Heroism

Wednesday, 22 February 2012

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 7/09/13)

Visual rhetoric scott eric kaufman
Films:

Television Shows:

Comics:

 Themes:

Feb 22, 2012 3:18:24 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Alison Bechdel, Batman, Batman Begins, Breaking Bad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Christopher Nolan, Comics, Daniel Clowes, Doctor Who, Film, Film Theory, Game of Thrones, Grant Morrison, Heroism, Literary Theory, Literature, Mad Men, Science Fiction, Scott McCloud, Teaching, The Dark Knight, Visual Rhetoric

Tuesday, 07 February 2012

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 ...)

Feb 7, 2012 4:29:45 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Alison Bechdel, American Born Chinese, Avatar, Batman, Batman Begins, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Chris Ware, Christopher Nolan, Comics, Daniel Clowes, Doctor Who, Douglas Wolk, Film, Film Theory, Gene Yang, Grant Morrison, Heroism, Historicism, History, Joss Whedon, Leverage, Literary Theory, Literature, Mad Men, Reading Comics, Robert Kirkman, Scott McCloud, Teaching, The Walking Dead, Visual Rhetoric, Watchmen

Sunday, 27 March 2011

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:

Batman year one
Compared to Mazzucchelli in Asterios Polyp:

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.

Mar 27, 2011 7:03:29 PM | Alan Moore, Books, Comics, Doctor Who, Film, Film Theory, Heroism, Historicism, Literature, Scott McCloud, Teaching, Visual Rhetoric

Monday, 08 February 2010

Paris Hilton : Bruce Wayne :: Roosevelt : The Bat-Man

Timothy Burke's post on how characters who originated during a particular cultural moment in the first half of the Twentieth Century are incapable of escaping it is compelling:

Batman (and most other comic-book and pulp characters from the time of his original appearance) draws a lot of his basic storytelling and setting from a moment when middle-class and working-class Americans were enmeshed in a complex national encounter with crime, law enforcement, corruption and Prohibition: a helpless frustration that the state couldn’t control organized violence and illegal commerce combined with a thrill at the lurid spectacle of gangster criminality and in more than a few cases, direct participation in an illicit economy of leisure that exposed the ludicrousness of middle-class respectability. One of the commenters on the Varney article very incisively observes that the result is that the Batman character is forever trapped fighting “Italian-American gangsters in pinstripe suits and crazy circus folk.”

However, drawing on expertise I can't legitimately claim, I think it's wrong. "The Bat-Man" (as he was then called) first appeared in Detective Comics 27, published in May of 1939, six years after Prohibition had been repealed, but two years before military mobilization would help the American economy recover the losses of the Recession of 1937.  The economic situation was bleak, but the violence associated with Prohibition had so abated that even Dick Tracy was being re-purposed to fight threats abroad.  The pulp aesthetic still appealed to the popular imagination, but its villains had become more myth than menace, which is why I would argue the appeal of Bruce Wayne in 1939 had more to do with the "helpless frustration" created by the depressed economic climate.  Wayne is, after all, introduced to the reader as that most pointless and contemptible of people:

Batman_socialite
He may be the dullest socialite ever, hanging out with Commissioner Gordon deep into the night, but he still represents the only upper-class figure commonly reviled by anyone with any political affiliation: the idle rich. Even the feigned ennui in these panels is designed to play upon a deep annoyance with people who have no cares and care about nothing:

Batman_oh_well
Batman_ho_hum

Did the Bat-Man become a popular character because the largely middle-class children who read comics wanted to see a wealthy man beat up, down, and upon common criminals?  Not really.  I don't think we can underestimate the potential appeal of believing that the Paris Hiltons of the Great Depression secretly deserved the air they breathed.  Roosevelt's popularity was due, in part, to the image of him as a patrician who cared.  He could have weathered the Depression on the strength of his family's fortune, but he believed in social responsibility (or so the story went).  The socialite-as-secret-hero narrative almost reads like a deliberate attempt to cure a literary-naturalist hangover: the robber barons and their idle children had been savaged for the better part of three decades, but with the Roosevelt's rise to national prominence, a new mode for what had become an archetypal villain became possible. 

But something would have to motivate this rehabilitation, and in this case, that something was the scion of one set of villains being victimized by the figure of another: for these models to pass into history, they would have to be dispatched.  So while Bruce Wayne's parents were shot by a gangster, we first learn of that in a brief flashback in Detective Comics 33, an issue in which the majority of the story concerns the Bat-Man destroying a laser-armed "Dirigible of Doom" that killed thousands of New Yorkers (i.e. one stock villain guns down another in order to cultivate narrative space for weaponized blimps).  Five issues later, the Bat-Man acquires a Boy Wonder and begins his long descent into Adam West. The dark, brooding figure from the early issues would not return until Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams took over Detective Comics in January of 1970, so it seems strange to ascribe, as Timothy does, the 30 years of popularity enjoyed by the character's camp incarnation to "the lurid spectacle of gangster criminality."

