INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 3

Since I don't regard Marguerite Van Cook's "Sublime Capital" essay as particularly well-organized, I decided I should simply go down the list of objections in  bullet-point format.  Here goes:

Kirby perhaps presupposed himself a participant in a post WW2 America that had fought and earned the right to play fair. He imagined that a handshake would suffice as he saw himself a part of an institution that in reality would later belittle his role.

From what source does Van Cook derive this handshake motif?  I've read a considerable number of Kirby interviews and don't remember him describing any "handshake deals."  In the interviews I recall, Kirby consistently cavilled against the fact that the publisher held all the aces and could refuse to give artists work if they wanted contracts.  But when he joined Goodman's company in the late 1950s, Kirby was no dewey-eyed innocent, as Van Cook implied in this segment.  Indeed, since Kirby and Joe Simon had allegedly experienced ill treatment by Martin Goodman over the CAPTAIN AMERICA property, Kirby certainly had no reason to believe that Goodman would "play fair" fifteen years later.

Lee working in a family business, saw himself as management rather than worker and this self-elevation transferred to how he interpreted his creative relationship, which gave more import to words, as though they signified his class and its rights and its sanction.

This is an absurdly broad characterization of Lee's frequent statements that he believed that the person who conceptualized a given work was the creator.  I've never read anything by Lee that even slightly resembles this Derrida-ized emphasis on words alone. In fact, if one examines side-by-side the Lee and Kirby accounts of almost any given character's creation, each always emphasizes the "original germ" concept in order to take credit as the true "original creator."  Thus Kirby as much as Lee has denied the viability of Van Cook's concept of "reified creativity."   
Van Cook then quotes a passage from Terry Eagleton:

‘Mass’ culture is not the inevitable product of ‘industrial’ society, but the offspring of a particular form of industrialism which organizes production for profit rather than for use, which concerns itself with what will sell rather than with what is valuable.

This is typical Marx-mallow reasoning: if a product sells well within mass culture, those sales are immediately suspect and cannot be part of that vague canon of "what is valuable."  Possibly Eagleton defines value somewhere better than Van Cook does in her essay, but the section Van Cook quotes is meaningless precisely because it opposes cultural value to sales-value in a laughable dualism.  That doesn't stop Van Cook from accepting the duality as a given, though.

Kirby and Lee became engaged in a culture that conflated their cultural output with their commercial product. Their value as artists was secondary to their commercial potential.

 Secondary to whom, Van Cook?  Martin Goodman probably cared about nothing but the bottom line of good sales.  But the subculture of fans who continue to talk fifty years later about the Lee-Kirby books, books intended for an ephemeral juvenile audience, are certainly no longer regarding the works in terms of their "commerical potential," except when engaged in the actual buying or selling a particular comic-book issue.  To speak of art and commerce as "conflated" implies the existence of some time and place where the two were not so intertwined.  At least when Theodor Adorno asserts the existence of some originary Pure Land of Art Untainted by Commerce, he puts his cockeyed premise on the table for all to behold, as Van Cook does not.

Then Van Cook decides that the Classical rhetorician Longinus can be used in her quest to prove the Logocentrism of Stan Lee:

Longinus further says the sublime rhetoric of the speech-writer resides in “great thoughts, strong emotions, certain figures of thought and speech, noble diction, and dignified word arrangement,” which might also begin to expose possibilities in the interactions between words and ideas in comics. All of these elements one would hope to discover in the pages of a heroic narrative of the superhero comics, but might be particularly explicit in a production such as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s “Thor.”

Van Cook's argument boils down to claiming that because Stan Lee wrote with "noble diction and dignified word arrangement" in THOR, in contrast to the way the Thunder-god's adventures might have sounded had they followed the shorthand notes Kirby placed on the margins of his art:

The effect would be comical beyond its acceptable level of dramatic kitsch if the entire comic were to be spoken in Kirby’s New York slang circa the Bowery Boys. As the language is transformed by Lee it is able to support its authority within the ideological tenor of received historicity.

And then later:

Both men recognize their own class in relation to the content. Kirby, who remained proud of his heritage as the son of a Lower East Side immigrant, does not write his text in “Thor-speak” but uses his working class action voice to express his ideas. This forces questions about how class operated between the men. Implicitly, art is produced in a strangely abased position in the social hierarchy of production. Art appears to be the tool of the intuitive, untamed mind, while writing evidences intellectual precision and authority. Logocentrism is bound to class structures and it seems Thor-speak claims the authority of the noble class and that its writer represents a conduit to this class with its values of duty and honor. Remember as Longinus says: “The great speech maker speaks great thoughts.”

