AN OPEN QUEST, Part 2

It's fairly ironic that I'm typing this on the last year of 2009, since my concern in the essay is about the changing of the yearly round.

To be sure, I've only passed through a little over two seasons since mentioning that I was reading THESPIS in this June essay. (In full disclosure I had read parts of it years ago, but only this year did I finish the whole book.) And the subject of Theodor Gaster's 1950 book is well attuned to the program of the myth-ritual school of earlier years, in that THESPIS's purpose is to discern what patterns human beings may have followed in their organization of rituals. As a literary critic, my concern with Gaster-- who is cited in Frye's ANATOMY-- is to suss out whether or not his work on religious myths and rituals glosses Frye's insights on literary myths.

My conclusion is that not only is Gaster significant to Frye, for all that Frye only refers to him marginally, it's possible that Gaster's fourfold scheme of ritual actions may have had some indirect, perhaps even subconscious, effect on Frye's arrangement of his four *mythoi.* This is pure speculation, though Frye evidently read Gaster closely enough that he did adapt one of Gaster's terms into a 1960 essay, which I mentioned here.

Both Frye and Gaster formulated schemas that revolved around the response of human beings to the seasonal round. In OPEN QUEST PART 1 I criticized Frye for perhaps imparting too much closure to his theory, so that it seemed like what should have been a cycle actually had an apocalyptic conclusion, but in Gaster I found an additional corrective.

Gaster divides the rituals of archaic humankind into four types, which he ascribes to particular times of the year. Gaster gives a drawn-out explanation of his typology on page 26 of THESPIS, but here's a shortened Internet-encyclopedia version for easy reading:

"First the rites of mortification, symbolizing the temporary eclipse of the community. Next the rites of purgation, by which all noxious elements that might impair the community's future welfare are eliminated. Then the rites of invigoration, aimed at stimulating the growth of crops, the fecundity of humans and beasts, and the supply of needed sunshine and rainfall throughout the year. Finally, when the new lease is assured, come the rites of jubilation; there is a communal meal at which the members of the community recement their bonds of kinship by breaking bread together, and at which their gods are present."

Gaster did not design these designations for any literary purpose, and it's only my speculation that they influenced Frye's categories. But I do think that they loosely line up with Frye's four *mythoi*:

Rites of mortification line up with the *sparagmotic* mythos of irony, in that ironies are those works in which all human efficacy is missing, and all passion spent.

Rites of purgation line up with the *pathetic* mythos of drama, in that drama is often (as Frye points out) concerned with individuals who find themselves in some way cast out from the main society, though such individuals sometimes possess some power of effective action, unlike ironic protagonists.

Rites of invigoration line up with the *agonistic* mythos of adventure, in that these rites, like literary adventure, concern themselves with what Gaster calls "the Ritual Combat, or mimetic battle between Life and Death, Summer and Winter, Old Year and New." (page 37).

Rites of jubilation line up with the *incognitive* mythos of comedy, in that comedy celebrates the same spirit of joy and hilarity found in its ritual kindred, and does so with only spotty relevance to dramas of rebirth and redemption.

In addition, Gaster introduces two Greek terms that identify how the respective rites work. Rites of jubilation and invigoration are both characterized by *plerosis,* or "filling," because both give the sense that the ritual fills the community with new life. Rites of mortification and purgation are both characterized by *kenosis,* or "emptying," because they "empty out" the community of "noxious elements" one way or another.

Incidentally, anyone who googles either of these two terms as I did is likely to find far more references to *kenosis* than to its sibling, since the first Greek term received better press thanks to an apperance in the New Testament.

But neither term is exclusively applicable to religion, and together they bear a striking resemblance to David Sandner's commentary on the ways in which human creativity can seem at once incredibly "full" and surprisingly "empty." I remarked in this essay that this duality applies also to the way different creators, such as Daniel Clowes and the Hernandez Brothers, choose to view certain artifacts of creativity, as well as noting a similar duality in Frye's personal references here, where he said that he preferred comedy and romance/adventure to tragedy and irony (as I do myself).

A fusion of Frye with Gaster and other fellow travelers (such as Joseph Campbell), then, remains my particular quest, albeit one not shared by many others. Notwithstanding that, it's my abiding hope that, no matter how many confluences I find like those listed above, that said quest will always remain an "open" one.

