Making Comics by Scott McCloud

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Making Comics by Scott McCloud

11 November 2018

Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It

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Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It

3 February 2019

Uzumaki by Junji Ito

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Uzumaki by Junji Ito

2 April 2019

In Bed with David and Jonathan by Tom Bouden

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In Bed with David and Jonathan by Tom Bouden

13 February 2019

Why So Serious?-Christopher Nolan’s Joker

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"I like this job I like it", "Some men just want to watch the world burn", "Wanna know how I got these scars", "Why so Serious", 9/11, Alfred Pennyworth, Anti-Hero, Batman, Batman: The Animated Series, chaos, Christopher Nolan, Comics, Film, film review, Heath Ledger, Jack Nicholson, Joker, Joker's Scars, Mark Hamill, Psychosis, September 11th, terrorism, The Dark Knight, Tim Burton, violence

My father can’t watch the movies Seven or The Dark Knight, and yet he never misses an opportunity to ingest every episode of CSI, including that episode where the teenager gets part of her skin chewed off by her friends…Google it.  This mystified my mother, my sister, and I when we found this out because often we have to bear the brunt of my dad’s television viewing habits and that often entails hour upon hour of crime shows in which human beings perform murder after murder, rape after rape, torture after torture and by the end the viewer is offered one more closure on the loss of another human being’s life while being interrupted for five minute intervals so that someone can sell them Viagra, Yogurt, A low-Rate Adjustable Reverse Mortgage, and maybe a Snickers Bar.  I’m not trying to mock my father, I really do love the old man, I just didn’t appreciate the fact that he said that he didn’t like the movie in a snide, pejorative tone, and then watched half the film with us before leaving during the climax scenes.  You’d think a film that involves a man dressed up as a bat ramming straight into a garbage truck would appeal to him, but, alas, such is life.

I can’t say for sure, but I think the reason my dad didn’t enjoy The Dark Knight was for the same reason I love the movie: The Joker.

To be honest, I don’t really give much of a damn about the character of Batman.  While I have some friends who worship the character as a god and have every individual issue of the comics memorized, I’ve approached Batman the way I’ve approached Fried Chicken.  In small doses, it can exactly the sort of thing I want to ingest, but when consumed in large quantities after a while it can become fattening and give me heartburn.  I love the possibilities of the character and the universe the character offers, but too often the culture of Batman, more specifically the fan-boy-gate-keeper culture of Batman can kill my passion before I’m even past the first page.

Fortunately, I discovered the character at the right point of my life: when I was a kid and found my parents VHS copy of Tim Burton’s Batman.  Even as a kid I absolutely loved Jack Nicholson’s Joker going to the trouble to memorize every line he had in the movie, and today even without having it playing I can recite entire passages of the film from memory.  And, for the record, I’m still the only one who realized that Jack said, “I’m of a mind to make some mooky.”  I had no idea what that actually meant, but it was really really fun to say when I was eight.

Along with Tim Burton’s now canonical masterpiece (not to mention one of the last truly great films the man’s directed), I was also brought up on Batman: The Animated Series.  While nostalgia has unfortunately dominated society at large, there are times when one can honestly look back at an animated television program and admit that what they spent every Saturday watching was a truly great show and not just an excuse to veg-out on the couch and inhale toy commercials and breakfast cereal.  The show was brilliant and beautifully animated, but most importantly it had The Joker played by Luke “Mutherfucking” Skywalker, a.k.a. Mark Hamill.  Hamill’s performance is still one of the standards of the Batman universe and it doesn’t hurt that he kept doing the part alongside Kevin Conroy in every subsequent Batman game.

These two experiences of the character seemed to define my idea of what the Joker and could be, and so as the Dark Knight came out, and I like many young fanboys were left mystified that the “gay cowboy actor” could be cast in the role I was terrified about what the new Batman film would do to a character that, at the time, I loved.

Heath Ledger’s Joker changed everything.  And that’s not just an empty statement.

Watching The Dark Knight Again I was able to really observe how, in retrospect, the performance was truly paradigm altering in terms of what a villain could be in a film.  And I don’t mean to Bally about with hyperbole but I do truly believe that The Joker has permanently altered what a villain can and should be to a post-9/11 audience.  One scene, in particular, stands out to me, and it’s the torture recording.

The Joker: [the Joker has Brain Douglas captured and is recording him] Tell them your name.

