Acephalous

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.)"

Every quarter I present my students with five panels from McCloud...

...and have them compete to see who can come up with the most hilarious narrative.  Here are the panels:

They need to add narration or dialogue (or both), as well as specify what the word-picture relations are and how the transitions between the panels work.  Every quarter I learn a little something about my students with this exercise, and this quarter is no exception: I've learned that they're either high, horny, heart-broken, violent, menstruating or some combination thereof.  Should be a fun class tomorrow.

How do you take your average orphan and turn him into a lunatic in a fetish-bat costume?

The Joker, of course, has a theory:

But his version, from Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, is only technically correct.  Bruce Wayne did have "one bad day," yes, but it was different from the "one bad day" the Joker had:

The difference could be that wives and children can be replaced—for tax purposes, if not in our hearts—whereas birth-parents cannot, but while that's true, that's not the most significant difference.  The most significant difference—the one that, despite not knowing the secret identity of the Batman, the Joker deeply understands—is that "one bad day" is far worse when, instead of being told of a death secondhand, you witness it yourself.  Hence, his plan:

Batman is always Beginning again

(I never thought I'd dip back into this well, but then life happens and there you go.)

Heath Ledger notwithstanding, I think it's fairly obvious that Batman Begins is the better of recent reboots.  Nolan structures the first film not around an admittedly ingeniuous performance, but around a modified classical dynamic, by which I mean, he abides by his Aristotle.  It opens with the most incentive of incentive moments—a boy watching his parents murdered before his eyes—then proceeds to a classic peripeteia*—that moment of reversal when the boy who witnessed his parents' murder decides to forsake revenge and fight all crime instead the responsible criminals.  It need not bear mentioning, I don't think, that the deus ex machina, which Aristotle would otherwise despise, in this case fits within "the unity of action," because it has "an air of design" that's well-nigh indisputable. 

The real crux is the film's anagnorisis—or "revelation" in the I-murdered-my-father-made-kids-with-my-mother-sense—which occurs at a time Aristotle would've approved of, but not in the way he'd prefer.  You'll remember that, early in Batman Begins, the recently returned Bruce Wayne takes his horny butler's advice and invites some models to go swimming in a restaurant with him:

Nolan's use of a medium-long shot there is deceptive, as these aren't really women so much as beards:

I'm not saying they're all legs and hair, the cropped medium shot notwithstanding—but for the purpose of the plot, Nolan certain reduces them to as much.  (We're just going to skip over the scene of them skinny dipping, you know, for the kids.)  The point is that these women are props, mere things Alfred suggests Bruce Wayne should acquire should he not want to be discovered as the Batman.  So, then, anagnorisis avoided ... except:

The love of Wayne's life can't even look at him—and not just because I caught  bad capture.  She's just watched him escort two soaking models from a hotel she's about to learn he bought, so she shouldn't want to look at him.  But when she does, he makes a plea:

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.

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:

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 11/28/2011)

(For the record, many more [and all future] updates can be found here.)

By request, below are the links to all of the visual rhetoric exegeses (a.k.a. McCloud or Bordwell-inspired "lecture notes") I've produced in the past few years.  I would say I'm surprised there aren't more of them, but then I remember 1) how labor-intensive they are to compose and 2) the number of drafts I've deemed insufficient for public consumption that linger unfinished in assorted folders.  So here goes:

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
• 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"
• 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 - "The Pandorica Opens"
• Leverage - "The Van Gogh Job"
• 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"
• 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
• 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

Reifying memory in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home fits neatly into the last third of my "Confessional Narratives" course for all the obvious reasons: it's intensely autobiographical; it's told from an emotional and temporal remove from the events narrated; those events are of indisputable significance to the life of the confessor; etc.  In particular, it resembles Craig Thomspon's Blankets and Art Spiegelman's Maus in that its focus is on the narrator's relationship with someone particular; however, unlike Thompson's relationship with God or Spiegelman's with his father, Vladek, Bechdel's interested in a fundamental reconcilation with her closeted father.  

I'm not claiming that Spiegelman was uninterested in understanding his father better, only that his attempt was doomed to failure because the unknowable horror of the Holocaust made it impossible for him to either share that experience or even understand the gravity of its effects on his father, e.g. these non-consecutive panels from "And Here My Troubles Began":  

There is something non-universal about the way in which the Holocaust altered Vladek Spiegelman, and as much as Art attempts to divine the particular from the universal or vice versa, he never succeeds.  The nightmare of history is such that his father's story can only ever be that: his father's story.  The same doesn't logic doesn't hold for Bechdel's Fun Home, not only because the horrors of discovering you're gay aren't comparable to finding yourself in Aushwitz, but because Bechdel's lament is that her father, Bruce, didn't live long enough to experience life outside the closet.  It's no coincidence that Bechdel has "a hallucinogenic memory" of accompanying her closeted father to retreive her mother from the city:

The irony of this memory occupying an hallucinogenic space "a few weeks since the Stonewall Riots" in Bechdel's memory should be obvious.  I'm not saying she's lying or even misremembering, only that she's making history meaningful in a way that's similar to what Vladek performed on the first-order and Art did on the second.  The difference between her performance and Art's is that she's doing so in order to make sense of his life in a way Art could never duplicate.  

Again, not faulting anyone for anything here, merely acknowledging what Art himself does above: the inability to understand, however tenuously vicariously, someone else's experience will prevent you from ever sympathizing with or being able to offer anything but sympathy to this other person.  That's not the case in Fun Home, which is less concerned with communicating the attempt to reach an inreconciable understanding than the act of coming to an understanding you can live with.

