Defending the Bats: An Interview with Angela Ndalianis (Part One)

In the summer of 2005, I went to Melbourne to attend Men in Tights: A Superhero Conference, hosted by the School of Art History, Cinema, Classical Studies, and Archeology at the University of Melbourne. It was like a dream come true for this particular comics geek to be able to hang out in Australia with comics scholars from around the world. Well, now you get a chance to share some of the fun, because highlights from the conference are being published as The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, a new book edited by one of the conference hosts Angela Ndalianis. (My own essay on superheroes, multiplicity, and genre theory appears in this book. I ran an earlier draft of this essay on my blog a while back.) Since I like to use this blog to keep people up to date on new work in comics studies, along with fan studies, games studies, new media literacies, and a number of other topics, I wanted to flag this book for your attention and in doing so, direct your attention to its editor Angela Ndalianis. Angela's work should be of interest to anyone who cares about comparative approaches to media: her first book, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, manages to cover Baroque art and architecture, special effects, science fiction, comics, and amusement parks -- what's not to like. She's been teaching a course for several years which take Australian students to places like Disneyland and Vegas to study location-based entertainment and now this fieldwork is resulting in a forthcoming book on the history and theory of public amusements. And recently I learned that she's collaborating with James Collins on a fascinating new project dealing with collector culture and digital media.

In this first part of a two part interview, I grill her about her work on superheroes. Next time, we catch up with some thoughts on amusement parks and collector culture.

Your introduction to The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero begins with some autobiographical reflections on your childhood experience of reading comics. As many have noted, the autobiographical turn has been central to alternative comics and to comics scholarship, though most often, the story told has a decisively male focus. What do you think your experiences as a female comics fan brings to this discussion?

I guess, primarily it undermines these gendered assumptions. It's hard to say - especially when I was growing up in the 1960s and 70s - how much the association of comics and male readers was a socially generated pressure (of 'correct' tastes and interests becoming to little girls and little boys) , and how much was 'naturally' ingrained in our make-up as individuals. I actually lean towards thinking it's a socially induced taste-behaviour - sort of like the early game arcades, only this attitude has persisted. If anything, having more female readers engaged with their comic book experiences may open it up, both in terms of giving expression to the voice of female readers, and opening up the way to new female readers.

There may be shared gendered comic book experiences for male and female readers (like identifying with the empowered super-muscled male superheroes in the superhero comics; desiring the mega-bazooka female superheroes; rolling eyes in disbelief at those very same heroes but nevertheless becoming engrossed in their stories) but we need to also keep in mind that the reasons and ways we each consume our favourite comics carry with them their own personal reasons and associations. As I explain in the Introduction to the book, my father handed me my first comic as a 3-year old, and I was hooked from that point. All I remember about the comic was that it was a superhero comic - I don't remember which superhero. And there was something about the entire ritual of 'reading' comics (at this stage in my life it only involved reading the images): the touching and flipping of pages, the texture of the paper and the colours and images that the pages contained, and the sense of intimate possession associated with holding these comics in my hands. This sense of comfort I felt through sensory possession is still one of my oldest and happiest memories. Then there was the way wonderful worlds opened up to me in each panel on the page, and the immersion and intense relationship I developed with the superheroes and their stories. (It was nearly always superheroes, although, I did occasionally become sidetracked by the adventures of the Archies, Disney characters, and Hollywood stars like Laurel and Hardy and Jerry Lewis). Comics and cartoon shows are the two popular culture objects that left an imprint on my early memories and I still associate both with a combination of fondness and a feeling of being at peace with the world. I've always been a television junky, but there was something about the ability to physically possess comics in a way I couldn't possess my favourite tv shows that made them weave into the autobiographical and the personal more intensely - for me, at least.

And, from the perspective of female readership, I can say with certainty that, as a girl, I rarely felt short-changed or undermined by the fact that I was drawn to so many male superheroes. I cannot tell a lie, Batman was (and is) an object of desire for me. Somewhere in the fantasyscape of my brain, I still dream that there may be a reality in which he exists, and when I cross into that parallel universe, our future together will be guaranteed. Aside from my feelings for the Dark Knight, however, for me, Wonder Woman, Catwoman and Batgirl existed on the same level as Batman, Superman and Spider Man. It was their power, sense of their humanity and values, and ability to resolve crises that I associated with. I don't want to turn all academic on you here, but, I think it's Yuri Lotman who talks about hero roles not being gendered but associated with narrative action: it's society that imposes the 'norms' that associate active characters with the male, and the more passive roles with the female. Maybe 'society' never got its 'how to' ideological claws in me as a little girl and, I must say, my parents never encouraged me to play passive or victim roles - far from it. I think children don't start to fall prey to performing gendered roles till they approach their teen years, until then, they're fluid. I look at my 3 nieces (who are 4, 6 and 10) and am overjoyed to see that they in no way feel hemmed in when it comes to their abilities. In their minds, they're invincible. The difference is that they have more female superhero and hero roles to choose from - especially in animated cartoons - than I did as a kid, and that's more liberating for them as girls.

What has your experiences running the original conference and editing this book told you about the current state of comics studies?

I couldn't believe the amount of interest both during and after the 'Men in Tights: a Superheroes Conference'. The conference was held in mid-2005, and to this day I receive emails about follow up events and conference publications, as well as queries about whether courses are offered in comics studies at my - or other - universities. I've also had an increase in the number of PhD students I have who are writing on comics and superheroes. In your essay in the anthology, you write about the tendency in public consciousness to collapse the superhero genre into the comic book medium and given that the superhero's been such a driving and sustaining force behind the medium, it's not surprising. There are a number of anthologies and books that have come out in recent years that have taken a more serious and academic approach to comics and, in particular, superheroes in comics. This anthology, and the one I co-edited (Super/Heroes: From Hercules to Superman) emerged from the conference in 2005. The current anthology The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero focuses more specifically on comics and superheroes, whereas the earlier book centred more on predecessors and mythic prototypes. In addition to scholars I know who are currently writing books or essays for future publication on the topic, the healthy growth of comics studies is also evident in books like Comics as Literature (Rocco Versaci), A Comics Studies Reader (edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester), Superheroes! Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films (Roz Kaveney), Film and Comic Books (edited by Ian Gordon, Mark Jancovich and Matthew McAllister), and Superhero: the Secret Life of a Genre (Peter Coogan). To add to this, there was the Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy exhibition and mini-conference that was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in mid-2008. If anything, the exhibition revealed the extent to which the superhero - as representative of comic book culture - is woven deeply into the consciousness of so many people. Even if their first exposure to the superhero has been through film or television, most people know that it's the comics that gave birth to them. I should also add that the Institute for Comics Studies was unofficially launched by its Director Peter Coogan at the Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy mini-conference event which was held at the MET in June 2008. The official launch will take place at ComicCon in 2009 and what's exciting about this Institute is that it aims to address and support the thirst for knowledge that's out there by providing scholars, professionals and fans with a contact point that can direct them to comics resources, courses being taught, conferences, as well as encouraging and organizing events with the industry. I'm really excited to be on the Board of Directors, which, in addition to including other academics such as yourself, also includes comics creators, distributors and producers.

One of the funniest outcomes of the Men in Tights conference had to do with my Batman obsession. In Melbourne, we have a problem with fruit bats. At the time of the conference they had over populated our botanical gardens and before the more logical solution of capturing the bats and migrating them to outer suburbs was achieved, a bunch of trigger happy stooges were going into the gardens and killing off bats by the hundreds. The organizer of an group called "Save the Bats" had attended the conference and heard me talk about my love of the Batman - and soon after the conference, I was contacted by this guy who asked me to become a Bat-Spokeswoman and to get the word out to students to attend protests and be more active in saving the bats of the Botanical Gardens. So how could I say no? My students thought it was hysterical - I still remember making an announcement about a save the bat protest (complete with the backstory) at the beginning of a lecture in my Genre Studies course and they cracked up in fits of laughter. In their eyes, the sequence of events made sense. Of course I'd become the spokeswoman for bats - I had, after all, shared my Batman fascination with them for years!! And this story did find sweet closure. When the Melbourne City Council eventually did move the bats out of the city, many came to settle in my suburb. So now, if I go out into the garden at night, I can sit on a bench with my cats Bats and Elektra, and look up at the giant pear tree in my back yard and listen to the very audible crunching sounds that are made by the giant fruit bats that visit my garden. Happy times!

Your introduction links the contemporary superhero to much older mythic traditions. What do we learn by searching for more "universal" themes underlying contemporary comics? What are the limits of this mythological approach to contemporary culture?

I've always been fascinated by myths and myth studies and, in particular, by the fact that heroic patterns of behaviour, hero types, and hero stories are repeated again and again throughout time and across different countries. I've always been a fan of ancient Greek and Old Norse myths and their heroes, and despite the fact that surface details may change there was so much that was similar - especially in the stories radiating around Asgard and Mount Olympus, with their shared epic tales of superheroic battle related to creation and apocalypse and everything in between. I guess it's the idea that there may be a shared desire that crosses temporal and geographic boundaries and that's fundamental to human nature (and to our understanding of the world around us) that I find so impelling. What really does my head in is trying to come to terms with 'why'? Why these stories of grand heroic battles where humanity and the universe itself is under threat? Of fearsome heroes with superhuman strength who face dark, monstrous doubles that threaten the social balance? Why have basic narrative patterns of hero myths repeated themselves across time and across different cultures? What human needs, desires, or fears does this repetition fulfil?

Having said that, there are so many limitations to universal myth models. Once you locate the repeated themes and hero types, what then? What about all of the specifics? Sure Superman may have much in common with ancient characters like Hercules and Zeus; and Thor may be named after and serve similar actions to his Norse namesake, but there's so much more to Superman and Thor as contemporary superheroes that speak to our own times. Both emerged within the specific context of C20th culture and that specificity has to count for something. Superman and Wonder Woman's origins, for example, were nurtured by the realities of Nazism and Hitler's 'perfect man'. The creation of the Fantastic Four through exposure to cosmic rays while on a scientific mission in outer space can be place very firmly within the 1960s, the rise and faith in science and technology and the emerging Space Race. And as retcons and continuity rewrites have shown us, the identity of comic book superheroes don't necessarily remain fixed across the decades: they've been revised, deleted from history, and rewritten into a new history. Beyond such socio-cultural reflections, newer superheroes like Animal Man, Hitman, Planetary, the Invisibles, the Authority - especially in the hands of 'auteur' artists and writers - tell us as much about the processes at work behind creating, reading, interpreting and refashioning comic book heroes across many decades of their production and consumption. If the fluidity of the superhero mythology shows us anything it's that a universal model of interpretation fails to come even close to understanding the nature and rationale of such dynamic processes of production.

Why do you think the superhero has been such a persistent figure across the history of 20th century popular culture?

Let's face it! On a basic level, they're exploits, dramas, relationships, stories and fashion sense are just great fun and the comic books invite repeat performances on the part of the reader. On a more serious level, like the cowboys of the western superheroes have embodied ethical codes and moral structures that society needs to embrace in order to survive. Despite their excess and hyper-humanity, they've always represented the voice or, more precisely, the various voices of the people, reflecting the social dilemmas and belief systems of their time. Even when the superheroes became darker in the late 80s, propelled by writers like Frank Miller and Alan Moore, they still reflected abstract moral crises of their era. Significantly, individual superheroes have consistently reflected the changing times that they belong to, learning to adapt to each decade that passes and the cultural changes that come with the passing of time. The Spider-Man of the 1960s, for example, is not the same Spider-Man of the 2000s - they're identities that are the product of different societies at different times that have reached different audiences. The superheroes who have survived across each shifting decade have been able to adapt their form, and connected to this is the superhero's capacity to translate and cross over into other media. This has been a huge plus in extending and familiarising audiences with the superhero stories. The Flash, Superman, Wonder Woman, Catwoman, the Hulk, Elektra - while originating in the comic book format, have also migrated media to appear in radio, television, B-film serials, blockbuster films, novels and computer games.

Angela Ndalianis is Head of Screen Studies at Melbourne University. Her research focuses on entertainment media and their histories, and she's especially interested in the aesthetic and formal implications of media collisions between films, computer games, television, comic books and theme parks - an area she has published widely in. Some of her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), and the anthologies The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2008) and Super/Heroes: from Hercules to Superman (2007). She is currently completing the book Spectopolis: Theme Park Cultures, which looks at the historical and cultural influence of and on the theme park, and is co-authoring a book titled Curatorial Culture with Jim Collins. She can be contacted on angelan@unimelb.edu.au

Mobilizing Generation 2.0: An Interview with Ben Rigby

This fall, I will be teaching a course on New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement. The class is designed to provide a bridge between the research we are doing for the Center for Future Civic Media and Project New Media Literacies. It also hopes to explore in depth a range of current research about how the new media landscape is impacting how young people learn to think of themselves as citizens. Here's the course description:

New Media Literacies and Civic Engagement

What does it mean to be 'literate' and how has this changed as a consequence of the introduction of new communication technologies? What social skills and cultural competencies do young people need to acquire if they are going to be able to fully participate in the digital future? What are the ethical choices young people face as participants in online communities and as producers of media? What can Wikipedia and Facebook teach us about the future of democratic citizenship? How effective is Youtube at promoting cultural diversity? What relationship exists between participatory culture and participatory democracy? How is learning from a video game different from learning from a book? What do we know about the work habits and learning skills of the generation that has grown up playing video games? What impact are young voters having on the 2008 elections and why? What lessons can we take from the study of virtual communities which might help us enhance civic engagement at the local level? Who is being left behind in the digital era and what can we do about it? This class is designed to introduce students to a new wave of research which is bringing together scholars from many different disciplines to ask new questions, pose new models, and try new experiments to better imagine the future of American education and of democracy itself.

Much of the reading in the course will be drawn from a series of books recently produced by the MIT Press and the MacArthur Foundation. These books reflect a national push by the MacArthur Foundation to explore how young people are learning informally through the affordances of new media and what implications this has for the future of schools, libraries, public institutions, the workplace, and the American family. Researchers and guests from The MIT Center for Future Civic Media and Project New Media Literacies will play an active role in the course, sharing projects and curricular materials under development, grounding our more theoretical considerations with real world perspectives. Students will have an opportunity to explore these ideas through research papers but they will also be asked to get involved in the development of projects which are designed to have an impact on real world communities.

If you happen to be a student at MIT, Harvard, or Wellesley, I hope you will consider taking the class this fall. The class meets Mondays, 11-2 pm, and Weds, 3:30-5 pm. I am hoping to write here from time to time about some of the ideas that emerge from the class. We will also be hosting several discussions through the MIT Communications Forum this term focusing on the roles which new media played in the 2008 Presidential Campaigns.

To whet your appetite on this topic, I wanted to share here an interview with Ben Rigby, the author of a recent book, Mobilizing Generation 2.0, which offers case studies and insights for activists and campaigns as they think about how to reach and court young voters. The book includes discussions of blogs, social networks, mobile technologies, wikis, and virtual worlds, among other web 2.0 practices, and features contributions from a range of key thinkers including danah boyd, Seth Godin, Mitch Kapor, and Beth Kanter. Rigby, who has developed web and mobile strategies for a range of nonprofit and Fortune 1000 companies, founded MobileVoter.org, an organization dedicated to using new media to politically empower young people.

You organize your book around new technologies and platforms. Yet at every civic media event I've been at lately, the core debate has been whether the change is

being brought about by new technologies or by new social and cultural practices

which help to foster a greater sense of civic engagement. Is this a false

debate? Where do you fall in terms of the relative importance of technologies

vs. social and cultural practices?

It's absolutely a false debate. Technology is a social and cultural practice. It means nothing outside of the context of the people who use it. This question led me to re-read the paper that inspired me to pursue a thesis program in Science, Technology, and Society back in college. It's called "Steel Axes for Stone-Age Australians" by Lauriston Sharp.

To summarize Sharp's brief ethnography: The Yir Yoront is a Western Australian aboriginal group that, by the early 1900s, had very little exposure to any social group outside of their limited radius (and virtually no contact with non-aboriginal peoples). The stone axe played a central role in their lives as a productivity tool, but most important, as a lynch-pin of social relations. Being difficult to manufacture, these axes were in short supply. While any Yir Yaront was permitted to use one, their use was controlled by adult men. Women and children who wanted to use an axe were required to get one from a man (usually a direct relation) and needed to return it promptly and in good condition. A man referred to his axe as "my axe," but women and children never did. The axe also figured prominently in trading relations with nearby groups. The Yir Yaront traded sting-ray-barb tipped spears for raw stone with their neighbors to the south (where quarries were located). Again, adult males figured prominently in these relations as they were the primary producers of spears and lead negotiators.

When an Anglican mission arrived in 1915, the missionaries set up a plan for "raising native living standards." In return for undertaking certain tasks or behaviors, the missionaries distributed incentive goods to the Yir Yaront. The missionaries quickly discovered that their steel axes were valued more than any other trading item. Thus, they'd give out these axes as incentives for participation in their programs and as gifts during holidays. They'd give them to men, women, and children indiscriminately.

Sharp describes the events that follow the introduction of the steel axe as "the collapse and destruction of all Yir Yoront culture." Wives and children no longer needed to defer to their superordinate male. Men, in turn, became insecure as they questioned their roles and masculinity. The hierarchy of 'ownership' melted, which resulted in the rise in stealing and trespassing. Trading links weakened as stone was no longer highly valued. Associated trade ceremonies took on less significance and became poorly attended.

Frustratingly, Sharp's ethnography leaves off there. It appears that he left the field just as these monumental transitions were taking place. I haven't been able to find any followup reporting. It's the ultimate cliff hanger (if any readers have additional information on this group, please send!). He reports, somewhat melodramatically, that the Yir Yaront's southern trading partners passed through a similar set of cultural transformations which resulted in an "appallingly sodden and complete cultural disintegration, and a demoralization of the individual such as has seldom been recorded elsewhere."

Even without the melodrama or the end of the story, it's clear that a technical innovation (or introduction of such) sparked the transformation of a society. However, because the technology in question is a simple axe, it's easy to disambiguate the tool from the social and cultural practice that surrounds it. Here, the tool gets moderately more effective at its ostensible task (chopping), but it's how the Yir Yaront wove it into their life that's critical. If it were any garden variety tool, that'd be one thing. But the axe was central to the Yir Yaront hierarchy and belief system. It's impossible to understand the axe without understanding its cultural context - it doesn't make sense.

Similarly, email, social networking, and YouTube don't mean anything by themselves. They are what we make of them - and how we believe in them. Peer production of media is significant because of the way that we value media. Technology is inherently social.

In fact, this question ties into my motivations for writing Mobilizing Generation 2.0. In order to make social change, you have to understand -a- what the axe does (chopping) and -b- how people value it (cultural context). Of course, there's a chasm in complexity between the axe and today's technologies such that even understanding -a- is something of a challenge. However, it's -b- that's really important. And you can't get to -b- without first getting to -a-.

So the book is organized around our most significant axes: blogs, social networking, mobile phones, wikis, video and photo sharing, online mapping, and virtual worlds. It intends to give readers a crash course in understanding -a-. Then, once that territory is covered, the book goes into -b-: how young people are using their technologies and how organizations are, in turn, using these same technologies to connect with youth.

We have a curious relationship with the word "technology." In common speech, we use it to define a subset of our tools which are unfamiliar to some, but not all, members our social group. Thus, tools such as tshirts, shoes, and axes are just "things"... things familiar to everyone. But microchips, cell phones, and Web sites are "technologies." Of course, they all belong to a kind of tool continuum - and it's helpful to understand "technology" in this context.

There's a moment when a tool stops being referred to as a "technology" and becomes just a thing. A light bulb, for example, has moved from being a technology to just a thing. However, a cell phone is still a technology. It will eventually move into the category of "thing" as it becomes more familiar to more people and as newer and less familiar tools take its place. The dividing line on this continuum differs among age groups - it sits forward for younger people. This rough diagram illustrates this idea.

Of course the continuum varies from person to person. But for an older person running a nonprofit or political campaign (as most director level people tend to be), it's helpful to imagine that most of their "technologies" are just "things" in the minds of young people - nearly as natural and thoughtless as putting on shoes in the morning (which is not to say, however, that they're insignificant).

All along this continuum (and back to your question), each of these tools is embedded in our cultural context. I can't imagine it being any other way until the point at which our tools take on an agency that's quite outside of our collective control. To my thinking, this point happens when we start having earnest discussions about civic rights for intelligent computer systems - which means that these systems will have evolved into something entirely different from what they've been. I think that this moment will eventually arrive, but that it's many years away.

Over the past few years, organizations of all kinds have begun to explore the

value of virtual worlds. Yet, virtual worlds still arguably reach only a culture of early adapters. What is the current value of virtual worlds as a political platform? Are we experimenting with something that will have a long term impact but may offer only limited short term rewards? If so, how can you justify putting energy there in what may turn out to be a tight political contest?

I don't know much about the inception of Second Life, but I imagine it went something like this:

[Scene: friends sitting around a poker table drinking beer]

Philip Rosedale: Have you guys read Snowcrash?

Friend #1: Yea, it rocked.

Philip Rosedale: Wouldn't it be cool if we built that thing?

Friend #2: What thing?

Philip Rosedale: The thing! The actual virtual world that Stevenson describes. I know some tech guys.

Friend #1: Phil, you should do it. That would rock.

Philip Rosedale: Yea, maybe I will.

Then Rosedale takes the book, hires some coders, and transliterates the book into pixels. And so, we've got Second Life, which is Snowcrash come to life - irony and all. Second Life was such an early sensation that it has, thus far, defined what is meant by "virtual world." In fact, it's gone further by defining the common understanding of character-driven 3D space (which is distinct from a "virtual world").

Second Life's early success and recent woes have, in fact, put a damper on innovation in the 3D space. Second Life and its imitators (of which there are now dozens, including Google's recent project called Lively) continue to replicate Snowcrash. They recreate fantasy versions of something that approximates real-life. And social change efforts in these worlds are doomed. They are shoddy replications of experiences that are better in real life: walkathons, tschotchke giveaways, museum exhibits.

But these efforts are only the first forays into what will eventually be the next world changing technical movement. Snowcrash is not where we'll end up. The potential of immersive 3D space is much greater than imitating and fantasizing about our existing reality. Remember in 1995 when businesses would scan their paper brochures and use the resulting JPG as their Web site? That's where we are today with the use of 3D space.

So, for anyone concerned about the 2008 Election, there's very little of interest. I wouldn't spend any time at all in today's virtual spaces. From the candidate perspective, it's not worth the effort. My advice for social changemakers is to keep a close eye on the space and to wait for it.

You end the book with a suggestion that "web 2.0" constitutes a "tectonic shift" in the political landscape. Explain. What's the nature of that shift? How quickly is its impact being felt? What changes will traditional political organizations need to make in order to take advantage of this new model for reaching voters? And what do you think will be the biggest points of resistance in moving in this direction?

Yochai Benkler describes this shift wonderfully in the Wealth of Networks. We (I) owe him a debt of gratitude for the book. Benkler describes the shift as nothing short of a massive redistribution of the means of production. That's tectonic. It's a dozen steel axes put into the hands of everyone. And it's a power grab right now between:

a) Those who are trying to prevent the redistribution (ie: RIAA)

b) Those who don't recognize that massive shifts are underway (ie: most large nonprofits and traditional political organizations)

c) Those who love their newfound axes (ie: most young people and Web2.0 business owners)

So -a- will fight it; -b- will lose (most of the time); and -c- will fight to make -b- join them instead of joining -a- so that -a- doesn't win, which is not at all a certainty at this point in time.

All signs are that a record number of young people have been participating in the current presidential elections and that voter registration for those under 30 have increased dramatically in recent years. What factors do you see as contributing to this increase in youth participation? Will these trends continue to rise as we look towards the fall?

I don't have anything substantively new to say on this topic, other than to echo what you and other smart observers have been saying for the past couple of years. Young people's media has become participatory - and they're reacting positively to a candidate (Obama) who has shaped his campaign in a similar fashion. Moreover, he's using language and speaking about issues in ways that give him the air of authenticity. For the sake of increasing youth political involvement, it's a good thing he won the nomination.

You begin the book by discussing your experiences running a nonprofit, Mobile

Voter, which you suggest failed to meet its goals for registering and

mobilizing young voters. Why did Mobile Voter fail and what did you learn from

this failure?

There's such a finality implied by the word "failure." I don't believe in it. It's too black and white.

To take a recent example - this spring, we entered our newest initiative, Volunteer Now!, into the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. The Challenge involved two rounds. To make it into the first, we needed to generate votes on Net2's web site. I emailed my list asking for votes and we made it in. The second round involved two days at a conference center in San Jose. At the conference we met dozens of enthusiastic social change activists and several potential funders. We also demonstrated the product dozens of times. In sum, we met a ton of people, honed our pitch, and got great feedback for the project.

We didn't place in the top three. Did we fail? Of course not. There's so much value in this experience. I'm unsure what historical events brought us to consider our efforts in Manichaean terms (win/lose, evil/good, fail/succeed), but I think it's a big problem. We're afraid of nuance.

So, instead of slinking away from not winning the Net2 challenge, I sent out an email to my list again with the subject line "We didn't win!!" And funny enough, that email generated a response that was 10x higher than the initial email asking for votes. There was a lot of value in looking at the "loss" as an opportunity for engagement.

So, that's a long entree to your question about Mobile Voter's 2006 "TxtVoter" campaign. In 2006, we raised funds from the Pew Charitable Trusts to register 55,000 young voters. By Nov 5th, we'd registered about 35,000 - of which only about 2,000 came through our text messaging system. The rest came via our GoVote.org Web site which we built and operated in conjunction with Working Assets (now Credo, who put the lionshare of the effort into generating traffic to that site).

It would be disingenuous to say that we weren't disappointed by the numbers - especially since we started the season with a Dean-like yell and aspirations to register many more than 55K. However, there's a rich context to this "failure." In addition to TxtVoter's registration component, we helped to implement a get out the vote (GOTV) campaign that was studied (and party organized) by researchers from Michigan (Dale/Strauss) which has since become the seminal study on the effectiveness of text messaging for GOTV. We also developed a list of best-practices which is now being used to replicate the most successful instances of the TxtVoter campaign (there were some events in which response rates surged to 46% versus the 1% overall average). To boot, the experiences of the '06 campaign led directly to the writing of Mobilizing Generation 2.0, which intends to address some of the pain points that I saw across hundreds of nonprofits and political campaigns during the TxtVoter initiative.

In sum, the learning is: there is no failure and we need to better embrace nuance.

"Fighting Evil -- So You Don't Have To"

So, this post is mostly me going all fan boy on you, so if you have a low threshold for the freaky and geeky aspects of this blog, you may want to move along. But if you are looking for something fun to check out this summer, then let me recommend a new series, The MiddleMan, which has shown up on ABC Family, of all places.

