Order of the Kick
Posted: February 21, 2012 Filed under: Geek, Intellectual Property, Internets | Tags: comics, DO SOMETHING STRANGE FOR A LIL PIECE OF CHANGE, James Franco seducing himself for some reason, Kickstarter, Order of the Stick, Rich Burlew Leave a comment »I promise we’ll resume our discussion of mental illness in popular music soon enough. But before that, I want to talk about some a remarkable development that occurred last week in the realm of crowd-sourced funding.
Kickstarter’s been in the news quite a bit lately. Just last week, Forbes magazine reported that two major projects both passed the $1 million mark in donations. But I’m not here to talk about the Double Fine Adventure, an initiative by the creators of the head-tripping Xbox cult hit Psychonauts to fund their next adventure game outside the constraints of the game industry. Nor to talk about the Elevation Dock, an iPod doohickey that I guess people liked because it raised almost twice its 75K goal. Nor even Fucking James Franco, an successful endeavor by Portland’s Social Malpractice Publishing to archive the finest Franco-related erotica (now yours for $15.00 plus shipping and handling!).
Is erotic celebrity fan fiction less creepy when written ironically by hipsters? Or does that somehow make it creepier?
No. Let’s talk about Order of the Stick.
Order of the Stick is a popular webcomic by writer-artist Richard Burlew, currently squeaking in just over $1.2 million in the final hours of its Kickstarter reprint drive. Order of the Stick is a parody strip, gently poking fun at the conventions of Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing games over the course of an epic adventure. No understand: while the Venn diagram of “stuff Fletcher likes” and “stuff geeks like” has a very very large overlap, Dungeons and Dragons is one of the few items (along with Dr. Who and Final Fantasy VII) to land squarely in the right-most circle. But despite unfamiliarity with the source material I read through the archives of Order of the Stick a few years back, and liked it a lot. Mind, only one out of five jokes lands the way it’s supposed to, and a few of the apparent fan-favorite characters are hair-pullingly irritating. But the story also works as a light-hearted fantasy adventure that manages occasional gravity and pathos despite its simplistic art. There’s also a really impressive siege storyline that juggles twice as many characters as The Two Towers without sacrificing clarity, scope, or impact; it’s a must-read if you’re interested in graphic or serialized storytelling.
But I’m not writing this to recommend Order of the Stick.
I’m writing this because Order of the Stick, an amusing but crudely illustrated stick-figure Dungeons and Dragons parody, made over a MILLION FUCKING DOLLARS BY FUCKING ASKING NICELY FOR IT.
THIS IS A BIG FUCKING DEAL.
There are a couple of lessons to be learned from this:
1) Geeks are passionate, and, like Ludacris, will express their passion with their wallets. Someone apparently spent $5,000 to have his personal RPG character featured in an upcoming strip. With our money, perhaps, we love not wisely but too well.
2) Order of the Stick is a work that would have absolutely no chance whatsoever of even being published before the dawn of the internet age. What would the venue for a work like this have been? A back-page feature for a biannual D and D fanzine? A photocopied pamphlet on the counter of your comics shop? Thanks to the internet, artists like Burlew can publish, find an audience, and eventually profit from their highly idiosyncratic work. This is great news for the artist, and for society, which can only profit from a wider variety of creative output outside the purview of the entertainment industry.
3) In defiance of the frenzied lobbying of the music and film industries, Burlew made this really impressive amount of money despite the vast majority of his opus being available to everyone, for free, over the internet. You can make money without draconian copyright legislation. Scarce goods like books and custom sketches, donor perks, interaction with an engaged audience: these are all ways, apparently, to make not just money but a shit-ton of money, even when your product is being distributed for free over the entire net.
So in the end, I think the success of The Order of the Stick is great news for the future of the arts. It points to the viability of a new model of producing and distributing content, removed from intellectual property law and the entertainment industry. Congratulations to Burlew, and to his audience for making this happen.
