Peiratikos

In all this talk about superheroes and fascism, I’m struck by an obvious question I haven’t seen addressed. If we read superhero comics and these comics are so harmful, who has been hurt personally by the ideologies or politics or narratives of superhero comics?

I have a story of my own, but I think I’m in the minority. I think of it as being more about the dangers of interpretation than with any problems in superhero stories anyway, but I want to see if I can get any other responses before Monday, when I’ll have time to write about myself.

Tim O’Neil has returned to tell us (again) why superheroes can’t be taken seriously:

In a lot of ways, this hearkens back to the “literature of ethics” conversation of a few months back. As we discussed then, the “literature of ethics” concept was good except for one teeny-tiny fact: there is no examination of ethical dilemma in 99.9% of all superhero books. Black and white, good and evil, are pretty much accepted as is, and any shades of grey are presented as mere obstacles to be overcome. So, when you pick up The Avengers or Superman, the unspoken assumption is that the powerful superbeings whose adventures take place therein are morally infallible creatures whose strange abilities give them the obligation to combat “evil” outside of the traditional constraints of our legal system… Which is why I just don’t think an intelligent, grown adult can seriously accept most superhero books on face value…

Ignoring the unsupported blanket statement¹, the problem with Tim’s argument is that phrase, “at face value.” As David Fiore pointed out, “what intelligent adult accepts anything they read at face value?”

But the really weird thing about Tim’s argument is that it implies that it’s good for children to read pro-fascist literature and take it seriously. What?

¹ The only reasonable answer to the claim that an arbitrarily large percentage of items in a certain category suck is to cite Sturgeon’s Law. “99.9% of X sucks” and “99.9% of everything sucks” are both cop-out statements, because they seek to avoid addressing specific problems by throwing generalizations at them and hoping they go away. They deserve each other. The bulk of Tim’s argument is based on such a cop-out generalization, so it’s hard to take too seriously. His real point seems to be that he prefers to read superhero comics in a childlike (uncritica)l manner rather than an adult (critical) manner, and his elaborate justifications merely obfuscate this.

I guess it’s not really subtextual at all.

I’ve been too busy with cleaning, packing and crankiness to write about comics this weekend, and you can expect that to continue for the next few days at least, though I promise to get back to The Filth and hope it will be sooner than expected.

However I didn’t spend my whole weekend being productive and cranky. I saw Saved! yesterday, and it was much more effective and affecting than I’d expected. Since about age 21, I’ve been fascinated with the way being a teenager is being presented to teenagers, though I no longer think I’ll ever get around to writing this up formally. As a result, I still read some YA and am willing to watch movies that aren’t just standard romances. Because I went to a single-sex Catholic high school and because of who I was while there, I didn’t have anywhere near a normal high school experience, so I’m interested to see what Hollywood thinks normal is, but I’m not well-equipped to judge its relation to reality. I assume that a high school in an area as wealthy as the location in Mean Girls seems to be might have that much conspicuous consumption, and even our uniforms didn’t keep some girls from having visibly nicer cars or haircuts than the rest of us, so I think that’s clear enough. I asked Steven whether couples made out in the halls as in Joan of Arcadia, and he thinks so but wasn’t really paying attention. We had people change clothes basically in the hall after school and probably more offers to lend people tampons than his school did, but I don’t expect to see that in the movies.

Anyway, my point is that the realistic details don’t matter as much as the politics and the heart when I’m looking at these things. Saved! has more heart and better politics than I expected. I know it’s got an audience problem, trying to appeal to Christians and anti-Christians or former Christians alike. But basically it’s not about God any more than Joan of Arcadia is. It’s about what you’ll do to fit in and how that differs from belonging. and the ending, in which everyone remembers that Jesus spoke out in favor of forgiveness and kindness and even those who don’t care about Jesus think that sounds like a good plan, is perhaps predictable but not a cop-out, and each character had to take time and make a decision to love or to reject love. As far as messages go, I’m comfortable with that one, but there’s even more going on.