AN OPEN QUEST, Part 1

"In the St. George plays the hero dies in his dragon-fight and is brought to life by a doctor, and the same symbolism runs through all the dying-god myths. There are thus not three but four distinguishable aspects to the quest-myth. First, the agon or conflict itself. Second, the pathos or death, often the mutual death of hero and monster. Third, the disappearance of the hero, a theme which often takes the form of sparagmos or tearing to pieces. Some times the hero's body is divided among his followers, as in Eucharist symbolism: sometimes it is distributed around the natural world, as in the stories of Orpheus and more especially Osiris. Fourth, the reappearance and recognition of the hero, where sacramental Christianity follows the metaphorical logic: those who in the fallen world have partaken of their redeemer's divided body are united with his risen body."-- Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, p. 192.

In DIVINING COMEDY I performed some corrective surgery on Frye's schema above, in that I excised Frye's comparison of the hero's "reappearance and recognition" in respect to the mythos of comedy. I'm probably the only comics-fan who would care if this operation killed the patient, but in my judgment the only thing Frye's system loses is his notion of forming all four mythoi into a closed "quest-myth," when what is more needed is an "open quest."

One reason Frye conflated the comedy-mythos with that of "rebirth" narratives was, as I discussed earlier, because he was a Christian, which meant that his religion's eschatology was oriented upon an "End of Days," to say nothing of the fact that the principle source of that eschatology is that of a book-narrative that has a beginning, middle, and end. A second reason, touched upon in earlier essays, is that Frye's literary theory owes much (albeit with modifications) to the so-called "myth-ritual school" of early 20th century classicism. The four dramatic actions from Greek theater which Frye adapted as the four "themes" of his four narrative *mythoi* were derived from one prominent member of that school, Gilbert Murray.

I won't explore here the controversies surrounding the myth-ritual school, which isn't much in favor these days though it has received some academic re-evaluations of late. At worst, it was too much of a totalizing approach to mythology, assuming that everything in archaic mythology stemmed from some ritual religious act. It wasn't as far-fetched as Robert Graves' penchant to see all myth as recapitulated ancient histories, or (to cite the fellow who let the monocausal cat out of the bag in myth-studies) Max Muller's notion that all myths related to sun-worship. But like all monocausal explanations, pure myth-ritualism left a lot to be desired.

Frye was, as others before me have observed, careful not to let his exploration of literary myths spill over into an outright endorsement of this school. Thus his literary theory doesn't stand or fall with the fortunes of the myth-ritual school, since he was simply using their literal formulations in a figurative manner: to describe the ways in which literary myths paralleled religious ones. Only in one regard did Frye approach the literalism of the myth-ritualists, and that is in the schema quoted above, in which the four *mythoi* are imagined as four stages within the life of a single protagonist. However, even here the "quest-myth," which Frye imagines as beginning with the *agon* of the romance and ending with the *anagnorisis* of the comedy, is meant as a figurative teaching-tool, rather than actually expounding on how the respective *mythoi* evolved.

To me, each of the *mythoi* is a closed system, so there is no need to see them as part of some greater spectrum modeled on the career of a particular mythic/literary character, be it the Christian St. George, referenced above, or the pagan Perseus, also referenced in the same "Theory of Myths" section of THE ANATOMY.

Frye is on much stronger ground when he compares his four *mythoi* to the cycling seasons-- or rather, with the different emotional and expressive moods called forth in human beings by the seasons. He then uses the four terms-- agon, pathos, sparagmos and anagnorisis-- to describe the themes underlying this storytelling structures, but he fails in THE ANATOMY to note what he would later expound upon in A NATURAL PERSPECTIVE: the fact that colloquially the word "theme" can be used to mean either (1) what actually happens in the story, or (2) what the story's events signify. I suspect that in ANATOMY he feels that each theme carries both "narrative values" and "signficant values," to borrow the terms in he used in "Archetypes of Literature," an essay predating ANATOMY by about four years, and which I discussed here.

In *my* adapation of Frye's terms I wish to make clear this double-sidedness of the terms he called "themes." Thus in future I will identify the words themselves, which I call "radicals," purely as "narrative values." For instance, an *agon*'s narrative purpose is to sort out the conflict between hero and villain, apart from whatever significance the story as a whole may have for audiences.

However, the adjectival forms I mentioned in AGONISTIC AND OTHERS will serve to describe the "significant values" implied by the narrative radicals. Thus "agonistic" describes the emotional and expressive *dynamization* offered by the adventure-story to its audiences, and the other three adjectives describe the dynamizations appropriate to their types of stories.

