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Opus 186:
Opus 186 (June 19, 2006). Featured this time are a long essay
on Wonder Woman & the “strong lead female characters” that have, lately,
populated funnybooks plus a somewhat shorter diatribe about Marvel’s Civil War
series and a rave or two about a brand new comic strip—all pictures, no words.
Here’s what’s here, in order: NOUS R US —Superman
as Jesus, Superman as gay icon, and the annual Superman festival in Metropolis,
Illinois; the Raggedy Ann annual shindig in Arcola, Illinois, plus a short bio
of her cartoonist creator, Johnny
Gruelle; Coulter and Rall and the 9/11 widows; and Coulter and Ahmadinejad
face off; FROTH ESTATE —The
Chandlers, erstwhile owners of the Los
Angeles Times, battle the new owner, the Tribune Company, over the new
journalism (i.e., investment earnings); CIVILIZATION’S
LAST OUTPOST —“The Omen” is wrong, er, incorrect; FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE —Civil War and Real Life in Red and Blue
America; Bad Girls and Good Girl Art and our proclivity for circumlocution when
it comes to T&A; COMIC STRIP WATCH —Marvin gets an Asian cousin; the pantomime of the surreal; BOOK MARQUEE —New titles forthcoming; DIMMING THE LIGHTS —Haditha, the fog of
war and the failure of discipline and honor, plus Ted Rall again. And our customary reminder: don’t forget to
activate the “Bathroom Button” by clicking on the “print friendly version” so
you can print off a copy of just this lengthy installment for reading later, at
your leisure while enthroned. Without further adieu—
NOUS R US
All the news that gives us fits.
As
we slip, willy nilly, further and further into the hyper-religiosity of the
times, it is doubtless inevitable that someone, many someones, would see
“Superman Returns” as a modern, cinematic up-dating of the New Testament’s main
story—the story of God sending his only son down here to save mankind. Or, as
Marlon Brando, playing Kal El’s father, says in the opening of this year’s
Superman saga, Kal El is being sent to Earth because humans “lack the light to
show the way. For this reason, I have sent them you, my only son.” Those
echoes, kimo sabe, cannot be accidental. Nor are other incidents in the
movie—Superman sustaining a stab wound in his side and, on another occasion, posing
with his arms outstretched as though crucified. Clearly, the makers of the
movie are hoping to attract some fragment of the crowd that overwhelmed the box
office for Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” movie a couple years ago.
Evangelical Christianity is all the rage nowadays among the marketing mavens of
Madison Avenue. If two nearly unknown hack writers can make millions with a
series of sf novels about “The Rapture,” surely Warner Bros would be foolish
not to play up whatever Christian appeal can be discerned in “Returns.” Surely.
But there is, alas, nothing particularly unique about the Superman-Jesus
parallel being touted in the movie. Western Civilization is laced with such
parallels. The “savior figure” is inherent in the archetypal framework
described by Joseph Campbell’s Hero with
a Thousand Faces: the cultural icon, the hero, is called to adventure,
leaves the comforts of his home, meets a menace threatening the welfare of his
people, conquers the menace, and returns to his home. Same old, same old, seems
to me. A fresh wrinkle this time, however, is that “Superman Returns” is also
being sold to the gay community. None of the marketeers are maintaining that
Superman is gay, but the character has, apparently, always appealed to gay men.
Maybe it’s just the display of male epidermis, thinly disguised in blue tights.
In any event, the ever perspicacious Warner Bros ain’t overlookin’ this
connection either, taking advertising on a gay cable tv channel. And the May 23
issue of The Advocate, the national
gay mag, asked on its cover: “How gay is Superman?” The answer: not at all. But
the movie-makers hope to seduce that audience into dropping a few coins in the
turnstile when the movie is launched on June 28 (or June 30, depending which
source you’re dependent upon). The double-barreled Warners Bros promotional
approach may yield one of the year’s more fascinating theatrical
encounters—when the Evangelicals meet the gays, entering and exiting the movie
houses of the nation.
Meanwhile, Thursday, June 8, marked
the beginning of the 28th annual Superman Celebration in Metropolis,
Illinois, a hamlet of 15,000 souls at the southern tip of the state on the
banks of the Ohio River, just 13 miles down river from Paducah, Kentucky. In
1972, DC Comics granted the city fathers’ request to be the adopted home of
Superman; and the same year, the state recognized Metropolis as Superman’s home
town by passing House Resolution No. 572, which also designated Superman a
“Distinguished Son of Metropolis.” The impending movie, “Superman Returns,”
generated a lot of interest in Metropolis’ annual shenanigan. Said Jim
Hambrick, president of the Metropolis Chamber of Commerce: “I give 25-30
interviews a day from all over.” On the eve of the Celebration, he guessed
“this will probably be the biggest festival ever.”
Numerous stellar persons were
scheduled to appear over the weekend—Michael Rosenbaum, Lex Luthor of
“Smallville”; Noel Neill, Lois Lane from the 1950s “Superman” series (she’s
85); comic book writer Marv Wolfman and artist Steve Rude; and Stephan Bender,
the actor portraying the 15-year-old Clark Kent in “Returns.” At last year’s
festival, one of the visiting dignitaries was John Schneider, star of tv’s
“Smallville” and “Dukes of Hazard,” and attendance reached heights never before
scaled. Festival co-chair Karla Ogle couldn’t say whether people flocked to
Metropolis to see Schneider because they are “Smallville” fans or “Dukes of
Hazard” fans, but they came in quantities that eventually totaled 35,000.
The “official Superman” for the
weekend was actor Scott Cranford, a 6-foot-2 former body builder who auditioned
for the role in a nation-wide hunt six years ago and has been Superman ever
since. “Who wouldn’t want to be Superman?” Cranford asked, rhetorically. He wants
to be Superman so determinedly that he married his wife Marcella in Superman
costume three years ago during the Superman Celebration. Continuing this
nuptial tradition this year was Christopher Denning, who appears as Superman at
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, who married Bonnie Finkenthal next to
the Superman statue on Sunday afternoon, closing the festivities.
Another highlight of the weekend was
fund-raising for the life-size Lois Lane statue in Noel Neill’s image that will
eventually stand on the courthouse lawn behind the 16-foot bronze Superman
statue in Superman Square. Devotees could buy $75 engraved bricks for the base
of the statue, which should be completed in about two years.