The Middleman is based on a cult comic book series for Viper Comics, created by written by Javier "Javi" Grillo-Marxuach with art by Les McClaine. "Javi" was a producer and writer for the first two seasons of Lost, was the Co-Executive Producer for Medium, and contributed to Charmed and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. According to Wikipedia, that font of all knowledge, "Javi" had originally conceived of The Middleman as a television pilot before deciding that he would transform it into the comic book medium because it would cost to produce a "tentacled ass monster" for television.

There's three graphic novels worth of The Middleman comics out there, which I grabbed from my local shop after watching the premier episode of the series last week. I basically inhaled the three books on the first leg of a trip to Australia, still wrapped up in the afterglow of what turned out to be a really good first episode of what I hope is going to be a very fan-worthy television series.

Don't worry if you missed the first episode because it is available online from ABC Family for free (if you call being forced to watch almost a dozen commercials for the American Girl movie in a row "free") or from iTunes for a modest fee. You might also simply read the first graphic novel, given that the opening episode is an incredible faithful, more or less line by line recreation of the story from the comics.

How do I explain what this series is about? The Middleman is an all-American hero, a former Navy SEAL, who works for what the comics calls O2STK, The Organization Too Secret To Know. His job: "fighting evil -- so you don't have to." As he explains to the series female lead, Wendy, "Ever read comic books?....You know how there's all kinds of mad scientists and aliens and androids and monsters and all of them want to either destroy or take over the world. It's all true." Wendy is a snarky young art student temping at a scientific research center who finds herself staring eyeball to tentacle with a massive bug-eyed monster and she doesn't blink: she grabs a letter opener and fights back. Her plucky and matter of fact response to the stuff that makes most people turn inside out wins her the respect of the Middleman, who offers her a job as his assistant when it is clear that she's been blackballed from all other temp companies in the aftermath of the firey explosion that blows up her previous place of employment.

From there, things get a little weird -- although nothing that a regular reader of indie comics can't handle. In the opening episode, she confronts a hyperintelligent monkey who has based his whole world view on contemporary gangster movies like Scarface and Goodfellas and wants to rule the mob realm. After all, everyone knows that us comic fan boys go ape over super-intelligent apes. In the graphic novels, each book parodies a different genre, with the second volume devoted to a spoof of Mexican wrestling culture and the third book taking down every cliche from the James Bond franchise and a few from giant robot anime.

The scripts for the series, not to mention the comics, are full of one laugh out loud one-liner after another, most of them playing on precise and pithy references to popular culture: I haven't seen a script this dense with injokes since early Joss Whedon. The opening episode draws a strong parallel between the central protagonists and The Avengers (Emma Peale, not Marvel), and it's a hoot watching the ape tell us to "say hello to my little friend." The tone manages to be campy without being too campy: it doesn't take itself seriously but it also manages to make you care about the lead characters, which include not only the Middleman, who "Javi" aptly describes as "Dirk Squarejaw", and Wendy, but also Wendy's "not gay -- just a film student" boyfriend, her sex kitten and performance artist roommate, her seriously weird next door neighbor who speaks in lyrics from Johnny Cash songs, and Ida, the android who has gotten permanently stuck in the persona of a little old librarian with an attitude. (If the television version is half as good as what they do with Ida in the comics, we are in for a big treat.)

The performances consistently live up to the quality of the script: everyone gets a few memorable lines and moments in the spotlight in the opening episode and I can't wait to see where the characters go from here. While the opening episode is straight from the comics, it sounds like the second episode, which airs Monday night, will be original, best I can tell from the spoilers out on the web. I might have guessed this anyway because I don't think ABC Family is going to allow them the budget to do the spectacular battle royale featuring a legion of Mexican wrestlers from book 2 or depict the slug-fest between giant robots or the genetically engineered shark man from book 3 of the comics series. I wish I had something really profound to tell you about this series, but it's hard to reach profundity after only one episode (not to mention while sitting jetlaged in a hotel in Brisbane.)

But I did want to share my current fan boy excitement with those of you who regularly read this blog and may be looking for something fresh and a little different. When The Middleman asks Wendy if she reads comics, she rattles off "Astro City, Box Office Poison, Demo, Hellboy, Dead@17..." Those aren't bad as a set of cultural coordinates. I'd say that if you read and enjoy any of these books, then you should probably give this series a shot. And if you don't read comics, think Ghostbusters or Men in Black with a bit more hardcore indie edge than either of those Hollywood blockbusters.

You can get a taste of the performers and the show's sense of humor from these mock PSAs promoting the series.

Here's Wendy:

And here's The Middleman:

More Transmedia News

I've been meaning to do another post on this topic for a while. First, I was inspired by a story in Fast Company, sent to me by Jesse Alexander, which described a gathering of Hollywood's fan boy elite to talk about the futures of cross-platform storytelling:

Tim Kring, the lanky, goateed guy at the head of the table, created Heroes, NBC's hit television show about superpowered people. To his right, in a black hoodie and narrow black-framed glasses is Damon Lindelof, cocreator of Lost, ABC's island-fantasy juggernaut, as well as producer of next year's eagerly anticipated Star Trek movie, directed by J.J. Abrams. Across the way is Lindelof's buddy Jesse Alexander, co-executive producer of Heroes (formerly of Lost and the pioneering she-geek hit Alias). Nearby is Rob Letterman, the self-described nerdy director of DreamWorks' next mega-franchise movie, Monsters vs. Aliens. He's chatting up video-game creator Matt Wolf, who's developing a project with Alexander....The long-haired bearded guy pouring straight bourbon is Ron Moore, creator of the new Battlestar Galactica, the SciFi Channel's acclaimed reimagining of the classic series. The guy eating pizza on the couch is Javier Grillo-Marxauch, a veteran producer of Lost and NBC's paranormal series Medium, who's now having his own fantasy graphic novel, Middleman, turned into a series on ABC Family.

so, how come I never get invited to parties like this?

The article goes on to introduce the concept of transmedia entertainment and to suggest that it is one of the hotest topics in the entertainment world today:

"In five years," Kring is saying, "the idea of broadcast will be gone."

"Right," says Lindelof. "Instead of watching Heroes on NBC, you'll go to nbc.com and download the show to your device, and the show will be deleted as soon as you finish watching it -- unless you pay $1.99; then you get audio commentary. You enhance it. It's like building your Transformer and putting little rocket ships on the side." ...

In the analog era, such efforts might have fallen under the soulless rubric of "cross-promotion," but today they have evolved and mashed up into a new buzzword: "transmedia." The difference is that cross-promotion has nothing to do with developing or expanding an established narrative. A Happy Days lunch box, in other words, does nothing to advance the story of Fonzie's personal journey.

While such merchandising campaigns still exist, transmedia offers one big plot twist: X-ray vision. Today's audience, steeped in media and marketing, sees through crass ploys to cash in. So the Geek Elite are taking a different approach. Rather than just shill their products in various media, they are building on new and emerging platforms to expand their mythological worlds. Viewers watch an episode of Heroes, then follow one character's adventure in a graphic novel. They tune in to Lost, then explore the island's twisted history in an online game. It is this "transmedia storytelling," as Alexander puts it, that ultimately lures the audience into buying more stuff -- today, DVDs; tomorrow, who knows what.

The article offers a pretty good snapshot of where the industry's thinking is at in terms of transmedia properties and certainly offers an up date on my discussion of The Matrix in Convergence Culture.

This week, the New York Times reported on the plans to release a suplamentary dvd to more or less coincide with the release of the Watchmen movie next year:

The second film, tentatively called Tales of the Black Freighter, follows a side Watchmen storyline about a shipwreck and will arrive in stores five days after the main movie rolls out in theaters. The DVD will also include a documentary-style film called Under the Hood that will delve into the characters' backstories.

Those of you who have read Alan Moore's original graphic novel will recognize both of those titles as materials which are complexly woven into the narrative, offering us a glimpse into the way popular culture might have evolved -- towards pirate comics -- in a world where superheroes are real (Black Freighter) and a sense of the ways superheroes might be covered as cultural celebrities (Under the Hood). As the producers have striped down Watchmen for the screen, they have pushed these elements to the margins. In another era, they would have been left on the cutting room floor, but instead, they are becoming the backbone of Warner Brother's transmedia strategy for the film.

The article also noted:

In addition, the studio plans a dozen 22- to 26-minute Webisodes to help make the complex story easier for the uninitiated to digest. Called "The Watchmen Motion Comic," it will be a panel-by-panel slide show of the graphic novel narrated by an actor.

Keep in mind that Warner Brothers was the studio which sponsored the Wachowski Brothers's transmedia development around the Matrix franchise.

All of this suggests how central transmedia entertainment has become to the thinking inside Hollywood today. So it is great to have a chance to share with my readers some insights from a real master of this practice.

Talking Transmedia: An Interview with Starlight Runner's Jeff Gomez (Part Two)

How important do you think hardcore fans are to the success of genre entertainment? How do such fans create value around your properties?

As exemplified by the efforts of many recent genre producers, the cultivation, validation and celebration of fandom are vital to the success of any genre rollout. It's interesting to note that two major genre releases in 2007, The Seeker: The Dark is Rising and The Golden Compass were both released with either limited or no transmedia components designed to immerse a potential fan base into the fantastical worlds of the films--no one was indoctrinated into the fiction--and both failed spectacularly.

Genre fans are passionate. Passion is the least expensive and most powerful driver behind any endeavor. Passion can punch holes through the wall of noise that is media culture, it generates curiosity and leadership, and the passion of a base of fans can help to keep producers and creatives "honest"--forcing them to remain true to the core messages, themes, mythology and characterizations of the story world. Passion generates value, because it draws attention and is often quite infectious.

What do you see as the downsides of generating such passionate consumers?

On the other hand, passion can be blind and judgmental. Fan zeal can threaten to "box in" a property, potentially stunting its growth. It can generate negative "buzz" around a project, which can leak into media coverage and plant seeds of doubt in the general audience base. Despite the attachment of a well known director in George Miller for Warner Bros. upcoming Justice League super hero production, for example, many fans have expressed doubt around casting and story issues that have leaked to the fan media. These have raised concerns in the studio strong enough to postpone the start of production until after the Writers Guild of America strike ended. The delay allowed for the production to take a lower profile and for script and casting choices to be amended. Whether or not this will help the production remains to be seen.

As some of these genres have become more commercially viable, the San Diego Comic Con has emerged as an important media marketplace. Can you speak to the role this gathering plays in the marketing of your properties?

Comic Con International in San Diego plays a more and more pivotal role in heralding, marketing and launching new genre efforts. In the midst of negotiating with executives at The Walt Disney Company for a job working with one of their largest franchises, Starlight Runner took them on a tour of the Comic Con exhibition floor. Many of the "worlds" we helped to develop were on spectacular display: Mattel's Hot Wheels universe, the fantasy realms of Magic: The Gathering, high priced back issues of Valiant Comics, and the announcements for new video games and comic books based on Turok and our own "Team GoRizer" at Disney's own booth! Suffice to say, a deal was quickly sealed!

Each year, Comic Con attracts well over 100,000 "gatekeepers," fans of niche, cult or genre entertainment who make it their business to spread the word about the newest and coolest content to their friends and acquaintances both in their home communities and on the Internet. It used to be that one of these gatekeepers would have a circle of five to ten contacts back home to whom he or she would convey what was best about the convention. Now in the age of social networking and pop culture web portals, that number has multiplied exponentially. Add to this the mass media coverage given to Comic Con and content producers can reach untold millions through it.

The Christian community might be read as another kind of niche public for media properties -- often alienated from mainstream content, deeply interested in providing alternative forms of entertainment for their families. What are the challenges of reaching these consumers, and can their tastes be reconciled by the demands of the mass audience?

Like any niche audience, the Christian community wants to enjoy entertainment that reflects their values and sensibilities. Interestingly, the classic Hollywood ethos reflects Judeo-Christian values: good usually wins out over evil, the hero triumphs after embracing the just and moral path. The problem is actually rooted in how the studios choose to communicate with them.

When Disney and Walden Media reached out to the Christian community to promote The Chronicles of Narnia, what was interesting was that this was a property filled with supernatural beings, witches, magic and violence. However, the studio played up the film's allegory as evocative of the stories and themes of the New Testament.

Quite the opposite happened with The Golden Compass, another children's film that also portrayed supernatural beings, witches, magic and violence. Instead of bravely strategizing a plan and communicating to the Christian community that the film could be used as a tool to discuss vital issues such as faith, false prophets and the abuse of religious power, New Line Cinema chose to downplay those elements of the film and avoid contact with religious leaders. The result was suspicion and distaste for the film among smaller Christian organizations that leaked into the mass media, creating unease with the film among the general population. The film failed in North America.

In short, the entertainment industry is still grappling with how to properly market broad content to the Christian community niche, let alone content specifically designed to appeal to their personal experience.

To extend the religious metaphor of "cult media," do you see cult fans as playing a particularly important role in proselytizing for the content, "evangelizing" the brand?

Fan "apostles" often play an instrumental role in spreading the word and drawing attention to niche content. Many studios and publishers of genre entertainment are currently developing programs to secure relationships with the fan community (or various subsections thereof). While this is not easy to do and often brings on headaches large companies would rather avoid, it is becoming inevitable. After all, without evangelists, how can new religions (or tentpole franchises) spread?

Some have suggested that media producers with strong niche followings might be able to develop alternative distribution models for their entertainment content, marketing their properties directly to the public through subscriptions or downloads, rather than negotiating with networks or film studios. How realistic do you think this scenario is within the current marketplace? What do you think are the obstacles of establishing such a direct relationship between producers and their fans?

There has never been a better time to explore and establish alternative distribution models for niche entertainment content, but these opportunities are still not easy to exploit and may not last forever. It takes a cocktail of money, talent, timing and pure luck to build a major head with direct digital distribution of entertainment content, particularly if your resources are limited compared with those of a Hollywood studio or entertainment firm.

Of course, we've seen recording artists (Coldplay), independent filmmakers (The Blair Witch Project) and amateur content producers (Ask a Ninja) do just that, but it's still a long shot and remarkable resourcefulness is necessary to cut through the noise enough to generate global distribution that generates a reasonable return.

Starlight Runner views alternative distribution models as a means to launch a new property, particularly one with "cult" qualities, in an effort to build buzz, develop a fan base and establish proof of concept. This is a killer combination that can help producers leverage more equity and creative control over their properties after larger partners such as movie studios or media conglomerates move in.

The Nickelodeon smash TV series The Naked Brothers Band, for example, started out as a low-budget indie film making the rounds at small film festivals, before the producers established a web site that offered the film's songs as downloads and sparked a modest but intensely loyal fan following. Nickelodeon took note and granted the production a sweet deal in return for the rights.

Even now, tools and models are being devised that will more readily enable niche content producers to connect directly with their potential audience. Fans want to participate and express themselves, and producers must accommodate them with structures that will allow for guided user-generated content, story material that dovetails with the current storylines set in-canon, and perhaps one day, the opportunity to touch and interact with the canon itself.

"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part Four)

Forms Stretched to Their Limits In this intensified comic atmosphere, it should be no surprise that bodies - whether that of live comic performers or cartoon characters - were reduced to, in a phrase associated with Jack Coles, "forms stretched to their limits." Vaudeville's performer centered mode of production and its emphasis on constant novelty and heterogeniety pushed its stars to develop a range of performance skills and to exploit as many of them in any given performance as possible. This push towards intensification resulting in such specialties as the protean or quick change artist who might transform his identity dozens of times in the course of a performance, trying to play all of the parts in the enactment of a Shakespearean drama or an adaptation of War and Peace. It also resulted in the tradition of the eccentric dancer, whose performance would include back-flipping acrobatics and rubber legged dance moves, which often defy our normal assumptions about human anatomy. One can see remarkable examples of this tradition in the preserved segments from Spike Jone's TV work.

In "I Like to Sock Myself in the Face," Peter James, a regular member of Jone's stock company, sings a rapid patter song which proclaims the masochistic pleasures of self-directed violence. The clown, dressed in an over-sized checkered suit which defies every advice ever given about what to wear on early black and white television, races onto the stage, hurls himself up the curtains, bobs up and down in rhythm to the music, before proceeding to slap and kick himself in the face, run circles around the bandleader, winding up his legs and kicking in all directions, and turning back flips. He flings himself on all fours, bouncing up and down on the floor. All of the above is performed live by the breathlessly enthusiastic entertainer and unveiled for us in a series of long takes which make it clear that there is no trickery involved.

Such a performance might well be called "cartoonish" and that's precisely the point - it offers us the illusion that a live performer's body may be as elastic and protean as that of a cartoon or comic book character. There is little separating Peter James's proclaimed joy in socking himself in the face and the prolonged sequences of Wolfie's equally intense gyrations and contortions in response to Red Hot Riding Hood in Avery's cartoons. Wolfy gets shown going stiff as a board, stretching his arm across the auditorium to pull his beloved off the stage, banging himself in the face with hammers, whistling and pounding on the table, popping his eyes out of his head, and shooting himself in his desperate and uncontrollable expressions of erotic desire. These hyberbolic reactions became the primary source of comedy for extended sequences in the film and such displays are often what people remember most vividly about Avery's cartoons.

Art Spiegelman finds a similar fascination with hyperbolic extensions of the human body in Jack Cole and his most famous creation, Plastic Man:

"Plastic Man had all the crackling intensity of the life force transferred to paper....Plas literally embodied the comic book form: its exuberant energy, its flexibility, its boyishness, and its only partially sublimated sexuality."

The pleasure of reading a Cole comic was watching his protagonist stretch and pull in all directions, changing shape and identity at will, often anchored only by our recognition of the red, black, and yellow coloring of his costume. In yet another analogy to modernist art, Spiegelman argues that the character "personified George Bataille's notion of the body on the brink of dissolving its borders," suggesting a sexual charge to images of Plas's bulbous head at the end of his extending, flaccid or erect neck, or at the suggestion that any body part might take any shape at a moment's notice.

The same might be said of the characters depicted by Basil Wolverton, whom art critic Doug Harvey has linked to a much larger tradition of grotesque caricature, again drawing on references to surrealism, expressionism, and dada:

"Wolverton's obsessively detailed images of impossibly distended organs, alarming proliferations of extra limbs, seething oceans of twisted, sagging,and diseased integument, and traumatic and impractical fusions of man and machine in which man inevitably got the painful end of the stick.... His work has a singularity of focus and vertiginous sense of exhilaration that verges on nausea, and it has continued to be vital and grown increasingly relevant, from the days of vaudeville through to the post-McLuhan mediascape. And if it makes your sister puke, it's done its job."

Spigelman has emphasized the kinetic qualities of Cole's artwork, tracing the ways that Plas moves from left to right, top to bottom, from panel to panel, forcing the reader to scan his eyes rapidly from place to place within the frame: "

Plastic Man's S-curved body ...loops around one pedestrian in the distance and extends between two lovers about to kiss - lipstick traces are on his elongated neck as he passes them - to swoop up between an old man's legs like an enormous penis wearing sunglasses and stare into his startled face."

Wolverton achieves a similarly kinetic quality within single images as mouths, eyelids, hair, wrinkles, all seem on the verge of drooping and sagging, like so much meat ready to fall off the bone or where a man might tied his neck into a knot to avoid the temptations of drink or another might attach a fan to his nose to disperse the stinch of his buddy's garlicky breath. One character may be all mouth, another all nose, another might have four or five chins, each so butt ugly that we stare at the page like rubber neckers at a car accident, unable to take our eyes away even as we feel mounting disgust.

This gagging sensation is suggested by the moment at the end of the above quote where Harvey breaks from the sanctifying language of the art critic to acknowledge a much more adolescent and masculine pleasure in watching his sister's retching. For the most part, the 'vulgar modernists' were misbehaving schoolboys, running amuck, seeking to shock their teachers, mothers, and sisters with their willingness to transgress norms of taste and decorum.

There was an inherent tension between all of this frantic activity and any sense of spatial orientation. Jack Cole's Plas zigzags across the page. Wolverton's Powerhouse Pepper makes expressive use of speed lines which seem to swoop upon us from all sides. Peter James races, leaps and tumbles around every corner of the stage. Olsen and Johnson walk through a series of movie sets with each match on action revealing them wearing a different period costume. A chase scene in Tex Avery's Who Killed Who shows multiple versions of the same characters racing around different parts of the space at the same instant. Another gag shows the detective falling down a trap door in the bottom of the frame and then falling into the same shot from above. Don't expect spatial relations to make sense, don't expect the world to cohere, just sit back and watch as they rip the screen apart and put it back together again.

We can celebrate their formal inventiveness , the giddy excitement created by such unfettered movements, their expressive graphics, yet we also have to acknowledge how much of this humor was directed at women -- literally in the case of Avery's representations of the wolf's pyrotechnic desire or figuratively, in the ways that the works associate all of that ballet, opera, and classical piano music we've described with a feminized realm of high culture. In a world where men display phallic energy through their ability to extend their bodies in all directions, women are often depicted as fixed and static - witness the use of rotoscoping to give Red a much more realistic appearance than Wolfy in the Avery cartoons. There are exceptions, such as Martha Raye's character in Hellzapoppin who shows an ability to freeze frame and reverse the action at one in one particular musical number. Yet, for the most part, male characters enjoy much greater freedom of movement and fluidity of identity. One could argue that such male-centered pleasures are consistent with the analogies to modernism, given how often, say, critics have pointed to the masculine assumptions which shaped artists as diverse as Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollack.

Indeed, high and popular artists may be complicit in reinforcing this particular set of gendered relations. Consider the case of Lena the Heyena, Wolverton's most famous work. The drawing was produced in response to a contest hosted by Al Capp's Little Abner and judged by a panel that included Frank Sinatra, Boris Karloff, and Salvador Dali. The image won out over those produced by such comic book rivals as Jack Cole and Carl Banks, first appearing in Abner and later recycled for a famous early cover for Mad Magazine. Here, high meets low on equal terms, with Dali recognizing and rewarding the "surrealistic" elements in Wolverton's decisively more lowbrow work.

From Mad to 'Sick'

We should not be surprised, then, that alongside Dali or Hoberman, the most famous patron of the "vulgar modernists" was Hugh Heffner who sought to recruit many of those discussed here, including Jack Cole, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Elder, to work for Playboy. While the temptation is to talk about the "no holds barred" nature of their postwar work, we can see the kinds on invisible constraints that shaped their work if we look at the much more sexually explicit but formally similar work Elder and Kurtzman did on "Little Annie Fannie" for Playboy a decade or so later. Biographers describe the cartoonists' discomfort with the more explicit imagery and subject matter Hef expected them to produce for his men's magazine, even as he provided them more creative freedom to fill panels with "chicken fat" gags, to introduce intertextual elements, or to shatter the frame borders. (The recent reprinting of Little Annie Fannie includes an extensive set of annotations in the back trying to explain the numerous topical references that ran through the series. ) In the end, we don't know whether the sexuality was sublimated in their postwar works or whether the sexual explicitness of their later work was forced in their efforts to remain relevant to the sensibilities of a different generation.

Basil Wolverton's grotesques informed later underground comicbook artists like R. Crumb. A famous portrait of Crumb, his legs twisted and tangled, bears unmistakable similarities to a Wolverton drawing showing a similar contorted male figure. Crumb would give the grotesque elements of Wolverton's work a political charge: Crumb used images of contorted human figures to push back against what he and others in the counterculture saw as the state's repressive control over their bodies, offering up much more aggressive representations of racial difference as a challenge to a sexist and racist society (in effect, taking the 'innocent' ethnic types found in the earlier work and shoving it back into the shocked faces of a generation which had been too complacent about racial inequalities). Reading the "vulgar modernists" alongside Crumb, one seems just how good natured and complacent they were, how much they observed limits and respected norms, even as they sought to enact their disruption and transgression.

While the comedy rests on our acceptance that they hold nothing sacred, there is, in fact, much that remains sacred and protected within the humor of the 1940s and 1950s. While Kurtzman and Gaines faced rebuke before the Kefauver committee for their role in creating E.C. horror comics, Mad was seen as a safer alternative to which they retreated in the aftermath. If it was not exactly exhaulted, it never faced government scrutiny. None of these clowns or comic artists were blacklisted during the McCarthy era; their formal transgressiveness and sublimated eroticism would have felt much more comfortable in the context of their times while overt ideological critique would have been much less acceptable.

Hoberman was drawn to these artist at a time when politically engaged filmmakers and cultural critics saw reflexivity as a way out of the illusionism of classical Hollywood cinema, seeing shattering textual codes and conventions as the beginning of a different kind of relationship to spectators. When they looked at the films of Tex Avery, say, they could find many examples of this kind of formal transgression. Avery's films sent characters flying outside the frame or showed them straddling a line separating black and white and technocolor. One character in Batty Baseball (1944) stops the picture and demands that they go back and show the lion roar and provide opening credits, while the dog begs for the picture to end after being beaten mercilessly by Screwball Squirrel.

The character at the start of Who Killed Who is reading a book "based on the cartoon of the same title," turns to the audience, and explains that if the cartoon is anything like the book, he's about to be murdered. Screwball Squirrel lifts up the bottom of the frame and takes a peak into the next scene to see what he's supposed to do next. And we could go on and on.

As Dana Polan notes in an essay principally focused on another "vulgar modernist" text, Chuck Jones' Duck Amuck (1953), there is a difference between reflexivity as a formal practice designed to defamiliarize various textual codes and conventions and reflexivity as a political practice designed to critique real world institutions and practices. One takes pleasure in pulling the rug out from Hollywood conventions, while the other teaches us a new way to see the world or offers us new perspectives on the realm beyond the movie house.

Reading Mad magazine taught the coming generation to be skeptical of political authorities or the influence of Madison Avenue, but they would have to push its humor up several notches before they could find a mode of comedy well suited to the politics of the counterculture. These artists paved the way for everything that came yet they might have been the last generation of American humorists who could transgress wildly and yet still hold a place within the consensus culture. They were, in short, marginal but not outside the frame of mainstream culture.

From a critical perspective, then, the question is whether we should allow ideological criteria to always trump aesthetic ones. Modernism, in the high art sense, was certainly divided between artists, or even works within the body of the same artist's careers, which were more focused on formal innovation and ideological critique, and we have found a way to accommodate both strands in the cannon of western art. Cannons often get defined in terms of the lasting impressions and continued influence of an artist's body of work and by that criteria, these artists continue to exert a strong influence on our culture down to the present day. As Doug Harvey writes in regard to Wolverton,

"generations of comic creators, from Will Elder, Gahan Wilson, R. Crumb and Gary Panter to Peter Bagge, Drew Friedman, and Charles Burns, have been influences by his meticulous technique and pictorial audacity. Artists from the world of 'fine' or 'high' art, such as Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Kenny Scharf, Peter Saul, Jim Nutt, and many others turned Wolverton's pop-culture monstrosities into museum-worthy artifacts."

