Acephalous

Ironically, she's not doing transwomen any justice.

I'm genuinely fond of Gail Simone's work—both in comics and combative internet forums—and I fully support what she says about the addition of a transwoman to the cast of Batgirl:

She added that she thinks most superhero comics readers don’t have a problem with increased diversity, but rather with stories that promote sermonizing over storytelling. Alysia will be “a character, not a public service announcement … being trans is just part of her story. If someone loved her before, and doesn’t love her after, well—that’s a shame, but we can’t let that kind of thinking keep comics in the 1950s forever.”

Except it's not "just part of her story," because it's just not part of the story. It's an interruption in Barbara Gordon's issue-wide interior monologue. Because in this issue Gordon has quite a bit of confessing to do:

You don't even need to enlarge the image to see that the majority of this conversation is filtered through Gordon's interior monologue—those black dialogue boxes speak for themselves. This is Gordon telling you a story about Gordon, which would be fine if this didn't happen:

I admit to having edited out three panels of hugging and a close-up of that message-cat, but that doesn't detract from my larger point: Alysia's confession isn't an organic element of the narrative. It's utterly forced. Consider the first set off panels above: it's a series of two-shots emphasizing the bond between Barbara and Alysia that "transitions" to an unnecessarily dramatic close-up on Alysia. Because it's not as if Barbara's confession of having been paralyzed and tormented and stalked lacks emotional weight. Her burden is even indicated, visually, by the purple half-bat that haunts her words. She can't escape what's been done to her and who she is, not even when she's telling her own story to herself. Which, again, is all well and good. I adore the confessional mode so long as it doesn't involve Don Draper talking about swimming. But a narrative written in the confessional mode simply isn't the best place to have someone other than the confessor make a grand gesture. My editorial work above may be a little dishonest, but it's certainly indicative of the issue's overall narrative emphasis. If Simone wanted to have Alysia's moment be hers, she should've placed it in a narrative that didn't belong to Barbara Gordon, because that makes it seem like an afterthought.

And that only provides more ammunition to people who think "cis-gendered" is just "another one of those terms invented in universities aimed at eliminating the word “normal” when discussing sexual preferences." Because people who think DC is pushing an LGBT agenda will feel like its being "shoved down their throat" when revelations like this are inserted into narratives so awkwardly. That close-up pushes Alysia into the reader's face in a manner liable to remind readers that the forced intimacy of all close-ups is actually really creepy, and when it comes to rhetorical effect, the difference between "shoved down my throat" and "thrust in my face" is without distinction.

Representations of rape in comic books

[I'm re-posting this because I received an email on my earlier post inquiring as to whether "cartoons" are capable of tackling difficult social issues responsibly. I think this old post demonstrates how something as ostensibly slight as a "cartoon" can have a profound impact on a person's moral development.]

The year was 1988. I was a recent transplant to Louisiana and a tad on the introverted side. (What with being deaf and all.) So I spent endless hours reading comic books. I may have “like ‘em liked” some girls at this point, but can find no evidence of it in my fourth grade yearbook. Not only did I know nothing about girls, I distinctly remember not even knowing what this “rape” thing I heard about on the news was. But I mowed my lawn every day—my father having decided to instill the value of hard work by allowing me to earn $4 whenever I wanted by re-mowing what my new work ethic transformed into a hilariously mangy lawn—and so I had plenty of money to blow on X-books. Meaning I spent most afternoons blissfully unaware of anything that didn’t involve the X-Men or X-Factor or The New Mutants or, if I was desperate enough, Alpha Flight.

One late October afternoon, I purchase a copy of X-Men #236. On the cover Wolverine and Rogue are hung by their feet from a scaffold, flanked on both sides by grinning fools in military garb. (This image disturbs me more now than it did then.) What had happened? The X-Men had sacrificed themselves to save the world, only in the end they were granted a reprieve: they would be dead to the world but would live undetected and undetectable in the Australian outback. They were invisible to all forms of electronic recording devices. They were able to move throughout the world invisible to all by the naked eye. Or so they thought until a fascist state called “Genosha” declared war on them. To make a long story short: shit hit fans. Wolverine and Rogue were captured.