Brian: Brian… Douglas.

The Joker: Are you the real Batman?

Brian: No.

The Joker: No?

Brian: No.

The Joker: No? Then why do you dress up like him?

[grabs Brian’s mask and dangles it in front of the camera]

The Joker: whooo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

Brian: Because he’s a symbol that we don’t have to be afraid of scum like you.

The Joker: Oh you do, Brian. You really do. Yeah. Oh shh, shh, shh, shh, shh. So, you think Batman’s made Gotham a better place? Hmm? Look at me. LOOK AT ME!

[turns camera to himself]

The Joker: You see? This is how crazy Batman’s made Gotham! You want order in Gotham? Batman must take off his mask and turn himself in. Oh, and every day he doesn’t, people will die. Starting tonight. I’m a man of my word.

[laughs]

While I’m not a fan of posting videos in my essays, sometimes the delivery is far more important than the actual lines themselves:

The scene is impossible to forget, and I like many people remember it not because the laughter was genuinely disturbing, but because what immediately followed was a long silent shot of Bruce Wayne’s penthouse and the movie theater being completely silent. For once in the history of obnoxious people talking during the movie, nobody had anything to say.  It became clear at that moment that Batman movies were no longer about Bat-Shark Repellent and dancing the Bat-Tootsie.

Heath Ledger’s Joker was not like anything that had come down the pike of the action movie franchise, let alone the superhero franchises as they existed in the Pre-Marvel blossoming.  Superhero movies had to be defined by a charm and feeling of positivity. Even at their darkest, there was an understanding that certain levels of violence or psychosis just weren’t going to be explored.  And note, I’m writing principally about movies rather than the comics which always had elements in them that could be severely shocking or depressing or legitimately disturbing.  It’s just that the Joker that Heath Ledger was playing didn’t feel like anything I had ever seen before in a major motion picture.

It feels ridiculous now to write this honesty on the internet given the fact that Ledger’s Joker has become a freaking meme and a staple at comic con instead of a legitimately frightening terrorist dressed up as a clown.  Time has a tendency to lessen trauma and fear, and looking at the character again the use of the word terrorist doesn’t feel too bold.  Apart from the fact that the characters in the film regularly refer to The Joker as such, it’s important to remember that The Dark Knight was riding the wave of the Post-9/11 sentiment that was redefining villainy in art.  No longer were characters hyperbolic stand-ins for communists that were larger metaphors for the villainy of foreign nations.  The Joker was just nobody.

Mayor: [regarding The Joker that’s sitting a holding cell] What’d we got?

Lt. James Gordon: Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name, no other alias.

It didn’t seem real in 2008 that some random individual could cause such chaos and misery, but then it was easy to remember that some random individual in the Middle East, as far as the United States was concerned, was able to fund and mastermind the death of close to 3000 people.  It’s easy today to understand that any random person could walk into a school and shoot and kill children.  It’s easy to recognize that some random person could walk into a church during a bible study and kill people.  It’s easy to recognize that a lunatic could walk into a movie theater, call himself the Joker, and shoot the place up.  It’s easy to think this because that’s the world we’re living in, and so in many ways, The Dark Knight managed to capture the Zeitgeist before the culture was even aware.

I don’t want my review to be only that The Joker changed things for filmmakers and the landscape of cinema period, because I’m positive that somebody’s probably already written that essay and done a better job than I could have.  For me watching The Dark Knight again I was struck by how incredible the film was in terms of its direction, but then also because Heath Ledger’s performance really was incredible and I recognized how much it had mattered to me.  I’ve written before about my fascination with anti-heroes when I was young, and  I like many young men became obsessed with the Joker when the movie came out because he became, all at once, the defining anti-hero of my generation.

There was powerful darkness to The Joker that just couldn’t be denied and part of that was his now iconic stories about his scars.  The first scene remains the most powerful because of a single line:

Gambol’s Bodyguard: Yo, Gambol, there’s somebody here for you. They say they just killed the Joker.

Gambol’s Bodyguard: They brought the body.

[a body bag is brought in and dropped on the table; Gambol unzips it, revealing Joker’s face]

Gambol: So. For dead, that’s 500…

The Joker: [sitting up and sticking a blade in Gambol’s mouth] How ’bout alive?