Occupy Sin City
Posted: November 14, 2011 Filed under: Geek, Politics | Tags: comics, Creative Patricide, Frank Miller, Holy Terror, Occupy Wall Street, This Blog Is An Opperating Table and I'm the Surgeon 1 Comment »It’s a COLD PHILADELPHIA NIGHT. There’s a cold wind, a WINTER wind, while I’m walking home from the UPENN BOOKSTORE. There’s a bum on the street and I give him two bucks because I’m a SOFT SON OF A BITCH.
I like COMICS. I like READING comics. Good stuff, cheap paper on your fingers like autumn leaves. I like comics, and damned if I don’t like FRANK MILLER. Daredevil. Sin City. Grumpy incontinent Batman. All GOOD STUFF. Without Frank we would not have the 300 drinking game (DRINK EVERY TIME A PERSIAN DIES) and the world would be a DULLER, more SOBER place.
He’s also got a REAL DISTINCTIVE NARRATIVE VOICE, and WRITING in a PASTICHE of his STYLE is FUN. REAL FUN.
But Frank got OLD. Got WRINKLY. Started dressing up like HIS OWN CHARACTERS in public, or maybe designed characters that dressed like HIM. Made Clive Owen dress in black spats with red Converse, so maybe people might confuse the two of them. That’s SLOPPY, Frank. Real sloppy.
Sloppy like HOLY TERROR, a recent ORIGINAL GRAPHIC NOVEL that’s mostly BATMAN FAN FICTION. POORLY DISGUISED Batman fanfiction. See, Frank had a pretty LOUSY day about ten years ago. A pretty lousy day called NINE ELEVEN. So he started a graphic novel called “Holy Terror, Batman” where BATMAN PUNCHES NINE ELEVEN in the FACE. Frank doesn’t like BROWN PEOPLE who kill WHITE PEOPLE, but Frank is apparently okay with WHITE PEOPLE who kill BROWN PEOPLE. Turns out the GODDAMN SUITS at DC COMICS didn’t take too kindly to that. So we got Holy Terror, Batman, minus the goddamn Batman.
Frank says Batman didn’t work in the story anyway and he’s got a DAMN GOOD argument, which you can see with this video from our pals at NEWSARAMA:
“Batman fights the JOKER, Batman fights the RIDDLER. Batman fights much more containable enemies than AL-QUEDA.”
Note the RED CHUCKS. Also, Frank keeps pausing. Real PORTENTOUS. OMINOUS. Like he doesn’t have to say this stuff because he knows we already agree with him, like even the specter of 9/11 is enough to send a chill through your spine. The MONEY QUOTE is at 4:54 for anyone interested:
“I can tell you SQUAT about Islam. I DUNNO anything about it. But I know a GODDAMN LOT about al-Queda and I want them all to BURN IN HELL.”
LISTEN to how he says it: “god-damn-lot.” He sounds like your GRANPA, at your grandmother’s funeral, raging at the CANCER or the STROKE or WHATEVER GODDAMN THING took the sorry old broad’s life. And you can’t get too MAD at him. He’s OLD. He’s HURT. He’s SCARED.
Like I said. I’mma SOFT SON OF A BITCH.
But I’d like to EXAMINE a FLAW in Frank’s ARGUMENT: Al-Queda’s too big for Batman, sure, but they’re also too big for a guy in a BROWN BATMAN SUIT who is TOTALLY NOT BATMAN, YOU GUYS. And that coulda been that, except Frank had to say his piece about OCCUPY WALL STREET, and here’s a damn SPOILER ALERT: it doesn’t make much sense.
Everybody’s been TOO DAMN POLITE about this NONSENSE:
The “Occupy” movement, whether displaying itself on Wall Street or in the streets of Oakland (which has, with UNSPEAKABLE COWARDICE, embraced it) is anything but an exercise of our blessed First Amendment. “Occupy” is nothing but a pack of LOUTS, THIEVES, and RAPISTS, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These CLOWNS can do nothing but HARM America.
