MYTHCOMICS: "EXTEND THE HAND..." (GOODY GOOD COMICS #1, 2000)

Prefatory note: the full title of the story under discussion is "Extend the Hand of Love to All Who Can Use It," and it's the longest story in the stand-alone issue of GOODY GOOD COMICS. The cover illustration-- which is the only free image I found on the Net-- has nothing to do with "Extend," though the image of a robot munching on a meaty rib fits the ironic nature of not only this story, but the whole oeuvre of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez.

In fact, I've recently thought that the best way to sum up the worlds of the Hernandez Brothers is that of "Betty and Veronica trapped in the nauseous world of Sartre's Roquentin." I've expressed my admiration for the best of the Hernandez's work, but much of their appeal grows out of their mastery of the kinetic and dramatic potentialities. Neither artist is particularly good at the more abstract potentialities: both seem to have no deeper understanding of didactic concepts than warmed-over Marxism, and their ability to evoke mythopoeic ideas is often short-circuited by their over-reliance on pseudo-literary absurdism. I pointed this tendency out in my review of Jaime Hernandez's TI-GIRLS project:

When I read the original serial in LOVE AND ROCKETS: NEW STORIES 1-2, the story seemed random and unfocused.  For the reprint volume Jaime added 30 new pages which went a long way to providing closure to the story, though there are still plenty of surrealistic moments where strange things happen and the only response is, "who can figure comics?" For instance, Santa Claus appears in the story briefly, to little purpose except so that Jaime could indulge in a little whimsy not connected to the usual fantasy/SF tropes of superhero comics.

Like Jaime, Gilbert Hernandez has often dipped his toe into SF-fantasy of the absurdist kind. Usually, though, his efforts (and Jaime's) lead to more "random and unfocused" fantasies, as with a Gilbert story in NEW COMICS #1, where two obscure Martin-and-Lewis clones get shunted to an alien planet and have a lot of silly adventures.

"Extend," though no less absurdist than other Gilbert works, is one of the artist's tightest stories in a mythopoeic vein. The story's protagonist Roy has appeared in assorted stories, where he appears to be an ordinary fat Earthman with a Beatles haircut. I've read some of the other Roy stories and I was not especially impressed.

"Extend," however, is a pretty strong satire of space opera, particularly in terms of Gilbert showing off his penchant for gory effects that don't appear in the more mainstream SF offerings. With no explanation, Roy is first seen wandering around an alien world. He's apparently been there for some time, for he pals around with a diminutive alien friend whom Roy calls (for unknown reasons) by the name "Homo." He's also not thrown for a loss when he spies a group of three uniformed women, who are seen making enormous leaps over the countryside, which might be a reference to Burroughs' jumping-jack hero John Carter, or to Buck Rogers and his anti-gravity belt, or both. Roy refers to the women as "the Leapin' Elitists," but they don't stop to converse with him.

When Roy goes hunting for food, he accidentally spooks the mount of a young local ruler, whom I will denote as "the Good Boy King." The young "despot" (as Roy calls him) gets his knee wounded, and in seconds, the wound expands to a huge boil. At the king's insistence, Roy takes up a sword and slices the boil. However, with the usual lack of explanation, a fully formed clone of the Good Boy King springs from the bloody wound, swipes the sword and kills his double, thus establishing himself as "the Bad Boy King."

Gilbert's intention is clearly to satirize the adventurous fantasies of normative space opera. Roy passively allows the Bad Boy King to take him prisoner and bring him back to the Good Boy King's city, where the villain has no problems posing as the real ruler. When Roy is contacted by two of his friends from the Leapin' Elitists-- who are monitoring the situation but don't actually intend to rectify it-- he does at least tell them about the clone. The two females, rather than helping him, conduct Roy into a dark tunnel where he sees visions of his lost Earth-life, whereon he moans about being a coward:"That's why I couldn't live in my own skin." Then he exits the tunnel into an arena, and is gorily killed when the Bad Boy King sics a monster onto Roy.

However, after Roy has died, the Leapin' Elitist girls suddenly feel free to resurrect him, even though one of them thinks it may be a contradiction of their non-interference policy. Whatever the girls do to Roy not only reconstitutes his own body, but also releases a clone of Roy-- again born from a swelling in the knee. Just as the Bad Boy King was the opposite of the original, Roy's copy is a courageous fellow who says things like, "The air of freedom stirs me as I re-enter the world, ready to do God's work." The Roy-clone ends up by perishing as he kills the king-clone, and Roy awakens, none the wiser for all the drama happening around him. He ends up re-uniting with Homo and the two of them ride off on the back of an alien beast.