So--

Does this mean that when Jack Kirby himself chose to use "noble diction and dignified word-arrangement" when he wrote his own dialogue for THE NEW GODS, that Kirby "abased" his own artwork by having Orion say grandiloquent things like, "I have heard the word-- and the word is battle!"

What a horrible man you were, Writer Jack Kirby, for abasing the work of Artist Jack Kirby!!!

Van Cook does address Jack Kirby, writer, but significantly, she does not choose to explore NEW GODS, the Fourth World title closest in tone and content to Marvel's THOR, but a sequence from MISTER MIRACLE, in which Kirby spoofed Stan Lee as the flamboyant agent Funky Flashman.  But to hear Van Cook tell it, even this japery remains within the sphere of false consciousness:

But his mockery does not release either from the cycle of production. Althusser states that free will is essential for this continual state of self-delusion (false consciousness) to persist. The subject must feel that he is free to act as he chooses, but his self recognition within the social structure ensures that he will continue to be productive and remain within an ideology that he believes he has created and sanctioned.

Because Kirby's character Mister Miracle-- who is more or less coeval with "labor" even as Flashman symbolized "management"-- shows amused tolerance of Flashman's absurdity, Van Cook tells us :

Scott Free promotes a silent acceptance of the workingman’s role, while the entitled Flashman proclaims about the difficulties of creative work.

Van Cook's interpretation-- that Flashman represents the reinforcement of the "stratifications of class and labor"-- does not hold under close scrutiny.  There is a shadow of truth in the fact that Scott Free is an actual producer of a commodity, in the form of a performance (which Eagleton might or might not find "valuable") while Flashman is merely one who claims he can facillitate the commodity's dispersal to audiences.  In Steve Ditko's Randian terminology he might be called a "looter."  But Flashman, unlike Stan Lee in Kirby's actual life, never becomes a permanent influence on Scott Free; indeed, he never appears in any Jack Kirby work following MISTER MIRACLE #6.  That's not much of a "reinforcement," Van Cook!

Finally, "Sublime Capital" veers off from its original topic of the ideologies of Lee and Kirby, and chooses to go after the generalized ideologies of the American military, touched on briefly (and irrelevantly) with respect to the service records of Lee and Kirby.  After detailing how a U.S. Congressman expressed his regard in a Congressional session for a particularly affecting TERRY AND THE PIRATES sequence by Milt Caniff, Van Cook tells the reader how this was her original context for her discussion of the Longinian sublime:

Originally, before the Kirby /Marvel result, I had intended to offer this passage about “Terry and the Pirates” as evidence of  the power of the sublime as a political tool and to discuss the slippery parameters of cultural institutions and government bodies.  I wanted to interrogate how diction in comics elevates or otherwise shapes response and meaning.  In the end, the colonization of the Colonel Corkin speech by a government representative suggests that elevated diction is recouped by the ruling class, even in the ambigous guise of applause.

In other words, if there exists even circumstantial evidence that sublimity, in the form of "elevated diction," is something that a "ruling class" might use against the disenfranchised, then one must look askance at rhetoric-- "especially sublime rhetoric"-- as being yet another commodity. 

Yet once again, the one-sided duality persists. If "rhetoric" is determined by Eagleton's implicit concept of "sales-value," then real "cultural value" must be somehow outside the sphere of commodification; must be the opposite of "noble diction."

Well, the most logical opposite of "noble diction" would be "plain speech."

Therefore, I submit to my readers the true face of a Cultural Value Beyond Commodification.

(Yeah, I gotcher Logocentrism Rat Cheer, ya hippie.)

SON OF QUICKIE GROTH POST

I'm aware whenever I look at Google stats for THE ARCHIVE, those stats may not represent how many actual human eyes have perused my posts. The all-time champion, QUICK TAKE ON 'THE BEAT' BIN-LADIN POST, almost certainly received some boost simply because it had the hot topic "Bin Ladin" in the title. I imagine its stat-status has simply been the result of automatic 'net programs that pick up on anything that mentions such high-profile topics.

