Peiratikos

The comics internet is fucked! And we’re all part of the problem. Really, you’re not pushing comics forward. We’re folks on the internet writing about stuff, and we don’t matter to anybody but ourselves and the few other people who read us. Just kick back, have fun writing about stuff, and don’t worry about the forward momentum of the art form.

I think we can all agree that the final sentence of Rose’s post was ill-advised. A very bad idea. If you read everything Rose has written about this and think she’s accusing anybody of being misogynist or claiming she knows what anybody was thinking during recruiting for CBG, you need to work on your reading comprehension skills. The only badly behaved people in that comments thread are Alan David Doane, Steven Berg and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Christopher Allen.

You all are protesting way too much. Why is that?

You spend—let me count—one and a half years writing about comics, then you make a couple of fairly mild criticisms of Comic Book Galaxy (and one ill-advised final sentence, yes, we all remember that) and you’re suddenly PART OF THE PROBLEM!!!

You are all very silly and hysterical. So am I. Maybe you should get over it now, Logan and friends. I myself am getting over it… now. Now you try.*

P.S. Rose did bring up race, Logan. Thanks for reading before ranting.

P.P.S. No, really, we don’t want to write for CBG. So sorry.

* Yes, actually, this post is part of our shameful secret “agenda.” If I used smilies, I’d put one of those eye-rolling smilies right here.

What I Watched

La Dolce vita, Federico Fellini et al.: The irony of 8 ½ is that even after Guido’s revelation that he loves everybody and can’t live without the people in his life, the movie remains trapped in his fantasy. Guido has successfully alienated everybody, but he imagines that they all forgive him and join him in a circus-like celebration of his new happiness; he imagines that everybody else’s happiness is congruous with his own. The movie remains claustrophobically solipsistic to the end. La Dolce vita, on the other hand, remains outside its protagonist Marcello’s mind. (Guido is a film director and Marcello is a gossip journalist, but they are almost variations of the same character. Guido is more playful, less seemingly defeated by decadence than Marcello; but who knows how Marcello really thinks of himself? The gauche Marcello at the end of La Dolce vita might be how the rest of the world sees Guido.) It turns out the whole doomed culture is solipsist. If Marcello ever has an inspiration like Guido’s, it remains hidden; we see only the stark reality: a sordid orgy, an encounter with a big dead fish, a moment of failed communication. La Dolce vita and 8 ½ both begin their finales with characters half-walking and half-dancing onto a beach; I recall that the characters moved left to right in 8 ½, but in La Dolce vita they move right to left. (Rose reminds me the girl whom Marcello cannot hear and fails to recognize moves from left to right, which is certainly important.) Basic film technique: because right is good (and because Western written languages read left to right, time progresses in a left-to-right circle on a clock, &c.), movement from left to right suggests progress; although the association of left and badness has largely disappeared, movement from right to left still seems backwards. In 8 ½, of course, the characters move clockwise in a circle—the progress is as illusory as the fantasy in which it occurs.

La Dolce vita reminds me of Bright Young Things (which I saw first), and I imagine Stephen Fry was influenced by Fellini in making his own movie. The oppressive sordidness of the upper-class and its hangers-on and the obsession with celebrity are straight out of Evelyn Waugh’s book—I suppose Fellini was influenced by Waugh. But Fry’s swarms of photographers and party scenes mixing sexy young people and batty old aristocrats are straight from Fellini. There an interesting connection I just noticed between Vile Bodies/Bright Young Things and La Dolce vita, viz. the protagonists are both writers who’ve written books that are never published (Marcello’s supposed book is only mentioned, Adam’s is a finished manuscript but is confiscated as smut by Customs). Both are journalists who write celebrity gossip whose books seem to represent a failed communication of something more important and genuine—it’s easy to idealize a book that exists only hypothetically. (Adam’s book exists more than hypothetically but only to him, never to the viewer.)

What I Read

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H.W. Fowler: An indispensable guide to using English with good taste. Provides ceaseless entertainment to the well-educated and pedantic. The dictionary was published in 1926, so interested readers can judge the accuracy of Fowler’s speculations on future developments of usage.

Shining Knight #3, Grant Morrison, Simone Bianchi et al.: Lots of exposition, as Jog notes, but it’s pretty fun. The Seven Soldiers stories all have storytelling and the unresolved dialectic of story and reality—in Shining Knight #3, a certain character’s relation of the original Arthurian myth becomes even more interesting on a second reading, after her true identity is revealed. Elsewhere, narrative captions comment on the narrative with excerpts from an Arthurian protomyth; at the end of issue #2, in fact, Sir Justin responds directly in dialogue to the narration. Morrison infuses Shining Knight with myth but avoids tiresomely literal adherence to the monomyth and overwrought quotation from The Apocalypse of John.