In fact, the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne are, for long stretches, the only lurid spectacles associated with the character; but they are, I would argue, the enduring source of his appeal.  Every time the franchise enters the doldrums, Thomas and Martha are dug up and shot down again, because their deaths are the Greek tragedy responsible for the character's malleability.  Although we speak of the character in the singular, as Warren Ellis demonstrated via Planetary in 2000, doing so makes little sense.  The only thing all these characters have in common is a pair of dead parents; other than that, each iteration is retrofitted to suit the particular needs of a particular historical context.

All of which is only to say that while the criminals he fights may still look like gangsters, they only do so superficially.  As to Timothy's larger point:

So where is our contemporary Batman or Shadow or Doc Savage or Dick Tracy to counter Dennis Kozlowski, Kenneth Lay, or Joseph Cassano, our 21st Century Prunefaces and Jokers, a character born not from the trauma of a street crime mugging but of a family or town destroyed by unaccountable individuals and institutions? It’s time for a new cycle of mythmaking even as we continue to enjoy the recycling of old ones.
I think someone really needs to start watching Leverage.
Feb 8, 2010 11:37:23 AM | Comics, Heroism, Historicism, Literature, Teaching, Television, The Dark Knight

Friday, 17 April 2009

How to teach the interrelatedness of historical context and audience via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth

Someone emailed to ask how it is I teach historical context via a single comic.  The book in question: Warren Ellis's one-shot cross-over between the Wildstorm imprint Planetary and the DC franchise that is the Batman.  Ellis created the book as a means of investigating the enduring popularity of the superhero genre.  Over the course of thirty-odd issues his team of quasi-cultural anthropologists tore through the history of the 20th Century in an attempt to answer that deceptively simple question: Why have impossible people in tights mattered so much for so long? 

Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth (2003) opens by jiggering that old comic standby: the multiverse.  An incidental murderer named John Black has been having seizures, and every time he seizes, a blue dome extends from his body and shifts him and everyone else from one dimension to another.  The dome looks like this:

Batman00 

The people who shift from a point in their dimension to an already-occupied point in another end up like this:

Toomanypeople

Not a pleasant way to die.  So the Planetary team is called in to investigate.  They learn that Black's fingerprints were recently found outside a soup kitchen and go to investigate.  They corner him in an alley when:

Continue reading "How to teach the interrelatedness of historical context and audience via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth" »

Apr 17, 2009 8:37:01 PM | Books, Comics, Heroism, Historicism, Teaching, Television, The Dark Knight

Thursday, 09 April 2009

A scene analysis of the 9/11 analogue in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns

Being the fourth in a series.  Earlier installments can be found here:

If it seems like there's a lot of narrative sans analysis in there, that's because there is.  One assignment for Tuesday is that the students need to select one of the frames I didn't analyze and describe its formal properties (framing, lighting, &c.).  (The moments when I narrate the plot are likely the most compelling for those not interested in Film Theory 101 because I wrote them plenty funny.)  Unlike my earlier posts I skipped a lot of frames.  Why?  Because director Bryan Singer is a loon whose camera only stops panning once in this entire sequence and there are only so many hours in the day/seconds in your attention span. 

We begin with a computer simulation of what's supposed to happen:

Vlcsnap-3418891 

Singer provides a template his audience can refer to.  (Note that in the simulation the camera is above the plane.  This will be important.)  He pulls the camera back into a close-up on the nice stewardess lady who's explaining in her nice-stewardess-lady voice what's happening in the simulation:

Vlcsnap-3418945 

This would be a good time to mention that Singer films this scene like the obsessive former film student he is.  The camera never stops moving.  Never.  The only reason this close-up doesn't become a medium close-up is because he cuts to Lois Lane asking a question.  At this point the camera glides slowly and fluidly—not unlike the plane on the simulation—creating a sense of constant motion without any excitement.  Then he cuts to Lois with a workmanlike reverse shot:

Vlcsnap-3418980 

But it's an odd reverse shot.  Lois meets the stewardess's eye but there's no eyeline match because the stewardess responds to everyone on the plane:

Vlcsnap-3418984 

Because viewers expect eyeline matches in shot/reverse shot sequences, the stewardess's response feels like a snub.  Singer violates convention in order to evoke an emotional response from the audience and does so with great efficiency: he doesn't need for Lois to look snubbed or say she feels snubbed because the editing took care of that for him.  He then reverse cuts back to Lois:

Vlcsnap-3419017 

Who never appears to break eye contact with the stewardess.  Keeping the one-sided match makes Lois seem determined.  With his next cut he reveals something we had no reason to suspect: that this shot sequence has a source in the scene itself.