The second-place winner, though, is more puzzling: QUICKIE GROTH POST. I don't see why the 'net programs would pay any special attention to Gary Groth's name, much less the opinion expressed in the essay: that the COMICS JOURNAL's coverage of the mainstream probably stemmed less from duty than from expedience. I've certainly written opinions on both Groth and the JOURNAL that are more substantive. Could the high numbers have something to do with both essays being short?

In any case, by way of follow-up I want to amend some of my statements in the essay and its comments-section. I originally wrote:

I’d certainly admit that by the late 80s the JOURNAL had started to avoid emphasizing the mainstream, even though the mainstream/indie scene had not fragmented as much as it has today. That’s the period when covers started featuring people like Ralph Steadman rather than Wolfman and Perez.

Richard Bensam stated that he remembered the shift in the JOURNAL's mainstream coverage as earlier, around 1981, when the company Fantagraphics began publishing AMAZING HEROES:

Doesn't that shift in the Journal also coincide with the launch of Amazing Heroes?

I reiterated my recollection that the true shift into what I termed "full-tilt elitism" was more toward the late 1980s:

One could certainly see AH's 1981 debut as a harbinger of things to come, but my memory is that if nothing else TCJ was still heavily cover-featuring mainstream guys.

However, though it's true that in the late 1980s the JOURNAL became a bit more adventurous about featuring cartoonists utterly outside the domain of any comics-fandom, such as Ralph Steadman, I was wrong, and--

(cue Kermit the Frog yelling "Yaayyyy--")

RICHARD BENSAM WAS RIGHT!!!!!!

Today I did a systematic examination of what images or concepts had been featured on JOURNAL covers since the magazine was formed from the ashes of its previous incarnation, THE NOSTALGIA JOURNAL. Almost without exception, up till 1983 JOURNAL covers focused on characters or imagery with a strong fantasy content (one such exception being a Kurtzman cover featuring a military battle). The flashpoint for "the Big Change" is signalled on the cover of COMICS JOURNAL #80 (March 1983), in that the main focus featured a critic's polemic rather than a character or concept.





The feature article for #80 was Carter Scholz's "Seduction of the Ignorant." It was not the first lugubrious, teeth-gnashing screed ever to appear in the JOURNAL, but if I'm not mistaken (I do have one or two gaps in my collection) it was the first to have the cover's central image built around it. Two other oddities:




(1) Though it may not have been the first time a JOURNAL-essay tossed out that witless Marxist concept "commodification," it's surely the first time the concept was featured on a cover.

(2) Oddly, given my remark above about how the early 1980s still featured interviews with mainstreamers like Wolfman and Perez, TCJ #80 contains the second part of an interview-diptych with those two stalwarts.


Why did Scholz's essay get the cover? Was it just that the JOURNAL didn't have any art relating to the mainstreamers or their titles? Or did the editors deem that Scholz's essay was of greater moment than a couple of superhero raconteurs?


Whatever the behind-the-scenes drama, 1983 supplies the ideal flashpoint, not least because immediately thereafter the magazine's covers strayed ever farther from the earlier business-model of heavy mainstream representation. Over the next ten issues, covers featured the following:

#81-- William Gaines
#82-83-- Dave and Deni Sim
#84-- Michael T. Gilbert
#85-- Robert Kanigher
#86-- Tintin
#87-- Heidi McDonald's anti-"fight-scenes" essay
#88-- "rating comics" essay
#89-- Eisner
#90-- Al Williamson

The only trend not shown in this breakdown is that over time the JOURNAL did feature mainstream talents on their covers *if* they were deemed either especially talented, especially popular, or both. Such figures included Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Mike Baron, Bill Sienkiewicz and the never-repressible Gil Kane. However, the die was cut, so to speak. From then on, the JOURNAL's covers emphasized current mainstream figures only if they possessed some particular stature in the eyes of the editors. Failing that, covers featured either the talents that one might call variously "artcomics" or "altcomics," or talents who had belonged to the mainstream of long ago, such as issue #95, with a Captain Marvel cover heralding a C.C. Beck interview.