[Joker’s men hold the bodyguards]

The Joker: You wanna know how I got these scars? My father, was a drinker, and a fiend. And one night, he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn’t like that. Not. One. Bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it. He turns to me and says, “Why so serious?” Comes at me with the knife. “WHY SO SERIOUS?” He sticks the blade in my mouth… “Let’s put a smile on that face.” And…

[glancing at thug]

The Joker: Why so serious?

[kills Gambol]

This scene was disturbing enough largely because the final action wasn’t actually shown, we only saw a reaction to the violence, but that in itself was effective enough.  What became more frightening, as the film went on, is how this changed in a later scene.  Rachael Dawes, Bruce Wayne’s former girlfriend, confronts the Joker at a party and he more or less attacks her while repeating the story, yet something’s changed:

The Joker: Well, hello, beautiful. You must be Harvey’s squeeze. And you *are* beautiful.

[he walks around her]

The Joker: Oh, you look nervous. Is it the scars? You want to know how I got ’em?

[He grabs Rachel’s head and positions the knife by her mouth]

The Joker: Come here. Hey! Look at me. So I had a wife. She was beautiful, like you. Who tells me I worry too much. Who tells me I ought to smile more. Who gambles and gets in deep with the sharks. One day, they carve her face. And we have no money for surgeries. She can’t take it. I just want to see her smile again. I just want her to know that I don’t care about the scars. So… I stick a razor in my mouth and do this…

[the Joker mimics slicing his mouth open with his tongue]

The Joker: …to myself. And you know what? She can’t stand the sight of me! She leaves. Now I see the funny side. Now I’m always smiling!

[Rachel knees the Joker in the groin; he merely laughs it off]

The Joker: A little fight in you. I like that.

As usual, my mother summed up what was scary about the Joker so beautifully the first time I showed it to her.  After the film had ended and we talked about it for close to an hour or more, she seemed to summarize the entire film when she observed, “Whatever has happened to The Joker is so horrible to even he can’t clearly remember what it was.”  It was a beautiful thought and I really, REALLY wish I had been the one to have it.

This observation though is probably what appealed to me about the Joker.  Watching the movie over and over again I would memorize his lines because there was something about that darkness that appealed to me.  I was young, depressed, not sure of who I was, frustrated by my seemingly perpetual virginity, and so looking at this character who just seemed so himself, there was some darkness of willpower that I either admired or else was simply fascinated by.

And perhaps one exchange in the film between Bruce Wayne and Alfred offers the clearest sentiment, which itself has become something of a cultural meme.  After the party, Bruce and Alfred are attempting to determine the identity of the Joker and while they are discussing his motivations Alfred offers Bruce, and the audience, a lesson about humanity at large:

Bruce Wayne: [while in the underground bat cave] Targeting me won’t get their money back. I knew the mob wouldn’t go down without a fight, but this is different. They crossed the line.

Alfred Pennyworth: You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation. And in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand.

Bruce Wayne: Criminals aren’t complicated, Alfred. Just have to figure out what he’s after.

Alfred Pennyworth: With respect Master Wayne, perhaps this is a man that *you* don’t fully understand, either. A long time ago, I was in Burma. My friends and I were working for the local government. They were trying to buy the loyalty of tribal leaders by bribing them with precious stones. But their caravans were being raided in a forest north of Rangoon by a bandit. So, we went looking for the stones. But in six months, we never met anybody who traded with him. One day, I saw a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. The bandit had been throwing them away.

Bruce Wayne: So why steal them?

Alfred Pennyworth: Well, because he thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

This final line, much like the “Why so Serious,” is one that has entered the larger culture and can at times seem kitsch or cliche, but as I’m fond of writing cliches are cliches for a reason.  The Joker is a character defined simply by his desire for chaos and anarchy, and his sheer force of will.  Rather than try to contribute to society and make his life something that contributes positively to his community and culture, he finds far more amusement in breaking it all down.

One of the more annoying aspects of youth is its frustration with its own inexperience, and I’m not trying to talk down to teenagers, I’m trying to talk down to my former self.  But only slightly.  Being a young man I resented adults who seemed stable and comfortable and it didn’t make any sense that they seemed to have all the answers and all the power with what to do with my life, and so I, like many young men, gravitated to anti-hero because they provided me with some form of agency.  The only difference between me and the rest of my friends was that, while they bought rap CDs and played sports, I listened to heavy metal and bought a “Why So Serious Poster.”  The Joker became an icon to me not because I thought he was cool, but because he seemed to embody this idea of anti-authority which was exactly what I needed at that point in my life.

