Spaces Between: Gender, Diversity, and Identity in Comics [1st ed.] 9783658301156, 9783658301163

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Nina Eckhoff-Heindl Véronique Sina Eds.

Spaces Between Gender, Diversity, and Identity in Comics

Spaces Between

Nina Eckhoff-Heindl · Véronique Sina Editors

Spaces Between Gender, Diversity, and Identity in Comics

Editors Nina Eckhoff-Heindl University of Cologne Cologne, Germany

Véronique Sina University of Cologne Cologne, Germany

ISBN 978-3-658-30115-6 ISBN 978-3-658-30116-3  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3 © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Titelbild: Aisha Franz’s interpretation of the topic Spaces Between. Gender, Diversity and ­Identity in Comics © Aisha Franz 2020 Responsible Editor: Barbara Emig-Roller This Springer VS imprint is published by the registered company Springer Fachmedien ­Wiesbaden GmbH part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Abraham-Lincoln-Str. 46, 65189 Wiesbaden, Germany

Preface

Comics are both visual and sequential art as they constitute a visual medium that is defined by the sequence of its static images as well as by the spaces between the panels. Hence, the succession of sequential images in comics is by no means seamless. Rather, the conglomeration of (blank) spaces both interconnects and separates them at the same time. These ‘spaces between’ might be used or construed as a reference to a realm of the ‘unshown’, wherein notions of a final, self-contained truth are renounced and alternative worldviews that challenge the social status quo are enhanced. Thus, even though comics have been perceived for decades as a pop-cultural mass phenomenon, which manifests, establishes and perpetuates stereotypical representations, the medium never completely became one with this role of a reactionary stabilizing force. Rather, comics are imbued with a socio-political dimension that has always encouraged comics artists to creatively use the spaces between, and to question as well as subvert social and cultural norms (see Chute 2010; Frahm 2010; Sina 2016). As a medium that combines both picture and text, comics constitute a transgressive form which resists common classifications and mechanisms of exclusion based on hierarchical and hegemonic structures. In this respect, comics have the potential to destabilize and blur binary oppositions such as subject/object, nature/ culture, man/woman, authentic/artificial, good/bad, abled/disabled, normal/abnormal or black/white. In certain circumstances, the medium thus has the potential to break up rigid dichotomies, binaries as well as dialectics, and to open up spaces for the representation of the ‘shades between’.

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Fig. 1   Aisha Franz’s interpretation of the topic Spaces Between. Gender, diversity and identity in comics. Image credits © Aisha Franz 2020

This potential is addressed by the title and topic of this volume: Spaces Between. Gender, Diversity and Identity. And it is also what the German comics artist Aisha Franz managed to capture in this book’s cover illustration. Full-sized und uncropped, the image shows an exemplary comics page consisting of six panels arranged in a rather strict grid pattern (Fig. 1). While the individual panels are kept in grey colors and contain only empty white speech bubbles, a colorful mass emerges from the gutter transporting and unveiling various cartoony characters of different genders, ages and ethnicities. There are also characters with impaired and unimpaired bodies as well as different animals, plants, robots and even aliens appearing on the comics page, demonstrating the wide range of representational possibilities offered by sequential art.

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Fig. 2   Draft of Aisha Franz. Image credits © Aisha Franz 2020

In fact, the first draft of the motif was much more figurative, depicting different female characters stepping and climbing out of the panels and the gutter, literally emerging from the margins in order to finally being seen not only as represented subjects but also as a creative force (Fig. 2). However, Aisha Franz felt that “everything should be designed less concretely”. In her opinion the sole representation of human characters would limit the thematic scope too much as well as the potential embedded in the ‘spaces between’ as a kind of ‘space between’. Plus its content should be of importance. Consequently, she decided to draw a colorful abstract ‘glibbery mass’ that would squeeze out of the gutter and overgrow both the ‘conventional’ panels as well as their content, allowing for different shades, diverse human and non-human characters as well as non-hegemonic modes of representation to appear on the comics page. The contributions to the present volume exhibit a great variety of interdisciplinary perspectives on and theoretical approaches to the notion of ‘spaces

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between’. In spite, or rather because, of their varying theoretical frameworks and methodological heterogeneity, they draw our attention to the nexus between the medium of comics as well as categories of difference and identity such as gender, dis/ability, age and ethnicity, thereby aiming at uncovering and analyzing different forms of the ‘spaces between’ within the art form itself, but also within its production and its audience. In this respect, the contributions gathered in the present anthology not only contribute to the disclosure of exclusions, power structures and (hetero)normative allocations in comics, but they also critically analyze their socio-political and communicative forms of (re)production. Moreover, they contribute to the opening and deepening of an interdisciplinary conversation between comics studies, dis/ability, postcolonial, gender and queer studies as well as other areas of both critical discourse and thinking. The volume opens with Carolyn Cocca’s “Reproducing Inequality and Representing Diversity: The Politics of Gender in Superhero Comics” in which she explores the representations and stereotyping of female superheroes. Her text underscores the importance of diverse representations, and suggests directions for future interdisciplinary and intersectional comics studies research. In her essay “Gendered violence and structures of power. Reclaiming the victim narrative in the Netflix show Marvel’s Jessica Jones”, Juliane Blank takes a look at the reflection of power and gender structures in the popular Netflix superhero series thereby paying close attention to how the first season of the show focuses on the issue of abuse and the identity of the female protagonist as a survivor struggling for agency. Jeffrey Brown also deals with the superhero genre in his article ­“Spider-Analogues: The Unmarking and Unmasking of White Male Superheroism”. Brown outlines the concept of comic book ‘multiplicity’ and shows how despite all the different Spider-Man variations featured in Marvel Comics’ crossover event ­Spider-Verse (2014–2015), the primary identity of the main character as unmarked white male is never jeopardized. Unmarked identity is also part of Philip Crawford’s investigation even though he emphasizes the necessity more strongly of remaining unmarked by others, and therefore of racial passing. In his essay “My Noose Around that Pretty’s Neck: Meditations on Matt Baker’s Good Girls”, Philip Crawford pursues an approach of artistic research in which he establishes a dialogue between his own artworks based on the works of the African American comics artist Matt Baker and the context of lynching in American history. In “The Nude and the Naked: from Fine Art to Comics”, Ann Miller explores the gendered and asymmetrical relationship of looking. Using the example of

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Charlotte Blazy’s Que j’ai été (2010) and Catherine Meurisse’s Moderne Olympia, Miller convincingly points out the interplay of gendered gaze and authorship. The essay by Marina Rauchenbacher and Katharina Serles deals with another form of looking. Entitled “Fragmented and Framed. Precarious ‘Body Signs’ in Comics by Regina Hofer, Ulli Lust, Barbara Yelin and Peer Meter”, they examine the comics-specific segmentation of gaze structures and bodily manifestations drawing from Georges Didi-Huberman’s concept of ‘thresholds’. Natalie Veith’s “Othering Voices and the Voice of the Other: The Depiction of Joseph Merrick in From Hell” employs a dis/ability approach by focusing on the medium-specific depiction of a character with speech impairment. In addition, this essay provides a revealing cross-media investigation of the so-called ‘Elephant Man’ as a composite media figure. In “Dis/ability and Hybridity: The Bodies of Charles Burns”, Jonas Neldner deals with the portrayal of surreal experiences of body images that revolve around excrescences, mechanic amalgamations or sexually transmitted diseases. Focusing on a selection of comics by Charles Burns, Neldner illustrates the role of hybrid and dis/abled bodies in his work, and outlines how his fiction serves as a prime example of how the interplay of mise-en-scène from the genre of American film noir and the school of surrealism addresses the issue of increasingly altered body images as well as their standing in society in the medium of comics. In “The Binary Comics of a Non-Binary Artist: How Vaughn Bodé’s Identity Structured his Art”, Romain Becker draws the connection between the multifaceted personality of the underground comics artist and modes of depiction in his publications. With his main emphasis on Bodé’s Schizophrenia (1973), Becker exemplifies how the comic artist’s ideas of gender, sexuality and spiritual beliefs appear in the comics and therewith are interwoven with Bodé’s self-expression. Nina Eckhoff-Heindl’s “Branford the Best Bee in the World. The ­Socio-Culturally Imprinted Self of Anthropomorphic Bodies” sheds light on an animal character of Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012). By referring to findings from gender and masculinity studies, human-animal studies as well as cultural studies, her essay investigates how the animal character functions as a substitute for humanness and simultaneously is in a constant correlation with the human protagonists. Paying particular attention to the aspect of gender, Véronique Sina explores the relationship between media, bodies and discursive constructions of Jewishness in the autobiographical comics by Jewish-American underground cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb. In her essay “‘If only I’d had a nose job’. Representations of the Gendered Jewish Body in the Works of Aline Kominsky-Crumb”, she

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discusses how the cartoonist uses the medium of comics and its specific modes of (visual) representation to reflect, irritate and undermine bodily gendered codes of Jewish identity. In “Manga Aging: Grannies and Gutters”, Jaqueline Berndt focuses on the recently booming subgenre of senior-centered manga, or ‘granny comics’, and addresses intersectionality by exploring how the inclusion of the elderly as characters and readers relates to manga’s system of gendered genres. Berndt pays special attention to the gutter as a stylistic device reminiscent of shōjo (girls’) mangas. She shows how the gutter, or mahaku (Jp. liminal time-space), serves genre-specific nostalgia as well as affectively engaging page compositions in addition to closure. The volume concludes with Tahneer Oksman’s “The Art of Loss”. In her essay, the author identifies the two formal strategies of ‘cumulatio’ and ‘combination’ in Maira Kalman’s artistic oeuvre and offers a close reading of Ulli Lust’s Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life (2013) as well as Una’s Becoming Unbecoming (2016), two contemporary autobiographical comics of loss that utilize these techniques. Her close analysis of both comics reveals how the formal strategies of ‘cumulation’ and ‘combination’ help to show that individual losses are set in a dynamic, relational network. This volume is compiled from a selection of talks given at the German Society for Comics Studies’s (ComFor) 13th annual conference, Spaces Between— Gender, Diversity and Identity in Comics, which was held at the University of Cologne from September 17 to 19, 2018, as well as additional contributions by the editors. This anthology could only be realized thanks to the generous support from MedienStiftung Kultur, the Equal Opportunities Officer of the Faculty of Arts and the Humanities as well as the University of Cologne’s financial fund on the implementation of the statutory equality directive. We are very grateful to Aisha Franz for the exclusively designed illustration for our conference and anthology topic. No other motif could have conveyed our theoretical framework in a better way. We would also like to thank our editor Britta Fietzke for her tireless work, as well as the staff at Springer VS—in particular Monika Mülhausen and Barbara Emig-Roller, who invited us to realize this book and helped us every which way during the publishing process. Véronique Sina Nina Eckhoff-Heindl

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Bibliography Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic women. Life narrative and contemporary comics. New York: Columbia University Press. Frahm, Ole. 2010. Die Sprache des Comics. Hamburg: Philo Verlag. Sina, Véronique. 2016. Comic – Film – Gender. Zur (Re-)Medialisierung von Geschlecht im Comicfilm. Bielefeld: transcript.

Contents

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Reproducing Inequality and Representing Diversity: The Politics of Gender in Superhero Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Carolyn Cocca

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Gendered Violence and Structures of Power. Reclaiming the Victim Narrative in the Netflix Show Marvel’s Jessica Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Juliane Blank

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Spider-Analogues: The Unmarking and Unmasking of White Male Superheroism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Jeffrey A. Brown

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My Noose Around that Pretty’s Neck: Meditations on Matt Baker’s Good Girls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Philip Crawford

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The Nude and the Naked: From Fine Art to Comics . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Ann Miller

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Fragmented and Framed. Precarious ‘Body Signs’ in Comics by Regina Hofer, Ulli Lust, Barbara Yelin and Peer Meter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Marina Rauchenbacher and Katharina Serles

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Othering Voices and the Voice of the Other: The Depiction of Joseph Merrick in From Hell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Natalie Veith

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Dis/ability and Hybridity: The Bodies of Charles Burns . . . . . . . . . 109 Jonas Neldner

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The Binary Comics of a Non-binary Artist: How Vaughn Bodé’s Identity Structured His Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Romain Becker

10 Branford the Best Bee in the World. The Socio-Culturally Imprinted Self of Anthropomorphic Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Nina Eckhoff-Heindl 11 “If only I’d had a nose job”. Representations of the Gendered Jewish Body in the Works of Aline Kominsky-Crumb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Véronique Sina 12 Manga Aging: Grannies and Gutters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Jaqueline Berndt 13 An Art of Loss . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Tahneer Oksman

Contributors

Romain Becker  is a PhD candidate at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, where he teaches courses on comics, among others. His PhD thesis under the supervision of Anne Lagny and Jean-Paul Gabilliet focuses on the German comics publisher Reprodukt and its work. His research takes a particular interest in editors and publishers, adaptations, formats, as well as identity in comics. Dr. Jaqueline Berndt,  Professor in Japanology at Stockholm University, PhD in Aesthetics/Art Theory (Humboldt University Berlin, 1991). 2009–2016 Professor in Comics Theory, Kyoto Seika University, Japan. Research on manga as graphic narratives, anime, media aesthetics, comics exhibitions, modern Japanese art. Manga: Medium, Art and Material (Leipzig University Press 2015); Shōjo Across Media: Exploring “Girl” Practices in Contemporary Japan (co-ed., Palgrave 2019). PD Dr. Juliane Blank is an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Saarland (Saarbrücken) in the department of German Literature. She specialises in adaptation, visual narrative, the cultural history of catastrophes and representations of gender. Her dissertation Literaturadaptionen im Comic. Ein modulares Analysemodell (2015) provides a basic model for analysing graphic adaptations, but also examines recurring techniques and strategies of adaptation. In 2019, she finished her habilitation thesis on chance and coincidence in representations of catastrophes. Juliane Blank has been the managing editor of the journal KulturPoetik since 2010. Dr. Jeffrey A. Brown  is a Professor in the Department of Popular Culture and the School of Critical and Cultural Studies at Bowling Green State University. Brown is the author of numerous articles about gender, ethnicity and sexuality in media, including the books: Black Superheroes: Milestone Comics and Their xv

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Fans (2000), The Modern Superhero in Film and Television (2016) and Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity: The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero as Cultural Nexus (2019). Dr. Carolyn Cocca is Professor of Politics, Economics, and Law at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. Her book Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation won the 2017 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award in the Best Academic/Scholarly Work category. She is also the author of Jailbait: The Politics of Statutory Rape Laws in the United States and the editor of Adolescent Sexuality. She teaches courses in U.S. politics, constitutional law, and gender studies. Philip Crawford is a US-American artist based in Berlin. He considers his practice as an attempt at what historian Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation in which voice is lent to historically voiceless subjects by embracing the fictive alongside the archival. Philip focuses on the nature and functions of myth and memory in heroic narratives by investigating the content, material conditions and historical context of and popular responses to the various cultural artifacts that he appropriates. The images, objects and statements he appropriates become resources for a body of work that includes critical essays, works on paper, installation, and performance. Philip holds a B.A. in History from Stanford University. Nina Eckhoff-Heindl, M.A., is a MSCA-Fellow in the program “a.r.t.e.s. EUmanities” at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne (Horizon 2020: Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant No. 713600). Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Cologne, Germany and at the University Zurich, Switzerland. Her dissertation project deals with aesthetic experience and the visual-tactile dimensions of comics. Her research as well as her publications focus on Modern and Contemporary Art, Image Theory, Aesthetics, Comics Studies, Dis/ability Studies, and Holocaust Studies. www.ninaheindl.com. Dr. Ann Miller was formerly Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Leicester. She is joint editor of European Comic Art, and has published widely on (mainly French-language) comics. Recent publications have included essays on Dominique Goblet and Pauline Martin, on Joe Sacco and on Lewis Trondheim. She has also translated the work of many French-language comics theorists, including most recently Thierry Groensteen’s The Expanding Art of Comics: Ten Modern Masterpieces.

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Jonas Neldner  is a BA student of English and German philology at the University of Cologne. He also works as a student assistant at the chair of American literature and culture (Prof. Dr. Hanjo Berressem). From July 2016 to April 2017 he held a scholarship at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, Canada. His research interests include critical posthumanisms, critical dis/ability studies, feminism, comics, science fiction, weird fiction, film studies, literary naturalism and subcultures. Dr. Tahneer Oksman  is an Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College, the author of “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press 2016), and the co-editor of the anthology, The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself (University Press of Mississippi 2019). She is currently at work on a book about comics, loss, and grief. Dr. Marina Rauchenbacher  is a Research Affiliate at the University of Vienna. She is a co-applicant and team member of the research project Visualities of Gender in German-language Comics. Marina worked as a Research Assistant as well as a university assistant at the University of Vienna. She was affiliated with the Beatrice Bain Research Group, University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching focuses on visual culture, comics and gender theory. She is a co-founder of the Austrian Association for the Research and Promotion of Comics (OeGeC) and a board member of aka—Arbeitskeis Kulturanalyse. Mag. Katharina Serles  is a co-applicant and team member of the research project Visualities of Gender at the University of Vienna, where she studied German, English Studies and Art History. She worked as a university assistant in Vienna and Dresden and doubles as editor-in-chief of the cultural-political magazine KUPFzeitung. Her main fields of research and teaching include comics and visual arts, gender studies and image theory. She has co-founded the Austrian Association for the Research and Promotion of Comics and is a member of the German Society for Comics Studies and The Comics Studies Society. For more information see www.katharinaserles.com. Dr. Véronique Sina is a Research Associate at the Department of Media Culture and Theatre at the University of Cologne. She obtained her PhD in Media Studies at the University of Bochum with her dissertation: Comic—Film— Gender. Zur (Re-)Medialisierung von Geschlecht im Comicfilm (transcript 2016). As a postdoctoral researcher she is working in the realm of Gender and Queer Studies, Media Studies, Visual Studies, Holocaust Studies and Jewish Cultural

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Studies. She is the co-editor of the book series “Comicstudien” (de Gruyter), the co-founder and spokesperson of the Committee for Comics Studies at the German Society for Media Studies (GfM), the vice president of the German Society of Comics Studies (ComFor) as well as a member of the Comics Studies Society (CSS). Natalie Veith,  M.A., Department of English Literatures, University of Stuttgart, areas of research: British literature and culture from the 19th to the 21st century, visual culture studies and modes of representation, visual and pluricodal media (comics, photography, film, etc.), gender studies, postclassical narratology.

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Reproducing Inequality and Representing Diversity: The Politics of Gender in Superhero Comics Carolyn Cocca

Abstract

Superheroes have delighted and inspired decades of comics readers, but they have also embodied inequalities of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and ability. As with positions of power across various political, economic, and social institutions, certain demographic groups have been overrepresented while those from more marginalized groups have been underrepresented and stereotyped. Female superheroes exemplify this underrepresentation and stereotyping, but also have the potential to destabilize norms and binaries to serve as empowering figures. This essay explores representations of female superheroes, and the multiple reasons as to how and why they have changed—and not changed that much—over time. It underscores the importance of diverse representations that are both numerous and authentic, and also suggests directions for future interdisciplinary and intersectional research about such representations in the field of comics studies. Keywords

Superhero · Representation · Women · Power · Gender · Race · Disability ·  Sexuality · Stereotype · Diversity

For the last 75 years, female superheroes have been much less numerous, much more often stereotyped, much more often sexualized and much less likely to drive

C. Cocca (*)  New York, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_1

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the action than their male counterparts. They’ve also been mostly white, cisgender, non-queer and non-disabled. This essay examines how and why this is the case, how it’s changed over time, how little it’s changed over time, and why it matters. What’s on the comics page can both embody cultural anxieties as well as cultural aspirations, can both shore up as well as destabilize harmful binaries, and can both foreclose as well as open up all kinds of possibilities. This is why there is power on the page. There is power in our pens when we analyze what’s on the page, particularly when we analyze who is being pushed into the page’s margins and gutters. These spaces can be spaces of action, which we can use to analyze power relations, and to bring the margins to the center. The same groups who are marginalized both inside and out of the panels are also marginalized both inside and out of political, economic and social institutions in our world as well. But because the superhero genre, our institutions, and our cultural norms are mutually constitutive, they are all changeable. This is why our work is so important.

Theories and Methodologies This essay reflects analysis of portrayals of prominent female superhero characters (and their friends, teammates, villains and kinship networks) in comics, novels, tv and film over several decades. This design allows me to compare characters to each other, as well as to compare characters to themselves across media and over time. I employ insights from feminist theories, queer theory, critical race theory, disability theory, political science and political economy, cultural studies, fan studies as well as comics studies to analyze the following: the broader historical context of a given time period at the moment a character was portrayed; the production and distribution of comics at that time; the character’s representation in print as compared to that in a concurrent tv show or movie; and the interplay of editors, writers, artists, parent companies, and different audience groups about those female characters at particular times and over time. All of these elements interact messily with one another—ideas, norms and narratives circulating as well as being negotiated by various people in various institutions—producing how a superhero looks at a specific time in a specific panel on a specific page or in a specific frame onscreen. In terms of sources I examine comics from the 1940s to the present; superhero tv shows and films; interviews with writers, artists, editors, publishers, and ­producers; creators’ and fans’ websites, Tumblrs, Instagrams, blogs, tweets, podcasts, and letter columns; sales figures, tv ratings and box office sales; as well as scholarly sources from multiple fields.

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No approach and no set of sources can ever be truly comprehensive. But just as comics scholars can and should make the margins and the gutters (the ‘spaces between’) into spaces of action, we can and should strive to break barriers in our work—whether barriers of disciplinary training, barriers of the four corners of a panel or of a page, or even barriers of repeatedly investigating the subjects, identity categories or time periods that we are comfortable with. We need to do more innovative, uncomfortable, intersectional and interdisciplinary qualitative work as well as some quantitative work in order to make broader arguments about patterns over time, or among multiple institutions, or across different groups of people.

Female Superheroes, 1940–1960s: Underrepresented, Stereotyped White Girls In the 1940s, comics were sold on newsstands, so they had to appeal to a large audience, and they did (see Gabilliet 2010). The U.S. was at war and women had to contribute to that effort, so some fluidity in gender roles was not only accepted but encouraged. As written and drawn by men as well as women, female characters at this time were independent and spunky and strong. This is when Wonder Woman launches, but there were others as well. Wonder Woman, created by a man who thought that women were morally superior to men, at this time celebrates her strength and exhorts other women to use theirs. She is an outsider, a freak, a queer immigrant from an all-female island. She falls in love with the first man she sees, which softens her challenge to unequal gender roles, but she will not marry him because she will not pretend she is weaker than him (see Marston and Peter 1945). After World War II, though, women were forced out of ‘men’s’ jobs and into a ‘cult of domesticity’ in which women were constructed as wives and mothers in secondary roles within nuclear families. This domestication and heteronormativity is evident in comics too, and it only accelerated after the Comics Code was adopted in 1954.1

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Code was adopted by the comics industry in response to public criticism from multiple groups about comics’ potential negative effects on children, particularly in the horror and crime genres, but also in the superhero genre. Most relevant to this essay’s discussion of gender in superhero comics is that the Code prohibited representations of “illicit sex relations” or “sex perversion” (i.e., any non-marital sex but especially that between samesex couples), and mandated that “live-romance stories emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage” as well as “respect for parents [and] the moral code” (Comics Magazine Association of America 1954).

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Written and drawn almost entirely by white, non-queer men, the post-Code female superheroes—all of whom were white, upper-middle-class, ­able-bodied, slender and attractive by Anglo-European standards—became interested in domestic tasks, motherhood and romance with men (see Madrid 2009). Wonder Woman’s boyfriends’ marriage proposals become constant. Jean Grey and Sue Storm faint when they use their powers too much. Both cook for their teammates and design their costumes, and both were just ‘girls,’ as Jean was Marvel Girl, Sue was Invisible Girl, and there were also Batgirl, Supergirl, Hawkgirl, and others as well. This was in contrast to, say, Spider-Man and Iceman, who were teenagers but not called Spider-Boy and Iceboy. Furthermore, the girls were isolated: the X-Men were four men and one woman (Jean), the Fantastic Four were three men and one woman (Sue), the Justice League was six to nine men and one woman (Wonder Woman), the Avengers were four men and one woman (Wasp). When there is only one female character in a given work and she is written in stereotypical ways, she circulates the idea that all women are like her. And when they all look so similar to one another, it not only reinforces dominant norms of beauty and power but also contributes to symbolic annihilation of all other women (see hooks 1992; Tuchman 1978). The very presence of female superheroes at this time was significant as it presented readers with disruptive, subversive images that challenged dominant cultural narratives of women as weak or subordinate. But the acceptability of their challenge to gendered binaries was enabled by their small numbers as well as the ‘normality’ not only of their heterosexuality, but also of their race, class, and gender performance (see, e.g., Helford 2000; McRuer 2006). After the advent of Second Wave feminism in the later 1960s, some male creators at DC and Marvel comics imported ‘feminist’ ideas into their books, but they tended toward anti-male caricatures. The writers retained the characters’ interest in heterosexual romance and fashion. The new Batgirl is a librarian with a PhD (later a Congresswoman), but has numerous stories about dating and checks her face in her compact as Batman and Robin call for her help (see Fox and Kane 1968). Wonder Woman gives up her powers for her boyfriend (who dies), opens a fashion boutique, gets trained by a wise, blind, Asian man named I-Ching, and dates and cries over numerous men—for five years. The cover of Wonder Woman #180 from 1968 is emblematic of how much Wonder Woman has changed from the strong leader of the 1940s (Fig. 1.1). She is secondary in her own comic, now titled The Incredible I-Ching and The New Wonder Woman, and she is posed submissively below this new character. Wearing not her superhero costume but a fashionable jumpsuit and white boots, she weeps at I-Ching’s feet, lamenting the loss of her boyfriend, Steve, as I-Ching comforts her (see also O’Neil and Sekowsky 1968).

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Fig. 1.1   Wonder Woman and I-Ching on the cover of Wonder Woman #180. Image credits Mike Sekowsky, Cover of Wonder Woman #180, 1968. DC Comics

Both of these characters, written and drawn by men, were independent women: one with an advanced degree and professional job; the other a business owner. But both are bound by their interest in dating men, both are engaged in feminized professions, and both are generally the only women in their stories in print and on tv, just as small numbers of white women began to enter professional arenas from which they had formerly been banned. The number of letters from female fans dwindled.

Female Superheroes, 1970–1990s: Increasing Diversity, Increasing Sexualization As the Second Wave of feminism began to make an impact, so did backlash to it. Part of this was an increasing objectification of women. The Comics Code ­revision of 1971 allowed for more exposure of skin and exaggeration of female bodies. Female characters were still mostly white and greatly outnumbered, and

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as drawn almost entirely by men their costumes began to get tighter and smaller, their hair and breasts got bigger, and one hip got cocked out to the side. They still did heroic things, but the framing focuses the reader on their looks. A small number of female superheroes of color were introduced at this time, creating space for new possibilities but also enabling the reinscription of traditional articulations of gender, sexuality, race and class. Among the X-Men and New Mutants, Storm, Jubilee and Dani Moonstar were powerful, beloved and nuanced women of color. But African Storm controls the weather, referencing the trope of Africans’ ties to nature; she loses that control if she gets too emotional, referencing the trope of women as emotional. Chinese-American Jubilee has fireworks powers, conflating Chinese nationality and fireworks; she loves malls, conflating girlhood and shopping. Cheyenne Dani Moonstar’s original powers are related to visions and communicating with animals, both associated by whites with Native Americans. Qualitatively, the X-Men have had multiple prominent female characters, some of color and some with disabilities, but quantitatively all X-teams have been dominated by white non-disabled males (see Darowski 2014). Female characters of color were generally more exoticized in terms of their powers and dress. Black female superheroes often had animalistic powers or clothing, like Vixen, Pantha, Bumblebee and Ladyhawk; or had Blaxploitation elements, like Misty Knight and Monica Rambeau, who were modeled on actor Pam Grier (see Brown 2013; Svitavsky 2013). Asian female superheroes were usually martial arts experts with swords, like Colleen Wing, Psylocke and Katana. A panel from Power Man and Iron Fist #66 from 1980 displays two of these tropes at once (Fig. 1.2): Misty Knight’s depiction embodies the 1970s Blaxploitation film genre’s common depictions of black women as wearing tight clothing and natural hair, and as willing to use violence to bolster their tough-talking independence; Colleen Wing’s purse feminizes her somewhat, but her depiction with a sword as well as red-and-gold wrap top also mark her as both Asian and dangerous. There were not really any prominent South Asian, Middle Eastern or Latin American female characters yet, such that large swaths of the world’s women were just erased, excluded from the mainstream superhero genre. This small number of stereotypically-written female characters of color had to stand in for all women matching their demographics. They reinforced stereotypes for some, introduced them to others and fostered cognitive dissonance or opposition in readers who knew there was more to all women of color than one-note clichéd tropes.2 Readers would split in different ways in the later 1980s and 1990s, when mainstream superhero comics changed rather drastically. 2On

how reception can vary, see, e.g., Duggan (2000); Brooker (2000); Brown (2000); Hall (2003); Kellner and Durham (2012).

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Fig. 1.2   Misty Knight and Colleen Wing in Power Man and Iron Fist #66. Image credits Jo Duffy (W), Kerry Gammill (P), Ricardo Villamonte (I), Glynis Wein (C). Power Man and Iron Fist #66. 1980. Marvel Comics

The growth of the direct market of local comics shops, suburbanization, higher sticker prices, royalties based on high sales of superhero comics and a further loosening of the Comics Code in 1989 homogenized the comics fanbase— it became older, more male, more white, etc. (see, e.g., Brooker 2000; Gabilliet 2010). This coincided with a growing conservative backlash against feminist, civil rights and LGBTQ rights movements. It was also a time of progressive activism, of more intersectional Third Wave Feminism, growing diversity of comic writers and artists, underground comics and Friends of Lulu as well as the launch of Milestone Comics. Amidst those crosscutting pressures and due to the specific male creatives involved (some of whom founded Image Comics), mainstream superhero comics at this time showcased hyper-muscular male characters and hyper-sexualized female characters. The men face front, fully clothed, with a focus on their

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a­thleticism. The women are posed from the side, in skimpier clothing, with a focus on their breasts and buttocks or from the back, foregrounding their behinds as they look over their shoulders. Some readers did not distinguish what they saw as the sexiness of the female subjects from their sexualization as objects. Others saw the objectification, then read around it and against it; still others stopped reading these comics. Some loved the images and dismissed the complaints. All four reactions among fans, artists and editors are evident in interviews and letter columns. Sales, initially, rose. New books of the 1990s and into the 2000s with adult and teen female characters tended to follow this ‘Bad Girl’ style. These stories tended to fail the ‘Broke Back’ test, the ‘Sexy Lamp’ test, the Bechdel test and the ‘Fridge’ test. The first is that if you can see both curves of a woman’s behind and both of her breasts at the same time, such that her back would have to be broken to hold that position, the comic fails the broke back test (see Cocca 2014). The second, coined by comics writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, is that when a female character is so superfluous to the action that she could be replaced with a sexy lamp and the plot would still function, a story has failed the test (see Hudson 2012). There is simply no narrative reason for either of these kinds of poses. For instance, in a panel from Fantastic Four Vol. 2 #1, Susan Storm does not speak, as the three male characters do; nor does she face front as they do (Fig. 1.3). Instead, she is posed in an unnaturally twisted position to make her curves the center and focus of the panel. She serves no purpose other than to be ‘eye candy’. Nor is there any narrative reason for failing the Bechdel-Wallace test, in which a story does not have at least two female characters who speak to one another about something other than a man (see Bechdel 1985). This is a very low bar, but most superhero works fail it. The fourth test stems from the phrase ‘women in refrigerators,’ as coined by comics writer Gail Simone, and refers to the terrible angst suffered by Green Lantern when he opened his refrigerator to find his dead girlfriend in it. This is about female characters being made the targets of violence, especially sexualized violence, such that the plot of the story then explores that violence’s effect on male characters (see Simone 1999). All four of these tests show very quickly that decades of superhero media have centered men, while women are often just window-dressing. The underrepresentation, stereotyping, exoticization, sexualization, Bechdel test failures and fridgings are all narrative devices of both image and text that display women as one-dimensional objects rather than portraying them as multidimensional people. In comics, television and movies today, these narrative devices are still present.

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Fig. 1.3   ‘Sexy Lamp’ Sue Storm in Fantastic Four Vol. 2 #1. Image credits Brandon Choi and Jim Lee (W), Jim Lee (P), Scott Williams (I). Fantastic Four Vol. 2 #1. 1996. Marvel Comics

In general, comics display the most nuanced versions of female characters, while movies display the least nuanced. The people who are writing, drawing, producing or directing these types of stories are almost never women. When women aren’t telling the stories, women’s stories rarely get told, so their power is subverted. When women are in the driver’s seat, creatively, statistics show that they will hire more women to be behind the scenes, put more women in front of the camera or on the page and produce more multifaceted female characters (see Smith et al. 2015; Cocca 2016).

Female Superheroes, 2000–2010s: Increasing Diversity, Decreasing Sexualization Gail Simone started a list of ‘women in refrigerators’ because of Batgirl Barbara Gordon being shot, paralyzed, sexually assaulted and photographed by the Joker in the massively popular The Killing Joke. The story is about the effects of all of this—not on Barbara but on her father and on Batman. Then writers Kim Yale and John Ostrander, wife and husband, gave Barbara a new alter ego, Oracle, an information broker, team leader and wheelchair user. Gail Simone would write Oracle later as well.

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There are few representations of disability that are as nuanced as Oracle, and many fan letters noted as much. To some extent, though, she is written, not unlike other characters with disabilities, as a ‘super-crip’ whom everyone admires for ‘moving past’ their disability and achieving great things. She and others also tend to have a superpower or prosthesis that counterbalances the disability, like her eidetic memory, Misty Knight’s cybernetic arm or Karma’s prostheses. Adding in Cyborg and Forge’s prostheses, Daredevil’s radar-like sight and Professor X’s telepathy, a pattern begins to emerge that female and male disabled characters of color have enhancements increasing their physical strength, while white characters with professional degrees have super-mental abilities; a pattern that shores up the ‘normality’ of the white characters while presenting uncomfortable stereotypes of race. Characters with disabilities often have their disability as the main feature of their characterization, as opposed to just one aspect of it, or they have difficulty ‘accepting’ the disability, or they are usually either alone or lonely (see, e.g., Davis 2010; Garland-Thomson 1997). These same three trends can be seen historically in LGBTQIA characters: that gender/sexuality defines the character, the character struggles with their gender/sexuality, the character is often alone or lonely. Sometimes these queer or disabled bodies are drawn much differently from non-queer, non-disabled bodies—sometimes more sexualized, like some depictions of Oracle and Misty Knight; sometimes less, like Oracle drawn as just a head on most covers, or like Renee Montoya often in shapeless suits. After decades of Mystique as the only prominent female queer character, there has been an increase in the number of LBTQ female characters in comics: Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, Renee Montoya and Kate Kane/Batwoman, Anissa Pierce/Thunder and Grace Choi, Barbara Gordon’s friends Alysia and Jo, as well as America Chavez. Some of these, by queer female authors and artists, have been more nuanced portrayals that have not followed the same ‘old’ tropes. For instance, Marguerite Bennett’s DC Bombshells series, launched due to the success of a series of figurines of female superheroes as World War II-style pinups, does not just feature the female characters as something to be looked at. Rather, they are each well-drawn, detailed, independent characters who each have a chance to shine. Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, both Batman-universe antiheroes/villains who are generally quite sexualized in most mainstream depictions, here by Mirka Andolfo, wear variations on their usual clothing that are more practical but still sexy, and take their usual playful friendship to the next level as they kiss in the closing panel of DC Bombshells’ chapter 42 from 2016 (Fig. 1.4). The art is focused not on their curves, but on their emotions. Their relationship is also taken in stride by the other characters.

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Fig. 1.4   Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn in DC Bombshells. Image credits Marguerite Bennett (W), Mirka Andolfo (A), J. Nanjan (C). DC Bombshells, Chap. 42. 2016. DC Comics

There are, today, more female characters, queer characters, characters with disabilities, and racially and ethnically diverse characters, along with some diversity in personalities and a little bit in body types. The trend has accelerated due to numerous factors: changing national demographics and gains of multiple civil rights movements, the rise of social media for instant communication between fans as well as between fans and creators, more conventions enabling face-to-face interactions between fans and creators, so many superhero films and the ability to download them and tv shows and digital comics without having to leave home, bookstores and libraries carrying trade paperbacks, female comic shop workers organizing themselves as Valkyries and librarians as Valhallans, and a vocal backlash to the portrayals of the 1980–2000s by some creators and some fans (see, e.g., Duncan and Smith 2012; Johnson 2007; Lackaff and Sales 2013). Crucially, there are now more female writers, artists, and editors, who are putting out more characters written with nuance and complexity. This has reinvigorated previously-marginalized fans of comics, brought new fans to the superhero genre and inspired many as they are finally seeing heroes who actually look like themselves. But although this new diversity has gotten a lot of press, the actual scale of the change is really only on the margins, numerically. The universe of superheroes remains overwhelmingly male (white, cisgender, heterosexual, etc.),

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a disconnect that underscores the importance of quantitative work alongside qualitative (see Cocca 2014; Shendruk 2017). Only 11% of superhero tv shows airing now or in development star women (Supergirl, Jessica Jones, Batwoman and Star Girl), all of whom are white and one of whom is queer. Another 17% of the shows have ensemble casts with roughly equal numbers of women and men. Four characters on those shows are queer and several are women of color.3 Only 15% of superhero movies coming out in 2019 or in development star women (Captain Marvel, Dark Phoenix, Batgirl, Wonder Woman 2, Birds of Prey, Silver and Black, Black Widow and Kitty Pryde). It is probable that all eight will star white women. Only 9–15% of superhero comics (the number of titles varies slightly each month) star female characters. A few more co-star female and male characters in equal numbers; most titles with ensemble casts do not. About 5–9% of superhero comics are penciled by women and about 10–16% are written by women (see also Hanley 2018, 2019). As points of comparison, in 2010, about 6% of superhero comics starred female characters; in 2000, about 5%. Qualitatively, the increasing diversity is a sea change for the superhero genre. But quantitatively, the change is very, very small. Decisionmakers in the big companies may have decided that marketizing diversity is profitable but apparently only to a point. The number of fans saying that they are delighted and inspired by that diversity is clearly being taken into account, but the old conventions of the superhero genre remain.

Conclusion: Superwomen, Politics and Scholarship The old conventions are still prevalent in superhero comics because most of the same people are still working in superhero comics. They will not take blind submissions, and their social and professional circles remain small and relatively homogenous; they offer jobs to people they know in these circles. And they are looking at pushback on social media, at conventions, on podcasts and in local comic shops by ‘traditional fans’ (i.e., male, white, older, heterosexual readers who frequented local comic shops in the 1990–2000s). These people

3Statistics

in this as well as the next two paragraphs compiled by the author for all months of 2000, 2010 and 2018 plus January and February 2019 from various sources, for a total of 35 television shows, 53 movies and roughly 150 comics per month.

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decry diversification and inclusion of new creators and new characters as ‘political,’ as bringing unwanted politics into their comics, without recognizing that the decades of people like them being vastly overrepresented as creators and as superheroes was just as political. They are so used to discrimination, marginalization, exclusion and its repetition across decades that it seems ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ to them. But there is nothing ‘natural’ about the numerical imbalances, different relationships to the plot, non-diverse and stereotypical portrayals, and objectification of female characters versus male characters. The lack of women and especially women of color and women with disabilities and queer women in rooms in real life where big decisions are being made, and the devaluing and sidelining and objectification of women when they are present, feels ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ because we have seen that over and over again for so long too. But it is not. And we have the power to make change in this area. Representations of superwomen are one of the many places we can see the inequalities of our world. But representations are changeable, and social, political and economic inequalities are changeable too. Fictional characters can perpetuate ‘traditional’ ideas about gender, sexuality, race and disability that justify devaluing people and discriminating against them, or they can subvert those stereotypes in ways that empower those who have been marginalized because of them. Underrepresented groups need to see heroes and leaders that look like them so they can more easily imagine themselves as heroes and leaders. And overrepresented groups need to see heroes and leaders who do not look like them, so they can see that heroes come in all genders, races, ethnicities, sexualities and abilities. We need to interrogate cultural norms about privileged bodies and cultural stereotypes of non-privileged bodies; disrupt the repetition of sexist, heterosexist, racist and ableist images and tropes; and push for the production of media that authentically represents a spectrum of humanity. We need to make more space for new and more equitable possibilities. So let’s get down into the gutters, and over to the margins, and get to work. Acknowledgements  This essay draws from my Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation (2016) and my keynote presentation at ComFor 2018, “Spaces Between— Gender, Diversity, and Identity in Comics.” It updates and extends that work.

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Bibliography Bechdel, Alison. 1985. The rule. Dykes to watch out for. http://dykestowatchoutfor.com/ the-rule. Accessed: 18.03.2019. Brooker, Will. 2000. Batman unmasked: Analyzing a cultural icon. London: Continuum. Brown, Jeffrey. 2000. Black superheroes, milestone comics, and their fans. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Brown, Jeffrey. 2013. Panthers and vixens: Black superheroines, sexuality, and stereotypes in contemporary comic books. In Black comics: Politics of race and representation, ed. Sheena Howard and Ronald Jackson II, 133–150. London: Bloomsbury. Cocca, Carolyn. 2014. The broke back test: A quantitative and qualitative analysis of portrayals of women in mainstream superhero comics, 1993–2013. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5 (4): 411–428. Cocca, Carolyn. 2016. Superwomen: Gender, power, and representation. New York: Bloomsbury. Comics Magazine Association of America. 1954. The comics code of 1954. Comic book legal defense fund. http://cbldf.org/the-comics-code-of-1954/. Accessed: 18.03.2019. Darowski, Joseph. 2014. X-Men and the Mutant Metaphor: Race and gender in the comic books. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Davis, Lennard J. (ed.). 2010. The disability studies reader, 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Duggan, Lisa. 2000. Sapphic slashers: Sex, violence, and American modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Duncan, Randy, and Matthew Smith (eds.). 2012. The power of comics: History, form and culture, 2nd ed. New York: Continuum. Fox, Gardner (W), and Gil Kane (A). 1968. Detective comics 371: “Batgirl’s Costume ­Cut-ups”. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. 2010. Of comics and men: A cultural history of comic books, trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997. Extraordinary bodies: Figuring disability in American culture and literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Hall, Stuart (ed.). 2003. Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage. Hanley, Tim. 2018. Gendercrunching quarterly, Winter 2018: DC and marvel comics. Bleeding Cool. 27.04.2018. https://www.bleedingcool.com/2018/04/17/gendercrunching-quarterly-winter-2018-dc-and-marvel-comics/. Accessed: 18.03.2019. Hanley, Tim. 2019. Women in comics, by the numbers: Summer and fall 2018. The Beat. 15.02.2019. https://www.comicsbeat.com/women-in-comics-by-the-numbers-summerand-fall-2018/. Accessed: 18.03.2019. Helford, Elyce Rae. 2000. Introduction. In Fantasy girls: Gender in the new universe of science fiction and fantasy television, ed. Elyce Rae Helford, 1–9. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. hooks, bell. 1992. Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press. Hudson, Laura. 2012. Kelly Sue DeConnick on the evolution of Carol Danvers to Captain Marvel [Interview]. Comics Alliance. 19.03.2012. http://comicsalliance.com/kelly-suedeconnick-captain-marvel/?trackback=tsmclip. Accessed: 18.03.2019.

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Johnson, Derek. 2007. Fan-tagonism: Factions, institutions, and constitutive hegemonies of fandom. In Fandom: Identities and communities in a mediated world, ed. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 285–300. New York: New York University Press. Kellner, Douglas, and Meenakshi Gigi Durham. 2012. Introduction. In Media and cultural studies: Keyworks, ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner, 2nd ed., 1–26. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Lackaff, Derek, and Michael Sales. 2013. Black comics and social media economics: New media, new production models. In Black comics: Politics of race and representation, ed. Sheena Howard and Ronald Jackson II, 65–78. London: Bloomsbury. Madrid, Mike. 2009. The supergirls: Fashion, feminism, fantasy, and the history of comic book heroines. Minneapolis: Exterminating Angel Press. Marston, William Moulton (W), and Harry G. Peter (A). 1945. Wonder woman 13: “The Icebound Maidens”. McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York: New York University Press. O’Neil, Dennis (W), and Mike Sekowsky (A). 1968. Wonder woman 179: “Wonder Woman’s Last Battle”. Shendruk, Amanda. 2017. Analyzing the gender representation of 34,476 comic book characters. The pudding. July 2017. https://pudding.cool/2017/07/comics/?ex_cid=SigDig. Accessed: 18.03.2019. Simone, Gail. 1999. Women in refrigerators. http://lby3.com/wir/. Accessed: 18.03.2019. Smith, Stacy et al. 2015. Inequality in 700 popular films: Examining portrayals of gender, race, & lgbt status from 2007 to 2014. Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at University of Southern California: http://annenberg.usc.edu/pages/~/media/ MDSCI/Inequality%20in%20700%20Popular%20Films%2081415.ashx. Accessed: 18.03.2019. Svitavsky, William. 2013. Race, superheroes, and identity: ‘Did you know he was black?’. In Ages of heroes, eras of men: Superheroes and the American experience, ed. Julian Chambliss et al., 153–162. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Tuchman, Gaye. 1978. Introduction: Symbolic annihilation of women in the mass media. In Hearth and home: Images of women in mass media, ed. Gaye Tuchman et al., 3–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Gendered Violence and Structures of Power. Reclaiming the Victim Narrative in the Netflix Show Marvel’s Jessica Jones Juliane Blank

Abstract

Among the numerous comic books adapted for the screen is the lesser-known Jessica Jones: Alias (Marvel’s Max imprint, 2001–2004). In the context of the Marvel Studios’ marginalisation of female characters, Netflix’ decision for a show focusing on the struggles of a female protagonist is complementary to the dominating narrative of the male superhero. Furthermore, showrunner Melissa Rosenberg chose to adapt only one of the comic books’ story arc, albeit expanded over thirteen episodes of the first series of Marvel’s Jessica Jones (2015). The result was a ‘dark’ and ‘real’ Netflix show that, in a very ‘grounded’ tone, addresses the issue of rape, psychological abuse and its survival. By visualising the objectification, abuse and silencing of women in today’s culture, the Netflix show provides an ‘update’ of the comic book series that connects the (potentially fantastic) superhero narrative to the real world. Furthermore, the ‘update’ introduces the issue of both gendered violence as well as disempowerment into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, thus contributing to overcoming the trope of the female victim in the superhero genre. But instead of just unmasking systematic misogyny and the rhetoric of abuse, the Netflix show also explores strategies of re-empowerment by addressing the question of who controls the narrative and enabling the protagonist to become the heroine of her own story—even if she struggles with that label.

