Peiratikos

I am having a sick day today and while I’m tempted to use that as an out if I later need to claim I was not in my right mind when writing this, it’s something I’ve been thinking about all weekend. The title of the post is my way of apologizing to John Jakala for mentioning the problem with Bombaby he brought to my attention without actually seeking out the link (here I do plead sick), and also because “grotesque anatomy” is an awfully good title he’s not using anymore.

While it wasn’t my inspiration here, we saw The Aviator Friday night and basically enjoyed it (though I thought the ending especially was needlessly heavy-handed) and also bought the first volume of Sgt. Frog. One thing leads to another, and I found myself buying and devouring volumes 2 and 3 before the weekend was over. It’s a book practically everyone had recommended and I found myself just as charmed as many other bloggers have already been, but on returning home with the first book I saw that Lyle had qualms about the portrayal of sexualized women. This made me curious since plenty of posts on this blog have been me complaining about just such things, and so I am surprised to say I’m not going to do so here. Sure, there are a lot of panty shots (what’s up with Natsumi’s basketball uniform?) and weird breast things going on in Sgt. Frog and they just didn’t bother me. I’m not sure I can explain why this is and it’s all going to be very idiosyncratic and probably won’t translate well to your experience, which is fine with me. That’s as far as I’m going to go with a disclaimer, but it seemed worth noting that I’m not trying to recreate the scene from The Aviator where the poor professor has to measure various “mammaries” to convince a skeptical ratings board of the acceptability of their prominence in The Outlaw.

Instead what we’ve got in Sgt. Frog is the Hinata family, where 14-year-old Natsumi and her slightly younger brother, Fuyuki, reveal and capture Keroro, a charming little megalomaniac from the planet Keron’s expeditionary invasion force. The head of the Hinata family is Aki, the manga editor mother often absent for weeks at a time, who cements Keroro’s place in the household.

This is Aki’s first appearance, but is characteristic of her depiction as an editor throughout the first three volumes. While this is clearly part of the exploitative representation Lyle and others talked about, it struck me as less objectionable than, say, the scene in Mean Girls where Tina Fey accidentally removed her shirt in front of her students and a coworker. Here, Aki is even dressed in what seems like a work-appropriate outfit and her fervor for manga manifests itself in sexual double entendres, which is a consistent pattern. Because they find this a turn-on, her male subordinates become obsessed with pleasing her, since her professional praise is invariably sexualized. I have to admit, my first thought was that this is a pretty effective system for her, since she gets the results she wants and isn’t necessarily aware she’s a sexual object (and there’s no real textual evidence, since there are no adult romantic roles, that she’s a sexual subject in any meaningful way). The setup reminded me more of something like Groucho Marx’s verbal/sexual jabs, although generally less witty and more obvious. Because this is a light-hearted PG-level comedy, I’m not expecting any sort of examination of the effects female sexuality has on straight male geeks, although it’s something I think about and watch online, even if I don’t often talk about it here. At some level, though, Sgt. Frog is raising those questions, although in a superficial way, and I appreciate that enough that it doesn’t seem ridiculously exploitative to me.

But to be honest, I think a big part of it has to do with the fact that while Aki Hinata has the largest breasts in the book, they’d look positively tiny if she showed up in a standard superhero book from Marvel or DC. Her breasts are large for her slim frame, but not extremely or unrealistically so. And that ties into the reason I’m not disturbed by the focus on shots of young teen Natsumi in her bra:

