Zot and Geography

"Jenny said, when she was just five years old
There was nothin' happening at all
Every time she puts on the radio
There was nothin' goin' down at all, not at all
Then, one fine mornin', she puts on a New York station
You know, she couldn't believe what she heard at all
She started shakin' to that fine, fine music
You know, her life was saved by rock'n'roll."
--Lou Reed, "Rock'n' Roll" 

In my last post, I wrote glowingly about Scott McCloud's Zot! (1987-1991). I'm not about to change my mind about what I think about the merits of the book, nor am I going to retract my belief that mainstream superhero books have a lot to learn from the lessons of Zot! However, I would be remiss if I did not also share my thoughts about how geography structures the book as a whole.

Last time I wrote about Zot's interest in geography and world-building. Clearly, the series juxtaposes the futuristic and utopian urban environment of Zot's planet and the humdrum planet that Jenny lives on to make its point about futurity and fantasy. Zot's planet stands-in for fantasy and romance while Jenny's suburban existence represents a Cheever-esque realism. Taken on its own terms, there seems nothing wrong to me on how McCloud differentiates these worlds in terms of genre.

However, Zot! produces another set of geographic binaries that is more problematic. McCloud places in opposition the suburbs of New York where Jenny lives in and the urban-core of Manhattan. Jenny, like the central figure of Lou Reed's song "Rock'n'Roll" is a suburban kid, but for her the city doesn't promise the musical kicks of the AM station or the darker thrills that Reed depicts in "I'm Waiting for My Man." Instead the city remains alien, a violent place marred by crime, institutionalized dysfunction, and racial antagonism. Where Zot's Earth is paradise, and Jenny's suburb is merely mundane, the city is a dystopia.

While McCloud expresses far more antipathy toward the city than Reed, both are united in that they depict the city as primarily a zone that is made distinct from the suburbs by its racial otherness. For Reed, New York City is the cite of soul-enriching black music and, more problematically, Harlem drug dealers. McCloud too fixates on inner-city crime, but he finds no pleasure in it.What makes Manhattan dystopic is that it remains, essentially, racially other and that confronting this difference seems to be the only thing that seriously harms Zot, both physically and emotionally.  

Zot's first defeat at the hands of the city comes when he attempts to stop a mugging in New York City. All to predictably the mugger is a black teenager (with an odd karate headband) and his victim is a white woman. Zot manages to stop the mugging, but things turn for the worse when he is attacked by the black teenager's older, bigger, and stronger accomplices. These gang members beat Zot into the ground and continue to beat him once they've got him there. Zot, normally so full of confidence, has suffered his first real defeat. However, even more disturbing for Zot is when he calls out for help the crowd of strangers around him is too afraid to help. Zot is more devastated by the crowd's lack of intervention then he is by the beat down. Commenting on this particular episode in the collection, McCloud wrote that he was embarrassed by the scene: "The would-be purse-snatcher and his bigger gang member friends were just lazy stock characters of a sort common in  the mainstream titles of the day, and they strike a false note to me now."

However, in the final chapter of the collection Zot is made again victim to the city's violence. Once Zot is stuck on Jenny's Earth for good, he tries to make a life for himself as an urban superhero. Apparently, the 'burbs are a crime-free zone. Zot finds this task more difficult than he does at home on his own Earth. Instead of being attacked by mad scientists or crazed robots, Zot has to seek crime out and he does not always find it. In these sections, it's obvious that McCloud is satirizing superhero story conventions where the hero manages to always stumble upon a crime in progress. However, Zot does find crime and he nearly dies for the privilege. Assisting the police on a raid on a crack-house, Zot is shot and seriously wounded. While these events happen off-panel, the crack-house and the surrounding crime are clearly racially coded as black.

If the book's geography betrays a series of assumptions about crime and race, this is pointedly not to say that McCloud is a racist. At times, McCloud tries actively to address the negative implications of racism.In one scene, Zot is riding the subways when he makes a disturbing discovery about residential segregation. Zot is an innocent and on his world racism is not a problem and thus, he cannot fully comprehend why the racial composition of the subway trains shift depending n the neighborhood he is in. This issue too would later embarrass McCloud. In the collection he writes, "When I look at it again, all these years later, I want to reach over and pat my younger self on the head and say: 'Nice effort, but let's try sticking closer to home from now on, okay?" Although this scene seems borrowed from Brother from Another Planet (1984), it seems like an observation that a formerly New York-based cartoonist would be able to make.

