Acephalous

Archaeology of the Impossible

Given that I have all of four days to wrap up the Winter quarter and vault into the Spring, lesson-planning's taken the bulk of my time of late.  I'm thinking, as per the tentative title of this post, of delving into meta-fictional accounts of the origin of comic "heroism" this quarter, and have come up with the following (largely other-side-of-the-pond) syllabus:

"The Origin of Batman" (excerpt from Batman 47) - Bob Kane

You begin with the almost-begin: this is the first time Joe Chill's mentioned, by which I mean implicated, in the death of Wayne's parents.  There's an earlier reference to their murder in Detective Comics 39 (November 1939), but it's abridged in a way that makes the story itself unrecognizable.  (Which is, yes, the very opposite of the point I make below about Morrison's All-Star Superman, but that's because you can't already assume an audience is familiar with a story before it's ever been told.)

Batman: Year One (comic) - Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli

See what I did there?  In terms of comparative styles, now I can introduce Asterios Polyp.  To wit, Mazzucchelli in Year One:

Compared to Mazzucchelli in Asterios Polyp:

Those aren't as different as I thought they'd be.  ("I have a hole in my cape," you can almost imagine Mazzucchelli's distraught Wayne saying.)  But outside the cleanliness of the lines, there's little to make you believe that the person responsible for the first image would later be responsible for the second ... and that's a belief I'm going to try to disabuse my students of.

Batman Begins (film) - Christopher Nolan

Because you think I'm capable of teaching this course without bringing up Nolan's film?  I didn't think so.

Planetary/Batman (comic) - Warren Ellis

This'll be the fourth re-telling of the Batman origin myth, only this time endlessly looped.  The point, rhetorically speaking, in having them encounter four versions of the same story is 1) to emphasize that there's some inherent appeal there, but 2) to demonstrate that even if a story has inherent appeal, the manner in which a given rhetor presents it actually matters.  The raw stuff is all well and good, but the power's in the telling.

Planetary #1 -10 (comic) - Warren Ellis

They're billed as "the archeologists of the impossible," after all, and Ellis's engagement with both the history of the genre and its conventions could hardly find a more suitable course to be taught in.

All-Star Superman (comic) - Grant Morrison

I'm thinking of teaching only the first page of the first issue, as it's the most brilliantly compact origin story ever, and after that Morrison's metafictional games might be a bit too much for students to handle.  There's a genius to its concision, i.e. the manner in which it boils down a story everyone already knows to its barest bones, and then presents them to a knowing audience in a way that is, quite frankly, moving.  (Sorry, sorry, I couldn't help myself.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One (comic) - Alan Moore

Introducing students to old-school, public-domain heroism ... plus plenty of opportunities to talk with my largely Asian-American classes about how "The Yellow Peril" is depicted.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (comic) - Mike Mignola

Being an origin story that involved someone other than Batman, so the students can reevaluate their premises about mythos in American culture at the end of the quarter, etc. etc.

Hellboy (film) - Guillermo Del Toro

Etc. etc.  That's quite a bit of material for a composition class, and textually speaking—i.e. despite it being all film and comics—it's historically and allusively dense to boot.  But it seems doable.   That said, if there's anything very obvious I'm missing, feel free to point it out ... until Tuesday, because believe it or not, that's when the Spring quarter starts.

Despite being one of the world's most ardent Alan Moore fans, I've no clue what's going on Neonomicon.

Which has the strange result of making some of its most disturbing moments read as unintentional comedy.  To wit:

I mean, if you were an anthropomorphic fish-penis hybrid and the woman you'd been raping for a week asked "What the fuck is wrong with you?" you'd answer with an emphatic "HOORNGH!" too.*

*I wasn't kidding when I said I don't understand this book one bit.  I hear tell the fourth and final issue's just come out, so maybe that'll make sense of it ... then I remember how Promothea concluded and entertain some serious doubts.  All right, enough "fun" reading for me, I'm back to work on the Clowes post.

RE: Clowes and I

Just wanted to say that I'll be addressing the Clowes comments as soon as I'm done grading papers, and sincerely apologize for the delay.  Y'all provided some high quality objections, so it'll take my undivided attention to obliterate them, which I'll be able to bring to bear in the next day or two.  So, more shortly.*

*I've spent the past week pulling 14 hour days in my office working with my students, so I hope you can forgive the delay ... and if you can't, what sort of person are you?  (A terrible one, is what.)

Enid and Rebecca aren't winning Ghost World

Given that I already related my attempt to make the final day of my "Slow Horror" course memorable, it only makes sense to do the same for the "Confessional Narratives."  The final works we studied were the print and film versions of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, both of which I hate with a pre-critical vicerality that—to pat myself on the back for being responsible—doesn't prevent me from acknowledging their importance and teaching them anyway.  That said, I find the book far more unlikeable than the film.  Consider the scene in which Enid and Rebecca first meet the waiter they dub "Weird Al" in the novel:

It's not that they mock the decor of a restaurant they patronized solely to patronize, but the manner in which they treat Allen.  Enid responds to his "Hi! My name is Allen" with "Hi, Al!"  If he had wanted to be called "Al," presumably he would have introduced himself as such.  Enid renames him on the spot, and without getting all pop-philosophical about the significance of the act of naming something, her behavior here is indicative of her general belief that she's superior to people who look and are employed like him.  But Rebecca's response is even more indecorous: the insult that had been implicit in Enid's renaming is explicit in Rebecca's question, "Can we call you 'Weird Al'?"  That she asks whether "we" can call him "Weird Al" is significant, because throughout the book she's only emboldened to behave in this manner when Enid initiates such encounters.  In short, then, Enid's culpable both for her own statement and for Rebecca's, because Enid's responsible for the dynamic that makes Rebecca feel perpetually, if not always consciously, egged-on.  