And watching the movie again I still absolutely loved The Joker, but not for the same reasons.  I loved him, this time around, because I realized how much he defined the villain of my culture and society.  No matter how many obnoxious libertarians, conservatives, and liberals turned The Joker into a meme about whatever-the-fuck-wh-the-fuck-cares, watching him getting beat up by Batman and still cackling was still legitimately frightening.  Watching him throw a lit cigar on a giant pile of money and kill Lau (Yeah don’t forget that shit, there was a living dude on that giant pile of money), and watching him kill a man with a pencil was still a reminder that this character had not only played a major impact on my life, but upon the lives of movie-goers the world over.

The Dark Knight is arguably one of the finest films made in the last two decades, not solely because of the Joker, but Ledger’s performance did permanently alter the zeitgeist in ways that are still apparent.  The Joker became part of the wider conversation about what is evil in our society and how can we recognize it?

The figure and face of atrocity is no longer a great body of a nation threatening nuclear war against one nation or another.  In our Information Age evil is a single man walking into a classroom and brandishing an automatic rifle.  It’s not a threat that is clean, or one that follows a real guiding philosophy or methodology and so fighting such an evil implies new moral questions about what can be done to stop such monsters.

It doesn’t seem like it should, but The Dark Knight is a film which always entertains and always leaves me wanting for more.  It explored and introduced me to a character that altered my perception of what true wickedness and evil could be, but it also gave me a chance to be yet another in a long line of douchebags at the party who only thinks he can do a great Heath Ledger impression.  And in the end, does that not somehow make me even more of the monster?

*Writer’s Note*

 

**Writer’s Note**

While looking for a few reviews and examinations of The Dark Knight, I stumbled upon this video which I think is pretty great analysis of the character and his effect not only upon the other characters of the film, but also how this could impact the viewer as well.  Please enjoy.

The Arctic Marauder

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The Arctic Marauder

12 July 2018

Oh Joy Sex Toy, Vol.1

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Art, coffee, Comics, Dice, Erika Moen, glasses, graphic novel, Joshua Jammer Smith, mechanical pencils, Oh Joy Sex Toy, original photograph, sex, Sex Toys, sexual Education, still life, White Tower Musings supports the use of sex toys and sexual education

Oh Joy Sex Toy, Vol.1

31 July 2018

My Saga of Saga: A Science Fiction Masterpiece about Breast-Feeding in Public and Being Born a Crime

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Alana, Apartheid, apathy, body humor, Born a Crime, Breast Feeding, Breasts, Brian K. Vaughn, Comics, Fiona Staples, Ghus, graphic novel, Hazel, Humor, interracial relationships, Landfall, Let women breast feed in public damn it!, Literature, Love, Love Story, Marko, Marko and Alana, Othering, Parents, People like to fuck, Petrichor, Politics, race, Race relations, racism, Rape, Saga, science fiction, Sex Criminals, Sexual Exploration, Sexual Fantasy, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, The Stalk, The Will, Trevor Noah, War, Wreath

 

The only other woman I had ever seen breastfeeding was my mother.  I remember stumbling in on her feeding my little sister a month or two after she was born and then promptly shutting the door and going back to the living room to watch Swat Cats.  This time it wasn’t my mother needlessly hiding herself away in her bedroom (though she might have just needed to be somewhere quiet and my near-constant Swat Cats marathon probably wasn’t what she needed) but was in fact a member of the graphic novel book club I’m a part of.  The woman was unforgettable with her purple hair and Nightmare on Elm Street t-shirt, but what struck me was, while I was delivering my usual lecture, this time on the graphic novel Saga, she actually lifted up her baby, opened her shirt, and held her child up to her breast.  I had never seen anyone breast-feed in public before, and seeing it sitting right next to me, I wasn’t entirely sure why anyone would ever have a problem with- it.  The kid was hungry and it wasn’t affecting me personally, so I carried on explaining why I thought Saga, which was also decorated with a breast-feeding mother, just wasn’t an interesting book.

My attitudes towards breast-feeding in public remain the same, let mothers feed their children damn it, but I’ve softened towards Saga.