Unlike in Mean Girls, the gay character actually gets to have a relationship, not just remain a comedy figure checking out all the hot guys. This is an important distinction.

And like in both Mean Girls and Joan of Arcadia, there’s a somewhat androgynous (at least by movie standards) nonconformist who ends up in a romantic relationship with the male nerd character. While in Saved! no one intimated that Cassandra was a lesbian, I think this setup works for several reasons. For one thing, none of them ever denies that bisexuality is an option or that you have to define your orientation for good in high school, which seems like a minor point but will be meaningful to the people who need to hear it, I think. It’s also interesting that nerds (and I count Roland in this group even though Saved! entirely lacks classroom scenes, but I’m working with stereotypes here) are now getting realistic girlfriends rather than none at all, ever, or fantastically attractive airheads, as either comedy or wish-fulfillment fantasy. And it’s good to see that (at least implied) bisexuality isn’t solely the realm of drunken sorority girls looking for attention, which seems to be a common representation.

And the Christians weren’t evil and weren’t perfect. Yes, many things were dumbed-down and mocked, but that’s how it goes in high-school comedy. All of them were struggling and trying to make sense of the world. And that can mean being a gung-ho Christian but not knowing the difference between Moses and Abraham, or being willing to lie to a superior to protect a student’s privacy, or doing bad things in hopes of getting bad people brought to justice, but none of the characters were zombies. They were all trying to do what’s right but first to figure out what’s right and how you can tell.

I realize this probably isn’t much to recommend the movie, but I did enjoy it. The teenagers looked like teenagers, with a few beauties among a lot of awkward classmates. The adults had foibles and blindspots but weren’t hopelessly irrelevant. There were some very funny lines and even though the ending is in many ways ambiguous, it’s more satisfying than if everything had been resolved in explicit detail. The future is open, and that’s the point. It’s time to graduate and move into the real world, where things generally don’t get tied up nicely. And that’s a good thing to know.

Couscous Express was published in 2001 by AiT/Planetlar. Its authors are Brian Wood and Brett Weldele. Becuase it has no page numbers, I will begin counting with page one as the first page of the story proper, which begins with the words “Olive Yassin: age sixteen.”

Couscous Express has an odd passage on pages 46-49. Olive, sixteen-year-old daughter of Turkish immigrants, has just purchased a sniper rifle. (She has contacts with gunrunners—her boyfriend Moustafa is a “mercenary courier” who does everything from smuggle guns to escort “political personnel to and from embassies” [p. 8]. Where she got the money to buy a sniper rifle is unclear, unless her gunrunner friends are just loaning it out. Later, she gets some grenades.) Moustafa’s partner Special is going to teach her how to shoot, but Olive doesn’t need the help: she’s a perfect shot. Her explanation for her skills? “I got cable tv. I know how to shoot. Jesus” (p. 49). Remember a few years ago when there was a minor scare about computer games because some of the perpetrators in school shootings played Doom? Well, Olive’s a step up from that—she doesn’t need to play games to practice shooting, she learned to be an expert sniper just by watching movies! There doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for her shooting skills (Moustafa doesn’t let her use guns, she got the sniper rifle behind his back), so I guess we can take her at her word. Olive succeeds in her fights against the Turkish Scooter Mafia because she’s immersed in American pop culture.

So… what? Olive is better because she knows how the story goes? This comes up a little at the end, too, when Olive half-mockingly—and not too convincingly—admits she’s finally learned the importance of Family and stuff. Couscous Express doesn’t deal with this theme much beyond the sniping-practice scene, but it’s what jumped out at me when I read it. It seems connected to assimilation into American culture, leaving behind old traditions and casting about for something to hold onto in their absence. These are the big themes in Couscous Express. Olive has the rebellious American teenager thing down so perfect, she’s stuck in a place where she can’t have a relationship with anybody without screaming “Fuck you!” at them. The only steadying force in her life is Moustafa, who gives her her one basically non-dysfunctional relationship. She’s racing into a nasty dead end (rebellious teenager schtick), pursued relentlessly by the old (Turkish Scooter Mafia), but in the end she’s rescued by the criminal fraternity of mercenary rollerblade couriers and a violent American-style action story…

Weird little story, but fun.