Natsumi is at an age where her body is changing and, like many girls, she sees this as a betrayal of sorts. In the last panel (reading right-to-left for manga) she says, “I just hope I don’t turn into a mutant like Mom!” While being spied on by a froglike alien isn’t a normal experience, I think discomfort with becoming physically/sexually mature is, and it was refreshing to see it. While Natsumi is often seen as a sexualized creature, whether caught in the panels changing her shirt or in the several instances her underwear makes an appearance, she has no interest in this role. When she has to “age” into an adult body in a later volume, rather than flaunting her physical assets she has to be brainwashed to agree to enter a bikini contest. Though she may look almost physically mature while she manages to capably run the household in her mother’s absence, she clearly still thinks of herself as the sort of person who would prefer to be playing basketball with her school friends. I don’t know how well Sgt. Frog sells with people who aren’t comics bloggers, specifically with the young teen girls who do read lots of manga, I would think that despite the cheesecake aspects of her presentation (and perhaps because of it) Natsumi would be a good object for identification. With fashion standards being what they are now, a lot of girls and young women have to balance the trend to look sexualized or provocative with their own actual sexual interests or lack thereof and the ways they want to present themselves. I know when I was younger I dealt with this basically through denial, cropping off all my hair and wearing huge clothes that cloaked the parts of my body I found awkward, among other less healthy means. I imagine it’s more normal to do what Natsumi does, look a bit sexy or at least be aware they’re being viewed sexually while trying to subvert this through the strength of pure personality.

Would it be better to keep all of this breast-anxiety off-screen? I don’t know. It’s there in Judy Blume books and I assume most young teens see the kinds of bodies on display on MTV or the magazines targeted to them. It’s not a new insight to notice that men’s lifestyle magazines typically have “hot” women on the cover, and that the same is true for women’s magazines. I think that’s something akin to what’s going on here, that Natsumi is definitely being portrayed for the audience that finds a view of a B-cup bra exhilarating while also passing on the more subversive message her own ambivalence toward her body portrays (which I don’t think you’d find as easily in either Maxim or Cosmo Girl). And again, I’m going back to breast size a bit, but since the proportions aren’t so insane, this is not as disturbing to me as finding out that real people find J. Michael Turner characters attractive, even if the character in question is a mere year or two older than Natsumi. It’s also sort of hard for me to believe that these shots of covered, proportional breasts are really so titillating (and I really couldn’t come up with a better word; sorry) in the world in which we live and read.

However, it’s easy to build bad breasts, and that was much of my reaction to Bombaby. I’d considered not buying it because it collects the first three released issues of the series along with the fourth issue, which wasn’t released separately, but I had been planning to buy the book in TPB anyway and figured that the publisher (Amaze Ink, though I’d somehow thought until I looked that it had been Slave Labor) could use the reminder that people will buy collected versions of books, so it’s worth treating both groups fairly. While the covers had been lovely and tempting, I didn’t especially enjoy the interior art and the story was weak, especially in its concluding chapter. I’m sort of sad that there weren’t any endnotes or explanations of what the creator was trying to do with the story, because I really couldn’t tell from the story. Also, isn’t the tutelary deity of Mumbai Mumbadevi, not “the Mumbai devi?” I’m sure they mean the same thing, but it bothered me. Actually a lot of things bothered me, but since it’s that kind of post we’ll focus on the art and the bodies.

Here is protagonist Sangeeta, and while writer/artist Anthony Mazzotta clearly wanted to show her as curvaceous (to suggest something about Indian beauty standards? Again, notes might help) she just looks like she’s pregnant and weirdly shaped on top of that. She has no waist and her torso is frighteningly small. Her clothes look painful and odd. Who wears a microminiskirt with a turtleneck? And she seems awfully happy and calm for someone who avoided being attacked by a gang of thugs only moments before.

And the above shows what happens to Sangeeta when she dances. Apparently her breasts are just two compartments of some sort of bag filled with liquid, since bulk seems to be able to move from one breast to the other when she moves. She still seems unnaturally happy, but I realize it’s a comic convention to avoid reference to the sort of pain swinging breasts of the size many female characters display would cause. Still, this seems pretty extreme to go unnoticed.

