NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 4

A lot of comics-forums remind me of a certain SOUTH PARK episode in which the main characters egged on a fight between two other kids who didn't have anything against each other. Often the posters on comics-forums don't care anything about the issues involved: they just want to see cyberblood.

But in Part 3 of this series A. Sherman Barros made an intelligent request as to my question, "Should I bother to respond to Tom Spurgeon when he'll never read it?" So I'm bound to tilt my lance at the Spurgemeister once more, and see if indeed his response is the "chickenshit mendacity" I predicted it would be.

Let's see here...

Seriously, I didn’t understand any of that. I also don’t understand why you think I’m suggesting you feel inferior to me and my kind, although it seems psychologically revealing that you’d just toss that out there. I don’t even know what “my kind” is supposed to mean (Methodists?), although again that I’m representative of some group that you might feel is against you could also be seen as psychologically revealing

Yep, bigtime mendacity. In addition to having tossing out a lame caricature of fanboys as (horrors) Wearers of the Dreaded Unhip Ponytail, Spurgeon tells me that he's sorry that "life turned out the way it did for you" as a stratagem to make me sound like a simple troll who's taking issue with his statements out of a frustration with life's unfairnesses. But that wasn't meant to make me feel "inferior," heck no. It was just another one of the sage observations by the guy who just got pegged (by someone or other on THE BEAT) as "the conscience" of the online comics-community. Odd thing to say of a fellow who unjustifiably accused one of your fellow workers of having given a blowjob to DC Comics, but hey, maybe tossing the rabid dog a steak will keep him from biting off your balls (if any).

I guess I could spend the time trying to figure out what you’re getting at, attempting to identify where you went off course and trying to explain you out of what I feel are your leaps of logic and what I’m guessing you think are your great gordian knot splitting sword-slices of truth, but that would be silly and likely a huge waste of my time.

And Tom Spurgeon knows whereof he speaks as to leaps of logic, since as noted earlier Rich Johnson's cautious praise of DC's past achievements becomes in Spurgeonworld a "blowjob."

However, I don't think he knows what a "reducio ab absurdum" is. When I ask him rhetorically whether he thinks Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman should bow down before the Idol-Head of R. Crumb (a DC Comics reference that people on THE ABSORBASCON would probably get), I already know that he doesn't expect either individual to "worship at the feet of Robert Crumb."

The entire point of taking a premise to an absurd level is to show that the premise is absurd at its core. In Spurgeon's case it was this statement:

A lot of the rest of this seems like nonsense to me, too. To take one: Vertigo expanding what comics storytelling could do 40 years after EC comics did better comics in the same genres and 30 years into the underground/alternative comics revolution is pure boilerplate PR. I don’t begrudge DC being smart enough to put some of their hot comics of that time into a line and make more of them, and I quite enjoy many of their titles, and many of their creators are excellent and Karen Berger is a peach, but this view of Vertigo as a boundaries-pusher outside of anything but the most made-up, self-serving conception of comics is PR horseshit and needs to die.

Putting aside many side-issues-- that Rich Johnson did not call Vertigo a "boundaries-pusher" or claim that it had eclipsed EC and the undergrounds, that the Vertigo line was an attempt to *make* experimental comics "hot" under a banner of their own, rather than a marketing of comics that were already "hot"-- the central premise here is that once EC and the UGs reached some lofty level of quality, no one who didn't exceed EC and UG by Spurgeon's standards can claim to have "expanded what comics storytelling could achieve" (Johnsons's actual words). I suppose in Spurgeon's mind "expansion" correlates with the notion of real-life explorers pushing into new territories. I don't know if that's what "expansion" means to Rich Johnson, but I'm certain it doesn't mean that to me. Literary accomplishment, even in pop-literature, is more than just "who did what first" or "who supposedly climbed higher in the rankings of 'who's more significant.'"

In TS's final paragraph he floods THE BEAT with crocodile tears about the "damage" he thinks he's done me. Yes, flatter yourself some more, Tommy Boy. I once told TS during one of our long arguments that I'm naturally contentious by nature and, as proof, cited my long history of writing the lettercol of COMICS JOURNAL back when it was a magazine worth a damn. Many of my letters pick fights with various other columnists/essayists-- R. Fiore, Carter Scholz, Kim Thompson. Some led to long discussions probably no more profitable than this one; one led to a simplistic "fuck you" reply from none other than that Thompson boy. Sorry, TS. I've crossed swords with many before you and will cross swords with many after you. You're just not that special.