What I Played

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Rockstar Games: It’s by far the largest and most complex of the Grand Theft Auto games, but it introduces the new concepts gradually as part of gameplay—in fact, most of the new concepts seem to be unavailable until the game introduces them, so there’s little chance of confusion. Each new GTA game invites new controversy; I haven’t heard of any controversy yet surrounding San Andreas, but its portrayal of gang banging in the poorest neighborhoods of a fictionalized Los Angeles is unlikely to get a pass. (In fact, Rose informs me, San Andreas is already in trouble.) I was skeptical of the decision to give the player-character in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City a name, personality and voice: too much emphasis on the story, which is superfluous and necessary only to give the gameplay a sensible context. San Andreas’s story has become even more, um, serious (relative only to Grand Theft Auto 3), and player-character Carl Johnson’s sad backstory (he returns to Los Santos at the beginning of the game because his mother has been murdered) is annoyingly incongruous with the hilariously frenetic gameplay. I haven’t decided yet if San Andreas is too big and too realistic, too focused on character and story, but it’s been fun for the fifteen or so hours I’ve played.

Edit 2005-07-06: Corrected my mispelling of Jim Cheung’s name.

Young Avengers, Allan Heinberg, Jim Cheung et al.

[This began as a post of brief thoughts on books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched in the last week (a new column-type thing I hope will get me posting at least once or twice a week), but my piece on Young Avengers #4 & #5 ended up so long that I decided I’d better put it in its own post.]

I almost wrote a response to James Meeley’s latest correspondence, but why bother? I will note that Heinberg diplomatically explains to him that Young Avengers is not an all-ages book. (Meeley, one imagines, objects also to teenagers reading about sex.) It is an intelligent book about and for teenagers. The art is pleasant; Cheung draws reasonably anatomically correct figures and costumes that look like real (albeit exceedingly tight) clothes. The story is pregnant with identity crisis both fantastic and realistic—the fuel of a good superhero story in David Fiore’s neo-existentialist romance mold, I think. The typical secret-identity confusion (and these kids’ secret identities are multilayered) is enhanced by the liminality of adolescence.* Iron Lad of the 30th century (ha ha) knows he’s going to grow up to be Kang the Conqueror (apparently a particularly infamous supervillain)—unless he refuses to do so, a decision which would irrevocably change not only his own 30th-century future but, thanks to Kang’s time traveling, the future of the 20th century, causing who knows what temporal chaos. Patriot is the grandson of Isiah Bradley, the black Captain America. Cassie Lang, Ant-Man’s daughter, thought she was normal, but it turns out she has superpowers too. Kate Bishop has no superpowers and isn’t even related to any superheroes, but she’s turning into one of those Batman-type characters who outdoes the superpowered but inexperienced—and, it must be said, inept—guys with pure human skill and cool-headedness. We don’t know much about Hulkling and the Asgardian yet.

Patriot (who, if he’s the kid from the end of Truth: Red, White & Black, is named Litigious) and Kate are the most interesting characters so far, I think. Patriot is a kid with a chip on his shoulder about Captain America’s role, however unknowing, in Isiah Bradley’s ruin, who finds himself with a power and responsibility he doesn’t want because of his heritage and who tries to compensate for his basic immaturity with a dubious attempt at macho bravado. Kate, on the other hand, is a girl who saves the day when the Young Avengers botch an attempt to rescue two hundred wedding guests in a church from hostage-takers; she decides to tag along with Cassie when Cassie goes on a search for the Young Avengers, and she grabs some superhero weapons and leaps into battle when Kang the Conqueror attacks. Their relationship begins with typical “no girls allowed on our superteam” posturing by Patriot, but it veers off in entertaining directions all its own when his attacks whither against Kate’s unassailable confidence. That their mundane adolescent sparring plays out in the midst of superhero battles heightens rather than diminishes the human drama. As Rose says (of Scott Pilgrim):

The reason I like superhero stories is because they have so little to do with the smashing and stomping that are supposed to be at their core, at least if done correctly. Instead they’re a heavy template for readers to fit themselves into a reality where certain narratives make sense and the readers can make sense of themselves. It’s not about the power fantasy but about both power and fantasy, which is something over-specific “slice of life” stories can miss.

Pretty much all the stories I’ve encountered in my life that I really enjoyed (as well as many that I didn’t enjoy) have at least a little bit of magic to undermine the alienating specificity of realism.† Kate and Patriot are very good. Iron Lad worries me, though, because Kang the Conqueror threatens constantly to overwhelm the story and turn it into a dumb fight between the Avengers and Kang. Battles and backstory minutiae don’t interest me in themselves, and they quickly bore me when they become detached from more entertaining storytelling concerns. That’s always the danger with a mainstream superhero story, that it turns into series of fight scenes and explorations of minor points of backstory, with the moral or philosophical problems of the story typically degenerating into inchoate muttering about heroism. An most infamous recent example is Identity Crisis, a story whose only reasons for existence are to explain apparent inconsistencies in some supervillains’ characterization and to engage in hand-wringing over superheroes’ inability to protect their loved ones (due mostly to ineptitude and negligence, as far as I can tell). The latter might have made for a good story,‡ but nothing ever comes of it except faux-tough-guy narration from Green Arrow about the tragedy of your wife getting killed because you’re never home and you forgot to secure your house against tiny people crawling through the phone lines.** So I worry that Young Avengers will degenerate into a big fight, with Iron Lad doing the right thing because he’s a hero (or doing the wrong thing because he’s destined to become a villain). Issue #5 remains entertaining, but it’s walking the fine line between a story with fighting and a story about the fighting. But I’m not very worried, because the last page (which genuinely surprised me) all but guarantees an entertaining conclusion for Iron Lad. Still, I never underestimate the corrupting influence of Marvel.