The one who KILLED MY PARENTS: I was naive enough to believe he was the LOWEST sort of man.
THESE– these are his CHILDREN, a PURER breed…
…and the world is THEIRS.
I mighta added the LAST PART. Also the CAPS LOCK.
Frank keeps going, because OF COURSE he does:
Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy.
Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.
And this enemy of mine — not of yours, apparently – must be getting a dark chuckle, if not an outright horselaugh – out of your vain, childish, self-destructive spectacle.
In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas’ basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft.
Or better yet, enlist for the real thing. Maybe our military could whip some of you into shape.
I’ve got a few goddamn OBSERVATIONS:
ONE: I’m not sure ISLAMICISM is even a GODDAMN WORD.
TWO: The threat posed by RADICAL GODDAMN ISLAM doesn’t NEGATE all of the major SOCIAL PROBLEMS that persist here in the US, which been OVERLOOKED by our GODDAMN LEADERS in favor of the INCENDIARY and INCREASINGLY QUIXOTIC WAR ON GODDAMN TERROR.
THREE: The protesters are doing THE EXACT SAME GODDAMN THING you are doing, except instead of writing a GODDAMN FUNNYBOOK they are freezing their GODDAMN ASSES OFF in the COLD and the GRIME of the gutters of this STINKING GODDAMN CITY where RICH MEN write the laws and the COMMON MAN lives in FEAR, lives in AGONY, can’t make a GODDAMN LIVING.
FOUR: GODDAMN goddamnit goddamn DAMN damn DAMNITY goddamn GODAMN DAMNIT.
Thank you for reading. The preceding was the second in a series of posts in which Fletcher tears down the comic book writers he idolized through his troubled adolescence in an act of creative patricide. Our next instalment is TBA: Please watch this space for when Grant Morrison or Neil Gaiman inevitably descend into ideologically incoherent senility, provoking further outrage.
Living in Arkham Asylum
Posted: September 21, 2011 Filed under: Geek, Mental health | Tags: Batman, comics, DC Comics, mental illness, OCD Leave a comment »When you start to conceptualize the mentally ill as a minority group, strange things begin to happen in popular culture, and previously acceptable entertainments become kind of abominable. Consider, for example, this NYTimes takedown of DC Comics.
Understand: I love Batman. Batman is one of my favorite things. But consider this summary:
“In a fantastic urban dystopia, masked Anglo-Saxon billionaire anonymously beats the crap out of the mentally ill.”
Replace “the mentally ill” with “African-Americans” or “Jews” or “gay people” and that starts to sound pretty goddamn problematic, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t help that Batman’s “insane” antagonists (Joker, Two-Face, the Riddler) fit a very particular comic book stereotype of mental illness. Generally speaking, mental illness does not cause you to become a criminal genius clown anarchist with a distressingly attractive girlfriend:
Short hipster girls with severe personality disorders: you are my personal Kryptonite.
Mental illness makes you count things, or want to die, or shit yourself. Once you accept that psychological problems are a real thing, that cause real people to suffer terribly, then portraying the afflicted as malevolent clowns or scar-faced vigilantes or sexy nurses becomes remarkably callous.
You can’t even get really mad at this kind of insensitivity: it’s so frivolous, and so deeply ingrained in our culture, that whining about it is useless. Try telling someone, next time you hear them use the word “crazy,” that they shouldn’t do so because it’s disrespectful to the mentally ill. See what kind of response you get. All you can do is point it out when a particularly painful example occurs, and do your best to educate people.
To conclude, here’s a wonderful piece of fan art depicting the Batman himself as suffering from your favorite psychological ailment and mine, OCD:
By Ulises Farinas.
