Acephalous

An end of the quarter treat: "Batman Is My Boss."

The final assignment of my visual rhetoric course is called Rhetoric in Practice (or RIP).  It has two components.  To paraphrase the rubric: the students create their own rhetorical performance, explore questions of how to target an audience, follow the conventions of a genre, choose the medium for their message, and all the while, use the critical tools they’ve been learning all quarter to develop their ideas.  They then perform a rhetorical analysis of their own work via a detailed writer's memo. 

The pedagogical theory behind this is sound: by forcing them to do something fun at the end of the quarter, I get better evaluations the tools I taught them over the course of it become more solidly ensconced in their brain-space.  Only this time, instead of deducing the rhetorical intent behind someone else's decisions, they must decide how to communicate their message to their target audience most effectively.  Over the years I've had many successful projects, including

• a Batman-centric version of The Game of Life that opens with pegs for two parents and one child already in the car and an Alfred peg in the wing awaiting the inevitable
• a pop-up book of Watchmen, in which the first page consisted of pulling a tab that sends the Comedian crashing out a window and into the reader's lap
• a scored and recorded soundtrack to Alan Moore's The Killing Joke
• a New York Review of Books style review of the novelization of Batman Begins, in which the book is slammed for its Ludlum-lite car chases and unconvincing fisticuffs
• an adaptation of this issue of Planetary by Cormac McCarthy
• a Master Legend-type recruitment video for a superhero academy

This quarter it looks like I'll be adding a few more to my personal hall of fame.  One of them is so conceptually brilliant in its timeliness that the idea alone sent my head spinning: a comic in which a super-heroic University of California student punches a certain unpopular university president in the face repeatedly (this idea elicited cheers from classmates when the student first shared it).  The second is a web-comic by this student entitled "Batman Is My Boss."  Here's a sample page in which she uses moment-to-moment transitions to great effect:

 

She plans on updating it both for the class and, with encouragement, after it ends.  Go encourage her already!

The Mazzuchellization of mainstream titles?

So long as I'm talking about Tony Stark, I want to point out the Asterios Polyp-y greatness of the cover of the most recent edition of The Invincible Iron Man:

The color scheme alone would have been a dead giveaway, but the head of the suit seals it:

Or am I simply imagining a beneficent relation between one of the most important books published in the past decade and mainstream comics?

On ideological incoherence in Iron Man.

I feel vindicated by the revelation that Iron Man went into production without a shooting script, if only because now I know the reason Robert Downey Jr. had so few quality lines is that he and director Jon Favreau were making up the dialogue as they went along.  This approach works when you can endlessly re-shoot uninspired or botched takes on the cheap, i.e. when you're not filming a $200 million film on someone else's dime.  Favreau delivered all that could be expected working under such constraints: a serviceable plot that relies heavily on the many charms of its actors and the explosiveness of its explosions.  The lack of a shooting script accounts for the ideological incoherence of the film Spencer Ackerman noted shortly after its release.  It is difficult for any film to have a singular vision in an age of studio-groomed auteurs and homogenizing test audiences, so one in which there is no script is bound to wander off the message it never had.  No matter how much attention Downey Jr. and Favreau paid to the lines to be delivered on a given day, they had no written substrate on which to base their improvisations.  There are no lines that resonate outside the immediate moment in the film because no one sat down and labored over the text in the manner required to create such resonance.  

In short, the ideological incoherence of Iron Man can be attributed to the material conditions of its production.  The same cannot be said of The Dark Knight.  Its ideological incoherence is a function of its script ... as I will discuss at some length in a forthcoming post in which I demonstrate that the film is all about dogs.

Manga recommendations, anyone?

Because it makes little sense to write a book about visual rhetoric and ignore the fastest growing sector of the market, but as my reading experience follows the typical trajectory of Claremont X-Titles (X-X?) to Sandman and Vertigo books to Fantagraphics lust, my experience with manga comes almost exclusively from some mid-90s flirtation with Ghost in the Shell.  I know about manga and its many varieties, but I lack the sort of fluency with its conventions that I have with American mainstream and independent books.  My question to you is this:

What should I read to acquire a robust, intuitive working vocabulary with manga?

Let the circle be unbroken.

From a thread about Michael Steele's "white Republicans are afraid of me" remarks on Sunday:

I’m terrified of Michael Steele the same way Mary Jo Kopechne was terrified of Teddy Kennedy.

