Of Renegades and Masked Men

Covers from Freedom Fighters (1977) and Moon Knight (1985)

I don’t recall seeing an Asian character playing a central role in a comic book until my mother took me to some kind of expo and purchased for me a WWII comic book that followed the story of a Japanese naval officer during and after the Battle of Midway.  It wasn’t until I was older that I realized what I had read was a form of religious propaganda, with the Japanese soldier eventually recognizing the might of American military power and after the war finding grace in a Christian God (these two things no doubt intended to serve as analogs for one another).  I think I threw it away when I was in college, but I now find myself wishing I had held onto it.  I did, however, hang on to the Freedom Fighters and Moon Knight issues you see above.  Both offer examples of the problematic relationship comic books have historically had with race.

Freedom Fighters was probably one of those comic books my mom kindly bought for me while checking out at the store.  In the #11 issue, a group of Native Americans con people out of money by pretending to ask for donations for a fake school.  Tired of meager scraps, they call upon their ancestors and receive mystical intervention in the form of super powers that they then use to commit more lucrative crimes.  The eponymous Freedom Fighters, led by the heroic and patriotic Uncle Sam, have to stop the now villainous Renegades. Captured by the Freedom Fighters and served up to the police in the end, one of the Renegades says, “We should be freed also — we were merely furthering our cause — righting wrongs done years ago,” to which the arresting officer replies, “Mister, your ‘cause’ seems to go only so far as your pocket!”  This issue was published six years after the Occupation of Alcatraz and in the same year as Leonard Peltier‘s conviction, neither of which I had any real sense of as a kid.

In the #6 issue of Moon Knight, Marc Spector is a superhero attired ostensibly in a white hood and a white costume (supposedly the costume is meant to be silver but comes off to my eyes as white), struggling against tragic odds to save Blacks from the corruption and drugs perpetrated upon them by their own leaders: a heroin addicted U.S. government agent and a fanged voodoo priestess.  I think it does little to deflect the racial history of white hoods and costumes and the representation of Black communities as corrupt and self-destructive that an early line deposits this story in the Caribbean.  The white hooded hero as rendered in this issue brings to my mind of D.W. Griffith’s valorization of the KKK in The Birth of a Nation (1915), though I’m sure in other issues Moon Knight has some other less racially charged adventures.

Perhaps luck would have it that I managed to hang onto two of the more extreme examples for racial representations in comic books, but I can’t say as I can recall much more positive and recurring images of Native Americans or African Americans.  Sure, there were Apache Chief in the cartoons and Luke Cage in the comics, neither an unproblematic representation of ethnic others, but perhaps more damaging is the lack of a range of images and with such range a continuous presence.  And, as noted above, there was also the absence of Asian American characters (or at least none that I recall reading when I was growing up), which is what makes Gene Luen Yang, Sonny Liew and Janice Chiang’s The Shadow Hero (2014) an interesting and compelling story today.  In The Shadow Hero, Yang, Liew, and Chiang offer an origin narrative of sorts for the hero of Chu Hing’s 1940s series, The Green Turtle.  They argue that Chu Hing wanted his hero to be Chinese and that the dearth of clear shots of the hero’s face was his way of getting around publishers who wanted the hero to be white, situating a Chinese representation in the absence of a clear face determining otherwise.

As a final note, I don’t recall owning any comic books with Chicano/a or Latino/a super heroes, either.

On Anime and Tokusatsu

When I was a kid growing up in Hawaii in the 1970s, tokusatsu stories were probably more popular than anime stories.  Tokusatsu TV series or movies are live action Japanese narratives that have a strong special effects component.  At the time, some of the most well known special effects consisted of actors in hero or monster suits doing battle amid model cityscapes to make the characters seem like giants.

There were a plethora of tokusatsu options in Hawaii.  My cousins had Ultraman (of the giants in suits variety), Rainbowman, and Kamen Rider V3 among their favorites.  My sister and I loved watching Go Rangers, Robocon, and Kikaida (to be fair, every kid I knew in Hawaii loved Kikaida, the full DVD set of which I own today). In movies, we had Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and even a movie version of Kikaida.  By contrast, only two anime series stand out in my recollection as being big in Hawaii in the 70s:  Raideen and Speed Racer (I would later learn about Kimba from my spouse, who grew up in MA).  Then at the end of the 70s and start of the 80s, there was Star Blazers, an American adaptation of Space Battleship Yamato.