For those unfamiliar with the comics or the films, Rogue has the power to absorb the memories and/or mutant powers of whomever she touches. So, naturally, she doesn’t touch anyone for fear of knocking them unconscious and draining them of their “life energy.” Her entire life Rogue has wanted nothing more than to touch someone without hurting them. To be loved. But she’d come to accept the fact that this would never happen. This self-sacrifice moved my fourth-grade mind. I sympathized with her despite having no clue as to what she sacrificed or why. I only knew that it pained her and, being the good sympathetic identifier that I was, I felt her pain by proxy. So without really knowing why, I wanted Rogue to be able to touch people.

And after she’s captured by the Genoshans, she’s stripped of her mutant powers. Now she can touch people without having to worry about killing them. For a moment, I’m happy for her. If only she can get out of this jam she’ll be able to touch someone! That’s all she ever wanted! Then I hit this panel:

And I was confused. That’s Rogue huddled there in the corner. She’s traumatized. Over the next few issues she’ll disappear. Another personality—and I mean that literally—will emerge. Rogue will be so hurt by whatever “liberties [were] taken when she was being processed” that she’ll cede control of her psyche to Carol Danvers. (Read the link.  It’s too complicated to explain briefly.) Needless to say, despite not knowing quite what those “liberties” were, countless data points began to constellate for me. I saw “touching” and “forced” and “fascism” and “liberties” circle the pained figure in the panel above and I was confused. Angry. Upset. I didn’t know why, but I knew that I was. My sympathies had identified with something they couldn’t comprehend.

When I was hit by that car and pain plus medication turned my mind to cottage cheese, the most “intellectual” material I could stomach were comics. Re-reading this one, I stumbled into a realization: my feminist sympathies were first marshaled while reading a comic back in the Autumn of ’88. The medium is far from perfect, but it’s not wholly without value.  I’m not defending myself here so much as describing a stage in my development. So please don’t read this and think “Scott think spandex is progressive?” I don’t. Only once upon a time, it inadvertently was.

Why do I teach comics?

I don’t know, why don’t you just ask me? Because apparently

I fool [students] into acquiring a decent approximation of expertise by providing them with source material that they believe they can become expert in. They’ll happily read eight chapters from Understanding Comics and memorize the 70 odd bits of critical vocabulary contained therein, whereas if I asked them to do something similar with Ciceronian rhetoric their anxiety would preclude the possibility of them ever feeling like they could master the material.

Or so I say!

I take it most of you are already familiar with my work on the medium, but for those who aren’t, I’ll throw some links below the fold.

Shorter Ann Althouse: Racists can't be racist because they love their racism.

So some of Scott Brown's staffers were caught tomahawk-chopping while war-whooping, which is absolutely not a traditional means of representing Native Americans as tomahawk-chopping, war-whooping, nothing-noble-about-them savages. There's no history of American cinema in which Native Americans were a violent bulwark against the tide of civilizing white men eager to manifest their destiny. There's no history of American literature in which Native Americans played the roles of "Captor #1" and "Captor #2" and let's just call them "Tribe of Captors" in popular captivity narratives that identified war-whooping with lady-taking and child-killing. None of that is real because Ann Althouse said so:

Someone doing the "tomahawk chop" is himself playing the role of Indian. This Indian character making a stereotypical gesture can't be read as expressing hostility toward Indians. The Indian is his hero.

See? "The Indian is his hero." Whose hero exactly? According to Althouse anyone doing the tomahawk chop. Which means that she believes that performing a racially offensive can't be considered racist because the performance itself is necessarily an act of loving emulation. For example, if one of Scott Brown's white staffers were to create a television show called

It couldn't be considered racist by definition because its use of the stereotypical Chinese immigrant is evidence of that this white staffer considers Chin-Kee to be "his hero." In all seriousness, Althouse's problem is that she's so ignorant that she doesn't realize that the stereotype of Native Americans that Brown's staffers invoke isn't historically accurate, which is why she can claim, straight-faced, that "these fake Indians, the staffers, are pretending to be real Indians," when in actuality they're pretending to be racist stereotypes of Native Americans.