This ride is flat scary, and I want off.

In less than 30 words, this commenter compresses the conservative response to white liberals and all blacks into the singular image of a threatened white woman. I would stop and note that the white female martyr in question worked with the man who supposedly terrified her and willingly entered a vehicle with him on that unfortunate evening, but that would be beside the point. It is not the woman herself to whom conservatives appeal when they utter her name, but what happened to her as imagined through their eyes.

Their horror at Kopechne's death (and their subsequent insistence that in it can be found the root of all ideological evil) reminds me of nothing so much as the origin story of Rorschach in Alan Moore's Watchmen. (Such obsessions happens when writing a book.) His moment of decision—the moment he became, a la Bérubé, outraged by Chappaquiddick—was when he discovered some fabric that had been purchased by Kitty Genovese shortly before her murder:

What turns Rorschach into the misogynistic psychopath deplored by a witless Anthony Lane but beloved by many a conservative? The seventh and eighth panels tell you all you need to know. They are not presented from Genovese's perspective: the scene-to-scene transition from panel six to panel seven clearly indicates that they're Rorschach's reconstruction of the indifference she witnessed as she bled out before the eyes of friends and neighbors. She is no more a person to him that Kopechne is to those who claim to speak for her and yet, like conservatives, Rorschach claims her death for his own purposes.

I would continue, but I don't feel comfortable speaking for the dead. Would that others shared my discomfort ...

In that moment, I knew I'd be accused of sexual harassment again.

Two of the "acquire an alternative skill set with real world application" assignments that we teach in composition are 1) how to build and manage a wiki and 2) how to compose a PowerPoint presentation that doesn't cause your audience to slit your throat or their wrists.  I combine them into a single assignment in which students choose the text they found most compelling, develop a wiki based upon its rhetorical situation (author/auteur, historical context, themes, signature features, symbols and motifs, etc.) and then share their results with the class.  On Tuesday, I stressed that their presentation must not consist of reading their wiki aloud (by virtue of emphasizing the difference in media, e.g. "How do you speak a link?") and we discussed strategies they can employ to prevent us from mass-suiciding on Thursday.

Yesterday, midway through an already engaging presentation, one of my students paused during her discussion of the contextual allusions present in her text. 

"Also," she said as she made to forward her presentation, "I think there's an allusion to tentacle porn."

The class gasped. 

Her mouse clicked.

I sat mute.  Horrified into silence.

Time dilated as we approached the horizon of this career-ending event.  I held that diphthong in "Wait!" so long it slid into a schwa.

Her mouse clicked again. 

The screen brightened and . . .

On informing your students that they're murderers

(Being another post in this vein.)

In a famous (and surprisingly controversial, for reasons I will tackle later in the week) section of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud defines the act of moving from one panel, through the gutter (the white space between panels), and into the next as "closure."  Unlike film, in which closure is made unconscious by the persistence of vision and the limitations of our perceptual apparatus (such that twenty-four frames per second is automatically perceived as motion), closure in comics is a collaborative effort between author (or artist) and reader.  Take a scene in which one person threatens to shoot another:

What happens (at least in my tweaked-for-maximal-classroom-efficiency sequence) between the second and third panel there?  Put differently: in order to achieve closure between the second and third panel, what do Moore and Gibbons compel the reader to imagine in order to make the transition through that gutter make sense?  The answer, of course, is that they force the reader to imagine murdering a pregnant woman.  That is, they make the reader a silent accomplice to the Comedian's crime per McCloud:

Just in case the awful complicity of the reader failed to sink in, McCloud draws himself hugging his knees in a dark corner (and undoubtedly near tears behind his grandma glasses):

Students absolutely loathe the possibility that McCloud might be correct.  They claim they are the victims of a sick manipulation on the part of the author; that they were tricked into imagining this terrible crime and therefore aren't culpable; that they never knowingly sin in their hearts unless someone forces them to do so; etc.  I then show them the omitted panel:

And after they express how much better they feel for not being an accomplice to a fictional murder, I ask them why witnessing a crime is better than imagining one and we turn to a slightly more thematic discussion of Dr. Manhattan's culpability here.  But they remember McCloud's point, which was why I implicated them in the Comedian's crime in the first place.

Wait—is that supposed to be a bad thing?

