General
House to Astonish Episode 106
We’re back, and we’ve got an hour and a half of comics discussion for you, with news on the passing of Dan Adkins, James Robinson leaving DC, Disney’s Big Hero 6 movie, Matt Fraction and Kelly Sue DeConnick’s t-shirts for charity and a run through the August solicitations. We’ve also got reviews of The Dream Merchant, Avengers: The Enemy Within and… well, something special, and The Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is dressing for success. All this plus the Giraffe Wok, Avengers: Endless Breakfasttime and Doombots in pleather singing about crop rotation.
As always, we want to know what you think about any of the things we’ve discussed, including but not limited to:
- What long-running or apparently classic series have you just never seen the appeal of?
- Are there any other Marvel properties you think would make good animated features?
- What has caught your eye from August’s solicitations?
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud.
Or listen to it right here:
House to Astonish Episode 106 – The Nerd Riots of 2013 by Housetoastonish on Mixcloud
Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter (where I’m @housetoastonish and Paul’s @ifdestroyed), via email (to housetoastonish@gmail.com) or on our Facebook fan page.
And don’t forget, our t-shirts are on sale at our Redbubble store – look good, spread the word.
Dancing With Bullets: Performing Masculinity in Image Comic’s “Dancer”
There are so many reasons I love Image Comic’s Dancer. I’m a sucker for international thrillers with spies and hitmen (throw in a little sci-fi action and we’re golden), I always wished I could be a ballerina despite my complete lack of coordination, and Nic Klein’s art is incredibly breath-taking and both inspires me as an artist and makes me feel incredibly inept (which is the highest compliment I can pay). So needless to say, I was hooked from the first page, but I honestly wasn’t entirely sure why. The story wasn’t exactly groundbreaking in originality, and the character types were all pretty familiar and straightforward. The script was thrilling, so maybe that was it?
Then I started thinking about Dancer in terms of its identity politics and what it’s actually saying about who we are, who we want to be, and more importantly, who we can be or become under the right circumstances. As The Fox says, “It’s time to stop thinking that you are what you are not, Alan.” As much as it’s about escaping near-certain death, it is about Alan’s struggle with his own identity as a hitman, facing down his own barbarism, brutality, strength, and tenacity…in the form of his clone. His younger self is a pitch-perfect stereotype of the hitman character: he’s strong, relentless, intelligent, and always seems to have the upper hand. The hitman/spy is a pretty standard trope of masculinity, where masculinity has typically been figured in terms of embodied violence and strength. It is monstrous and brutal, a technology of murder that is cold and calculated.
What Dancer manages to do is take two typically gendered binary constructs – ballet and being a gun for hire – and parallels them to reveal the performativity lurking behind said stereotypes.
It’s time for a COMICS FACT!
You will not read a more beautiful comic book this week or possibly this month than 50 Girls 50, the new collection of Al Williamson EC science fiction stories that is published by Fantagraphics. SO STATES OBVIOUS MAN!
Obvious Man is obvious!
Your Scalped timeline!
I’ve done this once before, with the Bendis/Maleev Daredevil run, but Jason Aaron does a lot of what Bendis did in that story, which is peg specific events to specific dates. He also tells the tale out of sequence, so the dates are hard to suss out. So I thought I’d do the same thing for Scalped. WARNING: This will be tremendously SPOILER-Y, so if you haven’t actually read Scalped yet, you might want to skip this. Unless you have no intention of reading Scalped, and then … well, feel free to read it or don’t. It’s your choice!
Continue Reading »
Comics Should Be Good 2013 March Madness: Round 2
The second round of the CSBG’s Fifth Annual March Madness tournament continues!
Here is how the bracket looks like so far…
Here are links to each of the four regions where you can vote for the winners of Round 2!
Revenge, Horror, and Censorship: Avatar Press’s Crossed
True to Avatar’s willingness to let their creative teams do whatever they want, Crossed fully explores the limits of an utmost hedonistic-rage-inspired apocalypse. It takes a long hard look at the worst of human qualities and magnifies them to such an extent as to completely shock and horrify. The point is that we needn’t be afraid of people turning into zombies and taking over the world: there already exist sociopathic humans who are far worse than zombies ever could be. The world of Crossed explores what it would be like if instead of being bitten and turned into zombies, humans got bitten and turned into the lovechild of Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy.
Where Crossed gets fascinating for me and moves away from just slasher-movie violence and torture porn explicit images is in David Lapham’s first run with the series, Family Values. What I want to talk about is a specific scene in Family Values: where the mother willingly crosses herself so that she can have the power and capability to enact her revenge on her husband for the horrible wrongs he committed against herself and her daughters. It is the only moment in the entire series where the ultimate evil is used to get revenge for some of the most atrocious a
cts a person could ever commit. It feels reminiscent of rape-revenge exploitation films like I Spit On Your Grave (1978) and Last House On The Left (1972), where violence becomes a form of vigilante-style justice.