* A note on adolescent power fantasy and the mainstream of superhero comic books. To suggest that superhero stories are immature power fantasies is to commit careless synechdoche in considering genuinely (if not self-consciously) immature power fantasies as the totality of the genre in ignorance (sometimes real, sometimes feigned) of more sophisticated stories about power and fantasy and identity. (Moreover, they tend to ignore the potentially interesting parts of otherwise banal or objectionable stories, such as the metafictional weirdness of Crisis on Infinite Earths.) In truth, superhero stories are a subset of a larger genre of fantastic fiction that includes, in addition to obvious superhero stories: Scott Pilgrim; much of Grant Morrison’s work in comics, especially The Invisibles but also Kill Your Boyfriend and Sebastian O; Eightball #23 (”The Death-Ray”); Dune; Wings of Desire; Joan of Arcadia. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it a genre; it’s not a coherent body of works like, say, film noir. It’s a disparate collection of fantastic stories with potentially interesting thematic relations. Occasionally there is clear intertexuality, but the mainstream of superhero comics is largely insular and doesn’t invite comparison with anything outside. Those few superhero comics which escape the stultifying effect of that insularity may be more fruitfully considered, I now think, in the larger context than in the context of the superhero mainstream.

There are several common elements in these stories, viz.: confusion and ambiguity about identity, represented in the protagonist both by a fantastic secret or unknown identity and by more realistic identity crises; a problematic power relationship enhanced by the protagonist’s preternatural abilities; significant romantic and existentialist influence; stories about stories (e.g., flashbacks, frame stories, storyteller characters); rejection of naturalism in favor of artificiality, often through narratorial and authorial discussion of the story (instead of remaining unobtrusive to assist ‘willing suspension of disbelief’) and extensive use of allusion and intertexuality.

† This is a problematic statement, probably too much so. I should distinguish between, um, storytelling and journalism. No, I don’t like those terms, but I mean narratives that are about more than their specific events and narratives that are about only their specific events. When I write story, I mean the former class of narrative. The latter kind is not a lesser art; the only lesser art is an attempt to create the former class of narrative using only the tools of the latter.

Needless to say, the nature of the magic used in service of stories has a profound effect. The superpowers and secret identities in Young Avengers encourage one kind of story, and the ubiquitous blue tv glow and mysterious guy who paints “Ghost World” graffiti in Ghost World encourage an entirely different kind. Obviously, I don’t consider ‘magic’ necessarily to be actual magic; I consider ‘magic’ to encompass any non-realistic storytelling device. I shan’t presume to guess how other people read, but I wouldn’t be surprised if even the strictest adherent of realism could find the realism-undermining magic in a beloved story or, failing that, recognize that the ’story’ in fact belongs to the second class of narrative mentioned above.

‡ E.g., Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.

** Not all such stories are bad—1960s DC comic books abound with five-page stories explaining how Superman used to hang out with Jay Garrick even though Jay Garrick is a fictional comic-book character in 1960s continuity (there’s a second Earth with Jay Garrick and a second Superman, which emits psychic radiation or something into the minds of comic-book writers) and why nobody realizes Clark Kent is Superman (Superman unwittingly transmits hypnotic disguise rays to people around him). Plenty of comic-book readers love stuff, obviously, so good for them. Identity Crisis’s crime is taking up seven long issues and being aesthetically offensive and dumb.

I’ve been hoping to post something substantive but now that I’m peering out from under the edge of a multi-day migraine, I’ll be shuffling back to bed as soon as I can. So instead of substance, I can give vague impressions.

Greg Burgas had some thoughts about why you don’t see more Christians in superhero comics (one of the answers being because you don’t look hard enough) and while I didn’t think there was too much going on there beyond the anecdote-swapping, it reminded me that I had written about portrayals of Muslim women in mainstream comics a few months ago. Both posts have plenty of activity in the comments, too, if you’re not about to retreat to bed and are looking to kill some time reading.

Since I wrote that in February, Vimanarama has ended, and I should really update my thoughts on how it dealt with faith in both religious and secular or personal terms. I found it both satisfying and disappointing; a three-issue story is seldom enough for me these days. I’m not sure I have much more to say now. However, there clearly is more to say about Dust of New X-Men, a book I’m not currently reading in either its Hellions miniseries or Mutant Academy X formats. Steven went to buy comics today and returned to tell me I absolutely had to look at the cover of Hellions #2, but he didn’t buy us a copy. Apparently the premise is that in this issue Dust has the option of making one wish that can change her life forever, and I’m not sure what to make of the suggestions the cover implies. I’m tempted now to buy the miniseries just to find out what’s going on with her, whether she now considers her modesty a confining limitation or whether the artist can only conceive of Muslim women as seductive harem girls in the Orientalist tradition (and I hope not, since he’s the interior artist as well) or really what’s going on here. I was interested in her story because I like teenage stories about body issues, especially on feminist terms. I’m interested in smart analysis of the contrary pulls to living in an attractive body versus being just one of the guys or a brain in a vat, what it means to be taken seriously as a person and a woman. On the off chance that this is what’s going on here, I may well have a look.

I thought I had more to say, but if I can’t remember, that must mean it’s time to quit.

[See Minority Report and Film Adaptation Part 1.]

Dick, Philip K. Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.