I find it interesting that of the two forms anime has become the dominant Japanese cultural export to the U.S.  I suppose that costumed Japanese super heroes and arguably a greater than normal need for suspension of disbelief may have found it hard to sustain any significant market share amid an evolving brand of realism that came to permeate American television and movies in the 1980s and 1990s (also, things in 1970s Hawaii may have been a bit different from things outside of Hawaii anyway).

By contrast, creators and storytellers seemed to find a freedom in anime that opened up storytelling possibilities.  At a basic level, there’s a cuteness to something like a Pikachu that would probably be hard to translate into a live-action rendering of Pokemon (even if there is this), but I think there’s something more interesting going on.  Animation, and with it anime, offers a wider and more fantastic field of possibilities, and this goes beyond the scope of how hard it would be to try to render with a straight face a live action version of Sailor Moon in the U.S (even if it did exist in Japan).  A better example might be the different ways that One Punch Man looks at different times depending on the mood of the scene or moment, a presentation that no live action TV series or movie I know of has done or is likely to attempt outside of lighting effects:

Anime series seem to be more willing than American television shows to stretch the storytelling possibilities, and I can’t help but wonder if the medium itself is a contributing factor.

One idea I’d like to call out is the relationship between time and storytelling.  For example, in the fifth episode of Cowboy Bebop, “Ballad of Fallen Angels,” once Spike is thrown through the window just after the 19:00 mark, the story chronology slows down to present us with a two and a half minute montage that fills in the back-story for understanding what has led up to this particular moment.  Something similar and more expansive occurs in the nineteenth episode of Attack on Titan, “Bite: The 57th Exterior Scouting Mission, Part 3.”  Most of the action of the episode involves Captain Levi’s squad riding ahead of an attacking Titan.  At about the 7:20 mark Eren wants to act on his own by biting his hand to trigger an event and is confronted with the choice of trusting himself or trusting his companions when Petra asks him to trust them.  The choice lasts but a moment in chronological time, but the anime expands the moment of this choice over eleven minutes by providing a backstory so that, when at the 18:54 mark Eren looks down at the bite mark on Petra’s hand and makes his choice, we understand the meaning of his decision.

While it’s true that such departures from strict chronology occur elsewhere outside of anime, I find that I have encountered them more often and in a greater variety of forms in anime than anywhere else.  Of course, to be fair, it may equally be a phenomenon of culture, as well, and in this regard one can weigh the unannounced and un-prefaced backstory that begins in episode five of Claymore–the likes of which, presented over the course of four episodes, I’d be hard pressed to find an analog for in American television.  I found it disorienting the first time, to be immersed in a plot and beginning to attach to characters only to be suddenly ripped away and introduced to a whole new set of characters, but would I have found it so had I grown up in Japan?  I really couldn’t say.  However, in the end, those four episodes stand out in my mind as the most memorable and intimate of Claymore, and to get the full effect of this backstory you really have to watch the whole of season one.

These are some general observations.  I’m sure I’ll have more to say later regarding the storytelling possibilities explored and leveraged in anime.  And, yes, I spent some time watching Cowboy Bebop and Attack on Titan this week.

The Daily-ness of It All

Drawing made by a student during daily start of class assignment.

In the documentary Stripped, Bill Watterson reflects on the daily quality of syndicated comic strips:

A comic strip takes just a few seconds to read, but over the years it creates a surprisingly deep connection with readers. The daily deadlines are brutal for the creator, but there’s a real payoff to that daily contact. Seeing the strip every day is a … it’s a fun little ritual. And people feel connected to what you’ve created. Even in a few panels, you can develop characters and express an outlook on life as the months go by, and before you know it readers are seriously invested in the world that you’ve created. So I think that that incremental aspect, the unpretentious daily-ness of comics is a surprising source of power. Readers do form an emotional bond with your strip.