There was a woman who used to work at the library who I considered a close friend, and that’s why it hit me pretty hard when she announced that she was leaving the library for one in Dallas.  I understood that her reasons were a combination of desire for better pay as well as to be closer to her boyfriend, but I have trouble finding people who seem to like me so I was pretty bummed.  The only real sort of solace I had in the whole thing was that, because she was leaving, that meant that I would be the only person in the library who really knew the graphic novel section, and so, once my supervisors approved, I became the one responsible for shelving the graphic novels.  This task is one that, to say I’ve warmed up to it is putting it mildly, I fucking love it.  Pushing my green cart to the second floor I take a good 15 minutes a day just to rearrange the shelves, prop up new books for patrons passing through the area, arranging the tipped over or worn books up to their proper place, and while I am shelving I almost always find a fantastic book I want to read.  One of them was Saga and, while I admit a moment ago I didn’t find the book terribly wonderful the first time I read it, looking at Marko and Alana on the cover there was the same impulse there always is, a little kid who read Calvin & Hobbes over and over and over again saying, “Check it out, you got a library card!”

I grabbed the first two volumes on my way back down to help a woman send a fax.

There’s too much of Saga to try and tackle all of it in just one essay, and I’m not even looking at just the first volume.  While I’m writing this I’m currently on Volume six, and I’m positive by the time I finish this essay I’ll probably be at the last volume, (it’s up to eight right now) and become one of the I’m sure millions currently devouring this book every time it hits the shelves.  I’ve also finished all of Sex Criminals so if I start appearing peaked it’s because I’ll be sucking comic-book writer’s dicks for new issues.  My other real challenge is the fact that Saga is beloved, or, put it another way, Saga is the comic book that people who hate comics read.  Being friends with the owner of Ground Zero Comics (though I suppose I’m being charitable he may not consider me a friend at all and now I look foolish) he’s often talking about his patrons who come in trying to their wives, girlfriends, etc. into comics, and while the first option is almost always Sandman Vol 2 The Doll’s House, Saga is the series he almost always cites as the second option.

It’s not hard to see why, given the fact that the series is written as one long emotional melodrama, and I don’t mean that pejoratively.  Rather than superhero comics which are often defined by physical gods fighting the forces of evil in tight outfits and experiencing their own sort of melodramas (nobody ever really dies and there’s always a brother who’s supposed to be dead but who turns out to actually be alive or a clone or some shit), Saga is drama about family centered in race, specifically race mixing.  Alana and Marko are people from different cultures, different races which are war with one another.  Marko is from Wreath, the only moon of the planet Landfall the homeward of Alana.  Marko’s people practice magic, whereas Alana’s people tend to gravitate more towards science and technology.  Because war, meaning total destruction of each other’s planets, could potentially destabilize the orbits of their worlds the cultures have moved their war to other planets thus involving a wide variety of peoples in this conflict and creating universal destabilization.  Marko becomes a prisoner of Landfall’s coalition where he meets and falls in love with Alana.  And because people in love have a tendency to fuck, Alana becomes pregnant which is where the series actually begins. 

The first page is memorable for a variety of reasons:

Allright, in all fairness, there’s really just one reason why this page is so striking: too many people forget that when babies are born they aren’t born with any original bacteria in their intestines to help with digestion.  Because of this humans evolved so that it was common for a pregnant woman to void her bowels during labor so that the bacteria in her feces would introduce bacteria into the baby’s body.  Now breast-milk is also a common way for mothers to transfer this bacteria, thus offering me another opportunity to remind my reader that breast-feeding is more important than your discomfort, but it should be noted that pregnant women also tend to poop because, well, shit’s happening.

But that first line, carefully outlining Alana’s reddened face is an important one because Brian K. Vaughn frames the narrative of Saga as first person narration in the veing of  Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Saga is the story of a woman named Hazel who is the product of an interracial union narrating her life story to her audience.  She introduces herself, not as a person, not as an individual ego, but more of an idea.

This is how an idea becomes real.  But ideas are fragile things.  Most don’t live long outside at the ether from which they were pulled, kicking and screaming.  That’s why people create with someone else.  Two people can sometimes improve the odds of an ideas survival…but there are no guarantees.  Anyway, this is the day I was born.  (1-4).