Once it is clear that each *mythos* has its own unique expressive capability, it should be possible to ward off, as in archaic ritual, the baneful influence of Bloody Comic Book Elitists. If a Gary Groth insists that Will Eisner's SPIRIT is better than other superhero works because he Eisner didn't take the superhero genre "seriously," it can be clearly demonstrated that Groth simply wants to see some other *dynamizing* formula-- that of comedy, or more likely, of satire-- rather than the one appropriate to the superhero genre.

Maintaining this openness of mind is part of the "open quest" referenced in the title, but not all, as witness Part 2.

DIVINING COMEDY

I don't know how long this site has had Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM online, but it'll certainly be of particular use to me in copying text for the purpose of either supporting or refuting Frye's theories. This essay will be a partial refutation of Frye's theory of the comic.

"The theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the form of incorporating a central character into it. The mythical comedy corresponding to the death of the Dionysiac god is Apollonian, the story of how a hero is accepted by a society of gods. In Classical literature the theme of acceptance forms part of the stories of Hercules, Mercury, and other deities who had a probation to go through, and in Christian literature it is the theme of salvation, or, in a more concentrated form, of assumption: the comedy that stands just at the end of Dante's Commedia."-- p. 43.

"Anagnorisis, or recognition of a newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy."-- p. 190.

The obvious pun in my title plays off of Frye's tendency to conflate the tendency of comedies toward social integration with that of religious salvation, as presented in Dante's DIVINE COMEDY. I believe I understand his logic but I disagree with his conclusions. I don't find much that is comic in the DIVINE COMEDY, or most similar stories emphasizing something akin to "salvation," and these narratives I tend to categorize under my heading of "non-agonistic" adventure-romance, in that Dante's work takes place in the context of an ongoing struggle between Good and Evil.

A larger question concerns the identification of comic integration with religious triumphalism, in that I view the latter as also more typical of adventure-genres than of most of the works that people consider to be "comedies." In making this equation Frye was probably influenced by his personal religion, in that he was a practicing Christian. It should be said that in most respects Frye's system is more liberal and pluralistic than the systems of those who worship only their own intellects-- which is all right with me as long as they show that they actually posses significant intellects. (This leaves out Barthes and Adorno right off). Only in this respect, in his identification of the theme underlying the *mythos* of comedy, does his religion steer him in what I deem an incorrect direction, though it doesn't undermine his system by any means.

In previous essays I've noted how various works that contemporary society deems comedies, such as the BLONDIE comic strip and the Three Stooges shorts, don't conform either to Frye's general propositions on comedy or his "six phase" design of comic modes, on which I don't plan to discourse here. As I've also stated before I think that the root of our disagreement is that Frye, like Henri Bergson, considers the root of comedy to be "repetitive activity," while I favor the root to be "incongruity," following the arguments of Arthur Schopenhauer.

On page 185 of THE ANATOMY Frye makes another telling equation between the structure of the Greco-Roman New Comedy and the structure of the Christian salvation-narrative:

"...we realize that the crudest of Plautine comedy-formulas has much the same structure as the central Christian myth itself, with its divine son appeasing the wrath of a father and redeeming what is at once a society and a bride."

In stating this Frye does not mean that every "comedy-formula" is like that of the New Comedy, with its concerns over winning a "bride." His "same structure" is an ideal model, not a prescriptive one. But the question remains as to whether his ideal is ideal in all respects. For instance, one of Plautus's best-known comedies is something of a reversal of New Comic themes, for THE AMPHITRYON deals with the comic misadventures that result when Zeus, preparatory to siring Heracles, decides to assume the guise of a Greek lord named Amphitryon in order to sleep with Amphitryon's wife. If anything AMPHITRYON resembles BLONDIE far more than any New Comedy story.

Now, while Frye thought that the "young-man-winning-a-bride" formula was structurally similar to that of a salvation-narrative like THE DIVINE COMEDY, because both ended the repetitious sequence of comic misadventures, I would say that both AMPHITRYON and BLONDIE are better explained by incongruity than by repetition. What they have in common are not young men seeking brides but older men who are for one reason or another embarassed as they seek to maintain order in their households. There is nothing inherently "repetitious" in Amphitryon's predicament: he does what any husband would do when he thinks his wife is sleeping with another man, and only the revelation of Zeus' trickeries mollifies him. Dagwood Bumstead's situation, as it occurs in a serial format, shows more repetitions, but I would suggest that what they have in common is the incongruity of their seeking to have the patriarch's ideal control of his world, and how they fail so miserably as to be funny in their humiliations.