McCloud takes far more of a risk in writing Ronnie, a black kid living in the white 'burbs, and this risk pays off for him far more than the subway scene. Ronnie is the son of a teacher and a hardware store owner and is thus a member of the black middle class that has left the city. However, Ronnie's father would still prefer it if his son's friends were black. McCloud illustrates this compelling in "Clash of Titans" (Zot! #31):

FATHER: Why do you hang out with those kids, Ronnie? They're not your kind. . . 
RONNIE: They're my friends. Dad. It's a white town. . .
FATHER: I know. . . I know. . . it's my fault for raising you here. But do all your friends have to be white? The kids from the city. . .
RONNIE: I'm scared of those kids, Dad. Those kids hate me. I'm not like them. Can I go to my room now, please?

Although this scene reproduces the geographic binaries that render the suburbs white and safe and the city dangerous and black, it also complicates those boundaries. There is a hint of honesty here that the stock figures of Manhattan do not have, cannot have as they're written. Ronnie is a fully developed character who must contend with the class aspirations of his family and his father's call for racial solidarity. He must figure out how to be black, while being groomed to wear a white collar. At the same time, Ronnie is trying to figure out who he wants to be and this doesn't always coincide with the professional and social ambitions that his father has for him. Ronnie's story illustrates the strength of the series, but it also points out the deficiencies that are inherent to Zot!'s troubling geographic distinctions.

x-posted with Narrative Review.

Zot

A backward glance, a compassionate caress. In this panel from Zot!, Scott McCloud depicts his titular hero bidding goodbye to his romantic interest,  Jenny. Zot must return to his own utopian version of Earth, leaving Jenny to deal with her mundane problems back home. If ever there was a panel that could best encapsulate the collected black and white run of Zot! it is this one. If our hero Zot represents anything, he represents hope and the possibility of change. He is the symbol of better times to come. In contrast, Jenny is a figure grounded in realism, a pessimist at heart who hopes to expatriate herself to Zot's idealized world. In this image, the pair embraces and readies themselves for a kiss that will be all too brief. The issues anthologized in Zot! (1987-1991) deal with teenagers struggling with their own problems, wondering where the future will take them and if they will make their dreams come true.

Scott McCloud is probably better known as a comics aesthetic theorist rather than as a comic book artist.  Although academics have taken issue with some of his more hazy generalizations, Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2005) remain bold efforts to explain how comics work as a medium. Unquestionably, McCloud figured out how comics worked first hand when writing and drawing Zot! in the late 1980s. The book shows the maturation not only of McCloud's characters, but also illustrates the maturation of his artistic talent. While the early stories remain committed exercises in genre, the second half Zot! takes on a quieter more introspective tone that is rarely achieved in today's mainstream, superhero-heavy comic book marketplace.

The first half of Zot! focuses almost entirely on Jenny's trips to Zot's futuristic Earth of "1964." It is a planet that never ages, but is always making social and technological progress. This fantasy Earth serves McCloud's purposes in two ways. The first way is that it allows McCloud to imagine future problems that may besiege mankind in the future. Thus, Zot's super villain adversaries all represent some future menace that mankind better avoid, whether that be primtivism, hyper-capitalism, technological supremacy, or a dehumanizing aestheticism. While the villains are all a lot of fun, they are not the real strength of the first half. Zot's utopian version of Earth provides him a means to talk about the nature of escapism. Jenny's desire to live on Zot's world is really just a way to avoid her own problems. Rather than go into what these problems are exactly, McCloud only hints at Jenny's difficulties. In the first half of the collection, we learn about these problems only from Jenny's thought bubbles or from her conversation. We experience her dilemmas primarily as baggage that she brings with her on her trips to Zot's world. It's a smart move.

