(Commentary) I've been rather lax in keeping this segment on its regular weekly schedule, so let's dig into the inbox and get things back on track, shall we? Our first correspondent writes:
"It's in the Globe and Mail's paper edition today, but for some reason not on their website. Leo Bachle, who later changed his name to Les Barker, died in Toronto a couple of weeks ago at 79.
"Here's a little about his creation [Canadian comics character Johnny Canuck], who came about because of paper rationing during WW2.
"Bachle went to NY after the war and drew for Stan Lee, but according to the obit, Stan's girlfriend at the time took an interest in him, causing Lee to exclaim, 'Goddamned Canadians - you can't put a leash on 'em!'
"After Bachle left the biz he became a standup or sorts, performing with Marlene Dietrich, Rich Little, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Phyllis Diller, and more.
"It's a good obit in the paper; I cribbed most of what I've given you here, mostly since I didn't know about his post-Canuck career. Perhaps it'll be on their website after the weekend. Johnny Canuck made an appearance on a stamp in 95, part of the Superheroes of Canada set. It was nice to see then that he and his creator had not been forgotten."
Ordinarily, something like this would merit an entry all its own, but I'm afraid I haven't been able to find anything online which would corroborate Bachle's death. If anyone finds a link to such a story, please let me know.
The next email concerns an item in this entry from last Wednesday:
"I was happy to see your comments about the Chronicle's article on comics. I don't understand why people think this is some sort of breakthrough. The tone of the article, in my opinion, was the equivalent of a pat on the head and a pinch of the cheek. 'My, aren't you the cute one!' Glad to see I wasn't the only one to think so."
Thank you kindly -- given the efforts by so many to produce a body of comics work worthy of the word "literature", it's always a disappointment to see such labor dismissed so casually, and I don't think that under the circumstances one should simply throw up one's hands and say, "Well, at least they noticed us."
On a more positive note, our next correspondent writes:
"Hi, just saw the recent mention of comics academia in the weblog and also the Sturm interview in the recent TCJ issue and taught I'd drop a note to inform you that in Quebec we have one university offering a complete program in comics (or bande-dessinée to be precise). In fact, this is probably the only university in North America offering such a program. In case no one knew about this in the US. If you did mention it before, my apologies..."
Nope, I hadn't seen that before; thanks for sending the link along. Next up, an email concerning last Thursday's entry on the speculation over how DC Comics will handle having its bookstore distributor sold out from under it:
"Just a couple of thoughts re: this.
"First, one possible scenario would be that things would continue essentially unchanged. The DC books could still be distributed through AOLTW Books, needing only to reach terms as a 3rd party logistics customer. The terms of the current expense allocation for distribution may be set at market rates which would mean that DC would face no change at all, except in the legal specifics of the relationship.
"Second, remember that DC has an option to buy Diamond. This would be pretty unlikely though since AOLTW is looking to conserve cash through divestment, not use it with acquisitions."
Thanks for the comments. I received a second email on the subject, but left it on my terminal at the office and forgot to forward it to my home computer -- I'll try to get to it next week. Our last two emails concern my commentary last Sunday and Monday on the implied connection between gay rights and the X-Men mythos. We begin with Aldo Alvarez, who writes:
"It's mutants like you that make the rest of us look bad!
"Just kidding :)
"Actually, months ago, I wrote on a gay comics board that the X-Men couldn't (developmentally-speaking) make it through to a queer cultural metaphor as the binarism of human/mutant couldn't be problematized with folks who don't fit the categories. (There are no equivalents to bisexuals, Men Who Love Men (But Don't Identify As Gay), Sex In The City lesbians, etc.) Actually, blurring or erasing the binarism would pretty much kill the franchise because it would erase its central conflict. So it's doomed to replay assimilation / separatist arguments that eventually won't be easily made new or saleable.
"I only started reading X-Men when Morrison came on board, so maybe I may not have the most informed opinion. I got interested in the franchise when I saw the movie and pretty much spent the rest of the evening breaking down all the minority culture subtext(s) with my date until we stretched critical credulity ("Obviously, Professor X and Magneto broke up over an ideological tiff on Sunday morning").