A Compendium of Extraordinary Literary Analysis
Posted: August 19, 2011 Filed under: Geek, Popcult | Tags: Alan Moore, comics, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1969 Leave a comment »I’ve gotten some search engine love for the post I did a few weeks ago on my disappointment with Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1969. So I thought it would be worth posting a link to some really excellent analysis of the book, courtesy of your pals and mine at The Mindless Ones:
http://mindlessones.com/tag/league-of-extraordinary-gentlemen-century-1969/
I chime in at the bottom of parts III and IV, at some length. If anything it’s an excellent reminder that, while I might dislike the book as a reader, there’s still plenty of interesting material in there worth looking at. Next time I get worked up about a book like this, I know what I need to do.
What he said. Thanks, 1960s LSD rapist Voldemort!
Alan Moore May, In Fact, No Longer Know the Score
Posted: August 1, 2011 Filed under: Geek, Internets, Popcult | Tags: Alan Moore, comics, Creative Patricide, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1969 4 Comments »As authors get older they run the risk of getting stale: I suggested this to my doc in session a few weeks ago and his response was “I will never read another fuckin’ John Irving book as long as I live.” Science fiction writers face a similar decline, regardless of age; I blame the loss the self-expressive element that made the fiction compelling, replaced by a viral need to expand the narrative as much as possible. So pity the aging genre author, twice afflicted, his art quarantined from the rest of the species by double incubators of age and irrelevance. And pity Alan Moore.
A little background, for those of you who live charmed in the mainstream, unaware of the bleak parallel dimension that is Earth-Geek. Alan Moore is a writer of comic books, best known for the flawed cinematic adaptations of his work that they keep making for some goddamn reason: Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, From Hell, Constantine. The crown jewel of Moore’s opus is Watchmen, a superhero “deconstruction” and one of the best-reviewed and best-selling comics of all time. Moore’s recent work includes Lost Girls, a weighty-in-the-physical-sense three volume hardcover collection of Victorian erotica pastiche, featuring Alice of Wonderland and Dorothy of Oz getting’ lezzy up on each other[1]; and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
The original League was a g-whiz penny-dreadful that applied the Justice League superhero team-up model to the public-domain heroes of yesterday. Mr. Hyde and Captain Nemo team up to fight Fu-Manchu. A sequel followed, featuring Dr. Moreau’s genetic atrocities against the Martians from War of the Worlds, and then a second and a third; each more expansive, assimilating larger and larger chunks of literary history. Each has further indulged the Wikipedian urge to catalogue, to construct a timeline expansive enough ton encompass all of fiction. We are now at the fifth “graphic novel,” which takes place in the 1960s, and includes Voldemort rape.
And if you’re one of the 90% of my tiny little readership that is blessedly unaware of online fandom, you probably just thought “wow, those are two words I never expected to see in sequence, and now that I have I’m not sure my life is enriched.” I spend depressing and unhealthy amounts of time staring into this horrible internet box, and I took “Fandom Studies” in college. And more than anything else, I am reminded of online fan fiction, reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1969. A sweaty prep school Moore, his legendary beard scarcely thick enough to conceal his acne; lurched over his laptop in an airless dormitory and keeping his terrified roommate awake with the sound of hunt-and-peck typing and heavy breathing.
“Voldemort rape,” as it were, is crucial to Moore’s brand. Watchmen was about how superheroes would, in the real world, be fascist and sexually dysfunctional and generally unpleasant . Supreme, Miracleman, Promethea, Tom Strong, the aforementioned Lost Girls: all of these books drew upon older characters and stories, either to poke gentle metatextual fun or to gleefully, fetishistically piss on them.
Let’s listen to the magus himself:
“The major subtext of Century is right there in the name: We are looking at 100 years in the continuity in our world of fiction. We’re not looking at the real world, but rather our dreams, what was on our minds during those periods. Which is an interestingly close reflection of real events, at least as Kevin and I are pitching it.
And I think that one of the things that is going to be most noticeable, when all three chapters can be continuously read straight through, is the extraordinary impact of change upon our fictional world, and by extension the real world that produces those fictions.