One day I will wake up in a world in which "Ann Althouse" is revealed to be the work of an art collective trying to win a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the Longest Sustained  Installation of  a Person Who Couldn't Possibly Exist. I pray that day comes soon.

In the meantime go read my other post. It'll cleanse this stupid clear off your palate.

Racism? Solved. Sexism? We're ... working on it?

In the spirit of this, I present this.

You know who wouldn’t mind watching a film in a gun-free zone?

This guy:

Because he also saw something terrible happen at a theater. The only person who thinks that guy would support filling the air of a crowded theater with crossfire would be a good idea would be the one who drew him.

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 5/06/13)

Films:

• Batman Begins (classic horror) - Christopher Nolan 
• Blow-Up (I) - Michelangelo Antonioni 
• Blow-Up (II)- Michelangelo Antonioni
• The Dark Knight (I) - Christopher Nolan
• The Dark Knight (II) - Christopher Nolan
• Fellowship of the Ring (conventions of high fantasy) - Peter Jackson
• Fight Club - David Fincher
• Fight Club (II) - David Fincher
• Fight Club (III) - David Fincher
• Ghost World - Terry Zwigof
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki
• Superman - Richard Donner
• Superman Returns - Bryan Singer
• 30 Days of Night - David Slade

Television Shows:

• Avatar: The Last Airbender - "The Ember Island Players" 
• Breaking Bad - "Buyout" I (Naturalism)
• Breaking Bad - "Buyout" II (Realism)
• Breaking Bad - "Say My Name"
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All," Said the Fly to the Money Pile
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All" the Invisible Lines and Immaterial Connections
• Breaking Bad - "Gliding Over All" Until You're Not
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Hush"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels" - Buckling the Frame
• Doctor Who - "The Eleventh Hour"
• Doctor Who - "Amy's Choice"
• Doctor Who - "Vincent and the Doctor" 
• Doctor Who - "The Pandorica Opens"
• Doctor Who - "The Big Bang"
• Doctor Who - "The Impossible Astronaut"
• Game of Thrones - Embiggening Men in "Blackwater"
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Poor Will
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Bran
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Catelyn Stark and Jon Snow
• Game of Thrones - "Winter Is Coming" for Will and Bran
• Game of Thrones - "Lord Snow," you're no bigger than a half-man
• Game of Thrones - Everyone is alone, everyone is surrounded in "The Wolf and the Lion"
• Game of Thrones - How circular is "A Golden Crown"?
• Game of Thrones - Table-setting and brain-burning in "You Win or You Die"
• Game of Thrones - Learning to use "The Pointy End"
• Game of Thrones - Swords! Swords! Swords! in "Baelor"
• Game of Thrones - "Valar Dohaeris," Indeed. But who? Where? To what end?
• Hannibal - The frail horror of shallow focus
• Leverage - "The Van Gogh Job"
• Louie - "Daddy's Girlfriend II"
• Mad Men - "Don and Sally in 'A Little Kiss'"
• Mad Men - "The Ballad of Peggy and Pete, Redux, in 'A Little Kiss'"
• Mad Men - "The Grown-Ups"
• Mad Men - "Shut the Door.  Have a seat."
• Mad Men (I) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men - Who owns "The Other Woman"?
• Mad Men - Hands and hands and hands in "Commissions and Fees"
• Mad Men - Nostalgia, forestalled, and "The Wheel"
• Mad Men - "It's not the tooth that's rotten," it's "The Phantom"
• Mad Men - One foot in "The Doorway"
• Mad Men - "Collaborators" in the Secret, Sacred Curb Dances of Suburban Love
• Mad Men - Is the Awesomeness of White Men really "For Immediate Release"?
• The Walking Dead - "Days Gone Bye"

Comics:

• American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
• Blankets - Craig Thompson
• Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
• Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
• Kick-Ass (I) - Mark Millar
• Kick-Ass (II) - Mark Millar
• Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth - Warren Ellis
• 30 Days of Night - Steve Niles
• The Walking Dead (word-specific panels)
• The Walking Dead (picture-specific panels) - Robert Kirkman
• War is Boring - David Axe
• Watchmen (panel construction) (I) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (panel construction) (II) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (responsible film criticism) - Anthony Lane
• Watchmen (unfilmable film filmed) - Zak Snyder vs. Alan Moore
• Watchmen (students as murderers) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan as a figure of the reader) - Alan Moore

 Themes:

• On Poorly Executed Claustrophobia in Film and Television
• On Effectively Executed Claustrophobia in Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium Now Easier than Ever to Find!