Similarly, Tex Avery's influence is explicitly acknowledge through Jim Carrey's performance in The Mask, through the opening sequences of Who Frame Roger Rabbit?, or throughout Tiny Tunes, Ren and Stimpy, and Animaniacs while it is hard to conceive of the world depicted in The Simpsons or South Park in the absence of Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman. Hoberman's essay ends with the suggestion that "what was once oppositional in vulgar modernism has largely been co-opted by the culture industry" (pointing to the then contemporary examples of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman or Saturday Night Live.) I have argued the opposite here-- that their containment within commercial culture worked to mute any overt political statements they might have made and that subsequent generations, following their example, have often pushed their transgressiveness much further. Perhaps these later works are consistent with Hoberman's closing call for a "vulgar postmodernism" though I will leave to someone else the always thankless task of policing the borders between modernism and postmodernism. That these works are a living presence in our culture makes the project of revisiting Hoberman's essay and reassessing this body of work that much more urgent.

We have been able to only start the project of a comparative or cross-media analysis of "vulgar modernism" and its place in American culture. Hoberman's intuitive grouping of these artists proves rewarding whether we address the question in terms of biographical details or close textual analysis. These artists were fellow travelers in an artistic project none of them sought to articulate but all of them sought to demonstrate. It was a project whose roots could be traced back to vaudeville but which has been read in relation to a range of modern art movements, caught eternally in a struggle between competing claims of low-brow audacity and high art respectability. Calling them vulgar may oversell their transgressiveness, calling them modernist may overstate their avant garde impulses, yet the reality lies somewhere in the tension between the two. Whatever we want to say about them, they were artists who experimented with the basic building blocks of their respective media and taught a generation a new way to look at the world around them. When Powerhouse Pepper nonchalantly tells us in the final panel of a rather freakish comic story that certain specified pages were a dream sequence, when Startchie explains to a friend that the hearts flying around his paramour's head might mean simply platonic friendship in "cartoon language," they depict a world whose characters (and through extension, their readers) understand themselves as being constructed through recognized artistic conventions. When, in Symphony in Slang, Avery constructs a whole film around literalized metaphors, then we can see him inviting us to reflect on the role of language in shaping how we see the world.

And, yes, they could make your sister puke, your mother blush, and your teacher sputter. Not bad for a day's work.

"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part Three)

Chicken Fat If Avery used the opera singer and the magician as comic stand-ins for the text's struggle between norms and their disruptions, the aesthetics of early Mad Magazine can be read through a more literal conflict, or at least competition, between writer Harvery Kurtzman and artist Will Elder for the attention of the reader. Elder liked to cram his panels with what he called "chicken fat," extraneous gags and signs which pulled our attention from story actions in the foreground to seemingly irrelevant background details. As Elder explained, "chicken fat is the part of the soup that is bad for you, yet gives the soup its delicious pleasure." For the most part, these background gags were Elder's own additions, not dictated by Kurtzman's script, though some have suggested Kurtzman increasingly created opportunities for such elements. At other times, the writer expressed frustration when these gags overwhelmed the basic building blocks of his narrative or upstaged his verbal humor. Readers would linger on a single panel, scanning for more comic elements, rather than following the forward momentum of the plot.

One frequent form of "chicken fat" were advertising signs or graphiiti, texts which often annotated the action or offered conflicting ideological perspectives on the events. Throughout Elder's "Startchy," (Mad, 12) background details hint at a much harsher social milieu than depicted in the Archie Andrews comic books. Yet, Elder can not resist putting a Burma Shave rhyme on the butts of a series of background figures in one panel. A scene from "Shadow!" (Mad, 4), showing a young woman falling down a flight of stairs, places a different advertising slogan on each step, while the natives in "Ping Pong" (Mad, 6) defend themselves with the Blue Shield and Knights of Pythias icons, playing cards, board games, roulette wheel, and surf boards . Such images need not be consistent from frame to frame, as in "Sooperdooperman" (Mad, 4) where a different icon appears on the chest of battling caped crusaders, in each panel, further undermining any conception of a coherent or consistent fictional world.

Elder's contemporary, Basil Wolverton, is similarly known for his use of background details and signs which distract us from the main action. Consider the range of different signs depicted on the cover of a single issue of Powerhouse Pepper: "Fighters: Don't Mope on the Rope," "Seconds don't count. The Referee does!," "Don't Pile in this aisle!," "Tonight: Powerhouse Pepper vs. Doug Slugmug," "Next Week: Rush Crushmush vs. Bopper Sloppermopper," "If you must smoke, light up with genuine boxing matches." A heckler from the crowd asks via a word balloon, "How's to sell you life insurance?" while the protagonist is distracted from punching down his over-sized opponent by a shapely woman walking down the aisle. A semiotician would have a blast interpreting the various functions of such signs (promotional, regulatory, informative) within the fictional world as well as the ways that their language, especially the rhyming slang which was Wolverton's trademark, become a source of pleasure well beyond any meaningful function they might serve within the depicted space.

Wolverton similarly deploys sound effects graphics as a source of pleasure in and of themselves, often using them to distract from rather than reinforce the main action. One illustrated essay. "Acoustics in the Comics," captures the cartoonist's fascinations with sound effects. Wolverton begins the essay describing his uncertainty as he tries to figure out the best way to graphically convey the sound of a horse stepping on someone's head. Responding to critics of his often wild and crazy images, Wolverton embodies such criticisms through the figure of an editor who insists on "realistic" sound effects. Across a series of misadventures, he depicts the cartoonist as trying to identify the precise sounds required to represent a range of unlikely experiences, so that flup represents the sound of "dropping your uppers on a gob of putty," Jworch as the sound of a safe falling on a man, Koyp as the noise a skin pore makes with it snaps shut upon contact with cold air, and soop as the sound of "a octopus tentacle slapping a bald bean" assuming the head is round (though it makes a "spoip" sound If the head is flat. These acoustic gags play upon the ways that Wolverton's art refused to abide by realist or classical expectations, preferring to draw his readers in more zany and improbable directions.

Wolverton was interested in how wacky or improbably sounds might disrupt the norms of a classically constructed text; many of his best graphics engulf his frazzled protagonists with textual representations of their disruptive and distracting sonic surroundings. One representation of artists at work included the sounds of pens scratching on the sketchpad, of someone pulling on his hair, and the astonished response of critics and readers asked to make sense of what the artist is depicting. Another shows an anxious man trying to watch a movie surrounded by other patrons chomping popcorn, popping gum, and rocking in their chairs.

Corny Gag, Isn't It?

Tex Avery's cartoons similarly exploit our fascination with background details, though the linear nature of cinema makes it much harder for us to linger and savor such elements. (One probably has to watch Screwball Squirrel multiple times before you spot the painting of a fire hydrant hanging on the wall of the dog's quarters.) Rather, they unfold in front of the camera, one gag at a time. Consider, a few examples, from his first MGM film, Blitz Wolf (1942).

A Good Humor truck appears alongside a tank brigade. A sign pops out of the top of a flame thrower promising "I don't want to set the world on fire." The Hitler-like Big Bad Wolf steps out of a truck which bears the label, "Der Fewer (Der Better)," and holds up a sign to the camera, "Go on and Hiss! Who cares!" (which gets pelted with tomatos by the picture house audience.) When the Wolf's Der Mechanized Huffer Und Puffer blow the little pigs's house down, it reveals a sign reading "Gone with the Wind" before the camera pans to show a second sign, "Corny Gag, isn't it?" An endless pan up the barrel of an alied weapon pauses long enough to let us read the words on yet another sign, "Long darn thing, isn't it?" and when the weapon fires, it whips out a graphic representing Japan and yet another sign drops down from off-screen space informing us that "Doolittle Dood it!" Again and again, such signs destabilize our relations to the represented actions, sometimes suggesting that the characters are themselves aware that they are appearing within a cartoon which we are currently watching (as in the wolf's direct address to the audience) and to which we may respond (as in hurled fruit) and other times speaking on behalf of an unseen narrator, who feels compelled to comment on the depicted actions (including labeling gags as "corny").

Avery also often based gags on the disjunction between sound and images. Consider three examples from Screwball Squirrel. In the first, Screwball closes the door to a phone booth before letting loose with a prolonged raspberry, a sequence designed to call attention to the act of censorship which represses some of his more bodily humor. (This particular rude noise is specifically prohibited in the Production Code). In the second, the camera pulls back from the canine antagonist rolling down the hill in a barrel to show what we might have first read as non-diegetic musical accompaniment as having a source in the fiction: Screwball is making appropriate sounds using drums, timpani, and bird whistles. At another point, as the dog relentlessly chases the squirrel, we begin to hear repeated noises on the soundtrack and the image gets caught into a loop, which suggests the recycling of stills that go on routinely in animated shorts. The image freezes, the Squirrel steps away, hits the needle of a phonograph, gets the music on track, and then, steps back into his place in the chase. In all three cases, Avery refuses to allow us to take the relations between sound and images for granted. Like Jones and Wolverton, Avery sees noise as the source of comic disruptions of the well constructed texts, finding pleasure in the breakdown of normal codes and conventions.

Jokes On Jokes On Jokes

Terry Gilliam has described what he values most about Will Elder's work: "the way he filled every inch of the thing with, just stuff....jokes on jokes on jokes." Such visual clutter and comic density is especially visible in the expanded panels which open many of Elder's Mad parodies. One such panel for "Is This Your Life?" (Mad, 24) tries to engulf all of 1950s American culture, into a single crammed and cramped image, including fictional characters (the Lone Ranger, Donald Duck), news casters (Edward R. Murrow) and political personalities (Nikita Khrushev, Richard Nixon), television and film stars (Groucho Marx, Bing Crosby, Marilyn Monroe), and brand icons (Aunt Jemima, The Smith Brothers, the Quaker Oats man, Snap, Crackle, and Pop), on and on. The opening of "Starchie," shows Blondie and Little Orphan Annie as another two students attending Riverdale High, while Annie carries a textbook, "Freud is a Fraud by Freed" which pulls us into another discursive field altogether.

Such plays with intertextual references are also common to the work of Tex Avery (see Who Killed Who, 1943, where Santa Clause pops out of a closet and pulverizes the protagonist for failing to respect a sign warning him not to open the door before Xmas) or in Hellzapoppin (where Johnson bumps into a sled marked Rosebud and mumbles that he thought they had burned that thing or where the Frankenstein monster pops out of the audience and hurls Martha Raye back on stage during the disrupted ballet sequence described earlier.) All of this suggests that what Hoberman described as the "encyclopedic" nature of Frank Tashlin's comedy, "an elaborately cross-referenced Bartlett's of mass media quotations"[p.34] or the "collage-like" qualities of Will Elder's comics [p.37] might be extended to describe the tradition as a whole. These artists borrowed freely across media, genres, modalities, and cultural hierarchies.

Moreover, these artists saw visual density as a source of pleasure in and of itself. Often, the specific details are less funny than the sense of their accumulation, of so many unlikely things occurring in the same space at the same time. Consider Hoberman's description of the opening image of "Ping Pong,"(Mad, 6) Elder's parody of King Kong:

"a giant slobbering ape towering above the mass of screaming humanity that flees before it on vehicles ranging from flying carpets to pogo sticks. Although the overall effect is monumentally static, the image yields a dozen miniature emblems of exaggerated panic: one man is running with a bathtub clutched around his middle, another's eyes have just popped from his sockets, someone else appears to have plunged his hand through the back of the head in front of him so that it emerges, flailing, through its mouth. Meanwhile, Ping - brushing off the scaffolding that has suspended itself from his underarm in an attempt to plaster a 'Post No Bills' sign across his torso - is being attacked by a cannon firing puffed rice, a parachutist with a peashooter, a machine-gunner suspended in a diaper that is carried by a stork, and an army helicopter whose rear propeller has unobtrusively pulverized a portion of the frame line."

(p.37) This dense image seems appropriate for a post-war era where critics were commenting on the struggle of Madison Avenue executives to grab our attention in an increasing noisy and distracting visual landscape. We can't take it all in. No two readers see the same thing. And indeed part of the pleasure is the promise of comic effects beyond comprehension.

The Hell sequence at the start of Hellzapoppin is as visually dense as anything Elder ever created with acrobats leaping and flying in every direction, with people walking in between jugglers hurling flying sticks back and forth, with elements thrust into the frame from every possible off-screen space, and with gag elements appearing and then vanishing again with no real explanation. The introduction of Olsen and Johnson gets heralded by a menagerie of chickens, ducks, sheep, goats, and dogs, in a scene which includes everything but the kitchen sink (which, have no fear, gets brought in for comic effect in one of the film's later scenes.) At the risk of a bad pun, this "devil may care" attitude reflects a sense of old vaudeville, burlesque, and joke book gags, being pulled out of moth balls, for one last play, with everyone involved recognizing how tired or hokey these devices may be individually but hoping that if they throw enough things at the screen at once something will produce a laugh or a sense of wonderment. And when the word play gets too bad, one can just step outside of the joke altogether: "corny, isn't it?" These comic artists flag their jokes the way Babe Ruth point out his homeruns: we know where they are going to go but it's still amazing to watch them get there.

"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part Two)

A Comparative Perspective

Hoberman's most important contribution is the way that his essay takes artists who are often discussed as idiosyncratic within their own medium and reads them collectively and comparatively as part of a larger artistic project that took shape across and between media in the post-war period. There is still a lot we do not know about these artists and how they might be related to each other, but it is increasingly clear that Hoberman's intuitive sense of their fit with each other reflects some behind the scenes collaborations. Let's take for example the musician Spike Jones. Jordan R. Young's biography of Jones, The Man Who Murdered Music, traces his migrations across different media (stage, radio, live action and animated cinema, comics, television, and records) as well as his collaborations with a range of other artists often associated with 'vulgar modernism': Jones sought advice from Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin on gags for his various film and television performances, contributed material to Ernie Kovacs' television series, and published pieces in early Mad magazine. All signs are that these artists knew each other socially and professionally, were informed by each other's work, drew on the same aesthetic roots, and in every other sense, constituted what we might describe as a circle. They did not adopt a shared label or issue manifestos to describe their motivations. Basil Wolverton, for example, did speak, tongue in check, of himself as belonging to the "spaghetti and meatball" school of art, a term which reflected his own low-brow aspirations and to the particular way in which he drew flesh and hair, but this term never extended to the others in this circle.

Over the past decade or so, each of the artists associated with "vulgar modernism" have undergone a rediscovery with new books published on Will Elder and Jack Cole, a recent coffee table book reprinting sketches and published works by Basil Wolverton, and the reissue of some long-lost television and radio performances of Spike Jones on dvd. This essay draws heavily on this new material to reconsider the Vulgar Modernists, attempting to offer a more systematic mapping of their shared aesthetic vision. I will define what they had in common and why it is productive to draw comparisons between works produced across such a broad array of different media. For the moment, I am accepting Hoberman's 'vulgar modernism' as an inherited and problematic term, which reflects the ways a generation of critics has talked about these works I write this essay in the hopes of sparking further evaluation rather than making a definitive statement. My focus is going to be on Tex Avery, Spike Jones, Olsen and Johnson, Will Elder, Jack Coles, and Basil Wolverton, but for space considerations, I am not taking on Bob and Ray, Ernie Kovacs, Frank Tashlin, and many others who would also belong in a more thorough discussion of vulgar modernism. My focus here is primarily formal, though there are important ideological questions, having to do with their representations of race, gender, sexuality, wartime propaganda and postwar advertising, censorship and regulation and so forth, which will need to be confronted in any larger discussion. In short, this essay opens a can of worms, hoping more people will pay attention to these artists and their contributions to American culture. But then, comedy is always messy business.

Cartoonus Interruptus

Enough throat-clearing. Let's begin with a consideration of one of the emblematic moments from Tex Avery's oeuvre, the opening sequence from Screwball Squirrel. The streetwise protagonist highjacks "the picture" from his cloying counterpart, Sammy. Sammy's big eyes, fluttering eyelashes, baby talk, coy gestures, and sentimentalized music stands in sharp contrast to Screwball's aggressive manners, broad gestures, nasally voice, slangy language, elastic body, and slapstick gags. Sammy and all of his "cute little furry friends in the forest" are no match for Screwball who takes the more effeminate squirell behind a tree and knocks the crap out of him, turning to the camera to explain "you wouldn't have liked that picture anyway" and promising "funny stuff" as soon as the phone rings.

Animation scholars have correctly identified this moment as a critical confrontation between two schools of American animation, though most of them have incorrectly aligned Sammy with Walt Disney, where-as read in the context of Tex Avery's recent move from Warner Brothers to MGM to take over the animation division, it is more likely that the immediate reference point was to Harmon-Isling his predecessors. We can read the gesture as acknowledging the changing of the guards at Metro, much as Avery began his first MGM cartoon, Blitz Wolf, by offering a syncopated version of the MGM Lion's opening roar. Both moments mark a repudiation of the past and signal that nothing was going to be taken seriously in the Avery era. There were, of course, other works by the Vulgar Modernists which more explicitly took on Disney, such as Will Elder's "Mickey Rodent", which opens with a panel depicting, among other thinks, the Fox walking a naked Pinocchio on a leash and Horace Horszneck being taken away by goons from Walt Dizzy because he went outside without his white gloves. Basil Wolvertoon created two sketches for his own amusement showing Mickey, Minnie, and Pluto confronting the kind of grotesque creatures which were his own stock and trade.

Perhaps more broadly, we can see these artists as taking on what Mark Langer has called the West Coast school of American animation with its middle class ideology, middlebrow taste, and classical aesthetic, in favor of a style which took nothing sacred, including the norms of classical cinema, and which saw itself as more "adult" at a time when American cinema in general was re-inventing itself to reflect the sensibilities of a post-war audience. Langer, himself, contrasts the West Coast school with the New York School, which he associates with the Fleischer Brothers. Many of the defining traits of the New York School carry over to this post-war generation of artists, including a focus on transgression of social norms, an emphasis on the artificiality of the characters and their drawn nature," the use of "exaggerated effects" which call attention to the "artificial" and "manufactured" nature of cartoons, and a "polyphonic and heterogeneous" mixture of elements.

Many of the 'vulgar modernists", however, come from the middle parts of the country, not from the coastal cities, and fell outside both urban sophistication and middle class propriety. Yet, like the Fleischer Brothers, their work was informed through borrowings from the vaudeville tradition where so many of them got their start. Indeed, there is a long tradition of confusing the kinds of transgressions found in vaudeville with devices associated with modernist distanciation, but it's worth remembering that the devices are deployed here to very different effect: to intensify rather than diminish our emotional experience.

We might understand the opening of Screwball Squirrel in relation to a widespread vaudeville trope, the interrupted act. In another essay, which traces this motif across Buster Keaton's film career, I describe the functions this device played in variety entertainment: "

The interrupted performance was a common act structure within the vaudeville tradition, seeming to hold open the prospect of onstage action as spontaneous, unrehearsed, improvisational. Vaudeville sought to maintain the illusion - and it was only partially an illusion - that the audience's response shaped the performance. In a theatrical tradition described by one Chicago critic as 'the field of the expert,' there was a certain pleasure in watching a performance go awry, witnessing events disrupt and threaten the performer's mastery over stagecraft, only to see order restored once again."

Such moments enact the tensions between narrative and spectacle or between normality and transgressions which are central to this school of comedy. We take pleasure in the disruptions and interruptions even as we hope for order to be restored.

In their stage show, Hellzappopin, Olsen and Johnson took this principle of the interrupted performance to the absolute limits, resulting in a show which was able to sustain the longest run of any Broadway production up until that point on the promise of the unexpected and the spontaneous: "

During Hellzapoppin, the audience had bananas, beans, 'pottie-seats,' eggs, and live chickens hurled at them; loud shots exploded; planted hecklers raised a rumpus; a ticket scalper cavorted up and down the aisles with tickets for a rival show; a clown tried to extricate himself from a straightjacket for the show's duration; an elderly woman, outraged that her dress had been lifted by a trick gust of air from under the stage, attacked the entire cast with her umbrella...A woman persisted in bellowing 'Oscar, Oscar'; the audience was bombarded with rubber snakes and spiders; and a whirling madness of cacophonous pandemonium and blatant boorishness engulfed the theater."

Universal brought the production to the screen as one of the last gasps of the 1930s anarchistic comedy tradition, resulting in what Hoberman described as "an alternative universe as might have been scripted by Victor Shklovsky under the influence of mescaline." The opening sequence literally pulls the floor out from under a high class musical number, sending a chorus line dressed in fine evening clothes and singing about heaven, falling gracelessly towards the pits of hell. The film concludes with Olsen and Johnson's elaborate attempts to disrupt the performance of a play within a play, destroying a ballet sequence, for example, through the tactical deployment of sneezing powder, sticky paper, men in bear suits, and thumb tacks, among other things.

While some of the running gags carry over from the stage, Hellzapoppin also finds cinematic equivalents for the play's disruptions of the theatrical experience, introducing, for example, an ongoing battle between the characters in the film and a projectionist (played by Shemp Howard), who grumbles about being forced to become an onscreen actor, mixes up the reels, jolts the projector sending shockwaves through the fictional world and in a gag which confuses the role of cameraman and projectionist, refuses to pan to follow the action but prefers to remain focused on a bathing beauty extra. In discussing the Comedian Comedy tradition, Steve Seidman and Frank Krutnik have argued that both social and formal transgressions get articulated around the figure of the central comedian whose normalization and social integration by the final reel shuts down the possibilities for reflexivity. In Hellzapoppin, this formal transgression can get dispersed across a range of different performers (here, including not just Olsen and Johnson but also Shemp Howard, Martha Raye, Hugh Herbert, and others). A woman crying out for "Oscar" interrupts Olsen and Johnson so many times that they demand someone do something about her, a request accompanied by off-screen sounds of gunshot and then silence. A title asking Stinky Miller to go home is projected over the action of a musical number, which ultimately has to stop dead until the silhouette of an audience member passes out of the theater. Hugh Herbert bombards Olsen, Johnson, and Raye with arrows during one particularly exposition-heavy conversation, with characters nonchalantly dodging or plucking away the projectiles whizzing all around them.

Just as disruption of the stage performance of Hellzapoppin could come from any direction and could exploit any aspect of stagecraft, the film version promises us a world where "anything can happen and probably will." Hellzappopin embodies this tension between the textual and the extratextual in the recurring gag of the distracted and increasingly antagonistic projectionist. In one sequence, a fight in the projection booth jolts the projector, causing the characters to bounce uneasily on the screen; their attempts to restore balance by adjusting the frame line throws the image further off kilter bringing the film itself out of alignment; one character's head gets repeated slammed against the frame bar as they try desperately to right themselves; and then, the characters get thrown into another film altogether, a western spliced in the middle of their reel, where they must battle Indians, before finally arriving back in their proper place in the film. After all, an opening title warns us that Hellzapoppin will bear no resemblance to any actual motion picture.

This interrupted performance structure was the stock and trade of another 'vulgar modernist,' Spike Jones. Literary modernist Thomas Pynchon emphasizes these elements in an essay written in tribute to the man known for his contributions to "music depreciation,"

"Spike's preferred structure was first to state the theme in as respectably mainstream a manner as possible, then subversively descend into restatement by way of sound effects, crude remarks, and hot jazz, the very idiom Spikes Jones and his Five Tacks had begun with back in high school, to the great displeasure of their parents."

Jones and His Cityslickers produced a range of fractured recordings of classical music but could also directed these auditory challenges at middle brow lounge music, as might be suggested by his best-known work, "Cocktails for Two." One widely circulated recording of the song opens with a few bars on the piano and a humming chorus, gradually complimented by strings and a male vocalist who valiantly tries to maintain his decorum as the band adds gunshots, clinking glasses, slide whistles, kettle drums, fire bells, gasps, coughs, hiccups, and belches. It is a classic showdown between music, which defines the high, and noise, which defines the low. Many modern listeners know the audio recording of "Cocktails for Two" which was a favorite on the Doctor Demento radio show but the stage performances relied as much on sight gags as on comic sounds, including the use of drunken midgets, two headed men, acrobats, and a range of other activities which upstage and engulf the soloist (as can be seen on recently reissued kinoscopes of his television series). Members of the Spike Jones troope always emphasize the highly structured nature of these comic disruptions - describing how they had to be taught to burp with the beat, if not in tune with the music. As Dick Webster explains, "The things that seemed so crazy on stage were intensely worked out. It looked like bedlam but it was organized bedlam." The dvds give us access to multiple versions of "Cocktails for Two," each sharing common elements, but each also including novel additions, suggesting a structured but still open space for improvisation within each performance.

From "Cocktails for Two," it is not hard to find our way back to Tex Avery's The Magical Maestro, which depicts the showdown that occurs when a carny magician , knocks out an orchestra conductor and takes his place, waging war on an opera singer who is offering a fairly straight rendition of a classical aria. The maestro does everything he can to distract his high class rival, including magical transformations of his identity, turning him into, among many others, a ballet dancer, a football player, an Indian chief, a convict, a black-faced minstrel, a South Seas Islander, and a Chinaman. These disruptions include both visual gags (proliferating Rabbits) and sound-based gags, including abrupt shifts in musical genre (including Hillbilly, Hawaiian and Minstrel performances). While the film offers a narrative frame for the interrupted act, disruptions, as in Hellzapoppin, also occur from outside the narrative space, such as hair which seems to get caught up in the film's projector and lingers until the opera singer plucks it away. Once again, the interrupted performance structure allows us to pit high culture against low, music against noise, and professional polish against liberating improvisation.

(To Be Continued)

"I Like to Sock Myself in the Face": Reconsidering "Vulgar Modernism" (Part One)

The following essay is a work in progress, produced for an anthology of essays on animation and its relations to live action comedy. I see it as a chance to explore cartoons, long a passion of mine, but so far, not a topic I've written about. It also gave me a chance to return to the field of comedy studies, where I began my career. For more of my work on this topic, see What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Asesthetic, Classical Hollywood Comedy, and the essay on Lupe Velez in The Wow Climax. It also extends the exploration of the relations between high and popular art which runs as a theme through the essays in The Wow Climax, but especially those dealing with Matthew Barney and with what Gilbert Seldes might have taught us about the aesthetics of video games. This essay is a bit on the academic side compared to much of what I post on this blog but my hope is that readers will bear with it for the insights it offers into postwar animation, comics, and comedy. Published in Artforum in 1982, J. Hoberman's "Vulgar Modernism" represents an important benchmark in critical discussions of "popular art." Hoberman constructs the case for the formal innovation and artistic importance of a range of popular artists who were seemingly locked out of the cannon on the basis of their low cultural status, even as their work continued to influence a broad range of modern and postmodern artists. Hoberman describes 'vulgar modernism' as "the vulgar equivalent of modernism itself. By this I mean a popular, ironic, somewhat dehumanized mode reflexively concerned with specific properties of its medium or the conditions of its making." [p.33] He goes on to suggest that this "sensibility....developed between 1940 and 1960 in such peripheral corners of the 'culture industry' as animated cartoons, comic books, early morning TV, and certain Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis comedies." [p.33] Hoberman devotes the core of his essay to individualized discussions of animator Tex Avery, director Frank Tashlin, cartoonist Will Elder, and television performer Ernie Kovacs, yet his introduction makes clear that the concept extends more broadly, speaking to a particular relationship between popular culture and high art during this post-war period.