Vaughn’s writing style is something I’ve had plenty of opportunities to explore and study and that’s largely because of my friend TJ.  As I’ve noted in several of my previous essays, he’s the founder of the local Graphic Novel Book Club that meets bi-weekly at Ground Zero Comics, and because of this prestige position he gets to decide which books are read in the group.  We’ve read quite a number of books over the years ranging from Understanding Comics to Transmetropolitian to Sandman to Fun Home, but many members have observed that, in the last year alone, we’ve read close to six or seven of the man’s books and this has lead some to label us the “Brian K. Vaughn appreciation society.”  There is some disagreement upon this suggestion largely because we’ve also read plenty of Jeff Lemire.  The coming war between the Vaughnites and Lemirians is coming and I’m not sure how many lives will ultimately be lost.

But this is just a way of saying that reading Saga is much like reading many of the other Vaughn books and the man has a real tendency to build up his spaces.  Saga is not just an intimate love story between Alana and Marko, it’s an opportunity to observe countless species and peoples, all of whom are impacted by the war between the two races.  The reader is sometimes bombarded by this enormous amount of oddity, and while the first time I was overwhelmed by this treatment, as time in the story progressed I became more and more used to the oddity of the humanity.  And this I believe is its own sort of method. 

Race is very much biological, your DNA will always determine your physical characteristics as well as plenty of facets of personality, but race is also rooted in cultural and individual psychology.  Observing someone’s physical characteristics and observing difference is not racism, it’s only when one allows those observation of differences to form bias that the corrosive quality of racism manifests.

A racist is ultimately formed by a subculture that educates them that differences in physical characteristics such as skin color, or more abstract qualities such as language or nationality, are an indication of lesser worth.  What’s incredible then about the graphic novel Saga is that, much like the Star Wars and Star Trek films before it, the reader is constantly exposed to individuals of different races and species intermingling without too much concern that such interactions are taking place.  The reader is able to see the physical differences, and encouraged to just accept these characters as people.  Whether it’s the Prince Robot IV and his television head, the floating ghost specter with half a body named Isabel, the half spider half human freelancer known simply as “The Stalk,” or my favorite character Petrichor a MTF transgender woman from Wreath.  Saga encourages the reader to see that race is biological, but that racism is ultimately just the social construct because regardless of physiology, anatomy, or whether you’re a pothead actress made out of moss, people are people, and their qualities are what ultimately define them.

That would have been my end to Saga were it not for the fact that recently I’ve begun a new routine.  With the rightful fall of Charlie Rose, my morning breakfast routine has been shaken up dramatically because I used to watch interviews and eat.  I’ve now taken to watching Seth Meyers, The Daily Show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and of course The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  This later one provides me with some news of the day and some means of maintaining my sanity as I watch the current administration do its…let’s say thing.  I like Colbert, he makes me laugh, and he gives me something to think about when I’m shoveling my eggs, donuts, and tea down my throat as I get ready for work.  Most recently however he interviewed Trevor Noah, complimenting him about his time on the Daily Show, revealing to the world that Noah had a brief appearance in the film Black Panther, and then asking him about the issue of race.  It was during this last conversation that Noah reminded me about his eloquence, but then also about the larger narrative of racism in South Africa.

And during this interview Noah pointed out that, ultimately, his existence voided the larger racist narrative.  If one race in power argues that race-mixing cannot produce offspring it voids and ultimately destroys the racist narrative to begin with.  This shouldn’t have been such a powerful observation, but hearing him express it as such made me pause and really dwell on that statement.  It also made me go back to his biography and look through a few of the passages.

Noah’s memoir Born a Crime doesn’t just mirror Saga, it could almost be its own spin-off.  Noah imbues his life story with plenty of wit and humor, but constantly throughout the book he is able to demonstrate a real intelligence about the farce that was the governmental race policy of his home nation.

He writes in one chapter:

In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.  Race-mixing proves that races can mix—and in a lot of cases want to mix.  Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.  (21).

Looking then at Saga this is most certainly the case because Vaughn and Fiona Staples, the illustrator who deserves an entire essay to herself, show the family as constantly on the run from the two central organizations of their homewards who see their union as not just a threat to the larger war effort, but to the very war itself.  The war between Wreath and Landfall is a racial war, it’s a war founded on the idea that the two races not only should not intermingle and interbreed, but that they cannot.  Alana and Marko, and by extension Hazel is a rejection of that system.  Its proof that the war is, ultimately, bullshit.