[…] Anderton said: “You’ve probably grasped the basic legalistic drawback to precrime methodology. We’re taking in individuals who have broken no law.”

“But they surely will,” Witwer affirmed with conviction.

“Happily they don’t—because we get them first, before they can commit an act of violence. So the commission of the crime itself is absolute metaphysics. We claim they’re culpable. They, on the other hand, eternally claim they’re innocent. And, in a sense, they are.”

The lift let them out, and they again paced down a yellow corridor. “In our society we have no major crimes,” Anderton went on, “but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals. (228-229)

In “Minority Report,” John Anderton is the founder and chief of Precrime. He acknowledges the apparent dilemma of precrime, but he doesn’t consider it a dilemma: it’s not a problem to imprison people who would have been considered innocent under the old “post-crime” legal system (obviously, since they haven’t actually committed a crime), because they certainly would have committed a crime if given the chance. It’s an odd metaphysics: The people who will commit a crime have no free will; their future is determined. But for the police who know the future, it remains undetermined; they can prevent a crime they know will be committed. It’s unclear what happens to precriminals; they may be imprisoned only until the time of their alleged crime is past or they may be imprisoned indefinitely. But either way, the system is problematic, at least from a human-rights perspective: if the police can change the future, then the future must be indeterminate; and it seems—to me, anyway—that we could reasonably doubt the rectitude of a conviction for a potential crime, however likely. But Anderton has absolute faith in the system, until the prediction of his own commission of murder comes in:

“You have to be taken in—if Precrime is to survive. You’re thinking of your own safety. But think, for a moment, about the system. […] Which means more to you—your own personal safety or the existence of the system?”

“My safety,” Anderton answered, without hesitation.

“You’re positive?”

[…] “If the system can survive only by imprisoning innocent people, then it deserves to be destroyed. My personal safety is important because I’m a human being.” (250)

He has apparently be framed—by his new assistant Witwer, he first thinks, but it turns about to be the Army—for the future murder of retire general Leopold Kaplan, except it turns out he wasn’t framed: the prediction is accurate. But he nows he won’t kill Kaplan—he was going to kill Kaplan the Army manipulated events so that he would, and after he discovers this plot he suddenly has no reason to commit murder. As it turns out, though, that was the Army’s plan all along: get a murder prediction for Anderton, let him discover their plot to prevent him from actually committing the murder, then discredit Precrime by revealing the clearly inaccurate prediction. Their goal is to get Precrime shut down so they can step in and take control of the police state.

Actually, one of the precog mutants (there are three) is slightly out of phase with the other two, like a clock running slow; and he, with Anderton’s knowledge of his own future as part of his predictive data set, predicts that Anderton will not commit murder. This minority report, as it’s called, doesn’t help Precrime much, as the Army plans to present it as proof that Anderton wouldn’t have committed murder. When a minority report occurs, it’s assumed that the majority report is accurate, so the Army can point out that in Anderton’s case, the minority report is in fact the accurate prediction.

What’s more important: his own life, or the system he created? Will he sacrifice the system he created to save himself? He sure will—until he discovers the Army’s goal of usurping Precrime’s position, at which point he quickly and silently changes his mind. After reviewing the three precog reports, he discovers that there are in fact three out-of-phase minority reports: the first predicts he will murder Kaplan, the second predicts he will change his mind and not murder Kaplan, the third predicts he will change his mind again and murder Kaplan after all. The third prediction provides him an opportunity to foil the Army’s plan: he must murder Kaplan to demonstrate the system’s accuracy. Will he sacrifice himself to save the system he created? He will. But only a few minutes before he finally decides to kill Kaplan, he was convinced of the system’s inhumanity and injustice. How does he justify his change of heart? He cheats. When Witwer worries about the serious flaw in the system implied by Anderton’s surprising sequence of predictions, Anderton says, “It can only happen in one circumstance […] My case was unique, since I had access to the data” (264). It’s a weak argument. It’s true that the precogs turned out to be correct in Anderton’s case; but as he says, his case is unique: that the precogs would happen to make three different predictions such that the predictions demonstrate that the future is determinate rather than indeterminate is wildly implausible, and Anderton is unbelievably lucky it happened to him. Much more likely, in a case like Anderton’s, the precogs would end up with an inaccurate prediction. Anderton insists that you can change your future only if you know what it’s supposed to be, but that’s metaphysical theorizing, and there’s no apparent reason to believe it. The predictions of Anderton’s commission of murder are accurate (in a bizarre way), but their more important implication is that the future is indeterminate, that a prediction doesn’t indicate something that will certainly happen unless the police prevent it. That much was obvious to us readers from the beginning, of course, and Anderton’s ordeal makes the problem painfully clear. But, for Anderton, political necessity trumps personal safety and human rights.

I’m actually not completely sure what I want to say about Minority Report yet, so I’ll end here for now.

I’m still on the injured list, with my right arm sort of swollen and sore from today’s NCV and EMG, but when I couldn’t sleep last night I read Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the second volume in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series and because this was a gift from the author, I feel compelled to write something lousy about a fun book in hopes that I’ll feel more inclined to say something fun later. I read it twice and noticed all sorts of interesting connections on my second time through, so I’m hoping I’ll have a second post about some of those later this week.