"Don't you love queering texts? I do. Thanks for your blog."
You're entirely welcome. There's only so far you can stretch a metaphor, of course -- the very concept of "metaphor" implies an imperfect comparison made to point out certain surface similarities -- and I would agree that in this case the metaphor can only be applied on a fairly superficial level. Push it further and... well, let's allow Tim O’Neil to explore the results for us:
"I read with great interest your recent series of items on the mutant metaphor in Grant Morrison's New X-Men as related to the history of the gay rights movement. While I share your fondness for Morrison’s X-Men I have some difficulty following the line of your reasoning to its logical terminus.
"I am always interested in the lengths to which people (primarily fanboys) have gone in stretching the underlying metaphors of a concept in order to justify their continued interest in juvenilia. People will go on at great lengths about the 'deep psychological resonance' behind Spider-Man's Jewish guilt and 'Everyman' status -– when really, its just making an excuse to continue reading superhero comics aimed at children. For the most part, the X-Men have had the same kind of critical reaction. In the olden days, there was never much of any conscious effort to play up the admittedly obvious persecution metaphors, because it was the soap opera elements that had people hooked. In later years, whenever the subtext was openly explored, it was so ham-fisted as to be laughable (i.e., every comic that featured Professor X and Magneto facing off and having long tortured expository conversations about the history of racial persecution, Magneto's childhood in the concentration camps, et al).
"So, along comes Grant Morrison -– someone who can actually write an intelligent comic book. I agree with you that there's a lot more thought put into Morrison's depiction of the mutant condition than just about anyone before him, but I don’t think that’s quite the complement it could be.
"I will concede that the X-Men concept is built on pretty deep metaphorical and historical foundations, but creators delve into these catacombs at their own risks. Playing up the 'real world' analogues to their persecution metaphors pretty swiftly hoists X-Men on its own proverbial petard.
"There’s one big difference between every historical persecution saga and the X-Men: there is no man -– black, gay, Jewish or Catholic -– who can crush a Mack truck with his bare hands. The fact is that mutants aren't just 'different' in the same superficial and insubstantial ways that black, Gay or Jewish people are from 'normal' WASPs -– they are powerful, in some cases insanely, apocalyptically powerful. This makes them substantially different.
"If mutants really did exist, the world would be a radically different place. For all the evil that has been committed throughout the millennia of human existence, it has been restricted to what one human can do to another. Introduce someone -– let alone an entire subsection of humanity -- who can read minds or teleport or turn their entire body into steel and you have instantly created a more complicated and dangerous dynamic than has been dealt with at any point in the history of humankind. These ideas, if brought to their natural conclusions, are just too powerful and too disturbing to ever be fully realized in the context of a book like X-Men, whoever may be writing it. Trying to shoehorn this concept into too close an analogy with similar real world political movements just cheapens the reality and mortally wounds the book’s suspension of disbelief.
"Its one thing to agree with the sentiment that 'Magneto is right' in the context of challenging society on a more combative and engaging level, but its another to recognize that Magneto is no Malcolm X. In the comics, Magneto is less the leader of an alternative philosophical movement than a mass murderer. Here's someone with tens of thousands of deaths on his hands, who has entertained open genocide many times throughout his career -– wearing a T-shirt that says 'Magneto is Right' would be the moral equivalent wearing a T-shirt that said 'Hitler was Right' at a Rabbinical convention. Malcolm X said 'by any means necessary', but he didn’t have the power to kill millions of people just by thinking real hard. The real-world analogue for Magneto wouldn’t be Malcolm X, it would be more like Milosevic or Lenin -– someone who used their prejudice or their theories to treat the mass of humanity as something less than an aggregation of millions of discrete and distinct individuals and nothing more than modeling clay.