In the second half of the collection, McCloud changes the tone of the book radically. Doing so was a risk for McCloud and it took some real chutzpah to do so. The second half of the book finds Zot stranded on Jenny's planet, unable to return home or to facilitate her visits to Earth 1964. Zot remains a fantasy figure in these stories, but his potency as a symbol for escape is not what it once was. Instead, McCloud turns his attention to Jenny's other friends and the mundane but painful struggles they have to endure. Each of McCloud's "Earth Stories," thus focuses on a member of Jenny's nerdy and socially-maladjusted clique as they deal with problems such as family substance abuse; divorce and dysfunctional families; homophobia and coming out; and teenage dating and sexuality. Although these stories are more down-to-earth (or down to our Earth, anyway), McCloud is still extending his original theme. The new characters that McCloud introduces are, like Jenny, trying to make sense of the world while at the same time trying to figure out who they want to be. While the science fiction elements of these stories are minimized, the series remains squarely focused on the future.

One of the aspects of Zot! that made it noteworthy in its day was the influence manga had on McCloud's stories. In the late 1980s, manga was still fairly hard to find in the United States. These days, manga is easily found in chain bookstores and when I walk down the aisle I usually see a good number of teenagers sitting on the floor, working their way through book by book. Manga has also become a stronger visual influence in American comic books as seen in the work of comic book artists like Humberto Ramos, Carlos Pachecho, and Salvador Larroca. However, what seems to be missing in most mainstream comic books today, and what should serve as the real lesson of McCloud's early work, is that character has to come before both marketing and spectacle. McCloud's stories still work today because human emotion remains central to their drama. Reading an issue of Zot! I never get the sense that "nothing-will-be-the-same-again" or "everything-I-knew-was-a-lie," but I do come to understand a character better and I do see the consequences of their simple maturation.

On being a fan and then not talking about it

One of the most common moves of cultural studies in the 1990s was to write about one's self. This was usually done in identity and meant mentioning one's race, class, and gender. When academic's attention turned to fandom, it usually meant declaring their own fandom. Over at Aca/Fan, Henry Jenkin's website, Will Brooker talks about why he declared his fandom in Batman Unmasked and why he did not in his second book, Hunting the Dark Knight. It's worth checking out. 

Who is the Black Panther?

x-posted with Narrative Review

Title: Black Panther: Who is the Black Panther?
Author: Reginald Hudlin & John Romita, Jr.


Inspired by the decolonization of Africa, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced a new character into the pages of The Fantastic Four in July of 1966. The first prominent black superhero to appear in American comics, the Black Panther was really T'Challa, a costumed adventurer who ruled the fictitious African state of Wakanda. Since his introduction, Black Panther has attracted a solid fan base, but he has been most successful as a supporting character. Whether this is because comic book fans are reluctant to pick up a book that stars an African character is a subject much debated by comic creators and fans alike.

Reginald Hudlin's Who is the Black Panther? (2006) is an attempt to both streamline the character's storyline and to make him a more prominent figure in Marvel's publishing line. In the back of the collection, Marvel has provided readers with what I assume is Hudlin's pitch for the series. Here, Hudlin establishes that he wants his run to be an iconic version of the character--something that Marvel could base a film franchise upon. (In 2009, the series would serve as the basis for a cartoon on NET). No doubt, this was a smart move given Marvel's recent forays into film. In his attempt to define the character for his editors, Hudlin writes:

The Black Panther is the Black Captain America. He's the embodiment of the ideals of a people. As Americans, we feel good when we read Captain America because he reminds us of the potential of how good American can be, if, of course, we have the conviction to live by the principles the country was founded on. As a black person, the Black Panther should represent the fulfillment of the potential of the Motherland.

For the most part, Hudlin succeeds in writing the "movie version" of the character. Who is the Black Panther? has a strong narrative thrust that would play well on the big screen. Of course, Hudlin is assisted admirably by veteran comic book artist John Romita, Jr., who uses wide panels to reproduce the experience of cinema. In the first chapter of the collection, the pair effectively defines not only who the Black Panther is, but what makes the nation of Wakanda so significant. Unlike the rest of Africa, Wakanda is a technologically advanced society that has never been conquered by another nation. They have always remained free of colonial rule. Hudlin's plot hinges on whether or not that will remain the case.