It's a permanent fixture in the right sidebar now, and I'll continue to update it regularly. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a terrible cold to attend to. (Stupid midterms wreaking havoc with stupid students' stupid immune systems ...)

Claustrophobia, as Wolfgang Petersen recognizes, is a cumulative effect.

(The continuation of the previous post which, like this one, is yet another one of those posts.)

I was going to jump right into the episode of Doctor Who I'm teaching tomorrow, but due to a non-Whovian coup, I'm going to prove my point differently first. To that end, I asked my however many Facebook friends I have the following:

Please name the five most claustrophobic films and/or episodes of a television show you've ever seen. If your nominee is chosen, I'll honor you by naming you by name in the post I'm going to write this afternoon. (Not much of an honor, but hey, it's better than nothing.)

Patrick Slaven, Kyler Kuehn, Carrie Shanafelt and Gary Farber all recommended Das Boot, and since I own a copy of said film, Das Boot it is. Short plot summary: back when Wolfgang Petersen had talent, he directed a film about a German U-boat and its discontents, and because the majority of the film took place on the boat, it had plenty of shots that approximate the "coffin shots" I discussed yesterday. (Being stuck in a metal tube leagues and leagues below the sea is roughly equivalent to being buried alive.) But unlike the frames discussed yesterday—in particular, the awkward image of Reynolds in his coffin—Petersen relies on standard scaled shots to create a claustrophobic atmosphere for his audience. So long as the audience grants him the conceit that the men in his film live precariously in a long metal cylinder, he need not 1) employ conventional "coffin shots" nor 2) improve upon convention or go whole hog (as Rodrigo Cortés did in Buried).

Petersen's audience knows that these men are confined behind a brittle shell of metal and will miles below the sea, so the enclosed atmosphere of the film is implicit. But that's not enough. As I mentioned yesterday, audiences key in to conventions in ways that subvert their effectiveness. A director can put a person in a closed coffin, but because so many have done so previously, the effect is merely communicative. The simple fact of being entrapped comes across, but the sympathetic feeling of entrapment doesn't. Das Boot is different. It lacks any of the obviously constricted shots and opts instead for a directorial ethos of tight framing (much as I discussed in my counterfactual Bones yesterday): 

That'd be a typical dinner shot. It lacks the ostentation of Reynolds in a coffin, but by framing this medium close-up as he did, Petersen's use of shallow focus indicates that there's little more to the room than what's seen here. Typically, shallow focus emphasizes a face (or faces) and blurs the unimportant background into a hazy nothing; here, however, the shallow focus reveals that the walls behind these folks abut them so closely that they can't be excluded from the shot. There's simply no way for them to be in focus and the walls around them not, which an audience will realize (even if it doesn't consciously understand) means that these men are very close to their walls. (Or vice versa.) It's not a "coffin shot," merely a medium close-up with a depth of field that reveals, in its entirety, how little there is to see. Stack a few hundred similar shots together and the claustrophobic intent of every director who's ever buried an actor for effect can actually be realized. Just to prove my point, here are some other shots from the film:

That shot of the living quarters need not be perfectly centered in such a way as to create a frame whose composition is so damn mathematical as to be oppressive, but Petersen's got an agenda. Also: 

There are many ways to depict a man amongst his crew, but framing his head as Petersen has (in a close-up) and situating it in the composition against many other similarly framed heads limits the scope of the frame to this head and these other ones. The face, again, is in shallow focus and yet because every other head's within the depth of field the constricted effect is only heightened. Imagine watching a film composed thus for 209 minutes (if you spring for the director's cut): the knowledge of the predicament of the crew is augmented, visually and viscerally, by the manner in which Petersen frames them.