Illinois is the site for another
comics-related festival, the Raggedy Ann and Andy Festival in Arcola, held this
year June 9-11 in the little town just south of Champaign where creator Johnny Gruelle was born in 1880. The
son of a painter father and a writer mother, Gruelle crew up in Indiana, where,
at the age of 19, he began a career as a political cartoonist for an
Indianapolis weekly. He was good enough to graduate to a daily, the Indianapolis Sun, and then to another,
the Indianapolis Star, then another, Indianapolis Sentinel, then on to the Cleveland Press and, eventually, the NEA
staff. After a decade or so of this, he entered a contest sponsored by the New York Herald, which was holding the
competition to find a new Sunday comic strip. Gruelle concocted a fantasy about
a kid-sized elf named Mr. Twee Deedle, who led children through a series of
fanciful adventures. Gruelle won the contest, which yielded a $2,000 purse as
well as the Sunday funnies assignment. While doing Mr. Twee Deedle, Gruelle also contributed cartoons to the weekly
humor magazines, Judge and Life, and, later, College Humor—single panel, full-page birds-eye view cartoons about
the small town doings. For Judge, the
cartoon was entitled “Yapps Crossing” and Gruelle did it from 1912 to 1923; for Life, another version was called
“Yahoo Center”; for College Humor, “Niles
Junction.” The first Raggedy Ann book was published in 1918, launching such a
successful career as a children’s book author that Gruelle stopped producing Mr. Twee Deedle in 1921. He returned to
the Sunday funnies in 1928 with Brutus, which ceased with Gruelle’s death in 1938. Raggedy Ann was not Gruelle’s only
venture into prose fiction: by the time she came along, he’d been writing
stories for United Press or United Features for quite some time. By 1933, he
claimed to have written one thousand stories for one syndicate or the other. He
also wrote two books for Bobbs-Merrill: Little
Orphan Annie Stories and Johnny Mouse
Stories. There’s a Raggedy Ann and Andy Museum in Arcola, which contains
numerous displays about the cartoonist and sells his books and other
memorabilia. Great fun, but I didn’t get there this year.
“Over the Hedge,” the animated
version of the United Media comic strip by Michael Fry and T Lewis, “held up
well” in its second week, according to Entertainment
Weekly: it pulled in $35 million to bring its total take, thus far, to $84
million. “X-Men: The Last Stand” earned almost $123 million in its release
weekend (Memorial Day weekend), but EW doesn’t think much of the movie: “This diminished sequel, a brute-force
enterprise, is what happens when movies are confused with sandwich shops as
franchise opportunities: an even greater variety of superheroes is not the same
thing as originality of recipe.” A sampling of criticism resulted in a C-plus
for the flick; “Hedge” got a solid B.
For more about the Dick Tracy Museum
(did I mention this before), visit www.chestergould.com
From Editor & Publisher: The Union
of Concerned Scientists is sponsoring two cartoon contests, one for amateurs
and one for professionals, designed to highlight political interference in
science, one of the Bush League’s more infamous tactics—namely, changing
scientific reports so they will conform to the neocon line. “The absurdity of
political interference in science is fertile ground for satire,” said Francesca
Grifo, director of UCS’s Scientific Integrity Program. Judges for the contest
include Tony Auth of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Clay Bennett of the Christian Science Monitor, both Pulitzer
winners; and Hillary Price, creator
of the comic strip Rhymes with Orange, and New Yorker cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff. Among the prizes, an
all-expense paid trip to meet the judge of choice and a $3,000 grand prize.
Deadline for submissions is July 31. More details at the UCS website, www.ucsusa.org
In her latest sprew in book form, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Ann
Coulter, who has become the latest media-transmitted disease, charges that
activist 9/11 widows are “self-obsessed” celebrity-seeking “broads” who are
“enjoying” their husbands’ deaths far too much and making money out of their
personal disasters. “These broads,” she writes, “are millionaires, lionized on
tv and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and
stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s
death so much.” In one of the finer ironies of the media culture in this
country, she is echoing almost exactly what cartoonist Ted Rall said shortly after the 9/11 tragedy when he did a strip
about the “Terror Widows,” accusing some of them—the ones who seemed to be
courting exposure on tv and radio talk shows—of cashing in on their misfortunes
(for a discussion of how his cartoon misfired, see Opus 82, then 83 and
84). Coulter and Rall “together”? Wonders without cease. But the seeming
confluence of opinion disappears upon examination. Rall was expressing his
revulsion at widows who seemed to be grand-standing their way to wealth and
fame. Coulter, on the other hand, points to the 9/11 widows as examples of what
she calls “the left’s doctrine of infallibility,” which, when interviewed by
Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today,” she couldn’t explain very well. Apparently she
means that the widows, because they were made widows by such a transcendent
national tragedy, assume they cannot be criticized for their opinions: they
attack the Bush League with impunity because no one will have the temerity to
question or criticize a 9/11 widow who so exquisitely, so personally, embodies
the grief of a nation. Something like that. About as convoluted as Coulter is
blonde. The Orlando Sentinel’s syndicated Kathleen Parker did better than Coulter at explaining Coulter: “Her
point was that debate becomes strained to impossible when one of the gladiators
on the other side has recently suffered a grievous loss. No one wants to
challenge a wife whose husband has been killed or a mother whose son has
perished in battle, even if they have become public political players. The
opposition will always look like insensitive bullies, as does Coulter, who
undermined her own messge more than her critics could. Calling the widows
‘witches’ and saying they were enjoying their husbands’ deaths was chum to the
other side. Rabble-rousing, fear-mongering and gay-bashing may keep local
constituents happy, but none of it gets us where we need to go: toward sane
remedies for a united nation.”
Maybe Andy Borowitz at the Columbus Dispatch has the best take on
these matters. On June 12, he announced: “Conservative pundit Ann Coulter today
challenged Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to what she called ‘an
insane-comment contest’ on live tv to determine who is the insane-comment
champion of the world. Appearing on Fox News, the sharp-tongued darling of the
right wing said that while she respects Ahmadinejad’s work, she thinks he will
be ‘no match’ for her arsenal of crazy, unhinged remarks. ‘I’ve heard Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s nutty rants in the past,’ Coulter said, ‘and while I think he
comes off like a total bananahead, in a one-on-one with me, he will be the
picture of sanity.” In Iran, Ahmadinejad accepted Coulter’s challenge and said
that while he was ‘confident of victory,’ he recognized that besting her in an
insane-comment contest ‘would not be easy. In any competition involving verbal
lunacy, Ann Coulter is the favorite going in,’ he said, adding, ‘I will need to
train for this for months.’”
Universal Press will launch another
manga-style comic strip on July 9. Van
Von Hunter is a “fantasy-adventure parody that stars a vampire hunter,” by Mike Schwark and Ron Kaulfersch, who created the comic for the Internet.
Compounding the deluge from Japan, Tokypop is releasing a series of Van Von
Hunter graphic novels.
Fascinating
Footnote. Much of the news
retailed in this segment is culled from articles eventually indexed at http://www.rpi.edu/~bulloj/comxbib.html, the Comics Research Bibliography, maintained by Michael Rhode and John
Bullough, which covers comic books, comic strips, animation, caricature,
cartoons, bandes dessinees and
related topics. It also provides links to numerous other sites that delve
deeply into cartooning topics.