Larry Young has this to say about people’s interpretations of Demo (look for the 11 June entry):

I very much enjoy readers’ interpretations of Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan????????s Demo. It????????s interesting to me, personally, that most audience members find the various snapshots of Demo so compelling that it seems, to me at least, that many readers are missing the lemon because of the meringue. Many folks who should ostensibly know better get fixated on the what-happens-then or the but-what-about-the or the he-didn????????t-take-responsibility or whatever. Me, I think they????????re not getting the fact that the story is the story. You????????re on the bus, or you????????re not. No need to blame the bus.

Sure. On the other hand, though, maybe some readers got the lemon and just didn’t think it was very good lemon. The story is the story is the story, but that doesn’t mean the story doesn’t have flaws. I thought Demo #6 (the only issue I’ve read) is a pretty good little story, but I was following one discussion that included people who found it unsatisfying, and everybody involved in the dicussion had cogent arguments for their readings of the story. Some readers found the severe disconnect between the frame story and the flashback troubling and annoying. I found it troubling, but I also found that that troubling disconnect was at the center of my reading of the story. (Actually, I found it quite annoying as well, at first, but I changed my mind.) Brian Wood, who participated in the discussion, apparently didn’t intend there to be a troubling disconnect at all. I can see how all three of these interpretations work—I find my own most compelling, certainly, but I can see how the others work. My point: there are lots of ways to read any text, and the ways you don’t care about aren’t irrelevant (even if you are the author or the publisher…).

Jason Kimble also replies to Larry Young, and makes a good point:

Truly impressive writing works on all the applicable levels, or at the very least plays a skilled magician’s game of compelling the reader to focus on the levels that work while failing to notice those that aren’t quite so solidly constructed.

If you haven’t managed that, you haven’t managed it. Playing “you just don’t get it” does no one any good, and just leads to a lot of naked emperors prancing around. While that might make for good porn, it’s not the best way to encourage critical thought and improve your storytelling skills.

Authors can’t choose for readers which parts of the text readers should focus on. If a reader chooses to focus on a part of the text the author considers irrelevant, it’s not that the reader is “fixating” and is “just not getting” it—it’s just that, well, that part isn’t so irrelevant after all.

What’s up with Scots and psychedelia anyway? I decided to take a night off Grant Morrison to seam up the shirt I’ve been knitting and generally lounge around, which meant I finally got to watch my new copy of The Incredible String Band movie, Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending. My mother watched, alternately amused and chagrined by her own memories, since it was her records that had made me a fan of the band in the first place. In fact, I’m not only a fan of the String Band, but I think many of the musicians I’ve come to like since share common traits with them, most notably Robyn Hitchcock and Rose Polenzani.

But I felt like a fool watching a movie that far predates me of a band that disbanded before I was born, because my first thought was, “They look so young!” And they were young and blooming with exuberance and honesty and songs I love, making it an endearing movie. One thing I noticed quickly was the way my relationship to The Psychedelic has changed since I was a teenager. Then I was mostly put off by the idea of drug use, which hasn’t particularly changed, but there wasn’t any of that visible in the film anyway, and I don’t know to what extent it was a part of their reality. Instead what I realized is that I’d been intrigued and repelled by psychedelic imagery because some of the ideas resonated with me but they were couched in what seemed to be nonsense gibberish. And at that point I realized I hadn’t avoided thinking about Morrison at all.