In contrast to some of Gilbert's other attempts at satire, this spoof of space opera works in part because he adroitly mimicks the genre's penchant for over-ripe phrases, as seen in the story's title. The chimerical idea of having clones erupt from people's knees bears a nodding resemblance to the archaic story of Dionysus's unusual birth. In this tale, the God of Ecstasy has yet to be born from his mortal mother Semele, but his father Zeus accidentally incinerates Semele, and the Father of Gods can only save Dionysus by sewing the fetus into Zeus's own thigh. Gilbert's use of "knee-wounds" to spawn clones is first and foremost a way of using gore to besmirch the squeaky-clean facade of the space opera. But it's also a visual motif of unnatural birth, which provides the most compelling image of the author's ironic domain, wherein all the rules of "serious" tales have been turned topsy turvy.

MYTHCOMICS: "DUCK FEET" (LOVE AND ROCKETS #17-18, 1986)

The serial narratives by the duo known as “Los Bros,” Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, have a better claim to the status of “art” than most of the works that get labeled "art-comics." I have to specify, though, that this is the type of art I call “the art of thematic realism,” a.k.a “play for work’s sake.” In this argument I cited Faulkner’s LIGHT IN AUGUST as a narrative primarily defined by work, but with many imaginative elements of play that gave it depth and balance. Today I'd say that the elements of play supplied the story with an underthought that served as a counterpoint to Faulkner’s overthought; i.e. his “serious theme.”

Not all of Gilbert Hernandez’s stories about Palomar—a small Mexican town inhabited by a host of bizarre, often tragicomic characters—are equally meritorious. However, the two-part story “Duck Feet”—originally serialized in two issues of the LOVE AND ROCKETS magazine—was widely hailed as an exemplary work, even by critics who had never worked for Hernandez’s publisher Fantagraphics.

For a story whose title references supernatural folklore—the widely distributed idea that magical beings, particularly witches, have animal-feet instead of human appendages—“Duck Feet” begins in a thoroughly mundane manner. Chelo, sheriff of  Palomar, rousts the local whorehouse in search of fugitive Roberto, who has recently killed his irritating grandfather. In three short pages Roberto clubs Chelo and flees to the rooftops of Palomar (a trope that seems borrowed from big-city chases, where it makes much more sense than in a small town). As a result of Chelo’s pursuit, Roberto falls to his death, but an odd detail intrudes: he dies with his head turned completely around.

Thus the story begins with violence perpetrated in defense of the community, and Roberto’s death has future consequences for Chelo and other characters, though it’s not the literal source of the ORESTES-like contagion that soon dominates Palomar. Though many of Hernandez’s regular characters make appearances in the story, the narrative revolves principally around three characters: Sheriff Chelo, local “loose girl” Tonantzin, and Guadalupe, the grade-school daughter of Luba. Luba herself, who's often a main character in the Palomar stories, is conspicuously sidelined in a sitcom-like situation worthy of Lucille Ball (I LOVE LUBA?). This places the narrative’s focus more upon Guadalupe as she tries to deal with situations brought on by irresponsible children and adults alike.

Shortly after the death of Roberto, a dark-clad woman enters Palomar. Some of the local kids believe that she’s a *bruja,* whose inhuman nature can be disclosed if one gets a look at her pedal extremities, her "duck feet." The unnamed woman’s feet are never seen, though when she has her feet washed by Chelo—who formerly held the occupation of a *banadora,*  or professional body-washer—Chelo shows no unusual reaction to what she sees. The “duck feet”  rumor, however, inspires one of the kids to steal a pouch set aside by the alleged bruja. The pouch contains a skull-- apparently that of a human baby, though one of the kids isn't entirely sure about that identification. The first chapter ends as the old woman misses her property and turns her evil eye upon Chelo.

At the beginning of Part Two, Chelo has fallen ill, as have various other citizens of Palomar, as the bruja—whose nature is no longer seriously in doubt—wanders the streets wailing for the skull of “mi hijo.” Thus does Hernandez creatively interbreed the widespread cultural trope of the contagion-bringer with that of the specifically Hispanic folktale of La Llorona, the Wailing Ghost. That said, the contagion is erratic in its effects. Guadalupe gets the sickness, even though she was only a witness when one of her play-mates stole the skull. The illness does not strike Tonantzin, and though she and Chelo have an adversarial relationship—the sheriff frequently chastising the young hottie for wearing revealing garments—Chelo deputizes the leggy beauty, which makes for some nice comic byplay.

I won’t detail all of the humorous and/ or horrific incidents that transpire while the bruja’s spectre haunts Palomar, but as noted before, Roberto’s death has consequences, inspiring his brother Gerlado to seek vengeance on Chelo. Guadalupe’s illness causes her to have weird fantasies about her mother, suggesting that Luba has something of a witchy aspect. Possibly Hernandez had this similarity in mind when he made Luba the inadvertent means by which the bruja gets back her prized skull.