As I reflected upon his words, I thought about how teaching has a daily quality to it that many educators perhaps overlook.  With the contemporary emphasis on things like assessment and core learning outcomes, some things that can’t be quantified tend to get lost, one of which is the daily relationship with students and the emotional connection students form with the learning process and the knowledge with which they walk away from our classes.  The daily-ness itself matters.

In this regard, over the course of some terms I use an assignment adapted from Lynda Barry’s Syllabus: Notes on an Accidental Professor to begin each of my writing classes.  I have my students take out a sheet of paper, divide it into four quadrants, and then they spend 30 seconds in one quadrant listing things they saw that morning, 30 seconds in another quadrant listing things they heard that morning,  30 seconds in another quadrant listing things they plan to do that day, and 1 – 2 minutes in the last quadrant drawing a small picture (the above image is excerpted from one such small picture).  Then the students spend 1 minute drawing a tight spiral emanating from the center of the paper.

When I started doing this daily assignment, my initial motivation was to get students centered and focused on the present moment and the class at hand.  Students come into the classroom from so many different experiences and places that I wanted them to have a brief meditative/reflective exercise to get everyone into the same place.  However, I think the assignment takes on a life of its own and means something quite different for students.  Whenever I’ve found myself having to catch up with the course content schedule and made a move to skip the daily assignment now and then, students have always objected most vigorously, insisting that it wouldn’t feel right.  I’ve always relented, of course, but Watterson’s words crystallized for me why relenting and taking the class through its daily routine was always the correct choice.  That exercise is, like comic strips for so many, a “fun little ritual” that makes students “feel connected” to and “invested” in the learning environment.

I’m going to spend more time thinking about how the daily-ness of learning can apply such lessons from the incremental power of comics.

Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives

I’m currently reading Robert S. Petersen’s Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels, which offers an extensive historical overview for considering graphic narratives, if not necessarily visual culture.  I guess that last observation itself deserves more comment, insofar as I think I’ve gone into this project with the assumption that graphic narratives are a core part of something more expansive than just narratives conveyed graphically.  I think the sequential nature of images (with or without text), or the use of frames (single or multiple) in visual storytelling, belong to something that not only encompasses serialized and non-serialized modes, but also the cultural and social investments people make in those stories, as well.  I see Comic Con and cosplay culture as co-extensive with the aesthetics of comics, manga, and graphic novels in ways that I think it would be reductive to dismiss as mere fandom.  This is something I’ll probably go into more later, but for now a quick review of Peterson.

While at times I find Peterson’s work to be a bit lifeless for focusing exclusively on the history of graphic storytelling, he nonetheless covers a great breadth of the history of that almost indispensable aspect of comics, manga, and graphic novels.  For example, he reaches back to cave art, like others who precede him.  He likewise considers “the Egyptian pallet of Narmer (3200 BCE and the Assyrian Stele of Vultures  (2525 BCE)” (10) before presenting a 6th century BCE urn by Exekias as an iteration of single-frame narrative art.  He discusses the Genji Monogatari Emaki hand scrolls that illustrate The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki Shikibu before moving into the kibyoshi of the 18th century.  And he also considers early European, Native American, and British exemplars of visual narrative.  While there’s no explicitly stated theoretical framework, he seems to be looking at the movement from more sacred and profound forms of graphic storytelling that was reserved for special purpose to more secular and profane renderings of such materials that were more widely and commonly disseminated.  In relation to this, Peterson seems to consider the expansion of comedic graphic storytelling and the rise of caricature as necessary precursors to the development of comics.

One of the strengths of Peterson’s work is the way in which it does consider the material history of graphic storytelling and the way in which the material history either constrained or facilitated the growth of visual media.  For example, while reviewing 15th century European adventure and moral allegories and the way in which illustrations became “a critical selling point” (26), Peterson writes:

The chief obstacle was the combination of cast-metal type for the words and woodblock cuts for the illustrations.  The different temperament of the materials under the pressure of the printing press meant that most books had their words printed first and illustrations inserted later.  Another persistent problem was the division of labor wherein the separate guilds of printers, writers, and illustrators fostered many inconsistencies and contradictions in the way printed books were illustrated.  Often, pictures bore only a casual relationship to the text because the publishers regularly reused illustrations from one publication and inserted them into another. (26)