Are such arguments, long or short, a waste of time? In the sense that they don't accomplish any physical aim, like removing grout from your bathroom walls, they are. (Of course, one could say the same of ranting about other people doing PR for DC, which TS has carped at on other occasions before this one.) Still, even if you can't see your mind's muscles, they do need exercise even as the body's do. I didn't get much exercise contending with TS this time, but maybe the next opponent will offer more of a fight. I did think that anyone who wanted to be as insulting as TS was in his original BEAT post was someone who wanted the exercise of a good cyber-battle.

But-- it seems not so.

CHILD MINA TO THE DARK DANCE CAME

In recent years I’ve been rather depressed with most of the commercial manga-serials offered in the United States. Even a lot of moderately entertaining works seem to lack any real drive to excellence. But my manga-depression comes to an end with DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND.

[Spoiler warnings: plot points revealed herein.]

In an earlier essay I reviewed Kim Newman’s alternate-world take on the DRACULA mythos, in which Dracula became consort to the Queen of England and turned Old Blighty into a haven for his vampire spawn. I wasn’t enthused with the Newman work, but Nozomu Tamaki wreaks wonders with the same basic idea. Here it’s a man-made island that becomes a haven for a kingdom of bloodsuckers: quite naturally for a manga-series, the island has been built off the coast of Japan. The heroes of DANCE are Mina Tepes, queen of the vampires, who facilitates the worldwide emigration of her people to the island, and Akira, her werewolf bodyguard. DANCE also sports a large cast of allies and villains, most of whom are incredible hot-bods. But Mina and Akira are the focal heroes, and their complicated relationship is the core of the series as they defend their makeshift kingdom (the “bund” of the title) against assorted threats—meddling human beings, assassins, conspiracies, and, most formidably, three vampire overlords, the last survivors of “the 100 vampire clans.” Grotesque horror and frenetic action dominate the storylines, though Tamaki makes considerable time for comic byplay and the Japanese “cult of cuteness.”

The notion of warring clans is but one narrative trope that DANCE adapts from medieval Japanese history in order to construct a vampire society attempting to find its “place in the sun,” so to speak. Another is the Japanese culture’s love for the evanescent, for Tamaki establishes that his vampires, unlike Newman’s, are not a long-term threat to human society. Despite the vampires’ potential for immortality, Mina explains, they usually burn themselves out by the violence of their own desires, and cannot possibly grow beyond a limited number. In this speech Mina references the silent film NOSFERATU, even as her own name references the book DRACULA and the legend of Vlad the Impaler.

Medievalism also informs one aspect of the relationship between Mina and Akira. He is not simply a paid bodyguard, for his werewolf clan has sworn fealty to the queen of vampires and thus he plays loyal samurai to her “daimyo.” But there is also a personal bond between Mina and Akira, who became friendly as children, a bond which leads to a germinating romantic relationship, forbidden because Mina is destined to marry and bear children by one of the remaining vampire clan-lords.

In this summation I’ve focused upon what DANCE owes to medieval models from Japanese culture. However, I’ve held back one aspect of the Mina-Akira relationship that stems principally from modern Japanese culture. That aspect stems from the phenomenon called “lolicon,” concerning the apparent sexualization of an underage girl. For though werewolf Akira has aged into a young man, vampire Mina has remained a child who looks to be about ten, with even fewer secondary sexual characteristics than Nabokov’s original nymphet Lolita.

In the first book, the reader isn’t told the reason for this arrested aging, and none of the characters question that she has not aged. I initially wondered if Tamaki were depicting a situation like that of Anne Rice’s INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE, where anyone who becomes a bloodsucker stays frozen at the same age he/she was turned. In INTERVIEW this results in a perpetual female child-vamp who yearns for a maturity she can never have. But in DANCE it’s eventually revealed that not only can Tamaki’s vampires age and give birth, Mina asserts, “Vampires are creatures whose very form is ruled by their minds.” Later it’s revealed that Mina has chosen to suppress her own aging to prevent the clan-lords from forcing her into marriage, though at best this remains a delaying-action. Further, for brief times she can assume the form of the nubile, busty woman she could have been, tantalizing Akira with mature erotic possibilities.

