  It's not surprising that he has nothing to say about any developments in the popular idioms during that period, whether the innovations come from Jack Kirby or from John Stanley.  It may be a bit more surprising that he has nothing further to say about comic strips after the 1950s innovations of Schultz, Walt Kelly and Jules Feiffer.  Did comic strips somehow lose their "pride of place?"  It would seem so, for as soon as underground comics are mentioned, their catalogue of their glories takes up most of the rest of the essay, not without a mention of Pekar's own AMERICAN SPLENDOR, of course.

 Pekar does not really supply any logical arguments as to why any of the artists he names are superior, and his essay's rhetoric might have been better served by a focus on the work of one or two creators. At every turn he validates creators in terms of their highbrow credentials, as when he claims that "[David] Boswell is far more well read and better educated than the average comic book writer."  Finally, after spreading this cornucopia of quality before his readers, Pekar more or less winds up by discerning some "hopeful" signs in then-current mainstream publishers, thanks to their publications of the works of such authors as J.M. DeMatteis (when in concert with artists like Jay Muth and Mark Badger), Val Mayerick (a frequent collaborator with Pekar in the day), and Bill Sienkiewicz.

It was certainly Pekar's privilege not to like anything but works that either seemed to aspire to highbrow status or that mocked the inferiorities of mere popular idioms.  But like many other comic book elitists, he merely lists a catalogue of things that he likes and makes only a desultory effort to unify them under any sort of theoretical umbrella.  In the highbrow world Pekar so esteems, this would be a ridiculous way for any critic to practice criticism.

And, no matter what limitations the comics medium may or may not have, it's ridiculous in this sphere as well. 

MIGHT MAKES FIGHTS; FIGHTS MAKE SUBLIMITY?

It occurs to me that before I can write the aforementioned essay on three types of human-centered "might" (and their consequences for sublimity) I need to define more particularly what might represents in my system, as opposed to a pure Kantian framework.

First, a quick re-acquaintance with the nature of the term "dynamic" as cited in KNOWING THE DYNAMIS FROM THE DYNAMIC:

DYNAMIC (noun): An interactive system or process, especially one involving competing or conflicting forces.

It's in this context that I invariably use the Greek term "dynamis" for any energy generated by the forces within this process.  For narrative such energies are often generated between elements of plot, characterization and other aspects of narrative, though the conflicts of character interplay and plot interweavings have proven the most fundamental to my system.

That narrative is a system, albeit not a closed one, should be obvious. In this essay I cited one of the few workable concepts I've adapted from Tzvetan Todorov:

"All narrative is a movement between two equilibriums which are similar but not identical.”

-- Todorov, THE FANTASTIC.

One of the best comics-sequences that catches the bare minimum of this narrative movement appeared in an issue of AMERICAN SPLENDOR by Harvey Pekar, celebrated by Alan Moore in a recent video.

Man is hot (first equilibrium). Man makes lemonade (transition).  Man is refreshed (new equilibrium).  The transition from one status to the next generates the energy, the *dynamis,* that makes this a narrative.  Take away any section of it and the interactive system is gone.

Now, there is *dynamis* in this enacting of a mundane chore, both in the narrative world and in the real world where presumably the real Harvey Pekar did make himself a glass of lemonade on a hot day.

But is there any "might" in it?

On this philosophy blog (which, quite frankly, I found while looking for Kantian passages to copy so that I wouldn't have to expend *dynamis* typing them), one Nate Hawthorne also cited the Kant passage I did in my last post, and adds this interpretation:

Humans have might as well. The surgeon who removes a tumor exercises a certain force to lift and hold a scalpel, and presses the scalpel to pierce the patient’s skin. Those are operations of might. A person who walks through a strong wind pushes against the force, the might, of the wind using their own might.

I disagree.  The surgeon who pierces the patient's skin, the person walking against a strong wind, and the comic-book writer who makes himself a glass of lemonade are all exerting *dynamis,* but not might (German *macht*).  Since Kant defines might as "an ability that is superior to great obstacles," then the surgeon and the comic-book writer are not exerting "might."  One could argue that the wind-walker is at least competing with the wind, but since (as Hawthorne mentions) there exists the real possibility that the wind may win the contest, the walker's exertion can't be considered superior to his particular great obstacle.

Now, it's possible that "superior" should not be taken to mean unconditional superiority, for if it were, then there would seem to be no need for Kant to distinguish "might" from "dominance."

A key element of Kant's concept of sublimity is that the person experiencing the sublime emotion must be witness to a phenomenon that is "mighty" enough to awaken the subject's sense of vastness, and yet the subject must feel that he is not in immediate danger, in which the forces of self-preservation would interrupt the subject's general mood of pleasurable displeasure, of awestruck "sense of wonder" (my term of course).