At times, Hudlin and Romita are capable of subtlety. When the United States plans an invasion of Wakanda and the assassination of T'Challa, we can see a sense of conflict on the face of Secretary of State Ms. Reese (an obvious surrogate for Condoleezza Rice). She is simultaneously disgusted by a racist U. S. military culture, proud of Wakanda's accomplishments, and perhaps, willing to attack the nation simply to prove her patriotic bona fides. Similarly, Hudlin is also willing to showcase the xenophobia of the Wakandas whose technological superiority manifests itself in arrogance and disdain for the outside world.

However, more often than not Hudlin goes too far in his effort to establish T'Challa and Wakanda as real "bad@asses" (his word, not mine). Instead of simply invading Wakanda, the U. S. covertly funds a crack team of super villain mercenaries. Super villains are a natural fit for any superhero series, but Hudlin goes too far by making the villains representative of Africa's colonizers: Belgium, Britain, France, and the United States. This is heavy handed and in the case of the U. S., not entirely accurate historically . Even here, Hudlin doesn't leave well enough alone and also attempts to indict Christianity's role in colonization of Africa. Thus, Hudlin creates a Church conspiracy (shades of The Da Vinci Code) in order to indict Christianity's troubling past in Africa. In doing so, he makes the British villain, the Black Knight, the Church's sworn servant. Readers are conveniently supposed to forget that England has been a Protestant nation since the 16th century. And then, at the end, there are the zombie cyborg marines whom T'Challa scares off with a few words. Is that too much? I suppose that depends on your sensibilities.

All and all, Hudlin's Black Panther is an engaging read, but at times its politics are--if not black and white--capable of only four colors.

Sexual Harassment and Fandom

The following comes from Bully Says: Comics Oughta Be Fun! but it bears re-posting and people ought to be aware of what's going on there. -The Editor


Overheard at San Diego Comic-Con while I was having lunch on the balcony of the Convention Center on Sunday July 27: a bunch of guys looking at the digital photos on the camera of another, while he narrated: "These were the Ghostbusters girls. That one, I grabbed her ass, 'cause I wanted to see what her reaction was." This was only one example of several instances of harassment, stalking or assault that I saw at San Diego this time.

1. One of my friends was working at a con booth selling books. She was stalked by a man who came to her booth several times, pestering her to get together for a date that night. One of her co-workers chased him off the final time.

2. On Friday, just before the show closed, this same woman was closing up her tables when a group of four men came to her booth, started taking photographs of her, telling her she was the "prettiest girl at the con." They they entered the booth, started hugging and kissing her and taking photographs of themselves doing so. She was confused and scared, but they left quickly after doing that.

3. Another friend of mine, a woman running her own booth: on Friday a man came to her booth and openly criticized her drawing ability and sense of design. Reports from others in the same section of the floor confirmed he'd targeted several women with the same sort of abuse and criticism.

Quite simply, this behavior has got to stop at Comic-Con. It should never be a sort of place where anyone, man or woman, feels unsafe or attacked either verbally or physically in any shape or form. There are those, sadly, who get off on this sort of behavior and assault, whether it's to professional booth models, cosplayers or costumed women, or women who are just there to work. This is not acceptable behavior under any circumstance, no matter what you look like or how you're dressed, whether you are in a Princess Leia slave girl outfit or business casual for running your booth.

On Saturday, the day after the second event I described above, I pulled out my convention book to investigate what you can do and who you can speak to after such an occurrence. On page two of the book there is a large grey box outlining "Convention Policies," which contain rules against smoking, live animals, wheeled handcarts, recording at video presentations, drawing or aiming your replica weapon, and giving your badge to others. There is nothing about attendee-to-attendee personal behavior.

Page three of the book contains a "Where Is It?" guide to specific Comic-Con events and services. There's no general information room or desk listed, nor is there a contact location for security, so I go to the Guest Relations Desk. I speak to a volunteer manning the desk; she's sympathetic to the situation but who doesn't have a clear answer to my question: "What's Comic-Con's policy and method of dealing with complaints about harassment?" She directs me to the nearest security guard, who is also sympathetic listening to my reports, but short of the women wanting to report the incidents with the names of their harassers, there's little that can be done.