Put in the starkest possible terms: Art fails to understand Vladek because he can't comprehend the Holocaust, whereas Bechdel tries to understand herself through her father's life and succeeds because the attempt is a thing in itself, e.g. the book's Proustian returns to Proust:

Fun Home reifies memory via narrative, but it does so in a way that reminds readers that human beings aren't made of words.  Granted, the above panel is about as word-specific as word-picture relations come, but in a graphic novel it's panels like this one that are intruding on the conventions of the medium.  People typically think of their memories as feelings and images punctuated by what others said, but outside of graphic novels the only means of communicating them without recourse to someone else's interpretation of them is through words.  This difference is figured in the book as the relation between Gatsby in the novel and Redford's portrayal of him onscreen: the former remains closer to Fitzgerald's vision of him because there's no other mind translating, via performance, Gatsby for the audience.

Dave Sim's relationship to literary modernism and Dear Lord whose prose is that?

I'm revising the paper for the Cerebus collection I mentioned earlier and, to be frank, I'm not sure I recognize myself.  Too much blogging and writing a pedagogy book instead of revising the dissertation must do that, I suppose, because this doesn't even sound like me:

Linking Sim to Pound by reference to their similarly developing relationship to form and to Joyce by their analogous material circumstances may seem like an attempt to shoehorn Sim into a canon in which he does not properly belong.  However, Sim's inclusion and ventriloquism of another notable Irish modernist, Oscar Wilde, in Jaka's Story requires at the very least that the book be considered an homage to, or possibly a parody of, Wilde's high modern aesthetic.  Whether the book partakes of that high modern aesthetic depends upon an estimation of the success of the ventriloquism, but even if it is unsuccessful, the inclusion alone is enough to warrant numbering Sim among academic modernists like Pound and Joyce.  Because there exist as many definitions of “modernism” as scholars of it, for the purposes of the current argument—not to mention general relevance—these competing modernisms will be defined specifically by the attitude they strike to history.  In this respect, the high modernism of Wilde can be characterized by its rejection of mimesis and the attendant distancing from history that that rejection entails, whereas the academic modernism of Joyce and Pound seeks to, as the latter urged, “make it new,” with the “it” in question being the nightmare of history from which the former struggled to awake. 

That Sim lifts Wilde from history and employs him as a narrator in Jaka's Story is not merely an irony seemingly designed to irritate the author of The Decay of Lying, but in “making Wilde new,” Sim demonstrates a formal and aesthetic solidarity with the academic modernists.  The highest irony of Wilde operating as a narrator is that he is not narrating Sim's book, Jaka's Story, but one that exists within Sim's titled Daughter of Palnu—meaning, in short, that not only does Sim's imitation of Wilde violate the principles of high modernism, but he employs the imitation to write a book which itself violates the principles of high modernism by relating the actual story of an exiled princess named Jaka.  The word “actual” is not meant to imply that Daughter of Palnu is factually accurate, merely that because her story is related to Oscar by her husband, Rick, no matter how fantastically Oscar embellished the novel would still be one in which, to paraphrase Wilde in The Decay of Lying, art would be imitating life.

I feel like, I maybe need, a few more, commas.  Also, this is, or may be, my most boring, post ever. 

Establishing the tone of AMC's The Walking Dead

The first few minutes of the first episode of AMC's The Walking Dead need to establish the tone of the entire series, but they need to do so without boring the audience.  Given that the comic on which it's based alternates between menacingly quiet moments and long stretches of extreme chattiness, it may be a mistake to think about the tone in a singular fashion; however, the fact that these two tonal elements could be characterized as "opposites" means that the opening scene of the series will have to choose one or the other.  Director Frank Darabont not only decided on quiet menace, he emphasized the future significance of silence by turning down the diagetic sound and eschewing non-diagetic sound entirely.  The result?  The series introduces itself to the world with a unusually quiet establishing shot of a car approaching the camera on a deserted road:

As the car nears, the camera tracks it and Darabont uses the resulting tracking shot to create the impression that the person behind the camera is hiding behind the car.  The camera pulls back until the burnt wreck in the foreground nearly obscures the patrol car, only to pan right at the conclusion of the long take and reveal that its "hiding place" has been compromised.  In short, the camera seems to be hiding from the patrol car, which strongly suggests to the audience that there's something to hide from and that it may be in that patrol car.  As if to emphasize that potential danger in the car, Darabont moves the camera-spy-without-a-hiding-place further away from the patrol car before cutting away:

Even after the cut away, the camera still behaves as if the mind behind it wants to remain hidden while scoping out a better hiding place.  It begins behind and to the right of the burnt wreck and tracks to the back and to the left as Rick Grimes moves toward it.  The resulting shot keeps Rick occupying the center of a long shot until the camera knows he can be trusted:

On teaching racially fraught literature in racially diverse classrooms (American Born Chinese)

The two problems that confront any author attempting to write a confessional comic are likely best summarized in these two sequences from Art Spieglman's Maus:

In short: how are painful memories and painfully stereotypical people best represented in a medium associated with childishness?  I'll discuss Spiegelman's answer to this question in more detail when I teach Maus in a few weeks.  For now, it is enough to pose it and identify it as a critical problem faced by all non-white authors, including that of American Born Chinese, Gene Yang.  Unlike Maus, in which an already assimilated Art Spiegelman is depicting his decidedly unassimilated father, American Born Chinese is very much concerned with the process of assimilation: what is gained, what is lost, etc.  For example:

"I put a zombie in his head? I can put zombies in people's heads?"

Such was the reaction of my students after I informed them of their murdering ways and asked them to tell me what happens in the gutter between the first two panels. 

Needless to say, teaching The Walking Dead will be directly responsible for me hearing countless things I never thought I'd hear in a classroom.