And this is indeed a fun book. It picks up with the craziness from the end of Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life and just gets crazier. Ramona can still show up in Scott’s dreams (and seriously, that would be the end of the relationship for me; I’m surprised I can comfortably share an apartment with Steven, but he manages to get around my privacy barriers) and there are other dreamers too and more video-game action, not to mention melodramatic coincidences and moments of realization. We get some background on Scott’s high school days, a secret origin of sorts. And when I talked last year about how the first volume made me regain some faith in comics, this year and this volume have brought me back to and beyond superheroes. I know I’ve argued before that even Joan of Arcadia is a story about superheroes, and I’m realizing that I defended superhero comics in the past for things they could do well, but I appreciate those things even more when they’re done without spandex or breast implants. And that’s just what’s going on in Scott Pilgrim’s life, from fighting to costume and hairstyle changes to interpersonal drama, superhero stuff.

The reason I like superhero stories is because they have so little to do with the smashing and stomping that are supposed to be at their core, at least if done correctly. Instead they’re a heavy template for readers to fit themselves into a reality where certain narratives make sense and the readers can make sense of themselves. It’s not about the power fantasy but about both power and fantasy, which is something over-specific “slice of life” stories can miss. In slicing skewed lives from a slightly off reality, Scott Pilgrim manages to avoid being a dullsville story about an endearingly scatter-brained slacker who can’t bother to get a job or commit to a real and healthy relationship by instead being a story that blows up the drama of the mundane so that it looks the way it feels. Scott’s heartbroken ex-girlfriend Knives Chau (17 years old!) doesn’t just get a new look to feel better about herself post-breakup but makes herself an obsessed avenging angel able to play out the fantasies many feel after a first rejection. Sitting on a rug eating garlic bread is a t????te-????-t????te dinner more romantic than a more traditional setup. Casual contact from a lost love can leave even a hero decimated. Romantic mistakes characters make play out in their lives again and again like the returns of villains who in a more standard superhero story would be burly guys or femmes fatales rather than plain old bad habits and bad choices and things going around and coming around.

And honestly I was a tiny bit worried about what direction this book would take, although I expected the humor and the lovely art. I don’t like stalker romances; they’re creepy in general and hit too close to home. And yet Scott’s relationship with Ramona is able to blossom into something real because the world around it, the league of evil ex-boyfriends, is so unrealistic that “normal” reactions or behaviors don’t enter into it at all and none of this bothers me. It’s the romantic version of cartoon violence, although the pain is palpable (and so is the thrill). But love is scarily full of possibilities, and I did basically love Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life. But I enjoyed its successor, too, and I remain charmed and excited. Last night I would have told you that I still prefer the first book, the mixture of inanity and wackiness, but tonight I was leaning toward the second. It may just be that I can’t really choose or separate them. And maybe on a larger scale separation just isn’t the point. Dreams and video games and real life are hopelessly muddled in this tale, as big bosses steal girls and vanquished foes leave only coins behind them. One thing flows into another, and while there’s some game physics going on, it’s not really clear if this is dream logic or life logic underlying the emotional narrative. I’m certainly still a fan, a Scottaholic as my little pal Knives would say, and If I can’t sleep tonight I’ll be reading again (though really I’d rather be dreaming myself).

Film adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s stories are obviously nothing like the stories. But I’ve never thought in depth about specifically how they differ, so now I’m looking at Dick’s “Minority Report” vs. Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report.

First, most immediately obvious, is style. Here’s a passage from “Minority Report”:

“Jerry” was twenty-four years old. Originally, he had been classified as a hydrocephalic idiot but when he reached the age of six the psych testers had identified the precog talent, buried under the layers of tissue corrosion. Placed in a government-operated training school, the latent talent had been cultivated. By the time he was nine the talent had advanced to a useful stage. “Jerry,” however, remained in the aimless chaos of idiocy; the burgeoning faculty had absorbed the totality of his personality.

Serviceable but unpolished. It’s a little clunky; the third sentence is carelessly ungrammatical. Having read several of Dick’s novels and short stories, I suspect he would write a story once, as quickly as he could, and never look back. I don’t know if that’s really the case; but he wrote forty-four novels and one-hundred twenty-one short stories in about thirty years, so he couldn’t have had much time for revision and proofreading. Dick’s writing isn’t always as rough as that passage, and it has its own shabby charm; but mostly, you don’t Dick to admire his lovely prose style. He rushes too urgently through the story to have style.

The story also lacks for description, both of the future world and the immediate environments and characters. Anything that must be described receives minimal description. The story takes place in New York, under the control of the Federal Westbloc Government; “Federal” suggests some continuity with the United States of America, and “Westbloc” suggests the government is a descendent of NATO. There was a devestating Anglo-Chinese War which left much of at least North America in blasted ruins, during which the Westbloc was controlled entirely by the military, which operated a domestic police force in addition to fighting the war. After the war, the Westbloc was demilitarized and the Precrime Agency founded to run the police force. There is a Senate, but it’s not clear what it does or what the government looks like at all. The preceeding paragraph is not a summary: it is almost the entirety of the setting information provided by the story itself. There are a few other details, but none of them implies a deeper world than is explicitly presented.