"I can suspend disbelief enough to enjoy a superhero book under normal circumstances, but the kind of logistical baggage you get when you start to apply real-world logic to X-Men is just too heavy. Morrison is a talented writer but I don’t think he’s doing his best work on New X-Men -– even compared with some of his more confident genre work (such as his masterful first year-and-a-half on JLA) it seems leaden and self-conscious.
"I respect the fact that his approach to the mutant metaphor is more intelligent than anyone before him, but the fact that he's pushed the concept farther than its ever gone before and still come up wanting is telling. To my mind it proves that the material is just too potent to inject into a superhero book without somehow trivializing it.
"Look at Morrison’s first big 'moment' -– the destruction of Genosha. Sure, it worked as a 'house cleaning' for some of the decades worth of garbled nonsense continuity, but if you apply the same rigorous logic to that action as Morrison has applied to certain other parts of the storyline, you see that what was essentially a Holocaust-level genocide was dispensed and forgotten fairly quickly. If that doesn't trivialize the concept, I don’t know what does.
"Its still an enjoyable book -– certainly enjoyable enough to get my $2.25 every month or so. But I don't think it resonates as deeply on all the levels that it seems to have affected you.
"For my money, I think the best title Marvel is currently producing would have to be Brian Bendis' Daredevil. I didn’t want to like the book but I gave it a try and I think its probably one of the best superhero books I've ever read. Here’s an example of someone who seems to have thought his concept through every possible contingency and permutation –- although it certainly helps that the concept behind Daredevil is nowhere near as cumbersome as that behind X-Men. If anything being published today comes close to that mythical ideal of an intelligent, thought-provoking and non-condescending superhero book, its Bendis' Daredevil."
I don't really disagree with most of what you say, but there are a few things I should clear up. First, I think you're overestimating how much my appreciation of Morrison's foray into Chris Claremont's acre of the plantation is based on a queer reading of the book -- I largely enjoy the series because Morrison stripped it of most of the more retarded clichés associated with superhero comics and replaced them with clever and imaginative science-fiction soap-opera (so long as Daredevil's wearing those ridiculous pajamas, I'm afraid I'm simply incapable of taking his funnybook seriously, Bendis or no).
Second, I should point out that Timothy Hulsey, whose writings kicked off this whole thread, already noted what you (correctly) cite as the biggest flaw in gay/mutant civil-rights metaphor: that your average oppressed minority cannot in fact threaten the neighbors with death-rays shooting from their eyes. As I noted above, there's only so far you can stretch a comparison.
Finally, I think you underestimate just how seductive violent response can appear to an oppressed minority. Example: as a young gay man I entered adulthood under the shadow of the first wave of the AIDS epidemic, when the obvious and overwhelming response of the rest of the population was "good riddance". Moreover, this was a time when the local police of my hometown of Phoenix, under the command of the utterly vile Chief Ruben Ortega, was keeping lists of known homosexuals and videotaping the entrances of gay bars for sheer intimidation value -- at one press conference, Ortega was asked how common incidents of gay-bashing were in Phoenix, to which he is reported to have replied, "not nearly enough" (for further information, see the late Deborah Laake's excellent reportage for The Phoenix New Times from the period in question). Had someone gunned that fucker Ortega down in cold blood while I was still in my early 20s, I don't think I would've viewed the assailant as anything other than a hero, and if innocent bystanders happened to get hurt in the process, I suspect I wouldn't have gotten too worked up about it. It's the kind of reaction only the folly of youth and/or a need for justice not slaked by reasonable society could produce -- and I think you'd probably be surprised by how common such venomous attitudes were among American homosexuals of the early 1990s (though I should point out that some did of course keep their cool as well). I hasten to note that a decade later, I'm much more mellow on the whole subject than I used to be, but then I'm living a dozen years and 1800 miles from that time and place, in one of the most liberal cities in America; I have that luxury now.
My, but we've wandered off-topic, haven't we? I think I'll drop it here; we've played the metaphor about as far as we can, anyway. Like the sidebar says, send email to weblog@tcj.com -- all email is considered anonymous unless you volunteer otherwise, and assumed printable unless you say otherwise.