All of which is only to say that a claustrophobic effect isn't bound to a claustrophobic situation. Certainly, both coffins and U-boats lend themselves to a claustrophobic treatment, but the reason Das Boot succeeds where yesterday's episodes and films failed has nothing to do with the narrative situation. It's all about the mechanics of how such a situation is filmed.

Tomorrow, I promise, I'll address this within the dictates of my class and discuss Andrew Gunn's direction of "The Victory of the Daleks."

What we talk about when we talk about hands.

As I was writing and writing and writing and writing about Jack London in my dissertation, I noticed something I was never able to fully incorporate into my argument: the man's obsession with hands. He not only wrote about them regularly in his fiction, but his letters are heavily peppered with references to his own "deformed" mitts. I scare-quote "deformed" because history has no record as to whether his hands were as he believed them to be—the scarred and calloused collection of fingers that his life of hard labor had created. That a leading voice for the working class was embarrassed by the signs that he'd once and long been a member of the same is one of those historical ironies that's better left for braver souls to judge. I'm more interested in the evidence. For example, were you a photographer taking a profile picture of London, he would present you with this:

 Or this:

Decent shots, no doubt, but ones in which the palms of his hands have been deliberately obscured. If you were a different sort of photographer entirely—one who wanted to take pictures of famous authors in diapers, for example—London would oblige thus:

Some jokes just tell themselves.

And for my first post from the new desktop — for which I can’t thank you enough — I present an image unworthy of it:

Now if you'll excuse me, I still need to reinstall everything I own. Thank you so much, though, for coming through for me. Who says conservatives have a monopoly on charity? (Besides themselves, of course.)

Just in case you need to bluff your way out of a war.

(This be yet another one of them posts. The direct sequel to this one, in fact.)

In the previous post, we learned that the Doctor can accomplish quite a bit by yelling at things. Admonishment, it could be said, is his only consistent source of power. He has the uncanny ability to be clever at precisely the right moment, and if he lacks the tools required to bring his clever plan to fruition, he possesses an improvisonal knack for making do with whatever's at hands. As a list of powers go, the Doctor fares quite favorably to no known hero—though he could be compared to a Malthussian Lex Luthor. (He did steal the TARDIS, after all.) Point being, by the time the Doctor regenerates into his Matt Smith incarnation, his reputation is such that he can stand on a rooftop, unkempt and in other people's clothes, and stare down the very same spaceship that, moments earlier, was going to incinerate the entire planet. 

Quite the reputation, that is, but what has he done to deserve it? "Been very clever with stuff on multiple occasions" covers it, but inadequately. Unlike Superman, the Doctor possesses no singular power that would require him to face a particular kind of foe in a particular type of manner. He can stand alone against an alien armada precisely because he lacks any clearly defined (or plausible) method of doing so. To quote the man himself in "The Pandorica Opens," in which the Doctor finds himself trapped beneath Stonehenge and the Earth surrounded by an alien armada:

Note how director Toby Haynes monkeys around with the shots in this short sequence. In the first frame, the Doctor is looking out the door, the locked Pandorica behind him, and he looks sheepish not only because of his slumped shoulders and pathetic frown, but because he's being oppressed by the compositional elements of the frame. Amy Pond and River Song flank him, and even though the shot scale is medium close-up—meaning the camera captures him from the waist to the top of his head—Haynes uses an unusually high level of framing, which creates an awkward amount of space between the top of the Doctor's head and the upper limit of the frame. This unusual level of framing makes it so the compositional oppressiveness parallels the narrative—or vice versa, as the relation between the narrative and composition is interdependent in film. In other words, it's as if Haynes squished the Doctor but left the camera in the same position it occupied pre-squishing.

But wait! There is a second frame in which the Doctor has one of his brilliant ideas!

"YOU HATE THE CROW JUST DIE"

Such was the entirety of an email I received, presumably as a result of someone searching for an awesome Crow costume and landing on this post. I'm going to take it as a badge of honor and remain aloof and amused.

Holy Terror, Frank Miller!