See, stories in which magical drug insights give a character (or author, I suppose) insight into reality-as-it-is always seemed unsatisfying to me. Morrison seemed to undercut the sincere spirit journey version in Animal Man with all the scenes in The Invisibles that suggest that while you can believe you’ve taken a drug, you can never trust yourself to believe you’re in reality. New X-Men has an awkward anti-drug slant, and drugs other than sex and reality seem to be basically absent from The Filth, which is odd. OK, they’re not absent, but they’re not consciousness-altering either. Tony needs his cat medicine, though what medicine and for what condition is both unclear and crucial. And the president has to take drugs to become a crack whore, so I’m not sure if that means the drugs he takes bring him into closer contact with his real self or not. And then there’s the medical marijuana sequence at the end, in which a guy who nearly killed himself while stoned prolongs his painful status quo (and maybe dulls the pain) with more drugs. So apparently I was crazy in thinking drugs don’t figure in much, but it still seems odd to me that drugs don’t show up more in the filth of the world than they do. I guess it’s still significant that they don’t seem to bring any extra awareness or sensitivity and that just living “normally” clouds your mind too.

What I found revealing about Be Glad was that contrary to what I’d gathered from their songs, The Incredible String Band didn’t believe there were lots of gods in the world. They believed they were gods, creating for their own enjoyment and amusement, and audience was of little concern. I like being ignored like that, because it means they don’t bother to pander to me. It might be that this is what Grant Morrison does too. Some readers think what he does is just playing with whatever he finds intriguing at the time, and I can’t totally disagree. I just think I have enough overlap that the ideas remain interesting without so much that I find them trite, but I guess the question is whether this matters to Morrison. It only matters to me inasmuch as I’ve described; the way he writes is interesting to me, and so I stay interested, not very exciting. And sometimes I think he fails completely at synthesizing things, and that’s interesting too. But while The Incredible String Band was not commercial (or at least I hope they didn’t have commercial aspirations, since their fame was fleeting) and could stand to say heartfelt but unhelpful things to Newsweek interviewers, beaming while their girlfriends embroidered tunics in the background, Morrison is making a real living writing comics and doing fairly well. Does this mean he has an obligation to give his audience what it wants? My standard answer when this question arises in comics is that that would be a horrible idea, because I really don’t want to see Wolverine battling a set of breasts the size of Connecticut. But obviously Morrison has to take audience into account to some degree if he wants to make any money, and I really don’t know how he or others manage this.

So I didn’t talk about The Filth much, but that’s because this was a night to think about what it means to be creating a good world in art and in life. I’m never sure I’m up to it, but there also doesn’t seem to be an acceptable alternative. And there’s another gnomic statement you can use to sum up The Filth. Perhaps I ought to start collecting them, and maybe that would be a start.

And I bid you good night.

If any comics publishers read this, hear my cry in the wilderness: we need page numbers! This is a serious problem in comics publishing. In my experience, DC is the only publisher that consistently produces books with numbered pages. Marvel books never have page numbers, not even the TPBs. I just flipped through all the Image and Dark Horse I found lying around—no page numbers. I pulled out a couple other books published outside the major American publishers—the only one I can find with page numbers is Persepolis. Thank you Marjane Satrapi! I’ve just flipped through about ten comic books and only one of them has numbered pages!

My problem here is, I’ve decided to be better about citations in my critical writing. Among other things, this means I’d like to cite page numbers of books. This, of course, is very difficult when the books have no page numbers. It’s not too bad with Marvel books, since they’re usually collected reprints of single issues and I can just count from the beginning of each issue rather than the beginning of the entire book. But I just read Couscous Express (published by the blogosphere’s favorite ‘indie’ publisher Ait/Planetlar), and I’d like to write about it, and I’d like to cite page numbers when I reference specific passages—but it has no page numbers! And there are no chapter divisions, so I’ll have to count myself from the very beginning of the book. I’ll probably get a pen and write in my own page numbers, but I shouldn’t have to do that. Comics creators and publishers, please number the pages of your books!