The role of the “nymphet” in Japanese pop culture is one upon which I’m not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority. I know, as many do, that the figure of the nymphet appears in many manga that aren’t exclusively erotic or romantic in tone, such as TENCHI MUYO, which some have called the progenitor of all Japanese “harem manga.” Many of the appearances of “girls-on-the-verge” are not “lolicon” as such, and their primary purpose may be to tap into a mass-market demand for the presence of “cute kids” to offset even the most grisly or violent serials.

And yet Tamaki is clearly playing around with the concept of “lolicon,” teasing the reader with the possibility while making clear that Humbert Humbert doesn’t live here. In the first DANCE continuity, Mina meets Akira for the first time in seven years, and uses an assortment of stratagems to make him want to serve as her bodyguard willingly, rather than out of a sense of impersonal duty. One of these stratagems includes disrobing in front of him. Her pre-pubertal form doesn’t entice Akira, but making him uncomfortable accomplishes the same end: that of helping her manipulate him into her service. This is made palatable by the fact that she does have an abiding love for him, and clearly would like to assume her mature form in order to be with him. During a dream-sequence in TPB volume 6, Mina imagines herself living a normal human life, which attests to her romantic desires for Akira, though only in mature form.

Though Tamaki holds off on the lolicon, he does present a sequence of outright “shotacon,” which is the same setup with the sexes reversed. Like many vampire-sagas, DANCE allows for a wide range of sexual arrangements. Characters Josie and Hamaseji have a “normal” hetero relationship, but Mina’s female bodyguard Vera had a relationship with Mina’s deceased mother, and a male-male vibe is fleetingly suggested between Akira and an androgynous werewolf buddy.

In closing I’ll note that Tamaki is one of the best “cinematic” manga-artists I’ve ever encountered. Tamaki avoids the cluttered, frenetic look found in many of the popular action-manga, using white (or dark) space skillfully. He also shows a facility with facial expression comparable to that of Dave Sim, whose talents in that department eclipse most of his contemporaries. The plots about various conspiracies and skullduggeries are simple but provide the groundwork for solid action-sequences that don’t get lost in a maze of speed-lines. My only complaint is that Tamaki depicts a few too many women with torpedo-tits. I've nothing against fan-service for us evil hetero overlords of the dominant phallocracy. But perhaps in this case a little less would count for more.

As of now I’ve only read six of the nine TPB’s released, but I’m certain I’ll be accepting further invitations to this DANCE.

INDUCTION JUNCTION

In DEDUCE I SAY I stressed the necessity for expanding the bounds of theoretical criticism by stepping away from the quasi-scientific inductive method, in which the critic usually has in mind some fixed notion of “the good” and then simply surveys an assortment of works that exemplify “the good” by either positive or negative example.

As with any endeavor, inductive critical works can be done well or poorly. In my short review of T.E. Apter’s FANTASY LITERATURE, I found that Apter’s criteria for her “good” in fantasy-works was too amorphous to prove useful to me, as well as being too weighted toward works of canonical literature. I’ve commented in more positive terms on Richard Wright’s COMIC BOOK NATION. I didn’t agree with Wright’s essential message: that comic books are only “good” insofar as they expoused liberal social messages for the edification of the reading public, which caused him to largely dismiss the Superman comics produced under the editorship of Mort Weisinger. But Wright’s criteria were cogent and his research solid, and so NATION is one of the best inductive studies of comic books, far superior to Harvey Kurtzman’s disappointing comics-history FROM ARRGH TO ZAP!

Somewhere between the middling example of Apter and the superior example of Wright stands Brian Attebury’s THE FANTASY TRADITION IN AMERICAN LITERATURE (1980). In contrast to Apter, Attebury’s writing-style is breezy and non-academic. I was fairly certain that I’d read the work before years ago, probably in the decade for which it was written, and indeed, several passages were still pleasantly familiar to me. And naturally, I appreciated that Attebury, unlike Apter and Tzvetan Todorov, dealt with all manner of fantasies by all manner of authors, ranging from a canonical figure like Hawthorne to more popularly oriented American fantasists like L. Frank Baum and Edgar Rice Burroughs. As an inductive study about how the idiom of fantasy evolved in America, Attebury’s study is invaluable.