In 2006, Frank Miller announced a forthcoming publication called Holy Terror, Batman! in which the Dark Knight would go to Afghanistan and get in a fistfight with Osama bin Laden. He claimed it would hark back to an earlier era in comics history when, for example, Superman would marshal his many powers to annoy Hitler:

All well and good, except DC didn't think the Batman brand would be enhanced by being aggressively associated with the worst elements of the Bush administration, and so the world was spared Holy Terror, Batman! Until a few weeks ago, that is, when Miller published Holy Terror, a book about a Batman-type vigilante who teams with a Catwoman-type thief and a Commissioner Gordon-type chief to defeat a series of terrorist attacks against a Gotham-type Empire City. (Miller's roman à clef is so obvious I believe DC might be able to sue for copyright infringement.) Let me begin by warning you:

This book is more terrible than I'm leading you to believe it is. It's Batman as written by Pam Geller after she and Glenn Reynolds split a box of wine. Only worse. Where the art isn't muddled it's obscured by a dense bank of unnecessary Eisner spritz. Human proportions—especially female proportions—remind anyone who may've forgotten of his directions to Jim Lee on All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder:

Less human than human.

Alyssa's post on the sentimental core of Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman is spot on:

I was surprised by how incredibly sweet the comic is. I wasn’t really expecting that. The basic premise, for those not in the know, is Lex Luthor finds a way to essentially give Superman fast-developing cancer, leaving Superman to do a lot of bucket-list things: give Lois Lane the chance to experience his powers for the day; nail one last scoop for the Daily Planet; go back and visit the grave of Jonathan Kent, his adopted father; save the world one last time.

However, the hallmarks of Morrison's work, according to renowned comic scholar (and Alyssa's occasional interlocutor) Douglas Wolk, are:

reality-bending metaphysical freakouts dressed up in action-adventure drag; metaphors that make visible the process by which language creates an image that in turn becomes narrative; a touch of feel-good self-improvement rhetoric; faith in the the power of pop and popularity to do magic; and skinny bald men who are stand-ins for Morrison himself, heroically conquering sadness and making the world evolve. (Reading Comics 258)

If those two descriptions seem at odds, that's because they are. Morrison is a talented but unintegrated artist. What do I mean? He can be as aggressively annoying as Wolk's flattering account of him suggests. Incorporating proxies of himself into narratives about the nature of narratives and claiming that magic makes these metaphorical selves visible? That is, to quote my advisor, pure "postmodern gee-whiz wankery." It's cleverness for the sake of being hailed as King Clever, and it grates on my every last nerve because it's so clinical and intellectualized.

AND YET.

I came to graduate school to study the works of James Joyce, whose complex wankery far outstrips anything Morrison's attempted, much less accomplished. So why does Morrison bother me in a manner Joyce doesn't? The short answer is that, at his best, Morrison doesn't bother me at all. When is he at his best? As Alyssa notes, it's when he's stripped a story to its emotional core and presented its complexities not as worthy subjects in and of themselves, but as natural consequences of a human narrative. Of course, the protagonists of these "human" narratives are rarely human: in All-Star Superman, it's Superman; in We3, it's a trio of weaponized house-pets.

That is to say: Morrison seems to have a problem elevating actual humans to a position worthy of simple human sympathy. A kidnapped pet or an orphaned alien are worthy of sympathy because they aspire to be more than their outsider status allows them to be. But an average human being? He or she is what he or she is—short of a magical authorial intervention that's as likely to land him or her in Sade's castle as provide anything resembling hope or help. The only transcendence average people can acquire is by proxy, e.g. Lois's "acquisition" of Superman's powers on her birthday.

In short, I don't find in Morrison much in the way of human sympathy for ordinary humans. This is where—their shared love of verbal and narrative pyrotechnics aside—I find Morrison lacking what Joyce possessed in abundance: because behind the modernist wankery that is Ulysses is a simple story about a man dealing (poorly) with a crisis he knew was coming but couldn't avert. It's a powerful story because of its fundamental humanity, not, as would be the case with Morrison, despite it.

Form and Content in Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman

Before I begin, I would like to re-admit that I don't "get" Grant Morrison.  I understand and, to some extent, can appreciate what others find interesting about his work, but for me reading Morrison is akin to arguing with someone who believes that, after death, we enter "the Supercontext ... a fifth-dimensional, informational continuum where things that we don't quite understand go on." (Because that's exactly what it is.) In other words, I don't disapprove of Morrison's grand scheme so much as I think its philosophical underpinnings are as sound and stable as those of anyone else who drops too much acid and claims communion with unseen entities of vast esoteric power. They—being the philosophical underpinnings, not the unseen entities of vast esoteric power—are there, certainly, but they're there to be accepted as revelation, not to be argued with.