One of you lot emailed me bits of a Warren Ellis script for one of the various X-titles—the perfunctorily racy "Emma" can only, I think, refer to Emma Frost—but given some of the email I received concerning my discussion of the ALL CAPPED verbosity of Alan Moore in this post, I felt I should share:

We're doing the steam-punk neo-Victorian thing, so we're doing corsets, gloves, chokers, boots, but we're also going to be doing long skirts (though, this being Emma, I'm sure she'd slit hers if need be). Let's have a teak carriage-clock type thing with a blank glass face (instead of a clock face) on the occasional table next to her, as she lounges and reads a hardback copy of Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. (Actually, she might read it in the untranslated French, so that'd be histoire de l'oeil). JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I'M TURNING INTO ALAN MOORE.

By request: my visual rhetoric course

As requested in the comments to my last post and via a couple of emails, here's a general outline of the course I teach on visual rhetoric. (If you find it interesting or just want to give me money, the book I'm co-writing with my course director should be available early next summer.) I'm more than happy to debate the merits of teaching rhetoric and argument through popular culture or the validity of any of the particular readings I put forward; however, keep in mind that those readings are presented in the classroom and, as such, are designed to be arguable instead of definitive. I want them to argue with particular statements because I'm teaching them how to argue, so there are moments (particularly in the readings of the films) that I'm deliberately wrong. Those moments will likely be obvious to you, but you're not an 18-year-old undergraduate on the short end of an institutional power imbalance who's afraid that, should they contradict me, they will fail the class, lose their scholarship and spend their days toiling away in the service industries.

That said, here are links to the analytic portion of the course:

1. I introduce them to the idea of the overdetermined image, because nothing is accidental in an Alan Moore script.*
2.  Nor, for that matter, is anything accidental when it costs $80,000 per second to film it, which is why we then discuss how Christopher Nolan turns Batman into classic horror monster in Batman Begins. The point here is get them fluent in the language of film, so that they might make arguments about how directors manipulate the camera in order to appeal to the audience. (We also discuss what is and isn't in the diegetic space, e.g. music, which is heard by the audience but not the characters.)
3. Then it's on to The Dark Knight. That link goes to a reading of the interrogation scene; this one leads you to a similarly thorough analysis dedicated to proving the controversial thesis that Batman is really fast—because demonstrating that even the simplest of claims require evidence and careful argument to be taken seriously is the point of the course.
4. Now that they're relatively fluent in the language of film, we try to prove something a little more complex; namely, that Superman Returns is very much about 9/11. First, I take them back to September morning; then we analyze the action sequence that's about planes slamming into NYC landmarks, lest they think I'm reading too much into the anxieties the film taps into.
5. Now that they're comfortable with film, I get them to apply that knowledge to comics via the comic that's about the conventions of comics and is therefore utterly unfilmable, Watchmen. I begin by reminding them of the overdetermined nature of the image, then we discuss panel transitions and word-picture relation, move on layout and narrative flow, then I try to prove what I stated in the second sentence about Watchmen being a meta-comic. My argument's deliberately argumentative, because Dr. Manhattan can also function as a figure of the reader as well the author, but that's an argument I want to have. From there, it's onto the unfilmable film itself.
6. Now that they can break film and comics into their constituent parts, I re-orient them in an explicitly rhetorical direction. We talk about the rhetorical situation, which is, of course, a triangle. (For the record: that silliness is me teaching myself to manipulate images in Photoshop for my book on teaching visual rhetoric.) Then we situate the rhetorical context in the historical context via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
7. From there on out, it's all about the writing.  I teach them about paragraph burgers, which, while silly, is the single most effective means I've found to teach paragraph structure. Students intuitively understand that you don't call a pickle with and a piece of a cheese a "hamburger." For the remainder of the quarter, we use the tools from the beginning of the course to make sophisticated arguments about the rhetorical stakes of what they'd otherwise dismiss as pop culture ephemera. 

*I've never written up my notes on getting them to think about structure via punchlines, which begins, not surprisingly, here with The Killing Joke. The gist of it is that jokes don’t work if you only provide the punchline, which is my way of introducing them to the notion of process: this shot in a film or panel in a comic or argument in an essay only works as a punchline if the joke's been properly set up. Basically, I try to get them to think about argument in terms they intuitively understand.

"Mordre wol out, that see we day by day."

During an extended discussion about the formal mechanics of the word-picture relation comics, I coined what I called "Scott's Rule #23":

[T]he percentage of time spent lecturing other people about how awesome you are is inversely propotional to your actual awesomeness.