However, though his criteria for “the good” in fantasy-literature is better formulated than T.E. Apter’s, Attebury’s criteria is a bit too limiting and could stand some deductive theoretical input. In his first chapter he cites his criteria for fantasy, as against genres that may use similar materials, thusly:

“Narrative poetry often approaches the fantastic, but narrative verse seems to have been all but phased out by less restricted lyric forms. Surreal fiction has the same freedom: it can flash a succession of words before the reader or suddenly drop all pretense and begin speaking discursively. Fantasy, though, needs consistency. Reader and writer are committed to maintaining the illusion for the entire course of the fiction. Tolkien refers to this commitment as “secondary belief;” E.M. Forster speaks of the reader of fantasy as being asked to ‘pay something extra,’ to accept not only the conventions of fiction but also implausibility within those conventions. Fantasy is a game of sorts, and it demands that one play whole-heartedly; accepting for the moment all rules and turns of the game. The reward for this extra payment is an occasional sense of unexpected beauty and strangeness, a quality which C.N. Manlove, among others, calls ‘wonder.’”—Attebury, TRADITION, p. 2.


As should be clear from my RULES OF ESTRANGEMENT series, I agree that it is important to immerse oneself in the rules of a fictional game, since I didn’t agree with a Grant Morrison statement that suggested that one could throw a narrative’s rules away on the slightest pretext. (Fortunately, most of Morrison’s actual comics don’t do this.) However, it’s a mistake for a reader to pay attention only to rules—to what I’ve called the “discursive” mode (a word Attebury uses for a different purpose above). What Suzanne Langer calls “presentational symbolism” is the chief means by which we experience “beauty and strangeness,” not through the rules about whether or not magic is possible in this or that world.

Attebury’s study might have benefited from some deductive emphasis like that of Suzanne Langer, for Attebury’s over-stressing of fantasyworld-rules causes him to devalue Peter Beagle’s masterful THE LAST UNICORN. Attebury, somewhat following in the footsteps of some of Ursula LeGuin’s polemic, carps at UNICORN—by my lights one of the hallmarks of “beauty and strangeness” in all American fantasy—because he says Beagle indulges in “anachronisms at the expense of the story” (p. 159). Yet one page before claiming that Beagle does not gather his fantastic phantasms “into a satisfying whole,” he comments favorably upon SF-fantasist Andre Nortion. He admits that she is not a great writer, with which I concur, but says, following the Forster dictum, that “her lack of irony and displacement often pays for itself in commitment to the story being told.” I’ve enjoyed assorted Norton books, and I can agree generally with Attebury that there’s a critical mindset that too often validates irony over all other elements of storytelling. Yet all the Norton books I’ve enjoyed don’t hold a candle to Beagle’s UNICORN, where it’s clear to me that irony is only one voice within many.

On a side-note, I enjoyed re-encountering the aforesaid Forster notion of “paying something extra.” Twice in recent essays—-both in response to online essays by one online critic in particular-—I’ve been surprised to see comics-fans speak as if their lack of response to visceral stimulations in the comics-medium—in one case to scenes of horror, in the other, to scenarios of violence-- had something to do with the limitations/execution of the medium. Relating to such visceral stimulations has never been a problem for me, and so I wonder if those who find it a problem have worked themselves out of the ability to “pay something extra” in terms of total investment in a given type of narrative. Food for future essays, perhaps.

CHIEF CONCERNS

Back in October, Scipio of THE ABSORBASCON wrote an impassioned salute to the character Niles Caulder (aka "The Chief") of the 1960s DOOM PATROL comic by Arnold Drake and Bruno Premiani, here. As a longtime fan of the DOOM PATROL title of that period, I agreed with almost everything Scipio said about Caudler, except for his contempt from Grant Morrison's rewriting of the original character. In the comments-thread I said:

I'll play Odd Man Out here and say that the Grimmy Grittification of Niles Caulder is very nearly the only such major rewriting that I *DON'T* consider worthless, and that's because Morrison had a Thematic Point To Make in trashing the old Caulder. Fans can try if they like to find Theme in the trashing of Doctor Light or Captain Atom or whoever, but all they shall find is dross.