J. Blank (*)  Saarbrücken, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_2

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Keywords

Abuse · Adaptation · Agency · ­Counter-narrative · Disempowerment · Gender ·  Marvel cinematic universe · Power · Rape · Superheroine · Victimisation

It is a well-known, yet still less-researched fact that female characters have often been objectified and disempowered in the superhero genre. In 1999, comic book writer Gail Simone created a website listing female characters in superhero comics who have been “either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator” (Simone 1994).1 Violence against women has often been used as a mere plot device that enabled the telling of the (male) hero’s story affected by these events. On a larger scale, the victimisation of female characters contributes to a stereotypical representation of gender in the superhero genre. In her study Superwomen (2016), Carolyn Cocca argues that film and television adaptations of superhero narratives have often perpetuated, if not intensified, conventions of representing gender and sexuality. One may almost come to the conclusion that blockbuster films about superhero teams like the X-Men or the Avengers have occasionally ‘taken back’ some of the changes in superhero comics concerning empowerment and independence of female characters (see Cocca 2016, pp. 149–51). Superheroines have frequently been marginalised, objectified and victimised in the big film franchises produced by Marvel Studios.2 By 2019, there have only been two films based on Marvel superhero comic books with a female lead: Elektra (2005) and Captain Marvel (2019).3 On the small screen, however, comic book

1The

website’s title Women in Refrigerators, which has come to denote the trope of the female victim in the superhero genre, refers to #54 (1994) of Green Lantern, in which the hero discovers his girlfriend’s body, who has been killed by the villain in order to hurt Green Lantern, in his refrigerator (Simone 1994). 2The most popular products in the field of Marvel adaptations are undoubtedly the blockbuster films from the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). It was introduced to the screen in 2008 with the release of Iron man and has concluded its third ‘phase’ with Avengers: Endgame (2019). For the structure of the MCU, (see Vignold 2017, p. 65). 3Elektra was not particularly well-received. It is interesting, however, that many viewers blamed the film’s deficits on the hero’s gender, arguing that it was a ‘bad movie’ because female superheroes are just not convincing—a fate that it shares with its DC counterpart Catwoman (2004). As Cocca points out, the assumption of a link between the lack in aesthetic quality and the protagonist’s gender is pure bias, since it has never been made about superhero films with a male lead (see Cocca 2016, p. 11). With regard to the heroines in

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s­ uperheroines have been more present in the last few years.4 When Marvel Studios made a deal with the media provider Netflix in 2013,5 the second show to be realised focused on a broken superheroine named Jessica Jones who was introduced in the comic book series Jessica Jones: Alias (Bendis and Gaydos 2001– 2004, in the following: Alias). Furthermore, the Netflix show Marvel’s Jessica Jones (in the following: Jessica Jones) tries to critique and overcome conventions of disempowerment, focusing on the theme of gendered violence and abuse. In this the show serves as a modernisation of the superhero genreʼs narratives about structures of gender and power.

Jessica Jones as an Adaptation of the Comic Book Serial Alias This essay will focus on the first series of Jessica Jones, released on Netflix in 2015. It has been met with wide approval by both critics and viewers. Starring Krysten Ritter as the failed superheroine Jessica Jones and David Tennant as her nemesis Kilgrave, the show is part of a franchise of Netflix shows6 that revolved

the Avengers franchise, fans and critics have discussed the need for a film led by Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff (aka Black Widow) for years. Captain Marvel (aka Carol Danvers) is the last hero to be introduced into the MCU before the finale of the Avengers franchise, which may be due to the critique Marvel Studios faced for marginalising superheroines. Yet it also has to be acknowledged that Marvel’s rival DC had already had a major success with a superheroine as a part of a film franchise: Wonder Woman was released in (2017) after the heroine was introduced in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) and thus integrated in the DC Justice League franchise. 4To name just a few: Marvel’s Agent Carter (ABC, 2015‒2016); Supergirl (CBS 2015, The CW 2017‒present); The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Netflix 2018‒present). 5Netflix started out as an online DVD rental service in 1999, but has been expanding its range continually since then, using the technology of online video streaming. In 2013, Netflix has begun to produce original shows (e.g. House of Cards and Orange is the New Black). 6I use the term ‘Netflix show’ to stress the differences to traditional network TV shows. Although Netflix shows are similar in terms of their structure, they have a different form of reception in mind. By releasing all of one series’ episodes at once, Netflix encourages a viewing habit often referred to as binge-watching (i.e. watching several episodes of one show in a row) (see Nesselhauf and Schleich 2016, p. 210). In view of the non-linear content organisation, the non-‘live’ character of its broadcasting system and the change in viewing practises, it has been questioned whether Netflix can be called television at all (see Jenner 2018, p. 4).

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around the members of the superhero team The Defenders. It was aired between 2015 and 2019.7 In contrast to other Marvel superhero teams in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) who protect the earth (and the galaxy) from supernatural threats, the Defenders operate on Manhattan’s “street level” (Vignold 2017, p. 111). All the Netflix Marvel shows are connected to the MCU and repeatedly refer to the events narrated in the films of the multilinear “Hyperserie” [hyperserial] (Vignold 2017, p. 64) of the Avengers franchise,8 yet do not interact with them.9 Each member (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist) had their own show while also appearing in the ­team-up Marvelʼs The Defenders (2017) as well as in some of the shows focusing on other members.10 As comic book adaptations, the Netflix Marvel shows do not primarily focus on a specific story or even a storyworld.11 Instead, this serial format supports the in-depth exploration of a superhero character (see Reinhard and Olson 2018, pp. 96–97) as well as the personal, social and political issues shaping them. ­Jessica Jones, for example, explores the complex character of a physically powerful woman who has experienced sexual violence and systematic disempowerment. In fact, the possibility of writing a “really damaged, complex female superhero”

7By

February 2019, all of the Netflix Marvel shows have been discontinued, although JesJones did return for one last series in autumn of 2019, as Jeph Loeb, head of Marvel Television, explained in a letter to fans (see Loeb 2019). 8The MCU is a complex serial structure, in which “various franchises are established as series within the series”. The films revolving around Captain America, for example, form a franchise that complements the other Avengers films and frequently overlaps with them (Vignold 2017, p. 64). 9Vignold points out that the Netflix show Daredevil includes references to the attack of the Chitauri on New York featured in The Avengers (2012) (see Vignold 2017, p. 111). In Jessica Jones, several characters use the euphemistic term ‘the incident’ to refer to the battle of New York. In fact, the issue of prejudice against ‘gifted’ people is explicitly connected to the aftermath of the battle: In Episode 4, one of Jessica Jones’s clients actually seeks revenge for her mother’s death in the attack (Jessica Jones, S1 E4: AKA 99 Friends). 10For example, Luke Cage was established as Jessica Jones’ love interest in series 1 of the latter show (aired 2015). Frank Castle (aka The Punisher), on the other hand, was the antagonist in the Daredevil’s second series (aired in 2016) before becoming the hero of the spin-off The Punisher (2017‒2019). 11Linda Hutcheon has suggested that establishing and exploring storyworlds is one of the main principles of recent adaptation phenomena of film franchises like the MCU (Hutcheon 2013, p. xxiv). The concept of a storyworld-oriented adaptation is different from the notion of adaptation as the transformation of “a single, fixed, recognizable story” (Hutcheon 2013, p. xxiii), which has dominated adaptation studies for years. sica

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(D’Alessandro 2016) initially drew showrunner Melissa Rosenberg to the comic book serial Alias.12 Alias was created by Brian Michael Bendis (writer) and Michael Gaydos (artist) as an R-rated comic book with Marvel’s Max imprint and ran from 2001 to 2004 for 18 issues. The protagonist Jessica Jones is a has-been superhero who has failed as a costumed vigilante. She now uses her accident-induced super strength and her ability to jump really high (which sometimes seems like flying) in her new occupation as neo-noir private investigator, involuntarily specializing in “superhuman cases” (Bendis and Gaydos 2015, n. p.), as the backcover of the first Alias collective volume emphasises. She is a heavy drinker, smoker and swearer with a bad temper, she lives and works alone, but engages in sexual relations with multiple male partners. The last story arc of Alias (Purple 1–5, #24–28) uncovers Jessica’s back story, which in the superhero genre is often used to shed light on the character’s motivation. As a costumed vigilante with the alias Jewel, Jessica was abducted by the mind-controlling villain Killgrave (aka Purple Man). He kept her as a slave for eight months (“I lay at his feet. /I slept on his floor. /I bathed him”; Bendis, Gaydos et al. 2015, #25, n. p.), but also used her physical powers as a weapon against other antagonising superheroes: “he was doing this to me for every fucking time Daredevil beat the shit out of him” (Bendis, Gaydos et al. 2015, #25, n. p.). After being sent out to kill Daredevil, she finally escapes Killgrave’s influence, only to be beaten up by the Avengers, who did not know about the mind control. As a result from this experience’s physical and emotional strain, she fell into a coma and could only be brought back by Jean Grey, a member of the X-Men. After her recovery, Jessica was offered a job with S.H.I.E.L.D., but refused as she thought she did not have “what it takes” (Bendis, Gaydos et al. 2015, #26, n. p.). On the surface, this storyline seems to comply with the traditional narrative of the abused, injured and disempowered female victim, and thus seems to maintain the typical ‘Women in Refrigerators’ trope of the superhero genre. Yet in some respect, Alias is trying to overcome the gendered stereotypes of the superhero genre’s conventions of narrating abuse and disempowerment. Anna F. Peppard argues that Alias “compellingly redresses the superhero genre’s conventional marginalization and victimization of female characters by emphasizing Jessica’s

12Melissa Rosenberg is a renowned screenwriter known for the Twilight franchise and the Showtime production Dexter (2006‒2013). She originally began working on a first draft for a Jessica Jones script for the network ABC in 2010, but restructured and rewrote it after its move to Netflix (see Schneider 2010).

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complex subjectivity as well as implicating male superheroes and superhero comics’ sexist conventions in her multifaceted abuse” (Peppard 2018, p. 158). The last story arc in Alias demonstrates that, despite her traumatic past, the protagonist is not a damsel in distress and does not need saving. Although Killgrave manages to abduct her again after his escape from prison, Jessica finds herself immune to his powers—thanks to Jean Grey—and can finally defeat him. Yet the Alias serial does not end with Jessica’s triumph over Killgrave, but rather concludes with a more conventional, heteronormative female role. After she has defeated Killgrave, she confesses to her on-and-off lover Luke Cage (aka Power Man) that she is pregnant with his child. They declare their feelings for each other, decide to enter into a monogamous relationship and raise the child together.13 With respect to the representation of superheroines and especially to the depiction of sexual abuse, it is potentially problematic that this conclusion presents motherhood as a “solution to Jessica’s gendered trauma” (Peppard 2018, p. 172). That the character’s finished development is shown by her ability to engage in a relationship and have a baby seems to have been unsatisfactory to Rosenberg, who decided not to use the theme of motherhood for her reinvention of the traumatised superhero in series 1 of Jessica Jones. As I will illustrate in this essay, Jessica Jones is an ‘update’, or even a “corrective” (Johnson 2018, p. 133) of the victim narrative in Alias, and it does so with a keen eye for recent debates on structures of gender and power. With the format of a “13-hour movie” (D’Alessandro 2016) that Netflix shows provide and picking up the ‘gritty’ aesthetics and dark tone of other Netflix Marvel shows like Daredevil (see Itzkoff 2015; Vignold 2017, p. 112), it sets out to re-think the world of Marvel superheroes from the perspective of a woman with power(s) that will— one could almost say, inevitably—be taken away from her.14

13Jessica’s

relationship to Luke Cage is one of the main story lines in Alias. In sequels of the comic book serial (e.g. The Pulse, 2004‒2006) and other comic books continuing the story of the character (e.g. New Avengers, 2010‒2013), Jessica’s identity as the mother of a little girl and, later, Luke Cage’s wife, is explored further and becomes one of the main motivations for her activities as a superhero. In the relaunched comic book serial Jessica Jones (2016‒2018), however, Bendis and Gaydos have found a way to move the character past the restrictions of family life (see also Peppard 2018, pp. 174–175). 14O’Reilly points out that the agency of superheroines is repeatedly put on trial, which often includes stripping them of their powers (O’Reilly 2005, p. 280). Cocca also mentions the motif of losing powers or having them removed (Cocca 2016, pp. 32–33, 127).

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Representation of Abuse in Jessica Jones and Alias Rosenberg decided to dedicate the entire first series of Jessica Jones to the Kilgrave15 story arc, trying to present it in a more “grounded” and “real” (Hill 2015b) tone. This includes a very concrete form of showing abuse suffered by the protagonist. In the comic books Killgrave’s main method of torture is an extravagant form of sexualized humiliation: although the protagonist herself insists that Killgrave did not rape her, the abuse is clearly sexualized and gendered (see Peppard 2018, p. 164). He dresses and undresses her like a doll, makes her watch him in various (probably forced) sexual scenarios, and controls her desires in order for her to beg him to have sex with her (see Bendis, Gaydos et al. 2015, #25, n. p.). In avoiding the rape trope, the creators of Alias probably meant to take a stand against the objectification and victimisation of female characters. Yet one could argue that by showing Jessica Jones in a schoolgirl costume and in a state of undress (Fig. 2.1), they at least visually preserve the depiction of female ­characters as sexual objects. Furthermore, the panel does not only show Killgrave and Jessica, but also two other women who are (visually) treated as ‘sex objects’. The panel is part of issue #25 of Alias which deals entirely with Jessica’s abduction and abuse by Killgrave. The flashback is integrated into a dialogue between Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. The two narrative levels are presented in very different styles: Whereas the present is shown with a raw and edgy drawing style, Bendis uses a more flashy style for Jessica’s past. Drawing and colour palette are reminiscent of the style of 1990s superhero comic books, including the sexualised depiction of the female body (see Edmunds 2014, p. 91). The panel shows Killgrave and Jessica Jones in his fancy hotel room, where he enjoys “a hell of a life [in which] anyone does whatever [he] want[s]” (Bendis, Gaydos et al. 2015, #25, n. p.). Apparently this includes a lot of money and the company of three (half-)naked women who, judging from Jessica’s dazed look, have been mind-controlled and did not consent to being undressed. Killgrave does not engage with any of the women, but rather shouts at Jessica angrily after reading a newspaper article on Daredevil saving the city. Meanwhile, two naked women keep writhing on the bed covered in bank notes. The panel illustrates Killgrave’s very specific method of sexual denigration: As Jessica relates

15The

Netflix show uses a different spelling of the antagonist’s name. Accordingly, the name ‘Kilgrave’ refers to the character in the show while the comic book villain is spelled ‘Killgrave’.

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Fig. 2.1   Killgrave controlling Jessica Jones in Alias #25. Image credits Bendis, Brian Michael (W), Michael Gaydos (A) et al. Jessica Jones: Alias. Vol. 4 (#22–28). 2015. New York: Marvel Comics

to Luke Cage, Killgrave included Jessica Jones in his sexual relations with (i.e. abuse of) female college students he would “pull off the streets” (Bendis, Gaydos et al. 2015, #25, n. p.), by making her watch them. In this panel it seems as if he used the two women in the background to create some kind of live-action porn scenario, yet he did not bother to ‘turn it off’ when he received the upsetting news about Daredevil’s triumph. This way the panel’s background tells us even more about Killgrave’s objectification of women than Jessica’s verbal narration of her experience. The panel I have just discussed illustrates Jessica Jones’ very specific experience as a victim of sexualised humiliation, but not of rape, as it is presented in the comic books. One could argue that Bendis’ and Gaydos’ insistence on the character not having been raped almost suggests that ‘the worst’ did not happen, and that there is no need to address the extent of Jessica’s sexualised trauma. Despite the subversive intentions of Alias, feminist critics have compared this treatment of abuse to the silencing of women’s experiences in popular media (see Johnson 2018, pp. 135–136). The Netflix show, on the other hand, is very clear about the fact that Kilgrave physically raped Jessica Jones many times, but it does not show the event itself. In an interview, Rosenberg states:

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With rape, I think we all know what that looks like. We’ve seen plenty of it on television and I didn’t have any need to see it, but I wanted to experience the damage that it does. I wanted the audience to really viscerally feel the scars that it leaves. It was not important to me, on any level, to actually see it. TV has plenty of that, way too often, used as titillation, which is horrifying (Hill 2015b).

Instead of visualising what happened to Jessica, the show confronts us with the effects of gendered violence. Thus, the protagonist is presented as a survivor struggling for agency, not as a passive victim whose story is defined by what someone has done to her.16 During the first ten minutes of the first episode, it becomes obvious that the protagonist is haunted by a trauma: While she is out on a job, she closes her eyes for a minute. Kilgrave’s shadow intrudes almost immediately into the rather intimate frame of the close-up and whispers into her ear: “You want to do it. You know you do” (S01, E01, 00:09). She snaps out of it, apparently distressed, and starts reciting street names—an anchoring technique used in the treatment of PTSD patients (see Asher-Perrin 2018). In this way, the show ‘proves’ to us that she is traumatised—without turning it into a spectacle. In the comic books Jessica talks about the abuse experience only in hushed tones and as a confession of her “big secret” (Bendis, Gaydos et al. 2015, #25, n. p.), hanging her head in shame. In the Netflix show, however, there are several scenes in which she directly confronts Kilgrave with his actions, choosing to be angry instead of ashamed.17 In these confrontations she insists on her definition of what happened while Kilgrave refuses to acknowledge his guilt:

16Sanyal

comments on the terminological difference between survivor and victim: “To get away from the idea of the victim as being ultimately destroyed, the term survivor was adopted in the 1990s. The aim was to turn the person who’d experienced sexual violence from a passive victim into an active survivor: She survives (active). Versus: She is being victimised (passive)” (Sanyal 2019, p. 75). 17In the second series of Jessica Jones, anger becomes a central issue. Contrasting Jessica with her even more superpowered, but r­age-driven mother Alisa, the show explores the thin line between justified anger and uncontrollable rage. In recent political debates on structures of gender and power like the #MeToo movement, anger has been discussed as a productive tool for activism. Laurie Penny, for example, states: “Anger can be a tool as well as a weapon, and it’s a tool we shouldn’t let rust away and never learn to use” (Penny 2017). The recent revaluation of this ‘tool’ in the context of gender hierarchies is particularly interesting, since anger is an emotion that is traditionally constructed as ‘unfeminine’ (see Kring 2000, p. 211).

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J. Blank J: It’s called rape. K: What? Which part of staying in five-star hotels, eating in all the best places, doing whatever the hell you wanted, is rape? J: The part where I didn’t want to do any of it! (S01, E08, 00:28–00:29)18

By addressing the question of agency, i.e. the power to determine one’s own actions, Jessica insists that rape must be discussed in the context of power, and not in the context of sex,19 or even love, as Kilgrave repeatedly suggests. It is part of the show’s ‘grounded’ tone that the experience of being controlled and abused is not presented as something that could only happen in the fantastic world of superheroes, but as something that happens in our day-to-day world. Reinhard and Olson argue that Kilgrave’s mind control, fantastic as it may be, can be read as a social allegory that “reflects the experiences that many women around the world have faced after being raped and made to feel as though they have no agency in their own lives” (Reinhard and Olson 2018, p. 88). By avoiding the depiction of the act of rape itself and focusing instead on the struggles of a rape survivor who fights for agency in her own life, the show moves past the trope of the female victim.

Disempowerment and Reclaiming the Narrative in Jessica Jones In contrast to the Alias comic book serial, the Netflix show Jessica Jones does not treat Jessicaʼs back story as something exceptional,20 but rather insists on the ubiquity of gendered depowerment and abuse. It pays close attention to the everyday dynamics of abuse that do not only haunt Jessicaʼs past, but also dominate the present. Accordingly the show seems to add a different, more ‘real’ form of power

18In

the following, I am using the subtitles provided on the DVD as a source for my transcription of the dialogue. 19While rape was widely considered as a form of sex until the 1970s, it has since been discussed to what extent rape can be considered primarily as an abuse of power and/or a form of (sexualised) violence (see e.g. Sanyal 2019, pp. 22‒29). 20In fact, the Netflix show multiplies the abuse experience by introducing another Kilgrave victim, the college student Hope Shlottman. It is her demise that motivates Jessica to take up the fight against Kilgrave, even though she initially wanted to avoid any confrontation after she had realised he was back.

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narrative to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One of the motifs that viewers and critics have praised as painfully ‘real’ is Kilgrave’s objectification of women that reflects gendered power hierarchies in modern society. For example, he repeatedly orders Jessica and other women to ‘smile’ until their faces hurt,21 because he feels entitled to seeing a ‘pretty face’ whenever he wants to. Throughout the first series, the theme of gendered objectification and disempowerment is central to the constellation of protagonist and antagonist. During the 13 episodes, Kilgrave tries to get Jessica to ‘come back’ to him by means of extortion disguised as courtship, threatening to hurt innocent people. Kilgrave treats Jessica as an object of his desire, a ‘thing’ whose possession he feels entitled to.22 Although the first series of Jessica Jones aired several months before the allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein became public, the show has been discussed as a contribution to the #MeToo movement (see Press 2018; Bitran 2018) due to its exploration of the dynamics and rhetoric of structural misogyny as well as the abuse in painful detail.23 Although Kilgrave is presented as a fantastic super villain who uses mind control to abuse his victims, he also shows great aptitude for every-day, very real techniques of disempowering and silencing women. One of these techniques is Kilgrave’s use of the power of narrative. Being an expert in diminishing his victim’s ability to differentiate between consensual and non-consensual situations, he repeatedly tries to overwrite Jessica’s story of abuse. He systematically undermines Jessica’s grip on reality, trying to unsettle her—a strategy that is known as ‘gaslighting’ (see Moulding 2016, p. 85; ­Asher-Perrin 2018). In Kilgrave’s version of reality that he presents in public and in confrontations with Jessica, he acts out of “eternal love” (S01, E07, 00:43),

21Kilgraveʼs

catch phrase ‘Smile’ is thrown back at him in a moment of poetic justice when Jessica breaks his neck in the last episode (S01, E13, 00:42:05). Kilgraveʼs use of the phrase has also been discussed in a context of harassment and toxic masculinity (see Hill 2015a). 22In fact, Kilgrave seems to be unable to differentiate between a person and a thing, making it clear that Jessica is very much an object of his desire when he tells her “You are the first thing, excuse me, person I ever wanted that walked away from me” (S01, E07; 00:44). 23The second series dives even deeper into the issue of gendered power hierarchies and abuse. The story of Jessicaʼs foster sister and best friend Trish Walker seems to echo the experiences of numerous Weinstein victims: as a teen star and aspiring actress she found herself at the hands of an older producer who exploited his powerful position in the business. Being confronted by the adult Trish, the producer refuses to acknowledge his responsibility, claiming that the 15-year-old girl had initiated the relationship.

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claiming her as the other half of a power(ed) couple that is meant to be. His tale is one of star-crossed lovers; hers is one of systematic abuse and mind control. This is a classic case of ‘she said—he said’24 and as such represents a fight about the power of discourse and the sovereignty of interpretation. In episode 10, the Netflix show convincingly visualises this fight for the power of discourse. The scene simultaneously explores Jessica’s possibilities to take back power by challenging Kilgrave’s narrative and establishing a counter-narrative. After she has unsuccessfully tried several times to catch him and get him to confess his crimes, Kilgrave comes to Jessicaʼs apartment to make a deal. The situation quickly turns into a negotiation on the terms of their ‘history’: 18 seconds in which Kilgrave claims he did not control Jessica. Yet we are presented with two slightly different accounts of what happened25 and two different interpretations of Jessica not managing to escape his control. Cutting back and forth between the past and the present, we first get to see Kilgrave’s version: they are drinking wine on a sunny rooftop terrace, he strokes her hair, she smiles at him and they kiss (Fig. 2.2). The scene reads like a depiction of intimacy and togetherness, but we can deduct from the scene’s colour scheme that something is wrong. The colour palette in Jessica’s scenes mostly consists of blue, grey and greenish tones. Suddenly seeing her in dazzling sunlight as well as in a bright yellow dress (see for example Fig. 2.3b) will inevitably make the viewer suspect that this is not ‘her’. Kilgrave comments: “It had been twelve hours. I timed it. I hadn’t told you to do anything. […] And then for 18 seconds, I wasn’t controlling you. And you stayed with me. With me, because

24Sanyal

also stresses: “it is very often word against word in rape cases, the hearing of evidence tends to center on the victim and their conduct” (Sanyal 2019, p. 167). 25Their first encounter and, presumably, the beginning of the abuse, is also presented from two different perspectives. A retrospective scene in episode 5 depicts how Jessica saves her future neighbour and employee Malcolm Ducasse from an assault, when Kilgrave happens to come along. He commands Jessica to come with him (S01, E5, 00:36‒00:38). In episode 9, the show comes back to this encounter: Jessica has kidnapped Kilgrave and imprisoned him in a hermetically sealed room, making it impossible for him to use his pheromonebased power of mind control. She tries to get him to confess, but he insists on talking about ‘them’ as if they were actually in love. When she orders him to “start at the beginning”, he goes back to their first encounter and presents it as a romantic one: “It was a cold, clear night, when I came across a young beauty being savagely attacked down a dark alley. I saved you, dried your tears, fed you dinner, and later we made sweet, sweet love” (S01, E09, 00:03‒00:04). The last phrase, a gross misrepresentation of the act of rape, triggers a violent response in Jessica: she hits a switch and he receives an electric shock that knocks him out.

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Fig. 2.2   Kilgrave’s version. Image credits AKA 1000 Cuts. (2015). Marvel’s Jessica Jones, S01, E10. Netflix. 00:26

Fig. 2.3a, b   Jessica’s version. Image credits AKA 1000 Cuts. (2015). Marvel’s Jessica Jones, S01, E10. Netflix. 00:27

you wanted to” (S01, E10, 26:55). His memory confirms his story of love, with Jessica acting her part. In her memory, however, we can see that she is in fact only acting and, what is more, acting against her will. Her face and body language contradict Kilgrave’s narrative of care and togetherness (Fig. 2.3a and b). She evades his kiss and her fake smile fades away as soon as he steps inside the house. She goes to the edge of the terrace and looks down into the empty street. In a sequence that is marked as a daydream or hallucination by blurring the edges of the frame,26 a white horse

26For

visual markers of unreliable narration in films see (Helbig 2006, p. 170).

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appears. She jumps down, landing softly on the floor, gets on the horse and rides away (see S01, E10, 28:04–29:04). Then she suddenly snaps out of the daydream, only to realise that she did not jump. When Kilgrave calls her to step away from the edge, she tries to move her foot in the other direction, but is apparently unable to resist his command. Kilgrave refuses Jessica’s version and insists that she did not escape because she wanted to stay with him. Jessica, on the other hand, stresses the psychological effects of mind control and abuse: “Getting you out of my head was like prying fungus from a window. I couldn’t think” (S01, E10, 29:17). In the following, the visual narration of the show sets out to prove that Kilgrave indeed just “saw what [he] wanted to see” (S01, E10, 29:24), as Jessica claims. In another flashback, we are confronted with the unsettling end of the scene that Kilgrave had claimed to be a romantic date. When Jessica does not immediately obey his command to come inside, he hands her a knife and orders her to cut off her ears (“If you can’t listen to me, you don’t need ears”; S01 E10, 29:53), but then steps in at the last minute to ‘save’ her. He takes her in his arms and whispers: “It’s all right. I’m here, Jessica. I’ll always be here” (S01, E10, 30:14). What is usually a comfort turns into a threat here, not least because Jessica does not respond to his embrace, but remains limp and looks frightened. But episode 10 does not only present different accounts of what happened; it also offers final ‘proof’ of her correct memory. Jessica shows Kilgrave the scar behind her ear and demands him to admit to the truth. When he reaches out to touch the scar, she punches him unconscious, thus enforcing her right to not be touched without her consent. Although Kilgrave protests Jessica’s counter-narrative and tries to take back control over the story (“what revisionist bullshit!”, S01, E10, 29:11), Jessica succeeds in overpowering him—first with words, or rather: images, then with her fist. Jessica’s memory does not only eclipse Kilgrave’s memory by sheer length; her version can also be proven by the scar behind her ear. In this way, the show supports the victim’s counter-narrative and visually unmasks and then punishes the use of strategies of disempowerment.

Conclusion In presenting the protagonist’s experience of abuse as an experience that is embedded in everyday culture as well as its structures of gender and power, the Netflix show Jessica Jones presents an ‘update’ of the already potentially subversive comic book serial Alias. At the same time, showrunner Melissa Rosenberg introduces recent political debates on gender and power into the superhero genre

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and its cinematic representation in the MCU. Jessica Jones is part of the Marvel Universe, but also confronts the superhero genre with its history of disempowering female characters. As I have illustrated in my essay, the show pays close attention to the dynamics and rhetoric of abuse, especially the power of narrative, or rather: narratives. It presents a female character who does not remain disempowered, but challenges her status as a victim by creating a counter-narrative—in which she is the survivor and the heroine of her own story. In this way, the Netflix show itself works as a counter-narrative to the gendered tropes of victimisation and disempowerment.

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Jenner, Mareike. 2018. Netflix and the reinvention of television. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Johnson, Melissa C. 2018. Jessica Jones’s feminism. AKA Alias gets a fixed-It. In Jessica Jones, scarred superhero. Essays on gender, trauma and addiction in the Netflix Series, ed. Tim Rayborn and Abigail Keyes, 133–144. Jefferson: McFarland. Kring, Ann M. 2000. Gender and anger. In Gender and emotion. Social psychological perspectives, ed. Agneta H. Fischer, 211–231 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loeb, Jeph. 2019. A letter to Marvel Television Fans from Jeph Loeb. https://www.marvel.com/articles/tv-shows/a-letter-to-marvel-television-fans-from-jeph-loeb. Accessed: 10.05.2019. Marvel’s Agent Carter. 2015–2016. Two series (created by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely). ABC. Marvel’s Daredevil. 2015–2018. Three series (created by Drew Goddard). Netflix. Marvel’s Iron Fist. 2017–2018. Two series (created by Scott Buck). Netflix. Marvel’s Jessica Jones. 2015–2019. Three series (created by Melissa Rosenberg). Netflix. Marvel’s Luke Cage. 2016–2018. Two series (created by Cheo Hodari Coker). Netflix. Marvel’s The Defenders. 2017. One series (created by Douglas Petrie and Marco Ramirez). Netflix. Marvel’s The Punisher. 2017–2019. Two series (created by Steve Lightfoot). Netflix. Moulding, Nicole. 2016. Gendered violence, mental health and recovery in everyday lives. Beyond trauma. New York: Routledge. Nesselhauf, Jonas, and Markus Schleich. 2016. Fernsehserien. Geschichte, Theorie, Narration. Tübingen: Francke. O’Reilly, Julie. 2005. The wonder woman precedent. Female (Super)Heroism on trial. The Journal of American Culture 28 (3): 273–283. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542734x.2005.00211.x. Penny, Laurie. 2017. Most women you know are angry — And that’s all right. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/women-angry-anger-laurie-penny?verso=true. Accessed: 23.11.2018. Peppard, Anna F. 2018. “I Just Want To Feel Something Different”. Re-writing abuse and drawing strength in brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’s alias. Feminist Media Histories 4 (3): 157–178. Press, Joy. 2018. The creator of ‘Jessica Jones’ serves up a dark mirror for our moment. New York Times Online, March 2, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/arts/television/jessica-jones-netflix-melissa-rosenberg.html. Accessed: 19.05.2019. Reinhard, CarrieLynn D., and Christopher J. Olson. 2018. AKA Marvel does darkness. Jessica Jones, rape allegories and the Netflix approach to superheroes. In Jessica Jones, scarred superhero. Essays on gender, trauma and addiction in the Netflix Series, ed. Tim Rayborn and Abigail Keyes, 83–104. Jefferson: McFarland. Sanyal, Mithu. 2019. Rape. From Lucretia to #MeToo. London: Verso Books. Schneider, Michael: “Twilight” screenwriter sets Marvel Adaptation for TV. Rosenberg plans “AKA Jessica Jones” at ABC. Variety. https://variety.com/2010/tv/news/twilightscreenwriter-sets-marvel-adaptation-for-tv-1118029209/. Accessed: 19.05.2019. Simone, Gail. 1994. Women in refrigerators. https://www.lby3.com/wir/. Accessed: 19.05.2019.

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Supergirl. 2015–present. (created by Greg Berlanti, Ali Adler and Andrew Kreisberg). CBS and The CW. The Avengers. USA 2012. Dir. Joss Whedon. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. 2018–present. (created by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa). Netflix. Vignold, Peter. 2017. Das Marvel Cinematic Universe. Anatomie einer Hyperserie. Marburg: Schüren. Wonder Woman. USA 2017. Dir. Patty Jenkins.

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Spider-Analogues: The Unmarking and Unmasking of White Male Superheroism Jeffrey A. Brown

Abstract

This essay outlines the concept of comic book ‘multiplicity’ as it applies to Spider-Man variations featured in Marvel Comics’ massive crossover event Spider-Verse (2014–2015). The fact that a primary Spider-Man is regarded as a fictional figure with a core set of immutable characteristics—a semiotic grounding point—allows the Spider-Man analogues to explore a range of social positions without jeopardizing the primary identity of the character. In particular, this essay will argue that despite all of the different Spider-Men that present important variations in the ethnicity and the gender of Spider-Man, the character’s overall status as an avatar of hegemonic masculinity is reinforced. All of the Spider-Men of different ethnicities—as well as the number of Spider-Women and Spider-Girls—represent an inclusionary logic inherent in multiplicity, but also, ultimately, reaffirms white American masculinity as the unmarked pinnacle of heroism. Keywords

Spider-man · Multiplicity · Superheroes · Comic books · Ethnicity · Gender ·  Diversity

J. A. Brown (*)  Department of Popular Culture/School of Critical and Cultural Studies, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_3

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Marvel Comics’ massive crossover event Spider-Verse (2014–2015) brought together hundreds of different analogues of their most popular character, ­Spider-Man, to fight an interdimensional threat to all of the Spider people in the Multiverse. Marvel returned to this extreme superhero team-up in various Spider-Man video games, the televised cartoon Ultimate Spider-Man (2017–ongoing), the comic book sequel event known as Spider-Geddon (2018–2019) and the animated feature film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). These stories all emphasize the flexibility of the core characterization of Spider-Man who has been presented in wildly diverse and often contradictory forms: from Cowboy Spider-Man, to Cyborg Spider-Man, to Cosmic Spider-Man and even Monkey Spider-Man. Marvel’s imaginative depictions of Spider-Man in a range of different characterizations conforms to the comic book convention of ‘multiplicity’, wherein modifications to familiar heroes are assigned to alternate universes or timelines. While many Spider-Man analogues are simply whimsical or humorous, a significant number of the variations are more serious and explore ideas about what Spider-Man would mean if he were not a white American male. Among the Spider-themed characters who inhabit the Spider-Verse are multiple female variations—Spider-Women and Spider-Girls—as well as a range of ethnic and national variants such as Spider-Men who are African American, Indian, Latino, Chinese and Japanese. The depiction of non-white, non-American and non-male analogues within the larger Spider-Man mythology represents a potentially progressive and inclusionary step for a genre traditionally overpopulated by heroic ‘Aryan’ super men. Conversely, the reliance on analogues of such a familiar character and the narrative logic of the genre, reinforces a presumption that the white American male is the baseline or default requirement of superheroism. The balance between these two different perspectives (challenging the norm of white male heroic hegemony, or reinforcing it) becomes a crucial terrain for understanding the possibilities and limitations of a popular media form attempting to address modern racial and ­gender politics.

The Spider-Verse The coexistence of different versions of a figure as popular as Spider-Man is a logical result of thousands of different writers and artists, in different time periods and across different media formats, all telling stories featuring a specific character. Every creator has a unique style and vision that allows a personal twist on the hero within the broad editorial parameters of what defines a character. In her

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discussion of comic book storyworlds, Karin Kukkonen notes: “The stories of heroes like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman have been published for decades on a weekly or biweekly basis, written by ever-changing authors. As a result, inconsistencies emerged in the different storyworlds and encounters involving these characters, and continuity, or the coherent and consistent development of the characters and their storyworlds, became a problem” (Kukkonen 2010, p. 155). Definitive continuity and character authenticity became difficult to stick to when there were multiple versions of iconic superheroes, from both Marvel and DC Comics, all in play at the same time. But, as Kukkonen goes on to argue, in order to address these variations and canonize the emerging multiplicity of characters “superhero comics made a virtue out of necessity and presented their storyworlds as part of a larger ‘multiverse’, in which a variety of mutually incompatible narrative worlds existed as parallel realities” (Kukkonen 2010, p. 156). The narrative device of a multiverse of realities allows both Marvel and DC to rationalize the accumulated character variations and a safe place to explore topics that may not be possible within the central continuity of a specific superhero. As Kathryn M. Frank notes in relation to introducing ethnically diverse characters: Alternate universes can provide creators with more freedom in constructing story lines and creating characters since there are fewer (or no) existing canonical elements to which they must adhere. New universes can also be used as a strategy for drawing in new readers, who can start reading the comics without needing to first familiarize themselves with years of continuity (Frank 2016, p. 242).

Henry Jenkins describes this narrative flexibility and the seemingly limitless variations on popular characters as ‘multiplicity’ (see Jenkins 2009). As Jenkins argues, multiplicity has become a notable trend that can be taken as symbolic of current multimedia texts, but character variations have long been a recognized feature of superhero comic books. Rather than a shift from Modernist ideas of narrative continuity to an era of Postmodern multiplicity, Jenkins reasons that comics have entered a period where principles of multiplicity are felt at least as powerfully as those of continuity. Under this new system, readers may consume multiple versions of the same franchise, each with different conceptions of the character, different understandings of the relationships with the secondary figures, different moral perspectives, exploring different moments in their lives, and so forth (Jenkins 2009, pp. 20–21).

But, as Jenkins goes on to argue, to assume that multiplicity has replaced continuity would be a mistake (see Jenkins 2009, p. 23). Instead, principles of continuity

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and multiplicity work in relation to each other. In other words, a central and standard idea of Spider-Man is crucial for a sake of continuity (Peter Parker, a nerdy white American male bitten by a radioactive spider, Aunt May, Mary Jane Watson, web-swinging, etc.), but variations of Spider-Man seamlessly coexist under the logic of multiplicity. The familiar Spider motif and Spider powers have increasingly been associated with characters who are not white men. Among some of the most popular of these diverse versions of Spider-heroes are: the earliest explicit Spider-Man analogue Miguel O’Hara, a half-Irish half-Mexican Spider-powered hero in a futuristic timeline who starred in Spider-Man 2099 (1992–1996) and a second volume of the series (2014–2017); Pavitr Prabhakar, the Spider-Man of Mumbai who appeared in the 2004 mini-series Spider-Man: India in an attempt to capitalize on the international popularity associated with the film Spider-Man 2 (2004); Peter and Mary Jane’s daughter May ‘Mayday’ Parker who became the first Spider-Girl and starred in her own series Spider-Girl (1998–2006) and then The Amazing Spider-Girl (2006–2009); Anya Corazon, who is of Puerto Rican and Mexican descent, and initially went by the superhero name Araña when she premiered in the pages of Amazing Fantasy in 2004, and later switched to Spider-Girl for her own self-titled series which ran from 2010–2011; Miles Morales premiered as a Black/Puerto Rican Spider-Man starring in Ultimate Comics Spider-Man (2011–2013), Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man (2014–2015) and then Spider-Man (2016–ongoing); Spider-Gwen was introduced in 2014 leading up to the S­ pider-Verse event, and became popular enough to headline her own series Spider-Gwen (2015–2018); as well as the Korean-American character of Cindy Moon, who has powers nearly identical to Peter Parker’s, was introduced in a relaunched The Amazing Spider-Man #1 (2014) and then was featured in her own series Silk (2015–2017). These Spider-Man analogues structured around changes in ethnicity and gender facilitate a greater diversity of heroism without challenging the preeminence of the original character. In his analysis of geo-politics in comics, Jason Dittmer argues that stories set in other worlds: “offer both reinforcement of primary themes found throughout these heroes’ continuities and also opportunities to narrate political alternatives that may or may not be more politically progressive” (Dittmer 2012, p. 143). Dittmer’s focus is primarily on nation states and symbolic heroes such as Captain America, Captain Britain and Captain Canada, but the multiversal Spider-heroes function in a similar way to explore the political alternatives of identity politics. The central and original conception of SpiderMan as a young white Peter Parker, who lives in New York and develops powers thanks to a radioactive spider bite, serves as a familiar foundation against which

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any ­number of analogues can emerge. Changes to crucial features like gender and ethnicity are understood in relation to the primary concept of Spider-Man. Spider-Verse was a massive crossover event orchestrated at Marvel in 2014. The premise for bringing hundreds of different Spider analogues into contact with each other revolves around a god-like family of villains (Morlun and his siblings called the Inheritors) who travel from universe to universe hunting and devouring Spider-people. Many Spider analogues are killed by the Inheritors before dozens of Spider-Men, Women, Girls and animals team-up to fight back and help save the multiverse. Part of the pleasure for fans is the sheer number and imaginativeness of the Spider variations presented. From the stiff 1960s animated television style of Spider-Man, to an obscure Japanese newspaper strip incarnation, to mentions of both the Tobey McGuire and Andrew Garfield versions from the ­live-action feature films. The promotional text on the back cover of the collected trade paperback Spider-Verse (2016) emphasizes the allure of the incredible range of Spider-Men involved: No single hero stands any chance of survival. To have any hope, the Spiders will have to unite – from the Amazing to the Ultimate, the Spectacular to the Sensational, the Friendly Neighborhood to the Superior, the 1602 to the 2099, Cartoon Spideys! Cloned Spideys! Cool-costumed Spideys! Even Cosmic Spidey! This one has it all, from old favorites like Ben Reilly and – yes! – Spider-Ham, to breakout stars like giant robot SP//dr and the rocktacular Spider-Gwen. Join Spider-Woman, Scarlet Spider, Silk, Spider-Man 2099, a time-torn Superior Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Girls present and future, and – of course – the one true ­Spider-Man as they join the wall-crawlers of all the worlds for the most incredible team-up of all (Slott et al. 2016, back cover).

Inevitably, the original Spider-Man (from Earth 616) and his Spider allies defeat Morlun and the Inheritors and save the multiverse. The Spider-Verse event was a huge commercial success for Marvel who leveraged the popularity of the characters into a number of on-going series and sequels. In Spider-Verse the previously established ethnic and/or female Spider analogues that some fans were already familiar with (Pavitr Prabhakar, Anya Corazon, Miguel O’Hara, May Parker, Miles Morales, Cindy Moon, etc.) are joined by many other non-white and non-male variations. The implicit message of all these different Spider characters is that anyone can be a hero, can be a ‘Spider-Man’, regardless of their ethnicity, gender, nationality (or even species). ­Spider-Verse depicts the inclusionary logic that has become associated with modern comic book multiplicities that true super heroism comes from within and is not dependent on a specific ethnicity or gender. So long as a character has some type of

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­ pider-related powers and adheres to the maxim of ‘With great power comes S great responsibility,’ then physical and cultural differences do not matter. This message of equality regarding who can become a hero helps to expand the historically narrow confines of what superheroes look like and allows a diversity of real world readers to imagine a Spider-Man who looks like them under the mask. Unfortunately, the utopian equality suggested between the countless ­Spider-Man analogues is undermined by a narrative/industrial need to reaffirm the primacy of a single Spider-Man as definitive. As the promotional copy cited above clarifies, there is: “of course—the one true Spider-Man.” Despite the seemingly infinite number of Spider analogues available, equipped with any powers and abilities the writers can dream up, mid-way through the massive story the ­Spider-Man of Earth 616 (Marvel’s default reality) becomes the leader of the Spider forces. In fact, the Spider analogues seek Spider-Man 616 out and bring him as well as his allies Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew), Spider-Girl (Anya Corazon) and Silk (Cindy Moon) to their ‘safe world’. Various other versions of Spidey tell him in Amazing Spider-Man #9: “Peter, that’s why they brought you,” and “This is a war. And You’re our secret weapon.” Surprised by their deference to him, ­Spider-Man 616 asks: “Me? Why me?” And one of the Spider-Man clones simple states: “Because you’re the greatest of us all” (Slott and Coipel, November 2014, n. p.). The ostensive reason for Peter Parker of Earth 616 being ‘The Chosen One’ is that he is the only Spider-Man to have fought one of the Inheritors (Morlun) and survived. The more salient reason—beyond the confines of the story—is that this particular Spider-Man’s status as the real, the original, the best and the ‘one true Spider-Man’ solidifies his position as the hero from which all of the others are lesser variants. The rather obvious implication, by extension, is that the white American male hero is ‘the greatest of them all.’ In his discussion of comic book multiverses in relation to geo-politics Jason Dittmer argues that the existence of alternate worlds always underscores the naturalness, superiority and inevitability of the superheroes’ canonical world. Whether displaced across space or time, Dittmer points out: “Alternative worlds revealed through interdimensional portals tend to highlight the politico-moral superiority of ‘our’ world while highlighting the contingency of that outcome. Time travel narratives similarly advocate a centrality to ‘our’ present over other possibilities” (Dittmer 2012, p. 147). The confirmation that the Spider-Man from Earth 616 is the ‘one true Spider-Man’ and ‘the greatest of them all,’ functions to validate that specific universe as the canonical Marvel environment. This specificity is typical and helps the publishers manage the balance between continuity and variation. But, in the case of this Spider-Verse crossover event, it is not just Earth 616 that is prioritized. It is a very specific characterization of Spider-Man that is elevated

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above the others. All of the Spider-Man analogues, including the non-white and non-male ones also from Earth 616, are confirmed as ‘Others’ in the sense of not being the real Spider-Man, but also in the sense of being different from his white American male persona.

Masks and Markings Despite his initial shock, the Spider-Man from Earth 616 quickly assumes command of all the other Spiders, ordering them around, dividing them into teams and leading them into battles. When the Superior Spider-Man (the villain Doctor Octopus in a Peter Parker body) tries to assume command of the Spiders and insists on lethal measures in Amazing Spider-Man #11, the real Spider-Man (616) asserts: “No. You do not get to make that call. You’re not in charge here. I am” (Slott and Coipel, December 2014, n. p.). The Peter Parker of Earth 616 is positioned front and center in the frame, directly addressing the readers, as he clarifies that he is in charge (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1   Peter Parker surrounded from numerous Spider-analogues. Image credits Dan Slott (W) and Olivier Coipel (A), Amazing Spider-Man, #11, 2014, n. p.

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Numerous other Spider-analogues, including Spider-Gwen, Miles Morales and Spider-Ham, are positioned behind the primary Spider-Man signifying their deference to him. Spider-Man 616 is visually and narratively highlighted in this panel as the definitive version of the character and the one that readers are meant to identify with. Once Peter defeats his villainous double in a one-on-one fight, proving to readers that he is “the best of them,” he declares his moral superiority in addition to his tactical and physical superiority: “We’ve already seen the Inheritors can’t be killed. Killing’s not the answer. It never is. We need to be better. And that’s why I am in charge” (Slott and Coipel, December 2014, n. p.). This one true Spider-Man leads all of the others to their eventual victory over the Inheritors and is confirmed for readers as the pinnacle of Spider-Man superheroism. The centrality of this Spider-Man as the real and the best one, the one the story presents as leader and the one situated as the main point of identification for readers, is that without drawing explicit attention to identity politics the white American male is reaffirmed as the natural heroic ideal. To the credit of Dann Slott, Christos Gage and the numerous other writers involved in the Spider-Verse storylines, the series does overtly validate the heroism of all the ethnically diverse Spider-Men and Women. Likewise, certain scenes were clearly crafted to address the implications of marking the white American male Spider-Man from Earth 616 as ‘the greatest of them all.’ For example, while the ‘one true Spider-Man’ is laying out their strategy for the invasion of the Inheritors home universe in Amazing Spider-Man #13, one of the British Spider-Men notices a despondent Indian Spider-Man sitting on the floor away from the main group, and tries to cheer him up: Spider-UK: Why so down Pavitr? Outside of the fearful odds and most certain doom. Spider-Man (India): I guess my problem is … him. Peter Parker. Don’t you see it? The pattern? Our names are so close … He has an Uncle Ben. I had an uncle Bhim. My spiritual guide is called ‘Master Weaver’, and now … There are too many similarities. I cannot escape it. That feeling … that he is the real Spider-Man. And I am some kind of echo. Or strange reflection. And expendable. Spider-UK: I don’t believe it. Not for a second … each member, from each world, is unique in their own way … Pavitr, you are Spider-Man. You’re a hero wherever you are and whoever is by your side. And that other fella? Who’s to say he’s not a pale reflection of you? (Slott and Coipel, January 2015, n. p.)