Noah’s biography goes on to note the length to which apartheid was ridiculous and cruel:

Laws were passed prohibiting sex between Europeans and natives, laws that were later amended to prohibit sex between whites and all nonwhites.

The government went to insane lengths to try and enforce these laws.  The penalty for breaking them was five years in prison.  There were whole police squads whose only job was to go around peeking through windows—clearly an assignment for only the finest law enforcement officers.  And if an interracial couple got caught, God help them.  The police would kick down the door, drag the people out, beat them, and arrest them.  At least that’s what they did to the black person.  With the white person it was more like, “Look I’ll just say you were drunk, but don’t do it again, eh? Cheers.”  That’s how it was with a white man a black woman.  If a black man was caught having sex with a white woman, he’d be lucky if he wasn’t charged with rape.”  (22).

There’s a brief moment in Saga when Prince Robot IV is being briefed by a Landfall intelligence officer about the couple and the subject of Alana’s consent is mentioned.  Alana’s pregnancy is observed and Robot IV says rather plainly,

“Love child?  Surely he forced himself on her.” (24)

And this is, ultimately, everything.  The narrative of the war and the races has become so ingrained in the zeitgeist, so embedded into the universal culture of Saga that two people of Landfall and Wreath falling in love and conceiving a child is not only inconceivable, it’s repulsive.  There’s also the fact that throughout the text Marko’s people speak a language that often appears to be some sort of slavic tongue mixed in with Spanish which makes the theme of racism all the more potent.

Hazel as a character is an idea and a material reality for her very existence is a crime.  Saga as a work of art then is not something that is just relevant it’s historical pertinent.  Often the charge against graphic novels is that they are too fantastic, too hyperbolic, or else that they are too much like a melodrama or a soap opera.  My argument against this charge is that while Saga is all of these things, it still manages to consistently say something about humanity which that we are more than the petty and paltry divisions which are used to allow suffering.

Rape camps, racism, sexual slavery, transphobia, and murder for hire are all concepts which are explored in the Saga Series, and while many would prefer that it didn’t exist, all of these concepts are realities that are still plaguing society.  Saga doesn’t just create a new world, fill it with quirky languages and science fiction creatures for the sake of delving into high fantasy; the book is an effort to touch and explore that which is most human.  Love is ultimately a biological imperative based in chemistry to get us to reproduce, but looking past this and seeing how we allow it to create meaning in our lives the story of Hazel is a story which, as Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime demonstrates, is an ongoing narrative.

People like to fuck, and people like to fall in love.  Regardless of a person’s sex, gender identity, race, or nationality everyone has the capacity to love another human being.  And this idea is powerful because love allows more than just two people to come together and find one another.  People comes with families, friends, associations, organizations, creeds, and personal ideologies all of which expose each person of the relationship to new ideas and people which expand their world.

Talking about Saga, and watching that woman breastfeed beside me, was a chance to observe other people, to explore a new way of thinking, and listen to other people’s opinions about what the book meant to them.  In a period and time when it feels more and more like human beings are looking for excuses and reasons to “other” each other (pardon that pathetic string of words) it speaks to the power of a book to ask its reader if those differences are really so profound that we can’t find some excuse to recognize another person’s humanity, and maybe see them as somebody we’d like to know, or fuck, or even love.

 

*Writer’s Note*

All quotes cited from Saga Volume 1 were taken from the paperback Image copy edition.  All quotes cited from Born a Crime were cited from the first edition hardback Spiegel & Grau copy.

 

**Writer’s Note**

I really wanted to cite Trevor Noah directly in this essay but it just didn’t work out that way.  So instead here’s the original interview from The Late Show.  Please enjoy, and please remember to take the time to appreciate that they got Trevor Noah to be an A.I. hologram in the movie Black Panther.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC6V4gLAat4

 

***Writer’s Note***

I didn’t get a chance to do it here, and maybe hopefully at some point I’ll have time to write a long treatise, but having now read the entrety of the Saga series run published thus far, my absolute favorite character, after Ghus, is Petrichor.  I don’t know whether or not it’s because she’s beautiful or else because she’s hysterical, but I adore her more than anything in the world, and I admit with no shame whatsoever that I have the individual issue with her on the cover in my bookshelf.

Patrichor is BAE.

Comics Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture

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Comics Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture

13 June 2018

Watchmen

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Watchmen

2 November 2018