Which is to say, the decision to have one of the characters in your comic praise the cleverness of what another one said is supremely lame. At the time, I didn't think I needed to post Scott's Rule #22, what with it being so obvious, but today Chris Muir forced my hand:

Or not. I think the lameness of having one of your characters enthusiastically egg on the lunatic rant of another requires no further definition. Toss in the fact that "You're really cookin'" is a painfully awful pun, and you're left thinking that Chaucer fellow I quoted in the title was onto something. If only someone would do something about Muir's crimes against the English language, freshmen logic, comedy and the comic form . .

Asterios Polyp

Stop what you're doing right now and click on this link.  I can wait. 

Back?  Good. 

Now go buy it.  

I'll have a comprehensive review of it completed whenever I locate my scanner, because explaining how the book works requires you see the interplay between David Mazzucchelli's words and hyper-stylized artwork.  (I know this is always the case, but you clicked on that link, didn't you?  So you can see that it's even more the case here.)

For those unfamiliar with Mazzucchelli, he illustrated Paul Auster's City of Glass [.pdf] as well as Frank Miller's Batman: Year One.  High quality material, that is, but nothing that hinted he was capable of something like Asterios Polyp. 

A stubbornness in the face of fact that is unbecoming of an academic.

(Before I get started, I want to acknowledge that I know Ann Althouse is an attention fiend, and as such revels in any that comes her way. Furthermore, I know that giving her the attention she craves will only embolden her to spout even more outrageous nonsense in the future. However, the white-hotness of her intellectual dishonesty here compels me to consider it a vacuity of historical import. Future scholars will read this post and realize that this was the moment crypto-conservatives discovered the fact that no matter how shallow their waters were, Zeno and his paradox prevented them from ever being emptied altogether.)

It may not be breaking new that the President copped a glance at a young Mayara Rodrigues Tavare last week:

But I want to call your attention to Ann Althouse’s “close-reading” of the photograph:

Obama’s arms hang free, emphasizing the tilt, and either gravity or will causes the left arm to hang inches away from the torso. See how much lower the right hand is than the left? His neck is craned out and around so that the line of sight is directly at the ass. His mouth is open as if to say: That’s what I want.

When presented with video evidence to the contrary, she curtly replied:

I have seen the video, and I stand by my analysis of the still photograph.

She watched video evidence that refutes her analysis and stands by it anyway. But I believe she can be forgiven for insisting, essentially, that photograph is what it is, because she knows nothing about photography. A competent photographer would know, for example, what forced perspective is, and that the effect sometimes occurs accidentally, such that a child innocently swatting an insect might appear to be brutalizing a baby (Exhibit 1). This occurs because both subjects are within the depth of field:

You know what Rob Liefeld isn't?

Before you ask: I can only suppose that it has something to do with the new Batwoman being a lesbian (which fact inspired the post that brings the creepiest Googlers here), but I don't read DC and so don't know.  I guess this counts as a win?

Update: "That guy" need not worry, it's all on me.

Rob Liefeld hates it when you gay up his straight characters...

. . . but he doesn't help his cause when he makes arguments like this:

He's a warrior, a Spartan, and not a gay one.

The evidence that the actual Spartans were homosexual [thanks James] is scant and somewhat contradictory.  In the most frequently cited classical source, "The Polity of the Lacedaemons," Xenephon insists that the Spartans were not homosexual in the manner of the Boetians and Eleians:

I ought, as it seems to me, not to omit some remark on the subject of boy attachments, it being a topic in close connection with that of boyhood and the training of boys.

We know that the rest of the Hellenes deal with this relationship in different ways, either after the manner of the Boeotians, where man and boy are intimately united by a bond like that of wedlock, or after the manner of the Eleians, where the fruition of beauty is an act of grace; whilst there are others who would absolutely debar the lover from all conversation and discourse with the beloved.