I probably didn't note the flashpoint at the time because it seemed to me that the pages inside did feature a good amount of dialogue about the Importance of Being Genre (which unfortunately usually devolved to discussions about superheroes alone). The JOURNAL still printed a healthy number of mainstream reviews in the early to middle 1980s. The late 1980s would draw back from that practice, however, and as distant as I was from the Halls of Power, I got distinct impressions that Gary regarded even negative reviews of mainstream comics as giving too much attention to The Enemy. TCJ never completely stopped reviewing mainstream titles, but by 1989-- which was the last year in which I submitted anything-- it was evident that the editors had no sustained interest in the genre-analysis that fascinated me. Following my departure, I did notice one critic, name of Leon Hunt, who made some insightful comments in the early 1990s. Not surprisingly Hunt was attacked in the lettercol by one of the magazine's foremost "know-nothing" elitists, Harvey Pekar. I don't imagine Hunt quit contributing to the JOURNAL purely because of Pekar's needling but I assume the guy simply found better things to do with his time. Why bother talking to a brick wall?

I used to feel that the JOURNAL missed a chance to be a great uniter of fandom; a forum through which one might understand all forms of comics art. But over time I realized that was a naive projection. Groth wanted division, not unification: his aesthetic stance depended on the absolute separability of good art and bad trash.
Love it or hate it, the JOURNAL's turning toward greater elitism in the 1980s was far more representative of its true nature than the early genre-friendly years.

But the memory of the "brief shining moment" abides with me nonetheless...

MYTHCOMICS #26: ZATANNA #1-4

PLOT-SUMMARY (script: Morrison; art: Sook): During a visit to her superhero support-group Zatanna confesses that despite her vaunted Justice League status, she’s a “spellaholic” with severe self-esteem issues, and that she may have helped bring about a new apocalypse. Prior to making a journey with some fellow mystics into a magical dimension, searching for the magical books of her late father Zatara, Zatanna casts a spell to conjure forth her ideal man. Zatanna’s allies die because of her recklessness, but she gains a new ally, runaway teenage girl Misty Kilgore, who wants to become Zatanna’s apprentice. Zatanna, seeking to control the conjured entity (aka “Gwydion”), seeks advice from occult expert Cassanadra Craft. Cassandra reveals that she was visited by a strange male magician who left behind a top hat for Zatanna and makes a mysterious reference to Zatara’s books: his image suggests that Zatara himself may have returned from death. After Zatanna uses her powers (as well as the top hat) to subdue Gwydion, she and Misty go on the road to train Misty. They encounter the ghost of Ali-ka-Zoom, a magician who in life was a member of a gang of heroic kids, the Newsboy Army. Ali-ka-Zoom persuades Zatanna and Misty to transport him to the estate of the magician’s old team-mate Kid Scarface, but by the time they all arrive, the “Kid” has been killed by the faery-folk known as the Sheeda. The magician conducts the spirit of his old friend to the afterlife while Zatanna grapples with two revelations: (1) that the Sheeda are one of the forces threatening to doom Earth, and (2) that Misty is destined to be the Sheeda’s new queen if the current ruler Gloriana is ever deposed. Zatanna then goes looking for more answers, and learns that the mysterious top-hatted man was not her father, but a lookalike magician: Zor, a renegade member of the “Time Tailors” who decided to change the cosmic design by helping the Sheeda. Zor tries to conquer Zatanna by transforming her into “Zorina,” an image of what she would’ve been like as his daughter, but she throws off his influence and uses the shapechanger Gwydion to fight Zor’s magic. Zatanna manages to subdue Zor long enough to break into the mystic dimension of the Time Tailors, who take Zor prisoner. Zatanna meets the spirit of Zatara, who reveals to her that she herself is the incarnation of his so-called “magical books.” Back in the real world Zatanna puzzles over the encounter until she is summoned to the final battle with the forces of Gloriana.



MYTH-ANALYSIS: Zatanna’s four-issue series isn’t a stand-alone narrative, but a narrative arc that participates with other arcs to make up Grant Morrison’s “Seven Soldies of Victory” mega-event. Therefore some of the myth-motifs referenced in the ZATANNA arc are more fully developed elsewhere: Ali-ka-Zoom and the Newsboy Army, who recapitulate the fantasies of heroic kid gangs of the Golden Age, are given greater attention in the arc of MANHATTAN GUARDIAN, while the Arthurian mythology of the Sheeda is glossed by the SHINING KNIGHT arc. Here I’ll concentrate on the mythos of the title character Zatanna, though I will confess some curiosity as to how Morrison happened to name his newsboy magician after a catchphrase used in Hanna-Barbera's FRANKENSTEIN JUNIOR cartoon.