But consider Minority Report. Like all film adaptations of Dick’s work, the first thing you notice is how good it looks. Not only good, but polished and shiny; the entire movie has a hazy, slightly overexposed glow. It looks like the inside of a tv ad. True, it’s not all shiny and tv-ready: Spielberg’s vision of Dick’s paranoid future does have slums populated by illicit Russian surgeons and drug dealers who’ve removed their own eyes to avoid ubiquitous retinal scanners. But the prettiness seeps even into the slum, in the form of a huge tv screen running ads for the precog police unit attached to the bottom of an overpass. (I’m not sure whether the slum advertising is supposed to be frightening or comforting, but it doesn’t matter in the end; the slum is forgotten in the climactic confrontation between the powerful.)

Where Dick’s story lacks style, Spielberg’s movie is intensely stylized; and where Dick’s world is sparse, Spielberg’s is dense. That density is necessary for Spielberg’s Hollywood brand of realism. It’s part of Spielberg’s schtick: he goes to great lengths to present a plausible future reality. (Of course, plausibility always comes second to thrilling chase scenes.) According to Joel Garreau’s account of Spielberg’s Minority Report futurist think tank, producer Bonnie Curtis claimed that the movie is grounded in “future reality” rather than “science fiction.” I know Spielberg said something similar about Jurassic Park back in 1993—I believe he used the phrase “science future”—but unfortunately I don’t have a citation for that. In his piece, Garreau says that

…the moviemakers seem to have gone to great deal of trouble to make this a legally persuasive future. The tension throughout the movie is between safety and freedom, a timely topic in 2002. And the whole plot of the movie centers on the notion that this Pre-Cog system is utterly infallible. Only thus can it be seen as reasonable search and seizure. Philip K. Dick didn’t go to this much trouble in his 1956 story of the same name on which the film is based.

These statements not only demonstrate a profound ignorance of science fiction outside the sealed-off reality of Hollywood; they also suggest how and why the filmmakers fail to understand or choose to ignore Dick’s point. For Dick, the point is not specifically how the Constitution would have to change to allow the existence of a precrime police agency in the United States; the point is to discover the more fundamental change required in society, the moral implications of that change and the impossibility of unchanging it. Details of world-building are unimportant, so Dick leaves them out. For Spielberg, though, the spectacle of an amazing future (and amazing chase scenes!) is at least as important as the moral implications of that future, if not moreso. Spielberg love big shiny toys—in fact, most filmmakers in Hollywood making science-fiction movies love big shiny toys. Despite Bonnie Curtis’s misguided praise, Minority Report is not fundamentally much different from, say, The Matrix: both movies surround a potentially daring speculative concept with dazzling Hollwood spectacle. (Actually, The Matrix is an unusually clever example of Hollywood science fiction: it turns its dazzling spectacle into something weightier by presenting a speculation about the relationship between reality and spectacle.) Spielberg likes to hire experts for a sense of authoritative realism, but that’s only another part of the spectacle.

Stay tuned for Part 2: John Anderton vs. John Anderton.

I can’t stay gone because I can’t stand to stay silent right now. Manga Life is a site from the folks who brought you Silver Bullet Comics: “Our aim is to guide you through the masses of manga appearing on the shelves of your book store, to pick out THE essential books to own.” While it was Johanna Draper Carlson who brought this to my attention, their review of From Eroica with Love deserves a close read. I realize that comics journalism on the internet is pretty dire and assume that there is little editorial oversight anywhere, but apparently the SBC/ML crew are okay with statements like “[homosexuality] is a gender, not a ‘Lifestyle choice’” and “[the male characters] look like women in drag! ” (since I’m assuming the author, Michael Deeley, doesn’t mean they do, in fact, resemble women in drag, who could pass as men) being prominently displayed in their reviews. I mention this because his input alone is enough to make me want to avoid the site. But I’m not just offended by the total lack of empathy or tact (”Also, the gay love scenes made me cringe. I????????m open-minded; not open-bodied.”) but by the fact that this is just horribly written. I don’t want to hear from an editor about how they’ll do better in the future; the present matters and it’s awfully grim.

Enough. I just wanted to pause a moment and go back to that (sort of) to boil things down to the most generic level and say that, basically, people have sexes (biological/genetic), genders (cultural expressions of masculinity/femininity), and sexual orientations (straight/gay/bisexual) with several other options that could be tossed into each of my parentheticals. Anyone who can’t handle this level of terminology probably shouldn’t be talking about any of this.

And have you guessed yet where I’m going with this? Maybe, if you saw that I already sputtered about this this morning, but here I go again. I’m a big proponent of conversation, communication, mutual understanding, which I hope would be clear to anyone who’s been reading this blog for any length of time. I think that at some fundamental level we do end up with Roman Jakobsen/James Smith-style mutual untranslatability where each of us uses language in a unique enough way that to some extent we can’t fully speak to one another. And so if I were James Meeley, I would never have assumed that “explor[ing] the kids’ identities — sexual and otherwise –” meant to everyone what it means to me. In fact, I know it doesn’t, since to me exploring a sexual identity means trying to figure out what sort of people you find attractive, dealing with fluttery yearnings and awkward kisses and awkward suitors and unrequited affection. And sure, at some point, sexual activity probably comes into the picture, but it’s by no means the core. And so my first objection to Meeley’s first objection to the aforementioned trend in Young Avengers is that the simplest response would be to clarify the terms, not draw up battle lines. But that’s why I’m not the sort of person who sends offended letters to comics publishers, I suppose.