The Froth Estate: The Alleged News
Institution
In
the last two years, the value of Tribune Company stock has declined 40%, which,
according to the Chandler family, is due to “disastrous” decisions made by the
Chicago-based media company. In mid-June, the Chandlers, who, for a century,
owned the Los Angeles Times before
selling it to the Tribune Company in 2000, demanded that the Trib Company spin
off its television assets (it owns 26 stations) and sell some of its 11
newspapers. That would undermine the Trib Company’s grand plan, which
envisioned becoming a media (and, hence, political and economic) powerhouse in
major cities—Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago—where, after acquiring the Los Angeles Times and other Times Mirror
properties, the Trib now owns a newspaper (Los
Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Chicago Tribune) and a tv channel. The straw that apparently broke the
Chandlers’ backs was that the Trib Company wants to take on $2 billion in new
debt in order to buy back 25% of the company’s stock. The plan was intended to
give cash to shareholders and lift stock price, thereby pacifying the investors
who have, it seems, been agitating for higher returns on their investments,
like all investors in the newspaper
business. The Chandlers, who own the second largest block of stock in the
company, declared that they would not sell any of it. After their objection
became known, shares rose 2.9% to $31.94, just below the $32.50 maximum price
that the Tribune Company has offered to pay under the buyback scheme, which
expires June 26. Although the Chandlers seem motivated by a desire to preserve
the journalistic integrity of the newspaper business they were once in, another
consideration lurks: if they sold their shares, they’d have to pay whopping
taxes. So maybe their motivation is not so pure. The Tribune Company’s strategy
also seems directed at maintaining journalistic excellence: if it can keep
investors happy with their earnings, the Trib won’t have to keep on
eviscerating its newspapers with massive payroll deductions, the most
conspicuous evidence, lately, of the company’s troubles with its investor base.
The Chandlers threaten to push for new management if their demands aren’t met,
and with 12% of the stock, they have the clout to make things uncomfortable;
only the McCormick foundation, with 13.6%, holds more. But it’s not clear that
the Chandlers are serious about any of this surface noise: if their threat
stimulates an investor groundswell for the spin-off option, they will gain an
edge in negotiating to withdraw from investment partnerships it is in with the
Tribune Company. They want to end the partnerships without selling shares (and
incurring tax obligations), but at present, the two sides are “hundreds of
millions of dollars apart” on plans for doing that.
So much for good newspaper
journalism, the health of the industry, and the future for comic strips. It’s
all about the money, tovarich.
CIVILIZATION’S LAST OUTPOST
One of a kind beats everything. —Dennis
Miller adv.
The
June 6 opening of the movie “The Omen” was
widely heralded with invocations of “the sign (or number) of the Beast,” the
number 666. That’s why they picked June 6 to open: June 6 this year and this
year only (for all practical—that is, mortal—purposes) is the 6th day of the 6th month of the 6th year of this
millennium—ergo,060606, or 666. Well, the joke’s on the Devil and his devotees.
According to a gaggle of English biblical scholars, cited by Ann Tatko-Peterson
at Knight Ridder, the number, which appears in the Book of Revelation, was
apparently mistranslated. It’s actually 616. So why not correct this horrendous
misapprehension? Says Daniel P. Winters, author of Superstitions 101: “Because 6-6-6 rolls off the tongue easier.
Plus, ‘The Omen’ would have to be rewritten, the related superstitions
reconsidered, the stars realigned, the whole population re-educated. And, I’d
have to rewrite my book.” Works for me.
Jon
Stewart, in the wake of the brouhaha over Stephen Colbert’s presentation at the White House Correspondents
dinner last month, described the dinner as “where the President and the press
corps consummate their loveless marriage.” Quoted in Editor&Publisher.com.
I can never quite resist the
headlines of the National Enquirer. June 19's issue blares that Angelina’s baby is not Brad’s. A notorious manizer,
Angelina consumated a “relationship” with someone else just about the time of
conception, and it’s entirely likely that the newborn child is that guy’s work,
not Brad’s. Other revelations in the same issue: Brad Pitt is not a man but a
transsexual, and Jennifer Aniston is not really a woman. I love this
publication. How can anyone survive the Modern Age without its vigilante
guidance?
FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE
Civil
War and Democrats vs. Republicans
The
comic book reading public, a dwindling population by most reports, has just
emerged, tired and sweaty-palmed, from the recent multiple-title cross-over
extravaganza at DC, “Infinite Crisis,” which burst upon the newsstands in the
wake of Marvel’s “House of M,” which, in turn, followed DC’s “Crisis on
Infinite Earths,” which, in the now tedious rotation, probably followed
something Marvel did, and so on, ad infinitum. I make it a point never to buy
into any of these transparent marketing ploys. I sampled one once and learned
that the casual reader can’t make much sense of the events transpiring on one
title without dipping into others on either side and fore and aft, too. So to
enjoy one comic book, you need to buy at least a half-dozen other titles, many
of which, in the normal course of events, feature characters or artists in whom
I have no interest. Moreover, keeping track of the proper sequence of titles
and issues requires major bookkeeping expertise. And the pleasure afforded by
successfully negotiating all of these snares and delusions is modest unless you
happen to dote, with a passion approaching obsession, upon the very notion of
“continuity” in characterization and event that these mini-series exploit. I
may be in my dotage, but I don’t dote on continuity in comics. And that
includes DC’s latest, OYL and 52. So I’m happy to give it all a
pass, usually. Until Marvel’s Civil War.
Marvel Comics, which never tires of
vaunting its realistic treatment of superheroes as individual and often cranky
if not neurotic personalities, has generally been more in touch with the
realities that surround its fictional universe than its cross-town rival, DC.
So as DC prepares to warm itself in the box office glow of “Superman Returns,”
which imposes an ethereal nimbus on its Christlike Man of Steal, Marvel has
started “the next big thing,” a Civil War, which appears to create among the
longjohn legions of the Marvel milieu a world paralleling ours by dividing the
superhero population into two groups so diametrically opposed that
reconciliation seems all but impossible. They may not be Democrats and
Republicans, liberals and conservatives, but their division echoes the issues
that are presently dividing the body politic of this nation.
The McGuffin is the role of the
superhero in society: they are all masked vigilantes whose dedication to “doing
good” we have always taken on faith. As editor Tom Brevoort put it in The
Comics Buyer’s Guide (No. 1619): “How comfortable would people really be,
if there was a Spider-Man, a guy swinging around roofs in Manhattan in a mask?
You don’t know who he is, what he’s about—just dropping down, beating up on
whomever he seems to feel like beating up on, saying, ‘Oh, they’re bad guys:
trust me’—slinging away, not answering questions, putting people in the
hospital. How comfortable would you be?” The answer, of course, is:
not very. And when the civilian population of the Marvel Universe starts
pondering these matters, their solution is to require superheroes to register
with the government, putting their secret identities on file. Those who don’t
opt in this direction must give up the superheroing life. The Civil War, then,
pits one group of superheroes against the other—those who register against
those who refuse to because giving up their anonymity puts them at personal
risk and thereby threatens their ability to function effectively.