Repetition, for me, is a tool that only works within a greater scheme of incongruous activities that one finds funny because the sufferings depicted are so essentially harmless. If there is any ideal underlying it, it is not Christian grace but a sort of perdurability in the characters who suffer so many zany misadventures. It is this perdurability in the face of the absurd that led me to feel that the emotional affect one should associate with comedy's *mythos* is that of a happy absurdity, which is the affect I wish to suggest with my revised term for Frye's *anagnorisis*-theme: the "incognitio."

Oddly, even though I find nothing comic in the DIVINE COMEDY, or even "the action of the Christian Bible" that Frye also finds comparable with comic action, I do think one early Church Father captured the essence of the incognitio. Asked why he believed in the Resurrection, Church Father Tertullian allegedly said:

"I believe--

--Because it is absurd."

STALKING THE PERFECT TERM: AGONISTIC AND OTHERS

Since starting this blog I've devoted few posts purely to the logic I used in forming a new literary term,as I did here. I've also introduced any number of terms in passing and will probably formulate a glossary of such specialized terms at some point or other.

But this post will be both a creation and a destruction of same. I introduced the terms "combative" and "conflictive" when I wondered how one might classify fictions in terms of the element of combat, which (a) is the most extroverted form of literary conflict, in that it connotes some physical contest, and (b) is alluded to by Northrop Frye as the "radical" of the adventure/romance genre in his ANATOMY OF CRITICISM. However, to complicate matters further, combat-considered-as-a-story-element isn't by any means confined to the adventure genre, but also occurs in the other three genres/*mythoi* which Frye categorizes, the other three being tragedy (which I call, more broadly, "drama,"), comedy and irony/satire. In order to denote the degree of prominence of this element in any of the four *mythoi,* I formulated three terms: the combative, the subcombative and the noncombative.

As examples of the first two degrees I wrote AGON IN SIXTY SECONDS, in which I contrasted Rider Haggard's KING SOLOMON'S MINES as "combative" and Haggard's SHE as "subcombative."

But I'm revising those earlier terms now.

My first reason for so doing is because I want to use the term "combative" in another context, while keeping "conflictive" in the same place it was: denoting any form of conflict no matter how extroverted or introverted. This other use of the first term will be critical to the development of another set of neologisms intended to directly address categorizations designed for what I've sometimes called the Idiom of the Superhero.

My second reason for revising the name of The Category Formerly Known as Combative is that I felt a need to bestow neologisms on all of the "radicals" (one of Frye's terms for the predominant aspects of his four *mythoi*) so that they could be used as adjectives when necessary.

Those aspects (which Frye also calls "stages," confusing things all to heck) are, for anyone who doesn't recall, are the agon (combat), the pathos (emotional turmoil), the sparagmos (ironic detachment), and what Frye calls the anagnorisis (comic turnabout) and which I renamed the *cognitio* because of my problems with Frye's definition of comedy, detailed here.

As it happens, I'm still not entirely satisfied with that term either, but I'll get to that.

Of the four, two already have adjectival forms: the *pathetic* (which unfortunately has other associations than the purely literary, but one does find it still used in a literary context) and the *agonistic,* which yields the same essential meaning I cited for "combative."

Thus, from now on in my mind, *agonistic* substitutes for all previous usages of the term *combative.*

Oddly enough, when I considered making an adjectival form for *sparagmos,* I made a form out of whole-cloth, probably the same way Francis Fukuyama took *thymos* and got "thymotic." Then I checked out "sparagmotic" on the Web and found that a few people had already used the term, though I'd bet it's in no one's dictionary. Plainly category-obsessed minds think alike.

And then, that left me with "cognitio," for which the only possible adjectival form would be "cognitive."

Not an option. Comedy in my view is about incongruity, not congruity-- about "not knowing" rather than "knowing"-- about the "happy accident" rather than the well-wrought plan.

So from now in my system the radical for the mythos of comedy I do christen the *incognitio* (which is also on the Web, but not as a quasi-literary term). *Incognitive,* also on the Web from other minds than mind, is thus the adjectival form, but means nothing but the root-aspect of the comedy-mythos.

One more time for the road:

AGON= agonistic
PATHOS= pathetic
SPARAGMOS= sparagmotic
INCOGNITIO= incognitive

These will almost certainly come up again, somehow.