Read today, the essay feels more timid than it did a few decades ago - an attempt to negotiate with the sensibilities of a high art readership (and thus preserve entrenched cultural hierarchies) even as it rescues certain key popular artists from the margins of critical consideration. We see this exceptionalism in the speed with which he labels such works "para-art" (by the start of the second paragraph) or the ways in which he sets up his beloved creators through analogies to already acclaimed modern artists, describing Tex Avery, for example, as "the Manet of Vulgar modernism." [p.33] In short, some artists rise above the "muck" that surrounds them, to reference another analogy in Hoberman's essay. To this day, his almost oxymoronic coupling of "vulgar" and "modernism" sparks controversy from those celebrating popular art and those defending high culture alike; we still have a long way to go before we resolve the vague discomfort which comes from applying formalist criticism to what we call popular culture more often than we speak of popular art.

Modernism?

Hoberman's concept of 'vulgar modernism' exists primarily as a frame for his close readings of particular texts and artists, so the passage quoted above is as close as he comes to an wholistic explanation of the concept. Modernism operates in his argument as a very broad and loose signifier of 20th century high art (and has become even more elastic as developed by subsequent generations of critics informed by his interpretations.) What links these popular artists to "modernism" for Hoberman is their interest in foregrounding the materiality of their medium and the conditions of its production and reception, their embrace of reflexivity and intertextuality. See, for example, his description of what Will Elder brought to early Mad Magazine: "His best pieces are collagelike arrangements of advertising trademarks, media icons, banal slogans, visual puns, and assorted non-sequiters....As Mad's leading formalist, Elder allows internal objects to tamper with the boundaries of a panel, breaks continuous vistas into consecutive frames, offers visually identical panels with wildly fluctuating details, and otherwise emphasizes the essential serial nature of his medium."[p.37] In short, Hoberman is interested in these popular artist's refusal to produce a coherent, consistent, or classically constructed world, openly displaying their own interventions as authors into the represented events. Hoberman, in that sense, was inspired by Screen's attempt to generate a Brechtian mode of film theory in the 1970s and by the French rediscovery of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis, both of which rested on arguments that self-reflexivity and intertextuality shattered the codes and conventions of classical cinema.

Hoberman's project has been most vigorously taken up by cartoonist and cultural impresario Art Spiegelman, who has used these artists as a missing link between the gutter art of the Tijuana Bibles of the 1930s and the underground comics of the 1960s and art comics of subsequent decades. Spiegelman has, in the process, broadened the cannon of the vulgar modernists by, for example, reprinting works by Basil Wolverton in his influential Raw anthologies, writing a book focused on the modernist sensibilities of comic book artist Jack Cole (Plastic Man) or for that matter, designing an album cover for a reissue of Spike Jone's music, bringing this once cornball music to the attention of new hipsters.

Let's be clear about the terms of this discussion. Hoberman's vision of "vulgar modernism" is very different from the concept of "cartoon modernism" being promoted in a recent book by Amid Amidi. Amidi is interested in the design aesthetic introduced into American animation in the 1950s by cartoonists such as Ward Kimball, John Hubley, Maurice Noble, and Ernie Pintoff, among others, which was explicitly informed by trends in contemporary art. Here the focus is on simplification, stylization, abstraction, the flattening of depth perception, and the expressive and non-naturalistic use of color, among other properties. If Hoberman is linking the vulgar modernists to Brecht's concepts of distanciation, Amidi defines his cartoon modernists in relation to Picaso, Matisse, Miro, Klee and bebop. Tex Avery would be an interesting figure for closer consideration because he is the one cross-over between these two very different conceptions of the relationship between American animation and modern art, having embraced aspects of this design aesthetic in his final few years of work (see, for example, Symphony in Slang).

Vulgar?

The term, "vulgar," receives even less attention in the original essay with a lot resting on what Hoberman might have meant when he described these works as "the vulgar equivalent of modernism itself." On one level, vulgar might imply untutored or ignorant, suggesting that we might approach such works much as the art world deals with outsider and folk artists. Yet, this argument is less than persuasive when we consider how many of these artists received formal training (and thus were exposed to 20th century art movements), experimented on the side with producing works which more fully met high art criteria, and often directly and explicitly parodied various modern artists and movements throughout their work (witness the recurring theme of "smashing the classics"). Art Spigelman has drawn a compelling representation of Jack Cole's Plastic Man in a modern art museum, looking at the paintings with a mixture of revulsion, confusion, and recognition. These guys studied side by side in art school with people who would go onto careers within the art world; they had the technical skills to do work which would have met the art world's criteria of evaluation, but they opted to pursue their careers in other spaces, creating different kinds of works for different kinds of audiences. They enjoyed their own marginality and often made fun of the pretensions and obscurtism of more exalted forms of artistic expression.

We might use the term, "vulgar," in a descriptive sense to describe the relatively low cultural status granted their work at the time it was being produced; we might deploy the term, "vulgar," to refer to certain intentionally distasteful aspects of their representation of the body and sexuality, their deployment of everyday materials including advertising as the inspiration for their own artistic production, though in that sense, they prefigure where art has gone in the postmodern period. Can we rescue "vulgar" by redefinining it in terms of transgressions committed both against the institutional practices of mainstream media and the world of high art or are the class politics of "vulgar" so deeply entrenched that it resists re-appropriation on this level?

We might also see them as "vulgar" in much the same way that Marian Hansen has spoken of "vernacular modernism" (here, drawing heavily on slapstick comedy as a primary reference point) and its relationship to classical cinema: "the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with the connotations of discourse, idiom and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity and translatability." Like Hoberman, Hansen welcomes the productive tension between popular art and high culture. I am holding onto Hoberman's term, "vulgar modernism," for much the same reasons: it generates discussion precisely of the relations between the two terms which needs to occur if we are not to simply naturalize old assumptions about the relations between high and low.

I want to move us away from Hoberman's use of the concept of "para-art" and the implication that these works are not quite art, worthy of aesthetic consideration but not perhaps the ultimate recognition given to "true artists." I start from the assumption that popular art needs to be evaluated on its own terms, that it needs to be understood in relation to its own aesthetic goals and circumstances, and that no apology need be made for popular artist simply because they work in institutional settings other than the art world.

(To Be Continued)

Who Do You Think I Am?: My Life as a Cartoon Character

Shortly after South by Southwest, I got a note from Rafi Santo from Global Kids calling my attention to the fact that my likeness had become a cartoon character, thanks to a new site called Bitstrips, which has used the festival to broaden its public visibility. Bitstrips is a site which supports the production and distribution of user-generated web comics. More recently, reader Jordon Himelfarb, a Canadian journalist wrote to tell me that the Henry Jenkins character had been deployed more than 95 times. I am one of a small selection of icons supposed to represent "famous figures", including Steve Jobs, Moby, and Doogie Howser. (The narrow range of options here suggests how deeply embedded this project has been in geek culture to date.) As someone who is interested in the ways images get appropriate and transformed over time, not to mention a notorious ego-maniac, I was very interested to see what uses were being made of this iconic representation of me. For what it's worth, I think I am funnier in real life than in the comics.

It is clear that the first few uses were from people who attended South by Southwest and were somewhat familiar with who I am and what kinds of things I am apt to say or do.

Quickly, though, the character begins to take on a life of its own. Certain aspects of the iconography (the bald head, the glasses, the beard) lend themselves to use to represent someone of a certain generation, as in this cartoon which depicts me as a father confronting his daughter's boyfriend for the first time.

bitstrips 4.htm

Something in my image conjures up a certain kind of knowledge and expertise. Thus, the character can be cast as a psychiatrist or doctor.

Or as a talk show host talking about psychology.

Or as a teacher.

Or as a mad scientist:

As a "high brow"

I'm even cast as the PC in a cartoon which plays with the Mac/PC template.

In short, the character got deployed many times not because people knew who I was in any specific sense but because my iconography constructs a particular kind of character which fits well within the classic formulas of the comic strip. This helps to explain both why my likeness becomes so spreadable and why it still carries a surprisingly narrow range of meanings, all things considered. I wonder what would have happened if the original "Henry Jenkins" character had shown me in my characteristic suspenders and not in a suit and tie.

This character, the expert, carries with it certain connotations and expectations. He is often a stuffed shirt or kill joy figure, that is, he deploys his authority to put others in their place and can thus in return become the object of ridicule. He is often portrayed as absent minded and befuddled, so that the comic situation can be used to suggest the limits of what can be comprehended. The familarity of this figure makes him a resource especially for professional humor including that involving medicine, computers, or education, themes clearly of interest to Bitstrips's first generation of users. It will be interesting to see what other ways this character gets deployed as the audience for Bitstrips diversifies. Already we can see examples of this figure getting used in other national contexts, though the stereotype seems to speak in languages that I don't personally understand. Even in the non-English language cartoons, though, I am most often depicted in an office setting suggesting that the character is seen as a professional and not as, say, working class.

I encourage my readers to see what they can do with the tool and send me a link to the results. In the meantime, see you in the funny pages!

I HEART Mutants (Except for That Shameless Mary Sue, Jean Grey)

This is the second in a series of "intimate critiques" produced by masters students in my Comparative Media Studies proseminar on media theory and methods. Each essay tries to blend personal narrative with larger theoretical issues as a way of digging deeper into the place of popular culture in our everyday lives. This year's set can be seen as a series of narratives of "coming out" as fans and how this process relates to other aspects of one's personal identity. I HEART Mutants

(Except for that Shameless Mary Sue, Jean Grey)

Lan Xuan Le

Spring 2008

I met the X-Men for the very first time on Saturday, October 31st, 1992. It was 9 AM, prime time for the grade school demographic, and the Fox Network was debuting its second attempt at an animated cartoon series based on a comic book of the same name. The first episode opened in the midst of the government's Mutant Registration Program, an initiative to find and round up all the human beings who possessed genetically-enhanced superpowers. In a recent, unexplained evolutionary burst, people across the world had begun manifesting unusual abilities at the onset of puberty. Pyrokinesis, telepathy, super-strength, invulnerability - the public had been waging a campaign of repression on these so called "mutants" out of a fear of their superior abilities. The first episode dumped the audience right into the middle of a long-standing conflict between homo sapien and "homo superior." It was in this political climate that Professor Charles Xavier and his band of select mutant followers have been fighting to preserve mutant rights against the human government and other mutants who would enslave humankind.

Running for a total of five seasons, X-Men was Fox Kid's second most successful show after Batman The Animated Series and continued airing reruns for a year after the release of its final episode. X-Men began as a popular serial comic book under the Marvel Publishing arm of Marvel Entertainment in 1963. Created by the legendary duo, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Uncanny X-Men told the story of a band of humans who struggled to protect a "world that hated and feared them." Although it was an established, long-standing franchise in American popular culture, the television show was my first point of entry into this universe.

I was not quite 12-years-old, the daughter of Vietnamese-American political immigrants, and a "gifted and talented" student in the mid-Western educational system. It seemed inevitable that the idea of mutant alienation and political struggle would ignite my young imagination. At the heart of the X-Men mythos lies a powerful metaphor of marginalization. Race, gender, sexuality - mutation stood in for and made visible the oppressions suffered by a class of people, of which I was a part. It spoke to the systematically, discursively constructed category of "othering" I suffered as a racial minority, de-naturalizing and exposing them. It spoke to my experience of systemic exclusions as a girl in America and a daughter in a family with Confucian values. X-Men represented my nascent political consciousness, the burgeoning understanding of myself as part of a larger grouping of people and an agent acting within a system of conflicting pressures. The story of X-Men became powerful to me in a way that the individual struggle of a character such as Batman could not.

The idea of mutation, a flexible metaphor, resonated with many of my experiences of exclusion. But race and gender remains, even today, the most powerful level of my experience of the mutation metaphor. Race is often discursively inscribed upon the bodies of racial minorities, like the "oversexed and savage" stereotype of black, male bodies or the sexual, pliant bodies of Asian women. So too is mutation a bodily "othering." This "otherness" of the mutant body often takes physical form, like with Doctor Hank "Beast" McCoy's hairy, animal-like appearance. Similarly, racialized or mutated bodies become the difference against which white or human bodies are visually and discursively normalized.

Some mutants in the X-Men universe, however, do not wear their differences on their bodies. Their abilities manifest in subtler ways, allowing them to "pass" as human. The conflict that arises between the obviously mutated and the "pretty" mutants erupts periodically in the story. In the X-Men universe, the physically mutated characters gathered into an underground, sewer-based community called the Morlocks after a similar, villainous society in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. They could not avoid the political experience of mutancy and became angry at those who remained sheltered and apolitical in their appearance of humanity. This, for me, mirrored the way my Asian girlfriends used the increasing invisibility of their race to avoid or even deny themselves as racialized subjects, often as gendered subjects as well. Those were precisely the moments that I understood my decisions through the mutant metaphor. By choosing to be a Morlock, I chose to openly live a fraught political reality that would act upon me whether or not I confronted it.

The metaphor of mutation, especially as applied to bodies, became a very powerful expression of the ways in which my own body had been re-written without my permission. As an Asian woman, my body is all too visible and yet my "color" has receded, being neither white nor black. I too have been inscribed upon, defined into my very DNA. But for mutants, their power lay precisely their differences. The very performance of their differences gave them the power to resist. The heroes of X-Men were those mutants who could come to accept and judiciously use their powers, not those who remained silent. That proved an important idea for me at the age of twelve, the ability to appropriate the performance of difference in some way, to reclaim the language of these performances to empower myself. It gave me a option to act, to vocally resist the silencing and naturalization of my exclusions.

While the characters in X-Men fight against the teleological framing of "mutation" in the same way I do as a woman of color, the metaphor to race and gender is imperfect. What I find most unsettling about the mutation metaphor, and the differences this represents, is the struggle between the biological reality and socially constructed nature of "mutation." Linking differences to the term "mutation" implies a kind of biological determinism. Within the story, however, these genetic changes actually produce an incontrovertible difference in the X-Men. The ability to mentally levitate objects is not comparable to the experience of race, gender, class, and sexuality, which are socially determined. Many groups have struggled to shift the debates of difference from biological determinism to social construction, and I remain ambivalent about how powerful this imperfect metaphor is for me.

I read more than just race into the bodies of these mutant characters. The bodies of women take on another significance in the X-Men television show for me. The idealization and display of female bodies is a standard part of the comic book industry's practice, which is dominated by a male culture of production. But female bodies often become sites of social anxiety. Asian female bodies, for example, were considered dangerous during earlier immigration to the US, because reproduction is the power of a marginal, feminine body to spread and contaminate the normative political body.

One of the most interesting women in the X-Men universe is Rogue, a member of the X-Men. Rogue is lushly beautiful, possessing super-strength, flight, invulnerability, and the ability to steal the life force of anyone she touches skin to skin. I envied Rogue because she represented the impenetrable female body. Rogue has the appearance of a woman who is sexually permissive, but the body which denies penetration. The markers of Rogue's class - her Southern "trash" stylings - are intimately linked to this perceived sexual permissiveness. Rogue's yearning to touch and be touched, especially when expressed in the presence of her on-again-off-again boyfriend Remy, yield to both innocent and lascivious interpretations. But because of her powers, she remains a non-reproducing body, one that is safely neutered, a contagion contained. Whether or not I understood it as a child, Rogue has always represented to me a site where masculine anxieties about women found expression.

Just as I found Rogue and the text's relationship to her body intriguing, I found the character of Jean Grey equally repugnant. In all the ways that Rogue embodies ambivalence, Jean Grey equally and oppositely represents the heteronormative forces within the text. Beautiful and in control, Jean Grey's cerebral powers mirror her middle-class origins, which stands in contrast to Rogue's physical (and blue collar) powers. Jean Grey's empathic social role in the team was to mediate the tensions of class, gender, and sexuality. She invoked her authority as the mother, the sanctioned, reproducing body, to quell insurrection and unify the group under a liberal morality invested in the feminine as a site of cultural reproduction. She became a symbol of the ways in which liberalism's promise of social justice sacrificed so many marginal voices to speak from a unified position. In a story that allowed me discursive reprieve, that provided catharsis in its simple acknowledgment of my exclusions, Jean Grey violated the agreement offered by the text.

I followed the television show until its end in 1997, at which point I sought to find the "original," the comic books, and continue my relationship with the story. I quickly discovered that the series had been running for nearly 40 years, the whole of it beyond my reach both economically and logistically. The serial nature of the comic book defeated my ability to master the canon as thoroughly as did my economic circumstances. The Internet, however, offered a different way into the X-Men history.

In 1998 I discovered fan websites, places where pieces of the X-Men story came together, character by character. But I found these dry, journalistic recitations insufficient to approximate the experience of reading the comic books, of knowing the X-Men first hand. It was during my web surfing that I found fan fiction, the resource that finally opened up X-Men to me. These stories became a snapshot of the fan's ongoing experience of reading, problematizing, and subsequent (re)writing of the X-Men comic books. It seemed a recursive, cyclical process carried through many stories, probably extending to other media properties. Whatever they represented to the fan author, for me as a reader, fan fiction became a constant renewal of the X-Men text. Through these stories, I could read X-Men anew through the lens of another fan's love. I began a two-year journey into the collective imaginary of X-Men, a historiography of myth and memory.

These fan stories explored the tensions of the comic book, perhaps further than the original format would have allowed. Dozens of stories addressed the same events in canon, correcting, changing, darning over the snags and tangles of plot holes. I had access to a collective record of the major shifts in the X-Men franchise and the fan reaction to them. Reading fan fiction was like mining the secondary sources of an historical event. Fan fiction, for me, became a record of what could never be part of the comic book canon, the discourse of an experience. The "truth" of the canon became irrelevant compared to reading the fantasy of the reading.

Fan fiction transformed my experience of the X-Men story, turning it from a monoglossic text into a multiple, unstable, heteroglossic pleasure. Every character, every relationship took on a complexity impossible in a single text, even a serial one. Although the series was multi-vocal, containing a diverse, international cast and expressive of a range of views to begin with, the very nature of fan fiction and individual interpretation allowed me a far broader experience. I adore, for example, not the canonical character of Gambit, but a layered memory of Gambit as can only be possible through people who both love and loath him. And so he is even more fascinating, engaging, and ultimately satisfying a character than any single text could offer.

By early 2000, the tide of fan fiction on the web had begun to ebb, bringing my journey with the fan community to an end. I attended college later that year and moved on to other media properties, but the X-Men would remain an essential part of my cultural imaginary. But my relationship to the franchise continued to change nonetheless. In 2000, Marvel released a full-length, live action film adapted from the comic books followed by two sequels. The same year, the X-Men: Evolution cartoon began on television, aiming to recapture the popularity of the original by re-imagining the X-Men's beginning in the present day. In 2001, the X-Men comic books spun off another alternate universe under the title of Ultimate X-Men that again re-imagined the beginning of the X-Men, but in a completely different universe from the Evolution cartoon.

The increasing number of alternate universes validated my increasing distance from the "canon" that I was originally so keen to obtain. It only added to the multiplicity and richness of the X-men text. While this move inspired fan anger for "selling out" the franchise and violating the integrity of the story, I saw this move as a way for the franchise to preserve its heteroglossic mythology. Each one of these re-imagined beginnings was designed for me, the interested audience that found itself excluded from the long-running history of the comic book. I finally felt courted by a universe that likely was not speaking to me, but from which I had appropriated strategies of resistance. While these alternate universes aimed to renew my relationship to the series, the ties had faded over time. I now possessed academic theories and frameworks through which to parse my experiences and exclusions.

In early spring of 2008, a fan group, in defiance of copyright, scanned and released all the volumes of the X-Men as PDFs online. Through the magic of peer-to-peer downloading, I finally acquired the whole of the X-Men canon. But in the end, I could not come to love them. With the exception of Joss Whedon's short stint at the helm of the Uncanny X-Men, the story was written predominantly by men for an audience that was not me, nor necessarily a group that included me. Fan fiction, on the other hand, was written primarily by women with whom I shared many salient experiences. In the end, I chose not to read the comic books lest they fundamentally change the relationship I had already nurtured with the franchise. The potential loss of that wonderfully unstable text could not ultimately compare to the gain of the comic book itself.

Lan Xuan Le

Swarthmore College, BA Biology and Asian Studies 2004

Boston University, Masters of Public Health 2007

Lan Xuan Le, who has BAs in both Biology and Asian Studies from Swarthmore College (2004) and a Masters in Public Health from Boston University (2007), has been part of the "games for health movement," conducting a qualitative study and co-authoring a white paper for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the use of games to combat childhood obesity. She also has a strong interest in the globalization of media and the construction of alternative understandings of what it means to be Asian and Asian-American through popular culture, an interest which led her to design, research and execute a library exhibition of anime and manga for Swarthmore's McCabe Library. She wrote an undergraduate thesis on problematic gender and sexual representations in Japanese popular culture with a particular focus on Card Captor Sakura, a paper which won the Swarthmore College Asian Studies Program's top writing prize.

Persepolis: The Video Game?

The following essay by Matt Weise appeared late last week on the blog for the Singapore-MIT Gambit Games Lab. My readers who are interested in games might well have encountered it there. But what he has to say is apt to be of interest to those of you who are interested in comics and animation, so I wanted to cross-post it to this blog. I read this essay with a certain pride: Weise was a Master's Student in our program before he went into the games industry (and then came back to play a central role in the operation of our games lab). His master's thesis (look under the class of 2004) dealt centrally with issues of how meaning and emotion get expressed through games, themes to which he is returning to within this post. Here, you see an example of a particular mode of games analysis which has become more wide-spread in our program through the years: Rather than writing an ideological critique which stressed the limits of the original text (or in this case, of games a medium), Weisse engages in a thought experiment -- first, comparing the game Just Cause to what he sees as a more rewarding media experience, Persepolis, and then imagining how games as a medium might be able to more fully realize what he sees as lacking in the text under examination. This is a mode of analysis which doesn't simply point out limitations but also imagines alternative possibilities; it doesn't just accept the text as given but rather writes beyond the ending of the text, reconstructs an alternative version of it to show what might be missing in the original. We've found that these kinds of thought experiments can generate more concrete discussions and may become the spring board for more creative interventions. In a space like Gambit, which is involved in developing playable prototypes which stretch the games medium, this ability to move between current examples and alternative versions can be a springboard for design activities. It represents one way that we can blur the lines between theory and practice.

Persepolis for Xbox 360?

by Matt Weise

Last week I bought a game I swore I wouldn't buy: Just Cause. I

">swore I wouldn't buy this game when I read that its politcal premise--the overthrow of a corrupt South American regime through guerrilla warfare--would involve the typical American rhetoric that, it would seem, no war-themed game can exist without: the protection of American interest. Thus a game that could have been, provocatively, Che Guevara meets Grand Theft Auto became yet another emulation of Chuck Norris barf bag cinema, the kind where some helpless country needs a swaggering yank to pull it, kicking and screaming if necessary, to democracy. This is why in Just Cause you are some CIA dude, and not just a suffering citizen of the (fictional) country who's finally had enough. One might imagine that a horrific dictatorship would be reason enough to go guerrilla, but in Just Cause we need the threat of WMD's which could possibly be used on America to justify ass kickery. Viva la Revolucion!

The notion fills me with disappointment. I know better than to expect a serious, documentary-like experience from a mainstream videogame, and yes many games are just elaborate power trips. But what's wrong with a power trip in which the indigenous population gets empowered in a way that isn't filtered through America's big brother mythology? Ugh. Still, I bought it last week.

I bought Just Cause because I played it at a friend's house, and it turned out to be pretty fun. The American aspect of the story is more or less in the background. Your avatar is Latin American at the very least, though he does appear to work for the CIA. The story itself is still moronic, full of Hollywood cliches. But those cliches make for fun gameplay at times, like when you perform all manner of ridiculous stunts. My friends and I had a ball riding cars, boats, and even planes like surfboards as we ran from government stooges. After that, I decided to swallow my political angst and pick it up for cheap.

Then, yesterday, my girlfriend and I went to see Persepolis.

The movie had a huge effect on me. I actually didn't know much about it, aside from the fact that it was based on a comic and was an autobiographical account of an Iranian woman's life. I wasn't expecting it to go so far into the politics and cultural fallout of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. I found the film deeply moving for many reasons, but I think what affected me most was how the protagonist was portrayed, as a wonderfully intelligent girl who was just trying to have a normal life while simultaneously dealing with a deeply repressive political shift. It humanized the recent history of Iran form me in a way that I hadn't experienced before. On another level the film worked simply as the story of a promising life tragically complicated by authoritarian religion... a concept that, at least in the abstract, strikes home for me.

I came home after watching this movie and didn't feel like doing anything. I just needed to sit and let the film sink in. My girlfriend kept asking me if I was okay because I basically stared into space for the rest of the evening. I thought maybe I could break out of my reflection by playing some videogames, but I stopped short at the thought of playing Just Cause. In light of something as moving and personal asPersepolis, the idea of playing a game that dealt with repression and revolution like Just Cause did made me recoil. My initial revulsion at the game's shallowness came surging back even more intense than before. Disgusted, I asked myself why it seemed impossible to make a game that dealt with social upheaval the way Persepolis did. Why couldn't Just Cause have been like Persepolis? Did I have to be embarrassed at the thought of picking up a controller every time I came home from a movie like Persepolis?

I don't have an answer to these questions, suffice to say that if it's not possible to make a game like Persepolis I've clearly been wasting my time with this garbage we call videogames. I wonder what it would take to make a game like Just Cause express ideas closer to what Persepolis is expressing. Leaving aside the typical objection of "you'd never get a game like that funded!" it seems a game design question worth exploring.

One striking aspect of Just Cause is how, for a game about a repressive regime, the regime doesn't actually seem to be repressing anyone. The NPC's--whom you see everywhere going about their daily lives--don't seem to do anything other than walk around and drive cars. They don't seem particularly unhappy. They are, essentially, exactly like characters in GTA: more of a decoration than a meaningful aspect of the virtual world. In GTA this is fine since the world is not about the NPC's, but in a game that's about revolution and freedom in the name of The People you'd think The People would be... well, people. Not that we need hyper-advanced A.I., but we at least need a game design where political repression is part of the world you are trying to simulate.

How do you do this? There's obviously no single, right way to do it. But we can start by observing that repressive states are, in essence, extremely limiting rule systems that every citizen must learn and deal with. This is something that Persepolis illustrates extremely well, especially in the first half where the protagonist is struggling to deal with all the new rules that are being imposed on women in the first years of the Islamic Republic. The women in the film learn to survive by quickly mastering this rule system, by learning exactly when to wear the veil, how to behave towards men in public, etc. As time goes on both men and women learn the system well enough that they are able to subvert it in small ways, such as having illegal parties with alcohol and banned western music.

It's easy to see how one can take the logics of state repression and model them as a game system. Because a citizen in a police state is in a game of sorts, a game with extremely dire consequences. But citizens try to game the system in order to survive, to express their sense of self and hope. A select few of those citizens might go further,and game the system with the intent not just to survive it but to change it. When the rules of the game are successfully rewritten, you've had a revolution.