That doesn't mean that I don't consider Drake's Niles Caulder a superior creation, though.

I like to think that when Morrison travestied Caulder he was then still under the spell of Evil Alan Moore, and that Moore's really the one to blame. But that's me.

By this time, I'm sure Scipio has forgotten that he challenged me to elaborate:

What "thematic point" did Morrison have to make by trashing Caulder? And... was it worth it?

Nevertheless, the following meditation on "continuity" is my belated answer to that question.

*****

In a sense, real “continuity” would be very like death, because it would be a state in which everyone came to resemble everyone else. George Bataille’s EROTISM emphasizes that the nature of living beings—at least those that propagate by sexual reproduction is “discontinuity,” in the sense of the organisms being non-identical with one another, cobbled together from the discontinuities of each organism’s parental units.

In comic books the usual connotation of “continuity” applies to the illusion of seamlessness between the many adventures in an open-ended serial, which, if it lasts long enough, may be worked on by many raconteurs. It’s inevitable that none of these raconteurs will have the same set of interests or priorities, no matter how much one of them may strive to write like a model.

To be sure, even though serial seamlessness is an illusion, it’s a valid part of the way we expect our serials to unfold. A raconteur is expected not to radically change the nature of the game he’s hired to play--unless, of course, he’s hired to write new rules.

Example time: One of my favorite superhero serials of the 1960s was THE DOOM PATROL. Though writer Bob Haney created the characters with artist Bruno Premiani, Haney quickly yielded the title to colleague-writer Arnold Drake, who wrote the remainder of the stories until the feature’s cancellation in 1969.

Within the continuity of Drake’s stories, the best character may have been Niles Caulder, the “Chief” of the Patrol. Drake made the crippled genius a man of immense feeling and humanity, who brought together three “freaks” to become superhero icons, and in so doing, fostered a kind of ersatz family. Drake leavened Caulder’s saintliness with occasional moments of hauteur or bad temper, but on the whole he was a believably good man. By the rules of the DOOM PATROL game—which began again when the title was inevitably revived—every subsequent depiction of Caulder should’ve been the same.

But, as it happens, the best revival of the DOOM PATROL did exactly the opposite. Grant Morrison’s DP was his breakout-series with American comics-fandom, but one of the big changes he brought about was to present a “Chief” who was not only brittle and arrogant, but who turned out to be toward the end of Morrison’s run, a villain.
No logic-parsing could ever reconcile the selfless and self-deprecating Drake character with the coldly manipulative Morrison version, who admits in DP #57 that he actually engineered the catastrophes that cost his heroes their normal status.





As this Chief reveals his hidden history to Robotman, he rationalizes that “we need shocks in our lives… Catastrophe forces us to think in new ways.” Of course, a page earlier this Caulder admits to some baser motives in the case of Elasti-Girl: “Impotent in my wheelchair, I wanted to exert control over a beautiful woman.”


But though Morrison’s Caulder is a villain, Morrison clearly means us to take his rationale seriously, especially in respect to Morrison's own rewriting of old continuity. It’s a bit shocking to an old fan like me to see a favorite character like Caulder rewritten, but unlike many raconteurs who do so with no greater theme in mind, Morrison clearly has a point to make. He’s not just trying to keep the illusion of seamlessness—though he is faithful to some aspects of old “continuity”—but rather, he’s showing what does and must happen whenever a later talent attempts to follow in an earlier one’s footsteps.

To put it simply, Grant Morrison makes the inevitable discontinuity an overt part of the continuity, and makes a virtue of showing off the seams amid the apparent seamlessness.

NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 3

I took a quick glance at the "Spurgeon blowjob" post, scrolled to the bottom, and saw that, true to form, Heidi McDonald had closed the thread for reasons beknownst only to Heidi.

TS managed to get in one last post before it closed, which I've not yet read. I suppose that it'll be more of the usual chickenshit mendacity, phrased in that clinical Spurgeonspeak that some fans take as evidence of intelligence.

I suppose I could read his parting blather and respond to it here, but I probably won't bother unless the stats for these posts should go up a bit. I don't expect that they'll ever go as high as they did for the essay MY NEW FAVORITE ADULT-X SPECIAL, but a few more pageviews would be hard evidence that someone out there would like to see Tom's ass cyberkicked a bit more.