Like many heroes who originated during DC Comics’ Silver Age, Zatanna continues the “legacy” of a Golden Age character: the aforementioned Zatara the Magician. Zatara was one of many Golden Age figures who were practicing stage magicians who fought crime as a “side-act.” Most if not all followed the example of the comic-strip magician-hero Mandrake, though in comic books the magicians often wielded powers more extraordinary than Mandrake’s hypnotic skills. Zatanna, introduced in the 1960s as the fullgrown daughter of Zatara, continued in that tradition to some extent, though by the 1980s she had been given a quasi-tragic dimension by the death of her father and her sexual dalliances with less than admirable lovers like John Constantine. Morrison’s version of Zatanna builds upon these realistic tropes but does so to provide a grounding for a hyper-real world of magic, where “every thought leaves a chalk-trace on the walls of the imaginal world.”


“I have a fatal flaw,” Zatanna tells her support group, “that makes me fall for losers.” In orthodox Freudianism, this would be seen as a deferral of an incestuous cathexis toward her super-capable father, while her attempt to summon an ideal man—whom she thinks will be “a great wizard or an ace crime-fighting dude”—are both confirmations of that hidden desire. The villain Zor seems to pursue the same Freudian logic. First he tantalizes Zatanna with the possibility of her father’s return. Then, when he has her in his power, he transforms the heroine into “Zorina,” a villain’s version of a “legacy continuation,” a perverse B&D temptress, to show Zatanna what she would have been “under my sadistic tutelage.” Morrison’s use of the word “sadistic” is not incidental, for in designing “Zorina” Morrison seems to draw upon the pattern established by such Sadean heroines as Juliette and Eugenie, who become master sadists under some quasi-paternal instruction.



However, many facets of Morrison’s story suggest that, just as Carl Jung’s theory attempted to encompass and supersede Freud’s insights, Zatanna’s mental cosmos can supersede any reductive forces. Zatanna only remains in the form of “Zorina” for two panels, for she quickly overrides Zor’s transformation by following it to its logical conclusion: since she’s a perverse daddy’s girl, she restores her own personality as a gambit to “annoy” her “daddy.”




Jung asserted that Freud’s idea of a purely sexual human libido was far too reductive. Similarly, Morrison seems to bring forth sexual demons largely to show the ability of the human will to transcend them. When the real Zatara reveals that Zatanna herself incarnates all the wisdom of his “magic books,” he describes her in terms of two abstract aspects (“mind” and “spirit”), a concrete one (“body”), and a concrete image given metaphorical meaning (“heart”). Conversely, whereas many comics-writers deal with magicians purely in terms of highflown thaumaturgies, Morrison continually makes references to the mundanities of stage magic, which seem to inform Zatanna’s consciousness as much as “imaginal worlds” and “brane universes.” Morrison’s own “imaginal world,” then, combines the concrete and abstract in a rare artful balance, a *coincidentia oppositorum” of which Jung himself might approve.

INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 2

The first Marx-munchkin quote in the Van Cook essay comes from Louis Althusser:

Ideologies are perceived-accepted–suffered cultural objects, which work fundamentally on men through a process they do not understand. What men express in their ideologies is not their true relation to their conditions of existence, but how they react to their conditions of existence; which presupposes a real relationship and an imaginary relationship.

Buried in this jargon-heavy twaddle is the standard Marxist take on the notion of *ideology.* Coined during the French Revolution, the word originally connoted any system of ideas regardless as to whether it was philosophically elaborated or not. Marx and his followers appropriated the word and applied it purely to the ideations of the bourgeoise, who by virtue of their exploitative culture are defined as incapable of any "true relation to their conditions of existence." Bourgeoise productions, whether they address themselves to "high" or "low" segments of the culture, are necessarily informed by "ideology," which is another way of saying "false consciousness." Said falsehood stands in contrast to the ideations of Marxism, which are alleged to be non-ideological because they are Really Really Real.

Thus Althusser is clearly within the tradition I have termed "ratiocentric," in that no matter whether one is writing of Balzac or Jack Kirby, the ratiocentric analyst assumes that there is nothing "true" within the work of the bourgeois artist, only patterns that prove the validity of Marxist thought. Van Cook is entirely in this tradition as well when she characterizes both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as pawns of a capitalistic puppet master:

I wish to affirm that both Kirby and Lee were proud to work within the ideology of American capitalism. In the legal case, neither side stands or challenges American capitalism on ideological grounds overtly, despite a strong undertow of class and labor issues that largely go unspoken. And while I have framed many of the issues within the sphere of artistic production, certainly both Kirby and Lee saw themselves in the business of selling comics. Elsewhere, Althusser helpfully casts light how problems might arise undetected by two men who had not only served in the military as a system of American ideology, but had become a part of the means of production for that ideology.