The pep-talk from Spider-UK bolsters Pavitr’s spirits, but more importantly it attempts to address the political implications of the story sidelining the ethnically identified Spider-Men as mere reflections of the white American male one.

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Spider-UK’s point (“Who’s to say he’s not a pale reflection of you?”) is an interesting sentiment suggesting that Pavitr could just as easily be the original. It is also a subtle recognition of the role skin color often plays in marking out Others, non-whites, as the variation. Perhaps the lighter skinned and lesser skilled Peter Parker of Earth 616 is a ‘pale’ reflection of Pavitr Prabhakar. But, despite the best of intentions, there is no getting around the fact that the story repeatedly positions the white American male Spider-Man as the real one. While multiplicity has helped to diversify the roster of top-tier heroes at Marvel, the insistence on one true Spider-Man in stories like Spider-Verse has the effect of implicitly confirming white American masculinity as a presumptive norm. The fact that the Spider-Man of Earth 616 is declared the ‘true’ and the ‘best’ Spider-Man, relegating all of the ethnic, feminine or non-American analogues as mere derivatives of the original Spider-Man, reinforces whiteness and masculinity as an unmarked category. Richard Dyer, in his analysis of whiteness as an invisible ethnic group inherently privileged in media representations, describes how ‘white’ resists being marked and thus becomes the most vaulted social category: In Western representation whites are overwhelmingly and disproportionately predominant, have the central and elaborated roles, and above all are placed as the norm, the ordinary, the standard. Whites are everywhere in representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualized and abled. At the label of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race (Dyer 1997, p. 3).

By this racial logic, being marked, qualified, stereotyped, categorized and assumed lesser is a burden only applicable to Others. “They are particular, marked, raced,” Dyer continues, “whereas the white man has attained the position of being without properties, unmarked, universal, just human” (Dyer 1997, p. 38). Similarly, many of the Spider analogues are doubly marked as variants and Others, while SpiderMan 616 is established as the baseline, unmarked, (white American male) hero. Any discussion of marked and unmarked identities in the superhero genre is compounded by the basic convention of costumes and secret identities. The colorful superhero costume does more than just conceal their true identity, it symbolizes the character’s heroic persona and publicly marks their body as spectacularly different than the average person’s. In her analysis of superhero outfits, Vicki ­Karaminas describes the function of the costumes:

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J. A. Brown The superhero wardrobe speaks of the identities of the wearer and serves to highlight the supernatural abilities and attributes of his/her heroic status. As part of an iconic signifier, the uber garment and its accessories, armored breastplates, masks, epaulets and gauntlets constructed of steel, separate those with superhuman strength from ‘mere’ mortals and sets the costume-wearer apart from conventional society (Karaminas 2006, p. 498).

Unlike most superheroes, Spider-Man’s costume completely covers his body and face. Without any exposed skin, the traditional Spider-Man unitard conceals both his identity and his ethnicity, though it purposefully does not disguise his masculinity. The tight bodysuit worn by Spider-Man and most of his analogues does little to hide the gender of the person inside the costume. Though many of the female Spiders are not as gratuitously sexualized as other costumed heroines, they are still depicted with undeniably feminine curves. On the other hand, the ethnicity of Spider analogues who opt for a version of the full body and mask costume is not as readily apparent (at least in relation to skin color). Costume variations can reflect cultural differences, for example; both Spider-UK and Spider-Punk have elements of the Union Jack evoked through costuming to reflect their Britishness, and the Spider-Man of India’s outfit combines the conventional red-and-blue web design for his upper body with a distinctively Indian dhoti covering his lower body. But, for most of the ethnically diverse Spider-Man analogues, the stories can play with the disjuncture between the visibility and the invisibility of their specific cultural backgrounds. In other words, while readers are fully aware of the character’s ethnicity, the story can still present ethnicity as ostensibly hidden within the narrative and unconnected to the hero’s status. Where ethnic signifiers like skin color can, in Dyer’s terms, present non-white figures as ‘particular, marked, raced,’ the full Spider-Man costume and mask can function as a type of unmarking. Nobody can really tell who is under the mask—the costume marks all of the Spider analogues as special (super powered), but it effectively unmarks ethnicity. It is only when the ethnically diverse characters are unmasked that they become publicly marked as non-white. Conversely, when Peter Parker is unmasked he becomes unmarked as a white American male. The awkward conflict between celebrating heroic diversity, and the stigmatization of being marked as Other through unmasking, is explicitly raised in the Brian Michael Bendis written Spider-Man #2 (2016). Part of Miles Morales’ mask is torn in a battle with a demonic beast and though his secret identity is not revealed, some of his skin is. After the fight, Miles’ best friend, Ganke, shows him a YouTube video of the battle posted by a fan who is excited to discover this

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Spider-Man is not white: “You see that? Wait, hold on … I’ll zoom in.—The new Spider-Man is brown. He’s a kid of color. This is huge!!! Is he African American? Is he Indian? Is he Hispanic? I don’t know. But he is def color. So exciting!” Miles is bothered by the focus on his skin color. The YouTuber squeals: “Black Spider-Man!” To which a sullen Miles explains: “I don’t want that … The qualification … This is—I don’t want to be the Black Spider-Man. I want to be Spider-Man” (Bendis and Pichelli March 2016, n. p.). Bendis recognizes the cultural importance of a black Spider-Man, but he also uses this scene to express the limitations that can be perceived to come with the ‘black’ qualification. Miles is disappointed because this partial unmasking immediately leads to his being publicly marked as the black Spider-Man, the other Spider-Man, a derivative of the original and the real Spider-Man… as a lesser hero. Creating racially diverse Spider-Man analogues is an effective way to introduce characters that reflect cultural differences that exist in the real world. It also provides young consumers from different backgrounds a range of Spider-Men they can identify with; heroes who look a bit more like them. But there is a tension between portraying these characters as role models based in diversity and exposing them as mere derivatives of the real (white) hero. The primacy of the original Peter Parker, white male, version of Spider-Man in the comics anchors the analogues at the same time that it unintentionally restricts their heroic potential. The critical and commercial success of the movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), which importantly focuses on Miles Morales as the central Spider-Man, demonstrates the potential impact that diverse analogues can have. By shifting the focus definitively to Miles rather than Peter, the film manages to reinforce its promotional tagline: “What Makes You Different is What Makes You Spider-Man.” The Spider-Verse comics share this sentiment but undermine the overall message by insisting on ‘one, true, Spider-Man.’

Bibliography Bendis, Brian Michael (W), and Sarah Pichelli (A). March 2016. Spider-Man #2. New York: Marvel. Dittmer, Jason. 2012. Captain America and the nationalist superhero: Metaphors, narratives and geopolitics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Dyer, Richard. 1997. White. London: Routledge. Frank, Kathryn M. 2016. Everybody wants to rule the multiverse: Latino Spider-Men in Marvel’s media empire. In Graphic borders: Latino comic books past, present & future, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher Gonzalez, 241–251. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Jenkins, Henry. 2009. Just men in tights: Rewriting silver age comics in an era of multiplicity. In The shifting definitions of genre: Essays on labeling films, television shows and media, ed. Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich, 229–243. New York: McFarland Publishing. Karaminas, Vicki. 2006. ‘No Capes!’: Uber Fashion and How “Luck Favors the Prepared”: Constructing contemporary Superhero identities in American popular culture. IJOCA: International Journal of Comic Art 8 (1): 498–508. Kukkonen, Karin. 2010. Navigating infinite earths: Readers, mental models, and the multiverse of superhero comics. Storyworlds 2:155–169. Slott, Dan (W), and Olivier Coipel (A). November 2014. “Spider-Verse” amazing ­Spider-Man #9. New York: Marvel. Slott, Dan (W), and Olivier Coipel (A). December 2014. “Spider-Verse” amazing ­Spider-Man #11. New York: Marvel. Slott, Dan (W), and Olivier Coipel (A). January 2015. “Spider-Verse” amazing ­Spider-Man #13. New York: Marvel. Slott, Dan, Christos Gage, et al. 2016. Spider-Verse (TPB). New York: Marvel.

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My Noose Around that Pretty’s Neck: Meditations on Matt Baker’s Good Girls Philip Crawford

Abstract

Matt Baker (1921–1959) is often considered to be the first African American comic book artist, perhaps best known for his talent as a ‘good girl’ artist. Baker’s pin-up styled comic book heroines captivated the imaginations of a predominantly white male readership targeted by early comic book publishers. Contemporaneous to Baker’s career is the historical period of racialized domestic terrorism known as lynching, with an estimated 4384 black people killed by white vigilantes between 1877 and 1950. The death of many victims, overwhelmingly male, was routinely justified by alleging they attempted to rape white women. How can we reconceptualize the heroism of a black artist whose work is predicated on providing provocative images of white women during a historical period when he could have been killed for simply speaking to them? This essay elaborates on a body of visual artwork attempting to reconcile Baker’s legacy with the sometimes-deadly contemporary perceptions of black men as criminals and sexual aggressors. Keywords

Matt baker · Good girl art · Lynching · Masculinity · Comics · Visual art

In the body of work titled My Noose Around that Pretty’s Neck, I attempt to reconcile the work and life of artist Matt Baker (1921–1959) with the

P. Crawford (*)  c/o Hartkopf, Berlin, Deutschland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_4

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s­ ometimes-deadly and still persistent perceptions of black men as criminals and sexual aggressors. Baker is often considered to be the first African American comic book artist. But more than his position among the ranks of the heroic Firsts in the black community, Baker is best known for his unique talent as a ‘good girl’ artist. His pin-up styled comic book heroines captivated the imaginations and aroused the libidos of a predominantly white male readership targeted by early comic book publishers. How can we reconceptualize the heroism of a black man whose work is predicated on providing provocative images of white women during a historical period when he could have been beaten, maimed or lynched for simply speaking to them? During Baker’s life there were almost 400 reported cases of black people put to death by white mobs. This number pales in comparison to the estimated 4384 black people killed by white vigilantes between 1877 and 1950, with the alleged rape of white women persisting as a particularly powerful justification for mob violence, building on existing stereotypes about the biological inferiority and voracious sexual appetites of black men (see Equal Justice Initiative 2017). The project I am presenting here uses Matt Baker’s work as a lens to decode the narratives which led to thousands of lynchings across America and continue to hyper-sexualize and dehumanize black men. As this essay will suggest, the myths surrounding black masculinity were constructed in ways not dissimilar from the literary formulas commonly found in comic books and other narrative media. Ultimately, I consider Baker’s overly sexualized female heroines as apt surrogates for the similarly objectified black male bodies. In the artwork itself this surrogacy is both figurative and literal. Each piece uses specially treated pages from comic books that feature Baker’s artwork. These now transparent pages form the canvases on which Baker’s good girl heroines are painted to mimic the artist’s style (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). But instead of the lively positions that Baker preferred, each good girl hangs from a noose. The morbid poses of these fictional bodies echo those of real-life victims, adopted from images found in the large archive of photographs and postcards created to commemorate historical incidents of lynching. Despite the bold colors and sensational effect, my aim in this project and essay is not to make definitive claims. Instead, My Noose Around that Pretty’s Neck is intended as a speculative investigation of the complex interrelations between lynching in American history, sexual violence and racialized heroism as they coalesce in the life and work of Matt Baker.

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Fig. 4.1   Good Girl #2 (2017) after the lynching George Reed in Rome, Georgia (1901). Image credits © Philip Crawford, www.philipac.com

Matt Baker Clarence Matthew Baker was born in 1921 in Forsyth County, North Carolina. In the 1940s, Baker’s family joined the vast migration of black people moving northward in pursuit of economic opportunity and social mobility, eventually settling in New York City to pursue his creative interests. After completing artistic studies at Cooper Union, he entered the comic book industry as a penciler and inker at the Jerry Iger Studio. The studio functioned as an early comic book factory or packager that systematized the way the art and stories were produced

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Fig. 4.2   Detail of Good Girl #2 (2017), acrylic and ink on resin-treated comic book pages. Image credits © Philip Crawford, www. philipac.com

before passing them on to publishers and distributors. At the time the work of comic book artists was largely anonymous, and Baker’s was not a prestigious role. Writers, rather than artists, were given title credits for published comic books, and at shops like the Iger Studio pencilers and inkers could be most closely compared to members of a production line. In the last two decades Baker’s art has been revived, and with it the praise of the man as a historical ‘first’ for the African American community. Baker’s brand of heroism can be categorized alongside hundreds of Firsts who are praised for their sometimes intentional, sometimes unwitting, efforts to make inroads into social systems that seem stacked against them.

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Good Girl Comics Matt Baker is also considered by many aficionados to be the best of the good girl artists. As depicted in these pages of Baker’s work, the heroines he drew were delicate, yet powerful. The Baker Style, as it came to be known, can be recognized in Phantom Lady’s slender legs and full hips topped by an impossibly curvaceous torso (Fig. 4.3). More emblematic is the almost tangible energy with which Baker’s Sky Gal seems to dance, slide and shimmy from panel to panel and page to page (Fig. 4.4). You can find his artwork behind the aging covers of Jungle Comics and Jumbo Comics featuring heroines like Sheena, Sky Gal, Camilla, Tiger Girl and Canteen Kate. The bulk of his early titles come from a single publisher called Fiction House. Unlike the early Detective Comics (now DC Comics) and Atlas Comics (later to form Marvel Comics), who focused on Fig. 4.3   Cover page of Phantom Lady with artwork by Matt Baker. Image credits Good Girl Comics 16, ed. by Bill Black. © AC Comics/Americomics with permission of Fiction House Magazine 1994, p. 23

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Fig. 4.4   Matt Baker’s Sky Gal sliding across panels. Image credits Good Girl Comics 16, ed. by Bill Black. © AC Comics/Americomics with permission of Fiction House Magazine 1994, p. 37

what we now consider classic superhero characters, Fiction House made its mark by providing more titillating heroines for their audience. No publisher, however, played to male libidos more frequently or effectively than Fiction House. Women in short skirts, long slender legs, and exaggerated breasts adorned the covers of Fiction House’s comic books, while stories prepared for the publisher by the Iger shop beckoned randy young males with sexually suggestive and sadomasochistic images (Wright 2001, p. 73).

The pulp pages of Fiction House books carried strong undertones of submission and sadomasochism, and occasionally overt references. While this is also true of work by other publishers (DC’s Wonder Woman and her creator William Moulton Marston have been scrutinized in recent years for the fetishized violence and

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scenes of bondage that can be viewed in many early issues), Fiction House stands apart in its notoriety for developing scantily clad heroines alongside equally skimpy plot lines. In his historical assessment of the effects of comic books on American youth, Comic Book Nation, Bradford W. Wright argues that commercial motive has been the driving force in the industry. Like most mainstream media, this steered its focus towards quantity over quality: mass appeal (see Wright 2001, p. xv). Wright analyzes the literary formulas used by publishers to track changes in the audience preferences that direct the industry. Audiences turn to formulaic stories for the escape and enjoyment that comes from experiencing the fulfillment of their expectations within a structured imaginary world.[…] Formulas that appeal to audiences tend to proliferate and endure, while those that do not, do neither. As a means through which changing values and assumptions are packaged into mass commodities, formulas are the consequences of determining pressures exerted by producers and consumers, as well as by the historical conditions affecting them both (Wright 2001, p. xv).

Literary formulas are narrative structures that denote a conventional way of treating a certain thing or person and are employed across a large number of individual works (see Calweti 1980, p. 121). These formulas capitalize on existing stereotypes to provide the audience with an accessible template for fictional characters or situations. Wright’s analysis suggests that for the most popular serial productions it’s likely that the individual storylines matter less for your enjoyment of the experience than the repetition of a standard arch. Recognition and fulfillment of audience expectations is central to continued consumption. In the case of Fiction House, these formulas reinforced contemporary gender and racial hierarchies. Heroines like Sky Girl and Sheena conformed to idealized stereotypes of white femininity. Purity and moral innocence were central to their storylines, often presented through stilted plots where the good girls fight organized crime or save dark indigenous populations from encroaching colonialists. At the same time, the good girls’ visual presentation stressed physical perfection. Large breasts and improbably long white legs were alluringly draped across panels. Matt Baker and other artists went out of their way to draw female characters in suggestive positions to accentuate their physical features. By mixing sex with tales of moral—and often racial—heroism, the good girls offered an appealing formula to the white boys and men in their target audience (see Savage 1990; Wright 2001). Fiction House was successful enough to warrant attention from early advocates of comic book censorship who feared the new medium was corrupting the

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minds of America’s youth. Along with a wide variety of comic books and pulp novels depicting violence, crime and fantasy environments, the publisher came under severe public scrutiny. Leading the censorship crusade was Dr. Fredric Wertham, the German-American psychiatrist whose 1954 bestseller Seduction of the Innocent provided a comprehensive analysis of the dangers of comic books. Wertham’s chief concern was that the positive portrayal of crime would desensitize children to violence, while a barrage of direct and subtle sexualized references lured them towards sexual perversion. One of Baker’s covers for Fox Feature Syndicate’s Phantom Lady was prominently featured in Wertham’s review to highlight these concerns. This attention meant little for Matt Baker or his legacy. He would never be known during his lifetime for his contribution to early comic book art. Aside from the subordinate role of comic artists, Baker’s publishers would have risked alienating a large portion of their audience if their artist’s race was revealed, particularly to their Southern readership. These concerns from publishers about their audiences’ reaction were well-placed. While Fiction House offered up their fantasy formulas, there were also powerful and pervasive real-life narratives at work about the purity of white femininity and threat of black masculinity.

The Black Rapist Myth The Black Rapist Myth is built on the belief that black men are predisposed to desire white women and incapable of controlling their bodies when faced with this particular sexual impulse (see Davis 1983; Bederman 1996; Sommerville 1995). At its foundation are the pseudo-scientific theories of racial inferiority that were set during the colonial era and reinforced in America over centuries of slavery. The myth was constructed during the Reconstruction period as efforts to restore the economy also forced Southerners to raise up new social structures. Black people became economic and social rivals, leading to laws and social conventions aimed at limiting black ownership, promoting segregation, and preventing miscegenation. Concerns over black wealth mixed with deep-seated fears of racial mixing and black reprisals for the injustices of slavery. Almost overnight, emasculated eunuch slaves became fearfully endowed black prowlers. Since that time, the Black Rapist Myth has stood as a safe haven for economic opportunists, white supremacists and jilted lovers alike. In publications around the country the myth was used to ignite a different type of passion in the hearts of white men, adopting the threat of rape as a routine justification for extrajudicial, vigilante violence targeting black men. With no

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need for judge or jury, protection of white womanhood became reason enough for mobs to perform summary executions of alleged offenders. If the wish of their audience was a validation of racial prejudice and a justification for active efforts taken to enforce racial separation, a segment of the press seems to have happily obliged. As one Memphis newspaper threatened in an article titled More Rapes, More Lynchings: The crime of rape is always horrible, but the Southern man there is nothing which so fills the soul with horror, loathing and fury as the outraging of a white woman by a Negro. It is the race question in the ugliest, vilest, most dangerous aspect. The Negro as a political factor can be controlled. But neither laws nor lynchings can subdue his lusts. Sooner or later it will force a crisis. We do not know in what form it will come (Editorial in Daily Commercial quoted in Wells-Barnett 1892).

At the height of the lynching crisis in 1892, journalist and activist Ida B. Wells made it her mission to debunk the Black Rapist Myth. Writing in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, Wells catalogues the formulaic use of rape in newspaper articles to justify killing black men. Disproportionate newspaper coverage contributed to the staying power of the myth. Episodes describing the crimes of black men were presented frequently and in lurid detail. Playing on the expectations of their readers, reporters and editors tapped into nightmarish fantasies. Like the repetitive good girl plotlines, these newspapers all read like variations on the same theme.

Lynching as Sexual Violence In a comic book, typically full of blood, violence and nudity, the erotic hanging theme is exploited. The average reader, of a generation not brought up on comics, may not realize the connection between sex and hanging (Wertham 1954, p. 170).

If the myth was the rhetorical tool used to stoke racial prejudice, lynching was the literal means of protecting white womanhood by attacking black manhood. Narratives of the purity of white women were forged in flames fueled by black male bodies and hoisted high on the same ropes from which they dangled. Today we associate lynching almost exclusively with racially motivated violence, typically involving mutilation or burning of the body and hanging with a noose around the neck. The term gains its name from a Virginian farmer who took it into his own hands to maintain order in his town during the Revolutionary War. Lynch’s Law initially referred to mostly non-lethal, public punishment of white immigrants

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and law breakers (see Lovett 2010). Community-oriented vigilantism was organized to fill gaps left by official law enforcement. In step with the formation of the Myth itself, lynching became both increasingly deadly and increasingly racialized during the Reconstruction. By the late nineteenth century the term referred almost directly to acts of domestic terrorism against black people and supporters of racial equality. Though Baker lived and worked in New York, he was in no way removed from the effects of the Myth or of lynching. In fact, it was at the height of Baker’s career in 1955 that Emmett Till was violently murdered to secure the womanhood of Carolyn Bryant, at whom he was accused of whistling suggestively. Widely publicized images of the lynched teenager’s mutilated and bloated body tucked into a small coffin were seen across the country after his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral (see Hudson-Weems 1994; Whitfield 1988). What would have been the reaction had Baker, his work known, returned to his native North Carolina? Like the Fiction House formulas, the myth of the black rapist was pointedly aimed at (and promoted by) white men. Both narratives capitalized on the idealized purity of white womanhood. Both exploit a similar sort of sexualized violence and domination. The gratification of submission and bodily dominance—whether those bodies are presented as lithe, white and feminine or black and brutish—are defined as an essentially white and masculine privilege. Lynching itself is often read as a racial crime in order to preserve the masculine identities of both the victim and offenders. Even the communities of lynched men are more likely to be remembered as martyrs for racial justice than as victims of sexual abuse. Rape and lynching both operate as tools for psychological and physical control in a continuum of tools used to assert white supremacy (see Carter 2012, pp. 414–417). The act of lynching is sexualized not exclusively in terms of penetration—though those cases exist—but in the sense of submission and dominance. Even when the alleged crime was not of a sexual nature, mob justice took on a peculiarly carnal tone. Victims were not simply burned or hung but often thoroughly abused. Men were stripped naked and molested; their bodies roughly handled. They were maimed and literally disassembled, skin flayed and appendages removed as souvenirs. Some were castrated and forced to consume their own genitals. There was a certain perverse sense of propriety that accompanied this ownership. Like the good girls who were clothed just enough to preserve some sense of modesty, in many public images of victims of lynching special attention is paid to

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covering the corpses’ groin. In photographs taken of charred and mutilated bodies hanging from the noose, you can often find a blanket draped carefully around the waist. What threat could have possibly remained? The mythologized black rapist and sexualized nature of lynching are intricately tangled together with other historical yarns that have led to the general hyper-sexualization of black men and a societal preoccupation with their bodies.

Artistic Meditations Matt Baker died at the age of thirty-eight of heart complications that plagued him throughout his life. Today Baker’s life and legacy offers a unique foundation for a speculative examination of one of the most gendered and violent segments of America’s long-lived racial conflict. In My Noose Around that Pretty’s Neck, I investigate both the discourse of heroism surrounding the perpetrators and victims of lynching and the images that still circulate and memorialize this tragic era, using Baker’s contributions to our popular archive as the basis for my meditations. The goal of my work is to reintroduce some of that tension that I find woefully unresolved in the praise of Baker’s achievements, to illustrate the sexualized nature of lynching, and to explore the similarities between the formulaic construction of heroic narratives as instruments of power and domination. In the pieces depicted here, I’ve taken pages of Baker’s comic book panels as my canvas in an effort to establish a material connection to the artist’s experience (Figs. 4.5 and 4.6). The good girls serve to complicate the tendency to equate heroism and vigilantism. Lynching itself was viewed as a heroic act by perpetrators, who proudly memorialized the events in photographs and postcards that still circulate as keepsakes. Lynching was considered vigilante justice not unlike that championed in the pages of most comic books. Posed in the same position as lynched victims, these beautiful vigilantes take their place (Fig. 4.7). Whether against the backdrop of Baker’s artwork or a reproduction of the original site of violence, each female figure is depicted in the Baker Style to retain their sensual currency while hinting at the morbid balance behind the man’s work. Baker’s dainty cartoon pin-ups struck me as apt surrogates for the real black bodies in my effort to illustrate the shockingly conflicted racial, sexual and political myths at work behind these images. Firstly, they serve as iconic surrogates, relieving the pained bodies of the victims from the weight of reproduction and

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Fig. 4.5   Good Girl #1 (2017) after the lynching of Sam Carter in Rosewood, Florida (1923). Image credits © Philip Crawford, www.philipac.com

representation. In my attempt to avoid replicating real, objectified bodies, I turn instead to the bodies of fictional superbeings. These fictive bodies are bodies conceived for pain, symbols that can be discarded or invested with new life by graphically calling to question their intended meanings. Baker’s heroines also stand in as sexual surrogates, replacing one sexual object for another without removing the author’s (or audience’s) desire. Neither the specter of white supremacy nor the domineering force of patriarchy lurking behind these two sets of images is diminished.

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Fig. 4.6   Detail of Good Girl #1 (2017), acrylic and ink on resin-treated comic book pages. Image Credits © Philip Crawford, www.philipac.com

Afterword The title for this series comes from a comic book referenced in Wertham’s study. In a short story included in the pages of Dagar Desert Hawk #19 (1948), we find the good girl heroine Tangi and her friend riding zebras in the jungle. They race through the lush underbrush undeterred until a white male antagonist hiding in the trees lowers a noose to snare Tangi. As the noose tightens around her neck, Tangi’s surprised exclamation that it seems “just like the other” hints that it is not the first time she’s been snared in this particular trap (Hope 1946, p. 30). The irony of her surprise lies in the fact that our protagonist likely falls victim to a similar plot device in each of her adventures. From issue to issue she is caught in a continuing cycle of formulaic violence and objectification. Just as the ownership of the noose might paradoxically reference Tangi as well as her captor—the protagonist as well as the antagonist—I propose that the ownership of this project’s titular noose is not necessarily mine, Matt Baker’s or the viewer’s. The possession suggested here is as timeless and universal as the myths that contributed to the spectacle of lynching and continue today in various forms. The indeterminate ‘my’ simply reminds us of the paradox of heroism and mythologized histories, where it is precisely the positionality of the speaker that determines whether the noose represents justice or injustice.

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Fig. 4.7   Good Girl in Floyd County (2017), postcard-sized digital print. Image credits © Philip Crawford, www.philipac. com

Bibliography Bederman, Gail. 1996. Manliness & civilization: A cultural history of gender and race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carter, Niambi M. 2012. Intimacy without consent: Lynching as sexual violence. Politics & Gender 8 (3): 414–421. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X12000402. Cawelti, John G. 1980. The study of literary formulas. In Detective fiction: A collection of critical essays, ed. Robin W. Winks, 121–143. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. Davis, Angela Y. 1983. Women, race & class. New York: Vintage Books. Equal Justice Initiative. 2017. Lynching in America: Confronting the legacy of racial terror. 3rd ed. https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/. Accessed 01.03.2019. Hope, Alec (W). 1946. “Tangi” in Dagar Desert Hawk 19. Fox Feature Syndicate, 27–32. Hudson-Weems, Clenora. 1994. Emmett Till: The sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement. Troy: Bedford.

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Lovett, Christopher C. 2010. A public burning: Race, sex, and the lynching of Fred Alexander. Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plain 33:94–115. Savage, William W. 1990. Comic books and America, 1945–1954. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Sommerville, Diane Miller. 1995. The rape myth in the old South reconsidered. The Journal of Southern History 61 (3): 481–518. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. 1892. Southern horrors: Lynch law in all its phases. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm. Accessed: 01.11.2016. Wertham, Fredric. 1954. Seduction of the innocent. New York: Rinehart. Whitfield, Stephen J. 1988. A death in the delta: The story of emmett till. New York: Free Press. Wright, Bradford W. 2001. Comic book nation: The transformation of youth culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

5

The Nude and the Naked: From Fine Art to Comics Ann Miller

Abstract

This essay first discusses the distinction established by art critics between the classical nude and the more radical naked, the latter exemplified by the work of Manet and Courbet. It then looks at the shifting boundary between art and pornography, and the consigning of erotic comics to the latter category, before alluding to more recent debates that have avoided moralising discourses in favour of a consideration of pornography as body genre. However, the essay notes Linda Nochlin’s claim that when artistic transgression becomes synonymous with naked female bodies, women are denied a viewing position, an argument that can be brought to bear on misogynistic representations of women in comics. Two comics authored by women offer alternative perspectives: Charlotte Blazy shows the disturbing bodily impact of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde on her textual avatar, and Catherine Meurisse transforms Manet’s Olympia into the protagonist of a musical comedy that pits the ­neo-classical ‘Officiel’ painters against the vanguard ‘Refusés’. De-eroticised by Meurisse’s graphic line, Olympia negotiates unbalanced gender power relations in two worlds where women are on display: art and show business. Keywords

Courbet · Manet · Meurisse · Musée d’orsay · Musical comedy · Naked ·  Nude · Pornography

A. Miller (*)  Oxford, United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_5

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The female nude, so perfect that it stands for art itself, according to Linda Nead (see Nead 1992), is famously distinguished from the naked by Kenneth Clark. Whereas the naked body has an “uncomfortable overtone” (Clark 1956, p. 357), the nude invites disinterested aesthetic contemplation. Nead notes Clark’s insistence on the containment and regulation both of the viewer (assumed to be heterosexual and male), restrained by codes of art appreciation, and of the female body, which he describes as sealed up and smooth, bounded like a “sheath” (Clark 1956, p. 79; see also Nead 1992, p. 6). Abigail Solomon-Godeau spells out the castration anxiety that is only hinted at by Clark: “as a fetish, the nude must deny or allay the fear that the real material body always risks producing”. Hence the suppression of the vagina, and the repertoire of poses (Solomon-Godeau 1986, p. 98). Nead refers to Derrida’s work on the parergon, the liminal area where distinctions between proper and improper concerns occur, to show how the frame separates the fine-art nude from the obscene (i.e. off-scene) corporeal body (see Nead 1992, pp. 6–7; Derrida 1978, pp. 19–94). That distinction became blurred towards the end of the nineteenth century by Manet’s Olympia, displayed to great outrage at the Salon in 1865.1 T. J. Clark claims that Manet remade the basic categories of nudity and nakedness, since the woman’s body was not “brought into order” (Clark 1999, p. 130), but instead marked by her social class and her obvious status as a prostitute, whose disconcerting stare renders the male spectator complicit in an implied financial transaction (see Clark 1999, pp. 109, 144, 146). Moreover, the female sex that is casually concealed by the model’s hand finds a substitute, according to Michel Leiris, in the black cat and the luxuriant bouquet proffered by the black servant (see Leiris 1981, p. 150), while the ribbon around Olympia’s neck, “dernier obstacle à la nudité totale” [last obstacle to complete nakedness] (Leiris 1981, p. 193) is a fetishistic detail, not reassuring like the chastely desexualised body of the classical nude, but arousing. Others have emphasised that the model’s direct confrontation of the observer draws on the conventions of early erotic photography (see ­Needham 1973). There are, of course, two women in this painting. Sander L. Gilman has suggested that the presence of the servant signifies illicit sexual activity (see Gilman 2003, p. 138), while Lorraine O’Grady reads her as curiously invisible, made to disappear into the background drapery, the better to construct “woman” as white, the object of a voyeuristic male gaze (see O’Grady 2003, p. 135).

1The

number of illustrations that can be included here is necessarily limited, and all are taken from the comics under discussion. Reproductions of all the paintings mentioned can be found on the internet.

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A year after Manet had exhibited Olympia, Courbet produced the even more scandalous L’Origine du monde. For Thierry Savatier, it represents a symbol of the freedom of creation, a rejection of all moral constraints, and is therefore an icon of modernity (see Savatier 2006), whereas Linda Nochlin asks: “Why must transgression—social and artistic alike—always be enacted (by men) on the naked bodies of women?” (Nochlin 1988a, p. 37). She describes the painting as “pornography […], a little masterpiece of overt sexuality intended for the private delectation of a sophisticated connoisseur. In Freudian terms, it represents the classic site of castration anxiety, as well as the ultimate object of male desire” (Nochlin 1988b, p. 176). The work was not shown in public until it was acquired by the Musée d’Orsay in 1995, and their website offers an anxious disclaimer: thanks to Courbet’s great virtuosity, and the refinement of his colour palette, “L’Origine du monde échappe […] au statut d’image pornographique” [L’Origine du monde avoids […] the status of pornographic image] (Musée d’Orsay 2006–2009).

Art and Pornography, Fine Art and Comics A painting hanging in the august Parisian gallery is, by definition, a work of art. Nead has contended that, with the demise of the nude in favour of the naked, the borderline between art and pornography was redrawn as a boundary between high art and various forms of mass culture, a distinction that depends less on the content of the image than on what kinds of cultural consumption, and consumers, are regarded as legitimate (see Nead 1992, p. 86). This would accord with comics scholar Bart Beaty’s discussion of a painting by Lucy McKenzie, Untitled (2004), a self-portrait that includes within it a comics panel by Milo Manara originally published in 1983, in which a woman is shown kneeling and masturbating, her naked sexual parts exposed (Manara 2009, p. 11). Mackenzie’s painting is ­gallery-hung and therefore undoubtedly art, whereas the Manara panel that it appropriates is regarded as mere “cultural waste” by commentators who are unaware, says Beaty, that Manara is a prize-winning comics artist whose work has its own “art-historical specificity” (Beaty 2012, pp. 7, 6). Brian McNair distinguishes porn from art a little differently. He cites L’Origine du monde, “sometimes seen as a prototypical pornographic text”, but argues that “above all we see the artist, and his individual vision” (McNair 2013, p. 26). He proposes two criteria: first, art is produced by individuals recognised as artists and second, it has a distancing effect that asks us to look for “significance beyond the erotic” (McNair 2013, p. 133), whereas porn has the sole purpose of arousal. The Manara panel might, for Beaty at least, qualify under the first

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c­ riterion, but it is doubtful whether it would be admitted under the second. However, it is precisely the force of pornography to move us in embodied ways that has interested recent researchers. As Susanna Paasonen has said, the polarised debate over whether porn is bad, inciting violence against women and reproducing social hierarchies of power and subordination, or good, an outlaw discourse that rebels against bourgeois mores, has given way to investigations of the affective and corporeal feelings that it evokes (see Paasonen 2014, pp. 136, 140). Others have argued that if pornography is synonymous with male fantasies, that is a judgement about the current state of the porn industry, not about porn, which is not “a historical invariant” (Power 2009, pp. 47, 56) and does not have to be inherently exploitative. We might, then, find the Courbet and the Manara images problematic not in relation to their categorisation as either art or porn, but because they exclude the female spectator. When Nochlin looks at Courbet’s picture, she is “shut out of the house of meaning” (Nochlin 1988a, p. 37). She cannot take over the male viewing position, which offers “erotic stimulation and vanguard transgression”, but nor is she prepared to “lie down with the model” (Nochlin 1988a, p. 37) and identify with the object of the gaze: “such an identification is inevitably either masochistic or narcissistic and connotes sexual availability” (Nochlin 1988a, p. 34). The (female) author of the present article objects to the Manara panel on these same grounds. It occurs multiple times with slight variations, lacking even the minimal porn narrative of desire and satisfaction (see Dyer 1992, p. 125): the female protagonist, a frigid bourgeoise, has a chip implanted in her brain enabling her to be aroused by a remote-control device, operated by a sinister doctor and switched off before she can climax. The story is never focalised through her, and the reader is given no insight into her feelings. It would be excessive to claim that the reception of Manara’s work, or that of L’Origine du monde, is mechanically divisible along gendered lines,2 but Beaty’s failure to attend to the misogyny of the Manara panel in his otherwise brilliant book suggests that Nochlin’s point about implied viewing positions cannot ­easily

2Lewis

Trondheim recounts his spat at the 2011 Angoulême comics festival with fellow jury member Wolinski, who wanted to put Manara’s name forward for the Grand Prix, on the grounds that “Il dessine magnifiquement les femmes” [He draws women superbly]. Trondheim’s reply was “Oui … C’est un super dessinateur de vagins” [Yes … He’s great at drawing vaginas] (Trondheim 2011, n. p.). In a subsequent collection of blogposts, produced after Wolinski’s murder, Trondheim, with hindsight, regrets his stand against the veteran cartoonist (see Trondheim 2015, n. p.).

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be dismissed.3 In relation to Courbet’s painting, a 2010 comic portrays just such a gendered divergence. Que j’ai été, an autobiographical comic co-written by a woman, Charlotte Blazy,4 quotes the painting when the narrator and her boyfriend visit the Musée d’Orsay, in a ­black-and-white drawing that sacrifices the “refinement” (Blazy et al. 2010, pp. 26–27) of the original and emphasises its resemblance to mass-produced pornography. Its inclusion in this sensitively-toned comic leads us to expect, though, “significance beyond the erotic”, in McNair’s expression, a significance that resides in the different bodily reactions of the male and female protagonists. The young man, on seeing L’Origine du monde, cannot hide his excitement at the “énorme” depiction of “une chatte” [a pussy]. He stares at it eagerly and calls his girlfriend, who experiences a sensation of emptiness, described in her verbal narration and symbolised visually by the blank canvas that expresses her subjective state (Fig. 5.1). The painting triggers memories of her childhood infatuation with a voyeuristic male authority figure who had subsequently been imprisoned for rape, although she herself had escaped physical harm. The young woman’s shock and unease correspond to the “masochistic identification” referred to by Nochlin, taking the form here of a recollection of her younger self as the naïve object of a disturbing gaze. If female viewers were left outside the “house of meaning” by Monet and Courbet in the 1860s and by Manara in the 1980s, they have subsequently been invited in by female artists who have “take[n] back control of their nudity” (Borzello 2012, p. 68), in Frances Borzello’s term, most often through naked ­self-portrayal, an important current in both fine art (since the early twentieth century) and in comics (since the twenty-first century, following earlier work by trailblazers such as Aline Kominsky). Artists representing this tendency in France include Aurélia Aurita, Caroline Sury and Aude Picault. The latter was also the first of several female contributors to the unabashedly pornographic BDcul series published by the small press Les Requins marteaux (see Picault 2010). We will

3In

a review of Thierry Groensteen’s La Bande dessinée, mode d’emploi, Amanda Macdonald notes that “despite its extraordinary sensitivity to the medium’s every other condition of generic existence […] Groensteen’s book scarcely registers gender as a legible element and dynamic within bande dessinée” (Groensteen 2008; Macdonald 2008, p. 202). She shows this blind spot as particularly in evidence in Groensteen’s analysis of a page from Robert Crumb’s Mister Nostalgia (Macdonald 2008, p. 206). 4The comic is drawn by a male artist, Renart, but the website of Les Enfants rouges, the publisher of the book, explains that on meeting Joseph Safieddine, Blazy had formulated the project “de raconter, librement, sa vie” [to recount, freely, her life]. I would therefore class it as autobiographical.

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Fig. 5.1   In front of L’Origine du monde. Image credits Blazy, Charlotte (W), Joseph Safieddine (W), Renart (A). 2010. Que j’ai été. Vallauris: Les Enfants Rouges, pp. 26 and 27

not embark here on an exhaustive exploration of interventions by female cartoonists into the cultural construction of the female body. Instead, we will focus on the work of one female comics artist, which takes the nude and the naked in fine art as its starting point, and sets out exuberantly to unsettle the proprietorial male gaze.

Gendered Relations of Looking, and the Subversion of the Male Gaze Catherine Meurisse’s Moderne Olympia was produced in 2014, in a collaborative publishing venture between Futuropolis and the Musée d’Orsay (Fig. 5.2). Olympia is thereby culturally ‘downgraded’ from fine art exhibit to comic book, and one, moreover, that transforms the characters from this painting and others from the museum’s collection into performers in another popular cultural genre, the musical comedy film. However, the mention of the Musée d’Orsay on the cover adds prestige, and the game of identifying the fifty paintings quoted gives it an educational purpose. The works are not shown as canvasses hanging on walls: instead, their characters and décor are integrated into a diegetic world

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Fig. 5.2   Cover of Moderne Olympia (2014). Image credits Meurisse, Catherine. 2014. Moderne olympia. Paris: Futuropolis/Musée d’Orsay, cover

within which they all share “the same ontological status” (Groensteen 2017). The story adopts the conventions of the self-reflexive sub-genre known as the backstage musical (see Feuer 1977), and some of the paintings are animated as scenes under production (‘toile’ means both canvas and film in French). Thus the ­fine-art nude, Vénus from Alexandre Cabanel’s Naissance de Vénus (1863) is transformed into a film star posing for the camera, her aestheticised respectability no longer protected by an elaborate museum frame (Fig. 5.3). The naked Olympia is also expelled from her gallery frame, and is seen on the cover being reframed by theatrical lights as a showgirl. She plays the part of an aspiring actress in a ­rise-to-fame narrative, a role less disreputable than that of prostitute, although she is shocked to discover that she is expected to sleep her way to success, in keeping with the mythology of Bohemianism and the sexual fantasy of the model as mistress (see Borzello 2012, p. 164) which seems less picturesque when translated into the contemporary actuality of the casting couch, especially since the revelations of the #metoo campaign, about which this 2014 comic now seems prescient.

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Fig. 5.3   Cabanel’s Venus posing as film star. Image credits Meurisse, Catherine. 2014. Moderne olympia Paris: Futuropolis/Musée d’Orsay, p. 32

L’Origine du monde, in spite of being owned by the museum, is not among the fifty paintings represented visually, but it is repeatedly alluded to verbally. Olympia aspires to play Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and tells the casting director that she has appeared in “toiles d’auteur” [auteurist paintings/films] (Meurisse 2014, p. 15). He is not impressed until he realises that she is referring to the X-rated L’Origine du monde. Her subsequent denials that she was really the model—she claims only to have been a stuntwoman, for example—become a running gag. Olympia is depicted as naked throughout, but any potential for erotic stimulation is eliminated by Meurisse’s cartoony style, and the fetishising ribbon serves primarily to make her identifiable. The signifiers of her status as a prostitute from Manet’s painting are subverted: the bouquet of flowers from an admirer is used as part of a repeated slapstick gag, and the black cat, rather than representing the invisible female genitals, becomes a funny animal that gets fed on tinned cat food. In the one panel that corresponds to the actual painting, Olympia’s arm is repositioned, and her posture signals disgruntlement rather than sexual availability (Fig. 5.4). Furthermore, she has a voice, via the speech balloons, which she uses to complain about the non-speaking parts that she gets offered. And the black servant, who no longer merges with the background, has been promoted from brothel maid to coach and counsellor. She is credited with an ironical wit: she makes an out-of-frame comment about Orientalist clichés, which can be interpreted as a critique of her own presence in the painting. It is only on the cover of the book that Olympia assumes the pose from the original but here it is recoded,

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Fig. 5.4   Disgruntled olympia. Image credits Meurisse, Catherine. 2014. Moderne olympia Paris: Futuropolis/Musée d’Orsay, p. 8

albeit in comic mode, as showbiz glamour. Her direct address acknowledges the spectator not as a potential customer in a sexual transaction, but as part of the audience interpellated by the big production number in progress (see Collins 1981, p. 140). The musical comedy plot demands a heterosexual romance that has the function of resolving a cultural opposition (see Feuer 1982, p. 71), in this case between Les Officiels, consecrated by the artistic establishment, and Les Refusés, the group of artists including Courbet and Manet who exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863, all transposed by Meurisse into film directors and actors. Olympia is associated with the Refusés, while the Officiels are represented by her suitor Romain, whose name indicates his origin as an extra in Thomas Couture’s neo-classical painting (or ‘film’, as the book would have it) Romains de la decadence (1847), and by Olympia’s rival in both career and love, Vénus, the classical nude and established actress. So the personal and professional rivalry between the two women turns upon the opposition between naked and nude, “the contested site”, as Nochlin has said, “of vanguard versus conservative practices in the nineteenth century” (Nochlin 1988a, p. 36). In the end, Romain leaves the nude Vénus for the naked Olympia, and the Refusés win out over the Officiels when a

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p­ roducer realises that fashions have turned against neo-classical paintings/‘films’. The Studios d’Orsay turn their planned production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a musical comedy in which Olympia has the starring role, and all the characters come together in a grand finale, with only Vénus thrust out to the margins. The main plot, thereby wrapped up, offers a mini-lesson in art history, part of the educational function of the book. However, what remains unresolved is the question of the imbalance of gendered power relations, particularly in relation to the gaze. The performance of glamour in the film world invites a different kind of looking from that between client and prostitute, but it still involves a commodification of the female body, and, as we have seen, behind the scenes, sexual exploitation is the norm: for example, the ballet dancers who appear in Degas’s paintings/‘films’ are resigned to the fact that roles are traded off against sexual acquiescence: they acknowledge that he is a “vicelard” [pervert], but explain that “Il nous prend dans toutes ses toiles. Ça nous fait un gagne-pain assuré” [He uses us in all his paintings/‘films’. That ensures our livelihood] (Meurisse 2014, p. 23). In Richard Dyer’s discussion of the backstage musical, he points to the key distinction between the narrative, which, he says, tends to work through problems, and the song and dance numbers, which offer utopian solutions or evasions (see Dyer 1992, p. 25). He refers to the Busby Berkeley musical GOLDDIGGERS of 1933, in which four would-be actresses find a way out of depression-era poverty by attracting rich men. The lesson of the narrative, that women’s only capital is their bodies as objects, goes unheeded, he argues, such is the escapist effect of the spectacular numbers, even though they consist precisely of an array of women’s bodies displayed for the camera. He suggests, by way of an explanation, that the numbers draw on non-representational signifiers such as colour, texture, rhythm and camerawork that offer formal analogies with the emotive life of the spectator, and so create euphoria (see Dyer 1992, pp. 26–27). This comic book follows that genre convention by punctuating the narrative with show-stopping production numbers, including a three-page cancan dance routine that rewrites the words of America from WEST SIDE STORY (1957) to celebrate fornication as a route to fame over ten panels (Fig. 5.5). These comic book numbers also draw on non-representational signifiers, but rather than upholding the feelgood illusion of show biz, they comprehensively demythologise it. The main source of satire is undoubtedly Meurisse’s graphic line: in a recorded discussion about the heritage of Claire Bretécher, Meurisse has described this pioneering artist’s portrayal of women as “anti-girly” (Rémy et al. 2015, 00:51:34),

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Fig. 5.5   Song of praise for fornication. Image credits Meurisse, Catherine. 2014. Moderne olympia Paris: Futuropolis/Musée d’Orsay, p. 14

and that term applies equally to her own depiction of female characters.5 It is true that, on the cover, Olympia’s body has a certain perfection and a clear outline, even if she has a cartoon face, but that promise is not kept on the inside pages. 5This expression occurs in the context of a previous remark by Aude Picault, another participant in the discussion, who contrasts Bretécher’s drawings of female characters to the “complaisance” (Rémy et al. 2015, 00:49:53) of certain current female artists who invariably draw women as pretty, fashionably dressed and long-legged. Meurisse notes Picault’s reluctance to use the word “girly” (Rémy et al. 2015, 00:51:40) to denote the work of these artists. The term has become stigmatising and controversial among women comics artists (see Tanxxx 2015).