"I understand that," I tell them both, "but what I'm asking is more hypothetical and informational: if there is a set Comic-Con policy on harassment and physical and verbal abuse on Con attendees and exhibitors, and if so, what's the specific procedure by which someone should report it, and specifically where should they go?" But this wasn't a question either could answer.

So, according to published con policy, there is no tolerance for smoking, drawn weapons, personal pages or selling bootleg videos on the floor, and these rules are written down in black and white in the con booklet. There is not a word in the written rules about harassment or the like. I would like to see something like "Comic-Con has zero tolerance for harassment or violence against any of our attendees or exhibitors. Please report instances to a security guard or the Con Office in room XXX."

The first step to preventing such harassment is giving its victims the knowledge that they can safely and swiftly report such instances to someone in authority. Having no published guideline, and indeed being unable to give a clear answer to questions about it, gives harassment and violence one more rep-tape loophole to hide behind.

I enjoyed Comic-Con. I'm looking forward to coming back next year. So, in fact, are the two women whose experiences I've retold above. Aside from those instances, they had a good time at the show. But those instances of harassment shouldn't have happened at all, and that they did under no clear-cut instructions about what to do sadly invites the continuation of such behavior, or even worse.

I don't understand why there's no such written policy about what is not tolerated and what to do when this happens. Is there anyone at Comic-Con able to explain this? Does a similar written policy exist in the booklets for other conventions (SF, comics or otherwise) that could be used as a model? Can it be adapted or adapted, and enforced, for Comic-Con? As the leading event of the comics and pop culture world, Comic-Con should work to make everyone who attends feel comfortable and safe.

–John DiBello
Crossposted From Here

On Evaluating

It seems to me that comics fan culture and publishers have three basic criteria for evaluating and marketing both weekly and collected comics. In the following post I provide a brief sketch for these three modes of evaluation. They are by no means encyclopedic in their nature, but I do believe that I get the broad strokes correct.

I. The Important Work

The "important" work has its origins in the mid-1980s and is mostly tied to the emergence of the direct market and an aging fan base well versed in the history of comics lore. The "important" work only makes sense if its audience is aware of the tortuous histories of copyrighted characters and if the comic magazine - either in its individual or collected form - has to be perceived as more or less a permanent object. The importance of this work rests on the permanence of the artifact and a deep knowledge of comic book history because it often promises grand scale action which will guarantee some irrevocable change. As such, it needs to remain on the stands so that it can remain as a sign of some turning point.

Due to its size and its interest in operating on a large scale, the "important" work pays minimal interest in character development and tends to stress spectacle, size, and generally, crossovers. Archetypal "important" works are Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret War. As of now, this is generally preferred storyline with the Big Two, and given the sales of titles like Civil War and Infinite Crisis, the fans themselves.


II. The Quality Work

The "important" work promises to bring big changes and sells itself as a "must-read" for fans. However, it makes little promise to actually being any good and often fails to institutionalizing the changes that it promises to deliver. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this, but I do not know anyone who is dying to pick up an old copy of Armageddon 2001.

Unlike the "important" work which makes promises to its own importance, the quality work is a little less showy about its promise to quality. Indeed, quality works often have no claims made about them by their publisher because they are often created and sustained in the shadow of cancellation. However, like works of great literature, it implicitly makes a contract with the reader that it will enlighten them about the medium or life in general. The mainstream variation of this type of work is generally cloaked in the trappings of the superhero genre, but it is not principally concerned with good guys beating up bad guys. Thus, Sandman is principally a mediation on free will, Starman is concerned with family relationships, and Alias is preoccupied with living with personal trauma.

The quality work is equally indebted to the direct market and the need for a permanent comic artifact. It requires a sophisticated audience, but its sophistication does not come from its arcane knowledge of character histories. It instead requires an audience who can read for theme and is willing to be devoted to a creator who is recognized as an artist. This is different than the "important" work which is more likely to be sold on the basis of an "event" and while the writer or artist might be part of the appeal, it is a secondary one. Furthermore, the creators behind an "important" work are likely to have mastered a recognizable house style.