Why can't Just Cause follow a model like this? One can imagine a virtual world in which citizens have simple behaviors. They wake up, eat, socialize, work, and go to bed... sort of like in The Sims. But they have to do all these things within a strict framework of government rules that sometimes conflict with their desires. For example, citizens might be expected to dress a certain way, stand at attention during a patriotic hymn, etc. If any deviation from this behavior was witnessed by patrolling police, citizens might be arrested, which would affect the happiness levels (like in The Sims) of the citizens around them.

The goal of a game like this, from the player's perspective, would involve two distinct

aspects:

Firstly, the player would have to learn the behavioral rules of the repressive society.This would be necessary so that the player could be invisible within the society in order to be able to subvert it. This layer would be somewhat like a stealth or spy game,in which players must learn to dress, act, and talk a certain way in order to avoid suspicion. Only instead of some military espionage scenario, the environment would just be everyday life.

Secondly, the player would have to perform acts that would affect the happiness levels of the society at large. This could be manifest concretely as a list of civil liberties which the citizens don't have. Restoring each one of these liberties would be a goal of the game, like a series of non-linear missions. Once all the liberties were restored,the society would be transformed.

This idea is interesting for its emergent possibilities. I am not imagining a game where society changes instantly, as the hard-coded result of a cut-scene or boss battle. I'm thinking that each "rule" that the police enforce (i.e. what clothes you can wear) correspond to a certain civil liberty on your list. Once that liberty is restored, the police stop enforcing it, changing the dynamics of the game. Thus "freedom" is something you experience as a player by having restrictions removed, and it is also something you see in the citizens around you because they no longer have to deal with those restrictions (i.e. there are less arrests, therefore happiness levels increase.)

And how exactly do you restore all these freedoms? Well, that's the real trick. Do you assassinate and intimidate? Do you organize peaceful protests in secret? It might be interesting to have a game where you could do both kinds of things, and each would have an affect on the citizens you are trying to help. For example, if you want to assassinate a government official by blowing up his house, that might work. But if you blow up his house, it will also affect the happiness levels of the population. Is the trade off worth it? What if you affect political change but end up alienating the population? Have you accomplished your goal? Is your goal to check all the liberties off your list? Or is it to make the population as happy as possible?

I don't know if the game I just described is subtle or complex enough to do justice to the personal nature of something like Persepolis. Of course, Persepolis isn't about being a revolutionary. It's about a citizen trying to keep her life and identity from falling apart under repressive rule. A game where you played a citizen under a repressive regime could be its own kind of game, with maybe some similarities to the game I described above.

Perhaps we're not ready for a Persepolis game on Xbox 360. Perhaps we're not ready for a Persepolis game at all. Perhaps I am dishonoring the reality of the author's life experience by even suggesting that we entertain such a notion. But I hang onto the notion that I am not doing that, that games are not somehow intrinsically superficial in their engagement of political ideas. Political and social ideas need not be trivial in videogames. They are not trivial by default. They are full of reality, tragedy, and emotion. The only reason they become trivial in videogames is because the makers of games choose to trivialize them.

I have no idea if a game like the one I described would work, but I believe that a Hollywood bubblegum crapfest like Just Cause could only benefit from such an experiment. Then maybe I could come home from a movie like Persepolis and not feel like a moron for having spent $400 on an Xbox 360.

I could feel proud.

Matthew Weise

Producer, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab

Matthew Weise is equal parts gamer and cinephile, having attended film school before segueing into game studies and then game development. Matt is a producer for GAMBIT and a full-time gamer, which means he not only plays games on a variety of systems but he also completes (most of) them. Matthew did his undergrad at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where he studied film production before going rogue to design his own degree. He graduated in 2001 with a degree in Digital Arts, which included videogames (this was before Game Studies was a field). He continued his research at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, where he worked on Revolution with The Education Arcade. After leaving MIT in 2004 Matt worked in mobile game development for a few years, occassionally doing some consultancy work, before returning to work at GAMBIT.

Confessions of a Superhero: An Interview with Filmmaker Matt Ogden

Earlier this month, documentary filmmaker Matt Ogden released his most recent film, Confessions of a Superhero, on dvd. I first became aware of this film, which depicts the personal lives of the people who perform the parts of superheroes in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, when it played at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin. Ogens' previous work includes Timeless and The Life for ESPN,

Players for VH1, each of which deals in one way or another with the colorful personalities behind the scenes in sports and show business. The film is hauntingly beautiful, showing us something of the fantasy lives of its protagonists, as well as heartbreaking in its depiction of these men and women, their motives for performing, their professional dreams and disappointments, and the society they have created for themselves. There are places where the film edges a bit too close to pathologizing its subjects for my taste, but there's always something to complicate any easy judgment we might want to make about these people and the choices they've made with their lives. You can learn a good deal more about the film over at their engaging homepage or at Myspace. You can also see some sample sequences on Youtube, including this sequence of Superman working the streets, an exploration of the economic realities of street performing, The Hulk's account of his struggle to escape homelessness, and a sequence showing the superheroes at home getting ready to perform.

What first attracted you about this topic? In your Director's statement, you describe a process which takes you from estrangement towards a closer identification with your subjects. How did this reassessment of these people and their lives come about?

I'm always attracted to stories about the underdog, about people on the fringes of society, or just interesting, sometimes quirky characters. At first, I thought it would be an oddball comedy documentary. Who would dress up and work for tips on Hollywood Boulevard? After we began production, Los Angeles became a character in itself. The city draws so many different types of people from all over the world seeking fame and fortune. It's a cliché, yet it's true. As I delved deeper into filming, I discovered these "superheroes" aren't much different than myself on the inside; and not much different than the other seekers in Hollywood. They want to make it. They want success. Deep down they want to matter, to make a difference. Don't we all want that, whether it's through acting, as a doctor, lawyer, entrepreneur, or teaching? Success comes in many forms - money to some, awards to others, a sense of accomplishment, et cetera - but in the end we all want to feel like we're enough. It's easy to judge people that are different. At first glance most would say they do not relate to these characters. But stick around and get to no anyone and you just might find something you have in common. I did.

Many of your earlier films -- The Life about sports, Players about Ludacris -- dealt with celebrities in the traditional sense of the word. This film deals with people who see themselves as having found fame but not fortune, as one of the characters puts it, having acquired fame for the characters they perform but not as a result of their own personalities. How did that earlier work shape your perception of these people? What did making this film suggest to you about the culture of celebrity?

I'm an idealist. I think celebrity is ridiculous. Then, why the hell did I choose this career, you might ask? I love it. I love telling stories. And I don't mind being paid for it, but I don't need the fame. I just don't care about Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. People should be recognized, if it all, for being good at what they do, what they contribute, not for who they date or who they made a sex tape with. I'd like to think the other people I've directed whether it's a hip hop artist named Ludacris or an MVP in the NBA or NFL, are more than just celebrities. They are good at their chosen professions whether anyone knows their names or not - they are great at what they do. Celebrity is just a natural offshoot of that. It's when people become celebrities for doing nothing that I don't relate to. When it's not about their profession, but what they do when they're not working - that is not what I want to learn about.

The characters in my film have found a different kind of fame. They've been featured on Jimmy Kimmel, Jay Leno, in magazines and interview shows all over the world. But they're not household names. And most people don't know their real names. They just recognize them for the characters they portray. And there is nothing wrong with that. In Robert Fritz's book The Path of Least Resistance he states "the path by which you move from where you are in your life to where you want to be cannot be put into a formula." This applies to my career as a director, even more so to these characters. This is their path and the road they chose to hopefully find success in the entertainment industry. Who's to say they want find it? Not me.

As far as celebrity goes, I do feel kids today want to be famous as opposed to a great actor. They want to be filthy rich, drive a Bentley GT Continental and where a Rolex instead of playing basketball for the love of the game or making music because they have to make music. Entertainment is a means to an end for a lot of people. If you aspire to be a celebrity, well...good luck, I guess.

In your director's statement, you said, "At first I wanted to show the eccentricities of these characters, but I didn't want to take the easy route and simply make fun of them. I wanted to peel the onion and go deeper." What steps did you take to avoid the stereotypes and preconceptions that your viewers might have about these people?

I attempted to keep my point of view out of the film. Once you turn the camera on, even if you never ask a question, reality is manipulated of course. People act different in front of a camera. In most family photos everyone is smiling. As soon as mom points a camera at you, you're trained to smile. Same with moving pictures sometimes. But I kept myself out of it as much as possible. If you laugh at the characters, they're being themselves and I'm not editing it in such a way as to get you to laugh at them. Im just showing you, the audience, what happened. As I got to know them better while filming I began to empathize with them. I hope the audience will take the same journey I did and end up rooting for the characters by the end, or at least some of them.

How have your subjects responded to this film? On the one hand, you do give them a kind of visibility on the screen. As they suggest in relation to the news coverage of the arrest of Elmo and Mr. Fantastic, all publicity has a value in their world. On the other hand, you really don't pull many punches here in terms of depicting some of the painful and humiliating aspects of their lives. Yet, several of your subjects came out to South By Southwest to help you promote the film.

Certainly, I was concerned and curious as to how they would react, particularly Max, who portrays Batman. He is definitely the antagonist, or villain of the film, if there is a villain. Truth be told, I do not know how Max feels about the film. Chris "Superman" Dennis seems to love it. Some people love recognition whether it's for good or bad reasons. Bad publicity is better than no publicity. I'm sure there's a little bit of this in play.

At SXSW, Superman and Hulk were celebrities. People loved seeing them there. And they deserved the notoriety.

One of the striking components of the film is the visual style -- especially your use of still photographs and oversaturated colors. How did these two stylistic choices come about and what do they signal about your relationship to this content?

From the moment the idea came to me, I knew I wanted this to be a visual documentary. In my opinion, a film should look as good as the story its telling. Charlie Gruet, the director of photography and a producer on the film, set out to give a style to the film, and not just shoot willy-nilly. The idea was to make this look cinematic, filmic, like you're watching a narrative film, not a talking head corporate video. All of the verite moments on the boulevard were shot handheld, in a fly on the wall style. The sit down interviews, scenics of Los Angeles, and specialty shots were more set up and art directed. But we didn't make things look "cool" for the sake of it. Each set, if you can call it that, was discussed and reasoned. Superman was interviewed on a vinyl couch against patterned wallpaper as if he was in Martha Kent's country home in the movie or comic book versions of Superman. Batman was shot in a cavernous warehouse (instead of a cave), but you get the point. Batman's past is dark. And we wanted a darker setting for him.

In addition to directing, I also shoot stills and we always shot during production for marketing materials, the website, posters, etc. The idea to use stills within the film didn't come until late in the process. We didn't settle on using still photos for the transitions until a month before we locked picture. We felt the composition of the photos complemented the sit down interviews and helped tell the story.

You clearly portray Christopher Dennis not simply as someone who performs the part of Superman but as a hardcore fan, someone who actively collects Superman related materials, who hero worships Christopher Reeves, and who shows clear disappointment when he doesn't win the costume competition.

Chris "Superman" Dennis is hardcore. He is obsessive about his character to the nth degree. The others certainly have an affinity for their characters, but not nearly to the extent as Chris. I personally feel Chris has lost himself in his character and I think he would agree. I know his wife Bonnie would agree. He so much want to be a leading actor, he is only known as Hollywood Superman. I think he's afraid of shedding the costume. He has an identity with it and without it he may feel no one will recognize him.

How did you select these particular characters out of the dozens of other performers you suggest are working in this same space? What made these stories stand out against the pack?

It was not a long "casting" process. I thought it would take forever to find the right characters. There are probably 80 people who work on and off on the boulevard and we highlight four of them - Superman, Batman, The Hulk, and Wonder Woman. First, I decided early on to stick with recognizable superheroes. For one, I felt like Superman or Wonder Woman was more iconic and forever then Sponge Bob or Freddie Krueger. Also, I felt that superheroes would make a good metaphor for the lives of the people inside the costumes.

Superman was the first character I approached. He looked like one of the leaders out there. That's how he carried himself. He introduced me to the others. I could have kept "casting." We did have a Spiderman character, played by Spike Henderson. And he was a great character. As opposed to trying to make it as an actor, this ex-professional golfer is trying to qualify for the Senior's Tour. We just didn't get enough footage of him. He didn't allow us enough access into his life to make a full story with an arc, so we had to leave him on the cutting room floor.

The film suggests at places that there is a hierarchy among the performers who work the Strip -- with Superman as a leader of sorts within this community -- as well as some antagonisms between some of the performers. What can you tell us about the community of personalities who interact in this space? Are there, for example, rival Superman performers competing for the same bit of turf or is there an understanding that once a character is taken, newcomers need to assume new roles?

Chris Superman Dennis certainly is the self-proclaimed leader of the boulevard. I don't know if the other characters would agree. But he is probably one of the most knowledegable out there. And he takes the unwritten code of the boulevard seriously. I never witnessed a second Superman but I did see rivals of other characters. Max Batman Allen has had a longstanding rivalry with another Batman character. The two have had many arguments over the years (with police involvement at times). People know what the rules are but don't always follow them so you will see duplicate characters and they compete for tips, argue, and sabatoge one another. This is how these people put food on their tables so someone coming on the boulevard with the same outfit is a problem they must take seriously. It is quite a soap opera out there. I spent two years witnessing it. God, I'm exhausted.

"This Ain't Your Gramma's Embroidery!": An Interview with Jenny Hart

Every year, I ask the students in my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to interview a media maker and to try to get a sense of the theoretical assumptions underlying their work. In part, this exercise is designed to give students some experience in conducting and interpreting interviews. In part, it is intended to get them out of the classroom and testing how the ideas we've been exploring in academic terms throughout the course relate to what's happening on the ground. Every year, I am astounded by what students come up with -- especially the diversity of media represented in an average cohort in our program. And so, off and on, I am going to be sharing with you a few of the essays I received which I felt would be of particular interest to regular readers of this blog. This first deals with the relationship between art, craft, and popular culture, a recurring theme in this class, brought home by Whitney Trettien's interview with Jenny Hart, an artist who works in embroidery. Enjoy.

"This Ain't Your Gramma's Embroidery!": An Interview with Jenny Hart

by Whitney Trettien

Jenny Hart is, first and foremost, an artist. Her work has been shown in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, London; she has been featured in the magazines Spin, Rolling Stone and Bust, to name a few. Many of her pieces are in the private collections of celebrities, including Carrie Fisher, Ben Harper, Tracey Ullman, Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor.

Yet most would dismiss her medium as mere hobby-craft, a distraction for middle-aged housewives. Hart paints with embroidery thread on cloth canvasses.

"I work with embroidery in multiple ways," Hart told me; "as fine art, as illustration, as a hobby-craft." Although she dropped out of art school to study French, Hart now shows her work in galleries and frequently collaborates with contemporary artists, such as Kevin Scalzo and Jon Langford.

"Aw Nutts" by Jenny Hart and Kevin Scalzo. 2002. Hand-embroidery on satin and felt.

One of her recent pieces, "Oh Unicorn," invites the viewer to break down the arts/crafts dichotomy through its tender treatment of its subject and its "non-traditional media" - deerskin embroidered with her own hair, a process she has described as "embroidering with air".

. "Oh Unicorn." 2005. Hair embroidered on leather.

When the swatch of deerskin makes up the back of a jacket or purse, the needlework is mere embellishment; when pinned to a gallery wall, though, the delicacy of the lines illuminates the artistry in hobby-craft, and the craftwork required to make art. Says Hart, "I introduce themes in patterns that typically are not used but have an obvious (at least to me) relationship to needlearts," both underscoring and obscuring her relationship to contemporary embroidery aesthetics.

It's clear in Hart's work that her artistic predecessors are not the darlings of the modern art world, but comic artists and illustrators like Moebius and George Herriman. "I grew up reading my older brothers' stash of independent comics," Hart admits. "Zap, Weirdo, Neat Stuff, Heavy Metal, Love and Rockets, Ranzerox - I love illustration and great comics. They also are a great inspiration to me for embroidery." One of her most recent works, "Girl with Japanese Clouds," uses the iconography of manga to express quiet grief, while much of her portraiture draws upon the conventions of classic illustration.

"Girl with Japanese Clouds." 2006. Hand embroidery on denim

"I'm working on an embroidered comic series this upcoming year," Hart says, adding that she has collaborated with comic artists in the past.

Hart, though, is quick to note that unlike comics, her work is not narrative. "I see my work as having a memorializing quality," she says. "This has to do with the medium - embroidery, often used on quilts and for heirlooms - and the format, portraiture." Despite needlework's long history in both art and storytelling - the Bayeux Tapestry is a typical example - today, embroidery is seen as a decorative craft, a means of ornamenting a useful object. Hart's portraits, however, allow embroidery to stand on its own, freeing her work to play with the concept of ornamentation. She often does so by ironically "decorating" not an object, but her subject. In "Jim Goad," for instance, the notorious author's head floats above the phrase "Nolite me culpare," while flames, a dying snake and revolvers adorn the edges of the fabric.

Jim Goad." 2002. Hand-embroidery and sequins on cotton

In a more flattering portrait, Hart embroiders "Ars longa, vita brevis est" under the ruggedly handsome head of Bill Hicks. Hart admits, "I tend to idealize people in my portraits."

Bill Hicks." 2003. Hand-embroidery and sequins on cotton and satin.

Hart also shies away from describing her work as "feminist." "Well, I'm quick to explain that my work was never intended as a feminist statement, or a comment on domestic handcrafts," she tells me. "But, once I began the work I came to respect that connection, I became aware of it - the time, the care and skill that goes into embroidering is overlooked and undervalued as 'women's work.'" Although none of her work is overtly feminist, iconic and bold women, such as Dolly Parton and the burlesque dancer Irma the Body, play prominently in her portraiture.

Blue Dolly." 2003. Hand-embroidery and sequins on cotton.

If Hart has not been shy to challenge the boundary between art and craft or high art and popular art, it should come as no surprise that she has used her artistic success to venture into business. Through Sublime Stitching, Hart sells embroidery patterns which center on a single theme that is often retro or camp, such as "Roller Derby" or wrestling ("¡Lucha Libre!"). "I saw no new 'mix' happening with embroidery," Hart says. "It was either flowers, or teddy bears or traditional themes worked over and over again with no new themes being introduced." The patterns may include a phrase or font, some icons related to the theme and a few more complex designs which the buyer can then mix and remix to create her own work.

Embroidered figures from Sublime Stitching's "Roller Derby" kit

Recently, Hart has used her business as a platform to disseminate the work of artists within the d.i.y. crafts world. She says, "I have started engaging the work of well-known illustrators (Kurt Halsey, Mitch O'Connell, Julie West) to design embroidery sheets for my company, that are sold to hobbyists." Illustrator Kurt Halsey's kit, for example, features needlework-friendly iterations of his twee pop illustrations, while tattoo and comics artist Mitch O'Connell's kit includes his trademark busty "bad gals." Hart has also collaborated with artists in other media, including indie pop bands The Decemberists and The Flaming Lips. These collaborations serve to collapse the distinction not only between artist and hobbyist, but between untouchable gallery work and reproduced, commodified craft. "Never before were the works of artists or illustrators sold as the craft platform for hobbyists," Hart explains, "unless they were doing so anonymously as a commercial and financial necessity. I'm deliberately combining the two to bring their fine art to craft, and the attention of crafters to their art."

By now, it should be clear that Hart's work draws from models typically thought of in relation to "new media": transmedia storytelling, media remix and mash-ups, internet entrepreneurship, participatory culture, social networking. Yet when asked to apply these concepts to her own work, Hart hesitates. "I guess I was working in 'new media' without realizing it," she tells me. "I'm definitely aware of working with an old medium and moving forward an old handcraft with emerging technology. The internet made it possible for me to launch my company." In many ways, Hart's work invites us to see digital technology not only in the context of the new, but in the context of the old, the nostalgic, or the residual - to explore, as Will Straw puts it, "the internet's relationship to a cultural past that it reinvigorates and invests with value."

Whitney Anne Trettien is a first year Master's Student in the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. She holds a B.A. in both English and Philosophy from Hood College (2007), spent her time as an undergraduate studying early English literature, continental and post-modern philosophy, as well as Latin, Old English, and Ancient Greek. Outside the classroom, she wrote extensively for online indie rock publications, edited webzines, and designed clothing for her internet company Moonslush. Unexpected commonalities between her academic research and the online communities she was involved with sparked her ongoing interest in the relationship between early oral narratives and the so-called "secondary orality" produced in digital culture.

Trettien is also a Truman Scholar and a political activist, having worked with the Green Party, Amnesty International, Women in Black, ACORN, and the Pro-Literacy Council, among other groups. She recently edited an anthology of stories, poems, photography, and artwork from the American peace movement entitled Cost of Freedom, which was published by Howling Dog Press in 2007.

Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twenty One, Part One): Barbara Lucas and Avi D. Santo

INTRODUCTIONS ADS: I am an assistant professor at Old Dominion University. This is my second year out of graduate school. I graduated in 2006 from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Radio-Television-Film. My dissertation focused on corporate authorship practices in managing transmedia brands prior to conglomeration. Basically, I analyzed how cultural icons like Superman, the Lone Ranger and Little Orphan Annie were licensed across media and merchandising sites and how their inter-textual meanings were managed. I also looked at how authorship rights were articulated by corporations over properties whose economic success rested on their seeming authorless and iconic. At ODU, I teach classes on critical race theory and media, international media systems, superheroes and US culture, and authorship and discourse. I am a co-founder of the e-journal Flow (http://www.flowtv.org) and current co-coordinating editor of MediaCommons (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org).

Outside of academics, the first job I ever wanted was to be a soap opera writer (apologies for not using the term "daytime melodrama", but they were just soap operas when I was a teenager; a term that likely contributed to my eventual embarrassment over truly persuing this vocation). I watched Another World obsessively throughout my teens. I am a huge comic book dork. I primarily read revisionist superhero narratives that play at established conventions of the genre, but my pull list ranges from Fablesto Y The Last Man. Favorite TV of the moment: Battlestar Galactica, The Boondocks, My Name is Earl, Friday Night Lights, Project Runway.

BL: I have an MA in English from Case Western Reserve University with a concentration on British Renaissance literature and am a member of the adjunct faculty and Lakeland Community College. However, I've been a fantasy, horror, and (to a lesser extent) science fiction reader since I was a child. It wasn't until I was an adult that I returned to my passions as a field of study as well as one of pleasure. I have been a regular presenter at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (www.iafa.org), and I'm the Division Head for the new Community and Culture in the Fantastic Division that focuses on fan fiction and culture, video game theory, hypertexts, viral marketing, RPG's, ARG's, folkloric and sociological approaches to the fantastic. Basically, my division deals with new and emergent texts, texts that are non-traditional in nature. The deadline for this year's conference, held in March 2008 is close, and I am still accepting papers. I have calls up at the UPenn website. They can also be accessed at http://community.livejournal.com/ccfantastic/.

Outside of academic and corporate lives, though intersecting with my academic interests, I write fantasy fiction and poetry. I am interested in comics and graphic fiction and tend to be an eclectic reader who can bounce between Sandman (Gaiman's version),Preacher, Age of Bronze, Gloom Cookie, and A Distant Soil with no problem. The one genre I tend to avoid is "mainstream" superhero comics. I am the sort of gamer geek that feels like she is cheating on her Playstation when she is playing games on her Xbox. My television watch list includes Heroes, Pushing Daisies, 24, Project Runway, Top Chef, Lost, and Dexter (though my hectic schedule often results in my falling behind and catching up once I get the DVD's).

My primary scholarly focus the last five years or so has been on fan culture and fan fiction, especially slash fiction. My work primarily involves complicating early monolithic assumptions about slash fiction and slash fans, assumptions that have seen it as another sort of romance writing. While that notion does fit a lot of the work that is being produced, it works less well when considering fringe writing such as dark fiction or BDSM fiction, which shatters or explodes traditionally romantic (a la romance novels) notions. Like many aca-fans who work in the fan studies area, I practice what I study. I co-moderate a The Lord of the Rings fan fiction community and write fan fiction myself. My article (co-written with Robin Reid and Eden Lackner) "Cunning Linguists: The Bisexual Erotics of Words/Silence/Flesh," which appeared in Busse and Hellekson's Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, looks at the erotics of writer/reader and writer/writer interaction during the composition and circulation of collaboratively written erotic slash fiction. Perhaps we can talk a bit about collaboration processes?

EROTICS OF COLLABORATION

ADS: I'd love to hear more about your findings here. What are the relationships of the authors to the text they are slashing versus one another? Are the characters/stories being reworked the object of erotic fascination or is it the sharing process?

BL: It is a combination of the two. Not all slash stories are erotic in nature, by that I mean the level of graphic description of the relationships depicted in them; however, writers tend to focus on characters and actors (in media fandoms) that they themselves find attractive or arousing. This explains the tendency for writers to follow characters across films or series, adding new fandoms as their objects of fannish interest add to their resumes.

Fans do play with sexuality through slash and het fiction, expressing their own desires, which they perhaps show more frankly because of the distance they achieve through filtering them through fiction, fiction that is (at least on the surface) about male characters.

There is even a further distancing in that the fictions are not entirely theirs; they are borrowed. I don't mean to suggest that there is a simple correspondence between the desires expressed in fics and those of the fans. Certainly, some fics reflect nightmares (e.g., rape fics and dark fics) and others simply explore modes of desire the fan may be curious about but would not ordinarily want to engage in. If horror fiction provides its audience with ways to confront fears and terrors while remaining safe and sheltered from them, erotic fiction does the same with desire, and many fans use it as a means of playing with desire in that way.

The sharing process itself is also erotic, something that we talk about in the "Cunning Linguists" article. The more erotic content, sensuality and/or sexuality, a story contains, the more likely the writer is to get feedback that is flirty, passionate, and erotic in nature from her readers. However, I do not believe this is a hallmark of slash fiction so much as it is of erotic fiction. I am on several lists with professional writers of romantic erotica, and the commentary from their fans tends to be similar in nature. They are also similar in that romantic erotica featuring male/male relationships is very popular with female readers. Romance publishers like EllorasCave and Samhain Press, to name a few, have male/male fiction title lines. These are, for the most part, communities that are by and for women.

ADS: Is there less slash fiction written about female characters, or is the erotic relationship between writers and readers different? In the past, I've frequented a CSI fan-fic site that featured a lot of different romantic pairings, including lesbian pairings like Sarah-Catherine. These stories ranged from BDSM narratives that either punished one or both characters for their "frigidness" or celebrated their non-traditional femininities to stories that softened one or both characters in ways that conform to very traditional constructions of femininity.

BL: There is going to be a much higher percentage in Xena fandom than there is in Buffy and more in Buffy than in The Lord of the Rings. Within more mainstream publishers of professional romance/erotica, the same trend applies. In fact, while they welcome male/male stories, they specifically state that they are not interested in female/female stories. Again, these are spaces where the creators and audience trend female. While this tendency has been criticized as straight women fetishizing gay men, that reading is far too simplistic.