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In the “fornication” routine, for example, the squiggliness of the line emphasises the lumpy imperfection of the dancers, its sketchy spontaneity inflicts gaping mouths and startled eyes on them, while speed lines accelerate their graceless movements, all bathed in a soft pink wash ironically connoting the girliness that Meurisse disdains. Instead of glitz and escapism we are offered a parodic performance of femininity that would make Judith Butler proud (see Butler 1990, pp. 31–33). And far from singing and dancing away the uncomfortable reality of predatory producers and casting directors, the number uses verbal and visual rhythms to hammer home the message: the increasing intensity provided by everlarger panels is accentuated by the repetition at the end of every line of “forniqua”, underlining the power relations that prevail in the art world and the film industry. Composition is also used to great effect. The Busby Berkeley-style spiral of the later finale number draws our eye to the central figure, not Olympia but the gleefully cigar-chomping producer, who has just hired her not for her acting ability but on Courbet’s recommendation of her talent on the bed sheets. Manet de-idealised the nude, who became naked, and Meurisse de-eroticises the naked model, dispelling any romantic idea of her relationship with the painter. And then, by her cartoon-like rendering of the showgirls’ glamour, she also distances us from the utopian fulfilment of the musical comedy, which ultimately relies on the image of woman as male projection. She includes a coda on the final page that offers a mise en abyme of the book’s challenge to that regime of looking. This last sequence, in which Romain and Olympia walk hand in hand towards one of Monet’s haystacks before disappearing behind it, both acknowledges and frustrates the spectator’s desire to see the vagina that is symbolised by Manet and actually depicted by Courbet, whose painting is referred to throughout this comic as a porn film. The comic never shows any frames from that ‘film’, even though Olympia keeps up her verbal refrain of indignation at the way it clings to her reputation: “Dans ‘L’Origine du monde’ j’étais doublure cuisses, c’est tout” [In “L’Origine du monde” I was a thigh double, that’s all]. Romain, acting as a surrogate for the reader, twists a line from Romeo and Juliet (in italics here): “Laisse-moi voir un peu ton bouton d’amour…” [Let me have a look at your bud of love, …] (Meurisse 2014, p. 64) to persuade Olympia to show him her sexual parts. She finally reveals them to him, even casting off the ribbon, the last vestige of fetishism, but they are not visible to the reader, whose view is obscured by the haystack (Fig. 5.6). Olympia is now completely naked, but she is not displayed for fantasy ownership by the spectator. Meurisse does, however, produce a version of L’Origine du monde in another book, Scènes de la vie hormonale, a collection of her cartoons from Charlie

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Fig. 5.6   The haystack. Image credits Meurisse, Catherine. 2014. Moderne olympia Paris: Futuropolis/Musée d’Orsay, p. 64

Hebdo (Meurisse 2016). The panel in question is not a direct reproduction of Courbet’s painting, but cannot fail to evoke it (Fig. 5.7). The female character is annoyed by her lover’s tattoo, which spells out “Maman”, so she gets to work with a razor, and shaves “ta mère” [your mother] (Meurisse 2016, p. 15) into her pubic hair. The lover is confronted with the terrifying Oedipal scenario implied by his tattoo, ramping up the castration anxiety that the whole fine art tradition tried to ward off. The masochism that Nochlin attributes to the female viewer of Courbet’s painting may now be reassigned to her male counterpart.

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Fig. 5.7   Another version of L’Origine du monde. Image credits Meurisse, Catherine. 2016. Scènes de la vie hormonale. Paris: Dargaud, p. 15

Conclusion Anthony Julius notes that “the subversive project appropriates the pornographic in order to interrogate the art convention and the art canon. It used the pornographic as an engine of transgression” (Julius 2002, p. 61). The canon proved robust enough to accommodate Manet and Courbet’s paintings of naked women (afforded honorary non-pornographic status by consecrating agencies), alongside classical nudes, even if it has continued to disbar erotic images from ­mass-cultural sources such as comics. The exclusion that has concerned us here, though, is not that of comics from the art canon but that of female spectators from these paintings and drawings, an exclusion that persists even after the destigmatisation of the term ‘pornographic’. The subversive project investigated in this essay has been the appropriation by female comics authors and artists of those same transgressive artworks in order to interrogate the convention according to which naked female bodies can be represented as passive and available for the imaginary possession of the male spectator. Blazy recounts the visceral impact on her textual self as viewer of Courbet’s portrayal of female flesh in L’Origine du monde, while Meurisse gives agency and a voice to Manet’s Olympia, whose ultimate accomplishment is to become flamboyantly invisible to the reader. Finally, in her appropriation of Courbet’s painting, Meurisse out-transgresses the original, revealing the fragility of the structure of masculine visual dominance.

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Bibliography Beaty, Bart. 2012. Comics versus art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Blazy, Charlotte (W), Joseph Safieddine (W), and Renart (A). 2010. Que j’ai été. Vallauris: Les Enfants Rouges. Borzello, Frances. 2012. The naked nude. London: Thames and Hudson. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge. Clark, Kenneth. 1956. The sude: A study of ideal art. London: John Murray. Clark, T.J. 1999. The painting of modern life. Paris in the art of Manet and his followers. London: Thames and Hudson. Collins, Jim. 1981. Toward defining a matrix of the musical comedy: The place of the spectator within the textual mechanisms. In Genre: The musical, ed. Rick Altman, 134–145. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. La Vérité en peinture. Paris: Flammarion. Dyer, Richard. 1992. Only entertainment. London: Routledge. Feuer, Jane. 1977. The self-reflective musical and the myth of entertainment. Quarterly Review of Film Studies 2 (3): 313–326. Feuer, Jane. 1982. The Hollywood musical. London: BFI and MacMillan. Gilman, Sander L. 2003. Black bodies, white bodies: Toward an iconography of female sexuality in late nineteenth-century art, medicine and literature. In The feminism and visual culture reader, ed. Amelia Jones, 136–150. London: Routledge. Groensteen, Thierry. 2008. La bande dessinée, mode d’emploi. Brussels: Les Impressions nouvelles. Groensteen, Thierry. 2017. Biographies of famous painters in comics. What becomes of the painting? ImageText 9 (2). http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v9_2/. Accessed: 30.7.2018. Julius, Anthony. 2002. Transgressions: The offences of art. London: Thames and Hudson. Leiris, Michel. 1981. Le Ruban au cou d’Olympia. Paris: Gallimard. Les Enfants rouges. 2010. Charlotte Blazy. http://enfantsrouges.com/charlotte-blazy/. Macdonald, Amanda. 2008. Review of La bande dessinée, mode d’emploi. European Comic Art 1 (2): 202–206. Manara, Milo. 2009. Le Déclic. Grenoble: Glénat (First edition 1983). McNair, Brian. 2013. Porno? Chic! How pornography changed the world and made it a better place. London: Routledge. Meurisse, Catherine. 2014. Moderne olympia Paris: Futuropolis and Musée d’Orsay. Meurisse, Catherine. 2016. Scènes de la vie hormonale. Paris: Dargaud. Musée d’Orsay. 2006–2009. Gustave Courbet, L’Origine du monde. https://www.museeorsay.fr/fr/collections/oeuvres-commentees/recherche/commentaire_id/lorigine-dumonde-125.html. Accessed: 01.09.2018. Nead, Linda. 1992. The female nude. Art, obscenity and sexuality. London: Routledge. Needham, Gerald. 1973. Manet, ‘Olympia’ and pornographic photography. In Woman as sex object. Studies in erotic art 1730–1970, ed. Thomas B. Hess and Linda Nochlin, 80–89. London: Allen Lane.

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Nochlin, Linda. 1988a. Courbet’s real allegory: Rereading ‘the painter’s studio’. In Courbet reconsidered, ed. Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin, 16–41. New York: The Brooklyn Museum. Nochin, Linda. 1988b. Catalogue entry. In Courbet reconsidered, ed. Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin, 176. New York: The Brooklyn Museum. O’Grady, Lorraine. 2003. Olympia’s maid: Reclaiming black sexuality. In The feminism and visual culture reader, ed. Amelia Jones, 174–187. London: Routledge. Paasonen, Susanna. 2014. Between meaning and mattering: On affect and porn studies. Porn Studies 1 (1–2): 136–142. Picault, Aude. 2010. Comtesse. Bordeaux: Les Requins marteaux. Power, Nina. 2009. One-dimensional woman. Winchester: Zero Books. Rémy, Matthieu, Fabienne Dumont, Catherine Meurisse, and Aude Picault. 2015. Bretécher et son héritage, discussion of Exposition Claire Bretécher, Centre Pompidou 30.11.2015. http://webtv.bpi.fr/fr/doc/4251. Accessed: 24.05.2018. Savatier, Thierry. 2006. L’Origine du monde: Histoire d’un tableau de Gustave Courbet. Paris: Bartillat. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. 1986. The legs of the countess. October 39:65–108. Tanxxx. 2015. Auto-droit de réponse. http://tanx.fr/bloug/archives/8033. Accessed: 01.09.2015. Trondheim, Lewis. 2011. Le Robinet musical. Paris: Delcourt. Trondheim, Lewis. 2015. Un arbre en furie. Paris: Delcourt.

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Fragmented and Framed. Precarious ‘Body Signs’ in Comics by Regina Hofer, Ulli Lust, Barbara Yelin and Peer Meter Marina Rauchenbacher and Katharina Serles Abstract

Drawing from Georges Didi-Huberman’s idea of the ‘threshold’ as a central trope for images and their inherent double bind, we interpret the gutter as an exponentially visualized threshold. It thus offers an alternative explanation for the often described physicality of comics as well as the precariousness of its bodies. Which ‘body signs’ and interpretations of these signs does the threshold evoke? How can we think about the interdependence of framing, fragmenting and repetition? How can we functionalize these reflections for comics studies? We explore the framing and fragmenting characteristics of the gutter by offering an exemplary analysis of four central German-language comics of the twenty-first century (Regina Hofer’s Blad, 2008; Ulli Lust’s Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, 2009/2013; How I Tried to Be a Good Person, 2017/2019; as well as Barbara Yelin and Peer Meter’s Gift, 2010). Keywords

Gutter · Image perception · Precariousness · Fragment · Threshold · Body sign · Ulli Lust · Regina Hofer · Barbara Yelin · Georges Didi-Huberman

M. Rauchenbacher (*) · K. Serles  Wien, Österreich e-mail: [email protected] K. Serles e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_6

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As an inherently self-reflexive and image-critical medium (see, e.g., Chute 2010; Frahm 2010; Heindl and Sina 2018; Serles 2018), comics1 does not only contain images, but produces (and reflects on) a deconstructive analysis of the concept and modes of the ‘image’ itself. Hence, it is not just a medium, but something more complex, as William J. T. Mitchell describes: “Trans- is only one among the many prefixes that must be attached to media in order to do justice to comics. They are also, as everyone knows, multi-, inter-, and meta-, which can reflect on their own conventions, paramedia that parody other media” (Mitchell 2014, p. 260). According to Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda, a “mutualistic” interaction is at the “heart” of what has been referred to as “empathetic” art by Chris Ware (Chris Ware quoted in Chute and Jagoda 2014, p. 3). This “interaction between text and reader—or, perhaps, author and reader” (Chute and Jagoda 2014, p. 3)— is triggered by the gutter: Crucially, the gutter spaces of comics are, in a sense, unregulated spaces, interstices that are components of meaning for the reader to fill in (or choose to ignore). For this reason, comics […] is a form that gestures at robust readerly involvement; it actively solicits through its constitutive grammar the participant’s role in generating meaning (Chute and Jagoda 2014, p. 4).

This essay aims at contributing to the understanding of the medium comics by analyzing specific modes of visual conceptualization with the help of a fundamental, image theoretical text, Georges Didi-Huberman’s Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde [what we see, looks back at us] (1992), which emphasizes the bodily aspects of image perception—or an ‘empathetic viewer involvement’, if you will. Drawing from Didi-Huberman, we establish an alternative discourse for what appears to be a peculiarly physical/bodily medium, for the ‘precarious’ bodies comics (re)produces, for the inherent subversive potential of body representations and for the performative power of the gutter.

1We

follow Hillary Chute’s proposal to use the plural form ‘comics’ as singular if we refer to it as a medium (see Chute 2008, p. 462).

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The Body on the Threshold of the Image on the Threshold of Comics Didi-Huberman discusses image perception based on Franz Kafka’s parable Vor dem Gesetz [Outside the Law] (1915): a man comes to the law that is guarded by a doorkeeper. Despite the door being open, the man is refused entry by the doorkeeper. The man thus waits—in front of the door, sitting on a chair—for the remainder of his life. Shortly before he dies, it gets darker and he recognizes light radiating from the door. He asks the doorkeeper why nobody else ever desired admittance, and the doorkeeper answers, “No one else could be granted entry here, because this entrance was intended for you alone. I shall now go and shut it” (Kafka 2009, p. 155).2 In his analysis of this text, Didi-Huberman proposes that image perception is much like remaining on a “seuil” [threshold] (Didi-Huberman 1992, p. 192; emphasis in orig.). Standing in front of an image, which he identifies as the object “du voir et du regard” [of seeing and the gaze], is like standing in front of an open door, “dans le cadre de laquelle on ne peut pas passer, on ne peut pas entrer” [into which frame one cannot pass, cannot enter] (Didi-Huberman 1992, p. 192; emphasis in orig.). The doorstep as a metaphor, signifies the precarious place of an opening and thus functions as a double bind—as one’s relation to the doorstep oscillates between in front of and in there. This state of an in-between directly refers to the deictic dimension of images in which the term ‘there’ suggests an ‘outside’ by simultaneously being an ‘inside’, which corresponds to an essential consideration of phenomenologically based image criticism, as it was first described by, for instance, Edmund Husserl (see Husserl 2005). Mitchell, further developing this concept for the image-theoretical approaches of the last third of the twentieth century, con­ sequently describes the perception of images as a “paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something ‘there’ and ‘not there’ at the same time” (Mitchell 1987, p. 17). Didi-Huberman’s configuration of the threshold also refers to the significance of the metaphorical dimension of the window in art history. There, the window stands for the image itself which functions as a ‘window to the world’, and it is the frame itself which enables perception. By means of the threshold or doorstep,

2“Hier

konnte niemand sonst Einlaß erhalten, denn dieser Eingang war nur für dich bestimmt. Ich gehe jetzt und schließe ihn” (Kafka 2006, p. 56).

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Didi-Huberman finally—and most importantly for us—introduces a considerably spatial and physical moment of image perception: Les images – les choses visuelles – sont toujours déjà des lieux: elles n’apparaissent que comme des paradoxes en acte où les coordonnées spatiales se déchirent, s’ouvrent à nous et finissent par s’ouvrir en nous, pour nous ouvrir et en cela même nous incorporer. [Images – visual things – are always already places. They only appear as a paradox in action, with their spatial coordinates dissolving, opening up to us and finally in us, in order to open us up, incorporate us and thus embody us.] (Didi-Huberman 1992, p. 194; emphasis in orig.).

In Devant l’Image (1990), Didi-Huberman describes this physicality of perception as “se laisser plutôt saisir” [being ‘captured’] (Didi-Huberman 1990, p. 25) by the image. All of this does not seem unfamiliar to comics studies: Scott McCloud identifies the reader as “a silent accomplice,” “an equal partner in crime” who might not “have drawn an axe being raised,” but who is “the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why” (McCloud 1994, p. 68)— all of which happens within the gutter and is—following McCloud—, thus, filled in by the readers. Ole Frahm describes reading comics as something one needs to do with an “Axt im Auge” [axe in the eye], “mit toten Augen” [with dead eyes], or with a “gespalten” [split] skull and gaze (Frahm 2010, pp. 122, 138, 141). These violent metaphors are significant: they relate to the principle of the gutter which repeatedly fragments bodily representations, narratives and discourses. We propose to read the gutter as an exponentially visualized threshold, and thus an even stronger marker of physical involvement. Much like the threshold’s function as a ‘double bind’ for Didi-Huberman, the gutter ‘opens up to us and finally in us’, thus offering an alternative explanation for the aforementioned ‘empathetic’ power of the medium comics. This subversive potential of comics should be emphasized rather than harmonized or even extinguished by concepts such as ‘closure’ (see McCloud 1994, p. 67). Subsequently, the very potential of the gutter allows not only for fragmenting, but also for framing. Repetition, variance and framing of ‘body signs’ within the panels induce a continuous reflection on questions of identity by pointing to the perpetually new performative construction and precariousness of bodies. Elisabeth Klar considers all of this to be a consequence of ‘seriality’: “Der Körper muss über die Panels kopiert und in unterschiedlichen Körperhaltungen und aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven dargestellt werden” [The body has to be copied across the panels

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and has to be depicted in different postures and from different perspectives.] (Klar 2014, p. 171). Further elaborating on Frahm’s notion of “unterbrochen[e]” [interrupted] (Frahm 2010, p. 41) identities of comics characters, she argues that ‘body signs’ in comics are “nicht identisch, sondern wiedererkennbar” [not identical but recognizable] and therefore “instabile[] Identität[en]” [unstable identities] (Klar 2014, p. 171). Furthermore, Frahm himself establishes violence not only as a mode of perception, but as a structural quality of comics as well: “Die Gewalt der Identifizierung […] und die Gewalt der Wiederholung” [the violence of identification […] and violence of repetition] (Frahm 2010, p. 122) are not necessarily contradictory. “Comic-Leser haben immer eine Axt im Auge. Die Gewalt der Wiederholung begründet eine Poetik, die sich niemals ganz in Identifizierungen aufheben lässt.” [Readers of comics always have an axe in their eyes. The violence of repetition constitutes a poetics which can never completely be suspended by identifications.] (Frahm 2010, pp. 122–123). Thus, the gutter as a double bind produces a power-political interplay between display and interruption. ‘Body signs’ develop their full potential—both in an affirmative and a subversive way—on the threshold only, that is when the comprehensive attempt to cross the threshold conflicts with the variability of the signs itself. On the following pages, we explore the framing and fragmenting characteristics of the gutter (with Didi-Huberman as our theoretical backdrop) by analyzing four German-language comics focusing on politics of gazing: Regina Hofer’s Blad [fat] (2008),3 Ulli Lust’s Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens (2009; Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life 2013), and Wie ich versuchte ein guter Mensch zu sein (2017; How I Tried to Be a Good Person 2019), as well as Barbara Yelin and Peer Meter’s Gift [poison] (2010). The following deliberations are based on close-readings and are structured as follows: first, we examine visualizations of eyes specifically; secondly, we analyze fragmented bodies and fragmenting gazes in a broader sense; and thirdly, we look at repeatedly discontinued and re-framed identities.

3First

published in 2008 under the pseudonym Borretsch and in two volumes in Ulli Lust’s online comics publication platform www.electrocomics.com. In 2018, the Austrian publisher Luftschacht delivered a print version. To accommodate our international readership we will be quoting from both sources.

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What We See Looks Back at Us Didi-Huberman almost exclusively focuses on sculptures, installations and architecture (mostly borders and apertures, such as walls, doors, portals and tombs). We transfer this somewhat straightforward, illustrative approach onto a metaphorical equivalent of the threshold: the eyes. Regarding the traditional concept of eyes as doors to the inner self or the soul, we ask if close-up studies promise a more profound insight or rather the idea of the discovery of something hidden. What happens if the readers’s gaze is reciprocated—and what if this promise is broken? For example: Barbara Yelin and Peer Meter’s comic Gift repeatedly promises specific (and literal) insights into the suspected murderer Gesche Gottfried by providing close-ups of her. As the reasons for her murders have never quite been cleared up4 and the comic fails in this too, the suggested deeper insights fall short. Consider the following scene: a guard is shown walking upstairs, on his way to the prisoner. He accompanies the pastor, one of the Bremen men who oversee the case. As the guard unlocks and opens the spyhole to Gottfried’s cell and light floods out into the dark corridor, all spectators (readers included) seem to be on the verge of solving the case, of uncovering something specific or secret behind bars (see Yelin and Meter 2010, pp. 31–32). This complex arrangement becomes paradigmatic to the present analysis in terms of the spyhole’s function as a threshold in Didi-Huberman’s sense: a gaze is performed, and its object seems to surrender to it. At the same time, however, this gaze is framed and fragmented; what becomes visible is a specific section of the room only, thus reverberating the limits of seeing. The following panels zoom in and, little by little, focus more closely on Gott­ fried’s head (Fig. 6.1). It almost seems as if the object eventually returns this gaze and makes contact. Nevertheless, the confrontation with Gottfried’s face and eyes in one of the close-ups remains unsatisfactory5: her gaze does not focus on the readers but instead is directed to the right, past the beholders; no emotion is discernible; no further insight is given (see Yelin and Meter 2010, p. 33). The en-face-composition suggests extensive possibilities for the readers’s insight as it evokes the Platonic idea of introspection via eye contact (see, e.g.,

4Gottfried,

an inhabitant of the German city of Bremen, was beheaded in 1831 for killing 15 people and poisoning at least 19 others. 5For a comprehensive analysis of this specific example see Rauchenbacher (2015).

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Fig. 6.1   In Gottfried’s cell. Image credits Barbara Yelin (A), Peer Meter (W). 2010. Gift. Berlin: Reprodukt, 33. © Peer Meter, Barbara Yelin and Reprodukt

Neumann 2013); a promise to be denied and undermined as the ‘pictorial’ distance simultaneously and intricately emphasizes the gap between the object of interest and the beholder. Regina Hofer’s Blad is an autobiographical account of growing up with an eating disorder. It strategically schematizes bodies and irritates, or rather deconstructs, identifications in order to visualize the gaze’s performative power on bodies. This is demonstrated in the very beginning when a visual diagnosis of an eating disorder via “große […] unruhige […] Augen” [big, restless eyes] (online: vol. 1, 5/print: 6) is undermined by the drawing itself: the close-up of the protagonist’s face shows pupils and irises blurred into two solid, black circles—mimicked and potentially mocked by the equally black nostrils. Textual attributions are consequently enabled as well as unsettled, once again disappointing the promise of introspection. Neither the regularly filled surfaces nor the central gaze evoke any sense of restlessness, they much rather question diagnosability, identifiability or the (clinical) gaze itself (see Foucault 2003). The convergence of medial and medical meta-reflection on both a structural and a content-based level is striking throughout the comic. The aforementioned

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schematizations might on one hand be explained medically: what is depicted/ seen (and how this is done), is motivated by the eating disorder, which causes “Konzentrationsschwächen” [lack of concentration], “Kreislaufprobleme” [circulatory disturbances], the protagonist’s eyes to burn or her vision to go black (online: vol. 1, 16/print: 17). On the other hand, the dissolution of figuration raises questions of focalization and refers to the Foucauldian critique of a sovereign interpretation (of images). Who looks at what? Who creates the images? Thus, the panels might be abstract depictions of a controlled and controlling inner self, or allusions to medical imaging methods and the possibility of visualizing diagnoses, or, lastly, depictions of mental illnesses. Conclusively, Blad deals with the (im-)possibilities of (self-)determination as well as the concurring and diverging of self- and other people’s perceptions of a person with an eating disorder. Finally, the German covers of Ulli Lust’s Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life and How I Tried to Be a Good Person provide a close-up of the protagonist’s eyes and cat’s eyes respectively. Whereas the former cover has been ascribed a more confrontational connotation, especially in combination with the direct address in the title (see Hochreiter 2014, pp. 241–242), the latter remains enigmatic as the cat will not take up a significant role in the succeeding narrative. Both covers do stress the importance of looking and the power that comes with that gaze (see, e.g., Foucault 2003; Honegger 1991; Mulvey 1975) which is made explicit in the first speech/thought bubble of Today is the Last Day: “Watching can be interesting too” (Lust 2013, p. 7).6

Fragmented Female Bodies In Hofer’s Blad, each page consists of four quadratic panels which often fragment the body of the anorectic protagonist Regina. Consequently, this body is spread over two or more panels. Its ‘body signs’ are sometimes abstract and always interchangeable, fluctuated, as well as unstable.7 This aesthetical choice, predominantly used for female characters, responds to the patriarchal power over female bodies. In Blad, it is the additional experiences of violence and self-harm from anorexia and depression that further motivate the structural fragmentation of the

6“Schauen

kann auch interessant sein” (Lust 2009, p. 7). Kupczyńska has elaborated on a similar strategy in a different series, see Kupczyńska (2014).

7Kalina

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protagonist’s body through the gutter. Moreover, Blad challenges the concept of ‘closure’: the fragmented body parts are not meant to be merged into a “continuous, unified reality” (McCloud 1994, p. 67). Much rather, they signify irritation/ disturbance, a lack of body awareness, and discrepancies between the self- and the public image. Looking more closely at all instances in which Regina’s body is split apart over more than one panel, it becomes apparent that the gutter calls for ­dis-closure: either, it functions as crosshairs and Regina is identified and fixed, or the gutter signifies moments of dis-limitation of the body, be it physically or psychologically: “Ich hatte mich total verausgabt. // Kannte meine Grenzen nicht” [I had worked too much. // Didn’t know my limits] (online: vol. 2, 25/print: 77). This dis-limitation is hence purported structurally as the gutter multiplies the gaze’s threshold. The body is seen and unseen in every panel that shows a fragment of it, and as a ‘whole’ in the split panel. Didi-Huberman’s description of the spatial structure of the threshold as “déchirure” [crack/fissure] (Didi-Huberman 1992, p. 192) and its ontological relation to “blessures les plus intimes” [most intimate wounds] (Didi-Huberman 1992, p. 192) matches the aesthetics and function of the gutter in Blad. In a very preliminary sense, comics are multiplied pictures with manifest and multiplied thresholds: panels, frames, gutter. Thus, reading Didi-Huberman’s text as a study on the mutual interdependencies of image and body, then applying it to comics, enables us to describe the physicality of the medium and its peculiar ‘body signs’ in an innovative way. Regarding comics, the precariousness of the depicted bodies calls for an altogether different attention. The fissure here can be read as a permanent, ­self-reflective moment, questioning its own possibilities for visualization: how can a frame relate to what it frames? “Different constructions of gutters and frames produce a different look and feel to the page […], they make the page signify differently” (Postema 2013, p. 50). Martin Schüwer discusses Gilles Deleuze’s cinematographic account on ‘geometrical’ and ‘physical’ conceptions of the gaze as especially productive for comics (see Schüwer 2008, pp. 189–193). Is it a predetermined or a dynamic frame into which something is put, operating in relation to its inscribed variables? Thus, the limitation process with framing might operate in two different ways—“mathematically or dynamically: either as preliminary to the existence of the bodies whose essence they fix, or going as far as the power of existing bodies goes” (Deleuze 1986, p. 13). Blad demonstrates the irrevocable transgression of these limitations or the limits of framing itself. In this regard, it also refers to the idea that perception and ‘body signs’ are preliminarily limited—and remain at the threshold.

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Fig. 6.2   Fantasy in the laboratory. Image credits Ulli Lust. 2009. Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens. Berlin: avant-verlag, 252. © Ulli Lust and avant-verlag

Lust’s Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life discusses the ­power-political dimension of body perception by referring to a traditional discourse of feminist critique: the fragmentation of female bodies. After being raped, the protagonist Ulli recalls a made-up childhood bedtime story in which her younger self walks into a basement and discovers a secret laboratory, used for experiments on female bodies. Showing two amputated breasts, the narrator recalls: “That was the moment when I realized that I too had breasts” (Lust 2013, p. 252; Fig. 6.2).8 The implied ‘clinical gaze’ refers to the cultural-historical dimension of the power of the ‘male gaze’, specifically the male clinical gaze, and the creation of femininity (see Honegger 1991; Foucault 2003). An earlier episode shows Ulli and her companion Edi dressing up. After cutting Ulli’s dress short, they apply eyeliner, lipstick and hairspray in front of a bathroom mirror. This is depicted by spreading the body parts over the panels of the page. Eyes, hair, mouth, legs are particularized, sometimes even separated from a body as mere symbols of ‘femininity.’ Such a fragmentation quotes—and criticizes—the objectification and fetishization of female bodies, as first extensively elaborated on by Laura Mulvey (see Mulvey 1975).9 The two central panels once again show fragmented bodies; their reflections in the mirror remain hidden. 8“Das

war der Moment, in dem ich begriff, dass ich selbst Brüste hatte” (Lust 2009, p. 252). 9Mulvey’s analytical concept of the ‘male gaze’ has layed the foundation for a feminist reflection on the representation of female bodies (see, e.g., Jones 2012, p. 69) as well as on corresponding and determining power-political practices. With regards to questions of intersectionality and the subversion of the binary gender concept, Mulvey’s approach of course has to be rethought and recontexualized (see, e.g., hooks 1992; Jones 2012, pp. 62–116).

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Fig. 6.3   Female body with phallus. Image credits Ulli Lust. (2017). Wie ich versuchte, ein guter Mensch zu sein. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 268. © Ulli Lust and Suhrkamp

Blad and Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life not only criticize cultural practices by referring to patriarchal conventions of thinking, seeing and depicting female bodies; moreover and more generally, readers of these comics radically repeat a performative con- and destruction of bodies.

Discontinued Identities—Precarious ‘Body Signs’ All discussed depictions of body fragments and fragmented bodies promise exceptional closeness or insight. They feature an alienated gaze on oneself (especially Blad) or identify the societally determining, dissecting gaze as such (as is the case in Lust’s and Yelin and Meter’s comics). Quite similarly, Lust finds ways of exposing and unmasking the violence of the ‘male gaze’ as she portrays the transgressive staring at the protagonist by growing hands out of the spectators’s eyes (see, e.g., Lust 2013, p. 226). Thus, she invents alternative configurations of viewing and also points to the aforementioned critique of sovereignty of

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interpretation.10 The gutter operates as the (negative) visualization of a cut, a performative depiction of the productive ‘differential moment’ (see Babka and Posselt 2016, p. 180). It undermines what identity politics are trying to fixate. Another autobiographical comic by Lust, How I Tried to Be a Good Person, exemplifies this as well. Here, a love triangle between the characters Ulli, Georg and Kimata is depicted; the sexual relationship between Ulli and Kimata becomes increasingly violent and abusive. The sequence discussed (Fig. 6.3) is one of many sex scenes between the two, however, for the first and only time an otherwise highly stereotypical power relation is inverted: if the sequence is read as a split panel or from right to left, it seems as if the female body is equipped with a dildo/phallus, penetrating another/its own female body. Psychoanalytically, having returned to a preoedipal state, Ulli experiences an orgasm through self-penetration and—only in this reading—a fleeting moment of autonomy/emancipation from the other two men in the triangle. This could be read as an allusion to her final emancipation from abusive relationships and other dependencies, or as an implicit queer reading of the otherwise rather heteronormative character. Hofer’s Blad stands out as the text evokes an expectation which the visual realization does not meet: in a comic exploring the human body itself, that same body is fragmented, deconstructed and exposed as a sign. Emotions, memories and human bodies are realized as schematic, symbolic, or non-human ‘body signs.’ This creates a kind of productive irritation which yet again provides a possibility to question visual representations. As such, Hofer depicts a ­de-identification and presents a subversive and productive fissure to the readers. The concluding example sums up most of the deliberations of this article: talking about evenings at a local pub while depicting a random bar, the narrator states: “Ich hörte mir die Sorgen der Männer an. // Überhörte die zweideutigen Bemerkungen. // Und übersah die taxierenden Blicke. // An einem Abend kam ich mit einem Burschen ins Gespräch.” [I listened to the men’s sorrows. // Ignored the

10In

Liv Strömquist’s non-fictional comic Kunskapens frukt (2014; Fruit of Knowledge, 2018) the hegemony of the ‘male gaze’ is the central topic as well. Similarly to Lust, she discusses traditional, hierarchically determined gazes onto female bodies without reproducing them. As can be exemplified by the passage on Saartjie Baartman, Strömquist—for a change—visualizes the powerful spectators, rather than exclusively reproducing visualizations of the highly exposed and exhibited Khoikhoi woman, and as such breaks with the hegemonial power discourse. Instead, the bodies of Baartman’s spectators are framed and exposed as well (see Strömquist 2018, p. 21–22).

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Fig. 6.4   In the local pub. Image credits Regina Hofer. (2018). Blad. Vienna: Luftschacht, 60. © Regina Hofer and Luftschacht

innuendos. // Overlooked the appraising gazes. // One evening, I started a conversation with a young fellow.] (online: vol. 2, 8/print: 60; Fig. 6.4). The visual as well as the textual are at odds, their relationship is disjunct, just as the readers’s power of gaze and interpretation. The narrator states to have overlooked the appraising gazes. Nevertheless, the gazes described are not visualized between the intradiegetic characters, but between the characters and the readers—or not at all, as the body gazing back is not identifiably human. Who looks? Who looks at whom? What happens while looking? It is the semiotic character of the depiction itself and its precariousness, which becomes presentable here—and therefore initiates critical analysis sui generis. Conclusively, Didi-Huberman’s discussion of image perception and the gaze, which he establishes via the configuration of the threshold, can be applied productively to comics analysis. If the gutter is discussed as an exponentially visualized threshold, it explores and exposes the bodily involvement comics generates

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as well as its self-reflexive and deconstructive potential: inscribed (and expected) processes of identification become fragile and instead a ‘differential moment’ is visualized, framed—and fragmented.

Bibliography Babka, Anna, and Gerald Posselt. 2016. Gender und Dekonstruktion. In collab. with Sergej Seitz and Matthias Schmidt. Vienna: facultas/UTB. Borretsch. 2008. Blad. Electrocomics. Vol. 1: https://www.electrocomics.com/ebook_unterseiten/blad.htm; Vol. 2: https://www.electrocomics.com/ebook_unterseiten/blad02.htm. Accessed: 27.03.2019. Chute, Hillary. 2008. Comics as literature? Reading graphic narrative. PMLA 123 (2): 452–465. Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic women. Life narrative and contemporary comics. New York: Columbia University Press. Chute, Hillary, and Patrick Jagoda. 2014. Special Issue: Comics & media. Critical Inquiry 40 (3): 1–10. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1. The movement-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1990. Devant l’image. Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1992. Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Foucault, Michel. 2003. The birth of the clinic. An archaeology of medical perception (1963), trans. A. M. Sheridan. Abingdon: Routledge. Frahm, Ole. 2010. Die Sprache des Comics. Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts. Heindl, Nina, and Véronique Sina. 2018. Formen der Selbstreflexivität im Medium Comic. Zur Einführung. Closure 4 (5): 1–12. Hochreiter, Susanne. 2014. Heldinnen und keine. Zu Genre und Affekt in Ulli Lusts Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens. In Bild ist Text ist Bild ist Text, ed. Susanne Hochreiter and Ursula Klingenböck, 233–256. Bielefeld: transcript. Hofer, Regina. 2018. Blad. Vienna: Luftschacht. Honegger, Claudia. 1991. Die Ordnung der Geschlechter. Die Wissenschaften vom Menschen und das Weib 1750–1850. Frankfurt a. M.: Campus. hooks, bell. 1992. The oppositional gaze. Black female spectators. In Black looks. Race and representation, 115–131. Boston: South End Press. Husserl, Edmund. 2005. Phantasy, image consciousness, and memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer. Jones, Amelia. 2012. Seeing differently. A history and theory of identification and the visual arts. London: Routledge. Kafka, Franz. 2006. Vor dem Gesetz (1915/1920). In Ein Landarzt. Kleine Erzählungen, ed. Roland Reuß and Peter Staengle, 49–56. Frankfurt a. M.: Stroemfeld. Kafka, Franz. 2009. The trial, ed. Ritchie Robertson, trans. by Mike Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Klar, Elisabeth. 2014. Transformation und Überschreibung: Sprache und Text in ihrer Beziehung zum Körper-Zeichen in den Comics von Alfred. In Bild ist Text ist Bild ist Text, ed. Susanne Hochreiter and Ursula Klingenböck, 169–189. Bielefeld: transcript. Kupczyńska, Kalina. 2014. Gendern Comics, wenn sie erzählen? Über einige Aspekte der Gender-Narratologie und ihre Anwendung in der Comic-Analyse. In Bild ist Text ist Bild ist Text, ed. Susanne Hochreiter and Ursula Klingenböck, 213–232. Bielefeld: transcript. Lust, Ulli. 2009. Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens. Berlin: Avant-verlag. Lust, Ulli. 2013. Today is the last day of the rest of your life, trans. Kim Thompson. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Lust, Ulli. 2017. Wie ich versuchte, ein guter Mensch zu sein. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Lust, Ulli. 2019. How i tried to be a good person. Seattle: Fantagraphics. McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding comics. The invisible art. New York: HarperCollins. Mitchell, William J. T. 1987. What is an Image? In Iconology. Image, Text, Ideology, 7–46. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, William J. T. 2014. Comics as media: afterword. Critical Inquiry 40 (3): 255– 265. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Neumann, Gerhard. 2013. Ludwig Tiecks Novelle Die Gemälde. Diagnose eines romantischen Dispositivs der Weltwahrnehmung. In Gemälderedereien. Zur literarischen Diskursivierung von Bildern, ed. Konstanze Fliedl et al., 25–41. Berlin: Schmidt. Postema, Barbara. 2013. Narrative structure in comics. Rochester: RIT press. Rauchenbacher, Marina. 2015. Opposing viewpoints. Politics of gazing in the graphic novel Gift. Colloquia Germanica 48 (4): 245–265. Schüwer, Martin. 2008. Wie Comics erzählen. Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie der grafischen Literatur. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Serles, Katharina. 2018. Bilder sehen erzählen. Kunstbetrachtung im Comic. Closure 4 (5): 134–146. Strömquist, Liv. 2018. Fruit of knowledge. London: Virago. Yelin, Barbara (A), and Peer Meter (W). 2010. Gift. Berlin: Reprodukt.

7

Othering Voices and the Voice of the Other: The Depiction of Joseph Merrick in From Hell Natalie Veith

Abstract

Focusing on how Joseph Merrick, also known as ‘The Elephant Man’, is depicted in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s comic From Hell, this contribution follows a twofold approach. First, it shows how From Hell makes use of the medium-specific possibilities of comics in depicting Merrick’s speech impairment and how this stylistic repertoire is used to turn disability into agency. Despite his underprivileged position within the storyworld, the depiction of his disability increases his individuality on the discourse level and emphasises the symbolic significance of the episodes in which he appears. Second, this contribution focuses on the comic’s critical depiction of the normalising and authoritative force of media. By referencing a corpus of previous mediations of Merrick’s life, the comic highlights the necessarily intermedial context within which such depictions of him are situated, thus revealing ‘The Elephant Man’ as a composite media figure. Keywords

Joseph Merrick · Elephant man · Alan Moore · Eddie Campbell · From hell ·  Representation · Gaze · Disability · Othering · Agency

N. Veith (*)  Frankfurt a. M., Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_7

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In 1888, a series of murders in the poor, run-down East End of London gained enormous public attention: several female prostitutes were found murdered with their throats cut and their bodies severely mutilated. The culprit was never caught, but the similarities between the victims led to the conclusion that the crimes must have been committed by the same person. The nickname ‘Jack the Ripper’ was pinned onto the killer and newspapers were quick to fill front pages with sensational headlines, making this the first and—until today—also one of the most notorious cases of serial murder covered in and proliferated by mass media (see Scholz 2013, pp. 59–67). Around its centenary, comics writer Alan Moore and illustrator Eddie Campbell used this case as the basis for their comic book series From Hell (serialisation 1989–1996, collected edition in 1999). They combine accurate information on the case and its historical context with elements of body horror and the supernatural, such as visions of the future, occult rituals and disturbing perspectives on the human body. The comic also introduces a metalevel that reveals larger cultural formations of violence. It exposes the horrors of reducing human bodies to signs and of the insignificance of individuals’ voices in the process of (mis-)reading and interpreting their bodies, since, within the discourse on the ‘Ripper’ case, the victims often merely figure as a ‘medium’ bearing the ‘handwriting’ of the killer. The comic also addresses the marginalising and de-subjectifying mechanisms affecting those with non-hegemonic bodies and the influence of the media in constructing the hegemonic (body) images they are measured against. While the main plot follows the female victims and the murderer (here depicted to be Royal physician William Gull), the comic also contains many ­sub-plots in which (often historical) side characters are used to support this larger narrative in a condensed form. One of these will be my focus here: Joseph Merrick, who also became known as the ‘Elephant Man’. Merrick was afflicted with a condition that caused severe deformities of his head and torso. In addition to the physical restrictions he suffered from, his facial deformities also caused him problems with understandable articulation. In his early twenties, he made a living by exhibiting his deformed body in a travelling freak show, which was also the origin of his stage name. Due to the interest that a surgeon from the Royal London Hospital, Frederick Treves, had taken in his condition, Merrick was eventually able to become a permanent resident at this hospital in the East End and abandon his life as a curiosity. Although he lived there shielded from the public, his case gained a measure of public attention, which brought Merrick visitors and correspondence. Many medical professionals examined him, but none of them were able to diagnose his condition and, correspondingly, there was no treatment. In 1890, he passed away in his sleep at the age of 27.

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In From Hell, Merrick is depicted during his time at the hospital, namely in the second chapter, which also introduces Gull as the person about to become the Ripper, and again in the fifth chapter, in which Gull murders his first victim, Polly Nichols. Juxtaposing the ‘Ripper’ with the ‘Elephant Man’ is not uncommon, neither in popular culture nor in the academic discourse. As Peter Graham and Fritz Oehlschlaeger point out, the similarities between the cases invite the linking of the two characters. For one thing, there is the intersection of time and place, namely London’s East End in the late 1880s. Moreover, Merrick was a patient at the Royal London Hospital, while suspicions were growing that the Ripper might be a medical professional. And, not least, both cases were shaking the established notions of normalcy and of what should be seen and what should remain hidden (see Graham and Oehlschlaeger 1992, p. 29). But as I will show in the following, Merrick’s depiction in From Hell goes beyond this juxtaposition. I will pursue a twofold approach: first, I will show how From Hell makes use of the ­medium-specific possibilities of comics in depicting Merrick’s disability and to which effect this stylistic repertoire is used. Then I will focus on the critical depiction of the normalising and authoritative force of media and how the ‘­Elephant Man’ is depicted as a composite media figure.

The Voice of the Other: Deciphering Distorted Speech From Hell’s visual style unites elements from various sources, ranging from more ‘realistic’ ones like historical photographs to cross-hatched illustrations as they were common in the Victorian popular press. This also extends to Merrick, whose first appearance (Fig. 7.1a) is fashioned after a carte de visite photograph of him (Fig. 7.1b). Despite enhancing the recognisability of the character, the similarity in body, dress, and posture also layers the scene with culturally established paradigms of perception and representation. The photograph aptly epitomises the tension inherent to this character by uniting extreme physical deviance with the adherence to cultural norms. It shows the anomalous growth of Merrick’s skin, tissue and bones, but simultaneously, this deviant body is dressed in a fashionable gentleman’s suit, including pocket-handkerchief and watch chain, and arranged in a posture common for late-Victorian studio photography. Moore and Campbell intensify this tension thematically, by placing Merrick in a domestic interior, and visually, by making use of a rough black-and-white drawing style that further obscures the character. But since no voice recordings exist and no established patterns to make recourse to, the depiction of Merrick’s way of speaking is based on the creators’

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Fig. 7.1   a Depiction of Joseph Merrick in from hell. Image credits Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, 2010, from hell, Chaps. 2, 23. London: Knockabout b Photograph of Joseph Merrick, c. 1887, unknown photographer. Image credits Jonathan Evans. 2003. Treves and the elephant man. London: Royal London Hospital Archives & Museum, n. p.

imagination, and the stylistic and creative choices they made rely strongly on the medium-specific properties of comics. The words in Merrick’s speech balloons are grossly misspelled in an attempt to phonetically transcribe his inarticulate speech, which is emphasised by the visual design of the type font and speech balloons: the letters look shaky and the lines run askew through the balloon, whose outlines are unevenly shaped. Distorted balloons are a stylistic technique that is used in several of Moore’s works for characters whose speech differs from the norm and who are usually also marked by physical and/or social difference.1 It can therefore be interpreted as an attempt to give a voice to Otherness. However, through the combination with misspelled words, Merrick is one of the most extreme examples. These stylistic choices have several functions that I will explore in the following. For one thing, they recreate the historical situation. Due to his speech impairment, Merrick was often misunderstood and intellectually underestimated. This only changed during his stay at the hospital, when some people took the time to either engage with him in written correspondence or to learn to understand his

1Other

examples for this technique are the eponymous main character in The Saga of the Swamp Thing (1984–1987), a humanoid being whose body is composed entirely of plant matter, or V in V for Vendetta (1982–1989) and Rorschach in Watchmen (1986–1987), whose voices are muffled by the masks they wear to obscure their identities and who are both social outcasts with ­non-conformist political views.

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way of speaking, which “contribute[d] to the development of Merrick’s self, his sense of agency. Merrick now ha[d] someone to speak with, an audience for whom to put his experience into shape” (Graham and Oehlschlaeger 1992, p. 52). It is through establishing this communicative link that Merrick’s status is raised from an object that is looked at and talked about, to a discursive subject in his own right. In From Hell, the readers can make the same choice and either skip Merrick’s speech balloons, assuming that they are not relevant, or be patient and decipher them. The comic thereby reveals the “distinctively dialogical nature of communicative disabilities” (St. Pierre 2014, p. 9), showing that utterances do not merely depend on the linguistic abilities of the speaker but also on a “context dominated by expectations of efficiency” (St. Pierre 2014, p. 15). For example, in the ensuing dialogue between Merrick and Gull (Fig. 7.2, centre panel), his utterance can be deciphered as “You know, when they see me, most people scream or laugh or sometimes they pretend I look perfectly ordinary. / Your honesty is most refreshing.” The specific depiction of Merrick’s speech, therefore, mirrors his discursive position. Following Michel Foucault, it could be said that by himself, Merrick’s utterances lie beyond the caesura that separates the voices that will be heard within the discourse from the ones that are excluded, thus degrading him to an object entangled in the utterances of others (see Foucault 1981, pp. 52–61). To achieve the status of a discursively recognised subject, Merrick is dependent on the complicity of others, in this case: the readers.