I'm not surprised that Van Cook rushes to mention the irrelevant fact that both Lee and Kirby served in the U.S. military. In the fundamentally-elitist view of a ratiocentrist, this is more proof that the subjects named have been hornswoggled by a repressive cultural hierarchy. However, the reference actually weakens her case, for one must then ask whether or not those producers of bourgeois art who DON'T serve in the military are somehow less enslaved by the system. Thus, since Julie Schwartz didn't (so far as I can tell) serve in the repressive U.S. military system, it would be logical if he were the first comics-editor to, say, go against his culture's ideology by including a black character as the regular member of a heroic team.

Except of course-- it wasn't Schwartz, but Stan Lee.





Next essay: why the bourgeoise productions of Lee and Kirby do indeed contain "a true relation to the conditions of their existence," albeit not one of which Althusser would approve.

INVADERS FROM MARX PT. 1

"...none other than Kapital-Hatin' Karl Marx, whose ideology has propounded more subintellectual drivel in literary studies than any other one-note-singer can claim."-- THE POOREST JOHNNY ONE-NOTE, June 2010.

I haven't had the occasion to attack any maundering Marxist diatribes lately, but thanks to this HOODED UTILITARIAN post by Marguerite Van Cook, I've finally some new grist for this particular mill.

There are, to be sure, points where I agree with Van Cook. Here's one:

Even the most ardent Kirby fan acknowledges that for a while the two men, Kirby and Lee, collaborated comfortably to produce seminal comics in the American canon and all but a few claim that to make Kirby the sole creator across the board is not defensible. The Kirby lawyers overstepped the mark in the attempt to regain control of early copyright and collect remuneration for the proceeds from early works that were subsequently developed. For those of us on the sidelines, perhaps more painfully the result legally diminishes Kirby’s place in history.

As others before me have commented, there was from the start precious little evidence that Kirby created the majority of his Marvel Comics projects independently of Stan Lee. I've seen Kirby-fans on the 'net desperate to believe that, say, the Fantastic Four *must* have been created as a original "pitch-page"-- one altered, perhaps, to include the company-owned character of the Human Torch. But while this remains an interesting speculation, it didn't constitute evidence that any court would validate.

The "legal diminshment" to which Van Cook refers means the court's embracing of the theory that "the idea is the only criteria for original creation." Such has been the position assumed-- perhaps with some degree of sincerity-- by Stan Lee, who has stated time and again that any time he had the basic idea for any character, he Lee was *the* sole creator. And since he was on staff for Marvel, the creative "primacy" thus belonged to the corporation that took over the original Marvel company. I agree with Van Cook's well-phrased defense of even those creators who *might* be secondary in terms of conception:

Even if hypothetically Lee originated characters, I would argue that where there is no previous model then the artist creates the image and reifies a concept. If there is no model to work from, then one must create the original figure, which henceforth will become that model.

I don't know by what methods a lawyer might have argued for this concept of "reified" creation, though I would think that Neil Gaiman's successful suit against Todd McFarlane might constitute some sort of precedent. Be that as it may, long before Monday morning I "quarterbacked" the Toberoff maneuver as a ego-driven grandstand play.

And those will probably be the last points on which I agree with Van Cook, for after that she starts quoting Marx-munchkins like Louis Althusser and Terry Eagleton while misappropriating my old favorite Longinus for purposes of (gah!) logocentrism.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

MYTHCOMICS #25: YUMMY FUR #1-18 (1986-89)

PLOT-SUMMARY: Ed the Clown lives in a city overrun with cannibalistic pygmies. He has the misfortune to receive an interdimensional transplant from an alternate-Earth dimension, in that the head of his normal penis is replaced by the miniature head of President Ronald Reagan. While the inhabitants of the other dimension strive to retrieve the head of their president-- which remains able to talk even while it’s a part of Ed’s anatomy-- Ed is pursued by police and pygmies. He’s succored from time to time by a few allies: Christian, a ghoul-like alien, and Josie, a young woman who becomes a vampire after she’s murdered by a serial killer. Josie kills her murderer but a ghost tells her that her killer’s spirit will go to heaven because he repented his act, while Josie’s spirit will go to hell because she didn’t have time to repent of evil. Eventually, after Ed’s story has hosted a menagerie of bizarre characters-- cow-stealing aliens, Jack’s beanstalk, vampire hunters and the Frankenstein Monster-- Ed regains a normal penis. However, Josie is killed by the disembodied hand of her killer, which causes her vampiric form to be exposed to sunlight.