The series slogan puts the issue
antagonistically: Whose side are you on? The standard ploy for comic book
adventurers pits the good guys in the white hats against the bad guys in the
black chapeaus. In Marvel’s Civil War, the white hats are divided among
themselves over the issue of registration. At issue is national security and
law on the side of registration and personal safety and liberty on the side of
those who refuse to be regimented. The echo of our own, real life national
dilemma is clear. The Patriot Act is intended to make us safer, but at what
cost? We are expected to give up some portion of the liberty that the Patriot
Act is presumably intended to preserve. A conundrum that Marvel’s Civil War
poses in slightly bent miniature. “This has enormous ramifications beyond
comics,” said Andrew Smith in CBG. The superhero, he says, usually operates
within a tradition of “apolitical behavior” in which the costumed do-gooder
ambles along within “certain accepted conventions.” Smith wonders how the
popular culture concept of superheroism will be affected by Marvel’s storyline.
But I take the proposition in a somewhat different direction. Just as Marvel’s
Civil War unhorses the conventions that used to govern superheroing, so does
the red state/blue state polarization in our national politics destroy the
convention upon which effective politics has always existed—compromise. The
superheroes, if Brevoort’s preview is any clue, will doubtless resolve the
issue through some sort of compromise. “Each character,” Brevoort said in CBG, “may come to see the wisdom in the
other side’s point of view or at least find a common ground between them.” If
only our real life predicament could be resolved as easily. Someday,
perhaps—when the heat of basic philosophical difference has somewhat abated—it
may.
Whether I actually buy more than one
or two or three issues in this series remains to be seen. I picked up what I
thought was the first in the series, but now I’m not sure. It has “Frontline”
on the cover, so it’s probably an offshoot (but vital to over-all
comprehension—yeh, yeh: aren’t they all?). I haven’t read it yet, but it seems
to be pleasantly gritty and therefore realistic (yeh, yeh: aren’t they all?).
And Spider-Man taking off his mask and the Wolverine dilemma seem provocative,
so—. Then again, I’m pretty bored with the Democrats and Republicans, who seem
bent solely upon out-doing each other in graft, corruption and self-interest.
They seem equally dangerous to the vitality of the Republic however hilarious
their machinations may otherwise be. I regularly make fun of George WMD Bush
because he’s goofier than the others in a gruesome catastrophic way. In hapless
contrast, Joe Biden, say, is just all bullshit, and Ted Kennedy is all bluster,
neither trait affording much opportunity for comedy. And neither end of the
political spectrum seems capable of putting the interests of the country and
its inhabitants ahead of their own plans to get re-elected forever and ever, so
they can plunder the national treasury for the rest of their days. And if all
of this authentic comedy fails to keep me amused, why would I find
entertainment in a comic book series that seems to parallel this disastrously
comical political reality?
FUNNYBOOK FAN FARE
Bad
Girls and Good Girl Art
Batwoman and Wonder Woman, Again and
Again
“Strong
female lead characters.” Femmes
fatales. Bodacious bimbos. Tough babes. Wonderful. I’ve said it before, tovarisch, and I’ll say it
again: T&A seems to breed hypocrisy
and euphemism. And here we go again. The “lipstick lesbian” Batwoman, DC
Executive Editor Dan Didio said, is
“another very strong female character.” More strength; more T&A. Next, here
comes the “new” Wonder Woman, “new,” I should say, for the fourth time that I
am immediately aware of. This one is being reincarnated by tv writer and
producer Allan Heinberg, whose
introduction to the Amazon princess was in 1974 with Wonder Woman No. 212, featuring the first of the twelve labors
Wonder Woman undertakes to rejoin the Justice League of America. Interviewed by
PW Comics Week’s Douglas Wolk, Heinberg said he intends to “strip away” the accumulated
continuity baggage Wonder Woman is carting around—politician, teacher, goddess,
superhero, karate fighter— in order to “tell a more personal story and find out
who Wonder Woman really is. What sort of person is she? What does she want? How
does she feel?” Acknowledging that Wonder Woman “isn’t as clear-cut an
archetype as Batman or Superman,” Heinberg sees that ambiguity as an advantage
that “allows her writers and artists an enormous amount of storytelling
flexibility and creative freedom.” In the opening pages of the new Wonder Woman No. 1, our heroine
describes herself as being on an impossible mission to impart an ideology to a
world that doesn’t believe in it. The ideology, Heinberg says, is “about the
power of love and truth to bring peace and end suffering.” The problem is how
does she achieve this goal—as political ambassador, teacher, religious figure,
superhero? How? “Questions like these, while important ones, tend to weigh a
character down,” Heinberg said, “—especially when she’s expected to fight
supervillains every issue.” Simpler is better, he said. Simplifying by avoiding
his own questions, he continued: “If Wonder Woman is, in fact, here to
instruct, she should probably do so by example rather than by lecturing. It’s
less condescending and makes more dramatic sense. Comics are a visual medium
and, as a fan, I prefer to watch characters actually doing things than talking
about them.” Sound reasoning, I’d say. But is it borne out in the first issue?
I confess that I haven’t followed
Wonder Woman since George Perez cranked up all that Paradise Island folderol: Greek mythology doesn’t intrigue
me much, probably because they all wear white togas and the whiteness and the
sameness of the fashion is visually boring. It was a noble try, though, and I
admire Perez for attempting it. But what’s been going on during the ensuing
decades, I simply dunno. In this new launch, it seems that the “new” Wonder
Woman is going to be Donna Troy, erstwhile Wonder Girl and the younger sister
of the original Diana Prince in the star-spangled girdle. Here we meet Donna
attired in short-skirted, bare-armed Greek warrior armor as she flies in to
extract Steve Trevor from the clutches of some terrorists. But the terrorists
want to talk to Diana Prince, not Donna Troy. Donna goes in anyhow and manages
to get Trevor out of there after getting nearly mauled by a cheetah, who is
being controlled by Minerva, who was, or is, the Cheetah. Before they actually
exit the environs, Donna must elude the clutches of another female villain,
Giganta, which Donna is able to do by sticking the big broad in the knuckle
with the sharp point of her star-shaped earring. But then, just as the Cheetah
gets ready to hack Donna’s head off with her, Donna’s, sword, here comes the
original article, Diana herself, still in her John Byrne-designed costume. (One
of the best make-overs in funnybook history, no contest.) Or so it seems. At
first. But when Diana persists in killing her adversaries, a sin she committed
before and was condemned to Limbo for, it develops that this Diana is just an
apparition of sorts, conjured up by Dr. Psycho, who now shows up. Meanwhile,
outside the compound where all the action and rescuing is taking place, the
Nemesis shows up, vowing to rescue Donna but only, says Sarge Steel, the
Director of the Department of Metahuman Affairs, who’s in charge of this
operation—only with a partner, namely “Agent Diana Prince,” now attired in her
Emma Peel kung fu outfit.