THE FUTURE OF AN ELITIST ILLUSION

A quick history on the following essay: a few months ago in my apa, I tossed out a reference to an essay Gary Groth wrote in the late 90s. When one of my apa-mates asked me to clarify my remarks, I was obliged to dig out and re-read the essay in order to write a response. In so doing I wrote it as it was primarily designed for the blog, as in the opening sentence, but that's a convenient fiction.

I stress the above just to discourage those who'd like to believe that I've been thinking about nothing but how to refute Gary Groth during the 12 years since he published his essay. It's an essay I do find memorable for its skewed nature, and I've probably referenced it at least once on some messageboard or other, but my reason for framing my apa-response in the form of a blogpost was to try clarifying (once again) why a elitist ain't a intellectual.

*****

Often on this blog I’ve made reference to the species of critic known as the “elitist.” In some quarters, like this one, the word is often used carelessly, to signify anyone who tawks dat dere intellegzual tawk. To the extent that anyone conceives an opposite number to the “elitist,” it is the so-called “populist,” whom elitists conveniently characterize as lacking all intellectual rigor.
Neither of these casual definitions is worth the time it takes to type them, but nothing I write is likely to exorcise them from common use, or to significantly advance what I consider the more viable critical philosophy of “pluralism,” with which I identify myself.

As I’ve done a more specific breakdown of these philosophical persuasions in another essay that I may commit to the blogosphere in future, I won’t be repeating my preferred definitions in this essay. My purpose here is to cite a prominent quote from comicdom’s most famed elitist and to demonstrate that it does not, in fact, possess much intellectual rigor, thus disproving the immediate association of “elitists” and “intellectuals.”

The elitist I choose is Gary Groth, and the defining quote—perhaps a theme statement for all elitist positions, or at least for all of those that appeared in THE COMICS JOURNAL—is taken from COMICS JOURNAL #199 (1997). Groth’s essay is one of many in that issue concerned with the question of downspiralling sales of comic books in the 1990s. Since this too doesn’t concern me here I will take Groth’s essay as if it were simply a statement of his general position. The essay is titled “Does Comics Have a Future as a Mass Medium?,” though hereafter I’ll call it “Mass” for short.

Groth wrote: “…comics has been dominated by a single, monolithic idiom that has tended to subsume all genres within it. The idiom to which I refer springs from superhero comics, and it hardly makes any difference if we’re talking about superheroes, westerns, romance, good girl art, bad girl art, fantasy, sci-fi, etc., because with few exceptions, they all adopt the same idiom as has come to be associated with super-hero comics: an oafish, slam-bang physicality that resists subtlety and nuance as well as the ability to communicate any genuine connection to human life.”

My WEBSTER’S defines “elite” as “the choice or select part: esp. a group or body considered or treated as socially superior.” The dichotomy proposed by Groth in “Mass” obviously depends on a “superiority dance” in which various works, which are mostly unspecified and which possess “subtlety,” “nuance,” and “the ability to communicate [a] genuine connection to human life” are seen as superior to those works characterized by “oafish slam-bang physicality.” No proof is offered in this essay as to why one mode is better than the other, though one can probably assume that Groth’s proof would define superiority in terms of the aforesaid “genuine connection to human life.”

One odd aspect of this excerpt is its overdetermined nature. Had Groth simply stated that the majority of genres in the American comic-book market of the 1990s were dominated by a physicality like that of superhero titles, that statement would have been a correct representation: one which still applies to the current market. But as Groth ticks off genres, he tosses in the one genre that was not dominantly characterized by “slam-bang” or even particularly “oafish” physicality: the romance genre. I don’t claim to be an expert on this genre in any medium, but even if one finds the majority of romance comics to be less than artistically ambitious, one usually doesn’t think of their maudlin melodramatic tales in terms of “physicality,” much less the physicality of superhero stories. Romance comics are about emotionality, however un-nuanced. One wonders why Groth brought romances up at all, for they convey far less “physicality” than, say, the erotic comics that enjoyed a constant market in the 1990s (some of which Groth published). Indeed, some of the meritorious comics-artists mentioned in “Mass,” such as Gilbert Hernandez, derive great power from the raw physicality present in some of their work, irrespective of how much “subtlety” chimes in as well.