My second and more important objection to both that and his second objection is that if he wants to convince everyone there’s no homophobia here, I’d like to see a little logic. Meeley’s complaint is about alleged future sexual content in an “all-ages” title. I see no point in disputing about what the future may hold, but you just can’t argue that this is an all-ages title. It’s quite clearly labeled PSR, which as a retailer of sorts is something he should understand means this is material suitable for 12-year-olds and older readers. While this is what Marvel used to call PG back when they were stealing terms from the MPAA, but clearly it’s more equivalent to their PG-13 rating. And what does PG-13 mean? It means that parents are strongly cautioned that some material may be inappropriate for kids under the age of 13. Marvel’s PSR is appropriate for most ages but parents should review it before or with young (presumably sub-12) children. Whether or not Meeley thinks this should be an all-ages book has no bearing on its status in reality. (Both Marvel and the MPAA share what I consider a disturbing tendency to let kids see tons and tons of violence per rating level, but that doesn’t really factor into this argument, thank goodness.)

My brother is 13 and I’d have no qualms about letting him read Young Avengers. I differ from James Meeley in that I would still lend him my copy if there was some gay romance, although I’m still not sure what this “sexual exploration” that so frightens him entails. And I suppose I’d let him watch PG-13 movies and have in fact taken him to a few myself. One I haven’t taken him to see but enjoy a lot myself is Saved, which I think could teach us a thing or two about the PG-13 rating (and, by extension, what sort of material is appropriate for the 12-and-up crew who are the explicit target audience for Young Avengers). In Saved, Mary is a student at a Christian high school whose classmate and boyfriend confesses to her that he thinks he’s gay. She decides to have sex with him (on screen, though with tasteful editing) to try to encourage a conversion experience that will make him straight. The experiment is a failure: he gets sent to a “recovery” program and she ends up pregnant. The rest of the film deals with these high school students (I don’t think I’m old enough yet to call them “kids”) exploring their identities — “sexual and otherwise.” This means everything from Mary’s sex with Dean to her later shy flirting with new student Patrick to her super-Christian friend Hillary Faye’s ends-justify-the-means attempt to draw attention to a topic she cares about to Cassandra’s ups and downs as a Jew at a Christian school and her boyfriend Roland’s experiences as a paraplegic. Because it’s a PG-13 movie set in a Christian high school, there’s not a lot of profanity, though Mary says “fuck!” after finding out she’s pregnant. In PG-13 movies, apparently, you can get away with one non-verbal “fuck” that doesn’t refer to a sex act. I’m pretty sure that’s not true even of PSR+ books at Marvel. Would I have taken my brother to see it? Probably not, because he’s young for his age and still sort of disgusted by kissing and also because my parents’ views and mine differ on religion and I wouldn’t necessarily want to get into that with him or upset them just because of a movie. But I’ve lent it to the brothers older than him and wouldn’t mind at all if he wanted to borrow it in a year or two when he’s ready for that sort of story.

Where am I going with this? Nowhere, really, because Meeley’s response when David Welsh posed the question of ratings to him this morning was just to say that Young Avengers ought to be all-ages. It’s not entirely clear whether this is a “some imaginary world, like, in my head” kind of response or that he simply wishes there were more all-ages comics or that he’s seen the recent darkening of the Marvel and DC universes and plans to rage against the dying of the light. The facts are that Young Avengers isn’t an all-ages title and doesn’t have any homosexual content. I don’t see why there’s any reason for it to be a last stand in the culture wars. By all means, it’s fine to write to Marvel to ask them to bring back Bucky or keep queers out of the limelight or aim for a no-prize in explaining what’s really up with The Scarlet Witch, but I hope no one doing this would be surprised when the response isn’t total concession from the publisher. Maybe as a woman and a feminist and someone well outside the target audience I’m just used to the idea that my preferences won’t be heard or reflected in most superhero comics, but I would hope that’s a more universal response.

And as usual, I don’t like the idea that comics need to be for kids. I wish there were more comics for smart people of many different ages, and it’s that lack that I’m feeling most acutely now. Young Avengers could perhaps be just such a title, a book young teens could read about the perils and excitement of being a teen writ large. I doubt it will be, but unlike some people I’m willing to hope. And I’m willing to say my piece and go away from things that don’t appeal to me, so this should be the last you hear from me about Manga Life unless things change drastically. But I think it’s worth having a conversation rather than sermonizing, don’t you?

Ron Rosenbaum is going to upset some people. In fact, he already has. The bulk of Sean’s reply to Rosenbaum focuses on Rosenbaum’s perceived anti-white-male prejudice, and Jon Hastings has already pointed out the flaws in Sean’s invocation of race. And Sean has acknowledged the flaws and further claimed that his argument is really mostly against Rosenbaum’s “anti-male, anti-fanboy” prejudice. Which, first of all, being anti-fanboy isn’t the same thing at all as being anti-male, so let’s not obfuscate things. And as for being anti-fanboy—Rosenbaum is that, indeed. Is Rosenbaum talking crazy talk?