Fig. 7.2   Merrick’s speech balloons. Image credits Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, 2010, from hell, Chaps. 2, 23. London: Knockabout

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Since deciphering Merrick’s speech requires more time, effort and attention, yet another effect is achieved: It imposes a different temporal structure on the reading process, forcing readers to either skip something or to slow down. Merrick therefore becomes a downright privileged character who has an effect that reaches beyond the diegetic confines of the story. Furthermore, by displaying his speech with a specific typographic idiosyncrasy, he is not just given any voice, but rather a visually and phonetically recognisable voice unlike that of any other character in the story. Hanjo Berressem has pointed out that “linguistic disabilities are usually seen as constraints. They might, however, also be seen from the point-of-view of ‘creative deterritorializations’” since they challenge the “system of communicative affordances and constraints” (Berressem 2017, p. 31) inherent to all language. This approach shifts concepts of constraint and inadequacy to the linguistic norm and away from those unable to comply with it. By challenging the semiotic conventions of speech balloons, the representation of Merrick’s manner of speech becomes one of those ‘creative deterritorializations’, pointing to the inadequacy of the medium rather than to that of Merrick. This also extends to his visual representation: in most of the panels depicting him, his head is partly cropped by the panel border, as if it were too large for these narrow confines. Simultaneously, this also shields him from yet more curious and penetrating gazes: those of the readers. Merrick resists being neatly enclosed within a panel just as his speech cannot readily be captured in a speech balloon. His depiction exploits the ‘spaces between’, the indeterminacies and the gaps of comics discourse, thereby showing both the possibilities and limitations of the medium. He functions not only as a rupture in the perceived notions of physical normalcy, but also in the conventions of visual and linguistic representation, in the medium and in the reading process. Therefore, the very aspects that contribute to his underprivileged position within the storyworld are turned into means of narrative empowerment, turning disability into agency, thus dialectically tying these two aspects together in one character. I would argue that these dialectics depend strongly on the medial properties of comics, on the combination of several semiotic codes that allow not only for the transcription of his way of speaking, but also for stylistically emphasising his speech through the visual design of type font and balloons. Moreover, by reading instead of just hearing Merrick’s speech, the readers have a better opportunity of understanding him, since, as Will Eisner has pointed out, comics grant autonomy to the readers when it comes to the speed and frequency with which panels are read. This allows the readers to take as much time as they want and need, in ­contrast to film, for example, in which the medium itself dictates the flow of ­perception (see Eisner 2006, p. 40).

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Gull’s and Merrick’s relationship is marked by similarly dialectical tensions that are expressed both through their juxtaposed manner of speaking2 as well as through the narratives and contexts they evoke. During their meetings, Gull compares Merrick to the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganeśa, telling him: “Just think—in India you would be WORSHIPPED. / […] Offerings are made at the commencement of any great journey or important venture” (Moore and Campbell 2010, Chaps. 2, 24). Initially, this seems like a small anecdote that provides a measure of relief to Merrick, emphasising that his perception as a ‘freak’ is not a universal fact, but a culture-specific interpretation. But on the other hand, it also makes Merrick even more conscious of the situation that he happens to be in: he is in London and not in India, he is seen as a ‘freak’, and he is not worshipped. Or maybe he is worshipped after all, but without realising it and by an unlikely worshipper: despite his status as a medical professional, an ‘agent of rationality’, so to speak, Gull has a liking for the occult and is a strong believer in “symbolic magic” (Moore and Campbell 2010, Chaps. 4, 25), as he calls it. Even though he handles Merrick with contempt, he also partly practises the aforementioned worship, to symbolically conjure divine assistance before his own ‘important venture’. On the night of the first murder, he lures his victim into his carriage and drives by the hospital, where Merrick is sitting in the front yard under the screen of darkness, his face covered by a mask. Gull urges Polly to look at the veiled creature and say, “Salutation to Ganesa.” With her head in the grasp of Gull’s hands, stammering the phrase, Merrick is the last thing Polly sees before she passes out (see Moore and Campbell 2010, Chaps. 5, 28). After the murder has been committed, Gull is shown lying in bed, wide awake in a state of spiritual elevation. This panel is braided into a sequence with panels showing Polly’s mutilated corpse and Merrick, lying in bed and apparently soundly asleep, which is also the last panel in the comic in which Merrick appears (Fig. 7.3). This depiction of Merrick in bed relates to an anecdote that Gull told him during their meetings, namely that a man in India, who is believed

2This

juxtaposition does not merely consist of ‘normal’ versus ‘disabled’ speech. In many scenes (though not in this one), Gull speaks in blank verse, similar to a Shakespearean aristocrat (see, for example, Moore and Campbell, Chap. 4). Therefore, both Merrick’s and Gull’s speech differs from ‘normal’ language, though in different ways. Gull’s speech stands in the tradition of aesthetically pleasing, poetic language associated with education and sophistication. Merrick, by contrast, occupies the other end of the spectrum that generally connotes a lack. In the end, however, both can be regarded within Berressem’s framework of “creative deterritorializations” (Berressem 2017, p. 31).

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Fig. 7.3   Gull and Merrick lying in bed. Image credits Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, 2010, from hell, Chaps. 5, 40. London: Knockabout

to be the incarnation of Ganeśa, but who is “not half so qualified as [Merrick] in that distinction,” is watched in his sleep for possible omens that might determine the nation’s future. Gull’s last words to Merrick are: “Be sure that you do nothing sudden in YOUR slumber, Mr. Merrick, lest our British Empire come to dust” (Moore and Campbell 2010, Chaps. 5, 13). Merrick’s slumber looks peaceful enough, but the scene also allows for a different interpretation, since the fact that Merrick is lying in bed is startling. Sources like Treves’ memoirs reveal that, due to the weight of his skull, Merrick had to sleep sitting “up in bed with his back supported by pillows, his knees […] drawn up, and his arms clasped round his legs, [with] his head rest[ing] on the points of his bent knees” (Treves 1923, p. 36). The one known exception is his death, presumably caused by the weight of his skull crushing his spinal cord while in a lying position. Treves recalls how he found him, “lying on his back as if asleep” (Treves 1923, p. 35).

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The comic itself does not mention Merrick’s peculiar sleeping habits or the circumstances of his death. Therefore, the scene should not be understood as an explicit reference, but rather as one of many instances in which the comic’s meaning is enriched and the plot thickened by intermedial references and allusions. It is safe to assume that around the time of its initial publication, many readers were familiar with Merrick’s case, which had gained significant popularity during the late 1970s and 1980s, most notably due to David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man (1980) as well as a “flood of [other] publications about Merrick” (Holladay and Watt 1989, p. 868) that appeared at that time. Many of these directly mention or depict the scene of Merrick’s death and draw heavily on Treves’ account. But while Treves interprets Merrick’s death as a final attempt to fulfil his wish to be normal and “lie down to ‘sleep like other people’” (Treves 1923, p. 36), Moore and Campbell’s depiction (or foreshadowing3) of Merrick’s death shifts the scene’s implications to something far more forceful: Merrick ‘does’ the opposite of what Gull tells him to do. Instead of “do[ing] nothing sudden in [his] slumber” (Moore and Campbell 2010, Chaps. 5, 13), he “die[s] suddenly” (Treves 1923, p. 36) in his sleep, thereby indirectly defying Gull’s attempt to utilise him for his “symbolic magic”. While Gull believes to give rise to a great age of patriarchy with his violent acts, the twentieth century will be the end of the British Empire. It will turn into a postmodern, late-capitalist society fighting recession during the Thatcher years when the comic was published, something that Gull also glimpses in a vision he has while committing the final murder (see Moore and Campbell 2010, Chaps. 10, 20–22). In From Hell, Merrick not only assumes a distorted voice for himself, but he also distorts the narrative that Gull wants to embed him in.

3It

is debatable if the scene really depicts his death or merely foreshadows it. His back is “supported by pillows” (Treves 1923, p. 36), but he is not sitting and resting his head on his knees. Historically, Polly Nichols’ murder on August 31, 1888 did not coincide with Joseph Merrick’s death on April 11, 1890, but the comic contains numerous instances of anachronistic montage and proleptic visions that are used to create correlations between otherwise spatially and/or temporally separate elements. In the scene in which Gull cautions Merrick to do nothing sudden in his sleep, the last panel of the sequence is a silent one in which the focus drifts portentously from Merrick to his bed in the corner of his room (see Moore and Campbell 2010, Chaps. 5, 13). Moreover, when Merrick is depicted standing in his room (Fig. 7.1a), some pictures can be seen hanging on the wall over his bed. The right of these can be identified as a roughly sketched-out version of the picture of a sleeping child that hangs in Merrick’s room in Lynch’s film (next to the door instead of over his bed). The picture features prominently in the final scene, in which Merrick looks at the child lying in bed before lying down himself (see Lynch 1980, 01:56).

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Othering Voices: Mediated Identity Nineteenth-century Britain was on its way to become the world’s leading colonial, industrial and commercial power. In the wake of this development, the (­ dis-) ability of a body was increasingly determined by its fitness for (industrialised) labour. Deviant bodies, like Merrick’s, therefore provided a major source of anxiety, since they defied the “capitalist norm, which demanded ‘useful’ bodies, able to perform predictable and repeated movements” (Lacom 2005, p. 548). Freak shows simultaneously spurred and lessened these anxieties, since, in exhibiting deviant bodies, they were also in a way “enacting cultural norms—one of which was earning capital” (Lacom 2005, p. 549). A central character in this process was the freak show manager, who, despite weaving sensationalist narratives around the ‘freaks’, also had a normalising and regulating function. Through an act of paternalist intervention, he created a link between ‘deviance’ and ‘normalcy’, negotiating this difference by providing guidelines and a space where ‘deviance’ could be channelled into financial profit. Contemporary critics have repeatedly pointed out the ironic similarity between Merrick’s former manager in the freak show and Frederick Treves, who, in a way, also provided a space and a set of rules within which Merrick’s ‘normalisation process’ could take place at the hospital. Susanne Scholz remarks that Treves took “the paternalistic decision to remove Merrick from the gaze of the public” and, henceforth, assumed a regulating position of authority: “From that moment on, every encounter with Merrick is carefully orchestrated by Treves, who takes on, as it were, the role of ‘impressario’” (Scholz 2013, p. 47). Merrick is once more exhibited, only with a different framing and to a different audience; Treves merely “refashioned the stage for Merrick’s display” (Lacom 2005, p. 551). This similarity is also taken up and dramatised by David Lynch in his film The Elephant Man, in which the visually most impressive and uncanny exhibition scene does not take place at the freak show but in a medical auditorium where Merrick stands naked in the floodlight, exposed to the gaze of dozens of visibly shocked onlookers—though shielded from the viewers (see Lynch 1980, 00:22). From Hell pursues a similar approach by emphasising how Treves provided Merrick with a chance for integration, but not without critically depicting this moment of paternalism and the similarity to Merrick’s life as a ‘freak’. During his first appearance, Merrick is not revealed immediately, but announced over a three-panel sequence (Fig. 7.4). In the first panel, Gull and Treves greet each other and establish their medical ranks and professionalism. Next, Treves leads Gull to Merrick’s room and announces him, thereby building up tension. And,

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Fig. 7.4   Introduction of Merrick. Image Credits Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, 2010, from hell, Chaps. 2, 23. London: Knockabout

finally, Merrick’s shadowy silhouette becomes visible in the opening door, indicating the shape of his deformed skull and showing that the ‘spectacle’ is about to begin. In the ensuing conversation, Gull treats Merrick in a virtually dehumanising way and the apparent safety provided by the medical discourse is exposed as marked by contempt. He calls him “the most dreadfully deformed human being [he has] ever encountered” (Moore and Campbell 2010, Chaps. 2, 23) and takes measurements of this ‘object of study’. In the last three panels of the sequence after Gull has left, Merrick remains alone in the now pitch-dark room, like a freak show performer after the curtain has fallen. The remaining difference is that Merrick was a conscious performer in the freak show, where the audience observes the ‘freak’ and reacts, while the ‘freak’, in turn, observes the reactions and behaves in a way to continually provoke them (see Scholz 2013, pp. 33–55). The examination scene in From Hell, by contrast, does not follow such a circular pattern. Merrick is being measured and observed but cannot actively contribute. He is thus devoid of agency in the process of extracting meaning from his body. Despite shedding a critical light on the practices of the nineteenth-century medical apparatus, this parallel between examination and exhibition is also used to show the thick layers of mediality into which Merrick is embedded. His depiction is permeated by pre-existent patterns, oscillating between his roles as a ‘freak’ and as a medical oddity. This focus on mediality also leads to a blurring of the border between fact and fiction, which is further emphasised by Treves’ visual appearance in the comic. However closely most of the characters’ depictions are

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modelled on their actual counterparts, Treves is markedly fictionalised. Instead of resembling the historical Frederick Treves, he rather looks like Anthony Hopkins playing him in Lynch’s film. Furthermore, there is a general visual likeness between the aesthetic programme of Lynch’s film and the comic, since both are completely in black and white and depend strongly on light-and-dark contrasts. Also, many of the visual details in the Merrick-sequence are adapted from the film, such as the tea set and the mantelshelf with pictures that, in both instances, function as props of bourgeois domesticity and normality, just like the tailored suit. These intermedial references function as a critical, metafictional comment on the creation of the ‘Elephant Man’ as a media phenomenon. From Hell explicitly creates a fictional framework for Merrick and openly refers to a film that has, in turn, been influenced by other also already fictionalised and inaccurate sources such as Treves’ memoirs. Andrew Smith points out that Treves not only uses a wrong first name in these memoirs, calling him John instead of Joseph Merrick, but that the text is also heavy with rhetorical tropes and draws on genre conventions of gothic literature and romance (see Smith 2000, pp. 293–298). Similarly, Graham and Oehlschlaeger remark that Treves’ account “resembles nothing so much as the folk tales by the Brothers Grimm” (Graham and Oehlschlaeger 1992, p. 13) and suggest that Treves’ imagination might have been “spurred” (Graham and Oehlschlaeger 1992, p. 24) by fellow doctor Wilfred Thomason Grenfell’s autobiography, which was published a few years earlier and also contains an episode with Merrick. The comic bears witness to the problematic nature of attempts to recover historical truth. It questions the originality and reliability of documents and the intentions they have been created with. Despite the prominence of Merrick’s case, most of today’s available facts about him either consist of quantifiable medical data (descriptions of his disease, standardised photographs, his preserved skeleton, etc.) or of narratives about Merrick, told by others instead of by himself and usually doing so by employing common narrative patterns and genre conventions. Strictly speaking, all these documents rather provide us with information on the ‘Elephant Man’ as a discursive phenomenon instead of information on the person Joseph Merrick. Through Merrick’s multi-layered depiction in From Hell, the comic draws attention to how the actuality of this historical character is overshadowed by his intermedial constructedness, utilised to convey meaning that is not his own. But instead of trivialising this character and neatly fitting him into the available narrative patterns, through his very appearance, Merrick himself disrupts the reading process and even defies Gull’s “symbolic magic.” Moore and Campbell’s comic simultaneously shows how important but also how problematic the recognition of discursively underprivileged and marginalised subjects and

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their respective voices is. However hard we try to recover Joseph Merrick’s ‘true voice’, it always remains subject to speculation, giving rise to even more narratives. We always only end up with the voices of others, or, as in this case, with imagined and distorted speech balloons.

Bibliography Berressem, Hanjo. 2017. The sounds of disability. A cultural studies perspective. In ­Culture – Theory – Disability. Encounters between disability studies and cultural studies, ed. Anne Waldschmidt, Hanjo Berressem, and Moritz Ingwersen, 29–36. Bielefeld: Transcript. Eisner, Will. 2006. Comics and sequential art: Principles & practice of the world’s most popular art form. Paramus: Poorhouse Press. Foucault, Michel. 1981. The order of discourse. In Untying the text. A post-structuralist reader, ed. Robert Young, trans. Ian McLead, 51–78. Boston: Routledge. Graham, Peter and Fritz H. Oehlschlaeger. 1992. Articulating the elephant man. Joseph Merrick and his interpreters. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Holladay, William E., and Stephen Watt. 1989. Viewing the elephant man. Publications of the Modern Language Association 104 (5): 868–881. Lacom, Cindy. 2005. ‘The Time Is Sick and Out of Joint’. Physical disability in Victorian England. Publications of the Modern Language Association 120 (2): 547–552. Lynch, David. 1980. The elephant man. London: EMI. Moore, Alan (W) and Eddie Campbell (A). 2010. From hell. Being a melodrama in sixteen parts. London: Knockabout. Scholz, Susanne. 2013. Phantasmatic knowledge. Visions of the human and the scientific gaze in English literature, 1880–1930. Heidelberg: Winter. Smith, Andrew. 2000. Pathologising the Gothic. The elephant man, the neurotic and the doctor. Gothic Studies 2 (3): 204–292. St. Pierre, Joshua. 2014. The construction of the disabled speaker: Locating stuttering in disability studies. In Literature, speech disorders, and disability: Talking normal, ed. Chris Eagle, 9–23. New York: Routledge. Treves, Frederick. 1923. The elephant man and other reminiscences. London: Cassell and Company.

8

Dis/ability and Hybridity: The Bodies of Charles Burns Jonas Neldner

Abstract

Focusing on a selection of comics by Charles Burns, I will illustrate the role of hybrid and dis/abled bodies in his works. Burns’ fiction serves as a prime example of how the interplay of mise-en-scène from the American film noir and the school of surrealism addresses the issue of increasingly altered body images as well as their standing in society in the medium of comics. Burns’ tendency to use the human body as a vehicle for criticizing societal disparities and drawing attention to extraordinary bodies constructs the body as a point of ubiquitous difference while contributing to the innate human fear of disrupting its physical intactness. Consequently, Burns’ portrayal of a surreal experience of body images that revolve around excrescences, mechanic amalgamations or sexually transmitted diseases touches upon tropes of the body horror genre and will be read as a plea for more diversity in human body perceptions. Keywords

Charles Burns · Dis/ability · Film noir · Surrealism · Hybridity · Normativity ·  Difference · Body horror · Disruption · Transformation

J. Neldner (*)  Köln, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_8

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I have become interested in languages which I cannot make up, which I cannot create or even create in: I have become interested in languages which I can only come upon (as I disappear), a pirate upon buried treasure. The dreamer, the dreaming, the dream. I call these languages, languages of the body (Acker 1997, p. 166).

Anyone who is familiar with the so-called body horror genre1 can recall movies, books or comics that feature overly graphic depictions of horrific bodies, distorted, disfigured and transformed by the impact of human, machine or metaphysical activity. These compromised bodies become grotesque examinations of difference and sameness as well as of norms and becoming Other. Evidently in the body horror genre the human body functions as the surface on which some of humanity’s most primal fears and anxieties are played out both in allegory and very literally. Specifically fears regarding our physicality and our bodies’ intactness. Upon reading the body as a place of dread, the body horror genre functions as a fruitful basis for discourses regarding corporeal images and their hybridity both within media and socio-political discourse. In addition, the omnipresent experience of its boundaries and the maintenance of the body defines social (in)visibility. In that sense, having control—as much as the loss of it—over the human body is essentially about maintaining an ‘abled’ body that is clearly defined and evaluated by society. The processing of the body in the comics by American cartoonist Charles Burns challenges these boundaries and questions societal normalcy and modes of disgust. Burns constructs bodies that go distinctly against ‘the norm’, which can be traced back to even earlier engagements in art and literature, such as Quentin Matsys’ The Ugly Duchess (1513), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (1819–1823) and, more recently in movies, the cinema of David Cronenberg, Katshushio Otomo’s Akira (1988) or Veronika Franz’s and Severin Fiala’s Ich seh, Ich seh (2014). Therefore, a negotiation of bodies encapsulates not a mere stylish facet of the body horror genre, or the transgressive endeavors of artists alike, but rather functions as the linchpin of humanly felt desires and anxieties. In short, it is not only about showing bodily disruptions, but even more so about the results of losing an ‘abled’ body that would cast individuals as dis/abled; simultaneously, it results in stripping them off

1For

a closer analysis of the body horror genre that specifically focuses on physio- and/ or psychologically disturbing violations, alterations and disfigurements of the human body, see also Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980), Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine (1993) or Judith Halberstam’s Skin Shows (1995).

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their agency and goes back to societal evaluations whether someone is perceived as normate2 or dis/abled. In this essay I want to analyze the aspects of body horror in the comics by Charles Burns, whose visuals originate in the style of 1940s American film noir and the school of surrealism. As a visual characteristic, film noir oftentimes entails a stark contrast of black-and-white, low-key lighting that is reminiscent of chiaroscuro, which is a term that originated during the Renaissance, and bodies whose gendered appearance contributes to their characteristic— the male chain-smoking detective in a trench coat is as much a staple as is the dark haired and ambiguous ‘femme fatale’ (see Bordwell and Thompson 2017). In order to approach this amalgamation of film noir and surrealism, I propose to examine the liminal space between the noir- and surreal-aspects of Burns’ oeuvre to understand his creation of hybrid bodies. I argue that it becomes a practice, to read Burns’ comics not necessarily restricted to a theory-informed lens of comic-, film- or surrealist studies but as a way of understanding its intersectional approach of incorporating various ways of media for a creation of not only hybrid bodies but also hybrid comics.3 Since “comics are the product of the intermarriage between popular satirical printmaking and various literary forms” (Cook and Meskin 2015, p. 65) they incorporate a versatile process for their creation. This process, perceived as a mosaic piece, means to focus on and appreciate all individual aspects of the process. At the same time, reading and/ or labeling Burns’ comics through this process will ideally provide at least one method towards a better understanding of an aspect of the subversive mechanisms of artists such as himself, David Lynch, Takashi Miike or David Cronenberg. Their distinct imageries have evidently processed both film noir and certain aspects of the surrealist movement, yet they develop these influences for a different purpose than their conceptual predecessors. It is precisely about the distinction between the normate and dis/abled during which these artists challenge and oftentimes blur the boundaries of the distinctions perceived as ambivalent and crooked. Whether in the case of Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), in which

2Rosemarie

Garland Thomson coined the term ‘the normate’ in her book Extraordinary Bodies from 1997. The normate is the merged identity of a cultural self which is inherited by those unmarked by stereotypical markers of dis/ability, race or gender and can, as a social figure, represent individuals as definitive human beings—naturally in opposition to its counterpart, the dis/abled (see Garland Thomson 1997, p. 8). 3For a closer analysis of aspects of hybridity and aspects of medialization see Véronique Sina’s Comic—Film—Gender (2016).

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Brundlefly—a compound of Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), an eccentric scientist, and a fly that becomes a hybrid of human and insect as the result of the scientist’s failed endeavor to achieve a breakthrough with his created ‘telepods’ designed for human-object-teleportation—is asking for its own killing; or in Takashi Miike’s Gozu (2003), in which a cow-headed, gender-undefined human is visiting people at night to ask for shelter and food; the disfigured baby in Eraserhead (1977) crying for help; or the transformed bodies in Charles Burns’ comics that want to escape their socially-excluded circumstances: all instances portray characters that are cast as mutilated—thus dis/abled—by societal norm, yet they are ultimately installed by Cronenberg, Miike, Lynch and Burns to speak out for more diversity and benevolence towards the despised other. Distinctly not used for their mere shock-value, as the monstrous Other, it is striking that these artists alike seemingly understand the complexity of the corporeal system and test out its frontiers—oftentimes in opposition to social norms as evidenced by age-restrictions for movies, or reviews that attest them a distasteful experience and B-movie appeal alike.

Hybridizing the Body Keeping this image in mind, the comics by Charles Burns invite readers to enter into his examination of the human body that functions as an incantation of a proverbial black hole. In the eponymous comic Black Hole, first serialized as a twelve-issue series between 1995 and 2005, then published as hardcover in 2005, a mysterious plague-like disease is transmitted between sexually active teenagers and causes physical mutations that eventually turns them into social outcasts living in ghettoized communities in the woods of a suburban Seattle in the 1970s. The front and back endpapers of the 2005 hardcover version of Black Hole (Fig. 8.1a and b) already show elementary aspects of the transformational process of bodies dealt with in the story. The front endpapers depict the teenagers in a state unaffected by the virus, whereas the back endpapers show the corporeal outgrowths. The Yearbook-like headshots of the teenagers introduce the physical mutations on a visual level and emphasize the liminal space in-between ‘normate’ and ‘dis/abled’ specifically, and children and adults in general. The body’s transformation that is inevitable in the adulting process is here used as a vehicle for the depiction of visual sickness that resembles a transformation from disease patterns such as cancer or HIV and entraps teenagers in a sphere that marks them as Other. The depiction of open wounds thus receives a newfound imminence:

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Fig. 8.1a, b   Yearbook earlier and yearbook later. Image credits Charles Burns. 2005. New York: Pantheon Books, front and back matter When we look back on such art of the early 90s, and wonder at its many figures of damaged psyches and wounded bodies, we must remember that this was a time of great anger and despair about a persistent AIDS crisis and routed welfare state, about invasive disease and pervasive poverty (Foster 2004, p. 646).

It is in particular in the fields of different arts that Foster’s statement about the early 1990s becomes a somewhat ambivalent endeavor. The ‘many figures’ lay bare the sheer amount of the crises’ dissemination in various patterns. In this case, and especially because of Burns’ incorporation of (sub)cultures with an almost exploitative touch—meaning the time-specific portrayal of STDs and the HI virus—in Black Hole, the invasive nature of the disease transcends into an entire field of “damaged psyches and wounded bodies” (Foster 2004, p. 646) that occupy the environment of the teenager’s lives. The before and after adds to the idea of something lying in-between two states—here two covers even—and suggests a temporal aspect to it, meaning that it is a constantly evolving process to the otherwise captured youth of these

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teenagers in yearbook photos. As a marker of difference, these transformations encapsulate blisters, various ulcers, a loss of hair, significant deformations and alien-esque outgrowths, which are partially beyond recognition. The panel structure of the four yearbook pages respectively invites audiences to come up with their own interpretation of the gaps between panels, suggesting that with each recipient there is a unique reading of the transformation and in-betweenness of two stages. This method allows readers to observe the parts both individually and as a whole. Whether readers choose to skip the entire text to merely see the outcome of the transformation or scan each page carefully to perhaps better understand the viruses’ workings is the moment where agencies are being re-shuffled. On the one hand, it is in between the two stages where the audience controls the pace and origin of the bodily disruption and transformation; on the other hand, it also means that there is a multitude of potential readings, which are informed by the individual’s reading. In its essence it creates an entirely unique hybrid of comic book and reader. Other hybridized bodies in Burns’ comics include a young man who has been transplanted a canine heart and shows dog-like behavior in Dog Days (2001). He licks his date’s face, barks, gnaws on bones and displays both a dog-like naivety and fidelity. Compared to common stories revolving around the werewolf-trope, Dog Boy does neither look like a dog nor transform into one and only behaves non-human. By this choice, Burns blurs the human and animal form by which he achieves the surreal affect and effect of a loss of distinction between both forms (see Schrank 2013, p. 5). Not only does it achieve an effect of ambivalence and is hence a manifold field of the workings of the horror genre, but it also touches upon the psychologically experienced feelings and tests out internalized manifestations such as a distinct boundary between human, animal and object. In El Borbah (1999), the main character is a Lucha Libre who is a private investigator and is reminiscent of the style of the great 40s hardboiled noir-detectives like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. His strange cases often involve cults, secret societies or underground organizations and essentially revolve around the bodies of sketchy characters that are cross-dressing, show distinct dis/abilities or are of cyborg or robot origin.4 Against the backdrop of Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg

4The

distressing science-fiction trope of old men implanting their heads onto significantly younger bodies is a recurring aspect in El Borbah and functions as a cartoonish hyperbole along the lines of grotesque bodies against power and power seekers, in a world mostly run by old rich men. This spectacle of rendering impossible fusions of new and old can best be characterized as an interaction of appeal and disgust, thus achieving a new hybridized form (see Csicsery-Ronay 2008, p. 7).

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as a hybrid being, as something that we all are due to our existence and dependence on objects and machines, it is precisely a concept that Burns tests out in his comics. Namely, that entities are “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction, [meaning] that social reality is lived social relations” (Haraway 2016, p. 5). The mix of realities and environments suggests the need to be inclusive. Consequently, there is not one factual reality, there are many; there is not one body, there are many. As can be seen in Burns’ most recent series, Last Look, from 2016 in which he mixes the reality of the bedridden Doug with the unreal in an alternate dimension called ‘The Hive’. Here, Doug is presented in a simpler drawn, more cartoonish version of himself (particularly concerning the reduced facial features) and called Nitnit—which is an open reference to the Tintin5 comics by Hergé, which also shows in the structuring of the book and art style: the upright format, hard cover binding and the 3 × 3 orthogonal arrangement of the rectangular panels (see Guilbert 2016, par. 13). Burns makes a deliberate reference to the American writer William Burroughs with the alien landscapes of ‘the Hive’ that have a seemingly Middle Eastern atmosphere. Namely to the ‘Interzone’, which is a place Burroughs created inspired by different settings varying between Mexico City, New Orleans and Tangier, Morocco. The so-called ‘Tangier International Zone’, as this fictional place, resembling factual elements, encapsulates an in-betweenness that can also be found in the inter-zones of Burns’ comics: Whether it is hybridity, like the developmental transition from human and alien-parts, meaning “the oscillating dream state and being awake, between consciousness and drugged sedation, or even body states” (Schrank 2013, p. 4), is often played out as mutation or dis/ ability. With strategies of appropriation techniques the merging of two distinctly different styles as well as realities mirrors an in-betweenness that is also evident in the hybridization of all portrayed characters. The evoked transition between bodies from physically ‘able’ to ‘unable’ and between mutated and/or decayed is played out as a hybridity and is equally a plot device for Burns’ narratives that depict alternate realities as much as the incorporation of styles for an unsettling reading experience.

5Other

similarities to the Tintin comics include the coloring, hairstyle of Nitnit or the petcompanion Inky, which is inverted from the dog-companion Snowy (see Randle 2012, par. 5).

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Shades of Black Taking a closer look at the visual and structural elements of Black Hole, I want to emphasize that the incorporation of a visual aesthetic from 1940 and 1950s film noir, as well as the pulp-like Romance comics from the same era, encapsulate an unsettling reading experience that works with the same genre conventions. Although film noir productions are often criticized for heightening style over content/substance,6 Bordwell and Thompsons stress film noir is a cluster concept that includes more than ‘just’ a visual nature: It links together distinctive subjects (urban life, abnormal mental states, misogyny), attitudes (alienation, nihilism, malaise, mistrust of authority and the upper class), themes (official corruption, revenge, male friendship and betrayal), plots (investigation, pursuit, deception), narrational devices (flashbacks, voice-over commentary, dreams and hallucinations), and visual techniques (Bordwell and Thompson 2017).

As can be seen in the aforementioned yearbook photos, the contours of the bodies and the way the shadows are cast works on a flat surface that is imbedded in pure black-and-white. The deliberate choice of this stark contrast adds to the grotesque image and emphasizes the center of the panel, which adds another frame to the scene. The visual darkness contributes to the comic’s thematic surreal nature and does exactly what is usually considered as film noir, which also functions on a visual level supporting the oftentimes dismal plot (see Bordwell and Thompson 2017). Whether in terms of mise-en-scène, or plot-wise, 40s and 50s film noir revolve around a crime or fraud in an inherently pessimistic world with moral ambiguity, between archetypical and gendered characters such as the hardboiled male detective or the ambiguous femme fatale. Focusing in particular on the character’s looks such as their hair color, which is always blonde or dark, women’s make-up, the stereotypical trench coat worn by the detective chain-smoking cigarettes, film noir is recognizable because of its style and not necessarily its plot. As the French title suggests, it was a cinema of visual and thematic darkness. The feeling of alienation both between characters, and characters to the world follows the aftermath of World War II and reflects cultural paranoia such as the red scare

6Here

I am thinking in particular of recent reviews of the movies by Nicolas Winding Refn or Sofia Coppola, who both also play with film noir elements.

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and a crisis in male identity due to empowered women.7 The clearly politically charged and convoluted storylines are laden with flashbacks, which disrupt the narrative sequence (see Kolker 2006, p. 232). Burns’ take on this incongruence and paranoia in Black Hole’s non-linear narration involving the disruption of bodies and framing of panels makes readers aware of the dreaded difference in an alltoo normalized style or system. At first sight, the most striking visual similarity is the particular stylistic choice of black-and-white with stark light and dark contrasts, as well as dramatic shadows, which is a style that originated in early German expressionist cinema. Precisely used to emphasize a particular effect such as fear, horror or pain, the German expressionist techniques involved a new visual style that, by way of editing and cinematography, drew attention to a distorted view of the world, to evoke a distinctly dark mood or idea. Quite evidently, traits of German expressionist cinema were transmitted across the Atlantic and into the so-called film noir Hollywood style. Asymmetrical camera angles aligned with atmospheric lighting were used to draw attention to grim plots and obscure characters. The fragmented mise-en-scène, which in many cases relied on painted backgrounds to evoke an unnatural feeling, mirrored the decurved arc of the plot and characters. Managing this balancing act, we do not only see images within images in Black Hole but even cut-open bodies that present another dimension or frame. The static nature of the comic book format in comparison to frames set in motion in movies makes readers aware of the multiple frames around images within images. This image-within-image notion is hence used to suggest a grotesque, underlying quality to plot, characters and, in this case, bodies. With actors wearing heavy makeup and having to move in slow, sinuous patterns and the mise-en-scène interacting graphically with their bodies, it creates an overall composition of distorted emotional states specifically and corporeal limitations in general. This merging of estranged bodies amidst crooked angles is stylized to visualize that the world of the film becomes a projection of the character’s mind and agency (see Bordwell and Thompson 2015, p. 471).Tracing this back to Black Hole, the panel structure is transformed towards the latter half of the book and goes in tandem with the estranged bodies of the teenagers, meaning that the static structure of the ­clear-cut lines changes towards a wavier format.

7The

‘femme fatale’ figure as a distinctive feature of film noir was—according to Pam Cook—a result of men trying to reconstruct a failing patriarchal order as women controlled both means of production and remained within the family when men entered the War in Europe (see Cook 1978).

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Upon carefully considering projections of the mind, it is necessary to stress that these films of the early twentieth century also reflect authoritarian, nationalistic or racist values within society and cater to ideologies that construct history and norm through art. By way of distilling a subjective view of the world this work ethos mirrored the artist’s perceived reality and challenged its physical counterpart (see Elsaesser 1996, p. 11). Considering the fact that cinema enfolds as an industry, it constructs its “power of spectacles” (Telotte 2006, p. 21) not only according to a repetitive scheme but also to provide viewers with a “metonymic image of their own situation” (Telotte 2006, p. 21). In other words: if cinema produces recurrent images of gender norms and idealized bodies (or even ‘normate’ and ‘dis/abled’), its distinction will embed itself onto the audience’s mind and color their apparent obligation to question themselves and others according to this scheme. Looking at Burns’ Black Hole or Last Look, it works both on an affective as well as an effective level due to its alternate depiction (and not evaluation!) of othered and hybridized bodies. In many cases it works precisely because of the panels’ framing, which is a deliberate reference to film noir and its incorporation of grim plots and obscure characters. In particular in the horror and crime films of the 1930s and 1940s, with their setting and light, this paved the way for film noir. Charles Burns re-arranged (re-painted and re-inked so to say) the frequent low-, wide- or dutch angle shots in several of his comics as well as the framing through mirrors, glasses or distorting objects known from film noir. Burns references these camera angles in the panels of Black Hole almost intertextually. Another frame in a scene is oftentimes introduced in the form of a cut-open body or woods, window frames and small gaps in closets in Black Hole to gaze onto objects or characters, much like the hole in Doug’s wall in Last Look. What is done in film noir by low-key lighting is achieved here by a distinct amount of black in each panel, to construct another frame around the bodies as well as staging them quite uniquely. At the same time, the amount of darkness of each panel in-between characters and bodies also adds the difference on a visual level as it does to the difference between ‘normal’ and ‘other’. The stark obligatory shadows achieved by venetian blinds and obscured by darkness in film noir are visualized in Burns’ comics by the layout of the panels at times but most frequently by thick lines and spaces, as if to underline the fact that the invisible is just as important as the visible. Or, put differently, if Burns shows us disfigured bodies they are as important as societally perceived ‘abled’-bodies or those that cater to beauty standards—which are inarguably portrayed more often both in comics and ­movies, which is of course not restricted to film noir.

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Dreaming the Body | Drawing the Body When attempting to understand where these hybrid bodies originate and why Charles Burns might be so interested in the portrayal of disrupting difference, corporeal outgrowths and grotesque takes on mutated bodies, a closer investigation of film noir is as important as understanding the unnerving and often illogical scenes of photographic precision, showing strange everyday creatures that are expressed in the cultural movement of surrealism. Grown out of the ­Dada-movement, surrealism, both in art and literature, showed an interest in disrupting rationalist thought and politics specifically in European culture, which surrealists alike accused of repressing the power of myth and imagination. By ways of reuniting the psyche’s realm of consciousness and unconsciousness, artists merged dream- and fantasy-like installations to subvert the reality towards a sur-reality. The distinct juxtaposition that is then perceived as surreal, strongly emphasizes a methodological research and experimentation with two or more distant realities to prompt personal psychic investigation and revelation (see Hopkins 2004, p. 18). Doing so, surrealism enfolds contradictions and potential wrongdoings in the everyday world and can be used to spur a revolution. Aligning a manifesto-like “code of behavior, a hatred of materialism, an ideal of man’s future state, a proselytizing spirit [and] a hostility for art for art’s sake, [it] inherits a hope of transforming existence” (Sylvester 1978, p. 1). Much like subverting a specific style like film noir, tapping into the unconscious mind and employing it for a comment on hybridized bodies the deliberate choice to bypass rationality can be used in favor of arguing for inclusion of otherness. Considering that surrealism unearths the known or assumed, it of course bears horrendous qualities that Charles Burns makes deliberate use of. Robert Crumb for instance claims that Charles Burns’ drawing style is more precise than Hergé’s famous Ligne Claire and not from human hand (see “Mr. Charles Burns – Zeichner des verdrängten Bewusstseins” 2011). Crumb in this way attests Burns a distinct quality, saying that his line does not encapsulate anything human and seems mechanic, which produces the illogical and startling effects of the horrendous, otherworldly and essentially surreal. This also functions as a bridge towards Otherness—here in the style of constructing panels. By juxtaposing two more or less distant realities in style of drawing or in the bodies from Last Look, Black Hole—here in particular on the surface level of the body, which changes both in shape and form—or El Borbah, they all share that they were drawn into a world of normative order known to us, which Charles Burns knows especially, as they are (for instance in the case of Black Hole)

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based on events and characters from his high school days in Seattle or (as in Last Look) depicting memories of his young adult years in the punk subculture (see ­Cartwright 2015). This ideology of constantly disrupting the known and then turning it into the unknown is done by rejecting cultural definitions; this is not caused by supernatural powers of a sublime take on horror but, in fact, by principles of the abject, where the societally labeled ‘monstrous’ beings cannot be distinctly called subject or object. Neither do these dis/abled characters fully belong to or are successfully separated from the normative conception of human-ness, on display in the ghettoized communities in Black Hole, for which these incarnations of dis/ability are needed as a distinctive counterbalance. Hence, the disfiguring bodily outgrowths caused by the sex virus in Black Hole that deems characters as dis/abled and forces them to live in their ghettoized small-town life in the Seattle of the 1970s is visualized in a way that subverts common norms of the noir that is equally applicable to El Borbah or Last Look.

Normalizing the Body | Estranging the Body A strong leitmotif in Burns’ comics is the interrelation of mind and body as well as the close investigation of hybrid or decaying bodies that are then deemed dis/ abled by the normate characters in the story. In all stories alike, the first encounter with the transformed body presents readers with a horrendous discovery of radical alterity. It is always something uncontainable, or even abject, the nature of which poses a serious challenge to our established orders, which then produces an epistemological crisis or even an incapacity to make sense. Previously approved principles of reason, normative orders or even an erroneously content perception of one’s personal safety, are juxtaposed with a mise-en-scène of deformed species, and challenges the perception of our surroundings. At the same time, it bears qualities of the unknown and by extension opens up the liminal space between real and unreal (see Schrank 2010, p. 29). Burns’ stylized bodies essentially produce a sensation of terror experienced in the face of the deformed, the infinite or even the supernatural. By displaying both physical and psychic deviations from normative body images in these surreal mutations he initially enforces readers to realize that the agency of humanity in the larger scheme of things might follow a downward spiral (see Schrank 2013, p. 6). Considering technological advancements of Artificial Intelligence research or societal power structures of political institutions, the invoked horror works according to humans’ helplessness. In his stories, it is not only the confrontation with the unknown that causes terror, but it is in fact the known that is then manipulated to be unknown. Consequently,

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Burns’ strong interest in the negotiation of otherness in a corporeal manner, posits the body as a vessel for difference by consciously invoking the innate human fear of disruptions of its physical intactness. I argue that in Burns’ proposed reading of not only altered bodies but bodies in general we can extract questions regarding difference, sameness and ‘normalcy’ which form a valuable contribution to current discourses between corporeal images and their hybridity, diversity and identity in both comics and ­socio-political discourse. In doing so, he bundles human’s shared weak spots as well as one of the most talked about topics with an unmatched subtlety and proposes a plea for more diversity in human body perceptions, by positing the body as a zone for a much-needed difference. At the same time, his surreal portrayal of bodies revolving around hybridized cyborgs, the change of gender and sexually transmitted diseases proves that there is no concept of ‘normal’. This plays out most evidently on the subverted body image, but it also challenges the debatably invoked binarism of the two sexes since a female character in Black Hole grows a tale while another male protagonist develops a tiny additional mouth—much like an oval opening—on his neck, which adds to the loss of agreed upon identities and gender related distinctions. This disruption of the spatial organization of the bodily system most commonly found in the body horror genre is also able to disrupt the previously established understanding of an individual self that one links to her or his identity and leads to reactions varying between irritation and disgust. This stylistic choice argues in favor of diversity towards Otherness as it does for dis/abilities in general. In this way, the dis/abled bodies being forced to live in a ghettoized environment are presented in a way that renders those prevailing conventions of normate and dis/abled as invalid: it is not about being normate or dis/abled but about understanding bodies as a hybrid of many forms, which are presented and experienced in various shapes. Cast out due to visual Otherness, the hybridized bodies of Black Hole are drawn in a way to ask for the eradication of a distinction between normate and dis/abled. Existing within society, Burns puts forth that what the normate considers to be abject is essentially within her/himself—the prospect of becoming dis/abled—and should therefore be treated as an omnipresent part of society that needs to be accepted. As much as the body-invading virus in Black Hole is perceived as a threat, it is essentially transmitted through bodily interaction and sexual intercourse. It works by bringing together two (or more) individuals, which is then visualized by bodily mutations. Labeling this visual Otherness then means that whatever is perceived as disgusting or grotesque means that these teenagers are ‘dis/abled’, whereas its shift from normate to dis/abled involved at least one normate individual whose insights are transformed. Consequently, this reading

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suggests that dis/ability remains a societal construct first, which negates individuals the ability to fulfill actions that are reserved for the normates. In Black Hole, being differently ‘abled’ implies not a lacking in ability, but merely a different way of achieving the same tasks. Therefore, a shared cultural understanding of the meaning of ‘normality’ is at question.

Closing the Body | Opening the Body In conclusion, the aim of this essay was to initiate a dialogue between the style, methods and characteristics of film noir and aspects of the school of surrealism in the comics of Charles Burns. With the body as a vehicle to write with and into, it becomes clear that Burns is significantly interested in the body as a space. The reoccurring disruption of normalcy and the stark interest between the visual surface of legs, arms, torsos or faces—plus their eventual transformation—add to Burns’ argument towards more diversity in the perception of body images, as these bodies go through a transformative process, thus resulting in hybrid entities and unique testaments to bodily hybridity. The notion of dis/ability becomes a framework for Burns to question and to constantly negotiate either on a physical or psychological level. In Black Hole, visual differences become reason enough to cast out humans, perceive them as dis/abled and, as a result, forces them to live in a ghettoized community outside society. Through the process of their transformation, Burns guides readers through the various facets of corporeality and draws attention to the socially constructed nature of ideas of ‘the normate’ and of ­beautiful bodies. As a final note, I want to emphasize that it cannot be a coincidence that there is a seemingly transnational interest, which pretty much originated at the same time, to subvert the clearly American film noir genre, paired with the European school of surrealism in favor of testing out bodily hybridity. Therefore, Charles Burns’ comics should be read with an intersectional lens that is focused on closely analyzing their minute details. Having merely scratched the surface in this essay, a closer analysis becomes a fruitful vantage point from which to study his poetics in order to lay bare his politics. Understanding hybridity means that close attention is paid to small differences as it suggests an overall evaluation of the hybrid body or object itself. Despite my concentration on Burns’ use of film noir and surrealist elements as well as on the dis/ability and hybridity in his comics, I ideally want to emphasize that there rightfully is no such thing as ‘normal’, and to allow for more diversity in the perception of bodies and art, as well as in finding one’s own access to a topic. In response to Burns’ noir and surreal tendencies, I suggest following

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my initial thought experiment to showcase the bridging and bringing together of accidental and constructed, despised and beautiful as much as feelings of awe and disdain. Curiously enough, these lines are evermore shrouded the less its obscure object of desire is tried to be put into a box.

Bibliography Acker, Kathy. 1997. Bodies of work. Essays by Kathy Acker. New York: Serpent’s Tail. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2015. Film art. An introduction, 10th ed. Singapore: McGraw-Hill Education. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 2017. “Film noir, a hundred years ago.” David Bordwell’s website on cinema. https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2017/04/18/filmnoir-a-hundred-years-ago/. Accessed: 05.09.2019. Burns, Charles. 1999. El Borbah. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Burns, Charles. 2001. Dog days. In By Charles Burns, ed. Skin Deep, 11–15. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Burns, Charles. 2005. Black hole. New York: Pantheon Books. Burns, Charles. 2010. X’ed out. New York: Pantheon Books. Burns, Charles. 2012. The hive. New York: Pantheon Books. Burns, Charles. 2014. Sugar skull. New York: Pantheon Books. Burns, Charles – Zeichner des verdrängten Bewusstseins. 2011. YouTube, 5:30. “Mediacontainer”, 06.03.2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZrQrGc29Gw&. Cartwright, James. 2015. Inside The sugar skull: Charles Burns on punk rock, art school and why he won’t draw his mid-life crisis. It’s nice that. https://www.itsnicethat.com/ features/inside-the-sugar-skull-charles-burns-on-punk-rock-art-school-and-why-hewont-draw-his-mid-life-crisis. Accessed: 13.03.2019. Cook, Pam. 1978. Duplicity in mildred pierce. In Women in film noir, E. Ann Kaplan, 69‒81. London: British Film Institute. Cook, Roy T., and Aaron Meskin. 2015. Comics, prints, and multiplicty. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73 (1): 57–67. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The monstrous-feminine. Film, feminism, psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. 2008. The seven beauties of science fiction. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 1996. A second life. German cinema’s first decades. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Foster, Hal. 2004. 1994a In Art since 1900: Modernism, antimodernism, postmodernism, ed. Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and David Joiselit, 645‒650. London: Thames & Hudson. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997. Extraordinary bodies. Figuring physical disability in American culture and literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Guilbert, Xavier. 2016. The inner worlds of Charles Burns. Du9. https://www.du9.org/ entretien/the-inner-worlds-of-charles-burns/. Accessed: 10.03.2019.