That said, I decided to teach All-Star Superman anyway and will attempt to do it justice. Fortunately for me, that's not too difficult to do if I concentrate on the opening pages of the first issue. To wit:

Heroic Abeyance (On Donner's Superman)

[The complete list of my visual rhetoric posts can be found here.]

Richard Donner knew that Superman needed a powerful entrance in Superman (1978), but he also knew that the one element that it would necessarily lack was surprise.  The audience knows who Clark Kent is and knows that Lois Lane won't actually plummet to her death, and Donner knows that the audience knows that.  Because he can't rely on the narrative to carry the weight of the scene, he must resort to using spectacle to carry the weight of the narrative.  The scene begins innocently enough, with an extreme long shot (in deep focus) of Lois Lane approaching a helicopter parked on a skyscraper:

Why go with the extreme long shot?  Because he needs to establish the relation of the helicopter to this mischievous cable:

How do we know it's mischievous?  Because he cut to a close-up of it.  The audience may not know why they are being asked to pay attention to this cable, but they know it will play some role in the narrative about to transpire.  Donner then cuts back to the original shot to show Lane entering the helicopter:

Note the deep focus here: even though the camera remains positioned exactly as it had been in the first shot, the scale of this would be considered medium long.  Why?  Because the most important element of a shot helps define what a shot is.  It could be argued that the helicopter is more important in the first shot, in which case it would have been a medium shot of a helicopter with Lane visible in the background.  But I'm going to argue that Lane is more significant than the helicopter 1) because she occupies the central position in both shots and 2) because her yellow jacket contrasts both the black to the left and the red to the right.  Besides, if Donner wanted the helicopter to be the central element, he would've just done this:

An even more extreme long shot of the helicopter pad works as a re-establishing shot.  Because of its scale and the lack of on-screen movement, this shot imparts a calmness to the proceedings.  Everything is going according to plan.  It is now safer for the audience to join Lane in the helicopter:

Donner situates the audience immediately behind Lane, but the shallow depth of field results in the back of her head being out of focus.  This shot is uncomfortable because it's contradictory: her centrality indicates the very same importance the focus diminishes.  Everything may not be going according to plan:

Some days I love my job.

For example, today, as I've been given permission to teach a course I'm calling "Alien Saviors," whose syllabus looks like this:

• Action Comics #1
• Superman (1978)
  
• Superman Returns (2006)
• Umberto Eco, "The Myth of Superman"
• Doctor Who, "The Eleventh Hour"
• Doctor Who, "The Beast Below"
• Doctor Who, "The Victory of the Daleks"
• Doctor Who, "Don't Blink"
• Doctor Who, "Time of Angels"
• Doctor Who, "Flesh and Stone"
• Doctor Who, "The Vampires of Venice"
• Doctor Who, "The Fires of Pompeii"
• Fiona Hobden, "History Meets Fiction in Doctor Who, 'The Fires of Pompeii'"
• Doctor Who, "Amy's Choice"
• Doctor Who, "The Hungry Earth"
• Doctor Who, "Cold Blood"
• Doctor Who, "Tooth and Claw"
• Torchwood: Children of Earth

I'm tackling historical context with the explicitly historical episodes, but if anyone can suggest some Baker-era episodes that would make sense to teach alongside the Smith, I'd be obliged. 

This must be the world's way of telling me it's time to rejoin it.

They made this just for me, put it on in Los Angeles and everything, yet somehow I missed it:

Via Scott McCloud. 

That's right: The Doctor as Batman via Scott McCloud. 

And I missed it. 

My students just think they're so funny...

The winner of the Caption Scott McCloud Contest is:

Well, she wishes to remain anonymous, but agreed that her brilliant interpretation of McCloud's textless panels ought to see the light of day.  As I said in class: "Congratulations!  I hate you!  You're awesome!  (Damn it.)"