Now, most of you reading this blog probably have had some exposure to geek subculture; I’m sure you know what a fanboy is. And you know that there are—um, girl fanboys too, which is a problem for the gender-specificity of the term. Or is it? In the egalitarian twenty-first century, we can all be nerdy ????ber-fans, but who dominates? From where I’m looking, it’s guys, guys, guys. Sean specifically cites Elizabeth Avellan as a producer of Sin City—one of eight, and producers don’t really have creative input in modern filmmaking anyway. He also cites Uma Thurman’s collaboration with Quentin Tarantino on Kill Bill, which I don’t know much about. But that some women have creative roles in these movies doesn’t have a lot of weight against Rosenbaum’s argument, especially because, N.B., how many women direct these fanboy movies? (By the way, Jon makes the good point that Sin City is not referential in the same way Kill Bill is, but I think that’s only a minor flaw in Rosenbaum’s argument. Rosenbaum also mentions Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and I’m inclined to think these movies use different means to reach similar ends.) I don’t know of any. Are there any? But even if there are, let’s face it, the dominant creative source, and the dominant audience destination, of fanboy movies is guys. They’re called fanboys for a reason, after all—it’s silly to claim women aren’t involved in this stuff (not that Rosenbaum actually claimed any such thing, that I see), but it’s equally silly to claim that the stereotypical association of fanboy stuff—manly violence, phallic symbols (swords!), pseudo-feminist “tough-guy women” characters, &c.—with guys is entirely false.

I haven’t seen Sin City and I’m not sure I will, so I don’t really know about that. But Kill Bill is, in its every aspect, fanboyism turned into an aesthetic. Deep morality? Oh ho. Maybe more on this later, or maybe you all have figured out what I think of Kill Bill by now, since I’ve written about it so much. For now, I might as well link back to “Remix Aesthetic in Moulin Rouge and Kill Bill.” Also, consider: a movie which portentously bleeps out the main character’s name, solely to set up two of the dumbest name-based puns in history, is the very definition of deliberately pretentiously stupid.

Steven is gearing up for exams, so I got to spend the entire evening alone, which is the first time I’ve had 4 hours to myself in years I think. I squandered it on a gin hot toddy and microwaved Indian food and then watched Casa de los Babys, and now I’m happy. Well, happy and exhausted and headachy, but you can’t have everything. What you can have is a short post from me, it seems.

See, Casa has got me thinking about stories and scale and what people prefer. I guess this was on my mind this weekend in Pittsburgh, which I think was my first major group comics shopping expedition. Part of what I’ve really enjoyed in being a comics blogger is seeing what people like and especially why. What I’m realizing more and more, though, is that I like the little things best. I don’t care if worlds will change and paradigms will crumble; I just want to see some interesting characters do or think or say or be interesting things.

And while I’ve always assumed that at bare minimum gender keeps me out of the target demographic for Marvel and DC, I’m also just not going to be interested in whatever exploding-continuity mega-crossover story they offer not because I don’t care about superheroes but because I don’t care about the scale. I have no interest in the Marvel universe, but I think useful stories can be told within it. I know I’m talking about the same things over and over again, that I care about property damage and innocent bystanders in superhero and action movie carnage, that I’d like Vimanarama much more if it were just a love story without all the cosmic strife, that I often prefer the throwaway characters to the egotistical protagonists. I know this is all about me and it’s nothing especially new.

In Casa de los Babys, six women have come from the United States to a Latin American country, where they wait together for the babies they hope to adopt. Meanwhile there’s a fully realized world of maids and child beggars and students and bitter revolutionaries and hopeful idealists. And people live their lives and have the moments of communication and revelation and missed opportunity that happen in life, and then the movie is over. And to me that’s much more successful than if it had all been wrapped up nicely with a montage of smiling pastel babies and a soundtrack surge that reminds me I should be weepier. It helps, of course, that there was superb acting on both Mexican and foreign fronts, good writing that was specific and sturdy without being overwrought, a world without angels (or villains).

But I’m starting to wonder if I’m in the minority here, too. I keep saying I’ll write about Project Superior, which I do hope to do, but not when I’ll be into overtime hours by lunch tomorrow with a full day’s work and more on Saturday ahead of me. And the thing about Project Superior stories is that many of them were pretty straightforward and clear, making a point and then getting on with things, even the ones that presented themselves as slice-of-life. But there’s a big difference between unpretentious revelation and portentousness, and I think that’s what Alan David Doane misses in his praise for only the most trite (if still a bit touching) story in Flight 2. Not all comics have to be symbol-heavy because honestly not all comics creators have the brains and intuition to pull it off. And as an aside, I’m so tired of people saying that Grant Morrison is all ideas and no execution, because I think the opposite is far more true. (And no, I don’t think it matters what I think, either.)

It’s someone who understands taking little, mundane things and making them hold, making them strong enough to withstand some insight and inquiry that makes the kind of art I prefer and enjoy. I don’t care about the epic plots of triumph and tribulation anywhere near as much because I don’t think life requires (or allows) solving some magical jigsaw puzzle. I don’t think there’s a narrative that makes it all make sense, but it’s only because there are so many narratives that we can make sense of anything at all. And I don’t expect anyone to cater to my preferences, but I still enjoy finding things I like when and where I can. It’s like having a quiet night alone to relax and think and be happy, and I wouldn’t mind if my life had more of both.