The percentage of femslash in fandoms definitely varies according to fandom, and the sorts of themes particular to it does as well. Most of the femslash I have read (and I will confess to not having read great quantities of it) tends to focus on friendships between women that deepen as an erotic component is introduced to them, which is, in essence, the most classic and traditional pattern for slash fiction. The feedback I have read on femslash stories tends to follow the same pattern as that for male/male slash, and the works I am familiar with tend to be single-authored rather than collaborative.

Overall, the collaborative writing process tends to be erotic in nature. Not all collaboration is erotic, but long-term collaborations between writers, as many are, that focus on producing erotic texts tends to knit levels intimacy between the writers as those same forces work on their characters.

In the parts of fandom I move in and study, fandom wife relationships develop between two women who are writing fic, especially erotic fic, collaboratively. The women really become "partners," a perspective that applies to their own relationship and how it is seen from the outside by other fans. While fandom wives can simply be good and fast friends, there are dynamics to the relationship that are not unlike those in a romantic relationship. A certain sense of possessiveness develops between the partners, and jealousies often arise if one partner wants to go on to write with someone outside the relationship. From what I've observed, a goodly percentage of fandom wives go on to other fandom wifely relationships when/if their current one ends.

The endings to such relationships tend to be messy and to be played out in front of the rest of fandom. I have been witness to several spectacular fandom wife marriages and divorces. In one, one partner lived on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast. The East Coast partner actually moved across the country to move in with her fandom wife, and their fandom divorce (spurred on by one's complaints that the other did not spend enough time with her and spent too much time online) ended up splitting many of their online friends between them.

ADS: This fandom wife dynamic you describe is fascinating, partly because of the gendered terminology fans use (are there no fandom husbands or fandom life-partners?), but also because it sounds so normative, even as it so clearly challenges assumptions about coupling.

BL: I agree. In fact, when it comes to tensions in fandom, some of the more fascinating ones exist between subversion and normativity, between exploding or reinforcing the status quo. Male pregnancy fictions are a good example of this. On one hand, they completely disregard the limitations of biological gender and are in a unique position to question and critique heteronormative assumptions about family. However, few fics actually do this. Instead, they reinforce many of the most pervasive, traditional, and heteronormative ideals, including ones that insist that jointly producing a child is the ultimate validations of a loving relationship.

ADS: My assessment is likely influenced by my own position within the academy, but I tend to read fan collaborations/the building and sharing of community as simultaneously desirable and fraught with tensions. This seems especially true when dealing with particular fan practices like collaboratively writing and sharing slash fiction, especially the more "taboo" kinds like BDSM or dark fiction, which not only refocus attention on particular relationships within media texts but also subvert power hierarchies (or call attention to them in new ways). The subject matter is often sexual and the sharing of fantasies that stretch the boundaries of what the official corporate authors of the text would find permissible (its amazing how lax many corporations are about fan-fiction until it "crosses a line" that has more to do with taste than profits - though these are often conflated in corporate rhetoric) seems to meld with the thrill of challenging cultural assumptions about "good taste".

For me, I see the conflation of breaking both legal and moral laws as part of the erotics here. Intellectual property law certainly cheats by trying to delimit how the public uses their cultural icons, so there is a thrill in ignoring these rules. Authorship is still largely imagined in official discourses as either a solitary act of creation or a corporate practice (Joss Whedon may be a genius, but we all know he didn't write every episode of Buffy. He had a writing team that was subject to some sort of rational assembly-line type production practice). Thus, fan collaboration seems to break down those dichotomies as well, making creation a shared experience that obfuscates the production process in favor of focusing on the content being shared. Finally, since cultural icons are often popular heroes in the Bennett and Woolacott sense that they are ever changing figures that embody (and neutralize) shifting cultural anxieties, the ability to play with these figures and tease out one aspect of their personas both unravels their function of preserving the status quo and actively engages the larger meanings of the icon, effectively shifting the tensions they are intended to manage. This seems simultaneously empowering and subversive, even as it confirms the middlebrow pleasures these icons/texts normally prescribe as desirable. The more I write here, the less I feel I know about the erotics of fandom, since I seem to have reduced this down to an instructional manual.

BL: The tensions between desirability and frustration apply to any collaborative endeavor. They are particularly acute for writers because our work is such a solitary labor. Collaboration adds a social element that can be a source of energy or vitality and a source of drama and anger. Naturally, building a community, fannish or otherwise, is also a collaborative venture.

I do not quite agree with your point that more taboo forms of expression necessarily represent tension points in fannish communities. In slash fandom, readers and writers tend to cluster around specific character pairings and specific kinks. For example, there are many slash fans who enjoy male pregnancy (MPREG) fictions. This is an acquired taste, one that has a loyal fanbase. Fans who do not share the same fascination avoid such fictions. Unless they are like me and decide to write papers on them. One of the icons I have on my LiveJournal says, "You have your kinks, and I have mine," which is often the prevailing attitude among fans. This is not to say that eruptions over personal kinks never happen, but they are not common in my corners of fandom. While we can talk about "slash fandom" as it was a monolithic entity, a more accurate way of looking at it would be as more discrete groups who crystallize around different discourses of desire.

ADS: I agree with you about the acceptance/celebration of different kinks that goes on in fan communities. I was thinking more of tensions that arise in relation to normative ideals. One's choice of kink is always in some way informed by knowledge of the social rules and the pleasures/ consequences of breaking them.

BL: Those tensions are actually playing out right now around a holiday fic exchange called Yuletide. The exchange cuts across fandoms, and this year includes over 1,200 participants. The first day of signups happened at the end of the Jewish high holidays, and one fan complained about this (even though signups lasted two weeks and there is no incentive for signing up early). The argument spiraled out into a debate about how fans will often organize events on Saturdays and resist the same on Sundays. The same sorts of complaints are voiced over these normative ideals, which tend to see slash fandom as female, heterosexual, white, and American.

ADS: As for how these ideas seem to connect with academic practices for me, the tenure process has made it very clear to me that single authorship is valued over collaboration. The denial of the community except as rational audience sitting in judgment transforms collaboration into a fetish for me, where new modes of academic publishing can reinvigorate community and focus on the processes of creation rather than the final product. Though a stretch, perhaps, I can definitely see these practices as erotic because they are both taboo and because they place emphasis on the act itself (no longer either masturbatory or a peep show where I show my body [of work] to an audience that I cannot see but I know is looking and judging me) rather than the final product (the money/tenure shot). The work I've done on MediaCommons and Flow are both informed by a deep sense that current academic publishing practices are limiting, but also that there is a liberating freedom that comes from sharing. Do I imagine fan community practices like slash fiction writing as similar? Somewhat. As media scholars, we typically seek to alter/challenge/tease out a text's meanings/underlying ideological assumptions/ institutional logics and constraints. Many fans do this as well, but they get to do this in forms that seem more like play (even though a lot of work often goes in to these creations) and sharing. Of course, part of this is the projection of my desires onto fan communities.

I'd imagine this works quite differently for non-tenure track faculty and as these discussions have clearly shown, there is a gendered component to these categories, with more women found in non-tenure track positions. I also know from working in a Comm department where half my colleagues are social sciency types who regularly co-author works that they find nothing erotic or exciting about collaboration. At best it is functional, at worst frustrating. They tend to fetishize the solo authoring process as much as I worship at the alter of community-building.

BL: I agree with the social science folks: collaboration on academic work is, well, it's work. It lacks the element of play and fun that is so much a part of fannish experience. Fandom can be serious play, but a portion of it, the part that poaches from and tests the canonical source texts, is playful. The relationships and intimacy between community members is often not, and tensions between fans who consider their experience all play and those who take their community and interactions more seriously do crop up.

I think attitudes about academic communication and community are shifting, like all things in academia, they will move slowly. I credit the Internet with this. As more scholars interact online in listservs and blogs and email, the more their interactions include personal and professional discussion and the more we become invested in each other as individuals. We move beyond being collections of ideas and methodologies. I have a personal blog (which is badly in need of updating) linked to my ICFA division blog. When I met one of my presenters on video game theory at the conference last spring, he immediately asked how my mother (who had been having health concerns, something I wrote about in my blog) was faring. It took me aback until I worked through to, "Oh, you read my blog." At that moment, our sense of community was built on more than our shared ideas, interests, and work.

ADS: This is very encouraging. I hope you are right.

STRETCHING THE CANON VERSUS CANONICAL FIDELITY

ADS: As you can probably tell, I am not a fan scholar per se. My interests are in the collective authoring practices and authoring constraints that accompany popular icons like superheroes. Within this lens, I tend to focus on how contemporary IP companies like Marvel Comics engage with fans and negotiate the various fan iterations of popular heroes in fan fiction, fan art, and various other collective knowledge initiatives. I also look at the ways that fans police the boundaries of authorship as often as they challenge them. I have studied the ways that superhero fan communities will often reject unauthorized stories as unprofessional, non-canonic, and out of continuity, while embracing certain professional writers and artists as part of the fan community (even as these individuals work for the very institutions seeking to police the meanings of popular heroes)

BL: Your experiences with the superhero communities and fan practices is very interesting to me, because there isn't quite the same sort of border policing in slash fandom. Perhaps it is because slash fans realize they are teasing very submerged meaning that is usually not intended out of the source text. That is, we accept we are going to be stretching canon, which makes it easier to accept some other distortions to or challenges of the source texts. However, there is a constant tension that exists between official canon and fan-defined canon/fanon. This permission to play with canon has its limits, and fans are not usually going to respond well to texts that totally shatter major canonical expectations, unless the work is clearly parody or crackfic.

At the same time, as texts grow more complex, defining what is canonical gets more problematic. In real-person fiction, for example, when the canonical source text is a person's like and persona, what defines canon? Some would say there is no such thing. I am not one of them. Canon tends to be an amalgamation of facts about an actor (or musician or sports figure), interviews with actors, commentary by colleagues, reading public persona and presentation, and a dose of the persona of fictional characters that actor has played in various roles. It is definitely something that is assembled, ordered, and prioritized by fans (and often contested by them) much more actively than canon in a fictional work is assimilated.

When we look at other texts that spill across media boundaries, the question of defining canon becomes even more complex as levels exist. Fans of Heroes, for example, can produce texts based on the canon of the television series, but they do so without having the benefit of additional information about characters that is revealed online in the Heroes digital graphic novel. If a fan wants to write about a character like Hana Gitelman, the woman who can mentally "hear"/intercept and communicate wirelessly, they have to access the digital graphic novels (soon to be released in a hardcover version), as her character is developed in cyberspace, not in the series. Hana also breaks out of the confines of the canonical television narrative by interacting directly with fans. My sister (who firmly insists she is NOT a fan) prowls the Heroes message boards and has signed up to get text messages from Hana on her cell phone.

ADS: Differences within communities over the rigidity or flexibility of the canon seems a valuable conversation. Of course, this is a question of degree, not an either/or scenario. Comic book/superhero fans definitely write fiction (general and slash) that potentially challenges the official continuity of their hero's universes, even as they also hotly debate what ought to be counted as canonical. My experience has been that many superhero fans privilege the officially produced stories over fan variations. Of course, this has a lot to do with the particularly close and incestuous relationship the comic book industry has historically cultivated with its fan base since the late 1960s. Henry Jenkins points out how over the past two decades the comic book industry has put out many elseworld-type variations of its own products, essentially creating in-house the narrative multiplicity that many fans otherwise create (with obvious limitations on certain subject matter). Partly, this can be seen as an attempt to reign in fan efforts to stretch the boundaries, but it is also partly an acknowledgement of those fan desires that many other media texts/ properties continue to deny.

Moreover, because the barriers for entry have usually been lower (and are still perceived to be) for the comic book industry, the perceived lines between creators and fans are blurred, so that many comic book writers and artists are not just fan-favorites, but marketed as fans themselves. I think this does two things: One, it reassures fans that their fantasies are being catered to because the people who create these texts are just like them (my point here is not whether this is true or not, but the way that the discourses of authorship and fandom that circulate blur the insider/outsider status so central to other fan community creative practices). Two, they encourage a detailed knowledge of the official continuity (and its official derivatives) because there is still the sense that this type of knowledge might be rewarded with a job or some similar form of cultural access. Thus, fan creations that push too far against the canonical grain are often devalued because there is a sense that this not only alienates the industry but also that there are already fan-insiders challenging that canon with an official stamp of approval. This seems similar to your assertion of the limits of fan openness to texts that shatter canon entirely without coding itself as parody or crackfic.

Of course, I am also massively oversimplifying what is often a very contentious and charged relationship between superhero fans and creators. What I wonder is, as digital authoring tools become more easily accessible, will we see this relationship shift with other media texts, as fans are both actively courted as potential creators by the industry and fan practices become increasingly integral to industry branding strategies? If television series started offering alternate variations of their plots (like those alternate universe episodes that occasionally pop up) would this change fan writing practices? And, of course, given the disparity within the industry in terms of gendered access to creative power, would there be a change along those axes?

BL: I think we are already starting to see the beginnings of a fan/creator convergence. In order to overcome the mid-season hiatus ratings slump, Heroes is set to produce 30 episodes. A number of them will be one-shots, focusing on a new hero not integral to the overall story arc of the series. Fans will get to weigh in on favorites, and the favorite will become a regular part of the cast. This very limited and restrictive sort of collaboration (where the boundaries and control is still rather firmly in the hands of the creators) is something that should fuel fan production, especially if a beloved hero is not renewed and fans want to continue his/her story.

While the new technologies offer fans more creative possibilities, I do not see creators giving much access to their power to fans in significant ways. However, I do see fans offering fellow fans more sophisticated (and competitive) alternatives to the creators' products. I'm thinking here of shows like Hidden Frontier, a Star Trek fan film series that released their episodes on the web and made the focus on the series the relationships between the characters, some of whom were gay. Of course, creators will likely take note of other popular and visible fan alternatives and popular ideas and themes may work their way into the creators' works.

"Ephemera vs. The Apocalypse": Retrofuturism After 9/11

The following was written as a postscript to my essay on Retrofuturism and the work of Dean Motter, which was serialized in my blog last week. Some of this material originally appeared in Technology Review but it has been revisited in light of the more recent essay.

A poster for Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of the No Towers describes the book as "Ephemera vs. the Apocalypse," and that's as good a description as any of the functions retrofuturism and residual culture have played in the aftermath of 9/11. As Spiegelman writes in the book's introduction,

"The only cultural artifacts that could get past my defenses to flood my eyes and brain with something other than images of burning towers were old comic strips; vital, unpretentious ephemera from the optimistic dawn of the twentieth century. That they were made with so much skill and verve but never intended to last past the day they appeared in the newspaper gave them poignancy; they were just right for an end-of-the-world moment."

Comics entered American newspapers at a moment of rapid, profound, and prolonged change: the dawn of the twentieth century was met with an explosion of new technologies, not to mention significant dislocations of the population from the farms to the cities, from the south to the north, and from Europe to America. Comics spoke for the lower classes who had not yet reaped the benefits of those changes and for a middle class that felt disoriented by them. Characters like the Katzenjammer Kids, Happy Hooligan and Krazy Kat with their perpetual energy and eternally elastic bodies could neither be contained nor destroyed; their misadventures were being read alongside news reports of people suffering electric shocks from faulty wiring, dying in tenement fires, blown up at moving picture shows, or getting run over by streetcars. These comics helped turn-of-the century Americans laugh at things that otherwise felt hopelessly out of control.

Spiegelman reproduces a selection of early comic strips, including a remarkable Winsor McCay strip, published in September 1907, in which his protagonists are depicted as giants, trampling over buildings in Lower Manhattan, not far from where the twin towers were later built and then destroyed. The McCay cartoon is striking because of the contrast between the artist's detailed representation of New Yorks architectural wonders and his surrealistic images of giant cigar-chomping clowns climbing skyscrapers. Similarly, the cover of No Towers uses a realistic but shadowy rendering of the World Trade Center as the disturbing backdrop for cartoonish figures raining from the sky.

Spiegelman wants us to read these vintage images of toppling skyscrapers and falling people against the reality of what happened on September 11, transforming slapstick fantasies into chilling prophecy. He has explored this terrain before, depicting the horrors of the Holocaust through images from funny animal comics in Maus. No Towers is not as good as Maus but these images hit such a raw nerve at the time he created them in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that he had trouble finding a U.S. publisher.

If Motter's books can be seen as offering at least a critique of older imaginings of technological utopianism, more recent works have turned to retrofuturism as a means of healing wounds and restoring a world -- and a world view -- that was shattered when the Twin Towers fell. We see this project of restoration, for example, in the beautiful sequence at the end of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York which uses digital effects to take us through a series of detailed simulations of the skyline of Manhattan as it evolves across the late 19th and 20th century, culminating in a shot which shows the World Trade Center towering over the island once again. When I saw this sequence in the theaters, audiences cheered to see this digital recreation of these national landmarks.

Something similar underlies the project Grant Morrison undertook in the Manhattan Shield segments of his Seven Soldiers books. Morrison's book depicts a version of Manhattan that never quite existed, full of buildings that were conceived by the likes of Robert Moses or Frank Lloyd Wright, but never built. Lest anyone doubt the motivation behind this particular act of retrofuturist imaginings, check out Morrison's interview about these comics in the New York Times:

"I want it to be a more exalted New York, where things that were dreamed of were finally brought into reality....[These architectural wonders] are the kind of thing that would become a tourist haunt or a terrorist target. All of the buildings I've included are. They would have been icons of the city."

If Scorsese's Gangs of New York has the alibi of historical reconstruction, Morrison's project is retrofuturist to its core, revisiting the imagined city of the future as a source of historical consciousness through which we can understand our current moment. His monuments are completed so that they can serve as targets for imagined future terrorist attacks

Kerry Conran, the director of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, was also haunted by ghosts of tomorrows that never were. He told Entertainment Weekly that the film took shape around a haunting mental image of a Zeppelin descending through snow and searchlights toward its moorings in Manhattan. Conran spent years recreating these images on his home computer before getting independent funding to finish the film. The result is gee whiz technological magic with most of the sets created digitally as actors performed in front of blue screen and with Lawrence Olivier, who died in 1989, restored to life and playing a new character, thanks to digital sampling.

The Making Of features on the dvd of the film make it clear that these images drew on appropriated and transformed iconography from the mid-20th century popular imagination. Conran describes the project as a "comic book brought to life":

"One of the first things we started with was...attacking New York City. Before we started, we sat down, almost for my own benefit more than anything else, wrote a handful of pages and some little thumbnail sketches suggesting how we should approach what New York should look like in the film. In large part, it was always based on these beautiful charcoal renderings by Hugh Ferris, this architect/illustrators from the thirties who did the most amazing and beautiful renderings of New York City that I have ever seen. That became our New York City....In terms of the Flying Fortress, I actually looked at [Norman] Bel Geddes's ocean-liner that he had imagined. It was of course never built but it was a thing of beauty."

The film's zeppelin is identified as the Hindenburg III, suggesting a world where the deadly explosion of the original Hindenburg never took place or where the culture chose not to let the tragedy reshape their lives. If Spiegelman wants us to reconnect his slapstick images with the pain and suffering of 9/11's real world victims, Conran imagines a world where many of the traumatic events that would shape twentieth and twenty-first century history have not and may never occur. His World of Tomorrow is a place where things not only went on as before but where people were able to realize their highest hopes for the city. As Christian Thorne has suggested, retro "is an unabashedly nationalist project: it sets out to create a distinctly U.S. idiom, one redolent of Fordist prosperity, an American aesthetic culled from the American century, a version of Yankee high design able to compete, at last, with its vaunted European counterparts." Not surprisingly, American artists have responded to 9/11 with a style of retrofuturism that celebrates the ideals and icons of mid-20th century American culture; it also exorcises some of the traumas which have swept aside the last vestiges of those ideals in our own time.

An army of giant robots -- inspired by the Superman cartoon, "Mechanical Monsters" -- march down Broadway. Airships barely avoid colliding with skyscrapers. A mysterious mad scientist, with a quasi-religious vision of purification and redemption, threatens to destroy the world from his hiding place in some uncharted spot. Just as we can now go back and read the popular culture of the late 1930s for its traces of an America on the eve of a world war, future historians will be able to read these images as early twenty-first century concerns mapped onto an imaginary world where gum-chewing boy geniuses, dapper young pilots, plucky "female reporters," and dashing British commanders can overpower anything the terrorists throw at us.

The images of technological destruction in Sky Captain are comfortingly far-fetched. The threats are larger than life but so are the resources with which we combat them. The movie flirts with global destruction, only to end on a much more reassuring note. This is the kind of movie that studio era Hollywood would have made if it had access to today's digital special effects. Set in 1939, once again the year of the Fair, Sky Captain is full of the gizmos and gadgets that filled the pages of Tom Swift novels, pulp magazines, and Buck Rogers comic books: flying fortresses, ray guns that melt solid steel, airplanes that can fly under water, robot armies, shrunken animals, and vast underground kingdoms. And alongside these imagined technical wonders, there are also loving reconstructions of residual media - the graphically rendered radio waves that bring Sky Captain into the film, the detailed simulation of a 1930s movie palace which is screening The Wizard of Oz, the comic books that Dex the boyish inventor reads for inspiration. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow closes the circle, linking its borrowed images of the future with the popular culture artifacts that draw collectors back to this era in the first place. The film celebrates the "sense of wonder" and the "can do" spirit of an America that was, in the language of the time, constantly striving to reach "new horizons." One running gag in the film concerns the reporters agony over having only two shots left in her camera as she encounters one spectacular experience after another, always convinced that what comes next will be even more wondrous.

Sky Captain doesn't just bring old images of technological wonders to life; it also captures the technophilia that shaped those glistening images. Go back and watch a movie like Things to Come (1940). The film stops dead for five minutes or more so we can take pleasure in showering sparks, pounding pistons, and spinning gears. This contemporary film seeks to reclaim that fascination with massive and streamlined machines that was so much a part of that earlier science fiction - and it does so by tapping our contemporary astonishment about its digital special effects.

Sky Captain also reminds us of a parallel history of popular fictions that challenged the quiet desperation which motivated mankind's hurried progress. Frank Capras 1937 classic Lost Horizon depicts Shangri La as a haven of peace in a world on the eve of war, a refuge from the relentless demands of modern civilization. Capra's film can be read as a poignant reminder that even then, not everyone wanted to live in the World of Tomorrow. Sky Captain depicts Shangri La as the site of atrocity and suffering: its residents have been enslaved by the evil scientists, forced to work in his toxic mines to generate the raw materials needed to fuel his war machines. We cannot escape the forces of change, the film seems to suggest, but we can survive and master them.

Gibson read these 1930s images of the future as having all of the hallmarks of fascism; Motter depicts what happens when Democracity and Futurama becomes a reality which drives people insane; but Conran wants to live in the World of Tomorrow. This form of retrofuturism is highly seductive, especially for those of us who check eBey regularly to barter over souvenirs and trinkets from the World's Fair or pour over old issues of Popular Science and Amazing Stories. At the end of the day, this form of retrofuturism is deeply conservative in its desire to restore a lost world. It wants to hold onto the fantasy of an American Century as long as possible, even as we see the dangers of that inflated national fantasy every night on the news. If, as Charles R. Acland suggests, the residual represents a kind of historical consciousness whereby shadows of the past challenge the myth of inevitable progress, we need to recognize that it can also function as a fantasy about returning to the womb. In the end, I love Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow but I fear what it tells us about the conservative impulses of own times.

"The Tomorrow That Never Was": Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part Three)

The Burden of Knowledge, The Burden of Dreams

Of course, these architectural wonders make little sense without digging deeper into the social vision that shaped them. Howard Siegel has traced the ways that a certain ideology of technological utopianism shaped the iconography of early science fiction, starting as a form of social critique of dominant economic institutions, but being highjacked and reworked by the 1939 Fair's corporate sponsors. As Siegel writes,

"Technological utopianism derived from the belief in technology -- conceived as more than tools and machines alone -- as the means of achieving a 'perfect' society in the near future. Such a society, moreover, would not only be the culmination of the introduction of new tools and machines; it would also be modeled on those tools and machines in its institutions, values and culture."

Technological utopians believed a more perfect society would emerge from a series of breakthroughs in transportation and communication technologies. Siegel explains,

"Connecting all sectors of the technological utopia would be superbly efficient transportation and communication systems, powered almost exclusively by electricity....The specific means of transportation would include automobiles, trains, subways, ships, airplanes, even moving sidewalks. The means of communication would include pneumatic mail tubes, telephones, telegraphs, radios, and mechanically composed newspapers."

Given this history, it is no accident that Motter refers to one of his cities as "Electropolis" and another as "Terminal City." Both names suggest the centrality of these imagines of power, transportation, and communication to his vision of the failed utopia. As one comic critics writes, "Terminal City itself is named for the fact that it lies at the crossroads of a number of transport routes...But the city also earns the terminal appellation in another sense, in that becomes the end of the line for characters like Quinn, marooned there with his reputation in tatters, or BB, the construction work she's seeking having long since dried up." The books lovingly detail the various transportation options - showing us what it is like to take a joy ride in a flying car, to arrive in the city via airship, or to walk through the lobby of the futuristic railroad station. At the same time, the books are fascinated with the various systems of communication, depicting what were once seen as futuristic breakthroughs, such as television which was introduced to the public at the 1939 Fair, as now obsolete and malfunctioning (depicted here in grainy black and white images). Motter's Terminal City still produces and consumes newsreel, Electropolis uses flouriscopes to search crime scenes, and Radian City uses a system of pneumatic tubes are used to deliver messages from building to building.

Presiding over Futurama, Democracy, Radiant City, and all of the other cities of the future were an army of engineers, city planners, architects, and designers. As Siegel explains,

"In utopia, efficiency would govern government as thoroughly as it would education and industry....Because technicians rather than politicians would run the utopian government, it would be technical rather than political in nature."

This technocratic vision saw central planning and social engineering as new kinds of expertise which might perfect human nature. This same celebration of efficiency and rationalism ran through the discourse of the 1939 Worlds Fair. Here, again, is the narrator from The World of Tomorrow: "City planners and architects believed they knew what the future had to be like and what ordinary Americans needed to learn to be able to live successfully in it."

This idea of the perfectability of human nature through the careful design of spaces and artifacts finds its expression through Motter's protagonist, Mister X and his theory of psychetecture, which the book describes as "a unified theory of civilization." The real power in Radiant City rest not with the political leaders, corporate executives, or crime bosses but with the seldom seen and cryptically described Consortium from the Ninth Academy, which Motter describes as "a roundtable of architects, engineers, photographers, chemists, and intellects. Big brains like Reinhardt, Eichmann, Von Stace, Riveuax, Rachmah Sheena, Templeton, Harbraun, Radiquiet....more of a cadre than a consortium." Mister X's new planned city embodied his belief that good design could enhance the mental health of its residents, but his designs were fatally compromised in their execution.