You can most noticeably see … well, I want to be careful how I phrase this, because I don’t want to be needlessly critical of all modern culture. But in terms of its flamboyance, its freedom, its expressiveness, it’s difficult not to note a decline.
I keep rereading this, trying to give Mr. Moore the benefit of the doubt, but I cannot construct an interpretation of these words in sequence that makes sense. Is he claiming that contemporary popular fiction isn’t as good as it was 100 years ago? Because that is idiotic. Most stuff today is trash, but most fiction produced in the 1890s was trash as well, only the passage of time has preserved the best while the Twilights and I am Number Fours of the era have been forgotten. Is he claiming that our fiction is inferior now because our civilization is declining? This is delusional. As Moore gleefully demonstrated in earlier volumes of League, Alan Quartermain was an imperialist and the Invisible Man a rapist. If you nostalgize the Victorian era you advocate for dysentery, stepping in feces, and racism.
There’s a very brief flash-forward to the 2009 of Moore’s League, and it’s a rain-soaked totalitarian nightmare patrolled by jackbooted thugs. Is there anywhere, in the UK or America, that looks like that right now? I read that panel and I see the incoherent anti-government fantasies of the fringe conservative movement. Is Moore a Tea Partier? Will the 2009 League team of with a fictional analogue of Sarah Palin (perhaps a grown-up Tracy Flick from Election) to fight universal health care?[2]
And it must be said: if you want to criticize the culture of the 1960s, using the fiction of the 1960s, why is a college-age Lord Voldemort (published in 1999) sexually assaulting Mina Harker (from Stoker’s Dracula, 1897)? What metafictional argument is being presented here? Is he criticizing Rowling? Stoker? Making some kind of undergrad-level argument that Potter “raped” Dracula, symbolically, seriously I worked really hard on my essay and I had a lacrosse game that weekend and I don’t feel a C+ reflects this?
Perhaps I am not qualified to comment on 1969, because I’m sure I did not get more than 10% of its allusions. I’m not well read. I play videogames and scour online forums as often as I read fiction; I am a self-loathing member of the hyper-stimulated generation Moore seems to critique. When I read 1969 I skimmed much of it, not because it wasn’t well-written and immaculately illustrated, but because I knew most of the references would neither contribute to the narrative in a meaningful way, nor help illustrate the bleak love generation malaise Moore is trying to depict. They’re just there, a list of things, juxtaposed over an irrelevant narrative. In his twilight years it seems the Magus has become another fucking hipster. He was into it before you. It was all so much better before it went mainstream.
Scan courtesy of the good folks at Comics Alliance.
I am going to be absolutely, embarrassingly earnest here, about literature and creativity: I believe the purpose of art is empathy. I believe that fiction is valuable because it allows us to understand that others may feel the same as we do, that we are not alone; and to recognize the interior life of those we might have dismissed as enemies. (David Foster Wallace has said things to that effect – I may be unconsciously plagiarizing here, or this may be a perfect example of the power of writing to demonstrate shared experience among unrelated individuals.)
Moore is capable of empathy. Watchmen was not great because it pointed out that superheroes are dumb, because no shit Harold fucking Bloom. Watchmen was great because of Dan and Laurie, trying to find purpose in their lives by uselessly repeating the pop-culture of their youth, and because of Walter, vicious and uncompromising and doomed. Miracleman captured the wonder of parenthood and the slow dread of being replaced by a smarter, kinder, and yet frighteningly alien generation. Writing a TVTropes-esque litany of “this character is also this character who had kinky sex with this character” does not create empathy. It is necrophiliac, the arrangement of corpses, like Kanye West in “Monster.”
Art by Frank Quitely, lyric by Kanye West.
There is a liberating feeling, as I write this. There is a thrill to patricide; Moore has been such an influence on me, and countless others of my generation, and countless other writers who influenced us. I look at the dog-eyed shaggy bastard and I am not mad, nor even disappointed. I am hungry, for his prestige and his cultural influence. I welcome you to continue your lament, Mr. Moore, for an era that did not exist. We will be better than you have become.