Vlcsnap-3419050 

This has a mildly unsettling effect.  Singer tells the audience that he's willing to withhold critical information.  What we see may be focalizing through the needs of a particular character (the network cameraman) or those of the director (Singer himself) or both.  I say "both" because Singer immediately cuts to a point of view shot from the cameraman's perspective as he whip pans from Lois to the stewardess:

Continue reading "A scene analysis of the 9/11 analogue in Bryan Singer's Superman Returns" »

Apr 9, 2009 5:56:36 PM | Academia, Comics, Current Affairs, Film, Heroism, Politics, Teaching

Monday, 30 March 2009

I give you permission to indulge in your basest voyeuristic urges...

. . . but only if you promise not to comment on my shiny new course blog.  I'm experimenting this quarter with placing all my lesson plans online before I teach and requiring my students comment on them the night before class.  My thinking is that all my classes will traffic in reinforcement instead of introduction.  This idea could be genius and lead to more rigorous and intellectually stimulating classroom discussions . . . or it could make for painful dull classes in which I reiterate what they've already read.  I'll keep you posted. 

Mar 30, 2009 10:21:13 PM | Academia, Alan Moore, Comics, Heroism, Teaching, The Dark Knight, Watchmen

Wednesday, 10 October 2007

The Key to Literary Theory: Don't be an Asshole

Since this comment's been linked to a few times, I thought I'd lift it from the thread and score a cheap post.  The context:

I turned in the paper savaged in yesterday's post.  It came back with comments to the effect of:

I'm giving you an "A," but come talk to me. You don't want to become an asshole. 

But There Is Danger. 

Office hours Monday. Please attend. Don't, and for certain, you'll become an asshole.

I showed up on Monday morning to receive my dressing-down.  Went something like this:

You like theory, and that's awesome. I wish more kids were enthusiastic. BUT—and this is an ALL-CAPS, BOLDED "BUT"—there are different ways to approach theoretical problems. I'll charitably define yours as an "entitled imperialism," because you believe that reading a tiny excerpt of a three-part philosophical masterpiece entitles you to lay waste to Kant's entire project. You can't do that. Only assholes can. Hence, The Danger. You have to take writers seriously, study them, the commentary on them, and then—and ONLY then—should you assert yourself as you did in this paper.

Only it took an hour to deliver, and was peppered with detailed examples from secondary literature on Kant to show me what engaged critique actually looks like.  I left the office in tears, but with a firm idea of what solid theoretical critique looked like.  If only it hadn't taken three years for me to produce any ... but that's another story.

(Also, if you haven't read the comments on that last post, you've missed out on J.S. Nelson's maudlin tale of intellectual un-discovery and Human's inspiring story of Kant, conversion, and sexual discovery ... and are the worse for it.)

Oct 10, 2007 5:06:18 PM | Academia, Heroism, Literary Theory, Literature, Louisiana, Philosophy, Teaching

Wednesday, 04 July 2007

Cute Bunny Saved by Quick-Thinking Graduate Student: A CV-able Moment

On the way home from the liquor store—Albertsons' is inexplicably closed, so it's Ed McMahon's Perfection and a Giant Slim Jim for dinner tonight—I heard the unmistakable sounds of a scrum in the bushes to my left.  Peering over the flowering hedge, I saw a snake cornering a bunny in the gutter.  I brandished Ed McMahon to no effect.  I chunked a Giant Slim Jim.  Snake and bunny remained locked in a diaromic display of Nature's red teeth and claws.  I had no choice.  No bunny dies on my watch.  I grabbed a stick and entered the fray. 

The snake slithered away.  The bunny scuttled, stopped, turned to me almost appreciatively, then scooted away.  As I stood gasping against Blockbuster's faux-stucco exterior, I had a Rashomon-moment:

My sympathies had been with the bunny from the first.  I never even considered the possibility that the bunny had been the aggressor.  An inveterate squamataphobe, I couldn't be bothered to give the snake the slightest benefit of the doubt.  He could've been slithering along, minding his own snake-business when Peter "The Scale-Snapper" Cottontail came bounding out the bushes, murder on his mind.  Maybe I missed the gang of feral rabbits hunkered in the brush, eagerly awaiting the signal to strike.  Then I remembered:

I intervened.  Presided over a motherfucking intervention.  Right or wrong, it matters not: I did my academic duty. 

Jul 4, 2007 10:11:01 PM | Academia, Heroism

Scott Eric Kaufman

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