If I should boil down the underthought of “Duck Feet” to an ersatz theme-statement, it might be to say that the community’s effort to remain cohesive by violence ends up bringing it close to total dissolution.  Palomar is spared the abyss, though, because once the bruja gets back her baby's skull, the contagion simply disappears and she takes her leave. The only permanent result of the witch’s visit, oddly, is that happy-go-lucky Tonantzin loses an innocence not connected with her sexuality. Tonantzin becomes politically radicalized by her contact with the cop-hating revolutionary Geraldo—an event which plants the seed for a future plotline of a tragic nature.

If the process of contagion-by-violence is the story’s underthought, what is the overthought? “Duck Feet” is not a political story, but other stories by Hernandez focus explicitly on his characters’ political beliefs. Hernandez plays it for laughs when Tonantzin fantasizes about shooting down invading U.S. soldiers. Yet her later rant against having her destiny controlled by “Libya and the U.S. and the U.S.S.R” captures a strong sense as to how denizens of the Third World feel about the cold-blooded machinations of the Great Powers.

Gilbert Hernandez’s work as a whole may not be strongest in terms of its political commentary. However, I credit him with finding an artistically resonant way of seeing political belief within the spectrum of ordinary—and even extraordinary—life-events—which is a compliment I can’t pay the next target in my line of fire.  

TI-GIRLS, TI-GIRLS, BURNING BRIGHT

I've followed the works of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez from their first Fantagraphics publications, and I still re-read both Jaime's "Locas" stories and Gilbert's "Palomar" works from time to time whenever I want to immerse myself in comics done at the uppermost level of accomplishment.

That said, I often have not liked their attempts to write other stories outside those respective universes. I suppose I could be accused of being one of those fans who wants a creator to keep doing the same things he's always done, but I don't think that's accurate.  Liking Miller's DAREDEVIL didn't make me wish he'd never done SIN CITY, etc., so I think in many cases the Hernandezes' attempts to trail-blaze new concepts simply haven't been as well realized as their first two innovations.

GOD AND SCIENCE: RETURN OF THE TI-GIRLS sort of-kind of takes place in Jaime's "Locas" universe.  The early stories originally included a few SF-trappings even though they took place in what looked like modern urban California. Gradually most of those trappings went away and the series became firmly grounded in the present day, though strange phenomena still took place.  Maggie, one of the series' principal stars, might read about superheroes in comic books, but there were no superheroes as such in her world, though occasionally Mexican wrestlers acted out such larger-than-life roles.

TI-GIRLS, however, rewrites the Locas-world so that it's evident that superheroes have always been around in some form, even if their doings rarely impact on the lives of ordinary humans like Maggie. The story begins when Angel, an athletic friend of Maggie, takes it into her head to become a superheroine, in part because one of the women in Maggie's apartment house seems to be one. Jaime's story does not admit to easy summation, but suffice to say that Angel finds herself meeting dozens of superheroines and supervillainesses.  Despite a complaint by one of the heroines that it's hard for women to get ahead in a world that's predominantly oriented on white males, the only time the reader sees any male heroes or villains in the story's present is a short sequence in a bar full of seedy, costumed guys, and only one among them seems like a half-decent fellow. It may be that Jaime concentrated on females with some idea of redressing old wrongs, or he may have just wanted to draw a lot of female characters of varying body-types-- something he and his brother Gilbert do better than anyone in the field.

When I read the original serial in LOVE AND ROCKETS: NEW STORIES 1-2, the story seemed random and unfocused.  For the reprint volume Jaime added 30 new pages which went a long way to providing closure to the story, though there are still plenty of surrealistic moments where strange things happen and the only response is, "who can figure comics?" For instance, Santa Claus appears in the story briefly, to little purpose except so that Jaime could indulge in a little whimsy not connected to the usual fantasy/SF tropes of superhero comics.

One reviewer said that there were two forces at work in Jaime's story. On one hand, he creates a lot of characters meant to have emotional resonance, even if their backstories are only sketched in. On the other, there's constantly an air of, "but this may go away at any moment."

Not until my third reading of TI-GIRLS, though, did I find an angle on it by which I could appreciate Jaime's accomplishment.  TI-GIRLS is in essence both an homage to 1960s Marvel Comics and an inversion of the company's priorities.