[1] I have read but do not own Lost Girls, because 1) I am not spending $80 on some hairy Anglo’s wank fantasy and 2) I refuse to purchase a used copy for reasons that should be self-evident.
[2] I usually try really hard to avoid specific political references on this blog, but the similarity of the visions presented by the Tea Party and the pot-smoking, polyamorous Moore was too striking to ignore.
DON’T TREAD ON THIS DONUT
Posted: July 19, 2011 Filed under: Food and Drink, Geek, Intellectual Property, Popcult | Tags: calories, capitalism, Captain America, Chris Evans, comics, consumerism, Dunkin' Donuts, introspection, Marvel 1 Comment »I did my duty for my country today. I am a writer, and despite my absolute lack of qualifications sometimes when I am in the bathtub I like to pretend that I am a journalist (“Stop the presses!” I shout to my rubberduck assistant, and “Bring me pictures of Spider-Man!” because as I understand it these are things that serious journalists frequently shout). And when you are a journalist, sometimes you need to do things for The People, and The Truth, and America. Today I took a bullet: a delicious, sugar-frosted star-shaped 290-calorie bullet. Today I ate the Captain America donut at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Davis Square in Somerville. I ate it not because I was hungry, or because I particularly like donuts, but because it was there and I could not in good conscience neglect to report on it for my audience. Also I didn’t have lunch today and I’m kind of buzzing on sugar and caffeine right now so this post may be a little weird, Christ guys I am sweating so much my arms are bleaching out the finish on the table at the coffeehouse where I am writing about Captain America: The Donut.
Captain America: The Movie is coming out on Friday. It features Chris Evans, Second Evil Ex of Ramona Flowers, as the protagonist. The film takes place the 40s, dude punches some Nazis, this is not a premise that requires extensive explanation. This isn’t X-Men where there’s a complex web of shifting allegiances and ridiculous superpowers. There is a man named Captain America, and he fights Hugo Weaving who is a Nazi without skin on his face, and this is like maybe one tenth of a standard deviation away from Superman in terms of purity of concept.
I think they really missed the ball not releasing the film on July 4th, but that would have required they go toe-to-toe with Transformers 3, and that’s how much of an institution Michael Bay is in our culture, guys: the greasy-haired motherfucker can stare CAPTAIN AMERICA, PUNCHER OF NAZIS down on the Fourth of July and not even blink. But while Cap missed the opportune tie-in date, he has something better. He’s got this monster:
This beast is fiercely American in so many ways I need to enumerate them. We will begin with the straightforward ways and proceed through increasing levels of irony:
1) It is a donut. Americans love donuts.
2) This donut is covered with Stars, Stripes, Frosting, America, etc.
3) It was created in honor of Captain America, a superhero created by Jack “King of Comics” Kirby and Joe Simon, who punched Hitler in the face before it was cool or even socially acceptable (it was a year before Pearl Harbor, Hitler was just this disreputable racist guy we were tangentially aware of, imagine a comic book today where Hellboy or Scott Pilgrim punches Silvio Berlusconi in the face and you’re like “damn, I didn’t even know I wanted to see that guy get punched, but now that I have I am so into it!”).
4) It is also a donut produced by Dunkin’ Donuts, and everyone loves Dunkin Donuts.
5) Furthermore Dunkin Donuts is a major corporation, which is also pretty American according to some political literature I have read.
6) Even better: the donut is the sexy baby of corporate synergy, part of the multimedia campaign to promote like the fiftieth goddamn summer blockbuster this year. The donut based on intellectual property that became wildly profitable without compensating its authors, and that is currently stewarded by subsidiaries of the Disney Corporation seventy years after its original publication.