Enough to take one’s breath away,
surely. There’s a healthy dose of action, though, so whatever’s being taught is
being taught by example, not by lecture. The action, alas, is so often
punctuated by the re-introduction of some personage from the past that it
nearly loses a claim to be action. If “love” and “truth” are the motivating
impulses and if this is the dramatization of those impulses, we don’t have here
anything much different from the usual run-of-the-mill superheroics. Love and
truth and an occasional punch in the bad guy’s mouth. But whatever the story or
the plot, a sort of jumble at the moment, the entire enterprise is rescued by
the dazzling artwork of Terry and Rachel
Dodson. Terry’s beauteous damsels—and there are five of them herein, three
of whom are “Wonder Woman” in one guise or another—are, as usual, a pleasure to
behold, and his storytelling, compositions and breakdowns, is expert and
dramatic. And Rachel’s inking is, as always, fluid and clean. She’s developed a
fine-line technique for indicating minor musculatural definitions in anatomy
that reminds me, strikingly, of the way Frank
Cho wields a line; and that’s all to the good, of course, even though
Rachel’s customary linear mannerisms were perfectly satisfying as they were.
Terry has a large role, Heinberg
tells Wolk, in this concept. “I came up with the initial premise,” Heinberg
said, “but every detail of its execution has been in loving collaboration with
the Dodsons. Terry and I work together on every single element of the book.”
Together, Heinberg said, they plan to explore Wonder Woman’s vulnerability as
well as her power. Not to mention the numerous permutations of female anatomy.
Oddly, perhaps, Giganta is not as well-developed in that department as her name
and the reputations of those limning her into being might dictate. In fact, only
Cheetah and Diana seem superlatively endowed in this installment.
As one of the fan press’s most
notorious dirty old men, I can scarcely sit here and type carping complaints
about pictures of voluptuous women in their scanties. Fact is, I’ve drawn scores of comedic lewd ladies in similar
states of undress for years. Well
beyond adolescence. In fact, some years
ago, MU Pres No, I’m not objecting to pictures of
naked women. What I’m en route to
scoffing about is the uproarious circumlocutions that are employed in promoting
products the appeal of which is frankly sexual. We haven’t (to my knowledge)
gone quite as far as a paperback book collector/dealer named Lynn Munroe, who,
in the name of political correctitude, eschewed using the term “GGA” (meaning
“Good Girl Art”) in his catalogues, starting in the winter of 1993. Munroe discovered that many of the adult
women he knew objected to the derogatory term “girl” when used to describe a
woman as a sex object. So he obligingly
consigned “GGA” to Limbo. Mind you, he continues to sell paperbacks with sexy
women on the covers “in various stages of undress and peril”; he just doesn’t
call ’em like he sees ’em anymore. (Which makes me wonder how he distinguishes GGA book covers from all
others. Does he say “Sex Object,
Female” to advertise his wares?)
“Some book covers are demeaning to
women,” Munroe wrote that winter in his catalogue. “Often they strike at some dark fantasy or fears that both sexes
share . ... The same covers are not
acceptable on new books today, and we think that’s a step in the right
direction. We present such covers for
adult collectors and bibliophiles only. But we don’t need to call the women who grace those covers ‘girls’ or
babes or bimbos or whatever demeaning terms we men have come up with over the
years. And maybe then there will be
more women in our hobby.”
Noble sentiments, these. But like so many similar attempts at
appeasing the politically righteous, this one is misinformed and wrong-headed.
If Munroe thinks sex object art
(SOA) has disappeared from the covers of today’s paperback novels, then he
hasn’t been in a bookstore recently that sells the fictions of Rebecca
Brandewyne, Cassie Edwards, Samantha James, and Constance O’Day-Flannery and
their ilk. Yes, these are authors of
those ripe bodice-ripping “romantic novels” written for women readers. For women readers!
And the covers of these books are
produced in accordance with an unvarying formula. A nineteenth century couple is depicted—a young and virile man as
impossibly handsome as the young woman with whom he is locked in embrace is
voluptuous; her gown is open at the neck to reveal a generous bosom, heaving
(we assume) with passion as she caresses his naked chest while he, one hand on
her naked thigh (her dress having been hiked up to her waist), clasps her to
him.
Pretty sexy stuff.
And these covers are presumably
appealing to thousands of women readers who buy this cotton-wadding by the
truckload (if we are to judge from the number of titles on the nearest
bookstore shelf). These covers must be
appealing or the publishers would surely have abandoned them long ago: this is a capitalistic marketplace, after
all, and manufacturers must be adept at meeting the needs of their buyers or
die. None of these publishers are dead
yet. On the basis of this evidence, then, I rather suspect that Munroe is
doomed to disappointment if he hopes banning “GGA” from the lexicon of paperback
collectors will, in and of itself, induce more women to take up the hobby. Clearly, women are as interested in Sex
Object Art (SOA) as men are. If they haven’t taken up the hobby of paperback
book collecting (or comic book collecting for that matter), there’s doubtless
another explanation for it: it could be
that women have better things to do with their time.
At least, funnybook aficionadoes
haven’t waded out as far into the Deep End in acquiescing to the demands of the
politically righteous as Munroe has. Yet.
But there’s hypocrisy and euphemism
afoot in comic book fandom, too. Wizard some winters ago produced a whole special issue devoted to the Bad Girl
Syndrome. The magazine is mostly
pictures, as you might guess, with several pages devoted to photographs and
copy on Pamela Anderson as Barb Wire. But introducing the subject is Brian Pulido’s essay, “All Hail the Femme
[sic] Fatales.” Pulido begins by citing the conventional wisdom of the industry
that “female characters couldn’t sell comic books.” And then he traces the history of the last couple years that
proves the adage wrong. Suddenly—overnight, as it were—female characters were selling comic
books!
(Excuse me—“strong lead female
characters.” We mustn’t overlook the
“strong” part: that’s the part that
justifies to the politically correct this blatant appeal to the male adolescent
reader.)
Pulido goes on to offer an
explanation for this phenomenon. “This
isn’t a trend,” he says. “This isn’t a
fad. Let’s recognize it for what it
is: a genre. What do the leading
characters of the genre have in common beyond the obvious?” he wonders. “You can see it on the page: it is passion. ... It’s the ’90s. It’s not
threatening to imagine a heroic woman in control.”
Strong leading female character
again.
Well, let me see. Apart from being strong in body, mind and
will, what do these characters all have in common? They all brave insurmountable obstacles, Pulido says, and they kick
butt and take names. Let’s get back to that “obvious” part he is trying to get
beyond. All these Bad Girls share other
attributes—boobs the size of basketballs, legs that go on forever, and costumes
that are designed to reveal rather than conceal.
I guess I agree with Heidi MacDonald
(for once), who said long ago in an issue of Lulu’s Clubhouse (the newsletter for Friends of Lulu, an
organization devoted to fostering women’s participation in the comics field):
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when someone comes up to me at a
convention and tells me that they are doing a book with a ‘strong female
character,’ and then shows me a book where this strong character loses her
clothes at every opportunity and every other panel shows her on all fours with
her butt in the air.”