He likewise considers legal developments that facilitated the growth in visual media and made life as an illustrator more economically viable within a capitalist economy, such as the expansion of the Statute of Anne in England to apply not only to written works but to illustrated ones:

In 1730, Hogarth produced a series of engravings called A Harlot’s Progress, which proved phenomenally popular; but as he argued successfully before the British Parliament, much of the profit for his work had been lost to more cheaply produced pirated imitations.  Once the Statute of Anne had been extended to printed pictures, Hogarth resumed his work with the publication of a series called A Rake’s Progress (1733), which secured his fame and made him quite wealthy. (44)

One of the shortcomings of Peterson’s work is the way in which much of the history passes by without much synthesis or critical analysis, even where such undertakings seem not only compelling but responsible.  An example of this is when he discusses the movement from Native American rock artwork to ledger artwork:

Ledger artworks were strongly influenced by contact with white settlers, missionaries, and the U.S. military, who traded or gave used paper ledger to the Indian artists as a means to record their stories.  The earliest ledger-drawn works were created by the Native American prisoners at Fort Marion in Florida, where the internees were encouraged to participate in the market economy by learning to produce commercial goods for tourists.  Despite the commercial interests, ledger art remains a fascinating record of the commonplace experiences in the lives of Native Americans.

From my perspective, the phrase, “[d]espite the commercial interests,” sounds rather tone-deaf to the observation of coercion that precedes it, but maybe that’s just me.

The tone of Peterson’s writing generally strikes a pose of scholarly objectivity broken up by subjective adulatory observations about the merits of a given artwork’s techniques or aesthetic power, which is to say a tone that I’m not too fond of for its posturing.  This may contribute to my perception of lifelessness.  However, I suspect a bigger contributor lies in the book’s shortage of accompanying example images.  Occasionally images are proferred, but more often Peterson directs the reader to numbered gray shaded boxes of text that further describe in words the graphic exemplars he is discussing in his main text.  To be fair, this may itself represent an ironic material constraint insofar as a book on the history of comics, manga, and graphic novels couldn’t afford to properly illustrate its coverage of that history.

On the Idea of Convention

Looking for a perspective outside of literature or literary criticism in order to get outside my own head, I picked up philosopher David Lewis’ 1969 tome, Convention: A Philosophical Study.  After working through some game theory regarding equilibrium in games of coordination, Lewis arrives at the following rough definition of convention:  “A regularity R in the behavior of members of a population P when they are agents in a recurrent situation S is a convention if and only if, in any instance of S among members of P, (1) everyone conforms to R, (2) everyone expects everyone else to conform to R, (3) everyone prefers to conform to R on the condition that the others do, since S is a coordination problem and uniform conformity to R is a proper coordination equilibrium in S.”

Now, of course, here Lewis is talking about social conventions, and at first I was thinking that I’d have no application for Lewis in my research and that my reading of him was perhaps a waste of time.  But then I found myself watching Tatsumi, the animated documentary on the life and work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi.  Tatsumi talks about the social push-back against his approach to Manga and its more mature themes confronting issues pertaining to alienation, sex, and death.  From Lewis’ perspective, Tatsumi’s decision to coin the term Gekiga was borne out of a violation of social convention, whereby his work did not conform to the regularity Japanese readers were expecting from what was in that instance in time known as Manga.  Gekiga represented an innovation in what Manga and graphic narratives could become some years before Crumb would help found the underground comix scene in the U.S.

Maybe it’s almost always true that innovations in art arise from a violation of conventions, and maybe I’m over-reaching here to find relevance for my reading of Lewis, but this is one of the things that occurred to me while watching Tatsumi.

Welcome to My Visual Culture Blog

I’ve started this blog as part of my sabbatical project.  I’m reading, researching, and working to incorporate visual culture into my teaching of literature and writing, focusing on the fields of graphic novels, comics and Manga/Anime. One possible future outcome would be the development of a course on graphic novels/manga.  I also intend to develop a more formal grounding in multimodal approaches to teaching, developing pedagogies for reading in new media environments.