MYTH-SUMMARY: I haven’t attempted to trace in great detail this YUMMY FUR continuity-- later collected under the title “Ed the Happy Clown”-- in the same detail that I have in other “1001 comics” posts. Here a full plot-summation would be gilding the lily, in that plot is not really very important in Chester Brown’s surrealistic opus. In this story characters come and go with no more causality than one sees in “Waiting for Godot,” thus rendering the idea of plot-mechanics nugatory. At a convention I asked Chester Brown if he had any particular reason for using the Frankenstein Monster in issue #16, whose cover shows the creature skydiving. As I remember, he said he just happened to want to draw Frankenstein at the time, so he worked that desire into the narrative.







“Life sure can be ironic sometimes” states a minor character in YUMMY FUR #2 (albeit in a side-story not connected to the “Ed” continuity). Ed the Clown is one of the most perfect examples of a protagonist that works within the literary mythos Northrop Frye calls an “irony,” for ironies concern characters stuck in a world where human action can have no meaningful effect. Ed’s first six-page story in YUMMY FUR #1 depicts him on his way to a hospital to entertain sick kids, only to learn from a doctor that “the hospital burned down and everyone died except us doctors.” One page later Ed breaks his leg in two places purely from the action of walking down the street, suggesting that his pipestem limbs are always in danger of shattering. He’s almost eaten by a horde of rats, and he’s only saved because city authorities turn loose a tribe of pygmies to fight the rats. However, the authorities blunder by air-dropping the pygmies, who go splat on the city-concrete and are apparently eaten by the rats. Ed is simply “saved” because the rats overlook him for their new prey.



Ed’s penis is victimized in the course of a very involved storyline. The scientists of another dimension invent a device with which they can use our world as a “dump” for all of their “dumps”-- i.e., a place to deposit unwanted tons of fecal matter. Initially the fecal matter comes through one man’s anus, but he dies and the “hole” to the other dimension is blocked when President Reagan (who looks nothing like the real article) falls into the machine. Somehow this causes his head to be plucked from his body and exchanged with the head of Ed’s penis. Presumably Brown enjoyed the prospect of debasing President Reagan, turning a figurative dick into a literal one, but to say the least it “unmans” Ed as well. In issue #8 he breaks down weeping, telling his talking penis, “My life is always like this. Everything’s always awful. Even my own penis hates me.” The Reagan-penis, after raging at Ed a little more, tries to calm him by telling him that it’s not his fault that “awful things happen to you,” which is quite true: Ed is the victim of both his author and his literary mythos. He does get a normal penis again, but Ed only survives all of his ordeals by dumb luck.


Josie, thanks to having become a vampire, seems at first glance the obverse of her friend Ed. She’s killed by her crazed lover, and becomes a vampire because she was “actively engaged in a grievous sin.” As a vampire Josie is immensely strong and cannot be killed by conventional weapons, and she conceives a sisterly protectiveness toward the helpless clown. But in Brown’s chaotic world none of her heroic actions can save her, for she’s condemned to hell as her killer apparently is not. In addition to being fated to go to hell once her undead life ends, some quirk of fate allows her killer’s disembodied hand to prematurely end that life.



In the novel MANHATTAN TRANSFER, author John Dos Passos shows fires continually breaking out all over New York, a leitmotif that suggests that the city is falling into apocalyptic disorder. Brown’s use of fire isn’t quite a leitmotif, but it’s certainly significant that the ED story starts with a hospital burning down (except for the savvy professional men) and ends with the conflagration of an apartment building, in which only Josie the Vampire dies. Fire is irregularly seen throughout the storyline-- Ed dreams of a fiery void, aliens speak out in space amid flaming bodies-- and the last panel of YUMMY FUR #18 is just one big panel of flames, suggesting the fires of hell to which Josie stands condemned. But surely it’s not just Josie that stands condemned. Her sacrifice saves Ed for a little while, as the sacrifice of Pirithous saves Theseus from death. But Ed and his world remain well and truly doomed.