It’s offensive, MacDonald says. “It’s offensive because it’s bad
comics.” Right. And it’s bad comics because the pictures are
not enlisted in a storytelling task. They’re pin-ups. And after a
while, they’re monotonous.
What’s so laughable about all these
mostly male discussions on the subject of Bad Girls is how hard the fulminators
of these gaseous dissertations work to avoid stating the obvious. Sex appeal. Bad Girls are popular not
because of the “strength” of their character but because of the natural
attraction that sexy women have for men. (Most comic book readers are still men, remember—and most of those men
are adolescents with raging hormones. None of this is mere coincidence.) The “bad girl” part—the strong heroic personalities of these
characters—is but the excuse that permits artists with an abiding interest in
the fundamental appeal of the female form to indulge that interest. And in doing so, they incidentally appeal to
readers with the same interests.
None of this should be baffling at
all, yet so many who wax eloquent on the subject seem blind to the
obvious. Well, it’s willful blindness,
admittedly: truth is, no one apparently
wants to talk about the obvious. Superhero comic books exist for somewhat the
same constellation of reasons. Artists
who like to draw the human figure in action have helped perpetuate the
genre: where else can they draw what
they most want to draw?
That’s not the whole reason for the
longevity of superhero comics. Both
superhero comic books and Bad Girl comics have other attractions that capture
readers’ interests. Superheroes enact
adolescent power fantasies. And Bad
Girls enact another fantasy. Munroe alludes to it when he talks about “dark
fantasies” or “fears” that we all share. Fantasy artist Rowena gets closer to the mark when (in a vintage issue
of Previews) she says: “I just wonder if the bad girl isn’t an
archetype of a woman that is a wonderful fantasy but not the type of woman that
a man could have a traditional, real relationship with. These women exist purely in the fantasy
world.” Rowena speculates that perhaps this “foreboding woman” idea took wing
because of AIDS, which, she muses, might be responsible for “people having more
and more detached interaction with the opposite sex” these days.
Maybe. But I submit that the “detached interaction with the opposite
sex” she wonders about has its roots much deeper in the human psyche. AIDS, after all, has been around only a
relatively short time. If people are
having “detached interactions with the opposite sex,” it’s probably because
sexual relations have always been fearful encounters (particularly in the
subconscious), and a television-watching culture encourages passivity in all
things—even sex, which gets passive only if the participants remain detached.
But the idea of woman as threat
actually has its origins in the subconscious fantasy life within us all. According to Freud, we all carry around in
our heads just below the surface of consciousness the remnants of infantile
fantasies that preoccupied our earliest years. The first phase of psychic
development during these years is the oral phase because the infant is focussed
solely on food, which is taken by mouth. All sources of pleasure, then, seem to be oral. The fantasy develops in which the surest
route to an enjoyable life is to eat. Everything desirable is seen as edible. Babies put everything they want into their mouths—or try to. Thus, in the fantasy, all things desired are
eaten—including, naturally, the nurturing mother, upon whose breast the infant is
fixated. Later, as we pass through other phases of psychic development, we
acquire a sense of guilt, and from that, fear. The Oedipal phase, for instance—during which the child desires the
mother in some vaguely sexual way—eventually inspires guilt in the child. Guilt in turn arouses fear: if we are guilty of something, surely we
will be punished, and we fear the punishment.
Fear takes many forms in the
subconscious. All of the psychic phases
through which we pass remain in the subconscious, lurking there like shadows,
shading our perceptions and our actions. From the oral phase, we inherit our interest in food as a source of
pleasure. And we sometimes speak of
desirable objects as if we wanted to eat them. (How many times have you heard the expression, “You look good enough to
eat”?) When it comes to guilt, fear and
punishment, the punishment in the subconscious usually fits the crime. If we want to eat everything and
subsequently feel guilty about it, then our fear is that we ourselves will be eaten.
Since our sense of guilt arises in
connection with Oedipal desires, sometimes the predatory gourmet we grow to
fear is “woman.” Hence, the fantasy of
the Devouring Woman.
In Bad Girls, this fantasy is
manifest. Bad Girls are
physically—sexually—desirable. But they
are also threatening, powerful creatures. These two circumstances in conjunction awaken slumbering oral fears in
our subconscious, adding nightmarish emotional weight to the formula before
us. And in the spate of female vampire
characters of recent years, the Devouring Woman fantasy is made bloodily
explicit.
So what? Well, Munroe and Rowena are right: a fundamental appeal of the Bad Girl resides in her ability to
rouse the nightmares of the subconscious—“dark fantasies” and unspoken
“fears.” She is, indeed, a woman with
whom no man can have a normal relationship.
But she’s also a nearly naked female
of the species, and as long as propagation is achieved through the union of two
sexes, the female of the species will appeal to the male for reasons so
powerfully biological that you’d think they would need no explanation—or that
any explanation attempted would not involve such large doses of circumlocution
as we’ve seen to date. But then, we’d have nothing to laugh at here, would we?
Meanwhile, we can ponder the
significance of a benchmark mutation of sex appeal as a sales gimmick that
surfaced, so to speak, some years ago and then sank from sight. “Nude variant covers.” This marketing maneuver produced comic books
the same issues of which had two covers: one with the strong leading female
character (SLFC) clothed; a second, with her in the altogether. Buck naked. If you buy both versions, you can enjoy the sensation of a striptease.
At least, it’s forthright pandering.
COMIC STRIP WATCH
Marvin,
the title toddler in Tom Armstrong’s comic strip, is getting another baby cousin. The mother of the existing cousin,
Megan, is divorced but wants another child, so she flies to China and adopts
Ming Ming, who shows up in the strip on June 25, convinced that she has been
abducted by an alien and flown to the “planet America.”
I keep insisting, with a doggedness
that must try even saintly patience, that comics are a visual-verbal artform.
And so they are. It’s the blend of word and picture that makes comics unique
among the static visual arts. But since we read the words by looking at
them—just as we “read” the pictures by looking at them—the tilt in comics,
metaphysically speaking, is toward the visual. It isn’t often in this visual
entertainment, however, that we find comics unabashedly visual, comics that
wouldn’t be comics if they weren’t visual enterprises. So a new strip called The first one I’ve pasted in here
threw me for a minute: that’s Lio’s father in the first panel, not Lio. Lio is
in the kitchen, and he’s spilled the box of animal crackers, which is where
that herd on the floor in the first panel comes from. The first panel is a
puzzle; the second panel explains it. In the next example we have every kid’s
nightmare about brimming bathtubs coming true: there is a monster just beneath
the surface. But in Lio’s world, it’s a benign denizen of the deep who shampoos
the kid’s hair. The next one is somewhat dark and requires a little de-coding:
I think Lio has dug a pit and covered it with leaves, with the intention of
trapping the fat kid, and you don’t find all the evidence for this conclusion
until you get to the last panel. In my final example, you must again take time
to look at all of the picture, and when you do, you eventually realize that
Lio’s voodoo doll is working: that kid suspended at the right is the spitting
image of the voodoo doll Lio has just snared. So voodoo works, right? Most of Lio requires de-coding, which, in the
Age of Da Vinci’s Code, is probably a smart marketing move. And the Lio code is all visual, all pictures.