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Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin shows. Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. ­Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2016. The cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-­ feminism in the late Twentieth Century (1984). In Manifestly haraway, ed. Cary Wolfe, 3‒91. London: University of Minnesota Press. Hopkins, David. 2004. Dada and surrealism. A very short introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Kolker, Robert. 2006. German expressionism. In Traditions in world cinema, ed. Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer, and Steven Jay Schneider, 231‒241. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Powers of horror. An essay on abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Randle, Chris. 2012. “It’s not like, here’s Anti-Tintin”. An Interview with Charles Burns. Hazlitt. https://hazlitt.net/feature/its-not-heres-anti-tintin-interview-charles-burns. Accessed: 14.03.2019. Schrank, Stefanie. 2010. Der Körper als Ort des Grauens bei Cindy Sherman. Master‘s Thesis (unpublished), Department of Art History, University of Cologne. Schrank, Stefanie. 2013. Deformity, decay and disgust. The Disrupted bodies of Charles Burns. In Breaking the panel! comics as a medium, ed. Rebecca Klütsch, Sina A. Nitzsche, and Stefan Schlensag, 100‒114. Wien: LIT. Sina, Véronique. 2016. Comic – Film – Gender. Zur (Re-)Medialisierung von Geschlecht im Comicfilm. Bielefeld: transcript. Sylvester, David. 1978. Regarding the exhibition. In Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, ed. Dawn Ades, 1–5. Britain: Arts Council of Great Britain. Telotte, J. P. 2006. German expressionism. In Traditions in world cinema, ed. Linda Badley, R. Barton Palmer, and Steven Jay Schneider, 15‒29. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

9

The Binary Comics of a Non-binary Artist: How Vaughn Bodé’s Identity Structured His Art Romain Becker

Abstract

Vaughn Bodé was an artist from the ‘underground movement’, best known for creating raunchy, humorous comics for adult magazines and for his hyperbolic descriptions of himself. A closer look at his work reveals one of his lesser known sides: his multi-faceted identity. Bodé’s comics appear to have inherent dichotomies concerning their formal and diegetic aspects, but they nevertheless constitute a cohesive whole. This can be understood as a reflection of his spiritual beliefs, according to which the universe is built on binary opposites which fuse together. Considering his transgressive gender identity, one can also interpret his inherently divided style as a representation of his non-binary self. His 1973 Schizophrenia best exemplifies this as it is a comic which not only divides its pages between the writings and the drawings, but also between two distinct comics: a classic cartoony humor piece and Bodé’s autobiographic coming out. This enables readers to somewhat live through Bodé’s complex identity. Lastly, his insistence on blurring lines also represents his schizophrenia, making it difficult for him to discern reality from fantasy. From 1972 onward, this became apparent in his Cartoon Concerts, in which Bodé once again challenged normative structures and made his identity part of his art.

R. Becker (*)  Lyon, France e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_9

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Keywords

Comics · Vaughn bodé · Transgender · Gender · Identity · Schizophrenia ·  Materiality · Format · Performance · Underground

“I am a Pop-Mystic Transvestite and a ONE MAN BAND” (Bodé 1975, p. 33), Vaughn Bodé declared at the very start of his posthumously published Confessions of a Cartoon Gooroo. The message seems cryptic at first, being the “inner cosmic statement of a madman or a genius”, but Jim Steranko, who published these confessions in his Mediascene magazine, also called them an “explosive revelation” (Steranko 1975a, p. 2). Indeed, for those who had never met the comic artist or read his masterpiece from 1973, Schizophrenia, it may have come as a surprise how Bodé described his religious beliefs in these confessions and, more importantly, came out of the closet. For those who did know him and his work, these revelations were less ‘explosive’. Still, the Confessions are really a manifest of sorts, enabling one to better understand his underlying artistic choices and decipher the sometimes cryptic nature of his work. I will discuss how Bodé’s spirituality goes hand in hand with his gender and sexuality1 and how they are formally conveyed in his art. After a closer look at Schizophrenia, which best exemplifies how his identity intermingles with his seemingly binary art, I will focus on his last artistic venture, the Cartoon Concerts. Vaughn Bode2 was born in 1941 and one of the prominent figures of the underground comix movement,3 “a genuine super-star among his peers” 1The

terminology used to describe Vaughn Bodé’s identity in this essay is based on Judith Butler’s notion of sex and gender as “performatively produced” concepts that are culturally constructed. In this respect they are not determined as “free-floating attributes” (Butler 1990, p. 25) one possesses depending on bodily features. Bearing this in mind, people who identify with being a man or a woman are part of a constructed binary gender system, while people who identify with any other gender adhere to a non-binary vision of gender. Sexuality refers to the attraction one can have to persons of a certain gender. The terms ‘bisexual’ or ‘pansexual’ go beyond a binary gender division and suggest a person can be attracted to potentially any gender, binary or not. 2‘Bodé’, with an accent on the ‘e’ was his most commonly used pen name and he would sometimes call himself ‘Da’ Bodé’. His first comics were published under the name ‘-Von’, however. 3While ‘underground’ could also designate everything outside of mainstream culture today, I am using the term to describe certain works in the period from 1963 to 1975 (see Rosenkranz 2008). Underground comics can be referred to as ‘comix’—the sensational spelling

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(­Steranko 1975a, p. 2). As a writer for the East Village Other and ­editor-in-chief for the Gothic Blimp Works, he was at the forefront of underground comics, working with artists like Robert Crumb, Trina Robbins, Art Spiegelman and Spain Rodriguez. Bodé can arguably be seen as a founder, if not a precursor, of the entire movement, as he wrote one of the very first underground comic books4 (also called ‘comix’), Dăs KämpF,5 under the pen name -Von. Later, in search of his financial success and international fame, he worked for the National Lampoon, planned movie deals and even performed his one-of-a-kind Cartoon Concerts in many venues, including the Louvre in Paris. In the end, after being “the most read and most watched underground writer/illustrator after Robert Crumb” (Gabilliet 2013, p. 52), Vaughn went ‘overground’ and “became a businessman, an administrator and an entrepreneur” (Steranko 1975b, p. 13), as Jim Steranko recalled. Considering his undeniable commercial success, ‘Da’ Bode’ saw himself as an artistic genius—and his fanbase agreed with him. “It became impossible to talk about the self-proclaimed ‘comic-book-messiah’ without using his own religious hyperbole” (O’Neil 1976, p. 61), as fellow writer Denny O’Neil wrote in Vaughn’s obituary for The High Times. The religious undertones in Bodé’s self-given titles such as ‘gooroo,’ ‘messiah,’ or even “self-recognized GOD­ HEAD” (Bodé 1975, p. 33) were no coincidence, however: throughout his life, Bodé built ties with various spiritual movements and religions, becoming a fervent believer in several of them.

hints at the non-conformity with established rules and the sexual content of these works. While ‘the underground’ was no unified artistic movement and covered very different artistic choices, geographical spaces and sociological realities, it produced changes important enough to warrant a unified label for some works produced in that time frame. 4As Jean-Paul Gabilliet states in his postface to the 2013 edition of Dăs KämpF, -Von may or may not be the very first comix artist (see Gabilliet 2013, p. 52). For him, Bodé’s subsequent career as a comix artist makes his claim as the forerunner of comix a valid one. As he remarks, however, in the comments section of the International Comics Journal, Patrick Rosenkranz states that Rick Griffin or Robert Branaman created the first underground comics, and another commentator, ‘IITravel ‘, explains that the fact that Dăs KämpF’s first edition was not bound makes it a portfolio rather than a comic (see Harvey 2010). One could argue that, on the contrary, it is this very lack of conformity that makes Dăs KämpF a true underground comic instead of just any subversive comic book. 5Despite what Patrick Rosenkranz claims, the original 1963 publication was not titled ‘Das Kamph’, nor changed to Dăs KämpF in its 1977 edition, as George Beahm insists (see Beahm 2016, p. 112): in its first appearance, it already had the name it would retain in the following editions (see Rosenkranz 2008, p. 53).

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“A One Man Band”: Bodé and the Balance of the Universe Growing up in a family with “strong contingents of Baptists, Catholics and Methodists” (Levin 2005), it should come as no surprise that at one point, Bodé considered a Jesuit priesthood (Bodé 1975, p. 33). It is also unsurprising for an artist in the early 1970s to meet with and follow various gurus, just as Vaughn did. From 1971 and onward, after a “revelatory” (Levin 2005) meeting with one of them, he joined Buddhist, Hinduistic and Taoist cults. Bodé did not follow the specific precepts of one religion, but rather picked and chose different concepts to form his very own belief system. Considering himself to be a “BODE SATTVA” (Bodé 1975, p. 33), an aspiring Buddha (with an obvious pun on his name), he conceived a philosophy the center of which was himself. This evolving God complex of sorts became an actual part of his comics. In a two-page poster (Fig. 9.1) for a comic originally published in the National Lampoon in December 1973, Vaughn’s brother Vincent drew the ‘messiah’, surrounded by various symbols of different beliefs. Vaughn’s clothes and hand gesture of benediction turn ‘Da’ Bode’ into a Christ-like figure standing under an arch made of (rather obviously) phallic columns, and carried by statues of scantily dressed women. The cross on his belt as well as the patriarchal cross on the arch also point to Christianity, but most other elements refer to other spiritual movements: both the word ‘Tao’ and the symbol of yin and yang (‘taijitu’) at the central top of the arch point to Taoism, for instance, but the ‘Om’ signs relate to Hinduism and Buddhism, to name just a few. The entire poster brims with religious symbols6 and Bodé incorporated all of it in his belief system. A closer look at the centerfold poster reveals more than just another male prophet, however. Bodé is wearing a glittering belt made of chains (a reference to his sado-masochistic practices, perhaps), multiple rings, bracelets and a necklace. Most significantly, Bodé draws himself with long, polished nails and a chest that shows a certain ambiguity as it might either be interpreted as female breast or as pectoral muscles underlining Bodé’s masculinity. Lastly, the microphone in his hand, yet another phallic symbol, acts as a reminder of how Bodé would all but abandon

6This

accumulation of symbols can be interpreted as somewhat self-ironic, especially considering that in the following page, Cheech Wizard, the eponymous character of the comic, vomits after seeing an image of his creator. The lack of respect towards this religious figure is further emphasized as Cheech Wizard kicks ‘Da’ Bode’, appearing in the comic as a character, between the legs (see Bodé 2015, p. 81).

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Fig. 9.1   Vincent Bodé, Adoration of Bodé. Image credits Bodé, Mark and Mike Baehr. Ed. 2015 Cheech Wizard’s Book of Me, p. 80. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books

the written page by the end of his career and focus on celebrating his masses, the Cartoon Concerts, in front of fervent believers. In this poster, Bodé embraces multiple religions, but also different sexes and genders by becoming an androgynous ‘messiah’ with a hippie flair and surrounding himself with sexual symbols. The balance between the phallic symbols and the female statues as well as the quite symmetrical nature of the entire poster point towards another aspect of Bodé’s spirituality: his belief in a perfect binary equilibrium in the world and in himself. Thus, he would indeed be a ‘one-man band’, fusing seemingly opposite elements into a single harmonic being. The taijitu at the center of the arch is significant in that regard, as it signifies duality and oneness in the philosophy it stems from and visually reflects this idea. For Bodé, there is black and white, man and woman, high and low—yet, everything is part of this one universe and every element requires its opposite for its own existence. This ‘dialectical monism’ forms the base of his spirituality and his world view.

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“A Pop-Mystic Transvestite”: Bodé’s Challenge of Gender Norms But as he implies in his cryptic “I am a Pop-Mystic Transvestite and a ONE MAN BAND” (Bodé 1975, p. 33), the feeling of oneness within a binarily divided universe is linked to another realization: considering himself to be a ‘transvestite’. It would seem that his view of the world also made him change his view on gender, or rather the opposite as his gender identity made him adhere to this specific philosophy.7 After all, he confessed one of his main reasons for wanting to become a Jesuit was that they “could even wear Dresses” (Bodé 1975, p. 33). Today, we would consider Vaughn Bodé being a pansexual non-binary transgender person.8 Born and raised as a man, looking “so-o-o-o straight” (Trina Robbins quoted in Levin 2005), he first questioned his heterosexuality and other sexual norms by cheating on his wife with both men and women. After he was allowed to consult the late Bodé’s diaries and to interview his family and friends, Bob Levin explains how Vaughn Bodé “believed that, in order to understand himself, he must be able to experience all aspects of himself, including full ‘transvestite release’, without apology or guilt” (Levin 2005). Thus, Bodé also challenged his cis-gender identity9 by cross-dressing, applying make-up, nail polish, etc. Presumably quoting Vaughn’s diaries, Levin adds that Vaughn Bodé “also believed that, since he continued to desire women, he must be a unique ‘unisexual’, ‘a

7According

to Denny O’Neil, the pillars and the arch in Bodé’s poster are actually “two cocks [who] ejaculate the yin-yang symbol” (O’Neil 1976, p. 88). Symbolically speaking, this could indicate that Vaughn Bodé believed that his spiritual beliefs stem from his sexuality or, at the very least, that his religion was heavily based on sexuality. 8Vaughn Bodé never used the term ‘non-binary transgender’, but rather called himself “trans-sexual”. However, he also claims that he “was […] trans-sexual” (Bodé 1973, p. 23, emphasis added by R. B.), possibly meaning that, at the time of writing, he did not feel that the term adequately described his identity. Thus, the term ‘non-binary transgender’, which encompasses a multitude of different gender identities without restrictions, while also emphasizing his not simply feeling like a man, seems most appropriate. Additionally, seeing as how he used masculine pronouns to refer to himself, this essay does so as well. 9I follow the definition that being cis-gendered means having the same gender as the sex one was assigned at birth. The opposite of being a cis-gender person is being transgender: having a gender different from the sex you were said to have at birth.

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forerunner of humans to come’” (Levin 2005).10 After having gone beyond so many of society’s norms for men, Bodé became convinced that he was, in fact, a transgender woman. In 1973, so as to make his male body match his gender, he started a hormone therapy to undergo a sex change. But a few weeks later, he stopped taking hormones, after he had become aware that they stripped him of his masculinity (see Bodé 1975, p. 34). Bodé had realized that transitioning into a female body would rid him of his balance between man and woman, a perfect equilibrium he sought to maintain. Da’ Bode had overstepped the bounds of my Unisexual life, Imbalance! […] God, what an astonishing discovery! What revelations! I was, without a doubt, a ­well-hung Man, dealing with his multi-plane identities in a Search for the balance to my Maness-Womaness, and it became obvious as shit, I had balance only when I dealt from the Man side, the natural-state of what I got. I went off the pills, and after a few weeks got back to ‘my’ normal Psychic, sexually-intense state. I cried with delight at all I had learned from this heavy, near Holy Teaching. Jesus (Bodé 1975, p. 34).

This part of his Confessions of a Cartoon Gooroo shows how deeply linked spirituality and gender identity were in Bodé’s thoughts: discovering his gender became a truly mystic experience, bringing him, as he believed, closer to Godand Buddhahood. To recapitulate, Bodé’s conception of himself and, consequently, of the universe, is based on ‘dialectical monism’: the world is split in two balanced parts forming an inseparable whole, flowing into each other, yet still distinct entities. Bodé himself was the perfect representation of this balance of coexistence, being a man and a woman at the same time, hetero- and homosexual, even God-creator and human. This harmonic tension also underlies his comics. They constitute a sort of gospel, one which could inspire others to accept their inner selves or accept others.

10The

term ‘unisexual’ and belief in being unique, in that regard, are perhaps a testament to the lack of knowledge about sexual preferences at the time, as he was certainly not the first bisexual transgender person. These ideas may also be proof of his dreams of grandeur, if not in fact a God complex.

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Of Lizards, Hats and Sex: The Worlds Bodé Drew At first glance, most of Bodé’s comics seem rather brutish, without a particularly sensible plot. As Denny O’Neil put it: “I have found, among cultured folks who knew of his work, none but critics of it” (O’Neil 1976, p. 89). The world he drew in his Deadbone and Cheech Wizard strips, the first for erotic magazine Cavalier, the latter for the National Lampoon, is inhabited by various creatures, most of which are two-legged, impotent, male lizards and naked, human females. The plot of these monthly strips typically involves one of these lizards who wants to have sex with a woman, and who then sometimes gets killed by her in the Deadbone strips. Variety comes from various methods of being denied sex or getting killed, and from the different science-fiction or fantasy settings. The Cheech Wizard strips are more consistent: in them, the eponymous Cheech Wizard, an unspecified male creature wearing a gigantic hat that covers his entire body but his legs, tries to or does have sex with the women inhabiting the same forest as him. Other times, after dramatic twists, philosophical debates or people questioning his magical powers, he ends up kicking one of the lizards in “da balls” (Bodé 1973, p. 5). While this seems rather lighthearted and, quite frankly, mindless during the first read, it would be dishonest to neglect Bodé’s refined art and ignore the fact that it does express powerful, sensible topics, above all his own gender identity and religious beliefs. A look at the Cheech Wizard comics shows how they represent the gender “allness” (Bodé 1975, p. 34) Bodé saw in himself. The clear dichotomy between the different characters in his comics is a testimony of how he conceived sex and gender. The females are always human and always sexualized, whereas almost all males are animals (mostly lizards) or an unknown creature with a hat and no apparent sexual traits. While the lizards are sex-crazed despite their impotence,11 the women tend to lack any sexual drive—a clichéd perspective on male and female desire, related, perhaps, to Bodé’s experienced identity as he linked sex to his own “Man-ness” (Bodé 2001, p. 7). Cheech Wizard is an exception to this

11In

the episode Benny’s Marsh Tours, Cheech tells a woman she will have to give oral sex to a lizard named Benny in order to pay for a taxi ride (see Bodé 1973, pp. 14–17). This supposes that Bodé’s lizards are, in fact, capable of having sexual intercourse. In Mounting Manna, however, a female character tells a lizard they are not supposed to have reproductive organs, yet that one does (see Bodé 1983, p. 10). Thus, one can conclude that the lizards mostly lack sexual organs (not a sexual drive, though) or are impotent, but that a rare few of them constitute a duly noted exception.

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rule, as—being the only recurring supposedly non-animal male—female characters seem to always want to have sex with him. Thus, in general, there is a clear distinction between male and female, being impotent or a sex god, being human or an animal, etc. The characters are divided in a Manichean, binary way and visually, they combine the animal and the human, or, as is the case with the socalled ‘Bodé broads’, the sexualized female characters, the woman and the child (see O’Neill 1976, p. 63). All of this harkens back to Bodé’s transgressive gender identity and world view.

The Harmony of Dissonance: Vaughn Bodé’s Schizophrenia Bodé’s original approach to structuring a strip, was dubbed “Pictography” by him, and it “is another extension of [his] creative filter personalizing the medium of cartoon art” (Bodé 2001, p. 60). All onomatopoeia, all speech, all narration is relegated to the outside of the actual panel, which gives the impression of a clear separation between picture and text. Not only is the world drawn by Bodé binarily divided, the very structure of his work itself is binary as well. While the “Pictography” strips may resemble a movie’s storyboard, they are, after all, comics. Evidently, comics do not function the same way movies do—despite the two media’s arguable kinship as forms of sequential art. Each of Bodé’s comic pages does seem to be separated into different panels, and, in turn, each panel is divided into text and image. One characteristic of comics, however, is its “iconic solidarity” (Groensteen 1999, p. 21): the co-presence of seemingly distinct panels still forms an inseparable whole, just as a triptych constitutes one single art work. The same holds true for each individual panel in Bodé’s work: even though the text is outside the image, they still belong together for the panel to convey its narrative meaning; this could be called ‘iconic-textual solidarity’. Visually, there is a strictly binary panel, but in spite of the tension between its parts, there is a coherence. The same goes for the entirety of the page, which forms a whole despite being split in different panels, themselves inherently divided. All of these characteristics specific to comics correspond to Bodé’s own queer gender identity and his view of the world where, as previously stated, everything is binary, but still forms a cohesive whole in its dividedness. In his “heaviest” (Bodé quoted in Beahm 1976, p. 20) comic, as Bodé put it himself, he incorporates this vision even further into his art. Bodé’s comic Schizophrenia, written in 1973, is composed of typical Cheech Wizard-strips (titled Suck my turnip) and of a comic titled Bodé, in which the

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Fig. 9.2   Cover illustration of Schizophrenia (1973). Image credits Bodé, Vaughn. 1973. Schizophrenia, cover. Berkeley: Last Gasp Eco Funnies

a­ rtist drew himself as a character, jumping around the surface of a planet and making his grand coming out, even before his Confessions of a Cartoon Gooroo. In the upper half of the cover (Fig. 9.2) is Cheech Wizard, a cartoon character and a walking phallic statement: his long, cylindric feet and the apparent bulge in his pants emphasize the obvious sexual innuendo in the title, as does the fact that his hat looks like a rolled-up condom. On the bottom half, a perpendicularly arranged photograph of Bodé sporting his usual jewelry and polished nails announces the autobiographical component of the other comic in Schizophrenia and introduces more feminine attributed elements. The binary cover already announces how strictly divided the content of the piece is. Inside the comic book, both stories are shown on the same page: the Suck my turnip-strips at the top part of the page and the Bodé-strip at the bottom. Just as the cover implies, the top comic is a classic Bodé, with ‘kick in da balls’ action, and light-hearted stories around fictional characters, whereas the bottom comic

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is his actual, real coming out (albeit in a science-fiction setting), as well as a celebration of life and the universe, drawn in a more realistic, less ‘cartoony’ style. On top of this diegetic, stylistic and formal division, there is, once again, the separation between text and image. This results in pages on which the images and the texts float in the gutter, seemingly independent from each other. But, of course, as previously discussed, they are not independent in this comic book, as they share the same space. One cannot read Bodé without also having a glance at Suck my turnip and vice-versa. The unicity of Schizophrenia’s divided pages is further accentuated through the parallels and echoing voices between the two seemingly antithetical comics inside it. On two pages from the latter half of the comic (Fig. 9.3), in “Who is C.W.?”, one of the Cheech Wizard stories, a woman insists Cheech finally reveal his true identity, the one hidden underneath the giant hat. At the end of it, Cheech surrenders and lifts his hat—the following panel is entirely blank, though, and the reader is left to wonder how Cheech looks. Is his identity too much for us humans to handle, as he himself suggests? When reading the comic in the c­ ontext

Fig. 9.3   Vaughn Bodé, “Who is C. W.?”, “Bodé” (1973). Image credits Bodé, Vaughn. 1973. Schizophrenia, pp. 22–23. Berkeley: Last Gasp Eco Funnies

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of Schizophrenia and not as a standalone piece, however, another interpretation arises. While the top panel of that page is whited out, the bottom one still shows Bodé pondering over his life, now all alone on the page. Hence, the question “Who is Cheech Wizard?” seems to be answered with “Bodé”. A look at both comics at the same time now puts them into another perspective. On the same pages where Cheech stubbornly refuses to show his face, Bodé proudly reveals his previously hidden identity. While in the upper half of the comic, one of Bodé’s creations is pestered with saying who he truly is, Bodé himself gives an answer in the bottom half. On one page, the woman asks: “What is you under tha hat?” (Bodé 1973, p. 22). On the next, as if he were responding to her, Bodé says “I was: auto-sexual, heterosexual, homosexual, masso-sexual, sado-sexual, trans-sexual, uni-sexual, omni-sexual.” (Bodé 1973, p. 23). Both comics seem to communicate with each other and their separation becomes porous. If Cheech is indeed an avatar of Bodé’s in this comic, as this interpretation would suggest, then not just the bottom strip, but Schizophrenia in its entirety is a comic about Vaughn Bodé’s identity. What Bodé ultimately attempts with Schizophrenia is telling readers what it means to be him, in spite of readers’ likely difficulty to understand his complex (gender) identity.12 With this comic, Bodé tried to bridge this lack of understanding—not only does he tell the readers who he is, but he also shows them by representing himself as an androgynous character proud of his/her identity and, even more importantly, by using various symbolical means. This can be seen, for instance, in the panel (Fig. 9.4) right after Bodé’s climactic declaration of being “trans-sexual” (Bodé 1973, p. 23). In this panel, Bodé tells readers that he is neither man nor woman, but rather “a whole spectrum of human things”. While speaking, Bodé climbs over a rock, thus symbolically surmounting the barrier put up against him by society and transgressing the traditional boundaries of gender and sexuality he already transgressed orally. Thanks to the slight frog’s-eye view and the full shot, what could be a small step for a man becomes a giant leap for a seemingly giant, god-like Bodé walking over a ­rock-turned-mountain. Schizophrenia goes even further, as it attempts to make the reader’s experience a fraction of how Bodé feels and who he is. In fact, he makes readers visually perceive the ‘spectrum’ of his gender identity and how he conceives the world

12Bodé

believing himself to be ‘unisexual’, the single unique person having that kind of non-binary identity, one can assume that he felt it would be truly impossible for others to understand him. While his friend and former roommate Jeffrey Catherine Jones supported the discovery of his gender identity, others less so (see Levin 2005).

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Fig. 9.4   Vaughn Bodé, “Bodé” (1973). Image credits Bodé, Vaughn. 1973. Schizophrenia, p. 24. Berkeley: Last Gasp Eco Funnies

by making them read a comic book in which everything is binary, yet is not, as text and image, ‘macho’ hippie-comic and ‘heavy’ coming-out comic coexist, and flow into each other. While the separation between the two comics is maintained, it is impossible to read one without being aware of the other and they thus become inseparable in a Schizophrenia read. This process of experiencing ­non-binary gender is further increased by the perpendicular arrangement of the pages. As Bodé is at a ninety-degree angle to Suck my turnip, the readers have to physically turn either the comic book or their head so as to be able to read it. Reading this comic makes the readers perform a physical action, makes them change their reading habits, just as its contents make them question and perhaps change their pre-conceived notions of gender. One is made to act differently than to what they are used to, just as Vaughn Bodé, as a queer person, had to twist his ‘natural’ identity to fit into a social mold. In that sense, reading Schizophrenia becomes a true performance.

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Breaking the Fourth Wall: Bodé’s Cartoon Concerts From 1972 until his death in 1975, Bodé would go even further in this direct confrontation between himself, his work and his readers. In his Cartoon Concerts, Bodé cut off the text from the image altogether and, in front of an audience sometimes even larger than a thousand visitors, he read the texts out loud while projecting the single images onto a screen (see Levin 2005). There, it was the dichotomy between reality and the comic that he made apparent. Yet it was, once again, part of a bigger work of art. By becoming the only intermediary for his comics’ texts and directing all attention towards himself Bodé became an integral part of his art. While in his concerts, Bodé did not perform autobiographical work, he was still very much at the center of them: the lights were directed at him as he voiced each character himself and paced the performance just as he wanted. He was the director, writer and actor of his concerts, the actual main attraction, which is why they were always advertised as Bodé’s Cartoon Concerts: they were about him as much as they were about his cartoons. With these performances, he built a bridge between reality and fiction, himself and his art and, once again, created seemingly binary art that actually is not (see Becker 2018, p. 98). Just as before, Bodé’s art reflected his conception of the world and of himself. Although he did perform his shows “aglitter with the sequins on his eyes and skintight leather suit” (O’Neil 1976, p. 88), and voiced male and female characters alike, it was less his gender expressing itself, it was rather another part of his identity: his schizophrenia. He was diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia” (Levin 2005) when he was younger, a condition that can sometimes blur the distinction between fantasy and reality. Revealing his inner workings in the index classifying his work, he explained just how real his comics felt to him. In order to not lose that sense of closeness to his art, Bodé refused to seek treatment: “I was struck numb, petrified that I could be ‘cured’ of my own universe” (Bodé 2001, p. 62).13 Explaining his reasoning further, and how palpable his creations were to him, he added:

13The

quotation first appeared in Beahm’s Vaughn Bodé Index (see Beahm 1976), but was republished in the 2001 Schizophrenia, not to be confused with the 1973 comic of the same name. The 2001 edition does reproduce the bottom part of the 1973 comic, Bodé, and leaves out the top part. It also contains other comics of Bodé’s, as well as various texts of his, making it a compilation of works rather than a new edition of the original Schizophrenia.

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Whether I was dealing properly with reality or not becomes a moot question considering the art that has emerged. […] The characters become real, the places and worlds I invent float in a reality all their own. I went there every day, intensely, for years […]. These ‘flights of mind’ became so real, I could not only see my dreams, but I could live them! […] The very reason my cartoons work so well is because they are the reflected experiences of a ‘real’ other world place (Bodé 2001, pp. 61–63).

According to Ruth Delhi, a “psychoanalytic social critic” consulted by Bob Levin, thanks to his Cartoon Concerts, Bodé “no longer had to keep a separate record of what he was thinking and doing and becoming” (Levin 2005): he had begun to include himself in his art, not only as a creator or a character, but as an interface between worlds, accentuating again the sense of being one with everything, a sense he held very dear. Hence, his art could not but revolve entirely around his own person, as he wanted to abolish the barrier between himself and his work. In his last piece of writing, Confessions of a Cartoon Gooroo, he emphatically declared “I AM THE CARTOON GOOROO OF ME.” (Bodé 1975, p. 35), meaning that in the end, Bodé wanted for his art to become a mouthpiece for himself and his teachings. One final comic best exemplifies just how tied Vaughn was to his art. In 1975, Bodé drew Da’ Terminal Trick (Fig. 9.5), a one-page Cheech Wizard comic intended for a Cartoon Concert which was to remain unpublished and unperformed. In it, Bodé appears alongside his characters, none of which respect his status as their God. Asked to show off his powers as ‘creator’,14 Bodé complies by first diverting his characters’ attention (as if he were not performing a trick), then actually disappearing—much to the dismay of Cheech Wizard and a lizard, perhaps supposed to mimic the audience at the end of a Cartoon Concert.15 Days

14The

same initial plot is found in an untitled Cheech Wizard strip, presumably first published in 1967 (see Bodé 2015, p. 47). In it, an interviewer asks Cheech to prove he is actually a wizard by showing him a magic trick. Cheech does not comply, however, and blackmails the reporter with a compromising picture of him. By reusing the same plot device in a comic starring only fictional characters and in a comic where he appears, Bodé creates a parallel between Cheech Wizard and himself and once again reasserts his closeness to his creation. 15The name Da’ Terminal Trick seems to imply that it was supposed to be performed at the very end of Cartoon Concerts. That way, there would indeed be a parallel between Bodé’s disappearance in the comic and after the concert, as well as his comic and real life audience being sad about his leaving. However, seeing as how Bodé tended to have Q&A sessions after his performances, it seems unlikely that he would simply leave immediately after performing Da’ Terminal trick. It is difficult to determine whether this specific comic is just a final act for his concerts, a “final irony” (Danky and Kitchen 2009, p. 53), as James Danky and Denis Kitchen interpret it, or an intended announcement of Vaughn’s death.

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Fig. 9.5   Vaughn Bodé, “Da’ Terminal Trick” (1975, unpublished). Image credits Rosenkranz, Patrick. 2008. Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963–1975, p. 238. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books

or weeks after drawing this comic, Vaughn Bodé also disappeared in reality. He died after a session of autoerotic asphyxiation had gone wrong, “the dumbest hippie death on record, a classic” (O’Neil 1976, p. 89). Contrary to other messiahs, Bodé did not come back to life, but his legacy lives on. He came out of the closet and performed on stage even though he knew he was “risking rejection, misunderstanding, moral outrage—even acceptance” (Steranko 1975b, p. 13). In the end, taking that risk paid off and Bodé earned a cult following: “They revered him like a god; hell, they worshiped him like a rock star” (O’Neil 1976, p. 61). Thanks to Schizophrenia and Bodé’s Cartoon Concerts, his audience was perhaps able to better understand his queer gender identity, his spiritual views and his schizophrenia. While his work always seems to be

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cleanly split in two, be it between fiction and reality or text and image, for example, it is actually a reflection of how Vaughn Bodé saw himself and the world: binarily divided, yet part of a bigger whole. “Baby, you get Yang, and you get Yin! You get LIGHT, and Motherfull, you get DARK right along with it” (Bodé 1975, p. 33).

Bibliography Beahm, George. 1976. Vaughn Bodé index. Newport News: C. W. Brooks. Beahm, George. 2016. The Bodé Bulletin: Facsmile edition issues one through eight. Williamsburg: Flights of Imagination. Becker, Romain. 2018. L’évangile Oxymorique Selon Bodé. Gorgonzola 23: 97–98. Bodé, Vaughn. 1973. Schizophrenia. Berkeley: Last Gasp Eco Funnies. Bodé, Vaughn. 1975. Confessions of a Cartoon Gooroo. Mediascene 15:33–35. Bodé, Vaughn. 1983. Mounting manna. In Erotica, trans. by Janine Bharucha and JeanPierre Dionnet, 10. Paris: Éditions Neptune. Bodé, Vaughn. 2001. Bodé consciousness. In Schizophrenia, ed. Marc Arsenault, 59–64. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Bodé, Vaughn. 2015. Untitled. In Cheech Wizard’s book of me, 47. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble. New York: Routledge. Bodé, Vaughn, and Vincent Bodé. 2015. Cheech Wizard meets his maker. In Cheech Wizard’s book of me, ed. Mark Bodé and Mike Baehr, 79–81. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Connell, Raewyn. 2009. Short introductions: Gender. Cambridge: Polity. Danky, James, and Denis Kitchen. 2009. Underground classics: The transformation of comics into comix. New York: Abrams. Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. 2013. Postface. Vaughn Bodé’s first struggle. In Dăs KämpF, ed. Vaughn Bodé, 51–65. Paris: Éditions aux forges de Vulcain. Groensteen, Thierry. 1999. Système de la bande dessiné., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Harvey, Robert C. 2010. Going underground. The Comics Journal. 18.10.2010. https://classic.tcj.com/top-stories/going-underground/. Accessed: 05.06.2019. Levin, Bob. 2005. I see my light come shining. The Comics Journal 5:62–81. Consulted on The Vaughn Bodé Archive. https://www.bodearchive.com/comics-journal-article.html. Accessed: 05.06.2019. O’Neil, Denny. 1976. The death of the Cheech Wizard. High Times 14:60–63, 88–92. Consulted on Tumblr. https://babylonfalling.tumblr.com/vaughn_bode. Accessed: 05.06.2019. Rosenkranz, Patrick. 2008. Rebel visions: The underground comix revolution 1963–1975. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books. Steranko, Jim. 1975a. Editorial. Mediascene 15:2. Steranko, Jim. 1975b. Vaughn. Mediascene 16:13.

Branford the Best Bee in the World. The Socio-Culturally Imprinted Self of Anthropomorphic Bodies

10

Nina Eckhoff-Heindl

Abstract

Chris Ware’s comic conglomeration Building Stories (2012) has already received a lot of attention, but one of its protagonists played a subordinated role so far: Branford. The Best Bee in the World. This essay seeks to shed light on this character, his graphic and stylistic appearance as well as his relationship with the human protagonists. By referring to findings of gender and masculinity studies, human-animal studies as well as cultural studies, this essay investigates how the animal character functions as a substitute for humanness and simultaneously is in a constant correlation with the human protagonists. Furthermore, I will examine the socio-cultural implications of animal representation, especially the entanglement of the bee character with gender and identity constructions, as well as the questioning of the reading viewers’ own anthropocentric perspective. Keywords

Body · Branford · Building stories · Chris Ware · Funny animals · Gender ·  Masculinity · Performativity · Representation

N. Eckhoff-Heindl (*)  Hagen, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_10

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“… and then, Branford smacked into the side of the can again: BONK!” (Ware 2012, Oak Park Magazine,1 n. p.)—this is how Branford the Best Bee in the World, one of the protagonists of Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012) is presented as part of a funny bedtime story that the comic’s nameless main character tells her daughter. Building Stories is a comic conglomeration which consists of 14 different parts in a box. These components include several newspapers, pamphlets and magazine formats, booklets, fanfold papers, a hard cover and a children’s book as well as a folded game board. These stories tell of five residents in a Chicago apartment building: a young woman who is the main character in most of the parts, a middle-aged couple, an elderly lady who owns the house, and Branford the Bee. These stories revolve around loneliness, everyday life and interpersonal distance. Two of Building Stories’ pieces are committed entirely to Branford and his beehive (referred to as ‘Branford Booklet’ and the newspaper ‘Bee Daily’ in the following). The main character’s bedtime story quoted at the beginning evolves around an event in the Branford Booklet. While in search for nectar, Branford got lost in a soda can and desperately seeks to find the exit. The crucial difference between the bedtime story and the one in Branford Booklet is that the latter is told from the bee’s perspective. In Branford Booklet and Bee Daily, the bee is primarily depicted in anthropomorphic form and thereby refers to a long tradition of anthropomorphic animal characters in comics, the so-called ‘funny animals’. As Daniel Yezbick points out, “the funny animal genre features anthropomorphic animal characters who provide broadly comic, frequently satirical commentaries on human nature” (Yezbick 2013, p. 181). These often upright walking characters wear clothes, live in houses and have to deal with the same problems as in human relationships. This description of an animal as a substitute for human contexts can also be applied to Branford. In this regard, it is no coincidence that Noel Murray refers to the bee storyline as a “comic relief” (Murray and Robinson 2012) in Building Stories. Though this characterization is only valid for the two afore-mentioned components of Building Stories, Branford Booklet and Bee Daily. Instead, the character is also part of other components, namely the folded game board and a pamphlet revolving around the couple.2 In these pieces the bee interacts with the human

1In the following I will use the designations Ware gave the individual parts of Building Stories in a completion chart (see Ware 2017, p. 235). 2Another piece, the children’s book, shows on one page (September 23rd, 2000, 7 a.m.) a more ‘realistically’ depicted bee on the wall of a house, reminiscent of the Branford storyline, but not explicitly invoking it.

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protagonists (who unfortunately lead to its death) and is depicted more ‘animallike’. All these different ways of representation can be found in the aforementioned parts or are even combined with each other in the case of the folded game board. As I will argue in the following, Branford the Bee does function as a ­stand-in for humaneness insofar as he fulfills the characteristics of the funny animal genre in one state of visual representation. At the same time, the transformative potential of the bee’s body sheds light on the close, yet culturally imprinted relationship between animals and humans.3 With the example of Branford the Bee and based on a detailed analysis of his formal character design, I will show how the socio-cultural implications of animal representations are interwoven with gender and identity constructions and how the anthropocentric perspective of the reading viewers4 is negotiated in Building Stories.

The Bee Body’s Potential for Transformation In Building Stories the animal protagonist and the human ones are constructed contrarily to each other: while the human characters remain nameless, Branford’s name fixates him linguistically on an authorial level, as Elisabeth Klar states generally for proper names (see Klar 2011, p. 225). In addition, the bee is characterized by a slogan-like supplement: Branford, the Best Bee in the World.5 But the expectations evoked by the protagonist’s designation are not met. Branford con-

3The

following explanations are based on my conviction that there is no hierarchical dichotomy between humans and animals but, in David Herman’s words, “that humans, as members of larger biotic communities, occupy one niche within the broader domain of creatural life” (Herman 2018, p. 3). This also results in the negation of the anthropocentric and traditional idea of the supremacy of humans over animals (see Haraway 2016, p. 91–198; Steiner 2015). ‘Human’ and ‘animal’ characters are thus to be understood as abbreviations for the terms ‘human animals’ and ‘non-human animals’. 4The expression ‘reading viewers’ is used in order to describe more precisely the recipients and the mechanisms of reception: when opening a comic book, the recipients are first viewers as they perceive the entire double page or the single page spread in its visual structure. Then they turn successively to the single panels, an action that is interrupted and expanded by the simultaneous observation of a single or double page. 5The added phrase resembles another and much better known character from Chris Ware’s work: Jimmy Corrigan. The Smartest Kid on Earth, with whom Branford has some characteristics in common.

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siders himself to be morally reprehensible because he mentally betrays his wife Betty with the queen bee.6 Moreover, he struggles with supporting his family and is continuously in a state of self-doubt. So, the declaration as ‘The Best Bee in the World’ is a satirizing and highly cynical commentary on the character’s life. Even though Branford is the only protagonist to be identified by name, on the level of design it is the opposite as his body is in a constant state of change. Depending on the context, Branford is depicted in different sizes, with or without a hat, wings or thorn, with frontal binocular vision, walking upright and more humanlike or crawling and flying in an anatomically more correct bee-like manner.7 Branford the Bee’s body is constantly changing. In Building Stories’ folded game board every side is dedicated to one of the apartment building’s renting parties. Branford’s side covers approximately one calendar year. Bringing the different pieces with the bee’s appearance in a chronological order, this depiction follows the events of the Bee Daily and frames those of the Branford Booklet (Fig. 10.1). Starting from an axonometric depiction of the apartment building and its garden where Branford’s beehive hangs from a tree, the connections between two events concerning the bee are highlighted. In the upper field, Branford is locked in the cellar of the building until the female tenant from the top floor releases him. In the lower field, Branford is once again shown in company of human characters, now one year after the first event. Attracted by a drop of cola on one of the steps of the residential building, Branford approaches. The man from the middle floor is frightened by seeing the bee next to his feet, steps on it and thereby kills Branford. The last panel shows the weeping bee family in front of a picture depicting Branford. But as the booklet format reveals, this does not mean the complete end of Branford: he is reborn as Branford the Benevolent Bacterium. Building Stories’ game board shows the range of Branford’s different visual representations. In the two panels showing the cellar room, Branford is only marked by tiny circles and motion lines (Fig. 10.2). In an enlarged version of this section the character is depicted more ‘bee-like’ and with a shift in posture. A close-up presents Branford—again with a change in his pose and center of gravity—as a half-length figure without wings, but with accentuated facial expres-

6Although

the common term ‘queen bee’ is highly anthropomorphized I will use it in lack of a better one for referring to the adult, mated female bee responsible inter alia for a bee population’s reproduction. 7The anthropomorphic character Branford is inspired by the painting Crying Bee (1996) by artist Bruce Linn (see Ware 2012, imprint on the box lid).

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Fig. 10.1   Two important phases in Branford’s life. Image credits Game board (detail) in Chris Ware’s Building stories (2012) © Chris Ware 2020

sions, a gray hat and white gloves. As Harry Morgan argues, comic characters permanently change their shape “like amoebas” (see Morgan 2011, p. 140). He underlines this statement by referring to human superheroes who can expand their limbs and adapt their body shapes depending on the situation, such as Plastic Man and Mister Fantastic (see Morgan 2011, p. 140). Branford’s character design, however, exceeds this transformative potential from both a stylistic and physiognomic perspective, since there is no point of origin to which the body forms back again. Through the bee body’s potential for transformation, Branford can function as a prime example of Ole Frahm’s analysis of comic-immanent ‘parodistic aesthetics’. Referencing Judith Butler’s concept of ‘gender parody’ Frahm concep-

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Fig. 10.2   The transformations of Branford. Image credits Game board (detail) in Chris Ware’s Building stories (2012) © Chris Ware 2020

tualizes the ‘structural parody’ in comics as revealing “the contingency of the relationship between sign and reality” (Frahm 2000, p. 180). This concept of structural parody articulates itself in Branford’s multifaceted appearance: neither Branford’s more anatomically correct mode of representation nor the anthropomorphic body form or something in between depicts what is meant ‘in reality’—not a ‘real’ bee is the object of representation here but a comics character in constant transformation. In Frahm’s framework, the interplay of repetition and difference is shown, among other things, in the seriality of the comic: the repetition and disrupture of panels and characters within, the form of publication as well as the reading and viewing itself: “These different kinds of repetition overlap; they exist simultaneously and sometimes they can only with difficulty be distinguished from one another” (Frahm 2000, p. 189). Véronique Sina, referring to Frahm and Butler, concludes that because of its continuous repetition and incompleteness a comics character per se is a performative one (see Sina 2016, p. 69). In this respect, by demonstrating the transformative potential of Branford, the elementary flexibility and fragility of comics characters are directly brought into view. Thus, it is possible to open up space for questioning concepts of originality as well as the animal as substitute for the negotiation of humanness.

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The Bee as Substitute In Branford Booklet and Bee Daily, the bee is primarily depicted in anthropomorphic animal form, which can also be seen in the more detailed panels of the game board. The yellow-black striped bee body is composed of circles and is the same for the whole of the bee population. Only attributes (such as Branford’s hat or the bow of Branford’s wife Betty) individualizes each bee and helps to differentiate between them. Ware himself describes this character design from circular forms as “‘big ass’ style” (Ware 2017, p. 167). In addition to Branford, Ware uses this style especially for characters in autobiographical comics about his life and the creation of comics as well as metareflexive comics about fine arts and literature. The repetition of the same body forms with slight changes to create entire character populations is common with comics productions (see Klar 2011, p. 223; Morgan 2011, p. 141). Besides, at the level of Ware’s general character design the ‘big ass’ style is functionalized to emphasize the similarities between animal and human, which then reflects upon the possibility of animal substitution for human subjects. On the level of Building Stories, however, the style choice sets the animal apart from the human characters, and stresses the bee’s ‘otherness’. With this conceptualization on design level, Branford fits into the tradition of the funny animal genre. In his essay Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel, Michael Chaney highlights the understanding of the animal as a means of expression for the negotiation of anthropocentric themes, through which the human claim to universality is confirmed and preserved (see Chaney 2011, p. 135). Contrary to the genre’s designation, the stories about anthropomorphic animal characters are not bound to (slapstick) humor—at least this has been the case since the underground comics of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Brian Cremins points out (see Cremins 2017, p. 146). These comics might still refer to the same humor from the funny animal genre by following narrative structures or character designs, but at the same time they also employ and subvert the knowledge about and the conventions of this genre. This also applies to Branford: it is rather the knowledge of the funny animal genre and its historical development that is addressed than the mere adaption of affirmatively humorous traits associated with the genre. Even though the anthropomorphic animals are an integral part of comics history, a question remains: which potential for interpretation does the bee provide? Compared to other animals, bees have been used less frequently as protagonists in comics, animation and other media, which has slowly changed in recent years—

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not least due to the growing interest in ecological themes.8 Nevertheless, the bee is one of the most domesticated animals and as Ralf Klausnitzer emphasizes, there are no other insects that have fascinated humans of all times as much as the honey bee (see Klausnitzer 2015, p. 153). The result of this fascination is a long history of intensive observation and research on the complex biological dispositions and social conditions of bees, which is reflected in Branford’s storyline by way of several explanations on scientific findings. As Klausnitzer argues, the study of the bee particularly provides information about the socio-cultural interest of the observing humans (see Klausnitzer 2015, p. 160). This history of bee study goes back to antiquity. Starting with inter alia Plato, Aristotle and Seneca, the bee functions as a symbol for poetry as well as the ideal state (see Johach 2007, pp. 219–220, 229; Klausnitzer 2015, pp. 153– 154). The areas of communication and reproduction of bees are also the subject of detailed investigations and speculations. This goes so far that we tend to use specific phrases that give the animals human traits: we still talk about the queen bee, the bee dances and the wedding flight (see also Steiner 2015, p. 29; Wild 2015, p. 27). In fables, bees are known for their diligence and, due to their pollination of plants, they are commonly used for sexual education. The bee as substitute directs even deeper into the discussion of being human, namely the construction of gender and identity. The interpretation of the bee as a political animal was accompanied by the coronation of the bee king whose regency lasted at least until the 17th century (see Johach 2007, p. 222; Merrick 1988, p. 9). With the invention of the microscope accompanied by new possibilities of observation, not only the gender attribution of bee king or rather queen, drones and worker bees was put to the test but also the metaphor of the ideal monarchic-patriarchal government. As Eva Johach explains, in scientific writings of the 18th century, the beehive was then seen as a house with innumerable rooms with the queen bee as caring mother and the worker bees as maidservants (see

8In

addition to Maya the Bee, which has been used in children’s entertainment across all media since the mid-1970s, comics include the anthropomorphic animal characters Bum Bill Bee (in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and later as a newly conceived protagonist of a short comic series in the 1940s), the Western series Buffalo Bee (late 1950s/early 1960s), and the superhero comics Bee-29 The Bombardier from the 1940s. All these characters have in common that they are minor characters or were very short-lived series. The animated film Bee Movie (2007) can be regarded as one of the larger film productions of recent years, in which the ecological importance of bees is also emphasized. Commenting on Bee Movie, Ware wrote in his notes for Building Stories: “it was as if Hollywood was reading my mind, or something” (Ware 2017, p. 234).