Therefore a phenomenon like a storm at sea can be "mighty," but not involve "dominance," since though there are contrary forces at work in a storm there is no sense of struggle in Kant's sense:

"Might is called dominance if it is superior even to the resistance of something that itself possesses might.”

So, to recap, we have three overlapping but distinct terms:

Dynamis= any kind of energy
Might= an energy which to some degree is "superior" to some unspecified lesser forces
Dominance= a superior energy which specifically arises from conflict

The latter two, it would seem, are implicated in Kant's theory of the sublime, and in mine as well.  But since the Pekar piece only evokes energy in its most general sense, then it would not be in any way sublime. I belabor this point in order to critique (once again) the dubious logic proposed by Douglas Wolk in his book READING COMICS, where Wolk attempted to read many if not all alternative comics as possessing Kant's quality of "unboundedness," simply because the altcomics weren't "bound" by commercial restrictions.

I foresee the need of some clarification on the functioning of the sublime in Frye's four mythoi, but may put that off until finishing the aforementioned NUM examples.

LATTER-DAY NOTE: Though I generally don't go back and revise earlier essays, I'm picking this one as an example of a place where I most misused the concept of *dynamis.*  Anyone reading this in 2012 should note that the *dynamis* term as used here has now been superseded by *plot-dynamicity," which see.

RATIOCENTRIC REBELLION

After my dream I lost command of words. All the chief words, anyway, the most necessary ones. But never mind, I shall go and I shall keep talking, I won't leave off, for anyway I have seen it with my own eyes, though I cannot describe what I saw. But the scoffers do not understand that. It was a dream, they say, delirium, hallucination. Oh! As though that meant so much! And they are so proud! A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that's the chief thing, and that's everything; nothing else is wanted—you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it's an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times—but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness—that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

-- Dostoyevsky, DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN, 1877 (tr. Constance Garnett)

Once or twice I've tossed out the neologism "ratiocentrism," loosely defined as a reaction against what I deemed false impositions of rational/reductive interpretations-- especially of literature, though the same principle could apply to any human activity. Ratiocentrism is my reaction against the post-structuralist concept of logocentrism, best defined as the "small-r" rationalist's extreme wariness of any system's evocation of a "Logos" in the form of an organizing principle or principles.

The last lines of the Dostoyevsky quote apply particularly well to those individuals goverened purely by reductive rational principles. For them "the consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness." One hears echoes of this attitude in every elitist critic who insists that a given reader is intrinsically better off to read that which gives him a deep sense of that which is "grave and constant in life" rather than that which makes him happy.

Of course this attitude is far from exclusively modern, as Eccelesiastes tells us:

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.

The rise of Derrida's form of logocentrism and of its literary response in post-structuralism was enchanced by a society that has enshrined the rationalization of life's processes over life itself. As a pluralist I would argue that one may learn as much, if not more, about the nature of life in the House of Mirth, whereas the House of Mourning may be a place where a given body may be subjected to dissection and/or embalming before it's properly dead.

That said, I don't agree with the vision of Dostoyevksy's narrator in his thinking that living by the Golden Rule alone could so transform society. And yet practitioners of literary pluralism should, after a fashion, value loving others as one does oneself, and, by extension, cultivating some degree of love for genres or literary modes even if one doesn't like every manifestation.

For example, I'm not fond of autobiographical comic books. Sometimes this has been a specific reaction against a particular creator, as with Harvey Pekar. Years ago, having read only one odd issue of AMERICAN SPLENDOR, I praised one of the sequences in a long essay written for COMICS JOURNAL (though it was unceremoniously re-routed to AMAZING HEROES, presumably because the essay said nice things about certain superhero books as well). Later, after I got to know Pekar's works more fully, I considered him a less than admirable practitioner of that genre. Nevertheless, I still esteem that one experimental sequence that I liked, even if I can't see much value in most of Pekar's work.

OTOH, I started buying YUMMY FUR early in its Drawn & Quarterly phase as a B&W independent. With the conclusion of the "Ed the Happy Clown" sequence, Chester Brown veered for the most part away from surrealist fantasy and concentrated far more on autobiography. And yet Brown's work retained a fascination for me despite his more mundane subject matter.

I might even characterize the two of them in terms Dostoyeskian: Brown gives the reader his life, while Pekar merely gives the reader his particular intellectual (or, in my judgment, pseudo-intellectual) take upon his life.

Therefore, thanks to Brown and occasional other toilers in this genre, I can stop worrying and learn to love autobio, at least as much as is humanly possible. I suppose there may be elitists out there who make some comparable on behalf of the occasional "good superhero," even if they disdain the genre as a whole.

Chilling thought, that there may such a thing as a conscientious elitist.

Not that I've run into many on the 'net lately. But hope springs, eternally ridiculous.