The point of rape-revenge exploitation stories are to give power back to the victim by letting them enact an instance of revenge that is just as horrifying and terrible as the pain inflicted on them in the first. An eye for an eye, except we cheer for the vigilante victim because their acts of violence are motivated out of a sense of justice. Carol J. Clover talks about these films, especially I Spit On Your Grave (1978) as possessing feminist qualities in that they have the woman stand up for themselves, rather than letting a system try and do this (a system which usually fails them). The girls in Family Values signify this: they are stuck in a position that they cannot easily escape from. They are victimized, brutalized, and largely powerless against it. Becoming crossed offers the one medium for the mother to become strong enough to finally take revenge for her family.
Common critiques levied against rape-revenge narratives are that by depicting the violence against the victim in such length and detail actually depowers them. But what these instances are doing are forcing the audience to align with and see the full extent of what these victims are put through: you can’t ignore it, you can’t pretend it’s not as terrible as it really is, and you can’t quickly forget about it. Arguably, this is being achieved in Crossed: Family Values. All the scenes of violence against the daughters combine to make us happy when the mother crosses herself. It’s a weird feeling, I know. It’s not even a comfortable feeling. But it’s effective.
Now, that scene from Family Values is the only instance of this that I can pinpoint in the Crossed series that works explicitly as rape-revenge exploitation. And while this scene is a fleeting moment, and the rest of Family Values reverts back to its gorey glory, that’s fine. The point is that the world and the system Crossed has created allows for this type of vigilante justice to be appropriately metted out. It evens the playing field in an incredibly terrifying way. (To quote Bender: “We’re boned.” All of us.) The violent exploitation elements of Crossed depict intense graphic violence to get under our skin and creep us out/disgust us/make us never want to trust another human being ever again, but to also show that these elements already exist and that’s the real fear.
Garth Ennis’s first crack at the dented in and disgusting can that is Crossed is a very well told story, that is both narratively well-constructed and intensely horrifying to read. Ennis takes what we think we know of apocalyptic stories, and ups the ante beyond any conceivable measure. In an age where we dare to be scared by something truly horrifying — when we have to resort to Saw and Hostel level of slasher gore to considered ourselves scared – Ennis gives us exactly what we are asking for. And a whole lot more. It’s violence exploitation, but it’s also using the apocalyptic-narrative that is so popular nowadays to heighten it’s terror: if you think the world simply ending is bad enough, you’re wrong. This is much, much worse. (Can we call this apocalypse-exploitation now?) Crossed very effectively shows us the worst possible facets of human beings: the sociopaths who feel no remorse, no restrictions, and do unthinkable things. And then fills the world with them. What’s scarier than that?
Also, the fact that Crossed exists is a nice testament to where horror comics have ended up, after their near-destruction from the Comics Code in the 50s that saw the complete censorship of the medium. Crossed not only denies any sort of censorship, but actively tops itself in its exploitation genre level of violence and torture-porn aspects. We don’t have to celebrate Crossed’s content, but we should celebrate the fact that Crossed is allowed to exist. Because sometimes there are certain stories that can only be told in certain ways. And Family Values is definitely one of those.
Amusing Bit About Uncanny X-Men #1…
A friend of mine, Darren, pointed this out to me and I hadn’t noticed it and it IS pretty amusing.
Okay, MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR UNCANNY X-MEN #1!!!
Brian Michael Bendis’ X-Men: Changing Everything You Ever Knew About the Marvel Universe
A fascinating thing occurred to me in anticipation of next week’s debut of Uncanny X-Men by Brian Michael Bendis and Chris Bachalo (CBR has a preview of the issue here). Brian Michael Bendis gained a great deal of notoriety for his changes to the Avengers franchise, but I always found the change theory to be a bit overblown. I mean, the one constant that the Avengers as a book seemed to have was change. I mean, for crying out loud, there was a point in time when the Avengers’ roster was seriously as follows: Black Widow, a powered-down Hercules who dressed like he was working out at the gym, Quicksilver, Crystal, Vision and Deathcry. That was the Avengers. So the notion that that team was somehow the “real” Avengers and Bendis’ team was not “real” because he had Wolverine and Spider-Man on the team (the latter, of course, had previously joined the team during the 1990s) always seemed silly to me.
With his work on the X-Men so far, though, I have to say that he is actually surprising me with just how much of a change it all is. It is debatable whether it is a change for the GOOD, but I am still impressed with the fact that he’s willing to dare to change the main franchise so much.
Help With the Iron Men of Comics!
I’ve decided to do an amended version of the Iron Men of Comic Books to address the folks who were left off of the first list.