Lycurgus adopted a system opposed to all of these alike. Given that some one, himself being all that a man ought to be, should in admiration of a boy's soul endeavour to discover in him a true friend without reproach, and to consort with him—this was a relationship which Lycurgus commended, and indeed regarded as the noblest type of bringing up. But if, as was evident, it was not an attachment to the soul, but a yearning merely towards the body, he stamped this thing as foul and horrible; and with this result, to the credit of Lycurgus be it said, that in Lacedaemon the relationship of lover and beloved is like that of parent and child or brother and brother where carnal appetite is in abeyance. (301, emphasis mine)

Note that while there are no carnal relations allowed in Sparta, the male-male couple is still referred to as "lover and beloved," which leads me to believe this could be a rough Spartan equivalent of the Sacred Band of Thebes.  The other most frequently cited ancient source cited on homosexuality in Sparta is Plutarch's "Life of Lycurgus," in which he describes the wedding night and connubial bliss of the married Spartan couple thus:

Then the woman that had the direction of the wedding, cut the bride's hair close to the skin, dressed her in man's clothes, laid her upon a mattress, and left her in the dark. The bridegroom, neither oppressed with wine, nor enervated with luxury, but perfectly sober, as having always supped at the common table, went in privately, untied her girdle, and carried her to another bed.

Having stayed there a short time, he modestly retired to his usual apartment, to sleep with the other young men; and he observed the same conduct afterwards, spending the day with his companions, and reposing himself with them in the night, nor even visiting his bride, but with great caution and apprehensions of being discovered by the rest of the family; the bride, at the same time, exerted all her art to contrive convenient opportunities for their private meetings. (112, emphasis mine)

The Spartans are still not homosexual in the manner of the Boetians, Eleians, or a host of my closest friends; however, on their wedding nights they gave the bride a man's haircut, dressed her up men's clothes, did their thing, then "retired to [the] usual apartment, to sleep with the other young men."  Lycurgus seems to have mandated that all young men need and must be double-super-secret beards, which means that because no one is gay, everyone is; or that because everyone is gay, no one is—or maybe they were Heisenbergian beards, in that no Spartan could be measurably gay while being observed and vice versa because we have inadequate tools. 

So even the most charitably homophobic reading of the classical literature puts to lie the notion that someone can be a Spartan warrior and unquestionably straight at the same time.  From our perspective, being a Spartan warrior entails engaging in behaviors that range from "overtly homosexual" to "extremely homosocial," so Liefeld's claim that his character is "a Spartan, but not a gay one" smooths the wrinkles of historical truth in the name of hospital corners. 

Unfortunately for Liefeld, in the years since history there's been this, which this (inarguably NSFW) image pretty much sums up.

(h/t Bill Reed.)

The escape valve of the exotic Negro*

A friend forwards this old solicitation from writers to readers about what they want to see more of in comics:

Pure ridiculousness.  Everybody knows that "City Problems" are "Black People" . . .

---

*Via Lorraine Hansberry in The New Negro.

The Book (obscenely condensed version)

Because who am I to ignore interested lurkers?  What follows is the section on comics and rhetoric I wrote for The Student Guide to Writing at UCI.  The book I'm co-authoring this summer is a vastly expanded version of the same (only with panels from actual comics instead of examples drawn from my none-too-fertile imagination).

The basic unit of analysis when dealing with a comic is the panel.  The visual elements of a panel can be described using the same vocabulary used to describe a frame from a film: background and foreground, diegesis, high or low key lighting, etc.  Pointing to the similarities between film and comics highlights what makes comics unique as a medium: the interaction of these visual components with the written word.  The word-picture relation can word specific, in which the words convey the meaning and the images merely illustrate it, as in a children's book; duo specific, in which the words and images both convey the same meaning, as when a picture of an irate man yelling is accompanied by a caption box that tells you the irate man is yelling; and interdependent, in which the words and images combine to convey a meaning neither is capable of conveying alone.  Most of the comics you will read in this course will rely heavily on interdependent word-picture combinations.

Comics are also unique in the manner in which they relate to time.  No matter how the words in the panel interact with the visuals, there is a tension between the static image and the words in the caption box.  Picture a panel that depicts a medium close-up of a young man in a bright orange shirt.  A caption box extrudes from his open mouth and occupies the space above his left shoulder.  The text inside it reads: "The bride?  You wanna know about . . . the thing it is that happened to her?  Because sure, I can tell you, but . . ."  All these words didn't spill from his mouth in the open-mouthed moment depicted in the panel.  The words propel the narrative forward in time in such a way that we cannot be sure which word the panel depicts the man enunciating. (It may not even be a word: the panel could be depicting the pause indicated by the ellipses.)  This tension between static image and narrative progress exists not only in panels but between them.