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Johach 2007, pp. 230–233). The formerly political charge gives way to the focus on reproductive contexts and the inscription of a new role for the quondam regent continuously conveying patriarchal values and claiming socio-cultural norms of human existence (see Merrick 1988, pp. 19–27). At the time, the natural scientists gained new insights—and not only regarding the queen bee. Starting with Aristotle’s writings, the gender attributions to bees in their different roles caused difficulties for an unambiguous interpretation based on gender stereotypes, as Jeffrey Merrick reveals: If nature deprived the drones of weapons and work, demoted them to sex objects, subjected them to the armed workers and the aggressive queen, then nature looked ‘unnatural,’ inasmuch as it violated the human norms it was supposed to confirm. Because the authority and sexuality of the queen bee turned the conventional patriarchical order upside down, many apiologists denied the facts or at least made efforts to dispel the threat to male hegemony by denying the relevance of her example to women (Merrick 1988, pp. 26–27).

In addition to the basic use of the anthropomorphic animal figures, as Elizabeth Schafer puts it, “to explore cultural perceptions of gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class to achieve intended purposes such as satire or humor” (Schafer 2013, p. 158), also the anthropocentric dimension of the bee’s cultural history resonates in the choice of this animal as protagonist in Building Stories. Branford is utilized to negotiate questions of hegemonic masculinity, a specific realm within the gender discourse for which Raewyn Connell established an influential concept. Connell’s approach is based on a model of multiple masculinities which are related to each other and to concepts of femininity. Furthermore, also other categories of difference and identity, such as race, class or age, are integrated into this complex hierarchical structure. As a historically dynamic model of power relations, hegemonic masculinity represents the “most honorable way of being a man” and claims “all other men to position themselves in relation to it and it ideologically legitimate[s] the subordination of women to men” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, p. 832). This hierarchical distribution of power between masculinities is already expressed in the origin story, the first encounter between Branford and his later wife Betty, printed on the cover of the Bee Daily. The female worker bees eagerly await the hatching of the male drones in order to start a family. Betty, however, isolates herself (due to her low self-esteem resulting from physical dis/abilities, specifically regarding hearing and seeing) by leaving the beehive. Meanwhile the drones hatch out, eat, fart and flex their muscles. They mistreat the female bees, who are expected to wait on the males. Branford is merely an observer in this

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spectacle and a voice-over comments: “Once, in a long while, however, one of them [the male bees] may inexplicably break off from the group and actually go out in search of nectar by himself, perhaps out of guilt or weakness. We might call such a bee ‘good.’ (The other bees call him ‘gay.’)” (Ware 2012, Bee Daily, n. p.). In the lower part of the page Branford and Betty, marginalized for different reasons in the sphere of dis/ability as well as gender stereotypes, finally meet and decide to stay together. The other drones repeatedly insult Branford with misogynistic and homophobic speech. As Michael Kimmel argues, homophobic denunciations accrue from the fear of being inadequate, of not living up to a hegemonic masculine ideal (see Kimmel 2001, p. 277). With Branford’s story, the offenses support shaping the matrix of masculinities in which his masculinity occurs as stigmatized and the perpetrators’ as stabilized (see Söll and Schröder 2015, p. 14). Though it is not only the other drones who threaten Branford’s male identity: after a nectar procurement flight, a horrified Branford discovers that pollen lumps are stuck to his hind legs. Such pollen panties, a short description explains, are only typical for female worker bees. Branford’s find is commented with “Note: Such a discovery to a normal drone bee would be the equivalent of a human male waking up in a dress” (Ware 2012, Branford Booklet, n. p., emphasis in original). Branford then asks himself: “God! Know these men more of me than myself? Be it a dim light, blind to my true nature, while to all else it be the clearest fact of day? I curse you God! I curse you for the cruel life I must bear—half drone, half worker … and neither a whole bee to be!” (Ware 2012, Branford Booklet, n. p., emphasis in original). These examples show how Branford’s masculinity is marginalized by the other drones on different levels. He plies activities with female connotation (collecting pollen) and does not correspond to the hegemonic ideal of the male bee, which entirely consists of negative ‘male’ characteristics (see Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, p. 840). Branford’s discovery of his biological deviation from the manly body norms further enhances the subordination of his—additionally and already doubted—masculinity. Simultaneously, his collecting activities are justified by social circumstances which enshrine his masculinity in another power relation: Betty is unable to collect pollen for her family due to her hearing and visual impairments. Branford sees himself as superior to his wife, pities her and acts as a protector. This relationship illustrates that the negotiation of the masculinities’ hierarchy not only takes place between men, but also involves all forms of (gender) identities, represented in this example by femininity and also dis/ability (see Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, p. 850).

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The relationship between husband and wife also plays a prominent role in Branford’s concept of identity. He is plagued by moral self-doubts, which stem from the contrast between recurring sexual fantasies with the queen bee and his ideal of a lifelong monogamous relationship with his wife. Branford and Betty fail equally in orienting their life plans on hegemonic gender and family conceptions. What is remarkable about this negotiation of masculinity (and femininity) is that it takes place on the basis of the bee population, which has a rich cultural history of gender and identity constructions. Besides the already mentioned gendered attribution of the queen bee, this also applies to the humanization of the drones. The drones are often referred to as lazy and instinct- or, rather, sex-driven, because they do not take part in the daily work routines and their only task is the queen bee’s insemination (see Johach 2007, p. 227; Menzel and Eckhold 2016, p. 296). Branford seems to be the only male bee that is disturbed by this biologically legitimate behavior and questions himself as well as his bee identity. In this respect, the Branford story is in accordance with the larger framework of Building Stories, in which a similar struggle with hegemonic gender and power relations forms the basis of the human protagonists’ story lines as well, just less explicitly (see Davis-McElligatt 2012).

Animal-Human Relations Even so the bee offers itself as an anthropocentric representative due to its ­historio-cultural implications, Branford as a character is not completely absorbed in it. Glenn Willmott argues in this respect: They [the anthropomorphic animal subjects] usually bear little visual or behavioral resemblance to actual nonhuman animals. We might even suspect they are nothing more than human characters in superficially animalized form, but we would be wrong, because that form is also significant: as the irrepressible expression of what Michael Chaney calls an ‘animal identity crisis endemic to the comics form,’ their nonhumanity matters (Willmott 2018, p. 53).

In Building Stories, the non-humanity of the animal character is particularly performed in the passages in which animal and human protagonists meet. Usually, as Glen Willmott argues, the encounter of human and animal characters poses problems:

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Fig. 10.3   The cellar scene from Branford’s perspective. Image credits Branford Booklet, n. p., in Chris Ware’s Building stories (2012) © Chris Ware 2020 [T]he intrusion of an explicitly human figure in a classic funny animal comic […] tears through rather than strengthens the normatively anthropocentric message: it violates the shift, in animalized characters, of the human concept from reified and transcendental to a manipulable […] basis of recognition (Willmott 2018, p. 68).

In Building Stories, the transformative potential of the bee body creates a way out of this dilemma. In the Branford Booklet, the confinement of Branford, already introduced in the board game piece, is shown in a more abstract manner from the bee’s perspective (Fig. 10.3). This doubling of the cellar scene adds two important layers of meaning: It provides, on the one hand, the opportunity to convey

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Branford’s thoughts and fears—whereas the bee remains completely silent in the game board. On the other hand, it emphasizes that Branford’s perception differs from that of the human characters. In his essay What is it like to be a Bat? (1974), the philosopher Thomas Nagel discussed the possibilities of a shift in perception from human to animal and stated: “[F]undamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. We may call this the subjective character of experience.” (Nagel 1974, p. 436, emphasis in original; see also Armbruster 2013, p. 21). Explicit statements about the quality of these experiences, however, cannot be made—since a human being cannot cast off humanness.9 In Building Stories, the shift in perception from the human to the animal perspective is marked by the superimposition of the characters’ bodies with geometric forms and the exaggeration of comics conventions: the bodies are built from circular forms, which can designate either flower, head, eye, bee thorax or abdomen. Besides, the bodies of Branford and the tenant feature (white) gloves that are commonly used for anthropomorphic animal figures.10 Chris Ware renders the bodily manifestations of both human and animal in a more abstract and exaggerated way. This emphasizes Branford’s subjective experiences in the intimidating situation of being confined, threatened, and finally released by using established comic-immanent design conventions. Additionally, the marking of different experiences is underpinned by compositional decisions. In the game board’s cellar scene, the arrangement in the panels locates the characters within the spatial structure of the cellar and in relation to the surrounding objects. Horizontal lines dominate these panels, vertical lines flank the two characters, creating the impression of a stable scenery. The cellar panels also serve to frame the panels which zoom in and out on Branford so that location, size changes and bodily transformations of the bee remain clarified.

9Applied

to bees, this means that although scientific research can be done on how facet eyes function and which color spectrum is visible to bees, there is always only the one possibility to ask with human eyes how bees see the world. This circumstance strengthens rather than breaks up the anthropocentric point of view. 10Gloves are often found in the design of anthropomorphic animal characters, Disney’s Mickey Mouse being the most famous example. These gloves are an adaptation of a typical prop used by blackface actors in racist ministrel shows (see Sammond 2011, p. 136; Kaufmann 2017, p. 128).

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The reading viewers thus adopt a point of view which enables both an overview as well as a focus on details. It is the human character’s perspective: as usual, she conducts everyday activities by washing her clothes—opening the window for the bee does not cause her any great effort. This situation is different for Branford. He is completely hysterical and feels threatened by a “pink land whale” (Ware 2012, Branford Booklet, n. p.). This emotional state is also reflected in the frameless panel layout, in which only components important for the plot are depicted. The only horizontal and vertical lines in this entire page layout are the window frames, which are so thin, however, that they cannot truly stabilize the composition. In addition, the reading viewers are directly confronted with the characters’ strong facial expressions. Thus, Branford’s despair and his later relief is also conveyed on the level of compositional and stylistic design choices. This incisive event illustrates the human character’s godlike power over the animal’s life: Branford is at the mercy of humans who can rule over life and death of others. The female protagonist decides to let the bee live. A year later, however, the male inhabitant of the apartment building adjudges to kill the insect. Nobody notices the bee’s death and everybody continues with their daily activities—according to Baker: “The animal is the sign of all that is taken ­not-very-seriously in contemporary culture; the sign of that which doesn’t really matter. The animal may be other things beside this, but this is certainly one of its most frequent roles in representation” (Baker 1993, p. 174). Branford’s death is not depicted explicitly, but it becomes obvious in the last panel in which Betty and her children mourn the missing Branford. This violent act elicits only a quick “shit” from the man (Ware 2012, Couple Pamphlet, cover) and an extensive cleaning of his shoe. This thoughtless episode of human arbitrariness leads to an elementary aspect of the formal disposition of comics, described as ‘structural violence’ by Elisabeth Klar (see Klar 2011, p. 221). As she analyzes, comics characters are isolated, fragmented, and dismantled by panel boundaries, they are cut into pieces or torn apart, and in the next episode they are assembled again, waiting for new subjections (see Klar 2011, pp. 221–222; see also Ault 2000, pp. 124–125). Also from a historio-cultural perspective, the relationship between bees and humans is determined by violence, especially regarding the domestication practices (see Hnat 2015, pp. 153–154; Imhoof and Lieckfeld 2013, p. 146; Gang 1997). In animal ethics, bees have been deprived of any cognitive activities and emotions for a long time (see Hnat 2015, p. 154). However, according to Stefan Hnat, scientists today attribute certain personality traits to bees in addition to a kind of navigational memory, spatial imagination as well as a form of free will (see Hnat 2015, p. 155).

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Branford can be understood as such a domesticated bee, insofar as he lives in a beehive next to the four other protagonists’ apartment house. Therewith, Branford is marked as a working animal and the mentioned aspects of violence and subjugation are invoked subliminally. Branford’s abrupt end contrasts with the potential of identifying with the character, which is not least showcased by the range of the parts in Building Stories dedicated to the bee. For the other characters Branford is only a (disturbing) insect, for the reading viewers he is a personality with an understanding of social relationships, memories and hypothetical future plans (see also Willmott 2018, p. 55). This insight is supported by the anthropomorphized portrayal of the entire beehive, through which ‘taboo’ themes of human coexistence can be negotiated.

Closing Remarks The human and animal traits reflected in graphic and stylistic conventions, the performativity and changeability of the character’s body as well as the ­socio-cultural backgrounds illustrate the implications of Branford as a protagonist. Furthermore, the increase of the protagonist ensemble in Building Stories by an animal character broadens the scope and enables the questioning of entrenched assumptions of human and animal identities as well as their relationship with each other. The staging of Branford assigns the bee as the unstable ‘other’ and simultaneously displays comics conventions as well as markers of identification and identity construction. Steve Baker summarizes this capability of animal representations as follows: This exceptional role as ‘the represented’, the objectified other, fixed and distanced by the controlling look of the empowered human, and instead exploiting the flexibility of the narrative space to turn that look back upon the humans, rendering them ‘other’, dismantling their secure sense of a superior identity by attending to that fragile identity’s investment in – and fear of – the visual (Baker 1993, p. 158).

In Branford’s character design, this potential is further increased, since the figure is not only anthropomorphized, but also interacts with the human protagonists. In consequence, the character’s identity is constantly shifting as can be seen in the visual representation, the construction of gender concepts and the historical background of the animal-human-relationship. This opens up an additional space for reading viewers to question socio-culturally imprinted assumptions. The animal

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still functions as a stand-in for dealing with, as Daniel Yezbick puts it, “the meaning of humanity and humankind’s place in the world” (Yezbick 2013, p. 185), but it is not completely absorbed in the mask of humanization. Acknowledgements  This essay was written in connection with my doctoral project which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 713600. In addition to this generous support, I am also very thankful to Sarah Sandfort for her attentive reading and helpful suggestions. Furthermore, I owe gratitude to Chris Ware for kindly granting permission to reproduce extracts from his work.

Bibliography Armbruster, Karla. 2013. What do we want from talking animals? Reflections on literary representations of animal voices and minds. In Speaking for animals. Animal autobiographical writing, ed. Margo DeMello, 17–33. New York: Routledge. Ault, Donald. 2000. “Cutting Up” Again part II: Lacan on Barks on Lacan. In Comics & culture. Analytical and theoretical approaches to comics, ed. Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, 123–140. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. Baker, Steve. 1993. Picturing the beast. Animals, identity and representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Chaney, Michael. 2011. Animal subjects of the graphic novel. College Literature 38 (3): 129–149. Connell, Raewyn, and James Messerschmidt. 2005. Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept. Gender & Society 19 (6): 829–859. Cremins, Brian. 2017. Funny animals. In The routledge companion to comics, ed. Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin, 146–153. New York: Routledge. Davis-McElligatt, Joanna. 2012. Body schemas. The Comics Journal. 24.10.2012. http:// www.tcj.com/body-schemas/. Accessed: 28.08.2019. Frahm, Ole. 2000. Weird Signs. Comics as Means of Parody. In Comics & culture. Analytical and theoretical approaches to comics, ed. Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, 177–191. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum. Gang, Elliot. 1997. The buzz about honey. The Animals’ Agenda 17 (6): 26–28. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Herman, David. 2018. Introduction: More-than-human worlds in graphic storytelling. In Animal comics. Multispecies storyworlds in graphic narratives, ed. David Herman, 1–25. London: Bloomsbury. Hnat, Stefan. 2015. Honig. In Lexikon der Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen, ed. Arianna Ferrari and Klaus Petrus, 153–156. Bielefeld: transcript. Imhoof, Markus and Claus-Peter Lieckfeld. 2013. More Than Honey. Vom Leben und Überleben der Bienen. Freiburg: Orange-press.

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Johach, Eva. 2007. Der Bienenstaat. Geschichte eines politisch-moralischen Exempels. In Politische Zoologie, ed. Anne von der Heiden and Joseph Vogl, 219–233. Zurich: Diaphanes. Kaufmann, Daniela. 2017. Art Spiegelmans Maus. Vom Suchen und Finden (k)einer Metapher. In Notwendige Unzulänglichkeit. Künstlerische und mediale Repräsentationen des Holocaust, ed. Nina Heindl and Véronique Sina, 127–142. Münster: LIT. Kimmel, Michael. 2001. Masculinity as homophobia: Fear, shame, and silence in the construction of gender identity. In The masculinities reader, ed. Stephen M. Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett, 266–287. Cambridge: Polity. Klar, Elisabeth. 2011. Wir sind alle Superhelden! Über die Eigenart des Körpers im Comic – Und über die Lust an ihm. In Theorien des Comics. Ein Reader, ed. Barbara Eder, ­Elisabeth Klar and Ramón Reichert, 219–236. Bielefeld: transcript. Klausnitzer, Ralf. 2015. Von Bienen fabeln. Zur literarischen Beobachtungs- und Faszinationsgeschichte der Apis mellifera. In Tiere im Text. Exemplarizität und Allegorizität literarischer Lebewesen, ed. Hans Jürgen Scheuer and Ulrike Vedder, 153–192. Bern: Lang. Menzel, Randolf, and Matthias Eckoldt. 2016. Die Intelligenz der Bienen. Wie sie denken, planen, fühlen und was wir daraus lernen können. Munich: Knaus. Merrick, Jeffrey. 1988. Royal bees. The gender politics of the beehive in early modern Europe. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 18: 7–37. Morgan, Harry. 2011. Gibt es eine Ästhetik des Comics? In Comic. In Intermedialität und Legitimität eines popkulturellen Mediums, ed. Thomas Becker, 137–146. Essen: Christian A. Bachmann. Murray, Noel and Tasha Robinson. 2012. Delving into Chris Ware’s massive, multilayered comics project Building Stories. The A.V. Club. 15.10.2012. https://www.avclub. com/delving-into-chris-ware-s-massive-multilayered-comics-1798233992. Accessed: 05.06.2019. Nagel, Thomas. 1974. What is it like to be a Bat? The Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435– 450. Sammond, Nicholas. 2011. “Who Dat Say Who Dat?”: Racial masquerade, humor, and the rise of American animation. In Funny pictures. Animation and comedy in studio-era Hollywood, ed. Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil, 129–151. Berkeley: University of California Press. Schafer, Elizabeth. 2013. Animal instincts: Diverse depictions of anthropomorphism. In Critical survey of graphic novels. History, theme, and technique, ed. Bart Beaty and Stephen Weiner, 158–161. Ipswich: Salem Press. Sina, Véronique. 2016. Comic – Film – Gender. Zur (Re-)Medialisierung von Geschlecht im Comicfilm. Bielefeld: transcript. Söll, Änne and Gerald Schröder. 2015. Die Krise(n) der Männlichkeit: Eine Einleitung. In Der Mann in der Krise? Visualisierungen von Männlichkeit im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, ed. Änne Söll and Gerald Schröder, 7–18. Cologne: Böhlau. Steiner, Gary. 2015. Anthropozentrismus. In Lexikon der Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen, ed. by Arianna Ferrari and Klaus Petrus, 28–32. Bielefeld: transcript. Ware, Chris. 2012. Building stories. New York: Pantheon. Ware, Chris. 2017. Monograph. New York: Rizzoli.

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Wild, Markus. 2015. Anthropomorphismus. In Lexikon der Mensch-Tier-Beziehungen, ed. Arianna Ferrari and Klaus Petrus, 26–28. Bielefeld: transcript. Willmott, Glenn. 2018. The animalized character and style. In Animal comics. Multispecies storyworlds in graphic narratives, ed. David Herman, 53–76. London: Bloomsbury. Yezbick, Daniel. 2013. Funny animals: Whimsy and worry in the world of animal narratives. In Critical survey of graphic novels. History, theme, and technique, ed. Bart Beaty and Stephen Weiner, 181–185. Ipswich: Salem Press.

“If only I’d had a nose job”. Representations of the Gendered Jewish Body in the Works of Aline Kominsky-Crumb

11

Véronique Sina

Abstract

Paying particular attention to the aspect of gender, this essay explores the relationship between media, bodies and discursive constructions of Jewishness in the autobiographical comics of Jewish-American underground cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb. In her comic Nose Job (1989), Kominsky-Crumb describes how she grew up on Long Island in the early 1960s ‘with cosmetic surgery all around’ her and asks herself how it comes that ‘boys get to keep their noses’ while imagining how she may have looked if only she had a nose job like most of her female teenage peers. In doing so, the cartoonist points out how the ‘Jewish nose’ is stereotypically perceived and believed to be a defining (bodily) feature as well as a marker of Jewish identity. She also addresses the central role of the body for the representation and cultural construction of Jewish women. Drawing on Nose Job as well as on other examples of ­Kominsky-Crumb’s graphic work, the essay discusses how the cartoonist uses the media of comics and its specific modes of (visual) representation to reflect, irritate and undermine bodily gendered codes of Jewish identity. Keywords

Gender · Jewish difference · Aline Kominsky-Crumb · Autobiographical comics · Nose job · Underground comics V. Sina (*)  Cologne, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_11

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As Andrea Most points out, every comics artist who deals with Jewish characters has to decide “how to represent a Jewish body and how to determine what exactly a Jewish narrative looks like” (Most 2006, p. 21). Hence, “[t]he choices each artist makes about how to represent Jewish bodies tells a story about the shifting status of Jewishness in contemporary […] popular culture” (Most 2006, p. 21). Paying particular attention to the aspect of gender, my essay explores the relationship between media, bodies and discursive constructions of Jewishness in the autobiographical comics of Aline Kominsky-Crumb. More specifically, I will show how the cartoonist uses comics and their specific modes of (visual) representation to reflect, irritate and undermine bodily gendered codes of Jewish identity. In 1948, Aline Kominsky-Crumb was born as Aline Goldsmith to a Jewish family in the Five Towns area of Long Island, New York. In her graphic memoir Need More Love (2007), the comics artist points out that the neighbourhood she grew up in was mostly known for gangsters and JAPs, i.e. Jewish American ­Princesses: Money was sacred, material prosperity was worshipped. An education was seen merely as a way to make more money. The ultimate for Jewish boys was to go to medical school and become doctors, or gods as far as everyone was concerned. For us girls, a good education was the way to land a rich husband and secure a ‘better life’, meaning a large, showy new house, a big brand new car, the right schools, summer camps and beach and country clubs, the absolute latest fashion […], and every beauty treatment available – including a nose job, fairly routine in this socioeconomic group. (Kominsky-Crumb 2007a, p. 31)

In her statement Kominsky-Crumb not only describes the socioeconomic background of her Long Island Jewish-American (upper-)middle class neighbourhood fairly stereotypically. She also shows “the gendered difference[s] built into the Jewish identity of her childhood” (Oksman 2016, p. 46). A gendered difference that is directly aligned with social as well as bodily features. In her comic Nose Job this intersection becomes even more prominent (Fig. 11.1). The three-page comic, which is also reproduced in her graphic memoir Need More Love, was originally published in issue 15 of the underground feminist magazine Wimmen’s Comix in 1989 (see Oksman 2016, p. 45). As stated by Hillary Chute in her seminal book Graphic Women. Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010), the Wimmen’s Comix phenomenon “enabled a body of work that was explicitly political […], prompting women cartoonist to establish a space specifically for women’s work” (Chute 2010, p. 20). In Nose Job, Kominsky-Crumb, who can be seen as one of the pioneers of women’s autobiographical comics, uses the distinctive features of the medium

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Fig. 11.1   First page of the comic Nose Job (1989). Image credits Aline Kominsky-Crumb (2007b), Nose Job, p. 86. London: MQ

to describe how she grew up on Long Island in the early 1960s “with cosmetic surgery all around” (Kominsky-Crumb 2007b, p. 86) her and asks herself how it comes that “boys get to keep their noses” (Kominsky-Crumb 2007b, p. 87) while imagining how she may have looked if only she had a nose job like most of her female teenage peers. The comic stars ‘The Bunch’ as its protagonist, one of Kominsky-Crumb’s alter egos that is frequently featured in her autobiographical work. In fact, ‘The Bunch’ owes her name to ‘Honeybunch Kaminsky’, a comic character created by the well-known underground artist Robert Crumb (who is Aline’s second husband). The story goes that Aline was called ‘Honeybunch’ by her friends even before she had met her future husband Robert Crumb, because her last name was

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Kominsky.1 As she explained in an interview with the Comics Journal in 1990, she was pretty flattered by this nickname at first, but then it started to bother her as she considered the Honeybunch comic character to be “a cute, cuddly little victim, dumb and passive and compliant” (Kominsky-Crumb quoted in Bagge 1990). Therefore, she decided “to make the thing [i.e. The Bunch] the exact opposite, a strong, obnoxious, repulsive, offensive character, but with a name that related to Honeybunch” (Kominsky-Crumb quoted in Bagge 1990). Hence, ­Kominsky-Crumb shortened the name to ‘The Bunch’, “which sounded disgusting” (Kominsky-Crumb quoted in Bagge 1990) and integrated the character into her autobiographic repertoire. By naming her alter ego ‘The Bunch’, Kominsky-Crumb not only alludes to a rather sexist character created by her husband, she also manages to take a name “that ha[s] been ‘passed on’ to her by the men in her life and revise[s it], thereby claiming some agency over the naming process” (Oksman 2016, p. 47), as Tahneer Oksman points out in her book Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs. Moreover, Oksman calls attention to the fact that by including ‘the’, a definite article as part of the Bunch’s name, ­Kominsky-Crumb indeed continues to objectify herself. However, this objectification becomes “a depersonalization that takes place on her [own] terms” (Oksman 2016, p. 47). ‘The Bunch’ can be seen as an example for the discrepancy between women as historical subjects and woman as a fictional construct, which is exemplified in Teresa de Lauretis’ ground-breaking book Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema from 1984. According to de Lauretis, dominant cinema [and other media] specifies woman in a particular social and natural order, sets her up in certain positions of meaning, fixes her in a certain identification. Represented as the negative term of sexual differentiation, spectacle-fetish or specular image, in any case obscene, woman is constituted as the ground of representation, the looking-glass held up by man (de Lauretis 1984, p. 15).

By naming her alter ego The Bunch, Kominsky-Crumb underlines the fact that her comic character should not be seen as a perfect “dream woman” (de L ­ auretis 1984, p. 13) imagined by man. Neither should she be (mis-)taken for a ‘­realistic’ or authentic gendered representation of Jewish women in general or of herself in ­particular. The Bunch should rather be considered as an exaggerated ­imaginative version of a highly complex persona, changing and evolving over time. By constantly drawing

1Aline

married Carl Kominsky in 1968 and got divorced only a few years later.

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different versions of herself throughout her work, Kominsky-Crumb creates a counterimage to the fixed media representation of female characters exemplified by de Lauretis. She also emphasises the “performativity and deliberateness of her autobiographical depictions” (Oksman 2016, p. 26). Consequently, the clothes of the protagonist may suddenly change from panel to panel, or The Bunch may be depicted with different hairstyles. Sometimes, Kominsky-Crumb may even use different drawing styles to depict her character(s). As described by comics scholar Hillary Chute, this “noncontinuous s­elf-representation” and “deliberate visual inconsistency” unsettles “selfsame subjectivity, presenting an unfixed, nonunitary, resolutely shifting female self” (Chute 2010, p. 31). In this respect, the gendered Jewish identity represented in the comics of Kominsky-Crumb must be understood as a constructed, performative concept, as doing gender and doing (Jewish) identity. As Judith Butler elaborates, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceede [sic]; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. (Butler 1990, p. 270, emphasis in original)

In fact, when it comes to gendered Jewish identity, the body plays a crucial role. In her comic Nose Job, Kominsky-Crumb addresses the body’s central role for the representation and cultural construction of Jewish women, showing that “the Jewish body is always inevitably a gendered body” (Oksman 2010, p. 213).

Jewish Gender Trouble2 On the first page of the comic Nose Job, we can see the full title that reads “Just Think … I could’ve ended up looking like Marlo Thomas instead of Danny!3 If only I’d had a Nose Job” (Fig. 11.1). The title not only sets the ironic tone for

2This

section is based on my essay Constructing the Gendered Jewish Self – Geschlecht und Identität in den autobiografischen Comics von Aline Kominsky-Crumb that was published in the edited volume Autobiografie intermedial. Fallstudien zur Literatur und zum Comic (2018).

3With

Marlo Thomas, Aline Kominsky-Crumb refers to the American actress Margaret Julia Thomas. Danny Thomas is the stage name of American comedian Amos Muzyad Yakhoob Kairouz. While Danny Thomas was not Jewish, he was often perceived to ‘look Jewish’.

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the following pages, it also takes up the motif of the fragmented female self (see Oksman 2016, p. 48). Hence, the title is framed by two different drawings of The Bunch, reflecting and reproducing specific beauty standards and stereotypes. On the right side, we see a version of how The Bunch may have looked if she had a nose job. The left side shows how The Bunch is usually depicted in the works of Kominsky-Crumb. While the version on the right side has a tiny nose, straight dark hair and a fairly thin waist, the left-hand version has a rather oversized prominent nose, unruly red hair and is characterized by a stronger physique. By directly contrasting these two images, and drawing arrows, self-reflexively pointing at them, Kominsky-Crumb offers not one but multiple versions of herself, contesting the essentialist idea of a fixed, stable and unchangeable (gender) identity. The reliability and authenticity of the things shown is also contested by ­Kominsky-Crumb’s distinctive drawing style. In his introduction to Love That Bunch, a 1990 collection of Kominsky-Crumb’s comics, the American underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar states that Aline’s work is “loaded with ugliness” (Pekar 1990, p. III). This opinion seems to be shared by further critics and colleagues as her way of drawing is frequently referred to as messy, grotesque, primitive, inelegant or hyperexeggerated (see Chute 2010, pp. 29–31). Indeed, her apparently “untutored” (Chute 2010, p. 31), grotesque cartoony style has a provocative effect as it aesthetically and ideologically undermines established notions of what is considered to be suitable, acceptable and beautiful to look at—especially when it comes to representations of the female body. Moreover, her shaky hand-made drawings also emphasise the fictionality and artificiality of the things shown, pointing out that—as a graphic medium—comics are never fully able to “either hide entirely or to project complete realism because of their use of illustrations” (Versaci 2007, p. 12). Thus, as Rocco Versaci notes, “the comic book aesthetic projects unreality to some degree because every comic book is a drawn version of the world and, therefore, not ‘real’” (Versaci 2007, p. 12). As “a deliberate deviation from photorealistic representation” (Etter 2017, p. 96), the drawn line always “reminds us of the constructedness of the staged comics world” (Etter 2017, p. 97). Kominsky-Crumb, who is in fact a fine arts graduate, consciously chooses a raw and hyper-exaggerated cartoony style for her drawings to defy stereotypical representations of Jewishness. As a result, the graphic self depicted by Kominsky-Crumb becomes a “masquerade of Jewish femininity” (Precup 2015, p. 314) and Jewish identity, a “(self-)caricature” showing how “in the process of self-representation, gender and ethnicity emerge as performances enacted on the site of the [comics artist’s] body” (Precup 2015, p. 315).

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When Kominsky-Crumb refuses to get a nose job in her teenage years, she does not only contest normative and hegemonic, i.e. gentile beauty standards, imposed on her as a Jewish woman. She also challenges the stereotypical image of the JAP (the Jewish American Princess), whose body is highly adorned (see Prell 1996, p. 84) and “who indulges in ceaseless pampering, face lifts, and alleged financial exploitation” (Precup 2015, p. 316) of either her father or her husband.4 By choosing ‘the nose job’ as the three-page comic’s central theme, the cartoonist also points out how the ‘Jewish nose’ is stereotypically perceived and believed to be a defining (bodily) feature as well as a marker of Jewish identity. But instead of simply reproducing these stereotypical assumptions, she uses comics and their specific modes of (visual) representation to reflect, irritate and undermine such bodily gendered codes and representations of Jewish identity.

The ‘Jewish Nose’ as a Marker of Jewish Difference As Sander L. Gilman shows in his work on the nose job’s history, within the racial science of the nineteenth century, Jews were perceived to be members of the ‘ugly’ races of humankind rather than the ‘beautiful’ races: The boundaries of race were one of the most powerful social and political divisions evolved in the science of that period. It was held that the Jews, rather than being the purest race, were, because of their endogenous marriages, an impure race and therefore a potentially diseased one and that this impurity was written on their physiognomy (Gilman 1994, p. 370).

4The

cultural stereotype of the Jewish American Princess (JAP) was established in American post-war literature in the 1950s (mainly by male authors such as Philip Roth) and increasingly negatively connoted in the 1970s. A (­stereo-) typical JAP is characterized by her pronounced materialism, her superficiality, her selfishness and her financial dependence on other people. Furthermore, a (stereo-)typical JAP is either hypersexual or unerotic, frigid, lazy and cheeky. As Riv-Ellen Prell explains with regard to the stereotype of the Jewish American Princess, the aspect of corporeality plays a central role for the (medial) representation of female Jewish characters—she writes: “The Jewish woman is represented through her body, which is at once exceptionally passive and highly adorned. She simultaneously lacks sexual desire and lavishes attention on beautifying herself. She attends to the needs of no one else, expending great energy on herself instead. This popularly constructed Jewish woman performs no domestic labor and gives no sexual pleasure. Rather, her body is a surface to decorate, its adornment financed by the sweat of the others” (Prell 1996, p. 75).

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Within this racial anti-Semitic logic, the nose became the prominent feature of the Jewish face, and consequently of the deviant Jewish character. Hence, Jews were believed to have a “socially dangerous” nose, reflecting “coarse and bad character” (Gilman 1994, p. 370). As a (negative) marker of Jewish difference, the Jewish nose was inseparably associated with the Jew’s ‘bad nature’, as Gilman points out: George Jabet, writing as Eden Warwick, in his Notes on Noses (1848) characterized the ‘Jewish, or Hawknose’ as one that is ‘very convex, and preserves its convexity like a bow, throughout the whole length from the eyes to the tip. It is thin and sharp’. Shape also carried here a specific meaning: ‘It indicates considerable Shrewdness in worldly matters; a deep insight into character, and facility of turning that insight to profitable account’. Physicians, drawing on such analogies, speculated that the difference of the Jew’s language, the very mirror of his psyche, was the result of the form of his nose. Thus Bernhard Blechmann’s rationale for the Mauscheln of the Jews, their inability to speak with other than a Jewish intonation, was that the ‘muscles, which are used for speaking and laughing are used inherently different from those of the Christians and that this use can be traced … to the great difference in their nose and chin’. The nose became one of the central loci of difference in seeing the Jew (Gilman 1994, p. 381).

Seeking to erase this marker of ethnic ‘difference’ and “physical abnormality” (Schrank 2007, p. 25), Jews sought to change their looks with the help of cosmetic surgery, especially in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust. Even though identifying Jews during the Nazi regime was first of all “a matter of legal definition and genealogical research” (Schrank 2007, p. 25), the negative stereotype of the Jewish nose continued to be prominent, contributing to and perpetuating racist ideas, as can be seen in numerous anti-Semitic caricatures that frequently appeared in Nazi-propaganda magazines and newspapers like Der Stürmer. In fact, the first cosmetic rhinoplasty took place in 1898, when a 28-year-old man was operated on by Jacques Joseph, a German-Jewish surgeon who practiced in Berlin and was soon called ‘Nasenjoseph’ or ‘Nosef’ (see Gilman 1994, pp. 384–386). At this time, surgical interventions were exclusively undertaken for reconstructive matters, not for cosmetic reasons. But as the patient complained that “his nose was the source of considerable annoyance”, that “[w]herever he went, everybody stared at him” and made ridiculing gestures and remarks, which made it impossible for him to live a ‘normal’ social life, Joseph “took the young man’s case and proceeded to perform the first modern cosmetic rhinoplasty” (Gilman 1994, p. 384) that cured the “disease of the visibility of the Other” (Gilman 1994, p. 385) by reducing “Jewish Noses to gentile contours” (Gilman 1994, p. 386).

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By linking Jewish noses to the medical discourse, the powerful notion of “suffering from a Jewish nose” (Gilman 1994, p. 386) was established, and persists as an internalized negative image until today (see Gilman 1994, p. 392). In her work on the Jewish nose and racial stereotypes in media, Bernice Schrank illustrates that rhinoplasty became a popular option among American Jews—especially Jewish-American women—in the 1950s and 1960s (see Schrank 2007, p. 30). According to Schrank, cosmetic rhinoplasty became more affordable after World War II. Moreover, the popularity of nose jobs coincided with the McCarthy era, i.e. the Communist witch-hunt and the infamous ­Rosenberg-trial (Schrank 2007, p. 31). Many American Jews “felt they were in danger” as they were linked to the “anti-Communist crusade, subversion, spies and the Holocaust” (Schrank 2007, p. 31). Therefore, cosmetic rhinoplasty was seen as an effective means of passing and assimilation. Nevertheless, “[t]he rhinoplasty which assisted passing ironically perpetuated the stereotype of the Jewish nose for which it was supposed to be the cure” (Schrank 2007, p. 32). In this respect, the procedure reinforces the notion of the Jewish nose as a deformity. In correcting a perceived facial abnormality, rhinoplasty perpetuates a racialized aesthetic in which features regarded as typically Anglo-Saxon are considered not only more acceptable, but more beautiful than those of ethnics and non-whites (Schrank 2007, p. 32).

In her graphic interpretation of the ‘nose job’, Kominsky-Crumb draws, in a literal sense of the word, on the medical as well as anti-Semitic propaganda discourse related to the negative stereotype of the Jewish nose when she depicts a study of different women (in profile) and their noses on the first page of her comic. The profile-study is followed by a medical diagram entitled “Rhinoplasty / reshaping the nose” (Kominsky-Crumb 2007b, p. 86) and an explanatory text giving some details about the surgical process (Fig. 11.1). On the second page, Kominsky-Crumb continues to reproduce negative Jewish stereotypes related to bodily features: The last panel in the second tier shows The Bunch and her High-School friends in 1962. The caption text at the bottom reads: “Prominent noses, oily skin & frizzy hair were the norm … (no we Jews are not a cute race)” ­(Kominsky-Crumb 2007b, p. 87). In the next panel, the narrator recounts how non-Jewish looks were perceived to be the hegemonic beauty standard when she states that “any girl with a small nose, no zits & straight hair was automatically popular …” (Fig. 11.2). Moreover, the panel shows how The Bunch and her friends are jealously looking at and speaking of Peggy Lipton, a tall, attractive blonde woman with

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Fig. 11.2   The ‘Jewish Other’. Image credits Aline Kominsky-Crumb (2007b), Nose Job, p. 87. London: MQ

what to them is perceived as ‘perfect’ skin and hair. Even though Peggy, who is referred to as “[m]iss perfection” (Kominsky-Crumb 2007c, p. 89) by Aline ­Kominsky-Crumb, does not ‘look Jewish’ to her and her friends, she nevertheless is Jewish, as the cartoonist states in her graphic memoire Need More Love: “Peggy Lipton, I remember her. She was at school with me, and was tall, thin, blonde, pretty, smart, nice and Jewish. I’m convinced that she must have been placed among us short, fat, curly-haired Jewish girls just to remind us how imperfect we all are” (Kominsky-Crumb 2007c, p. 89). This statement is followed by a photograph advertising the TV show Mod Squad (USA, 1968–1973), in which the real life model for Kominsky-Crumbs comic character Peggy, played the role of Julie Barnes, which “further reinforced her ‘goddess’ image and natural superiority” (Kominsky-Crumb 2007c, p. 89). On the next double page we can see a short black and white comic entitled I Remember Peggy (2007) in which the hierarchical notion of the negative ‘Jewish Other’, that is defined in relation to the positive ‘non-Jewish Normal’, is even further amplified. The two-page comic starts with a large black panel on which the title “I Remember Peggy” is inscribed with big white chalky letters (Fig. 11.3).5 Similar to Kominsky-Crumb’s Nose Job comic, the title is also framed by two different portraits, reflecting and reproducing specific gendered beauty standards and ethnic stereotypes. On the left side, the cartoonist has depicted a portrait of herself 5With

its black background and the chalky white lettering as well as the drawings, the whole panel evokes the look of a blackboard used in (high) schools.

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Fig. 11.3   Remembering Peggy. Image credits Aline Kominsky-Crumb (2007c), I Remember Peggy, p. 90. London: MQ

with dark curly hair and a big nose. On the right side, we can see a drawing of Peggy with a small nose and straight fair hair. In the course of the comic, the artist continues to juxtapose her perceived bodily shortcomings and ‘deficient Jewishness’ to the hegemonic beauty norm incorporated by her gentile looking friend, when she characterises Peggy as “goddess” with “naturally straight blonde hair / fair skin / pug nose / good taste” and a “tall […] thin body”, while identifying “large noses / big hair hard to control / fire plug physiques” and “pushy personalities” as the “flaws” and “problems” (Kominsky-Crumb 2007c, p. 90) of herself and her ‘Jewish looking’ friends (Fig. 11.4). Nose Job as well as I Remember Peggy can both be read as a “self-conscious admission of the internalization of the norms of […] society” (Gilman 1994, p. 393). In this respect, looking Jewish means looking different and being confined to a marginal position outside the norm. Ironically though, it is The Bunch that will end as an outsider in the Nose Job comic, isolated from her peers as she refuses to change her looks and to get her nose ‘fixed’ (see Oksman 2016, p. 51). In the end, she even manages to develop a ‘big nose pride’. In other words, ­Kominsky-Crumb portrays her alter ego The Bunch as being both inside and outside the Long Island Jewish community (Oksman 2016, p. 52). Moreover, “the question of Jewish identity and how to represent that identity” seems to be “inevitably related” to bodily issues and “to her identity as a woman” (Oksman 2016, p. 52). By referring to her Jewish friend Peggy as perfect goddess and repeatedly portraying as well as emphasising her hegemonic beauty and non-Jewish appearance, Aline Kominsky-Crumb calls attention to the fact that there is no such thing as ‘original’, ‘essential’ or ‘natural’ Jewishness or non-Jewishness. Rather, the characters in Kominsky-Crumb’s comic become Jewish through the performance of

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Fig. 11.4   Performing ‘Jewish Difference’. Image credits Aline Kominsky-Crumb (2007c), I Remember Peggy, p. 90. London: MQ

Jewish qualities while Peggy becomes a Jewish woman who does not perform any Jewish qualities at all. Consequently, both comics indicate that “anyone can possess Jewish qualities” and that “some Jews can be ‘more Jewish’ than others” (Silverman 2011, p. 31). Hence, the juxtaposition of ‘non-Jewish’ looking Peggy and her ‘Jewish looking’ friends can be seen as a perfect example of ‘Jewish difference’—a hegemonic concept Lisa Silverman has described as “the relationship between the constructed, hierarchical ideals of the Jew and the non-Jew” (Silverman 2011, p. 30). Jewish difference has to be understood as “an analytic category that refers to the socially-constructed hierarchical dialectic between Jew and non-Jew” (Silverman 2011, p. 34). It is “a condition […] that is shaped and reshaped by historical and cultural circumstances” (Silverman 2011, p. 30) and that unmasks ‘the Jew’ as well as their (bodily) gendered markers and codes of Jewish identity as constructed categories that could be theoretically exhibited and performed by anybody.

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Closing Remarks: The Gendered Jewish Body As I have shown in this essay, representing bodies plays an important role for the medium of comics. This is especially true for autobiographic oeuvres, because all comic artists who want to tell their personal story have to deal with the question of how they want to depict their autobiographical self. Whereas in (purely written) literature authors do not inevitably have to depict or define the appearance of their characters, there seems to be a certain necessity for comic artists to visually represent the physical dimensions of their comics’ characters as well as their bodies. And even though the mode of graphic representation may vary, allowing for a “multiplicity of body images” (El Refaie 2012, p. 72) in the medium of comics, once drawn, the body will be inevitably embedded in a discursive intersection of hegemonic norms and “social and cultural assumptions about class, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, age, health, and beauty” (El Refaie 2012, p. 72). In her autobiographical comics, the Jewish-American Underground artist Aline ­Kominsky-Crumb repeatedly addresses the central role of body images for the process of self-representation, showing the intersectional relationship of media, bodies and discursive constructions of Jewishness. Her ‘grotesque’ and cartoony drawings not only question the reliability and authenticity of the things depicted. By pointing out the context-depending discursive concept of visual media as well as the dynamic, processual and non-essential quality of identity building structures, they also show how being ‘Jewish’ is constructed and critically reflected as ‘the Other’ in the medium of comics. Hence, the gendered Jewish bodies and identities found in the Kominsky-Crumb comics reveal that assumed ‘Jewish qualities’—such as the ‘Jewish nose’—are neither physical nor biologically determined but discursive products of doing gender and doing (Jewish) identity.

Bibliography Bagge, Peter. 1990. The Aline Kominsky-Crumb interview. The Comics Journal. http:// www.tcj.com/the-aline-kominsky-crumb-interview/. Accessed 30 June 2019. Butler, Judith. 1990. Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. In Performing feminisms. Feminist critical theory and theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case, 270–282. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic women. Life narrative and contemporary comics. New York: Columbia University Press. Clementi, F.K. 2013. The JAP, the Yenta and the mame in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s graphic imagination. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 4: 309–331.

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de Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Alice doesn’t. Feminism, semiotics, cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2012. Autobiographical comics life writing in pictures. Jackson: ­University Press of Mississippi. Etter, Lukas. 2017. Visible hand? Subjectivity and its stylistic markers in graphic narratives. In Subjectivity across media interdisciplinary and transmedial perspectives, ed. Maike Sarah Reinerth and Jan-Noël Thon, 92–110. London: Routledge. Freund, Michael. 2016. The roots of an American Psychogram. Early alienation plus radical honesty plus Borscht Belt plus hard work or: How Robert and Aline found common ground. In Aline Kominsky-Cumb & Robert Crumb: Drawn together, ed. Anette Gehring, 13–20. Basel: Christoph Merian. Gilman, Sander. 1991. The Jew’s body. New York: Routledge. Gilman, Sander. 1994. The Jewish nose: Are Jews white? Or, the history of the nose job. In The other in Jewish thought and history. Constructions of Jewish culture and identity, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein and Robert L. Cohn, 364–401. New York: New York University Press. Kominsky-Crumb, Aline. 2007a. Need more love. A graphic memoir. London: MQ. Kominsky-Crumb, Aline. 2007b. Nose job. In Need more love. A graphic memoir, 86–88. London: MQ. Kominsky-Crumb, Aline. 2007c. I remember Peggy. In Need more love. A graphic memoir, 90–91. London: MQ. Most, Andrea. 2006. Re-imagining the Jew’s body. From self-loathing to “Grepts”. In You should see yourself, ed. Vincent Brook, 19–36. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Oksman, Tahneer. 2010. Visualizing the Jewish body in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love. Studies in Comics 1 (2): 213–232. Oksman, Tahneer. 2016. “How come boys get to keep their noses?” Women and Jewish American identity in contemporary graphic memoirs. New York: Columbia University Press. Pekar, Harvey. 1990. Introduction. In Love that bunch, ed. Aline Kominsky-Crumb, III–IV. Seattle: Fantagraphics. Precup, Mihaela. 2015. ‘That Medieval Eastern-European Shtetl Family of Yours’: Negotiating Jewishness in Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s Need More Love (2007). Studies in Comics 6 (2): 313–327. Prell, Riv-Ellen. 1996. Why Jewish princesses don’t sweat: Desire and consumption in post-war American Jewish culture. In Too Jewish? Challenging traditional identities, ed. Norman Kleeblatt, 74–92. New Brunswick: Rudgers University Press. Schrank, Bernice. 2007. “Cutting off your nose to spite your race”: Jewish stereotypes, media image, cultural hybridity. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 25 (4): 18–42. Silverman, Lisa. 2011. Beyond antisemitism: A critical approach to German Jewish cultural history. In Nexus. Essays in German Jewish studies, ed. William Collins Donahue and Martha B. Heller, 27–45. Rochester: Camden House. Sina, Véronique. 2018. Constructing the gendered Jewish Self – Geschlecht und Identität in den autobiografischen Comics von Aline Kominsky-Crumb. In Autobiografie intermedial. Fallstudien zur Literatur und zum Comic, ed. Kalina Kupczynska and Jadwiga Kita-Huber, 441–455. Bielefeld: Aisthesis. Versaci, Rocco. 2007. This book contains graphic language. Comics as literature. New York: Continuum.