At this point in the analysis, it's possible for readers to attribute the pair reveling in their unearned sense of superiority to an authorial critique, i.e. that Clowes is representing their reprehensible behavior, not endorsing it.  But as I noted in my earlier post, Clowes' own—albeit earned—sense of superiority infects most of his work, in this case in the fifth panel above.  Despite my formalist tendencies, I don't normally place too much stock into matters like the placement of speech bubbles, but between teaching this and Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, I'm compelled to ditch my insistence that where the text is placed on a page matters less than whether readers can quickly ascertain the manner in which it was intended to flow.  

So, for example, in the second panel above Enid's conversation-stopping "Whatever" is separated from the mock-Fifties banter not only for the pragmatic reason that it wouldn't fit, but because it's meant to indicate a distinct break in the established conversational rhythm.  Clowes could've drawn the panel in a manner that placed it immediately beneath Rebecca's question, but that would suggested that Enid responded immediately; instead, placing it beneath the table suggests that she paused a beat before humiliating Rebecca for playing the language game Enid herself had initiated.

Apply the same logic of placement to the fifth panel's "You loser!" and you have a speech bubble that doubles as a caption, in effect branding the server what the pair's entitled renaming of him already indicated they thought him to be.  The difference here is that it's not Enid who chooses where her remarks are placed on the page, but Clowes, and if Enid's partly culpable for Rebecca's question, Clowes is wholly guilty for Enid's "captioning" of the server here.

Of course, Clowes can only accomplish this little feat if Enid and Rebecca frame the server as they do in the panels above.  His occupation of the central area of the frame is fundamentally ironic: he's not a person so much as a function of a restaurant they're only there to mock.  They (and Clowes) can dehumanize him because, as a "loser" who sacrificed his social mobility for a regular paycheck, he doesn't number among the human race anyway.  

Now, consider the same scene in the film.  It opens with a pan-out from a close-up of a radio playing decidedly non-Fifties music to a medium shot of Rebecca and Enid seated in the booth:

How to ruin thirty days in a night (by violating the Dayenu Principle)

On the last day I teach in a quarter, I like to leave the students with a memorable example—something so memorable they'll hold the lessons of the class close long after they leave.  For my "slow horror" course, I chose to remind them that the purpose of a film is to manipulate its audience, and that this is readily apparent when films falter.  The film in question is the David Slade (of Twilight: Eclipse fame) helmed 30 Days of Night.  But being a good professor, I had them read the Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith books first.  Here are the final panels of the first series, in which—spoilers abound from here on out—the protagonist, Eben, and his wife are sitting on a hill after having toughed out thirty days of Alaskan night in a town, Barrow, overrun by vampires.  It's a clever premise—vampires select a town that far north in order to feast undisturbed for a month—but they're defeated when Eben injects himself with vampire blood, becomes a vampire, and defeats them.  He saved the town, Jesus-style, but now must die, Jesus-style, as the sun's about to rise and turn him to ashes.  Here are the final panels:

Notice the quiet beauty here: he dies a dignified death, off-panel, in the arms of a wife who loves him, and then she cries.  It's a fitting end for a man who's sacrificed his life to save the woman and the town he loved, and Niles and Templesmith handle it with class.  Here are the same moments represented in the panels above as David Slade would have them, starting with an establishing shot:

The unintended consequences of partying with tea

SEK is at the Norco DMV in the "appointment only" line after having stood at an unmanned counter with the word "appointment" over it for much longer than he'd like to admit.  He blames the mislabeling, but that's beside the point, which is that a woman who looked an awful lot like this, only older, cut to the front of his line.

ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY: I DON'T HAVE AN APPOINTMENT!

DMV EMPLOYEE: Then I'll have to ask you to step to the back of the line.

ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY heads toward the end of the "appointments only" line.

DMV EMPLOYEE: Ma'am?  The other line.

DMV EMPLOYEE points out the window to the line that's snaking from her counter and around pretty much the entire building.

ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY: YOU WANT ME TO WAIT THERE!

DMV EMPLOYEE: That's the line for people who don't have appointments.

ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY: THEN I HAVE AN APPOINTMENT!

DMV EMPLOYEE: (issues a blank, well-practiced stare)

ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY: I'M A PROUD WHITE AMERICAN!  YOU CAN'T MAKE ME WAIT IN LINE WITH THEM!

EVERYONE ELSE IN THE ROOM, THE MAJORITY OF WHOM AREN'T WHITE AND CAN'T BELIEVE SHE JUST SAID THAT: !?!

To placate ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY, DMV EMPLOYEE gives her a ticket and tells her to sit down.  ANGRY WHITE PATRIOT LADY sits down visibly satisfied in her exercise of X-treme privilege.  SEK, whose ticket reads "B 047," is called to Window 12 after about another an hour.

SEK: (to DIFFERENT DMV EMPLOYEE) Why'd you give that lady a ticket?

DIFFERENT DMV EMPLOYEE: Oh, we gave her a ticket.  She's T 099.  When they pull that, they all are.

This isn't the least bit disturbing.

I’m digging out from beneath a pile of student papers at the moment—as well as the consequences of holding the majority of my office hours at the end of the quarter, when the students are revising and can benefit the most—so it took someone else sending me an email to learn this disturbing fact:

Every time the Donalde thinks about sex, his next thought is about me.