The empty area between panels is the gutter, and it is where the reader is called upon to become an active participant in the creation of the text.  Unlike a film, in which the twenty-three imperceptible gaps between the twenty-four frames flashed per second create the illusion of movement, the gutter produces breaks in the narrative that require interpretation to repair.  If the panel following the one of the man in the bright orange shirt is a medium-long shot of a different, shabbily-dressed man in a prison garden holding an open stenographer's notebook and saying, "Yes, I want to hear about the bride."  What inferences must the reader draw for those two panels to make sense?  To begin with, the bright orange shirt in the first panel likely belongs to a prison-issue jumpsuit and the man across from him (as the reader infers from the comic equivalent of a shot/reverse shot) is a journalist interested in what this prisoner did to the woman they both refer to as "the bride."  The act of making that inference -- of bridging the gap between the first and second panel -- is called closure.  In this case, the closure is achieved via a subject-to-subject transition. 

However, were the second panel to depict not a journalist, but a long shot of the man in the orange shirt unfolding a lawn chair next to a grill, the "prisoner" would be transformed into a man at a barbeque discussing an unfortunate incident at a wedding.  If the third panel showed that same man placing a steak on the grill while continuing to discuss the wedding, closure between the second and third panels will have been achieved via an action-to-action transition, i.e. one in which consecutive panels depict the same subject undertaking a series of actions.  If the next three panels track the path of the steak from the man's tongs to the grill's surface, the reader will be compelled by this moment-to-moment transition to create closure by associating the steak's slow-motion descent with whatever it was that happened at that wedding, such that it would not be surprising if in the fourth panel the steak was replaced by a bouquet of flowers of the sort brides toss at weddings.  Because the reader knows that steaks don't often turn into flowers, it is safe to infer that the narrative has shifted to another place and time via a scene-to-scene transition.  But the assumption that this airborn bouquet is on its way into the arms of a single woman attending the wedding is not necessarily a safe one -- an author could be exploiting this conventional image to confounds the reader's expectations.  In a subsequent panel, the "empty" space behind the falling flowers could be revealed to be the white satin of the wedding dress worn by a woman whose pained expression informs the reader why she dropped the bouquet.

If that panel were followed by another in which a younger, tuxedo-clad version of the orange-shirted man from the barbecue perches on the edge of a bed with his head in hands, then another panel depicting leaves falling outside a bustling travel agency, then another still of two empty chairs beneath an oversized umbrella on some Hawaiian beach, the reader is presented with a number of interpretive decisions.  The transition from the jilted bride to her cold-footed fiance could be interpreted as a scene-to-scene transition, as could the transition from the fiance to the travel agency.  However, because these panels depict the same moment in a series of different locations, closure can be argued to have been achieved via an aspect-to-aspect transition.

The interpretive burden required to understand the intent of the author/rhetor of a comic is, as the previous paragraphs indicate, quite heavy -- even though the experience of reading comics is so intuitive that many otherwise intelligent readers consider the medium juvenile.  That so many comics chronicle the adventures of impossibly-muscled specimens of post-humanity in tights that reveal more than they conceal helps sustain this misperception.  But as the story of the prisoner and/or the man who left his wife at the alter demonstrates, the content of a comic is not determined by the medium itself.

Researching the competition; or, why other books about visual rhetoric & composition demonstrate the necessity of one like mine.

When demonstrating the importance of historical context, it's considered bad form to get it wrong.  For example:

• Hal Jordan?  Not the first Green Lantern.
• Sinestro?  Doesn't appear in Emerald Dawn.
• Doctor Doom?  Not the ruler of Latvia.
• Wolverine?  Not HIV positive.  (How would that even work?)
• "Raz Alcor"?  Liam Neeson has two names in Batman Begins and neither one of them is that.

Since I'm not sure where to begin with this—I could just as easily complain about shoddy research and methodology as go full nerd—I'll come to a full stop and change the subject.  A student essay addressed an offhand remark I made in class, about Dr. Manhattan being busted by Dateline NBC for sexing up underage woman, and inspired me to produce this:

Scott McCloud learns to follow the advice he'd later dole out.

(You stop blogging for five days and you forget how to write a draft.  This was near enough to what I intended its finished form to be that I'll let it stay up.  One last bit: I meant to segue that last bit into a comparison between experimental comics in the '80s and early '90s and modernist literature in the '10s and '20s.  There's something in the compulsion to manifesto on the one hand and proto-structuralism on the other that warrants fleshing out.)