There are no words in Lio. Said
Tatulli: “In Lio, the art [the
drawing] is the writing. Each strip is like a mini puzzle. There is no verbal
punchline; no rim shot. You have to look at the series of panels and kind of
put things together.”
Tatulli says he takes “full
advantage” of the space allotted to his strip to draw: “It’s very liberating
for a cartoonist who loves to draw,” he said. “Lio is a very simple concept,” he continued. “It has to live within
the pantomime format. What you see is what you get. No deep backstory, no
intricate relationships. The reader should be able to look at a week of strips
and instantly be able to know what is going on. Mostly, it is a surreal strip
that needs no explanation for why things are happening the way they do. Once
the reader accepts Lio’s world, they
realize that anything can happen. And I believe the wordless format aids that.
It’s simple joy in picture-storytelling with a funny or surprise conclusion,
and the central character of Lio is
your tour guide through this bizarrely funny world.” Bizarrely funny and, from
time to time, just a little dark—threatening, where vague menace lurks. “Every
child’s world is dark,” Tatulli said. “Do you remember lying in your bed at
night thinking what would happen if your mother died? Lio is not me,” he went
on, “but he is a reflection of what I was fascinated in as a child. Things like
monsters, robots, aliens and animals that I was sure had feelings and could
think like we do.”
And Tatulli should know about kids:
he has four, a son and two daughters with his wife Donna and a fictional girl
of grade school age who appears as the title character in another comic strip, Heart of the City, also syndicated by
Universal Press. Tatulli did his first published comic strip in 1988 for the
Burlington County Times in New Jersey—Bent
Halos, about two rambunctious angels. But Tatulli put the strip aside after
a while to ponder other concepts with broader appeal, and by 1997, he’d come up
with Heart, another rambunctious juvenile who lives with and pesters her single
mother in Philadelphia, where, until recently, Tatulli worked in television,
animation and producing. Heart debuted
in November 1998, and it’s still going strong. For Lio, Tatulli deploys an entirely different rendering style. Heart is drawn with a juicy brush; Lio, with a meticulous pen.
“It was important to me to separate
the two strips visually,” Tatulli explained in a Universal Press news release.
“So I picked up a pen and drew in a style that I haven’t drawn in for about 20
years. I was always intrigued by the artwork of an obscure 19th century artist, A.J. Volck—a political satirist during the Civil War, a
Southern sympathizer. I was fascinated with his darkly detailed illustrations.
Every time I looked at his spidery pen-and-ink drawings, I found something
new.” In adopting a similar style for Lio, Tatulli hopes for “art that immediately stirs an emotion, simply by pen
technique, even before you know what the strip is about.” The pen’s fine point
permits him to add more detail than he could get with a brush, Tatulli says,
and that’s part of his objective in Lio: “As a kid, I always enjoyed looked at detailed comic strips, even when I didn’t
‘get’ the joke. The drawings in Lio are
very time consuming but also a real joy, and hopefully, I can bring the joy
that I had looking at comics to a whole new generation of kids.” Kids and
adults, he adds, “who remember being young.”
The two strips are as different in
comedy as they are in appearance. Heart is a rather typical albeit exuberant,
imaginative kid, bouncing around her life. Lio spends more time thinking, or,
maybe, brooding. The strips are “polar opposites,” Tatulli said. “After doing a
week of Heart strips, I have to
mentally turn a dial 180 degrees to get into the Lio mode. It’s a whole other side of my personality much closer to
my youthful cartoon experience that I dig into. I tend to think visually
anyway, so Lio has been much fun to
think about in terms of camera-angles and layout of action. Heart requires more ‘scriptwriting’
[verbalizing in a playlet mode] and I use whatever space is left for artwork.”
Heart, as I see it, is akin to a real childhood. Lio is, too, but here, it’s the childhood of the mind—of dream and
nightmare; Heart’s childhood is all
activity and much less cerebral. Tatulli says he finds ideas for Lio anywhere: “I can be inspired by an
action figure or a sign in a store.” Lio is an imaginative kid, but his world
is not exactly imaginary. “It’s not his imagination,” Tatulli said, “but his
reality. Ideas are everywhere: it’s just a matter of taking that thing and
bringing into Lio’s world.”
And into his own. “As selfish as it
may sound,” Tatulli said, “I’m pretty much looking only to please myself.
That’s the only way I can create a comic that I can be interested in and draw
week after week, month after month.” Selfish as it may sound, that’s the only
basis upon which any artist, any cartoonist, can realistically contemplate a
career making drawings to meet deadlines.
“My goal,” Tatulli continued, “is to
be able to tell a whole connected story with just drawings, and I think that is
possible because comic stripping is an everyday thing. Every day you get a
little better. If you ride a bike every day, eventually you can do it without
hands. I want to take the multi-panel pantomime concept to new and edgy places
it has never gone before on the daily comics page. At this point, it’s just an
aspiration, but if this strip finds the audience that I hope for, the sky’s the
limit.”
Lio would not have happened, Tatulli said, but for his wife. “The idea for the
strip had been floating around in my brain for some time,” he said, “but I
never had the time to commit it to paper. When I was laid off from my day-job,
I suddenly had some time to put some basic inspirational drawings down. But it
wasn’t until I showed the drawings to Donna, who instantly liked the idea and
encouraged me, that I really sat down and started working out rough ideas for
strips. And it came so quickly after that. Had it not been for Donna, Lio probably never would have seen the
light of day.”
And the future looks bright. “I’ve
always loved pantomime strips,” Tatulli said. “There’s something kitschy about
them, and I wanted to explore that arena while updating the format to appeal to
a modern audience. This format will work well with an international audience.
Nothing will be lost in translation—because there is no translation! Heck, you don’t
even have to know how to read! Truly a comic for all peoples of the earth!”
Truly.
Lio debuted in 100 papers on May 15. Said Lee Salem, editor at Universal Press:
“This launch has proven to be one of our most successful ones, both in terms of
numbers and the heavy hitters on the list. Starting in more than 100 of the
most influential newspapers in the country is quite an accomplishment for a new
strip and indicates a continuing interest to follow.” And, as if endorsing
Tatulli’s prescience, at least one paper on the international market has picked
up the strip—Bel De Morgen in
Brussels.
Tics
and Tropes
“I am a success today because I had
a friend who believed in me, and I didn’t have the heart to let him down.”