Manga Aging: Grannies and Gutters

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Jaqueline Berndt

Abstract

Manga (as printed graphic narratives) has become an aging media with regards to reader demographics, technology, and business model; accordingly, series with elderly protagonists are seeing a boom in recent years. From the perspective of intersectionality, the question arises how the potential age diversity relates to gender, especially in terms of manga’s traditional system of gendered genres. The comparison of two representative series—Kaori Tsurutani’s Metamorphosis Veranda (since 2017) and Yuki Ozawa’s Sanju Mariko (since 2016)—reveals how publication site (webcomic, print magazine) and a related foregrounding of genre-specific style effect demographic range. One stylistic device is the gutter, or mahaku [liminal time-space], which serves ­genre-specific nostalgia as well as affectively engaging page compositions in addition to closure. Keywords

Manga · Gendered genres · Shōjo manga · Josei manga · Age diversity ·  Aging society · Gutter · Mahaku · Page layout · Panel

In popular as well as academic discourse, manga is being perceived as youth ­culture. In practice, however, it has become an aging media over the course of the

J. Berndt (*)  Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_12

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last decade. Already in 2005 Gō Itō1 called for a paradigm shift in manga criticism noting that Japanese kids did not take their departure from the still, monochrome and paper-based graphic narratives of manga anymore, but rather the audiovisual and colored moving worlds of animated TV series and video games. The shrinkage of the prime target group of manga magazines, teenagers, and their affinity for new media has caused a landslide change in Japan’s comics culture and industry. It had since the late 1950s been leaning on specialized weeklies and monthlies, where manga series were usually published first. But since 2005 the magazine has been outstripped by the previously subsidiary book (tankōbon), at least pertaining to the annual sales of printed manga. What poses a loss also holds a potential, though. The fact that the book format became paramount has helped graphic narratives to go beyond youth-centered taste communities and facilitate age diversity, serving casual readers across the traditional genre categories which have been not only age but also gender-specific (shōnen [manga for boys], shōjo [girls], seinen [male youth], and josei [women]). As the primary media for young people, manga began to lose its attractiveness in Japan ironically at the very moment when the Japanese government launched its policy of nation branding in the very name of manga, having it stand in for the whole of ‘Cool Japan’. A point in case is manga’s promotion by elderly politicians and their inclination to privilege elderly male manga artists as well as a generically masculine style, when commissioning brochures and other materials. Yet, such artists (like Takao Saitō and Kaiji Kawaguchi) do not necessarily warrant the universality in appeal that authorities might hope for. While their popularity among senior politicians, civil servants and salaried office workers, or salarymen, attests to the wide acceptance of manga as such and a ­cross-generational range of basic manga literacy, it reveals also the established view of male manga genres as the representation of a standard, that is, the privileged as unmarked position against which the subordinated stands out as marked (see Kacsuk 2018). The extension of manga readership into old age was first noted in the ­mid-1980s, as evinced by the journalistic Anglicism silver manga that circulated temporarily back then. But in actuality there were no special manga magazines targeted at retirees or a new subgenre resting on them. Manga remained closely tied to youthfulness, even as readerships matured and diverged (not rarely did

1In

this article, Japanese names are indicated in line with Western custom, that is, first name followed by surname.

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teenage protagonists serve to nourish the inner child of grown-up consumers). This changed only recently. About a decade after Japan had become a forerunner of the aging society in 2005 (see Thang 2011, p. 172), manga narratives began to attest to the fact that Japan’s “graying crisis” has also given rise to a new elder culture among urban middle-class people, which effected “a switch from the passive connotation of ‘silver’ – as in ‘silver seat’ (priority seats on public transportation)2 – to a proactive existence” (Thang 2011, p. 180) often expressed with the Anglicism senior. Senior-centered manga are at the center of the discussion below. In 2018, they made the news in Japan, mainly under the name of granny manga ­(obā-chan manga) (see Tengu-u 2019 [2017]). A significant number of series featuring protagonists of the ‘old-old group’, that is, age 75 and over, accomplished bestseller status and received prestigious awards. Representative examples are introduced in the following sections with respect to both protagonists and readership, the latter being deduced from the employment of gendered genre devices. The gutter and its Japanese conceptualization as mahaku come to the fore in that regard. As a whole, the article addresses intersectionality with respect to how the inclusion of the elderly relates to manga’s system of gendered genres: do the new ­senior-centered productions facilitate age diversity by going beyond fixated genre domains (with the female genres appearing as derivative and secondary), or do they reinforce the traditional divide along gender lines (which has, among other things, provided an empowering feminine space by means of segregation)?

Grannies (and Grandpas) Over the past few years, elderly protagonists have increasingly taken center stage in manga narratives. Often, this happens in a specific type of manga: published first on webcomic sites before appearing in book editions; privileging the episodic form over large narrative arcs, not rarely approximating the vertical four-panel comic strip; foregrounding the joys and sorrows of everyday life and therefore inclined to be categorized as essay (rather than story) manga; exhibiting a preference for simple line drawings, and ‘handmadeness’3 ranging from panel borders

2See

also the so-called Silver Human Resource Centers, established since the late 1980s. have discussed this in a different context in German (Berndt 2018). A revised English version is forthcoming in Mechademia 12.2, titled Conjoined by Hand: Aesthetic Materiality in Kouno Fumiyo’s Manga “In this corner of the world”.

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to dialogue lines; exercising restraint in detailing the backgrounds or using screen tones. Furthermore, these comics do not only look less ‘mangaesque’ than the global mainstream, they are also often created by illustrators without substantial ties to the manga industry (magazine debuts to begin with, and art-college instead of comics-school education standing out as well). For example, since 2017, publisher Shinchōsha’s site Kurage Banchi [lit. Jellyfish Bunch] has been hosting Ōya-san to boku [My Landlady and I] by comedian Tarō Yabe (1977–), who was the first non-manga artist to receive a Tezuka Cultural Prize in 2018 for his simply drawn comic strips. Serialized on the same site, 70 Uizan [First Child at 70] by professional manga artist Ryōsuke Time (1976–) has seen five tankōbon volumes due to the popularity of its comforting story: a 65-year-old freshly retired salaryman and his 70-year-old wife are having their first naturally delivered baby. Similar to these male artists who deliberately avoid stylistic references to shōnen manga or gekiga, the female-male pair of illustrators, working under the name Nekomaki, have published their series Neko to jīchan [lit. The cat and the grand-pa, or Le vieil homme et son chat, as the French translated edition has it] on the Kadokawa corporation’s website Media Factory. Picturing the everyday life of a widower in the course of the seasons, the short episodes have not only been collected in five books so far (Kindle editions of which are available in full color), but they have also been adapted to a ­‘feel-good’ movie, The Island of Cats (2019). Unlike the examples mentioned above, although similar in style, Yūichi Okano published his autobiographical comic strips depicting the care of a divorced man in his late 50s for his dementia-stricken mother, first in the news magazine of a small town in Nagasaki Prefecture, before a collection was released under the title of Pekorosu no haha ni ai ni iku [Going to Meet Little Onion’s Mother] (2012) by a local publisher. From 2016 onwards, the manga has seen its continuation in the nation-wide weekly magazine Shūkan Asahi. Interesting to note is not only how a long-marginalized subject made its way from the geographical and industrial margins to the center, but also that this still happened in analog media (which was to change finally in the aftermath of the Fukushima Triple Disaster of March 2011). In printed periodicals, the traditional backbone of the manga industry, elderly characters had been confined to secondary and comical roles for a long time. As distinct from the predominating genre fiction, the 16-page short story Tanabe no Tsuru [Tsuru Tanabe] by female artist Fumiko Takano (1957–) already highlighted in 1980 the marginalized position of elderly women in the modern Japanese family. At the beginning it introduced little Tsuru, who likes to play with dolls and paper cut-outs. But a dialogue line contains the word ‘granny,’ and on

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the fourth page the reader learns from script attached to her image that she is actually the grandmother of the Tanabe family, and 82 years old. Her visualization as a little girl seems to suggest that she has turned infantile out of senility, and precisely this prompts the 16-year-old Ruri to lock granny out of her room. But eventually, on the manga’s last page, Ruri changes her mind, and when she asks Tsuru not to tell her mom about her smoking, Tsuru replies: “But to the toilet, I can go by myself” (Fig. 12.1). In contrast to this last dialogue line which seems completely out of context, the panel features Tsuru from below, implying dignity and perhaps even cleverness, that is, the possibility that she just presents herself with infantility out of self-defense. The page was cited by Fusanosuke Natsume in Manga no yomikata (How to Read Manga) as an outstanding example of guiding the reader’s gaze by

Fig. 12.1   Fumiko Takano, Tanabe no Tsuru (1980). Image credits Fumiko Takano, Zettai anzen kamisori [Absolute safety razor]. Tokyo: Hakusensha, p. 82

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changing angles in regularly arranged panels (Natsume 1995, pp. 184–185). More than a decade earlier Masuko Honda, a pioneering scholar of children’s literature and girl studies, had discussed Tsuru Tanabe with regard to the similarities of girl and elderly woman pertaining to their marginal, because non-productive, position within family and society (see Honda 1983). Aging was not of utmost importance yet, and Takano’s story was not a typical manga anyway: it was published in the first issue of a short-lived alternative manga magazine, the quarterly Mankinchō, which featured new wave artists such as Katsuhiro Ōtomo. Yet, from today’s perspective, Tsuru Tanabe appears to have anticipated burning problems such as elderly people’s loneliness and self-neglect. The “girl-grandmother relation” (Aoyama 2014, p. 49) is still a central narrative trope and not confined to kinship as one of the surprise bestsellers of 2018 evinces: Metamorufōze no engawa [Metamorphosis Veranda in the English translation, and BL Métamorphose in the French]. Serialized on Kadokawa’s website Comic Newtype, it is the first major work by artist Kaori Tsurutani (1982–), who had made her debut in 2007, but mainly worked as an assistant for other female artists such as Hikari Nakamura and Akane Torikai. Metamorphosis Veranda has two protagonists: Ms. Ichinoi, a 75-year-old widow who teaches calligraphy from home, and Urara, a reticent 17-year-old high school student who is a fan of boys love (BL) manga. Finding themselves marginalized in their respective environment, they begin to form a relationship when Ms. Ichinoi enters the bookstore where Urara works and rediscovers manga, albeit with a new twist: BL had not been a proper genre in her youth, and its fandom had not flourished yet either, but it is still better read in secrecy as Urara and also Ms. Ichinoi’s daughter demonstrate with their behavior. At the beginning of volume 2, Urara takes the elderly lady to a fanzine sales event (modelled on J Garden in Ikebukuro and acknowledged in the book’s imprint). As the title indicates, this is the story of a metamorphosis, although not a particularly mangaesque one consisting of fantastic changes from old to young age or from ordinary to superhuman powers in a highly codified, cute illustration style. Such manga series do exist as well, for example, Ayumi Tsubaki’s xx demo mahō shōjo ni naremasu ka? [Can She Become a Magical Girl Even xx?], which features a 88-year-old granny who occasionally turns into a magical girl to battle bad guys, although not with violence but didactics. Metamorphosis Veranda uses mangatypical signs to relate the characters’ embarrassment (including sweat drops that appear in speech balloons or even ‘free space’), and occasionally it employs also handwritten words reminiscent of shōjo manga’s extradiegetic comments, but overall, restraint is exercised to let realism rule as related to characters’ interconnecting, encouraging each other, re/gaining agency of their life. In the narrative, this

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change is mediated by manga, and BL manga at that, which serves as an engawa, the wooden-floored edging strip of traditional Japanese houses (not congenially translated as veranda) that connects the inside with the outside. In a few cases, the two protagonists actually occupy that part of Ms. Ichinoi’s old dwelling. Several sequences picture Ms. Ichinoi reading manga within the manga. When she gets immersed in the narrative, the otherwise regular panel grid changes, as if conjoining her gaze onto the intradiegetic manga panels with the reader’s extradiegetic gaze reenacting hers. And while the underlying page turns from white to black, the intradiegetically watched manga drawings are set straight, adjusted to the restored grid, although still in paler lines (Fig. 12.2). One sequence shows Ms. Ichinoi immersing herself into the past, indicated additionally by a different typeface, and eventually projecting her own marriage onto the BL couple. Thus, Metamorphosis Veranda does more than feature a senior protagonist in all her realistically presented physical frailty or an intergenerational encounter on the engawa as liminal space and the role of manga in it. It also draws attention to the separating and conjoining operations that take place on the manga page, for example, by means of the gutter.

Fig. 12.2   Ms. Ichinoi reading manga within the manga (reading direction: from right to left). Image credits Kaori Tsurutani (2018). Metamorufōze no engawa [Metamorphosis Veranda], vol. 1. Tokyo: Kadokawa, pp. 12–13

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Gutter/less Metamorphosis Veranda ranked at the very top in the female category of the annual guide This Manga is Amazing! 2019 (Kono manga 2018), although it is not serialized in a gender-specific manga magazine, and it does not exhibit the obvious markers of generic manga femininity (such as illustrations of the protagonist as fashionable dress-up doll laid over panel tiers or adorning book covers, close-ups with huge eyes and very small mouths, densely collaged page compositions).4 This distinguishes Metamorphosis Veranda from Sanju Mariko (80-year-old Mariko). Thanks to the latter, which has been running in the printed women’s manga monthly BE LOVE since 2016, Yuki Ozawa (1964–) has finally experienced success with the first volume already selling half a million copies. The narrative follows Mariko Kōda, an 80-year-old widow,5 who is in exceptionally good shape and still works as a freelance author. But even she faces the societal hardships of elderly people once she leaves home. For example, she cannot rent an apartment without the signature of her son as guarantee, because landlords seek to avoid cleaning up after seniors’ lonely death (which then happens to a former colleague of hers even in a multigeneration family house). Thus, Mariko stays in a manga, or internet, café for a while, and when she gets fired by the literary magazine she had been contributing to for ages, she launches her own web journal with the help of a young nerd and a gamer-granny, trying to present a free space to former star authors who have grown old and impoverished. Like in Metamorphosis Veranda, grannies interconnect with youths, also on social networks, and they do not rarely feel united by their difficulties to get along with the middle-aged generation, ranging from Mariko’s editor-in-chief to anxious but overworked children. Much more exaggerated and fictitious than Metamorphosis Veranda, Ozawa’s manga is appreciated by readers in their 40s up to 70s for its feel-good impact, or ‘healing’ capacity. Obviously, it manages to accommodate the generically feminine profile of the magazine in an inclusive way that works across gendered tastes (instead of repelling readers disinclined to shōjo aesthetics). In short, three aspects stand out: first, the restraint to beautify faces which still play a prominent role, but lack noses when depicted frontally, and are rendered in ‘organically’

4For

discussions of generic manga femininity see B ­ auwens-Sugimoto (2016) and Antononoka (2019). 5The Japanese title word sanju means “80 years old”, with a celebratory connotation.

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alternating bold and thin lines, often dispersed in small dashes (grimaces that relate affective states also help to avoid idealization); second, the story is told in a straightforward way without complex flashbacks or dream sequences, but most narrative events rest on talk not physical action. Sanju Mariko averts the risk to become verbose by visually dynamic page compositions, forming the third aspect of its accessibility (Fig. 12.3). Instead of a more or less consistent grid, irregular arrangements predominate, alternating between a few horizontal tiers and lengthy vertical panels, panels with and without background, images directly drawn on the underlying page with some panels superimposed, straight and oblique gutters. In addition, Sanju Mariko contains many gutterless sequences (Fig. 12.4). The comics-specific gutter has been conceptualized in Japanese as mahaku, combining ma, the spatio-temporal interval or in-between, with the spatial yohaku as represented by the un-inked parts of brushed line drawings. Having coined the term, Natsume emphasized historic change: from the film-like articulation of time in clearly determined panels to a spatial composition that gives preference to simultaneity over sequentiality (see Natsume 1995, p. 191). Such undermining of the individual panel in favor of interrelationality has been exemplified by shōjo manga, or more precisely, productions of the 1970s that aimed at an ­interiority-oriented ‘deepening’ of graphic storytelling by means of collages that included incompletely framed or even unbordered panels (see Masuda 2002).

Fig. 12.3   Mariko facing her younger self. Image credits Yuki Ozawa (2017). Sanju Mariko [80-year old Mariko], vol. 4. Tokyo: Kodansha, n. p.

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Fig. 12.4   Mariko holding a grudge against the publisher’s rejection of her online journal project. Image credits Yuki Ozawa (2019). Sanju Mariko [80-year old Mariko], vol. 10. Tokyo: Kodansha, n. p.

This trend was superseded in 1980s women’s manga by ‘flat’ layouts as a different way to irritate the gutter’s initial function. Female artists who had started their career in magazines for male youths and not girls, introduced regularity to increase immediacy and tempo. Yet, instead of ‘boxing’ space and time, they created a diffuse time-space that allowed for various encounters on the surface of both narrative event and printed page (see Masuda 2002, p. 117). Gutterlessness, or panels sharing one and the same border, was crucial in that regard. While the compression of gutters is not confined to ‘female’ productions, in Sanju Mariko it may easily connote the genealogy of women’s manga as a genre (a pioneer of which was the serializing magazine BE LOVE, launched in 1980) just as the occasional multilayered pages associate the shōjo manga genre. The intertwining of ‘deep’ and ‘flat’ layouts, which has flourished since the 1990s, does not necessarily refer to a higher symbolic meaning though. In Sanju Mariko it serves primarily to dynamize the surface of the page and increase variety by means of formal juxtapositions, foregrounding aspects of the gutter that escape its conceptualization as cognitive closure or metalepsis (as, for example, elaborated in Baetens 1991). This again connects to media experiences, of the elderly characters as well as the, by tendency, elderly readers.

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The strict gender divide, which was central for manga in the past, seems to have turned into a reminiscence. Precisely this facilitates the demographic inclusiveness of the magazine-based Sanju Mariko with its clearly ‘feminine’ style, and presents an equivalent to the stylistic reserve of the web-based Metamorphosis Veranda. Yet each of the two manga series discussed here goes beyond naturalized notions of girls’ or women’s manga with regard to character types, narrative tropes, visual style or publication site. In its own way, each raises awareness for the historical contingency of manga’s gendered genres. Acknowledgements  I would like to acknowledge the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic, which invited me to its Annual Conference on Asian Studies (ACAS) and thus prompted the conjoining of manga and aging society.

Bibliography Antononoka, Olga. 2019. Shōjo Manga beyond Shōjo Manga: The ‘Female Mode of Address’ in Kabukumon. In Shōjo across media: Exploring “Girl” practices in contemporary Japan, ed. Jaqueline Berndt et al., 83–105. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Aoyama, Tomoko. 2014. The girl-grandmother relation in Japanese children’s literature. In Configurations of family in contemporary Japan, ed. Tomoko Aoyama, Laura Dales, and Romit Dasgupta, 49–64. New York: Routledge. Baetens, Jan. 1991. Pour une poétique de la gouttiere. Word & Image 7 (4): 365–376. Bauwens-Sugimoto, Jessica. 2016. Queering Black Jack: A look at how manga adapts to changing reading demographics. In Proceedings from the 2016 NAJAKS conference at Stockholm University, ed. Jaqueline Berndt and Gunnar Jinmei Linder, Orientaliska studier 147, 111–142. https://orientaliskastudier.se/documents/06_Bauwens_111_142. pdf. Accessed 10 Aug 2019. Berndt, Jaqueline. 2018. Hand in Hand: Kouno Fumiyos Mangaserie Kono sekai no katasumi ni (In This Corner of the World) im Vergleich zur Anime-Adaptation durch Katabuchi Sunao. In Ästhetik des Gemachten: Interdisziplinäre Beiträge zur ­Animations- und Comicforschung, ed. Hans-Joachim Backe et al., 53–84. Berlin: deGruyter. Honda, Masuko. 1983. Kodomo no ryōya kara [From the children’s domain]. Kyoto: Jinbun shoin. Itō, Gō. 2005. Tezuka izu deddo: Hirakareta manga hyōgenron e [Tezuka is dead: Towards an open-minded manga aesthetics]. Tokyo: NTT Publishing. Kacsuk, Zoltan. 2018. Re-examining the “What is Manga” problematic: The tension and interrelationship between the “Style” versus “Made in Japan” positions. Arts 7 (3): 26. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts7030026. Kono manga (ed.). 2018. Kono manga ga sugoi! 2019 [This manga is amazing! 2019]. Tokyo: Takarajimasha.

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Masuda, Nozomi. 2002. Kakusan suru jikū: koma kōsei no hensen kara miru 1990nendai ikō no shōjo manga [The diffusion of time and space: A study of girls comics after the 1990s focusing on the changes of panel arrangement]. Manga Kenkyū [Manga Studies] 2: 108–120. Natsume, Fusanosuke. 1995. Mahaku to iu shuchō suru mu [Mahaku, the insistent nothing]. In Manga no yomikata [How to read manga], ed. Manabu Inoue, 184–192. Tokyo: Takarajimasha. Nekomaki (Muse Work, ms-work). 2015–2019. Neko to jīchan [Cat and grandpa]. Tokyo: Kadokawa. (Nekomaki. 2018–2019. Le vieil homme et son chat, transl. by Vincent Lefrançois and Ryoko Sekiguchi. Paris: Casterman). Okano, Yūichi. 2012. Pekorosu no haha ni ai ni iku [Going to meet little onion’s mother]. Fukuoka: Nishinihon shinbunsha. Okano, Yūichi. 2018. Pekorosu no haha no wasuremono [Things forgotten by little onion’s mother]. Tokyo: Asahi shinbunsha. Ozawa Yuki. 2016–2019. Sanju Mariko [80-year-old Mariko]. Tokyo: Kodansha. Takano, Fumiko. 1982. Tanabe no Tsuru [Tsuru Tanabe] (1980). In Zettai anzen kamisori [Absolute safety razor], 67–82. Tokyo: Hakusensha. Tengu-u. 2019. Obāchan ga shujinkō no rōjin manga 8-sen: o-toshiyori saikō [A selection of 8 senior manga with a granny as protagonist: Elderly people are great]. LIFE LOG, 15.12.2017 (revised 29.04.2019). https://www.lifelogweb.com/entry/obaatyan-manga. Accessed 10 Aug 2019. Thang, Leng Leng. 2011. Aging and social welfare in Japan. In Routledge handbook of Japanese culture and society, ed. Victoria Bestor et al., 172–185. New York: Routledge. Time, Ryōsuke. 2016–2018. 70 Uizan [First child at 70]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Tsubaki, Ayumi. 2017–2018. xx demo mahō shōjo ni naremasu ka? [Can she become a magical girl even xx?]. Tokyo: Shogakukan. Tsurutani, Kaori. 2018–2019. Metamorufōze no engawa [Metamorphosis Veranda]. Tokyo: Kadokawa (Tsurutani, Kaori. 2019. BL Métamorphose, transl. by Geraldine Oudin. Paris: Ki-oon). Tsurutani, Kaori. 2020 (forthcoming). Metamorphosis Veranda. Los Angeles: Seven Seas Entertainment. Yabe, Tarō. 2017. Ōya-san to boku [My Landlady and I]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha.

An Art of Loss

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Tahneer Oksman

Abstract

This essay opens with a reading of a number of recent autobiographical exhibitions and books by illustrator, artist, and writer Maira Kalman. Oksman argues that a close reading of Kalman’s trans-medial, repetitive, and elliptical modes of telling her family’s history between and across various projects and texts, and using images and words, often in sequence, makes room for better understanding representations of loss in comics. Introducing two formal strategies apparent from Kalman’s works, ‘cumulatio’ and ‘combination,’ Oksman reads two contemporary autobiographical comics of loss that utilize such techniques. In Ulli Lust’s Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life (2013) and Una’s Becoming Unbecoming (2016), formal strategies of ‘cumulation’ and ‘combination’ help establish how individual losses are set in a dynamic, relational network. Keywords

Una · Becoming Unbecoming · Ulli Lust · Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life · Grief · Loss · Graphic medicine · Women and comics · Comics and sexual violence I hope this is a good book, but perhaps not a worthy one. Neither was it therapeutic, but it has been freeing. I like to think of this as my tapestry: like Philomela, who wove her own story after her tongue was cut out, this is my communication, my contribution, as one among many (Una 2016, Afterword, p. 205) T. Oksman (*)  New York, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2020 N. Eckhoff-Heindl and V. Sina (eds.), Spaces Between, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30116-3_13

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In 2014, illustrator, artist and writer Maira Kalman published My Favorite Things, a book based on a show put on by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City.1 The exhibition displayed a collection of forty pieces curated by Kalman, who had chosen them from the museum’s extensive archive of design-related objects, her personal collection and the National Museum of American History collection. The ensuing book consists of three main parts, beginning with an opening, “Part I: There Was a Simple and Grand Life,” in which Kalman sketches out “a little bit of background on the person doing the choosing” (Kalman 2014, p. 9).2 Contained therein is a series of reprinted gouache paintings which incorporate, or are accompanied by, hand-painted narrative tidbits recounting Kalman’s early life, in Tel Aviv and then New York City, and her parents’ earlier lives in Israel as well as what is now Belarus. An arresting pair of pages displayed shortly into this autobiographical segment depicts, on the right, an illustration of a man, Kalman’s father, wearing a gray suit and falling through the air, his eyes closed, one arm flung loosely overhead and a second folded limply downward (Fig. 13.1). The background is colored in a soft pink, a long, simply painted palm tree perched to one side, below two rectangular windows; the top half of a doorframe peeks out at the very bottom of the image. The facing left page consists of a clean white background with a brief narrative drawn out, as a poem, in Kalman’s characteristic spidery black handwriting. It reads, in part: The Gray Suit One day, my father was locked out of our apartment in Tel Aviv. He tried to get in by climbing down from a neighbor’s terrace on the third floor to our terrace on the second floor. But he slipped and fell to the ground. He fell, slowly,

1Titled

Maira Kalman Selects, the show was on view from December 12, 2014 through June 7, 2015. See www.cooperhewitt.org/events/current-exhibitions/maira-kalman-selects/. In addition to My Favorite Things, Kalman also published a children’s book in conjunction with the show, titled Ah-Ha to Zig-Zag: 31 Objects from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design (2014). 2In the short film Maira Kalman: My Favorite Things (2015), which is also connected to the exhibition, directed by Gael Towey, Kalman describes the book as a “catalogue sandwiched between two parts: one is a memoir and one is a rumination about life and love and things” (Maira Kalman quoted in Towey 2015).

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Fig. 13.1   Kalman’s father falling through the air. Image credits Maira Kalman (2014), My Favorite Things, p. 17. New York: Harper Design in his gray suit and did not get hurt. This was before I was born. Before he took us to the United States. (Kalman 2014, p. 16).3

Kalman’s depiction of her father’s limp, resigned body, which could pass for dead or at least unconscious, contrasts with her seemingly light-hearted verbal depiction of his fall as a passing misadventure, an anomalous accident. We are unsure of the agent or agents at work: has he been ‘locked out’ in a passive sense, having forgotten his keys, or has someone else locked him out? What’s the antecedent to this moment of frozen posture and what comes after?

3Kalman often plays with capitalization, sometimes within a single word. For ease of reading, I have used standard capitalization practices here.

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An identical image of her falling father, printed in a slightly smaller size and placed on the left facing page beside an altered accompanying narrative poem on the right (a reversed page order), can be found in Sara Berman’s Closet.4 This book was published in 2018 in relation to Kalman’s more plainly autobiographical, co-curated 2017 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.5 Kalman and her son Alex put together the exhibition to celebrate and memorialize their recently departed mother and grandmother Sara Berman’s life, particularly from 1982 to her death in 2004; in those years, she resided alone in an apartment in Greenwich Village. As the book tracks it, Berman broke from her husband and their life in Tel Aviv and moved into her own apartment in New York City, where she lived out her final 22 years. It was there she set up a space in which, as the Kalmans describe it, as though in contrast to her earlier life, “There was a place for everything” (Kalman and Kalman 2018, n. p.). The centerpiece to the exhibition, documented as a full-page photograph placed roughly in the middle of the book, is an excerpt from this space: an actual recreated closet set preternaturally in a museum (see Kalman and Kalman 2018, n. p.). The closet is doorless, a chain with a red dangling pompom the only spot of color against a background of whites, ivories, tans and grays. On display are white shelves covered in neatly folded piles of, among other items, pressed white shirts, pressed white underthings and pressed white towels. Some additional objects—an iron, several watches, a perfume bottle—can be spotted on shelves peeking out on the frame’s right side. In an interview published concurrently with the exhibition, Kalman marks 1982 as the year her mother left her father (see Frank and Kalman 2017). Both in Sara Berman’s Closet and My Favorite Things, Kalman visually and narratively bridges a variety of losses and breaks, of her mother growing up Jewish in Belarus and escaping, with the rest of her family, a life of brutal anti-Semitism; of her father, captured in mid-air, his predicament plainly suggestive of domestic disquiet. The closet, with its careful, utilitarian and aesthetically pleasing arrangement, comes to represent a new way of seeing, and subsequently of being, afforded her mother in this afterlife to earlier losses. As Kalman explained, “[w]hen you come from somewhere that has been erased, or

4The

pages in Sara Berman’s Closet are sized at six-by-eight-and-three-quarters inches; the pages in My Favorite Things are sized at eight-by-nine inches. 5The exhibit, Sara Berman’s Closet, was first installed at Mmuseumm in 2015 and later shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from March 6 to November 26, 2017. See www. metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2017/sara-berman-closet (accessed: 02.05.2019). The book also lists the mother-son pair.

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when you make a violent break later on in life, as my mother did when she left my father and came to New York, maybe it concentrates you on where you are, teaches you to look so intently, listen so intently” (Frank and Kalman 2017). Reading these various narratives of rupture alongside each other—Kalman’s illustrated falling father and the attendant poem; the photograph of her dead mother’s recreated closet—weaving a tapestry of sorts, this visual sequence evokes some striking possibilities for thinking about the poetics and aesthetics of loss. Kalman’s trans-medial, repetitive and elliptical modes of telling her family history between and across various projects and texts, using images and words, often in sequence, makes room for considerations of what comics can teach us about loss. And what loss—or what we know of loss—can teach us about comics.6 Specifically, Kalman’s overarching autobiographical project could be described as hinging on curatorial acts of what I call ‘cumulation’ and ‘combination’: what objects and memories the narrator decides to collect and include; what they say (the memories, thoughts, affects and ideas they trigger for our narrator); and how the various correlated images, sensations and stories come together. Recalling what Sara Ahmed, in Living a Feminist Life (2017), has termed the “memory work” that is part of “feminist work”, Kalman’s art reveals how, as Ahmed explains of this process, “you can gather memories like things, so they become more than half glimpsed, so that we can see a fuller picture; so you can make sense of how different experiences connect” (Ahmed 2017, p. 22). In the case of Sara Berman’s Closet, Kalman’s text relates the glory of her mother’s beautifully arranged, meticulously organized space, her mother’s own carefully curated assortment of the things she uses and loves, to a series of dark histories otherwise generally kept secret. Each beautiful item, carefully refolded by daughter and grandson, signals an untold story or untold bits of a told story, now brought together in little heaps. A similar interpretation could be applied to My Favorite Things, a work in which Kalman collects, turns over and connects what is remembered and what must be imagined; what has been passed on and what has been found. Her texts highlight and suspend individual fragments to reveal, in a more complete way, a functioning whole. As I will demonstrate using two recent examples of graphic memoir, through such formal strategies of ‘cumulation’ (or, its more familiar related term, accumulation; growth), and ‘combination’ (or amalgamation, the arranging of elements),

6While

I regularly think about, and discuss, Kalman’s works in relation to comics, and while I see much of her printed oeuvre as situated, if not within then at least at the boundaries of, a genealogy of non-fictional comics texts, it should be noted that Kalman does not self-identify as a cartoonist and her work is rarely described by others in that context.

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individual representations of loss are set in relation to another, or others, to reveal the importance not only of individual instances of loss, but to portray what we might better think of as an entire network of loss. Rather than dispatch losses as individual, isolated events, grieved over in bookmarked and boundaried times and spaces, with the help of such strategies each instance of loss can be understood as it is more closely experienced in life: as part of a larger scheme, as related to and always potentially in conversation with other losses—of different varieties and scales; of losses experienced by a person over an individual lifetime and of losses experienced with close and distant others. There is, of course, overlap between the two terms I have proposed: for instance, ‘cumulation’ can be thought of as a type of ‘combination.’ Nonetheless, we might simplify and think of a key distinction between the two formal strategies as a difference in quantity versus quality. In ‘combination,’ there is an emphasis on putting two or more elements together that are distinct from one another and that jointly create something constitutionally changed. The exile from a country of birth combines with the loss of a marriage, and later, too, with a loss of life. The experiences inform one another, each new experience of loss shaped out of what came before. In ‘cumulation,’ the emphasis is not so much on the qualities of the disparate elements being put together or even the quality of what emerges but instead on the shifted sense of quantity. A repeated image of a falling father evokes a cumulated sense of emergency, of danger; a wearing down. Often executed in tandem, a number of contemporary autobiographical cartoonists have taken on these strategies of tracing and conveying loss and its impact.7 They more

7These

formal storytelling strategies, as I map them here in relation to representations of loss, readily correlate with the ways comics scholars describe central defining aspects of the medium, particularly how individual panels or images relate to a larger whole. For example, Thierry Groensteen uses the phrase “iconic solidarity” to point out how each image in comics possesses its own individual impact even as it inevitably functions as part of a larger operational whole. His notion of braiding is relevant too, particularly “diachronic braiding,” through which images “echo” one another over the course of a text to create meaning (see Groensteen 2007, pp. 147‒149). Similarly, we might consider what Hillary Chute in The Space of Graphic Narrative (2015) describes as the “internally […] dialogic” nature of comics—how, for example, “words and images work in relation to each other but necessarily never blend” (Chute 2015, p. 199, emphasis in original). There is always already a mutual dependence in this system. Chute also points to the equally fundamental, and related, “externally dialogic” nature of comics—how we, as readers, are “draw[n] in to construct meaning” (Chute 2015, p. 199, emphasis in original). In an analogous vein, consider how experiences of loss are made up of what might be termed internally and externally dialogic components: an individual’s experiences of loss are ultimately shaped by a life-long roster of different kinds of experiences of loss; additionally, each individual’s experiences are inevitably tied to other people’s, in a historical or concurrent collective sense.

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closely represent the ways that loss and grief unfold in real life, as a number of contemporary professionals and researchers have shown, as a process without a set beginning and ending point, as “multidimensional” (Attig 2001, p. 33) as well as interpersonal and relational.8 Turning briefly to two examples of autobiographical graphic narratives of loss will highlight ‘cumulation’ and ‘combination’ in action. These graphic memoirs are centrally focused on experiences of sexual assault, sexual harassment and rape; in other words, they recount losses related to a sense of safety, security and trust. In 2009, Ulli Lust’s comics memoir was published in Germany; it was translated into English 4 years later and published as Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life.9 The 463-page tome, made up largely of pages including uniformly presented panels, often in three rows of three, is best categorized as a travel memoir. Lust tells the story of leaving Vienna as a 17-year-old in 1984, in order, in the words of her young alter ego, “to learn something, just not in a school” (Lust 2013, p. 13). She hitchhikes to Italy with a friend, nothing but a borrowed sleeping bag in hand, and has a few short-lived adventures (like attending Carmen in the Arena in Verona). But mainly, the book recounts how her ‘adventures’ are centrally characterized by the continual harassment she endures from nearly every man she encounters along the way. When the book opens, Ulli has been hanging out in Vienna with tattoo-­ wielding punks and she sports her own impressively angular, spiky hair-do. From the beginning, Ulli’s gender, marked by her hair, sets her apart. She seems to be one of the only women involved with groups composed largely of punk men. The catalyst for her journey story is Edi, a young runway that her roommate brings home one evening. Almost immediately, Edi proposes that the two hitchhike to Italy. Throughout, Edi serves as a kind of foil for Ulli, generally inviting new sexual experiences where Ulli is most often, though not always, seen trying to escape from unwanted advances. In the end, we can understand each woman as tactically responding, in her own way, to the same problem: that of not being in control of

8See

Niemeyer’s edited volume Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss (2001) for more on the limitations of conventional models of grief and loss and new directions for thinking about such experiences; see Amy-Katerini Prodromou’s Navigating Loss in Women’s Contemporary Memoir (2015) for more on manifestations of new models of grief in some contemporary (prose) memoirs. 9The original German title of the memoir is Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens. Lust recently published a follow-up memoir, in English, titled, How I Tried to Be a Good Person (2019).

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her own trajectory—of where she can go, of what she can experience, of what she will, or won’t, do with her body. When Susan Brownmiller published her influential 1975 feminist work, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, she drove the point home that any woman can be the target of rape and that the threat of rape is a constant, pervasive influence for women.10 Similarly, in Aftermath (2002), a book that in part recalls the author’s own traumatic experience, philosopher Susan Brison argues, “Sexual violence victimizes not only those women who are directly attacked, but all women” (Brison 2002, pp. 17–18). The threat of attack is expansive; it can’t be boiled down to a single moment, or incident. In Lust’s Today Is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, an atmosphere of threat is developed through the repetition of a roster of images—groups of men leering and laughing, individual men lurching, grabbing, coaxing and scolding, the protagonist wincing and watching, exclaiming and retreating. These repeated images wind their way through the course of the book: a steady, beating accumulation.11 As Brison argues, “Sexual violence is a problem of catastrophic proportions—a fact obscured by its mundanity, by its relentless occurrence, by the fact that so many of us have been victims of it” (Brison 2002, p. 19). Here, Lust generates that often invisible, and unfathomable, sense of disproportion through cumulation: the repeated images reveal a steadily mounting fear, a constant, building threat of violence, which threads (or—à la Thierry Groensteen—‘braids’) throughout the book. Halfway through Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, this mounting threat becomes a reality when Ulli is raped. This section of the narrative includes moments from before, during and after the traumatic event itself. Zeroing in on one of the images from this section, we witness an anomalous full-page panel: Ulli is depicted, swimming in dark waters (Fig. 13.2). The point of view captured here—not a breakdown, but instead a tall, sweeping view—is an impossible one: we are looking up at Ulli, presumably propelling herself to stay afloat, but we are somehow able to see through the dark waters. Her body, or the section of it that is visible, looks buoyant, even as waves fashioned from her body’s movement seem

10In

her introduction, Brownmiller writes of an important “moment of revelation,” after hearing numerous women share their testimonies of rape, in which she “learned that in ways I preferred to deny the threat of rape had profoundly affected my life” (Brownmiller 1975, p. 8). 11See Lust (2013, pp. 74, 96, 216 and 283) for some examples of groups of men leering and laughing; see Lust (2013, pp. 189, 219, 223, 369 and 371) for some examples of Lust’s persona pictured individually reacting to such encounters.

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Fig. 13.2   Ulli swimming in dark waters. Image credits Ulli Lust (2013), Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life, p. 255. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books

to be pushing downward. The bottom of the text reads: “How do they put it in the Austrian sagas? If you want to make your way through the dark tower, you must keep looking straight ahead. If you look around, you end up in hell” (Lust 2013, p. 255). This image returns us to Kalman’s illustration of her father falling through the sky: it is also an imaginative intervention. Not in hell, but not exactly free. In the immediate aftermath to her rape, Ulli is suspended. In her landmark work, Trauma and Recovery (1992), Judith Herman writes: “[A]t the moment of trauma, almost by definition, the individual’s point of view counts for nothing” (Herman 1992, p. 53). In similar fashion, Susan Brison describes, of the aftermath to her rape, “The line between life and death, once so clear and sustaining,

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now seemed carelessly drawn and easily erased […] I felt as though I’d somehow outlived myself” (Brison 2002, p. 9). Contained as Lust’s suspended image is in a book that establishes, through cumulation, an atmosphere of continuously building potential violence, the traumatic event, which maintains its own indescribable force, is wedged between repeated sights that nonetheless inform that scene of trauma and its immediate aftermath. The impact of that staggering loss ripples, following but also even preceding that break. Early in the book, the young protagonist announces the intention of her adventures in a postcard, which is, notably, never mailed to a friend. She proclaims that her “goal” is to “accumulate as much experience as possible, to meet as many people as possible—from the bum to the millionaire, normal people and crazy ones …” (Lust 2013, p. 34). In Lust’s book this narrative of hopeful ‘accumulation’ paradoxically yields a story of cumulated loss—throughout, the text indexes the experiences that the narrator had hoped for but never known, the possible that became impossible. Lust uses ‘cumulation’ and ‘combination’ to particularize her persona’s experiences—to ground one set of losses in relation to another; to generate not only the moment of trauma, but also its impact on what was and what never could be. Using these same techniques, UK-based cartoonist Una’s 2016 graphic memoir, Becoming Unbecoming, more explicitly engages not only with an individual story but also with known and unknown others to unequivocally express how each individual story of loss is ultimately tied to others. Known only by her pseudonym (“Una, meaning one. One life, one of many …” Una 2016, p. 10) she states in her opening), our narrator tells her story as a rape survivor, but it is a story in which she repeatedly de-centers her own narrative so that she cannot “speak for other survivors of trauma in order to speak with them” (Brison 2002, p. 30, emphasis hers). Una draws some particular details: of growing up in the ­mid-to-late 1970s in West Yorkshire, North England, of experiencing a variety of sexual assaults in various settings, of suffering the added pain of not knowing how to talk or think about them and not being listened to or believed when she tries. She conveys these personal experiences alongside the story she culls, using journalistic sources, of a series of rapes and murders committed by the Yorkshire Ripper around the same time; this serial killer was not caught until he had killed thirteen women. As Una explains, the reasons that he was not caught sooner had to do with assumptions made by the police, media outlets and the public, about ­so-called typical victims of such violence. The central, repeating visual symbol in Becoming Unbecoming is an empty word bubble which the narrator sometimes carries on her back, a heavy sack weighing her down, and sometimes holds above her like a balloon, like she is

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being lifted by it (see, e.g., Una 2016, pp. 23, 46 and 57). The bubble comes to stand for the potential of testimony to be both freeing and burdensome: not only do survivors of sexual trauma have to deal with finding ways of thinking about and telling of their indescribable loss, but they must also often deal with finding what Leigh Gilmore terms “adequate witness” (Gilmore 2017, p. 5)—listeners who know how, and are willing, to listen.12 Una weaves and wanders with this bubble throughout the text, whether she is telling her own story or giving a sense of that ‘fuller picture’ (see Ahmed 2017, p. 22)—from the story of the Yorkshire Ripper to broader statistics and trends around sexual violence in the UK. In Una’s work this word-bubble symbol—with its potential to lead to some form of freedom and also to prompt renewed catastrophe—comes to represent the struggles of countless survivors. This highly individualized mark (word bubbles, after all, generally ‘belong’ to particular subjects), paradoxically transforms into a connective symbol belonging to an anonymous, joint collective (see, e.g., Una 2016, p. 121). The oft-repeated symbol of the empty word bubble is also, interestingly, at times replaced and at other times accompanied by the image of a cloud, shaped much like a thought bubble. Here is a visual representation of a cumulus, of cumulation: the archetypal shape for an amassing formation. The two central symbols repeat, and thread, over the course of the narrative, with the first seeming to index what can, or cannot, be spoken, or conveyed to others, and the second seeming to index (like a thought bubble) internal thoughts, what the self can or cannot know of its own experience (see, e.g., Una 2016, pp. 146–147). They become referents, standing in for internally and externally dialogic systems of reconstruction, set in continual motion over the course of the text. The individual Una seems always to be in conversation with herself, mulling over her transformed sense of being in the world, mining her memories, even as she is also always potentially—sometimes just hopefully—in conversation with others. By telling her story of loss in this way, using means of cumulation and combination to point to so many other losses, of women alike but also always notably different from her, Una tries to account for this problem of expressing proportion, of revealing a bigger picture without erasing individual experience. So, for example, at several points throughout the book, she visualizes a number of statistics. She

12Gilmore

writes, “An adequate witness is one who will receive testimony without deforming it by doubt, and without substituting different terms of value for the ones offered by the witness herself.” (Gilmore 2017, p. 5).

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does this not only to help her readers begin to comprehend the reality behind the numbers, but also to bring questions of identity and difference into this collective story she is telling. On one page, she breaks down the statistics for various subgroups of survivors of sexual assault, showing how elements like race and class factor (see Una 2016, p. 124).13 The central questions posed in Becoming Unbecoming, are, then, first, how to convey this larger story without erasing difference; and second, how to unite these stories of survival with something other than absence, something other than silence. Una ends her narrative with a slideshow of illustrations of the thirteen women killed at the hands of the Yorkshire Ripper (see Una 2016, pp. 173–197). With these imaginative interventions, she pictures them not as they were in life, but as they might be were they still alive today. In this way, she attempts to account for the specificity of loss with made-up images of women meant to ‘stand in’ for countless other lost lives, countless other lost experiences. Here is one missed moment from one lost life, from thirteen lost lives; imagine the cumulative missed possibilities, all of the absent experiences from all of the absent lives. In the Afterword to her book, Una describes the act of telling her story as follows: “neither was it therapeutic, but it has been freeing” (Una 2016, p. 205). What these comics memoirs recounting loss and picturing grief show is how one’s way of seeing is transformed by loss, in ways that can be potentially connective but are not necessarily reparative. Loss can be blindsiding and eye opening, all at once. To return, briefly, to Kalman’s falling father, the second accompanying poem of the identical image, in Sara Berman’s Closet, presents the story in a variety of new ways. Kalman’s parents are named (Sara and Pesach); in this case, the two of them are depicted as locked out of their apartment, instead of just her father; and the gray suit is not mentioned until the very end of the poem, rather than as part of the title. When Kalman describes the fall in this second version, she also adds descriptive phrases, opening up the scene. As the second to last stanza reads,

13As

scholar Charlotte Pierce Baker argues in Surviving the Silence (1998), Black women’s experiences as survivors of sexual violence, and particularly as survivors who want, need, or are pressed to tell their stories, are inevitably affected by stereotypes about Black women—compounding that problem of finding ‘adequate witness’—and they also connect, as academic and activist Angela Davis, for instance, has shown, with broader, traumatic histories of racism as it relates to sexual violence.

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Without warning, Pesach slipped and fell all the way to the ground, but did not get hurt. (Kalman and Kalman 2018, n. p., emphasis T.O.)

With this revision, Kalman seems to acknowledge her father’s point of view, welcoming it, finally, into her rotation of active and dynamic images, memories and stories of loss. Accounting for one’s own losses, the poem seems to be saying, means acknowledging the self as ‘one among many’ (see Una 2016, p. 205) or recognizing that what we all share is the fragility of living in a world in which anything can happen ‘without warning.’ Acknowledgements  This essay is an adaptation of a keynote talk delivered at the 13th Annual ComFor Conference, “Spaces Between – Gender, Diversity and Identity in Comics.” I want to thank Véronique Sina and Nina Eckhoff-Heindl for the invitation. As ever, I thank Nancy K. Miller, for feedback and friendship.

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