This is my last example, but it shows how after changing out of her miniskirt outfit into a t-shirt that is basically the same color (another bad art choice, in my opinion) Sangeeta’s breasts seem to have changed shape yet again, hanging down like separate bags barely attached to her body. Perhapps if I’d been more interested in the story I wouldn’t have spent so much time thinking about how odd and uncomfortable her breasts looked to me, but it’s also possible that’s part of a chicken-and-egg thing. What I’m getting at is that I was willing to give Sgt. Frog some extra slack because it did show off its characters’ breasts (a lot) but did so with breasts that were consistently sized and not unrealistic. Bombaby, while not using Sangeeta’s breasts as explicitly sexual objects, was more objectionable to me because the breasts made no sense in a story that made no sense.

And on that note, I’m going to go to bed so I can get up in the morning and go to work like a healthy(-ish) person and then probably not talk about breasts in this much depth for a very, very long time.

Here’s something I just thought of. I don’t know, it might be crazy talk, but I’ll tell you about it and you can tell me what you think.

When I lamented the action movie’s triumph over the romantic comedy in Spider-Man 2, I meant it. Spider-Man 2’s pairing of romantic comedy and superheroism is no mere accident of narrative—the romantic comedy and the superhero story have a crucial intersection, which is the recurring conceit of the duplicitous hero whose dual identity first covers and eventually discovers (to use an archaic sense of the word) a seriously fractured and incomplete identity. In superhero stories, this is manifested in the opposed secret and superheroic identities, the thesis and antithesis that never synthesize. Superman’s possession of two identities (or three, if Smallville Clark is different from Metropolis Clark) highlights his lack of a natural, coherent identity. He is a Kryptonian, an Earthling, and an American, but he’s also none of them. They are masks he can wear and remove at will, not his face. Same with Batman, although The Dark Knight Returns is perhaps an attempt to synthesize Batman and Bruce Wayne. Romantic comedies often present similar, usually less heroic, dual-identity protagonists—the most relevant standard for what I’m thinking about now is the story of a man trying to make it with two girlfriends at once, a story that inevitably climaxes with a scene where the poor bastard tries to take both women on date to the same restaurant at the same time.

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life replays the classic same-restaurant-same-time scene, except that Scott is too inept to realize that it might cause problems to invite both Knives and Ramona to his concert, let alone that he should do anything about it. That scene is also the one in which it turns out Scott was only half-joking (if that!) about being a graduate of Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Scott really is thinks of himself as a superhero, if a highly unusual one. It can’t be coincidental that the book’s sidelong riffing on romantic comedy comes to a head in the same scene as the sidelong riffing on superheroes comes to a head. The climactic scene where the pop-culture fantasy (it’s all allusions to Star Trek technology, video games and musicals) that creeps through the book jumps up and really rocks out.

Judging by the previews (1, 2), the second Scott Pilgrim volume, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, is going to throw awkward-adolescent maturation stories into the mix—not surprising, since that’s another kind of story founded on identity formation and identity crises, as well as a common component of romantic comedies and superhero stories.

So what? I’m not sure, what do you think?

Edit: Changed “Scott really is a superhero” to “Scott really thinks of himself as a superhero”

David Mack’s problem with poetry is, he keeps writing these frightening sing-songy nursery rhymes. Alan Moore’s problem is that he writes show tunes.

Neither of them should ever write poetry, but they do anyway!

I am perhaps not reading this in the way it was intended (and I’m doing it on purpose, even!)—but if I were Warren Ellis, this preview isn’t quite the sort of publicity I’d hope for:

…Jones is very much an original character. Where Spider Jerusalem would use a bowel disrupter to incapacitate his “victims,” Jones gouges their eyeballs out with his own fingers.

Well, it’s a day after I post my new year’s resolution and I’m posting this? It’s all meant to be jovial good fun, I promise. The problem with my new year’s resolution is that it makes me reluctant to poke even good-natured fun, because the internet is such an anti-jovial zone.

From Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academia: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (which I haven’t read except for the online preview but which I hope to read soon):

But who gives a fig, you ask, about “the academic conversation,” which is often a bad conversation, boring, self-important, and dominated by insider orthodoxies? Academic conversations are often all these things, to be sure, but at their best moments they are more valuable and pertinent to students’ lives than academic-bashers give them credit for. Even so, you persist, isn’t the point of education to produce good citizens, not more academics? Surely it is, but these goals are compatible, for the issues and problems addressed by academic research and teaching are increasingly indistinguishable from the issues we wrestle with as public citizens. The point is not to turn students into clones of professors but to give them access to forms of intellectual capital that have a lot of power in the world.

Those who charge that academic discourse is itself the problem fail to see that talk about books and subjects is as important educationally as are the books and subjects themselves. For the way we talk about a subject becomes part of the subject, a fact that explains why we have book-discussion groups to supplement solitary reading, why Trekkies form clubs and hold conferences as well as privately enjoying Star Trek, and why sports talk call-in shows and sports journalism have arisen alongside the games themselves. Students must not only read texts, but find things to say about them, and no text tells you what to say about it. So our habit of elevating books and subjects over the secondary talk about them only helps keep students tongue-tied.

Another:

…one form the academic/popular culture contrast still takes is the complaint that schools and colleges fight a losing battle with popular entertainment for the hearts and minds of the young. The culture of ideas and arguments, so the complaint runs, is constantly overwhelmed and negated by visceral experience and spectacle. How can Socrates, Mill, and Henry James hope to compete for students’ attention with “Survivor,” the Spice Girls, the World Wrestling Federation, and the latest Schwarzenegger/Stallone action hero blockbuster?

The complaint makes sense up to a point, but it is misleading in two ways: first, from an educational point of view, the real opposition should be not between Henry James and the Spice Girls, but between intellectual and nonintellectual discussion of Henry James and the Spice Girls or any other subject. As I have noted, it is not the object in itself that creates problems for students but the public, academic ways of analyzing, arguing, and talking about the object. Members of the Spice Girls fan club do not read academic analyses of the Spice Girls (though if they were students, asking them to do so would be a way to draw them into academic culture).

So I said last year I got obsessed with world-building, even if I didn’t always know it at the time, and now I’m going to try to play around with a few things to see if I was right about that. I do hope to talk about The Nikopol Trilogy and maybe even will revisit the first Scott Pilgrim before the second book arrives, but those are not for today. Today I’m thinking more about failure or incomplete worlds with protagonists who don’t bumble in the right directions. I tried to read Kingdom Come to see if a lack of coherent, meaningful world is what made it unpalatable to me, only to find that just looking at the art makes me feel ill. I don’t know quite what the problem is, but looking at Superman (whether with his ponytail or his scruffy beard) made me feel like there was a landmine trembling in my stomach. So that was enough of that.

Instead I turned to The Originals, because it just doesn’t quite work for me (whatever that means) and I’m not sure why. Marc Singer convincingly argues that the background is almost the best part, that the fully realized world allows Lel to be the complacent, unreflexive narrator he is. I think he’s probably right, but I was going to argue the opposite, that it’s the lack of situatedness that makes the whole story play out like an elaborate game of paper dolls. I think it’s the weird dancing scenes that throw me, where all the flat flailing arms make me think this is just a parody of something else or maybe of nothing at all. But maybe I should step back first.

The Originals is a tale about the title group of Mods of the future, a gang of snazzily attired hovercraft-riding drug dealers and users, guys who just want to have fun and have pretty girls. Lel and his friend Bok want nothing more than to be Originals (says Lel) and eventually get their wish, only to find that they may not have known what they were getting into and may not have known themselves quite well enough. So while Lel gets deeper and deeper into the drug-pushing side of things, he also manages to snatch away the girl Bok’s admiring, Viv. The Originals fight with their enemies, The Dirt, a gang of nouveau greasers. Eventually there’s an arms race of sorts and a war of retribution and mistaken identity, and a resolution of sorts.