There have been any number of tedious homages to Marvel's groundbreaking works, the worst being Alan Moore's witless 1963 imitations. But while Jaime's inspirations go beyond the Marvel artists of the sixties, he 
puts his finger unerringly on Marvel's appeal.  Where Marvel specialized in alternating skull-bursting fisticuffs with soap-opera melodrama, Jaime's homage provides the same wild action but tempers the fight-scenes with brief melodramatic snippets that aren't intended to be developed continuously like a soap; they're just there for a quick "dose of reality" amid the crazy fantasy.

I don't think I'll re-read TI-GIRLS quite as often as I do the signature works of Jaime and Gilbert. But it's not a misfire like certain standalone Hernandez works, some of which I wasn't even able to finish.

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.

ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE, AND MAYBE THE NEGATIVE TOO

Toward the end of old PU, FJ gives readers a lengthy quote from Paul Ricoeur, of which I'll copy only the essential bits:

"At one pole, hermeneutics is understood as the manifestation and restoration of a meaning addressed to me in the manner of a message... according to the other pole, it is understood as a demystification, as a reduction of illusion... Hermeneutics seems to me to be animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen..."

In the next paragraph Jameson cavils at the religious rhetoric of Ricoeur (which I've left out, and which gives me some problems as well, though they're not the same as Jameson's). Jameson asserts that because Ricoeur's "conception of 'positive' meaning" is "modeled on the act of communication between individual subjects," it's useless to the anti-individualistic Political Unconscious except as a rough model from which to conceive some sort of "positive hermeneutic" that *does* fall in line with Marxist dialectic (which conception Jameson doesn't pull off, IMO).

Not surprisingly, all this talk about positive and negative hermeneutics (last mention for that fifty-dollar word) brings to mind what I quoted from David Sandner here, on the different perspectives of fantasy-world creation as practiced by Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien. Sandner called these artistic approaches "emptiness" and "fullness" respectively, but he could just as well have spoken of "absence" and "presence" as Jameson does in his critique of Frye.

Archaic myth, even more than literature, concerns the presence of the phenomena early man witnessed, as well as accounting for the absence of things early man could only imagine (a time when mankind was not subject to death, for example). The former schema may well be seen as a "positive" conception of phenomena-- "this river is here because God X did thus and so"-- while the latter schema is negative in its structure; "man is no longer immortal because God X didn't do what he was supposed to do." Literature doesn't approach questions of presence and absence in the same fashion as myth does, but the Sandner example suggests considerable overlap between the two forms.

Underlying both of these schemas are emotional *dynamizations.* Human beings are perhaps just as equally dynamized by breaking things down as by building them up: of showing the will to suspect as much (or more) than the will to listen. I hinted at the dichotomy here:

"...if one looks one can find both tendencies in the works of both authors, as I'm sure Sandner knew. I think Sandner's correct in seeing that both authors tended to dwell on one tendency more than the other, and it may be that much of what any reader favors tends more toward one tendency than the other-- be it the Beatles vs. the Stones or (to name a personal preference) the Hernandez Brothers vs. Daniel Clowes."

To illustrate how these distinct dynamizations play out with comics-authors as distinct in their ways as were Carroll and Tolkien, here's how Daniel Clowes views the topic of nostalgia in this 1999 interview with the online magazine HERMENAUT:

'Actually, although I think about stuff from my own childhood a lot, things I haven't seen in years, all I have to do is see the thing once and I'm cured of it. I've recently bought video tapes of cartoons I hadn't seen since I was four or five years old, and I'm enthralled by them exactly one time, by this feeling of "Wow, this is what I was so interested in?" My memory had turned them into something much more fascinating than they actually were.'

The dynamization here, of being "cured" of a nostalgic impulse, falls in line with the schema suggesting absence: the remembered thing is shown to be emptier than one thought, and it may be that there is a certain dynamization gleaned from this "is that all there is" reaction.

Contrast this to a nostalgic reverie from the three Brothers Hernandez v.2, #10 (2004), wherein Jaime, Mario and Gilbert all celebrate the fullness of their recollections of the trash and treasures of their early comics-collecting days. Remarks include:

JAIME on ZAP COMICS 0: ""Crumb covered every form of comic storytelling in one issue."

GILBERT on Elias' BLACK CAT: "sexy superheroics from a student of the Caniff school."

MARIO on LOIS LANE #48: "A book-length masterpiece."

Plainly, whatever flaws the Hernandezes (probably) see in these mementoes of their childhoods, the works don't lose the dynamizing qualities they formerly possessed, as Clowes' mementoes apparently do for him.

Neither POV is "wrong," naturally. Tastes are what they are, and as the Ricoeur quote asserts, human beings do need both mental approaches at varying times in both life and literary criticism.

The eternal problem, of course, is knowing--

Which times are the right times for suspicion--

And which are the right ones for listening.