7) This donut contains HELL OF preservatives, which is how we like our junk food, and in another bit of brilliant synergy many of these ingredients sound like they could be supervillain names: Enzyme, Dextrose, Xanthan Gum, Maltodextrin and Carrageenan. Fatty Acid and the Yeast are in there too and they sound they could be supervillains but goofy supervillains, like from Dr. Horrible or The Venture Brothers. (Fatty Acids could also be a hip-hop group, now that I think about it.)
So this donut is America in so many ways. It is multifaceted, like a gem. I think everyone can get behind this thing. It doesn’t matter if you enjoy it earnestly or ironically or post-ironically because you’re still shoving that sugary donut down your gullet, son. I can’t even quantify my own reaction to this donut, I’d need like a hipster PhD in irony algebra to sort through the complex emotions stirring in my soul, because all I knew was that I saw that sweet treat and every cell in my body was like OM NOM NOM harmoniously.
So I went into Dunkin’ Donuts to ask for it, and let me tell you it’s a bit of a trip to say the words “Captain America” in that sequence outside of a comic shop – I was ready to start discussing Ed Brubaker and Bucky Barnes and the “Fear Itself” crossover right there with the Indian mom-aged cashier lady, just from reflex. The Captain America Donut was a jelly donut which I’m not usually so into, but this object has a tasty ace up its sleeve which is thick frosting, and that made it work for me in a big way. Sadly, my particular Captain America donut only had a single blue star sprinkle, but considering the entire damn thing is just a giant fucking star of donut that’s still a much higher ration of star-derived calories then you find in your everyday American donut.
As you can probably tell, this whole thing was sort of an ordeal for me. There were many complex emotional reactions, and I need some time to sort through them. Also I think I need to eat some actual nutritive food because otherwise I might pass out soon. But it was definitely a unique experience, and one I recommend, if only for the opportunity to reflect on patriotism and consumerism and intellectual property while enjoying a tasty snack. I can state with some certainty that Captain America: The Donut will prove more memorable than Captain America: The Movie.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Mutants
Posted: June 20, 2011 Filed under: Geek, Popcult | Tags: comics, identity politics, X-Men: First Class 2 Comments »- I saw X-Men: First Class last Saturday. I thought it was pretty cool. Definitely better than Thor, almost certainly better than Here Is Ryan Reynolds With Green Pictures From a Computer.
- The remainder of this blog post will consist of equal parts emotionally naked confessional and shameless nerdery. Those who have no interest in seeing my psychology gutted and pinned like a formaldehyde frog should probably leave now.
- I got into X-Men back in high school. It was escapism for me as a teenager, but in a weird and distinctly obsessive-compulsive way. I wanted to learn everything I could about these characters and their world. Oddly enough, I read very few X-Men comics – instead I gorged myself sick on Wikipedia and Comicbookresources.com. So I have a comprehensive knowledge of the characters and their forty year history, I can explain the genealogy of Cyclops and Phoenix’s not one but three alternate future progeny and tons of useless shit like that, but I doubt I’ve read more than a handful of issues out of literally thousands. I’m a poseur, not a scholar but an amateur enthusiast in a subject where that shouldn’t even be possible. So take all of this with a grain of salt, true believers.
- It seems to me that the X-Men’s enduring appeal runs on two big ideas. The first is drama: the creepy delight of peering in on a group of imaginary friends (which I discussed in this post about Community). It’s fun to watch pretty people in silly costumes argue and kiss and save the world.
The second is what academia calls Identification With The Other. The premise of X-Men is that kids are developing superpowers, and are thus hated and feared etc. This gives the writers a chance to indulge all kinds of questionable racial/religious/sexual metaphors, mutants rounded into concentration camps and Iceman’s mom asking “have you tried not being a mutant” and everything.[1] This also gives nerdy whiteboy readers the opportunity to indulge our persecution fantasies without anything as uncomfortable as reading about and identifying with actual racial/religious/ethnic minority characters. We get to take our feelings of alienation and project them onto a team of lovable superpowered misfits. By the law of transitive properties, your teenage geek angst = the plight of the mutant race = the Holocaust, apartheid, Prop 13, etc.