Time will tell.

NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 2

So here's the exchange that prompted Tom Spurgeon's unveiling of his elitist tendencies, despite an earlier denial of same on THE BEAT.

Rich Johnson, seeking to choose the top comics-oriented story for 2010, chose the management changes at DC Comics. In truth, it was less a writeup of the particular changes from 2010 than a general summing-up of the company's past 20 years. This is roughly when the Vertigo imprint was created, which earns Johnson's restrained praise: "[DC] launched imprints like Vertigo to expand what comics storytelling could achieve."

After sketching a number of examples of DC's expansion-- Vertigo, Wildstorm, Paradox, and assorted merchandising efforts-- Johnson asks the questions:

Will the new DC Entertainment be as experimental and have a vision? Is the vision mining the existing characters for new movies and TV franchises?

Maybe other publishers will pick up the mantle of publishing innovation. There are certainly more out there now, more willing to take a chance on a new artist or author and take a chance on that new story.

Tom Spurgeon's response was to label this a "DC Comics blowjob." He devoted the rest of a rather confused paragraph to a harangue about DC's "shameful" ripoff of the Superman property, which for some reason he associates with 1978 rather than 1938. Then we get him accusing Johnson of having regurgitating DC's PR statements:

"Vertigo expanding what comics storytelling could do 40 years after EC comics did better comics in the same genres and 30 years into the underground/alternative comics revolution is pure boilerplate PR. I don’t begrudge DC being smart enough to put some of their hot comics of that time into a line and make more of them, and I quite enjoy many of their titles, and many of their creators are excellent and Karen Berger is a peach, but this view of Vertigo as a boundaries-pusher outside of anything but the most made-up, self-serving conception of comics is PR horseshit and needs to die."

I've always reprinted my first response in part 1. It was a bit supercilious but it contained a valid point: that EC stories also were not reinventing the wheel. I didn't address undergrounds as I was trying to keep the argument focused on a one-to-one comparison, but I would be happy to extend the same principle to the undergrounds. I would also note that there's really only *one* genre that Vertigo, EC and SOME underground comics all attempted-- and that's the horror genre. Where are the equivalents of Crumb's confessional comics at Vertigo? How many undergrounds devoted themselves to science fiction in the EC mold? Either there weren't that many, or I must've missed all those SF-issues of HORNY BIKER SLUTS.

Spurgeon's response to this argument was a restatement of what he'd already said, sans any justification but personal opinion:

I think the fact that EC did work at a lot like Vertigo of a similar if not superior quality 50 years earlier, and that all sorts of taboos as to genre and content in the alt-undground world were being broken in the 30 years leading up to Vertigo’s founding, kind of makes Vertigo less of the awesomely groundbreaking imprint than is frequently and broadly asserted on its behalf.

My response, to which TS declined to respond by saying he didn't understand it:

Is Moore’s SWAMP THING (admittedly a belated V-offering) not an expansion? Is SANDMAN not an expansion? Were Moore and Gaiman supposed to bow their heads in reverence before the Idol-Head of R. Crumb, for even daring to think they could add more to comics than he already had?

Vertigo is certainly not immune to fair criticism, but claiming that it isn't as good because it wasn't first to break all those taboos is hardly fair. Johnson does not actually claim that Vertigo reinvented the wheel, even the wheel labelled "great comic-book taboos." All he says is that Vertigo expanded "what comic book storytelling could achieve," which is simple truth. SWAMP THING and SANDMAN did expand the horizons, just as EC and the undergrounds had, albeit not the exact same horizons.

This is why pluralism as a critical discipline proves valuable. Though Spurgeon says he has enjoyed some Vertigo products, clearly he enjoyed the EC titles and at least some undergrounds more. This is his privilege. But it's a poor (and elitist) critique that asserts that any taste that finds SANDMAN more of a breakthrough than WEIRD SCIENCE-FANTASY must be the result of the author's desire to keep his tongue firmly applied to the boots of DC Comics.