Another aspect of “Mass”—not the least bit odd, since it’s entirely predictable—is that there is absolutely no middle ground of any kind between the two extremes. Crap is crap and art is art, and never the twain shall meet. Groth’s primary purpose here is to “prove” that the dominance of crap in the comics-medium has led to its marginalization in American culture, so that even “high-quality graphic novels by unique cartoonists could not make any headway in the ‘mainstream’ book market despite the distribution clout of the some of the biggest publishers of the U.S.”

Yet Groth’s essay passes over a fact that he acknowledges in other essays: that most of that “mainstream book market” is, in his aesthetic terms, also dominated by crap. The presence of the crap which dominated that market for the last century did not prevent the continuance of the niche market that nurtured highbrow prose authors (though perhaps not in as much prosperity as some of them desired), and thirteen years later, the continued existence of the crap-dominated direct market has not prevented the evolution of a similar niche market for highbrow comics. Going purely from the standpoint of personal taste I’d agree heartily with Groth that Gilbert Hernandez ought to be/have been better received by the reading public than he has been. But I object to the logic that must blame Hernandez’ lack of stellar success on that old devil superhero comics, when there exists a long list of meritorious works—Melville’s MOBY DICK and Conrad’s THE SECRET AGENT, for two—whose lousy sales records can’t be blamed on their medium’s marginalization.

The third interesting intellectual fallacy in "Grothmass" is how Groth structures his argument to make the financial and social good standing of highbrow prose to be far more “monolithic” (to use Groth’s own word against him) that it really was in history. Groth favors an absolute separation between the factors that promote “the success of a Chester Brown or a Dan Clowes” as against those that promote LOBO, but such a separation has never existed in any medium. Certainly it did not exist in prose, where Melville’s hopes to repeat the commercial success of TYPEE were dashed; where Conrad sought to respond to public fears of anarchists and failed; where Nabokov enjoyed great commercial success by appealing not to “subtlety” but to prurience made palatable by highbrow nuance.

Neither in this essay nor any other does the radical separation of “crap” and “art” prove intellectually viable. This persistent illusion does make a great rhetorical device, though, and without such rhetoric, Fantagraphics probably could never have marshaled its small but fervent core of supporters. In this respect elitism did serve a purpose in the past by challenging fans to think beyond old parameters, though some might find the new Frankfurt School boss to be no less a tyrant than the old mass-market boss. As for the future, I would hope that future fans might learn good logic from observing Groth’s bad use of same.

But I can’t say I’m counting on it.

RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS

On 12-17-09 Heidi McDonald wrote:

“In Nerd Movie Culture, women can never have their own agency — they are bystanders and sidekicks. ALIEN would never star Ripley today.”

And I responded:


"You gotta do better than that.

Frankly I think Nerd Culture (by which I assume you mean not just the Mating–or Non-Mating– Habits of Nerds Themselves but also the genre-products they patronize strongly) has in the past 40 years unleashed a buttload of empowered women when compared to the record of The Majority Culture (my term), whose taste has tended to favor movies that solely featuring male heroes in solo roles (John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Nicholas Cage) or buddy-teams like those of Gibson and Glover."


Since experience suggests that I won't get a substantive response from Heidi on this, I may as well amuse myself by expanding on this conceit here.

I'm not at all sure what Heidi means when she speaks of "Nerd Movie Culture," but since her argument (mostly directed against online nerd-posters who don't think GIRL COMICS is a great idea) references ALIEN and the retrofitted STAR TREK, I'm going to go out on a limb and presume she's talking about fantasy/SF/horror cinema, as opposed to the quasi-realistic cinema favored by the non-nerd Majority Culture in the days before STAR WARS mainstreamed fantastic cinema. Today the Majority Culture will patronize a lot of fantasy-cinema as long as it generally follows the pattern of the Hollywood Blockbuster. Thus maybe one could define Nerd Movie Culture as the segment of cinemaphiles who follows non-blockbuster fantasy-cinema with intense interest.


And if that's the case, then I would have to say that "Nerd Fantasy-Followers" show a lot more interest in "women with agency." Here's a few agents of womanhood whom most nerds will recognize:

Now, Heidi might not like any of these images of womanhood, or the likelihood that most or all of the above were conceived by male creators. But even though the disenfranchisement of women in movies may deserve condemnation, Nerd Movie Culture is not responsible for that.