We first see Mister X upon his return to the city of his dreams, which he is experiencing as a physical space for the first time, despite having worked through every detail on paper. His fascination, however, soon gives way to horror as he realizes what they have done to his master plan: "They changed the original design! They cut down on the building materials, cut corners, used a lot of cheap substitutes! The psychetecture was ruined! God knows what effects the actual city is having on all our minds!" He is determined to either destroy the city or restore its balance.

At times, the book portrays Mister X as an all-knowing figure, someone who moves through secret passageways and tunnels, allowing him to come and go everywhere without being detected.

In a short piece contained in the back of one issue, Dave McKeen writes,

"He looked into each of the city's eyes, each of its windows and seemed to understand. Where I could see only questions, he saw answers. With each spire and corner, each curve, each cornice he studied. His shoulders became heavier with the burden of knowledge. The burden of dreams."

And in a dream sequence, Seth depicts Mister X as the very embodiment of the city he designed, his head a cluster of art deco skyscrapers. Read in that way, Mister X becomes a figure not unlike Howard Roark, the architect protagonist of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead who similarly refuses to compromise on his vision even if it means standing up against unyielding public pressure or destroying his own creations.

But the more time we spend with Mister X, the less certain we become about the value of his theories or even about the stability of his mind. Perhaps he, like the other residents, has been driven insane by "the shortage of right angles or prime ciphers," the imbalanced claustro/agoraphobic Ratio, or the distorted visual ambiguity quotient. Or perhaps it has been madness from the start. As the book continues, Seth's drawings become looser, more distorted, depicting this world as seen by an unhinged mind. McKeen's short story captures perfectly the disorienting qualities of the city and the impossibility of grasping it fully and completely within a single intellect:

"The city is one huge melting pot of time. During the day, a hazy structure that we must embrace in order to remain sane. But at night, in our sleep, we glimpse the randomness of it all. A city of pauses, fast forwards, stills, cues, and plays. Or is this again the abstract logic of my dreams."

In the end, the city escapes human comprehension and drives all those who attempt to grasp its complexities over the precipice. The only way to survive may well be to sleep walk along the rooftops, never adopting a panoramic perspective on the whole.

Showplace of the World

Read through a contemporary lens, the cities imagined by the technological utopians can seem bloodless and antiseptic. This is part of what generates such horror for the protagonist of Gibson's "Gernsback Continuium:"

"They were both in white: loose clothing, bare legs, spotless white sun shoes... He was saying something wise and strong, and she was nodding, and suddenly I was frightened, frightened in an entirely different way....They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world... It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda."

Motter stops short of equating technological utopianism with fascism in the way that Gibson does: there is a kind of pathos about the failure of the dream which suggests the fascination and affection that the collector often feels towards the objects of his collection.

A great deal of that affection gets directed towards the books' nostalgic recreation of the stuff of early 20th century American popular entertainment. Images of spectacular night clubs and exotic eateries run through the series of books -- Club Congo, The Jaded Dragon, The Zircon Club in Mister X, Rick's Atomic Cafe, The Elbow Room, The Science Club in Terminal City and Flying Saucer Cocktails, The Color Bar, The Mermaid Lounge in Electropolis.

Motter and his collaborators may be drawing inspiration from amusement area of the 1939 World's Fair. For those who are interested in exploring the future orientation of the event, these sideshow attractions and carny rides have always been the subject of some degree of embarrassment. Motter makes fun of these mid-20th century performances in a scene late in Electropolis which shows a burnt out zeppelin pilot watching an aging and overweight mermaid swim around in her tank: The World of Tomorrow shows a much younger and more attractive "mermaid" swimming topless in a tank at an actual 1939 attraction.

There's no question that these popular amusements have seen better days than the aged and creaky forms they take in Motter's graphic novels. But, these show people - the stunt fliers, human flies, down and out boxers, entertainment entrepreneurs, escape artists, washed up movie stars, and jaded strippers - are the most human figures in the series. As Motter explained in our interview,

"That era of entertainment was rich with spectacle. Live public exhibition isn't much these days- With TV and the internet now doing most of the work. ...But in the early part of the 20th century, show business was big, clumsy and dangerous (in the pre-Disneyland era,) and pretty 'rustic' (in terms of finish.) It was exotic, and not always predictable. The industry simply makes it easier and safer today."

Cosmo, Terminal Island's human fly, describes the comradery he enjoyed with the other performers when the fair first opened: "The competition, while fierce, was usually friendly. There was a kind of bond between those of us in the daredevil trade. We were really competing against the NEW AGE itself. We were fighting against our own obsolescence." Displaced as a performer by the Fair's declining fortunes, Cosmo now works as a window washer but from time to time, the book calls him back into action and he emerges as the closest thing to a traditional superhero to be found in its pages. Through his eyes, we learn the fate of so many others of his breed, who one by one have met their deaths, often under mysterious circumstances: "Woody the Wingwalker's plane temporarily lost control. Little Egypt was eaten alive during her Famous Aquarium Escape when the mummy case was dropped in the wrong tank. Tom McBomb's cannon backfired."

Cosmo is a human embodiment of the residual culture that engulfs the citizens of Terminal City, a hero who can be taken out of mothballs for one last adventure, because he still holds onto older values and virtues. We might contrast him with Menlo Park, the robot detective at the center of Electropolis: Menlo wants desperately to be the kind of tough guy detective that Bogart played in the cinema, but no one quite accepts him as a knight of the streets. He speaks in clichés and the others roll their eyes; he sputters and sparks, but he isn't quite able to replace the human dick who was once his owner.

Then there's show business entrepreneur Monty Vickery (a curious cross between Billy Rose, who helped to stage spectacles at the actual fair, Carl Denham the fictional adventurer who brought back King Kong to New York City to amaze the masses in the 1933 film, and , Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, the real world adventures and producers of the film). Vickery has traveled the globe to collect the inhabitants of his Evolutionary (including what he promises is the "missing link" in human evolution) and in a master stroke of showmanship, he stages a boxing match in which Kid Gloves fights his way up the evolutionary ladder from monkeys and apes to the first humans. Then, as a followup, Kid Gloves battles the machines which are replacing humanity (witness the figure of the robot who manages human laborers at the Herculean Arms). The series of events culminates when Gloves bests the machines and then his heart bursts, like some later day John Henry figure, signaling the last gasp of a raw humanity that has not been overcome by the mechanization of his society. Here, again, we see the showfolk "fighting against their own obsolescence."

Professor Motter's Hobbyhorses

Motter surrounds his showmen protagonists with a colorful cast of secondary characters who seem to have been pulled from the panels of old Dick Tracy comics or the pages of long discarded pulp magazines. As Motter explains,

"These extraordinary environs needed to be populated by familiar, likeable characters. Archetypal, even cliché."

Motter's comics represent a world where larger than life characters like the mysterious Woman in Red, Li'L Big Lil (a cross between Batman's The Joker and Dick Tracey's Flat Top but in an plump and aging female body), the Killer Bs, Micassa and Sucassa the art thieves (who engage in constant comic patter inspired by Abbott and Costello), and a slew of other colorful characters are locked into a struggle to possess the Crowd Jewels of Alcazar, the Onyx Astrolab, a map buried beneath a cheap painting of horses playing cards, or some other high sounding gegaw. These figures, exaggerated and often comic versions of pop culture archtypes, become yet another form of the residual at work in the stories. Such figures seem to belong in this fallen utopia, even though such seedy lowlifes would have had no real place in the official representations of the World of Tomorrow which had promised that we would have overcome crime, eradicated greed, and otherwise perfected human nature.

As the series moves forward, we see more and more such figures and we find more and more puns and inside jokes which reference early 20th century conceptions of technology and the future. So, we learn that the Mayors of Terminal City have included Orwell, Huxley, and Gernsback, or we meet characters with names like Tessla Coils, Menlo Park, Boris St. Elmo, Alfred MacGuffin, Johnny Picasso or Raymond Alexander. These jokes extend into the backgrounds of images as well, so that if you look closely at a page set at Ralph's Used Robots, we will spot Maria from Metropolis, R2D2 and C3P0 from Star Wars, the Daleks from Doctor Who, Robbie the Robot from Lost in Space, Klatuu from Day the Earth Stood Still, and even what looks like one of the Rock'em Sock'em Robots from the 1960s children's toy of that same name. These panels represent a mini-history of the place of the robot in the popular imagination across the past century. Or another panel from the same book shows Metropolis (Superman's or Fritz Lang's we don't know), Gotham City, and Opal City as potential destinations, again linking Motter's cities to the history of urban representation in comics.

We appreciate such jokes because Motter and his collaborators have taught us to scrutinize every frame for buried details and to search out further information on any elements we do not immediately recognize. We are operating in the space of what Umberto Eco called "the already said" or James Collins described as "the foregrounding of citations." For Collins, this "hyperconsciousness" about past representations was a defining feature of American comics of the 1980s, suggesting the connection between Motter's books and other contemporary works such as Watchman or Dark Knight Returns. Collins argues that this recognition of and appreciation of references to earlier texts reflects the expanded competency and the easy access to older materials through the informal archives that are growing up in and around popular culture.

Here's Motter describing the expectations he places on his readers:

"Of course I hope my readers are hip to my world by now. Initially the approach was to put as many of my influences on the table without the stories becoming scrapbooks for 'Professor Motter's hobbyhorses.' This was the way I gave a wink and a nod to those who were similarly inspired by the same subjects. It paid off, I think. I have met many like-minded creators as a result. But I was trained by looking at the masters. The McLuhans were Joyce freaks. Eliot masters. Pound scholars. Finnegan's Wake was their Talmud. And it was (remains) FULL of treasures. I was convinced that I also had hidden treasures in my auxiliary 'influences.' "

As a practical matter, each of these references offer a secret handshake to those already immersed in retro culture. For everyone else, it is easy enough to find a secret decoder ring somewhere on the web.

So we have come full circle, back to the relationship Straw has posited between digital media and residual culture. Motter's works tap the residual at every possible level - from the broad outlines of his city to the smallest detail in the decore, from the names of characters to the archtypes and clichés through which those characters are constructed (One advertisement for Electropolis reduces the story to three genre icons --"The Femme Fatale, The Detective, The Architect"). It is clear that Motter and his collaborators are themselves fans and collectors of this retro culture and at the same time, they are using these images to pose a mild critique of the ideologies that shaped these earlier images of the future. Throughout all of this, we feel a certain melancholy in our recognition that the imagined world of tomorrow never came or more accurately, in these stories, it came and never left. Either way, the result is a set of shattered dreams and broken promises.

Next Monday, I will be back with a postscript about the ways that retrofuturism operates in a post-9/11 environment, focusing primarily upon Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow. By the way, today, June 20, marks the one year anniversary of the launch of this blog. Thanks to my loyal readers who have provided the encouragement to produce so much stuff this year. As of last week, we had passed the 1000th link mark, so thanks also to all of you who have helped spread the word about some of the discussions we've been having here. I am looking forward to continuing to keep this going as we move into year two.

"The Tomorrow That Never Was": Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part Two)

We can see this focus on historic "stuff" at certain points in Dean Motter's comics as well. There are some detailed frames created by Seth for some of the Mister X comics which include representations of a whole array of art deco bric-a-brac. Yet, more often, Motter and the artists who illustrate his stories, tap into iconography from older science fiction works as a kind of image bank from which to design their urban landscape. In an interview with the author, Motter commented that he was lucky to have identified artistic collaborators who were themselves fascinated with older images of the future and who therefore could work from specific reference points to older magazine covers or etchings of New York landmarks.

Where Tomorrow Is Today...

One recent book, Daniel H. Wilson's Where's My Jetpack: A guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived, might well serve as a guidebook or catalog for the cities depicted across Motter's books, given this shared pool of retrofuturist icons. Wilson shares with Motter the same disappointment that the future promised by General Electric and Westinghouse never quite came to be:

"The future is now, and we are not impressed. The future was supposed to be a fully automated, atomic-powered, germ-free Utopia - a place where a grown man could wear a velvet spandex unitard and not be laughed at. Our beloved scientists may be building the future, but some key pieces are missing. Where are the ray guns, the flying cars, and the hoverboards that we expected? We can't wait another minute for the future to arrive. The time has come to hold the golden age of science fiction accountable for its fantastic promises...Today zeppelins the size of ocean liners do not hover over fully enclosed skyscraper cities.. Shiny robot servents do not cook breakfast for colonists on the moon. Worst of all, sleek titanium jetpacks are not ready and waiting on showroom floors ...Despite every World's Fair prediction, every futuristic ride at Disneyland, and the advertisements on the last page of every comic book ever written, we are not living in a techno-utopia."

Wilson returns to the discourse of popular science, investigating how close we have come to these predictions and what has derailed them along the way, while Motter turns towards science fiction, examining what it might have been like to live in the city of the future and why such a future might have disappointed, even if we had achieved everything Futurama had predicted.

Motter's books move back and forth between technologies actually achieved in the mid-twentieth century and those only imagined. Consider, for example, this passage from an issue of Electropolis:

"Electra City was built at the very beginning of the Electric Age. It was an exciting, sparkling jewell that symbolized a nation's dreams of the future. 'Where Tomorrow is Today and Today's yesterday.' That's how they used to describe it. Sounds goofy now but I would envision its scintillating skyline -- shimmering the arcs of the colossal Van Der Graff Towers and gigantic Strickfadden machines, the air traffic flitting about like moths around a streetlight. I still get that impression from time to time but when folks began abandoning the city core, the underworld moved in and that image became obscured by grandiose, short-lived, and usually catastrophic ambitions. It would never be the same."

Motter wallows in what some have called the electrical sublime but in doing so, he blurs the lines between Van Der Graff generators of the sort one can see today if you visit the Boston Museum of Science and the mocked up mad scientist apparatus, often informed by a similar aesthetic, Kenneth Strickfadden developed for the Universal horror films of the 1930s. These books blur the line between what was, what might have been, and what were simply the figments of some pulp writer's hyperbolic imagination.

Regardless of the reality behind them, these images of the future all fit together to form a coherent, consistent, and compelling construction of the city; we recognize buildings from one issue to the next, even from one comic series to the next, and each new element introduced adds to the integrity of the whole. These elements may be represented with varying degrees of stylization and abstraction as they pass through the pens of artists with such different styles as Paul Rivoche, Jaime Hernandez, Ty Templeton, Dave McKean, and Seth (just to mention those who contributed to Mister X) but we still feel that they belong in the same fictional universe because so many of these elements can be rooted back in the same historical moment in the evolution of the utopian imagination. Many can be traced back specifically to the 1939 World's Fair, which was that shining moment when so many of these archtypes stepped off the printed page and gained a material reality: the fair promised its depression era patrons that they would be able to see, hear, taste, and smell the future. As the narrator of The World of Tomorrow explains,

"I think that there are moments where you can see the world turning from what it is into what it will be. For me, the New York World's Fair is such a moment. It is a compass rose pointing in all directions, toward imaginary future and real past, false future and immutable present, a world of tomorrow contained in the lost American yesterday."

The Fair itself represented a strategic blurring of temporal relations.

Building on a description from the Fireside Theater's Peter Bergman, Motter describes Mister X's Radiant City as "a city being imagined in the 30s, built in the 40s and stalled somewhere in the 50s. I'd add that it was forlornly recalled in the 80s." Each of those temporal markers sums up a shift in the conception of the future and of the experience of the city, shifts that are recognized by readers who have immersed themselves in the literature of retrofuturism. The idea of the "end of history" has long been part of the utopian imagination but there is something suffocating or claustrophobic about a city which has been locked down by a single vision and has been unable or unwilling to adapt to changed circumstances.

If Sterling once wanted to displace the old "steam-snorting wonders" from the heart of science fiction, Motter wants to revisit them as the residue of a bygone era. Here, for example, is the way Electropolis describes one of the architectural wonders of Electra City:

"When erected, the Diogenes Tower was the tallest building on earth atop which was mounted the world's most powerful ozone vapor beacon. The beams from the lighthouse would be visible from hundreds of miles away, even on the foggiest night. Built as the center piece of the Brave New World's Fair, it was probably the most ambitious engineering construction effort of the century."

The Tower was designed to be suicide proof, anticipating its attractiveness to jumpers, but in a fate as ironic as the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic, a detective is found hanging from the tower in what police have written off as a suicide before the building even opens.

Or consider the way Mister X characterizes its primary location:

"Radiant City was built to be the Dream City, a vast and beautiful Metropolis, designed to fulfill the grandest aesthetic, and architectural ideals, it now moulders in dilapidation. Its citizens are afflicted with sleep disorders, opium addiction, and a surfeit of perversions. It is a place as corrupt as the decadent upper class that rules it, and the human parasites that prey upon them."

Or consider the haunting presence in panel after panel of Terminal City of the head and shoulders of the Collosus of Roads, a massive statue which went unfinished when the Fair came to an unanticipated closure.

Where Do You Fit In?

The narrator of The World of Tomorrow describes his experiences of being mystified by the1939 Fair:

"Actually tomorrow scared me a little. Could I grasp the immense plan expressed in occult symbols all over the Fair? Would I be up to tomorrow?"

Or as a sign in the background of a Terminal City panel asks us, "Where Do You Fit In?"

Motter's comics are similarly fascinated by cryptic scenes of technological and scientific mastery - as represented through the images carved onto the side of key landmarks such as the Modern Times newspaper office (which echoes Chaplin's film of the same title) or the Herculean Arms apartment building. The offices Mister X visits have the look and feel of vast control rooms, communication centers where powerful men sat to control vast empires; the scale of these spaces are not human as suggested by the huge mausoleums depicted in the Duncan Cemetery, the Great Mall where robots perform theater, the vast aviary or the huge lobbies depicted in the various hotels and apartment buildings. The inhuman quality of such spaces is indeed part of the point: these buildings were designed on the basis of economic and technological imperatives that had little to do with human nature. No actual human being would be adequate to the demands this future placed upon them.What has led these cities into decline is precisely the inability of their inhabitants to live up to those over-inflated expectations.

More simply, though, these buildings have ceased to generate and sustain their inhabitant's interests, have failed to capture their imagination or inspire their ambitions. The future has simply run out of steam. Writing about earlier Fairs and Expositions, Tom Gunning has argued that their buildings were memorable precisely because they were designed to be remembered, because they sought to astonish us upon first impression and because they embodied as fully as possible the particular hopes, dreams, and fantasies of the era that produced them. Gunning goes on, however, to describe the process of disenchantment that necessarily follows from this push to produce wonders: "Astonishment is inherently an unstable and temporary experience. One finds it difficult to be continually astonished by the same thing. Astonishment gives way to familiarity." Astonishment gives way to habituation; we stop seeing our environments when they become simply the backdrop for more mundane activities: "What happens in modernity to the initial wonder at a new technology or device when the novelty has faded into the banality of the everyday?"

Here, we might think about Motter's recurring images of somnamulists, sleep walking along the roofs of skyscrapers, oblivious to their engineering accomplishments or to the vistas that open out before them. Those who suffered from Escher Syndrome (named after graphic artist M..C. Escher) are benumbed by the banality of everyday life. As a psychiatrist being interviewed on television in Terminal City explains,

"The condition really defies any satisfactory explanation. There have been a growing number of cases of somnambulism wherein the subjects are found in strange and precarious situations. They awaken on ledges or rooftops, often hundreds of stories above the street. In many cases there is no physical access to those places. Their means of getting there are completely without explanation and they seem to have no memory of..."

These sleepwalkers, though, are simply one of many unsettling elements that suggests the psychological imbalances experienced by those forced to inhabit this utopian society. Look closely and one will start to notice images in the background of people jumping off the rooftops, of flying cars crashing into buildings, or of crimes occurring in the back allies, all suggesting a city which is mentally unbalanced and socially out of sync. Indeed, once Motter left the book, such images - especially those of desperate and eccentric members of various cults and subcultures - moved into the forefront of the series, looking more like the cyberpunk society depicted in Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan than like the utopian architecture associated with Democracity.

The Hernandez Brothers vividly capture this movement from astonishment to disenchantment in a "Tales from Somnopolis" extra in the back of one of the first issues of Mister X: across three pages of wordless panels, we move from spectacular images of skyscrapers, zeplins, and caretaking robots, through increasingly darker images of social decay and urban blight, ending up an appoclyptic image of a flood which washes the city clean again. The series of panels ends with the text, "We hope this tour of our fair and radiant city answers any questions that you may have been too shy to ask. Thank You."

A Tale of Three Cities

Mister X, Terminal City, and Electropolis can be read collectively as the Tale of Three Cities, each designed with the best of hopes, each destined to achieve the worst possible results. As Motter explains near the end of Electropolis,

"We built the three cities - Radiant, Terminal and Electra - they all fell like Babel - each in its own terrible way. One drove its citizens insane. The population went from suffering from disorders like simple kinephilia and luxophrenia to full-blown omniphobia within a single year. Another succumbed to a titanic social depression caused by the termination of the fair it had been built to celebrate. And this township became overpowered by the very industry that had created it, paralyzed by electromagnetism and avarice."

The Cast Iron Beach offers perhaps the most vivid encapsulation of the move from idealized to blighted urban landscapes. One character describes to attraction at its conception:

"It was a magical place back then. It was designed to be the amusement section of the fair. It actually opened two years early. Folks came from all over to see it. To enjoy it. It attracted all kinds. From carnival types and exhibitors to tourists and locals."

But in an economy which has lost its way, the attraction falls into disrepair, the sands are washed aside, leaving only the metal shelfing underneath:

"Electra City must have been a lot nicer before they started calling it Electropolis. I figure that was around the time the sand washed way, leaving only the rusting steel plates...One can almost hear the ghosts of the midway echoing off the metal scaffolding that once supported a wonderland more fantastic than Alice ever encounters."

Or consider the case of Slant Town, an upper-class neighborhood built upon an unstable hillside property, which is reduced to a slum when the bedrock collapsed, leaving the whole neighborhood dangling at a nine degree angle:

"These days, it's a run-down bit of bohemian refuge. Smoky nightclubs, junk shops, soup kitchens, art studios, small galleries and all. But I'm always amazed that the whole shebang didn't come tumbling down long ago."

The inhabitants of this city now must live in and around the abandoned facilities created for the Brave New World's Fair much as residents of Queens may drive past the rusting remains of the Unisphere from the 1964 New York Worlds Fair on their way to low-paying, nowhere jobs. As Motter explains,

"It's a symbolic thing I suppose. The idea of a huge city that has seen better days isn't very 'realistic.' Except in antiquity. Modern cities are organic, evolving and constantly being re-invented....The same can't be said for the physical world we have constructed to live in. It remains, even if its inspirations fade from memory. "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair..." quotes Shelley in Ozymandias."

Things aren't going to get any better from here. The construction companies where B.B. seeks work have closed. Nothing new will be built. Christian Thorne argues that the nostalgia provoked by the retro and the dread sparked by images of post-appocalyptic societies are complexly intertwined in contemporary science fiction, our desire for one fueling our despair over the other. Thorne sees the recycling of the residual as a central aspect of the apocalyptic imagination with old junk re-evaluated once it accrues scarcity. Motter's comics, thus, play on this line - inciting our pleasure at seeing these old conceptions of the future realized and our fear that no matter how utopian our aspirations, human societies collapse in upon themselves in the end.

TO BE CONTINUED....

"The Tomorrow That Never Was": Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part One)

The following is the first part of my talk at the Berlin comics conference. This is a long selection which will be serialized over four installments. Be forewarned: this section mostly lays out the conceptual background for the paper; my discussion of Motter's work begins in earnest tomorrow. This is very much a work in progress that will eventually become an article. I welcome any and all feedback. The protagonist of William Gibson's 1981 science fiction short story, "The Gernsback Continuum", is a photojournalist, collecting images for a coffee table book he plans to call The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow That Never Was. As he searches for ramshackle roadside attractions and other traces of the ways people in the 1930s and 1940s imagined the future, he encounters what Gibson calls "semiotic ghosts," glimpses of a parallel world where the euphoric dreams of urban boosters and technological utopians had come true:

"Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them [the residents] thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars."

Over time, the impressions fade until all that is left are peripheral fragments of mad scientist chrome flickering on the corner of his eye.

Gibson's story was a bold gesture from a brash new writer, sweeping aside the technological utopian fantasies that had emerged in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and shaped the science fiction genre throughout most of its history. As Bruce Sterling, the co-editor of the Mirrorshades collection where the story appeared, explains,

"Times have changed since the comfortable era of Hugo Gernsback, when science was safely enshrined - and confined - in an Ivory Tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control. Not for us the steam snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant."

Gibson and Sterling wanted to push science fiction in new directions and saw little use for streamlined airships. Exit the World of Tomorrow, enter the Digital Revolution.

Can We Imagine the Past?: Science Fiction and Historical Consciousness

Dean Motter's Mister X (1983) comics emerged from this very same context - at a transitional moment when shifts in the technological landscape and the emergence of the discourse of the digital revolution were transforming science fiction as a genre. A full account of this period would point to the close proximity between the release of Bladerunner with its fusion of science fiction and film noir in 1982; the publication that same year of Frederic Jameson's "Can We Imagine the Future?," an essay which posed questions about the cultural functions of science fiction as a genre; the release of the first Mister X comics in 1983; the publication of Mirrorshades and of Joseph Corn's important anthology, Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology and the American Future, both in 1986. We can understand these various efforts to reconsider science fiction's pasts and reconfigure its future in the early 1980s as responsive to a range of cultural factors. The approach of 1984, the year made famous by George Orwell's novel, was encouraging the culture to reflect on the issue of whether the last part of the 20th century had taken the shapes that people had project. Many were looking forward to the end of the millennium and looking backwards at the end of what people had called the American Century. The expiration date had come and passed for many of the technological and geopolitical changes predicted at such landmark events as the 1939 World's Fair.

As the society entered into a new phase of prolonged and profound media change brought about by the so-called "digital revolution," the nation's artists were trying to figure out what aspects of science fiction could be carried forward and which needed to be reworked to reflect all of these changes. Cyberpunk emerged as a genre that allowed writers to look forward - even if only 20 minutes into the future - while what I am calling retrofuturism represented a genre that allowed people to look backwards, examining older myths and fantasies against contemporary realities.

Frederick Jameson's "Can We Imagine the Future?" has long set the tone for the ways science fiction scholars understood retrofuturism, arguing that the recycling of older iconography in works like Bladerunner reflected a growing impoverishment of the imagination. Jameson wrote,

"We can no longer entertain such visions of wonder-working, properly 'science-fictional' futures of technological automation. These visions are themselves now historical and dated - streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals - while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past."

The retrofuturism of contemporary science fiction suggested to Jameson that the genre may have outlived its usefulness as a means of making sense of the process of technological change; science fiction, he was arguing, reflected an old master narrative of human progress which no longer made sense in the context of a postmodern society. What was the value of a genre about the future, he asked, at time when people were discussing "the end of history" and when all the old signifiers were being emptied of their meaning. In the end, he concludes,

"What is indeed authentic about it [science fiction], as a mode of narrative and a form of knowledge, is not at all its capacity to keep the future alive, even in the imagination. On the contrary, its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future."