As a side-note, it's significant that both EC and the undergrounds, like most other comic books of their respective periods, predominantly featured short stories. Many of these were good, many were bad. But in other media aside from comic books, the model of the short story has pretty much given way to extended continuities. The progress of the television medium displays this increasing focus on the long story, going from the never-ending soap opera to the punchily-syncopated overlapping arcs of HILL STREET BLUES to the metatextual epic of LOST. And no matter what one thinks of the tastes of the direct-market comics-audience, this audience also has moved toward long stories rather than short stories. Thus one might fairly conclude that the boundary-expansions of SANDMAN and SWAMP THING (for all that Alan Moore borrows a helluva lot from EC Comics) may be, for this time, greater breakthroughs than those of bygone eras.

Of course a true pluralist attitude doesn't assume that one type of fiction is better than another because the former breaks more taboos than the other. An elitist one does, however, as elitism reifies itself by claiming that it pursues what Theodor Adorno fallaciously called "ideas," as against popular literature, which is only about the sensual. But it may be that any elitism that champions taboo-breaking as an absolute good in itself is not really interested in "ideas" as such, for "ideas" are not universally tied to the breaking of taboos, and I for one can find more interesting "ideas" in a decades' worth of DC Comics-- any decade one cares to name-- than in any decades' worth of undergrounds.

As William James noted, the true answer to any question depends on the terms by which the question is stated. And if the short version of this essay might be rendered, "Is a respect for Vertigo Comics' achievements an automatic 'blowjob' for DC Comics?", then I think I've made my answer more than clear.

NO FEUD LIKE AN OLD FEUD, PART 1

I was trying to avoid putting Tom Spurgeon in my subject list, but now it seems there's no avoiding it.

I've never met Spurgeon. I had ceased submitting to the COMICS JOURNAL about 1990, which is about two-three years before he became the JOURNAL editor. I don't recall having argued with him, as I did with so many others, in the magazine's letters-pages or elsewhere. My first arguments with him were a couple of really long ones on the Board That Must Not Be Named. In the last year or two I'd argued with him a few more times on THE BEAT, but none of those contretemps were nearly as long. That's at least partly due to the fact that the comments-threads could be shut down at any point by the management, though Tom has at times evinced a tendency to make statements and then blow off any attempt to make him back them up. Tellingly, when he thinks others do this to him, he puts on that fine JOURNAL veneer of righteous contempt.

In this post I've already alluded to one of those BEAT-fights. Now there's been another, which from my POV came about because I tried to question TS more closely about some of the points he made. Anyone interested can read TS' comments on a Rich Johnson piece at the post called TURN THE PAGE. But I will reprint my initial comment on Spurgeon's rant:

What an odd Spurge-splurge.

I respect EC Comics as much as the next geezerfan, but why would anyone state, as if it were unalloyed fact, that they pushed far more boundaries than Vertigo did? A lot of EC stories kick ass: a lot of them are just good time-killers. I’m not sure any of the kickass stories pushed any more boundaries than did SANDMAN. One could argue that, but not without establishing some sort of terms.

And while we’re attacking “conventional” stories, let’s not forget that an awful lot of EC stories build on established conventions picked up from prose stories.

Is the denigrating image of the ponytailed fanboy now that widely accepted over that of the fat slob? I never got the memo to that effect.

Now, that's supercilious as hell, to be sure. But I think TS went a bit overboard here in his comment to me:

Gene, like I said last time, I just feel sorry for you at this point. I am so sorry that life turned out the way it did for you, and that you’re so unhappy that you read personal insults into broad caricature and feel the need to strike back in a way, albeit in a way that hasn’t hurt all that much since I was 14.

I shouldn't need to point out that Tom Spurgeon has not one half-baked idea about how life has "turned out" for me. I have to assume that this extreme lameosity is (a) a standard Journalista dodge, to avoid answering faulty points by pretending that one's critic is an envious cretin, and (b) Tom's attempt to disengage by being as offensive as possible, far beyond the level of the merely supercilious (which is OK when Journalistas do it, natch).

I also shouldn't need to point out (though I will) that Tom's weird accusation is of a piece with all those accusations levelled at him and other Journalistas by more conservative comics-mavens, to the effect that they "hate comics."

In Part 2 I'll look at some of the stuff Tom said in response to my EC/Vertigo points, in order to show (as usual) the superiority of pluralism to elitism.