The last time I read Scott McCloud's Zot!  must have been a few months after the final issue came out in 1991.  (I made the mistake of all lame Lotharios: I lended them to a woman hoping she would be impressed by my ability to appreciate the wit of some third party and never saw my beloved books again.)  Because I'm leaning on Understanding Comics and Making Comics like a vaudeville drunk on hat rack, giving McCloud's creative output a chance to work its charm on me again seemed like a good idea.  So I picked up the collected Zot! in Baton Rouge and now I'm not so sure re-reading it was a good idea, because now I want to write a non-composition oriented article on the tangled relationship between aesthetic theory and creative works when they're both produced by the same person

Re-reading Zot! after having read Understanding Comics and Making Comics makes it painfully obvious that McCloud spent its run becoming the critic he now is.  The early issues are clumsy combinations of manga conventions (his admission) and Hernandez brothers stylings (the unacknowledged but obvious influence).  He quickly outgrew his concept but refused to abandon it, leading to a comic whose bittersweet (and before their time) coming of age stories never can quite get grounded.  He stumbled onto the animating metaphor of Buffy—high school as Hellmouth—but for whatever reason couldn't bring himself to embrace it.  Why not?  That's unclear. 

But even if we can't know the "why" readers of the originals can certainly date the "when," but because of a silly convention, those who read the collected Zot! cannot understand what the original audience knew: McCloud was the last person to realize what it was he'd become.  If only graphic novels contained the letter pages that accompanied the original issues, McCloud could've spared himself the pains of sitting in judgment over his own work:

Letters like this were my introduction to theories of genre, mode and medium.  I suppose they don't need to be reprinted, what with Understanding Comics and Making Comics being explicit statements about the issues raised in letters like this, but learning while being taught feels educational no matter who's doing the teaching.  In the back pages of Zot! I learned without realizing I was learning, and I think stuff sticks better that way. 

(Or maybe I'm just justifying using hamburgers and teaching The Dark Knight and my every last pedagogical strategy again.)

Why even fight if you don't fight dirty?

I always have a hard time convincing students that the violence in Watchmen is categorically different from the chompurfzung violence traditionally featured in comics.  Dave Gibbons draws Watchmen in the same style he used in a previous collaboration with Alan Moore ("For the Man Who Has Everything") to depict Wonder Woman thrutching Mongul:

From the Annals of Fauxprundity: THIS STORY IS ABOUT GRANT MORRISON WRITING THIS STORY!

Two or three years back, tomemos and I were discussing Grant Morrison's The Invisibles and he said something like, "Morrison is the ultimate 'either/or' author writing today: you either love and appreciate him or hate and are incapable of understanding why other people appreciate him."  Until this week, I never understood quite what he meant. 

With most polarizing literary figures—Pynchon, Barthelme, Acker, Wallace, and so forth—even when a person chokes on the air of consuete affectation, he still understands why other readers happily inhale it.  Pound might not be your bag, for example, but you understand why someone else would stick his head in it.  It also works the other way around: I love Ulysses, but I can understand why an intelligent person would just as soon chute the book as read it.

Except with Grant Morrison. 

The chapter Wolk devotes to him in Reading Comics scans like a fanboy's paean to a body of work he barely understands:

It's smart and complicated, and sometimes rushed and baffling, but mostly it's awesome, and where The Invisibles occasionally kicks back to indulge in its metaphysical side, Seven Soldiers starts hammering the FUN!!! button on its first page and never really stops.  Still, it's loaded to the gills with subtext.  It doubles as a Kabbalistic parable that also discusses the relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional existence and features symbolic correspondences with the chakras and the elements and planets—nearly every character, object, and incident in it has some kind of distinct allegorical value.  The symbolism, as clear as it is, is almost never made explicit, but if you're looking for it, it's there on every page. (278)

What can a critic do with a paragraph in which someone praises Morrison for writing an obliquely-allegorical new-age amphibian with a fun-button?  Nothing.  So this past week I sat down and read reams and reams of Morrison (about 70 percent of the material on this bibliography) and came to the conclusion that tomemos knows of what he speaks—because now I both hate Grant Morrison and am incapable of seeing why anyone appreciates him.  Why?

Because in the end every Grant Morrison story is about Grant Morrison writing stories.  Consider the final issue of his run on Animal Man (1990):