We might take two big ideas from Jameson's account of retrofuturism- that past imaginings of the future need to be understood as historical artifacts of older ideologies about human progress and that their remobilization in the present can be used as a means of reflecting on the failures of those dreams to become realities. While Jameson's work on postmodernism suggests that the redeployment of these older images of the future might amount to little more than an empty nostalgia, he seems to be hinting here that these images might function as vehicles of historical consciousness and thus as the basis for critique. Jameson's contemporaries were quick to explore the idea that "yesterday's tomorrows" might provide important clues into earlier moments in the history of the 20th century, a project reflected not only by the contributors to Corn's collection but also by essays like Andrew Ross's "Breaking Out of the Gernsback Continuum." But far less time has been spent exploring the contemporary deployment of earlier science fiction iconography as a way of working through the gap between an anticipated future and the lived reality of the late 20th century.

This essay will build on this idea of science fiction as a mode of historical critique, re-reading the retrofuturist project through the lens of more recent theoretical work on the concept of residual media. In doing so, I will be focusing primarily on a series of comic books written and conceived by Dean Motter over the past three decades (Mister X; Terminal City; Terminal City:Aerial Grafitti; Electropolis), all operating within a shared fictional world which is built from early 20th century representations of the "city of the future."

Motter, himself, has described his books in terms of "antique futurism," explaining during an interview with the author:

"Since the advent of the industrial revolution, our society has been predicting the cultural future via the machine. Whether in gigantic architectural visions such as the World Fairs, or the near-whimsical Popular Science covers, dreams of flying cars, household robotic servants, or jet packs. These visions, while engineering achievements of varying degrees of success and accuracy, were often oblivious as to how the culture would change. McLuhan (as well as the fictions of Orwell, Huxley and H.G. Wells) considered what would happen to humanity itself, not simply the evolution or devolution of our artifacts....So 'antique futurism' became my way of having some fun, while raising the questions."

For Motter, then, "antique futurism" has, among other things, to do with the gap between futures conceived through the lens of technological progress and the role that social and cultural factors play in shaping how we live and interact with technology. It involves the reassertion of human experiences and identities into the process of imagining the future. It also involves rereading the fantasies of the past through the lens of subsequent experiences and developments.

All of this requires us to pause for a moment and consider the varied temporalities of science fiction. Brian Aldiss has argued that science fiction only really emerges as a genre once the rate of change in our society becomes dramatic enough that people felt its impact within a single lifetime, beginning to see the future as likely to be profoundly different from the present. We can measure the heightened perception and acceleration of change in the diminished time spans of science fiction: the earliest stories felt compelled to project forward thousands of years in human history in order to imagine worlds dramatically different than our own; most of the representations of the future at the 1939 World's Fair, by contrast, were set half a century forward; and many recent science fiction stories, especially those in the cyberpunk, might require only a few years of separation from the present moment. In each cases, though, science fiction deploys the future as a way of distancing us from and reflecting upon the present moment.

From the start, however, science fiction has also functioned as a genre which enabled us to reflect upon the past. Time travel stories, such as H.G. Well's "The Time Machine," were among the first science fiction stories written, even though the metaphor of traveling back into history fit rather poorly within the rationalist scientific discourse that otherwise defined early science fiction as a genre. To tell such stories, one had to shed the idea that the genre was governed by reasonable and plausible extrapolation based on known science. Time travel stories, such as Orson Scott Card's PastWatch or Sterling's "Mozart in Mirrorshades," (also published in the Mirrorshades collection), continue to have currency. A second strand of science fiction, alternative history, takes us back to key historical turning points and asks what if scenarios, imaging how the world might have taken a very different shape if the outcomes had been different; alternative future stories, thus, imagine what would happen if the South had won the Civil War, if the United States had not entered World War II, or if Stalin had continued to dominate the Soviet Union down to the present day. A third strand of science fiction seeks to extrapolate based not on contemporary understandings of science but rather on earlier historical formulations, constructing science fiction stories based on ancient Greek, early modern, or Victorian conceptions of science. The term, "steampunk," was coined to refer to science fiction which built on Victorian society and technology, a genre inspired as much by contemporary representations of the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as by anything actually produced during the late 19th century. Sterling and Gibson's The Difference Engine, explores what might have happened if Charles Babbage's experiments had been successful, paving the way for a pre-20th century version of the digital revolution. Finally, retrofuturism takes earlier science fiction as its raw materials, revisiting mid-20th century constructions of the future from a more contemporary perspective. For the purposes of this essay, I will be focusing on works that mobilize the iconography that emerged through Hugo Gernsback's pulp science fiction magazines, through Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon comic strip, through films like Just Imagine and Things to Come, and through the 1939 New York World's Fair, among other sources, but there are other retrofuturist works - for example, Christian Gossett's comic book series, Red Star, which built on Soviet science fiction and socialist utopian literature - that revisit other historical constructions of the future. These various subgenres suggest that science fiction may be as effective as a genre for imagining the past as it is as a genre for projecting the future or commenting on the present and the key point is that its social commentary works by reading one time period against another.

Reconceptualizing the Residual

Such retrospective reflections are apt to gain new prominence and potency during moments of media transformation. Marshall McLuhan has described the ways that the introduction of a newer media often makes us more self-conscious about its predecessors, going so far as suggest that we may only fully understand and appreciate the properties of a medium - and its attending social effects - at the moment it is starting to fade from view.

The current moment of media change is stimulating a retrospective perspective in science fiction and fostering new kinds of historical scholarship, both of which seek to understand the continuing place of older media forms in contemporary culture. The introduction of digital media, for example, has revitalized the study of the book, helping literary scholars to reconceptualize themselves as writing about print as a medium rather than abstracting their discussion of specific works from the systems of communication within which they were produced, circulated, and consumed. Similarly, there has been a growing interest in understanding earlier moments of media in transition, mapping the cycle through which innovations in communication technologies got absorbed into or helped to change older cultural contexts.

And more recently still, there has emerged a body of scholarship which explores what writers are calling residual media. As Charles R. Acland explains in his anthology of that title,

"Figures from the past....creep up to remind us of their existence and of the influence they wield in the present. For an era such as ours that puts a premium on advancement and change above all else, declarations of the presence of the past can be confusing or alarming. There is nothing like that old party pooper 'historical consciousness' to dull the gleeful celebrations of progress and the new."

If Carolyn Marvin has invited us to study "old media when they were new," Acland and his contributors urge us to consider old media when they are old. They argue that the continued presence of older communication forms and practices encourages a heightened awareness of the process of scheduled obsolesce and invites a questioning of the prevailing discourse of media revolutions.

Residual media, according to Acland, consists of "reconfigured, renewed, recycled, neglected, abandoned and trashed media technologies and practices" which occupy a peripheral space in our culture. The book asks,

"How do some things -- whether in archives or attics, minds or training manuals -- become the background for the introduction of other forms? In what manner do the products of technological change reappear as environmental problems, as the 'new' elsewhere, as collectibles, as memories, and as art? What are the qualities of our everyday engagement with the half-life of media forms and practices and the formerly state of the art?"

A full understanding of residual media helps us to make sense of the gradual transitions that occur as a culture negotiates with the disruptive potentials of emerging technologies. Acland speaks of these older forms as "things and sentiments that won't stay lost, dead, and buried" and references Marc Auge's comment that "history is on our heels, following us like our shadows, like death," both analogies that mirror Gibson's description of "semiotic ghosts." If modern art offered us the shock of the new, residual media represents the shock of the old, a blunt reminder of the failed hopes and utopian longings of earlier generations.

In writing about residual media, Acland and his contributors revisit a concept from Raymond Williams who saw the residual as operating alongside more oft-cited categories of the dominant, the emergent, and the archaic. Williams wrote,

"The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present."

While the archaic refers to historic forms that no longer serve any vital cultural functions, William sees the residual as representing "areas of human experience, aspiration, and achievement which the dominant culture neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses, or even cannot recognize." Indeed, the residual is still valuable precisely because elements of the past can function as the basis of a critique of the present, underminding the idea that the dominant is inevitable or natural. Retrofuturism suggests the process by which ideas that once were emergent, once seemed to be futuristic in their implications, can be transformed into residual elements in a culture undergoing rapid and dramatic change.

How Digital Media Changes Our Relations to Residual Culture

In his contribution to Residual Media, Will Straw agues that the introduction of digital media has altered our relationship to the residual through the collecting and recycling of the "stuff" of past eras:

"The Internet...provides the terrain on which sentimental attachments, vernacular knowledge, and a multitude of other relationships to the material culture of the past are magnified and given coherence."

So, even as the cyberpunk writers sought a new language and new set of genre conventions by which to talk about the transforming effects of digital media, these same "new media" would enable the persistence of older material forms and practices. The link between the two might be suggested, for example, by Bruce Sterling's "Dead Media Project. Sterling's manifesto may start with a dismissal of earlier media forms as poorly adapted to the present environment,

"The centralized, dinosaurian one- to-many media that roared and trampled through the 20th century are poorly adapted to the postmodern technological environment. The new media environment is aswarm with lumbering toothy digital mammals. It's all lynxes here, and gophers there, plus big fat venomous webcrawlers, appearing in Pleistocene profusion."

Yet,the Dead Media Project is also shaped by a nostalgic fascination with the media of a bygone era.

The site takes advantage of the ability of networked cultures to draw together like-minded individuals to pool their knowledge and share their collections. Straw writes:

"A significant effect of the internet, I would argue, is precisely this reinvigoration of early forms of material culture. It is not simply that the Internet, as a new medium, refashions the past within the languages of the present, so that vestiges of the past may be kept alive...In fact, the Internet has strengthened the cultural weight of the past, increasing its intelligibility and accessibility. On the Internet, the past is produced as a field of ever greater coherence, through the gathering together of disparate artifacts into sets or collections and through the commentary and annotation that cluster around such agglomerations, made possible in part by high-capacity storage mechanisms."

Straw's essay starts with a discussion of a site called Longlostperfume.com which promises consumers "perfume beyond the touch of time," remaking and reselling scents that have long ago gone out of production. Straw might well have been thinking about the range of digital practices which supports the growing hobbyist and collector interests in "yesterday's tomorrows." Memorabilia from the 1939 World's Fair, for example, represents a significant category on eBay where one can go to bid on spoons, mugs, plates, pennants, programs, and other knickknacks from "the world of tomorrow." Go over to YouTube and one can find a healthy sample of film clips, including scenes from the oft-discussed and rarely seen Just Imagine, as well as from the various documentaries produced for the 1939 Fair depicting life in an imagined 1960 or 1980 America.

Wikipedia provides ample annotation on the various designers, architects, illustrators, and writers who shaped their earlier conception of the future and includes lists of the ways these icons have been mobilized in contemporary culture. Amateur archivists have assembled digital reproductions of the covers of pulp science fiction or popular science magazines, cataloging the various technological wonders or predictions by which an earlier generation sought to understand the directions their society was taking. Others have gathered together home movies, post cards, and every other available media artifact to construct detailed tours of the 1939 fair, showing every building inside and out. Such activities blur the line between private collections and shared archives as hobbyists become curators to show off their own holdings and to educate others into the lore of retro culture. Some of these experts will go on to construct beautifully illustrated coffee table books (of the kind that Gibson described in his short story) which in turn can be sold to niche publics of consumers via sites like Amazon. And small companies will use the web to sell lower-cost reproductions of historical toys and souvenirs for those who lack the resources to purchase the original: the digital tour of the 1939 World's Fair, for example, has its own gift shop where one can buy a whole range of retro goods.

It is well known that the baby boom generation uses sites like eBay to reassemble stuff their mothers threw away when they left for college (old toys, comics, baseball cards, and other junk). But these same web 2.0 platforms allow us to collect together information or accumulate artifacts from our parent's and grandparent's generation. Relatively few of the people who are trading in memorabilia for the 1939 World's Fair are old enough to have actually attended the event. Rather, they are fascinated with images of a future that had already started to fade from consciousness before they were even born, suggesting a variation on Stephen Greenbelt's claim that history writing involves a fascination with speaking with the dead.

Ironically, the Westinghouse Time Capsule was one of the major attractions at the 1939 World's Fair - a cache of goods from then contemporary culture which were designed as a form of communication with the future. Those attending the fair were intrigued by the prospect of what future archeologists might make of these various memory traces of their own times, debating what items from 1930s America should be collected and transmitted to future generations. The World of Tomorrow, a documentary about the fair, lovingly inventories the contents of the time capsule:

"They were putting in scientific texts and books reduced down to microfilm and messages from our time written by Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein. There were radio programs and records and comics, daily newspapers, copies of Life and a dozen other magazines. There was a Lilly Dashiel hat, a telephone, a pack of camels. A baseball and a golf tee. There were eyeglasses, a clock, a kewpie doll, a slide rule and a light bulb, a menu from Childs and a dollar in change..."

(Note the presence here of comics just a few years after Superman dramatically expanded the commercial reach of this still emerging form of popular entertainment.) The contents were a curious mixture of the mundane (everyday items which were seen as reflecting the lifestyles of the time) and the profound (messages from the era's leading intellectuals). The time capsule is premised on a future scarcity, on the assumption that much of material culture will be discarded and that very little of it will survive into the future without conscious efforts. The opposite has turned out to be the case and many cultural materials that were once perceived as disposable, linger. Even as the time capsule, presumably, remains in deep storage awaiting future generations, the junk that they bought at the fair and shoved in a drawer upon their return would serve as a different kind of time capsule for future generations of enthusiasts and collectors.

Straw also argues that the archiving of older media content via videotapes and digital storage media insures that once disposable forms of popular amusement become living presences in contemporary culture - residual in that they are pushed into the background, becoming the stuff of late night television, resulting in the kind of "belatedness" that film critics like David Bordwell have argued shapes current film production.

Motter, himself, comments on this function of residual media through a subplot in Terminal City which centers on the aging Hollywood dance team of Fields and Boyles (modeled clearly on Fred and Ginger). B.B., a young woman, has found her way to Terminal City in search of work, having little awareness that the construction companies that built the city's monumental architecture have largely closed down in an era of diminished economic hopes and opportunities. She finds her way to the once grand, now seedy Herculean Arms hotel. As her aging landlady is showing her a low-rent apartment, B.B. notices the tattered posters from Fields and Boyles musicals on the walls. She remarks, "My father used to take me to the drive-in when I was a kid to watch those old fields. They were great" and referring to the leading lady, she adds, "My dad... Gosh, he idolized her. Especially after Mom Died." The landlady, who turns out to be the female member of the now-largely forgotten dance team, is so touched by the story that she offers B.B. a discount on the rent, while B.B. returns the favor later in the book by reintroducing her to her her former partner. Here, Motter suggests the living, but marginal, presence that residual media plays in our lives, functioning as a shared reference point across generations and as a marker of those in the know about the past.

Images of "residual media," the forgotten and yet treasured junk of past generations, runs through a surprising array of contemporary comics. Seth, the artist who drew much of Motter's Mister X issues, has devoted much of his career as an independent comics creator to exploring the allure of older forms of popular culture - It's a Good Life if You Don't Weaken, for example, centers on a thinly veiled autobiographical figure who seeks to track down an obscure gag comics artist from the 1950s and adopts a style which itself mimics the look and feel of these earlier comics works; more recently, he uses the protagonist's postcard collection in Clyde Fans to trigger an old man's recollections of his past and lovingly documents the rare back issues being gathered together by his larger-than-life comics collector, Wimbledon Green. Kim Deitch's works (such as Alias the Cat or Boulevard of Broken Dreams are crammed with detailed reconstruction of historic animation and comics related collectibles, some real, others imagined, as he recounts the reign of terror of Waldo, a demonic figure modeled loosely on Felix the Cat. Dietch traces his protagonist's various purchases on eBay as he tries to track down the truth behind a long forgotten film and comics serial.

Such collectables are, as Deitch suggests, "the stuff that dreams are made of."

Ben Katchor's Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer books are organized around cheap novelties and forgotten haunts of a bygone era in New York City's history. Alex Ross uses images of a curio shop in U.S. to represent the jumbled memories and contradictory ideologies which shape Uncle Sam's confused memories of American history. And Chris Ware organizes several issues of his Jimmy Corrigan series around memories and artifacts from the Chicago Expositions of the late 19th century.

Comics, as a visual medium, lend themselves to these kinds of detailed and nostalgic reconstructions of memorabilia and collectibles, and the autobiographical turn in many contemporary comics encourages writers to reflect of residual objects which play an important role in their lives, especially given the role that collecting plays in comics culture more generally.

TO BE CONTINUED

On Cities and Comics: Report from Berlin

I am writing these notes at the end of a three day conference in Berlin centering on the relationship between comics and the city. I am not certain that I can do justice to what has been a diverse and yet programmatic conference, one thatlooked closely at the place of the urban imagination in comics from Japan, the United States, and Europe. For one thing, I have spent a good chunk of time the past few days in a kind of narcoleptic stupor - a consequence of fatigue from the end of the term, jet lag, and sweltering heat. (I suspect that the temperatures in Germany might have been one of the factors that convinced George W. Bush about the realities of global warming while he was here for the G8 summit). The only thing keeping me from simply melting into the floorboards has been a steady flow of iced Chai from the Starbucks around the corner. So, what follows will be a lose set of impressions rather than anything resembling live blogging or detailed notes.

The first thing I will note is the high level of sophistication about comics and comic culture running throughout the event - not simply the speakers who are some of the leading German (and American) thinkers about the medium but also the audience, which was full of bright and articulate young men and women who have developed a knack for thinking and talking about comics in all of their many manifestations. My friend, Greg Smith from Georgia State University, referenced the eagerness many of us have to find a comics homeland - a place where traditions are known and respected and innovative work is taken seriously. Might this be Brussells with its comics museums and festivals or Tokyo with its six story tall comic shops or San Diego, host of the Comicon to end all Comicons, or even the fictional Hicksville (where the library has all of those comics imagined and never actually produced by the grand masters of the medium)? Berlin might also be a worthy candidate if the conversations here were any indication.

At the same time, those of us who were here from the United States and speaking about American comics felt a kind of cultural divide. While it was clear this audience was passionate about various European comics traditions, especially Francophone comics, and about Manga, few of them knew much or cared much about the American comics tradition. Of course, the opposite is also true: I made a conscious decision some time ago that I could know American comics inside and out or I could try to sample comics from around the world. It's really been only in the past year or so that I have started to explore a broader range of national tradition, hence the writing I've shared here about Polish or Mexican comics. For me, a pleasure of the conference was learning more about writers like Tardi, Enki Bilal, or Marc-Antoine Mathieu, or to get an introduction to recent developments in Belgian comics by one of the country's leading comics scholars.

The conference made a very strong case for the centrality of the urban imagination to comics, across national traditions, and the centrality of comics as a medium for understanding how we have made sense of the experience of cities in the 20th and 21st century. The conference organizers Jorn Ahrens and Arno Meteling, lay out the basic claims in their prospectus for the conference:

There is undoubtedly a link between the medium comics and the big city as a modern living space. This emphasizes the need to investigate on the one hand a) how specifically urban topoi, self-portrayals, forms of cultural memorizing and variant readings of the city (strolling, advertising, architecture, detective stories, mass phenomena, street life) are being incorporated in comics, and on the other hand b) if comics have special competences for capturing urban space and city life and representing it aesthetically because of their hybrid nature consisting of words, pictures and sequences. Does the spatial inertia of the sequences in contrast to film, video or television result in a retardation in order to ease the saturation that has been attributed to the big city since 1900 (Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin)? This theory is backed up by numerous contemporary comic books and by the fact that the screen adaptations of comic books are limited to urban scenarios. Moreover, the history and the origins of comics support this theory.

From an historical point of view and against the backdrop of the modern age, comics are inseparably tied to the city: the history of comics begins - not taking into consideration the long history of combining pictures and words since the Ancient World and the tradition of illustration, caricature and picture stories in the 18th and 19th century - with the emergence of comic strips in American newspapers around 1900....

Parallel to expanding the comic strips successively to whole pages the space reserved for the city becomes bigger. Winsor McCay for instance uses the whole page as basis for his comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland (1906-1914) in order to create fantastic worlds and real cities. Eventually, comics outgrow the newspaper world: when the new format of the comic book is established as an independent publication, new characters fill the cities with life. Will Eisner's Spirit, which started out as a comic strip in newspapers, lives in a nameless city, Superman inhabits the futuristic Metropolis (1938), and Batman fights crime first in Manhattan/New York (1939) and from 1941 on in Gotham City. Thus, various distinctive comic book series at the end of the 1930s explore the city and its function as living space and origin of modern myths. In particular, the characters of the superhero comics (Superman, Batman) and the detective comics (The Spirit, Dick Tracy) delve deeper into the aesthetic, atmospheric and scenaristic possibilities of the city. From then on, the city acts even more as the foremost setting for comics of all genres and stylistic variants. The city becomes an important plot element, even an atmospheric and symbolic protagonist, and suddenly the focus of attention in a whole lot of genres.

From this point of view, comics have a certain self-reflexivity, whenever they act as a genuine medium of the urban modern age and adopt the cultural prerequisites of this modern age in the big city. This self-reflexive nature of the medium in terms of its history, mediality, cultural environment and origin can be found particularly in comics that treat, narrate and continue symbolic manifestations of the urban modern age. By now, every modern metropolis in the world has been made the subject of comics: Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo, and time and again New York. At the same time, many fictional cities from comics have found their way into the global cultural memory: Superman's Metropolis, Batman's Gotham City, the New York of Spider-Man, the Avengers and the Fantastic Four as devised by Marvel, Tokyo and the post-nuclear Neo-Tokyo of manga or the Duckburg of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

The authors and artists of the influential science-fiction comics from France and Belgium as well have incorporated urban space time and again into their narratives (Caza, Moebius, Bilal, Druillet, Adamov, Mézières). In doing so, they referred to patterns from other media and the whole repository of cultural history and iconography, which is occasionally exceeded and expanded: for instance, completely new narrative techniques are applied in Moebius' Le garage hermétique, or architectural universes are developed, e.g. by Moebius, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, François Schuiten/Benoît Peeters (Les citées obscures), also by Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson (Transmetropolitan), Dean Motter/Michael Lark (Mr. X, Terminal City, Electropolis), Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira, Domo), and Enki Bilal (Nikopol), which exert their influence not only on cinematic settings (Blade Runner, Batman, Batman Returns, The Fifth Element, The Matrix), but also on postmodern architectural designs. The city as setting is also important because it acts as historical, significantly dense background (Tardi, Moore, Miller, Ware). In particular, the Franco-Belgian École Marcinelle, which is not limited to realistic series, has opened up the urban space for the so-called semifunnies (Franquin, Tillieux). Therefore, the subject of urbanity should obviously be explored in terms of connecting narrative strategies and visuality (horizontality, verticality, panoramic view), and certain urban qualities should be used in order to start an agenda for comics studies.</blockqoute>

This rationale statement offers a pretty good summary of the interconnections that emerged between the various papers presented at this event.

Jorn and Arno played an incredibly constructive role in planning this conference, asking the speakers to address urban themes through the lens of specific artists, while leaving each of us free to bring our own methodological and theoretical perspectives to the table. As a result, the conference covered a broad range of figures, including Will Eisner, Dean Motter, Alan Moore, and Outcault, as well as the European masters referenced earlier. This push towards a focus on specific artists, rather than broad theoretical claims, resulted in papers which combined close formal and thematic analysis of specific comics with broader conceptual frameworks about comics as a medium and about the various ways by which we understand and represent the experience of living within cities. And the conference was organized to offer contrasting perspectives on a range of different cities - including a rich paper on the ways the the Duckburg of Carl Bark's Donald Duck comics was translated into the very German Entenhausen for the German editions of his books and extending across imaginary cities like Gotham City and Terminal City as well as the very real New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Brussels. Surprisingly, there was no focus here on Berlin, the city which engulfed us, even as we were speaking.

The papers offered some glimpse of the ways that comics intercepted a range of other media forms, including discussions of comics in relation to architecture, painting, sculpture, theater, video games, the web, cinema, and literary storytelling. And the city was approached as a site of self-performance, as the focus of moral panic and social anxiety, as embodying our hopes for a more utopian future, as the site of estrangement and alienation, as a symbolic and mythic landscape whose monuments help to embody the lessons of the past, as a constantly changing and disorienting landscape, as part of a new globalized culture, as the space by which modern bureaucracies seek to rationalize human experience, and so much more.

From a formal perspective, we learned about the complexities of framing and gestures in the comics of Will Eisner (which Greg Smith traces back to both 19th century melodrama and vaudeville), about the complex roles which text plays in Outcault's early 20th century comics, about the mirroring structure of images in Alan Moore, about the bold play of color and narrational perspective in Bilal's Nikopol trilogy, and about the experiments in self-reflexivity which run through Mathieu's works.

Throughout, we saw how particular architectural features of urban environment leant themselves again and again to the borders and panels that help organize the space of the comics page, suggesting that the fit between comics and the city have as much to do with aesthetic as ideological reasons.

The issue of memory was another recurring theme that cut across the papers - from Scott Bukkatman's rift on the role that autobiographical perspectives have played in comics criticism through my own focus on the relationship of retrofuturism to the ways that the web has shifted our relationship to residual traces of older media forms and cultural practices, from the ways that Moore's work connects to the history of "memory palaces" to the ways that comics move back and forth across major transitional points in the culture, helping both French and Japanese readers understand the events of the Second World War as a lasting influence upon their culture.

The conference organizers are pushing to find a publisher for an anthology based on the conference. Normally, I am not convinced that most conferences cohere easily into a book but because of the strong editorial role which Aherns and Meteling brought to the organization of this event, I am convinced that this material would easily cohere into what could be a very important anthology on this topic.

I promised some of the European comics scholars that I met at the conference that I would help spread the word about what looks to be a fascinating new journal, Signs (Studies in Graphic Narratives), which centers primarily on the history of early comics and sequential art, from an international perspective. The first issue cuts across a range of national traditions, including a full color reproduction of an 18th century set of comic prints from Florence, a discussion of the prehistory of Manga in Japan (by Jacqueline Berndt), a consideration of Ally Sloper as a comic type by Roger Sabin, and some consideration of Imagerie Artistique, a series of prints produced for children in 19th Century France. I have not yet had a chance to do much more than skim through the articles but I see each as a valuable contribution to the growing body of research on the early history of graphic storytelling. The journal is lushly illustrated, reproducing scores of rare and hard to find images. As the issue's introduction explains, these articles each seem to offer "new pieces for the completion of the dispersed sort of puzzle that constitutes comics history." The editors are looking for possible contributors to their forthcoming issues as well as hoping that some American libraries will subscribe to the journal and make it available to their patrons. Interested parties can contact them at info@graphic-narratives.org.

From here, I am moving onto Helsinki to talk about media convergence and to Gothenburg, Sweden to speak about educational games at a conference which will also be attended by T.L. Taylor, James Paul Gee, and Helen Kennedy, among many others.

I will try to post at least a sample of my paper on Dean Motter and retrofuturism sometime early next week. So far, it exists only as a power point presentation and lives in my head. I hope to use the blog to nudge me into putting more of it down in writing.