So if you have a suggestion for someone who was not on the first version of the list, e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com
Speak now or keep your peace when the new list goes up! 
Quick Note About Comments
The last few months we’ve been getting a LOT more spam comments. It is not a big deal, of course, except for one aspect of it all. When we were getting like 1,500 spam comments a day, I’d basically be able to wade through the spam filter to pick out any good comments that were accidentally caught in the spam filter (as it would be 1,500 a day, so I’d be able to check in at different times of the day where only 400 or so comments would be in the filter at any given moment). However, we’re up to something like 30,000 spam comments a day, and I just can’t wade through them all to see if good comments have accidentally been caught in the filter. So if you think your comment was accidentally caught by the spam filter, please let me know by dropping me a line at bcronin@comicbookresources.com
Note that I also routinely moderate comments, as well, if they contain suggestions for future columns, so that they remain a surprise when the column comes out. Those comments, though, should hopefully say something on your screen like “Your comment is being moderated” or something like that. I think that maybe if you don’t include an e-mail address when you post your comment, it doesn’t track your comment so it might look like your comment has just been deleted. Just note that unless you said something REALLY messed up, we’re not going to delete your comment. Looking through our trash folder, of the last 50 or so deleted comments, 46 of them were just duplicate posts and stuff like that.
While I’m talking about comments, I might as well give a quick refresher on the codes we use in the comments.
To bold something, use the following code around the words you want to bold…
To italicize something, use the following code around the words you want to italicize…
To quote something, use the following code around the words you want to quote…
I think that about does it for blog housecleaning.
“The Name’s Pussy, Contropussy:” Re-Visiting Exploitation Genres and Underground Comix
Contropussy, written by Emma Caulfield (Buffy’s own Anya) and Camilla Outzen Rantsen and with art by Christian Meesey, is a very weird and incredibly exciting read. Contropussy follows the life of a cat: a housecat called Sonnet by day and a femme fatale by the name of Contropussy at night. Make no mistake, Contropussy is a contemporary embodiment of the attitude of exploitation films and underground comix of the ‘60s and 70s. Double O, a dog and the main love interest of Contropussy, appears exactly like Booga, TG’s Kangaroo love interest, in the exploitation-style comic Tank Girl, and this homage brings to the forefront the controversy surrounding sexuality and sexual partners inherent in both comics. Because if Contropussy is sending any sort of political message, it’s about who can do what with their sexuality, nay-sayers be damned.
Contropussy is brazen in its talk of sexuality, as the first introduction to the titular heroine involves her monologue about masturbation, having a one-night stand with a stray cat, and reminiscing about her break up with her partner, Double O. True to any spy-thriller, the story itself focuses on Contropussy’s own adventures and mishaps, involving rescuing her friend from a cat brothel, international abductions, mind-control and the excitement and dangers of falling in love. Contropussy pushes the limits, in an often slightly-uncomfortable, maybe-don’t-read-this-book-in-a-café kinda way. While it does hold back on explicit depictions of sex, it makes no qualms about what Contropussy gets up to (or who she gets down with) on her late night prowls.
While Contropussy is very true to form in imitating the comix style of an unapologetic “what can I get away with?” mindstate it is taking place in 2013 and not 1970, and the cultural implications of the gender dynamics and overt sexuality are at the forefront. Indeed, in Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature Charlies Hatfield describes Robert Crumb’s “originality [as laying] in his use of such figures to express a vision at once self-regarding, almost solipsistic, yet socially aware, satirical, even politically astute.” Comix, in their refusal to be censored or limited, create the perfect avenue for political play.
While Contropussy can absolutely be enjoyed for the animal-centric sexploitation romp it is, it is also hitting at some poignant issues surrounding the depiction of female sexuality. There is no escaping the reverberations of inverting and playing with typical gender dynamics, especially when using the James Bond spy-thriller genre as a framing device. This is where the exploitation element comes in: Caulfield and Rantsen show Contropussy getting down and dirty constantly, consistently and unapologetically.
The punning name “Contropussy” is a clear homage to th
e most famous Bond Girl names, such as Pussygalore and Octopussy. She is the hero of this tale, oozing sex appeal and commanding respect, while Double O is relegated to the position of a (fairly one-note) sex object. Sadly, the Double O character doesn’t receive any in-depth characterization to flesh out this parody: throughout the narrative he remains the sex object, love interest and sometimes ally/sidekick for Contropussy. Despite this, towards the end of the graphic novel, Double O does provide one of the best laugh-out-loud situations when he attacks Todd Akin, who is spouting his infamous “legitimate rape” line, ultimately aligning Double O on the feminist side of the female sexuality debate. This isn’t a question of what men can do with their sexuality, because they haven’t faced the same shaming as women have. We admire James Bond, and slut-shame the Bond Girls. What Contropussy is wrangling with is inverting this to give the same level of respect to the feline and feminine version of Bond. It’s exploitation at its finest: show Contropussy doing what Bond does, unabashedly and rather awesomely.