—Abraham Lincoln
“Anyone can win, unless there
happens to be a second entry.” —George Ade
“I drink to make other people more
interesting.” —George Jean Nathan
“Always borrow from a pessimist—he
never expects it back.” —Anonymous
BOOK MARQUEE
Some
forthcoming graphic novels: Sloth (a
bored teen slips in and out of a coma) by Gilbert
Hernandez, But I like It (on tour
with a European punk-rock band) by Joe
Sacco, Get a Life (early stories
about a single Parisian guy and his bohemian lifestyle) by the French Dupuy and Berberian. And here’s Art Out
of Time: Unknown Comics Visionaries 1900-1969 by Dan Nadel, a coffeetable-size tome of 320 pages ($40) that reprints
specimens of idiosyncratic work by 31 lesser known ’tooners, all of whom were
experimenting with the new medium. And from the Andrews McMeel comic strip
reprint factory: She’s Turning Into One
of Them (For Better or For Worse), Sixteen Isn’t Pretty (Luann), 99%
Perspiration (Frazz), The Flying McCoys: Comics for a Bold New World, Planet of
the Hairless Beach Apes (Sherman’s Lagoon).
By the way, for some unaccountable
reason, I gave the wrong statistics for Dude:
The Big Book of Zonker last time. The volume is 288 pages, not 152; and it
costs $19.95, not $16.95. Or so it sez at Amazon.com.
DIMMING THE LIGHTS
As
we celebrate, a dubious word choice, the slaying of an infamous murderer,
al-Zarqawi, we are reminded, as if we needed the reminder, of the brutality of
warfare. It would appear that a bunch of U.S. marines, after an IED exploded
and killed one of their number, went on a rampage in Haditha, killing about two
dozen civilian Iraqis, last November 19. Difficult though it may be to admit
that U.S. military can misbehave so egregiously, it is not difficult to
understand why. According to Newsweek (June 12), even the most insightful of the marine commanders early in the Iraqi
War, Lt. Gen. James Mattis, who sought to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis by
encouraging his men to get out in the streets and play with the kids (“and—a
small detail but important—taking off the sunglasses that made them look like
invading aliens”)—even Mattis sent terribly mixed signals to his men. Appearing
last year on a panel in San Diego, Mattis is reported as saying: “Actually,
it’s quite fun to fight them. You know, it’s a hell of a hoot ... I like brawling.
You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years
because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood
left anyhow. So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.” Newsweek continues: “The Marine Corps, though
justly famous for loyalty and discipline, has a ‘shoot first, ask questions
later’ mentality, according to some grunts interviews. ... The marines were
happy with the loose rules of engagement for the Battle of Fallujah in
2004—like ‘the Wild West,’ said one—and not so keen about the stricter rules
for ordinary street patrols imposed since then”—rules that require taking
extreme care before opening fire on unidentified civilians.
American marines and soldiers face a
nearly impossible situation. Because it is a guerilla war, they can’t tell the
enemies from the friends, and they don’t speak the language of the natives so
they have almost no way to sort through the evidence presented to their eyes in
the field—on the streets, in the alleys, often suddenly, without warning.
Thanks to our notoriously arrogant and ignorant leadership, our soldiers have
no training in counterinsurgency. And they’re mostly all young, under 25. And
frightened, scared of dying every day. Knowing the risk of death from even the
most harmless looking civilian, U.S. soldiers are likely to shoot first and
worry about proper identification later, and it would be grossly unfeeling of
us to fault them for doing so. Unfeeling but not unreasonable. If they had
received better training, they would be able to do better. But without adequate
training—and, in many instances, without adequate equipment—they sometimes get
through the 110-degree desert days with the aid of steroids, Valium,
painkillers, and alcohol, according to one soldier interviewed by Newsweek. “They’d go on raids totally
stoned,” he said. “We’re killing the wrong people all the time, and mostly by
accident. One guy in my [tank] squadron ran over a family with his tank.” But
some of the abuse is intentional, he admitted. “A lot of guys steal from the
Iraqis. Money, family heirlooms, and then they brag about it.”
A volunteer army will attract a
certain number—small to be sure but manifest—of people who want to be
professional killers, who dote on the thrill of combat and life or death
predicaments. Maybe not Reservists or National Guardsmen/women: presumably,
they joined up for reasons having mostly to do with economic benefits rather
than the buzz of the battlefield. But those who joined the regular army and
Marine Corps—some of those, by no means all but surely some, joined because
they want to shoot live targets. In the ambiguous situation in which they find
themselves, it should not be surprising to find that sometimes soldiers like
these kill almost indiscriminately. Sometimes they do so because they know no
better. Newsweek concludes: “Left to
their own devices, grunts sometimes improvise. It is possible that [the marines
in Haditha] determined to ‘leave a calling card,’ which is to say, to warn
Haditha that IEDs would be met with heavy retribution. It’s an old and
primitive counterinsurgency tactic. Long ago, the Romans used it against the
barbarians.”
Quite apart from the military
personnel, who presumably operate under some hierarchy of control, there are
50,000 private contractors in Iraq, many of whom are trigger-happy shooters
from the Old West. Is it any wonder that Americans are getting a bad name in
Iraq?
In a recent column, Ted Rall wonders, particularly in the
wake of the Arab ire about the Danish cartoons, why there’s no rioting in the
streets of Iraq about the atrocity in Haditha. “The reason is simple,” he says:
“for Iraqis, American atrocities are old news.” American soldiers have been
killing Iraqi civilians with impunity for three years. He quotes a Baghdad
shopkeeper “who says that U.S. troops have never shown respect for the lives of
Iraqi civilians. ‘Six months ago,’ remembers Mohammed Jawdaat, ‘a car pulled
out of a street towards an American convoy and a soldier just opened fire. The
driver was shot in the head. There were no warning shots, and the Americans
didn’t even stop.’” Such incidents have been reported in the European media,
Rall says, but not in the U.S. media, which largely ignores this aspect of the
so-called War. Rall quotes Rami Khouri, editor at the Daily Star in Lebanon: Haditha “is not a huge story [in the Middle
East]. It’s getting a lot of coverage in the United States, obviously, but most
people in the Arab world are against what the United States did in Iraq ...
They say, Look, this was a catastrophe from the beginning and they’re not
surprised that this is happening. They kind of take it in stride because
everything the United States is doing in Iraq is seen as morally and
politically unacceptable.” To which Rall adds: “They don’t see a difference
between Haditha and the thousands of other Iraqis killed by U.S. forces since
2003.”
Rall quotes Marine General Peter
Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who claims incidents of soldiers
killing civilians “do not happen very frequently, so there’s no way to say
historically why something like this might have happened.” Rall responds:
“Actually, similar incidents have taken place in every war, including World War
II. Pace’s statement is either a dazzling display of ahistorical ignorance or a
bald-faced lie—take your pick. Pace adds that if some of his men committed an
atrocity at Haditha, they ‘have not performed their duty the way that 99.9
percent of the fellow Marines have.’ That’s not what the Iraqis say,” Rall
concludes.
Metaphors be with you.
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