I suppose the basic question raised is why this is set in the future instead of with real drugs and real Mods and real greasers and I’m still inclined to follow the standard line of response that the lack of real-world specificity avoids the corpselike hypertextual connections of Kingdom Come and leaves room for greater emotional connections, but that last part certainly doesn’t hold. Somehow the distance made me a more cynical reader, saying, “Oooh, their dads fought a war and they don’t care! How very like the ’60s and yet it’s the future!” Part of this was gender distance, too, because gender is a very weird thing here and women wield power oddly when they do at all. I don’t always have trouble connecting emotionally to male characters (or connect easily to female ones) but Lel would be a particularly cold fish even if he didn’t show the creepy, callous selfishness he does. But Gibbons is not just rejecting a chance for readers to try to spot the real-life references and locales and whatnot, but perhaps an opportunity for real emotion. I know I’ve bought and I think even advanced the argument that superhero stories succeed because their lack of specificity makes them abstract templates, but the proportions of the template seem wrong here and I can’t plug myself or what I know into it.

None of this quite talks about setting, though, does it? I said it was paper dolls, and it is, except that I like playing with paper dolls when I get to be in charge. (Ok, I did 15 years ago, and I imagine I could pull it off even now.) But it’s not even that, but that the art is flat like an advertising. The cover could be a pack of bubblegum or something, and while I’m not opposed to analyzing that sort of thing, it doesn’t seem to make much of a world here. It’s not just that things aren’t explained; the real world doesn’t always come with plaques about historical events and guidebooks and clear road signs. I’ve done archaeology and I spent last week wandering New Orleans, and I know that most of the fun for me is piecing together imagined understandings of what’s gone on to make these places what they are and what sort of people are in the houses shaping them as I watch. But in The Originals, I can’t figure out how the world fits together because it’s all so disconnected. The Dirt always seem to be in the same hangout, but The Originals have to ask Lel and Bok where to find them. There are warehouses, homes, clubs, highways, with no sense of whether they’re within two blocks of each other or miles apart. And that’s not the problem, still, but I’m not sure what the problem is. I think the real problem is that this whole book is like a didactic film strip. While I’m a bit young for film strips, this is how I imagine them, somewhat over-acted dramatic stills with awkward, banal voiceovers.

But really what bothers me is that the environment is supposed to have created Lel, and yet I can’t get a handle on either of them (which maybe means it worked?). There’s just no sense of pressure or space or even what inside him drives Lel to do the stupid, self-defeating things he does. What sort of world can have such people in it? Ours, probably, I know, but do I want to read about them? I realize Lel is young and awkward and the sort of person who probably thinks it’s tremendously deep to intercut his sex scene with a fatal stabbing, and yet I don’t find his naive self-assurance charming or intriguing or even shocking really. It just makes me want to be like Viv and walk out of the story and into a world that must somewhere contain something more. I’m not sure how to be clearer because it seems that the book’s clarity is the problem (and I keep saying “problem” as if there is one, which need not be the case) that if it didn’t consist of a set of pristine snapshots with terse teenspeak captions it would be something else entirely, and it isn’t.

An essay on postmodern remix aesthetic in Moulin Rouge and Kill Bill from a college film class I took last year. I don’t necessarily agree with all of it anymore, but I don’t necessarily disagree with any of it.

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Spider-Man 2

Is it a lovely romantic comedy or a superhero-action flick with delusions of seriousness? Unfortunately, pieta scenes and speechifying crowd out the superpowered romance, which is much more compelling.