In exploitation genres, the brazenness that Contropussy embodies is what works. For example, in the 1970’s exploitation movie TNT Jackson there is a great scene where the villain attempts to intimidate and torture TNT by threatening to burn her exposed breasts with a cigarette. The fact that the villain violently rips off her blouse shows this act is supposed to give him the power over her via controlling/threatening her sexuality. What follows is TNT handily defeating all the henchmen, wearing only panties. This scene is great and works so well in the exploitation genre because it shows TNT taking back the power that was being lorded over her: now she’s showing that she can take these goons on despite being stripped, robbing the attempt of using her sexuality against h
er of any of its power. You get both: exposed breasts for titillation, but also a scene latent with a feminist backbone.
Contropussy achieves this same effect throughout the narrative. Caulfield offers Contropussy, a very sexualized character, who makes references and jokes about her preference for certain types of bondage, as a way to illustrate that sexual liberation is entirely different from sexual exploitation. Early on in the graphic novel, Contropussy saves her friends from a cat brothel (by defeating her arch-nemesis Evil Rabbit in a grindhouse-level-of-gross/in-your-face-kung-fu battle), showing that there is a difference between embodying sexuality and having that sexuality controlled, used and exploited (as further cemented through Double O’s attacking of Todd Akin for his “legitimate rape” comments). Contropussy is very smart and works the exploitation/homage to the comix scene incredibly well. Caulfield and Rantsen lets Contropussy run rampant, showing that overt sexuality isn’t shameful.
Beyond just the exploitation-style politics, Contropussy reads like an old-school film noir (another beloved genre the narrative is paying homage to while simultaneously inverting). For example, Contropussy describes a character who “
walks across the street like a slow, slow drag off a cigarette after a really long day.” Contropussy parodies typical spy-thrillers like Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, offering a narrative that shifts the power from women in spy-thrillers as just fetishized sex object to the sexy main protagonist. By inverting typical dynamics found in spy genres, and by using the exploitation style of the underground comix scene, Contropussy is designed to shock and delight. And if the name itself isn’t a giveaway, there are plenty of shocks and boundaries being pushed. The use of animals works on an allergorical level, illustrating tensions found in the sexual relationships being exhibited, but it also provides shocks and laughs on a basic, literal level.
The stylized art is pitch-perfect for all of the intents of the narrative. Both realistic and exaggerated, Meesey’s art evokes the glamour of thriller movies, while presenting raw, unapologetic visuals at home in comix. Rather than offering a structured narrative that centres around one achievable goal, Contropussy reads episodically, due to its origins as webcomic, where we get scenes and stories that are bound together through the reader’s devotion to the characters, rather than a defining storyline. But this works, because it’s not necessarily the story that matters, but how Caulfield and Rantsen are inverting typical gender dynamics and paying homage to the genres that have paved the way for anti-censorship in comics and films.
Sections of this post originally appeared on NerdSpan by Kaitlin Tremblay.
The Iron Men of Comic Books!
With Robert Kirkman’s Invincible hitting #100 this week, we figured it would be an interesting idea to spotlight all the other comic book creators that had at least 100 issue long runs on North American comic book series.
The exact issue numbers really don’t matter (there’s a lot of “rough” estimates in the piece), but rather just spotlighting all the creators out there who have put in long runs on series (it certainly is tough to do).
Click here to read the article.
Congrats to Chad Nevett on his Blogathon!
Chad’s Blogathon has raised over $1,000!
That’s crazy awesome.
But he’s still accepting donations until his Random Thoughts column goes up on Tuesday, so go check out the whole Blogathon at Chad’s blog here and donate some more money!
Jimmy Olsen, Cross-Dressing All-Star
With the news that Jimmy Olsen might be JENNY Olsen in the upcoming Superman film, I wrote a feature for CBR on the times in the past that Jimmy has gotten in touch with his feminine side with some cross-dressing (plus the first comic book appearance…sort of… of Jenny Olsen!)
Check it out here.
Cool Gerry Conway Interview DVD Project Up at Kickstarter
Roger Priebe did a three and a half hour long interview with the great comic book writer Gerry Conway discussing Conway’s long career in comics. Priebe is currently trying to raise money to release the interview on DVD. He’s over halfway to his goal of $2,000. It sounds quite interesting. I pledged $20 (which gets you a copy of the DVD). If YOU think it is interesting, be sure to pledge some money, as well! I’m looking at you, FuryOfFirestorm (although I bet you’ve already contributed)!
Here is the link to the Kickstarter page.