In contradistinction to the "important" work, the quality work tends to be idiosyncratic, both in terms of style (although there are certain conventions that normally employed in some way or another) and in character. hile the important event might be long in terms of pages, its time frame is usually relatively short; no "important" work has lasted more than a year. Because of this and its usually diffuse and multi-character structure, the important work minimizes character in favor of spectacle and variety. We are promised that our favorite character will appear, however briefly. In contrast the quality work will often focus on one character or a small family of characters who over the course of five to six years will be fully realized as individuals, who will be distinct, and will often be untouched by future writers. Although they are owned by a media conglomerate, they remain intrinsically their auteur's characters both to fans and to the heads over at corporate.

Besides Fables, I cannot think of any work presently being published that has achieved any level of recognition that we would call a quality work.

III. The Consistent Work

Finally, we have the consistent work. This model of evaluation and creation relies less on any relationship to the direct market or an understanding of complex history. The consistent work might be the product of an aspiring auteur or someone who wants to write the next "important" work, but it is more than anything the writing of a competent comics craftsman who writes with the single issue in mind. He delivers his work on time and in working order. The work may at times be uneven, but at times it rises to near greatness. It has no pretensions either to importance or to extreme quality. It aims to be entertaining. Mark Waid's first run on The Flash might be an example of this in terms of writing and Don Kramer's present performance on Nightwing might be an example of this in terms of art.

While there are plenty of good examples of consistent workmanship in comics today, as the single issue becomes devalued as a moneymaker, this becomes less and less of a priority for companies if not for fans. The "important" work seems more likely to not also strive to be consistent work as its creators and publishers know that it will eventually be collected and published in trade. The "important" work that also strives to be, at some level, a quality work seems even less likely to meet a "consistent" standard.

IV. What The Future Holds

As the value of the single issue continues to fall, the value of consistency will be sure to go with it. Who needs to be consistent or timely when the real money lies in the collected product? As more and more fans begin to wait for the trade, it seems unlikely that anyone will much mind if they have to weight a little longer.

The "important" work, because it can so easily be collected, and because it proves to be so effective in capturing the attention of fanboys also seems to face no serious form of decline and will remain a valuable way of understanding, marketing, and evaluating works of comics fiction.

However, one wonders if the quality work will survive. Marvel has always been less interested in serious character studies (hence Johnny Storm and Peter Parker seem permanent juveniles in a case of arrested development) and DC has for the last few years dedicated itself to "crisis" management. Their current strategy for producing quality work is to repackage their previous successes in the omnibus forms of Starman and Sandman and to dub, previous "consistent" work by Jack Kirby as quality and give it the star treatment in deluxe reprinting. However, where is the new quality? With their Vertigo imprint a shadow of what it once was, and their mainstream line dedicated primarily to sea of inanities and half-thought through concepts, where will the new quality come from?

Second Post: The Dark Knight (2008)

My wife often likes to say that a single shot can justify an entire film. Because of this, I have dubbed her a formalist. She is OK with this, even though I make this comment as a fairly committed historicist.

That being said, there is a shot in The Dark Knight that would justify the film, if of course the film needed it. Let the gushing and the spoilers commence:

At the end of the film, the Joker falls off the side of a building after battling with the Batman. Unlike "the poetry" of Batman (1989), Nolan's Dark Knight does not leave the clown prince of crime to fall to his death. Instead, Batman rescues Joker from his demise by pulling him up with a grappling hook. Hoisted upside down from his leg and flapping in the wind, the Joker explains his philosophy of life. However, tellingly, the image that the audience sessis not of the Joker hanging upside down. The image has been inverted so that he appears right side up, with his jacket floating up behind him and flapping eerily in the wind. For the audience, this simple trick of inverting the negative's direction produces a certain amount of estrangement. The Joker appears at once normal, but the world appears strange. More tellingly though, is that the shot is from Batman's point of view. As I discussed in my last post and over here, the real tragedy in the film comes when Batman accepts the Joker's view of society. This shot is brilliant, and again would justify the film if it needed it, because it manages to formally suggest the thematic circumstances of that part of the film.

I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight,
I will stop thinking about The Dark Knight. . . .