The four examples above all spring, directly or indirectly, from fantasy-culture predominantly aimed at nerds of various age-groups. In their incarnations as big-budget movies all are aimed at various age-groups, mostly younger, within the Majority Culture, such as the young adults who might go see a GI JOE flick for laughs but would not know (or would never admit knowing) any of the Joes' goofy monickers. But that fact doesn't diminish the fact that all of these fantasy-characters have as much "agency" as Ripley of ALIEN, regardless as to whether one thinks them as good in other departments.

Contrast to that to the amount of "agency" in the films of Nicholas Cage, whom I tossed out in my somewhat-random grouping of Blockbuster Main Attractions. Cage does not, unlike Wayne and Eastwood, symbolize an extreme patriarchal vision of masculinity. And yet, most of the women in his adventure-oriented films generally do end up being "bystanders and sidekicks," unless you want to count the tediously-nasty witches of the WICKER MAN remake.


Summing up, I'm not sure what the vagaries of "Nerd Movie Culture" had to do with the various comics-fans who didn't like GIRL COMICS for one reason or another. So I'll guess I'll have to chalk it up to a generalized *ressentiment* toward Nerd Culture on her part-- which, given that Heidi McDonald acts the part of a nerd-girl on her site, would seem to be a little like (to steal a good Arnold Drake gag) "hating your own shadow, or sending threatening notes to your bathtub ring." (Quote approximate.)

WHAT GROTH HATH WROUGHT

I hadn't planned on saying much about the online COMICS JOURNAL until someone's helpful blogpost informed me that Noah Berlatsky had pounced on Gary Groth's opening editorial, so of course I had to go check both out.

I don't disagree with Berlatsky's verdict in this case but I won't address his essay here, as I couldn't care less about Gary Groth's low opinion of the blogosphere. But I do have to launch a protest against Gary's "brief history of comics criticism."

Gary's right in saying that comics-fandom got rolling with the efforts of EC fans like Ted White and Bhob Stewart, though it should be pointed out that both men were strongly interested in a variety of comics-work, not just EC. One may speculate that had EC never existed-- say, if it had fallen into bankruptcy before William Gaines had transformed it-- then both fans possibly would have remained interested in some if not all of the "stunted creativity" that Groth finds representative of mainstream comics following EC's demise.

Not long after his sweeping dismissal of the period, Groth summarily dismisses most of the fan-writers who formed the second phase of comics-fandom, meaning anyone who was to any degree a superhero enthusiast. The agenda is pretty clear: after Groth correctly labels the late Jerry Bails as having been primarily a "historian" rather than a critic-- which in my book means that one should not expect of him any deep critical insights-- Groth lambastes Bails's taste for having been enthusiastic about DC Comics 1959 "rejuvenated superhero line."

Wow, what a terrible moment of uncritical enthusiasm. It's almost as bad as this pronouncement by a young Gary Groth:

"When I read 'Conan'-- when he stands on a hill and hacks his way through to save a princess in a castle, I guess I do identify."

Admittedly Gary was 17 when he said this, about nine years younger than Bails was in 1959, and where Bails never recanted his liking for superheroes Groth has maximated every culpa in the book to distance himself from his younger self.

Now, I do not suggest that modern Gary is obliged to like anything that Bails or anyone else wrote from that time, just because their writings might have some historical significance. However, if Groth is writing a history as one who experienced (albeit a little later) some of the passionate interest in fantasy and superheroes that marked early fandom, I consider it ingenuous of him to elide his own experience in that aspect of fandom. He may have renounced all that sci-fi jazz in terms of his current personal tastes, but in writing even a "cursory survey" of critical thought in comics I think he's obliged to state for the record that he was once One Of Us. Surely one can see this in early issues of COMICS JOURNAL, which, whatever Gary's intentions, had a lot more in common with early superhero-fanzines than with GRAPHIC STORY MAGAZINE, which is apparently the Algonquin Round Table of discourse to which modern Gary aspires. (Whether he really did back in the 70s is arguable.)

Additionally, his implication that Nothing Good Came Out of Superhero Fandom overlooks that without that horribly meretricous rejuvenation of the DC superhero line in 1959, fans of all stripes might not have ever seen a FANTASTIC FOUR by Lee and Kirby, least of all the young Gary whose first comic was FF #13. Without the re-conceived superheroes of DC and Marvel, it's dubious as to whether comic books would have survived long enough into the 70s for the upgrade in criticism circa 1973.

What price superheroes?

Maybe without them, no comics, and no COMICS JOURNAL.

That too has to be a critical part of anyone's history of criticism.