WITCH SLAP PT. 2

OK, on to my reaction to Curt Purcell's reaction to the TRUE BLOOD mini-controversy.

Curt advised me to be cautious as to how I represented his views here, which is certainly his prerogative. I can't think of any better way to do that then to do a line-by-line refutation.

From this 8-18-11 post:

Is there anything more stupid than "Wiccans" getting all pissy and offended at fictional depictions of witches?

Actually I can think of several thousand things. The first thousand all belong to the American Republic Party.

In WITCH SLAP PT. 1 I stated that there were sound and unsound ways to protest fictional depictions of any group, religious or otherwise. The particular complaint that started this-- a modern Wiccan/witch's complaint that TRUE BLOOD misrepresented the way witches do magic-- was one about which I have reservations, though it rated a little higher with me that the guy who got torqued at Charlie Sheen's use of the word "warlock."

Nevertheless, I also asserted that there were some fictional depictions whose negativity deserved sanction. Except under the cover of satire, no contemporary television show could get away with asserting that the old medieval canard that Jews eat Christian children. In essence society regards this sort of misrepresentation as the equivalent of "hate speech," in large part because the representation may incite violence against the minority.

Now, no one is going to go on a literal witch-hunt because of a warlock who curses Charlie Sheen. However, not a few Christians still abide by the fallacy (also medieval in origin) that witches are Satanists, a common motif found in fiction. I certainly don't think Wiccans are incorrect, much less stupid, to protest such depictions, because they have just as potential to incite violence against a minority.

If I understand correctly, the term and concept have traditionally been employed as attempts to explain misfortunes like disease, infertility, crops not growing, etc., by blaming/scapegoating someone, and as pretexts for persecution.

This is a partial truth. Many tribal societies, even those outside the mainstream of Judeo-Christian-Islamic influence, fear witches for this reason. However, most of the proselytizing religions persecute witches purely because they don't adhere to the outlooks of said religions. In Exodus 22, we encounter at verse 18 the famous:

"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"

And two verses down, we have:

“Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the LORD must be destroyed."

So depictions of someone using magical powers malignantly would be correct usage, since that's how this mythical figure was imagined.

First of all, the TRUE BLOOD complaint is not about the depiction of witchcraft as so much "malignant" as "irresponsible," a point one can only validate if one subscribes to the complainant's beliefs about magic. Second, it's debatable as to whether ALL archaic depictions of witches come down to pure malignancy, and even if they were, most if not all of these depictions would be informed by the animus of a dominant, opposed ethos. Therefore, there's no viable rationale for saying that modern witches should be defined by this negative archetype, any more than saying that real Jews must be baby-eaters.

It's not like there was, historically, some actual oppressed religious minority corresponding to the term.

Also debatable. In 1921 Margaret Murray's THE WITCH-CULT IN WESTERN EUROPE posited that the "Satanist witches" persecuted during the medieval era were actually the underground remnants of the European paganism displaced by organized Christianity. And although Murray's evidence was widely criticized, some researchers have found support for Murray's basic thesis through more rigorous investigation, notably Carlo Ginzburg in his 1989 book ECSTACIES.

Now, as I stated on GROOVY HORROR, one may posit that all or most of this authentic pagan tradition was gone by the 20th century, and that no modern witches have any *literal/historical* connection to that "oppressed religious minority." However, even if one agrees to this view, I still have problems with Curt's final summation:

So it's not like this silly New Age "spirituality" that got made up within the last half-century is actually carrying on any such tradition. The fact that these people decided to call themselves that doesn't give them any real standing to dictate how witches should be portrayed in fiction, nor to be offended by portrayals that don't meet their approval.

Do silly witches and New Agers exist? I've affirmed as much above. However, one can find fools in any belief-system, including the sort of intransigent materialism I've criticized in PSYCHIC, FAIRLY. It's quite possible that every modern witch today is entirely the result of a faux Romantic-style revival, on a par with William Morris' attempt to revive medievalism.

But that in itself does not invalidate the religion. I said that there might be no literal/historical connection, but that does not mean that there can be no spiritual connection. Curt suggests that it may be considered "correct usage" for fiction to subscribe to the negative "mythical figure" of the witch. I don't deny the existence of this negative archetype but I think that even had there never been a single recorded positive archetype of the figure, modern witches would still be justified to come up with their own take on the figure, to make a positive archetype of their own.