Needless to say, as much as I love the X-Men, this is pretty goddamn problematic.[2] - The X-Men films, created with the involvement of openly gay creators like Bryan Singer and Sir Ian “Goddamn” McKellen, address these issues more openly and honestly. The aforementioned scene where Iceman comes out of the genetic closet to his mutaphobic mom and dad, for example, apparently drew directly from McKellan’s own experiences. That’s great, but I wish the films went a little farther, made the fanboys a little more uncomfortable. Turn the subtext into text. Magneto’s a holocaust survivor – would it have changed too much if he were not only Jewish but gay? Would the scenes of Chuck and Maggie in First Class staring deeply into one another’s eyes and probing each other’s psychic secrets have been less compelling were they not just homoerotic but explicitly romantic?
- On the subject of gender and sexuality I want to talk about Mystique, the bodypainted blue shapeshifter. I don’t think there’s a character that’s benefited more from the transition from page to screen. In the comics[3] she’s a conventional woman-of-mystery type. But her appearance in the film series is probably its single most striking visual. (I remember when X2 came out, the New Yorker called the character “one of the most openly erotic images in popular cinema”, while Newsweek suggest the character be renamed “blue man boobs.” Yes, someone was paid to write that, and it was published in a national periodical. I believe this sentence to be directly responsible for the death of print media and if so it is entirely justified.)
But while she’s sexualized at the same time Mystique is utterly inhuman: the yellow cat eyes, greasy red hair, anatomy obscured by reptilian scales. The effect is, dare-I-say, uncanny. The audience ogles a beautiful naked woman, and then without warning she changes and the male gaze is now fixed on some fat middle-aged guy’s ass. She evokes the fluidity of gender, the problems of “passing” for normal, she’s compelling and uncomfortable in a way I wish the X-Men were more often. - Although it’s been said before, but First Class’ racial politics are pretty much abominable. Actually killing the black guy first is embarrassing: killing the black guy first in a 1960s civil rights allegory, where the black guy’s superpower is that he literally cannot die, is sort of a narrative atrocity. Someone needs to have his laptop confiscated.
- One last point about the mutant allegory: there’s a facet of it that I think hasn’t been explicitly or adequately explored. Given my history, I can’t help but view the franchise through the lens of the struggles of the mentally ill. Now, the comics used infuriating clichés like evil alternate personalities and bump-on-the-head amnesia. But some of the characters speak powerfully to the experience of mental illness. (Briefly: Rogue and Archangel as trauma victims, Cyclops’ anger-directed-inward-style depression, X-23’s borderline autism, Jean Grey’s transformation into Dark Phoenix as addiction and schizophrenia.)
I think that’s part of the reason the X-Men speak to me. From childhood on I understood there was something different about me, something really wrong, and it helped to see such internal differences externalized as heroic superpowers. And I think that’s something everyone can understand: not everyone has a chemical imbalance but many will experience a major depressive episode, and everyone knows how it feels to hurt.
So I guess that’s what I’d want, if I were suddenly given control of the franchise. To address the concerns of minority groups more directly, more honestly, more courageously; and to speak more explicitly to the experiences of the psychologically “different.” - You know that part where Magneto killed the dude with the metal stuff? Yeah, that was pretty sweet.
[1] A metaphor that falls apart if you think about it: if a dude likes dudes I’m content to let him go about his business but if a dude has the power to detonate the latent kinetic energy in matter creating massive explosions at will then yeah, he should probably be on the do-not-fly list.
[2] Obviously this overlooks some pretty compelling defenses of the X-Men by actual minority fans. Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates has a pretty good essay about seeing the film with his kid.
[3] And again, I’ve never read a lot of these, so forgive me if I’m incorrect and let me know if I’m not giving the Marvel boys enough credit.