“Superhero”

I’m with David Fiore, “superhero” is no good. I’m sure it’s fine as a genre for commerical purposes, but as a critical genre, it mutates and limits the discourse in ways that are not useful to me. David’s “neo-existentialist romance” mutates and limits the discourse in ways that I find more interesting. I don’t know if he cares about this at all, but I’d be interested in some study of how the generic necessities of superheroism/crime-fighting distort the “neo-existentialist romance” in his interpretation of the Gwen Stacy clone saga. “Superhero” stories, like any fantastic stories, use fantastic elements to create pleasing and meaningful resonances with real-life stuff. (Well, that’s what I think fantastic stories do.) The generic expectations associated with “superhero” tend to calcify the potentiality of fantasy and make the resonances in “superhero” stories dull and predictable, which is how Spider-Man 2 became a movie that aches so heartbreakingly to be a romantic comedy but ends up overwhelmed by hoary old ruminations on the importance of heroes.

The Iron Giant

Now, I have to admit my favorite “superhero” movies is one about heroism. But The Iron Giant comes at the theme from an unfamiliar angle: the Giant rejects violent confrontation with “bad guys;” he wants only to protect people and rescue them from danger. It’s so refreshing to have a hero whose code of justice isn’t based on vengeance and punishment.

“Saving is what misers do.”

Is that profound or does it just make no sense? Despite my ill-advised participation in some of the debates on the artistic/critical worth of “superhero” comics several months ago, I find most “superhero” stories actually pretty dull. Most of the really good ones either ignore entirely the standard trappings of heroism and saving the world, or they shine that “existential spotlight” on heroism and find it seriously problematic. Not usually because it’s fascist so much as because it’s miserly. “Saving is what misers do.”—forget Watchmen, The Invisibles has my favorite critique of superheroic ethics.

Greetings from beautiful, noisy New Orleans! We’re honeymooning here until the end of the week, which is part of the reason you can’t comment right now (though we’re still checking emails at least periodically if you’re dying to tell us something). So don’t expect much in the way of posting, since I think I’ll be restricting my close reading skills to menus.

Anyway, I’m writing for a few reasons, one of which is to let you know that we’ll be moving to a new hosting service when we get back to Kentucky, which shouldn’t result in more than a little downtime, and that we’ll be getting a new look/structure soon. But also it’s been almost exactly a year since I started writing on the current incarnation of Peiratikos and it’s been an eventful year. The newer archive system will, I hope, be a little more reader-friendly, but I spent some time a few days ago reading through the current archive and enjoyed seeing how much we’ve written (not a lot lately) and how I’ve been able to interact with some of our readers and other bloggers.

When I started writing about comics here, I thought I’d focus on two topics that were close to me personally and theoretically at the time, what I called “creation of self through narrative” and the way that people feel justified in the rightness of the cruel and hurtful things they do. I did talk about these a lot, although never as much as I expected to, and I was more successful when ignoring things like that and talking about texts directly. That will be something to keep in mind as I start the next year, in which I also have to remember not to write so often about how much I hate fanboys.

But what I find really interesting is that the three books that would make my list for being the most moving in their respective categories aren’t really about creation of self and don’t deal with self-centered horribleness. Instead what Seaguy, Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, and Enki Bilal’s Nikopol Trilogy share (at least as it seems to me now, though it may not by next January) is a naive or ignorant protagonist concertedly finding a path for himself in a well-realized world that is not our own. While a happy new marriage isn’t (I hope!) a bizarre dystopia or a video-game-fantastic reality, it’s an interesting start to a new year in which I plan to have lots of new things to say.

And last of all I want to thank all the readers who’ve responded to Steven’s or my posts (and who can’t now, ha ha!) and forced us to clarify our thinking or move in new directions or generally regret ever having written about Kill Bill, because there were plenty of times when I wanted to just stop writing altogether, and it was both not wanting to leave Steven alone on the blog and knowing that there were people who read and liked (or maybe also hated) me that kept me from being able to sever myself, and now I’m glad I didn’t give in. And I think the readers who don’t comment, some of whom I know and many of whom I never will, because much of the beauty of this whole endeavor is that it does let my words move out and make connections I may never recognize. While I’ve often been a bad blogger when it comes to regular updates, it’s been a good year, and I’m grateful for all the good parts and pushing for more good and more (good) blogging in the year to come.