Seeing Machiko Hasegawa

Looking at Machiko Hasegawa’s post-WWII yonkoma manga, Sazae-san, I’m drawn to two examples in particular.  While others of her strips focus on family life and often offer gender observations, these strips seem to offer commentary on the Japanese-American dynamics and relationships after the war.  In the above strip, Namihei, Sazae-san’s father, goes with an American colleague or friend to a photographer to have their portrait taken.  However, when the photo is developed Masuo is all but left out of the frame.  There seems to be a mixture of pride in the friendship or working relationship, perhaps exemplifying a certain post-war pride Japanese took in the developing post-war relationship, but the focus on the importance of the American here (and perhaps in the larger national scene itself) leaves the Japanese subject outside the picture.  Likewise, while walking on a bridge below and enjoying the view, Sazae-san finds herself being beckoned by an American serviceman to pose for a photo.  However, much to her embarrassment, it turns out that the photographer sees and was addressing not her but the geisha-looking woman behind her.

Sazae-san, even whilst between the American and the “geisha,” seems to remain unseen in the last frame.  What is seen, instead, is the external stereotype and expectation formed by outsiders of what constitutes Japanese beauty, an idealized Japanese femininity.  In the presence of the “geisha,” Sazae-san is an absence.  I wonder to what extent the above yonkoma (four panel strip form of manga) can stand in as metaphors for Japan and manga/anime exports today.  To what extent do manga and anime in the U.S. reflect an American focus, and to what extent do we miss seeing a wider range of what’s actually out there?

At the moment, I’m reading Beautiful Fighting Girl by Saito Tamaki and Japanese Visual Culture, edited by Mark W. MacWilliams.  This makes me wonder to what degree does the beautiful fighting girl, so popular in manga and anime … from Princess Knight (1967) to Cutie Honey (1973) to Sylia/Priss/Linna of Bubblegum Crisis (1987) to Sailor Moon (1992) to Gally of Battle Angel (1993) to Birdy (1996) to Rushuna Tendo of Grenadier (2004) to almost the entire character list of Claymore (2007) to Saeko of Highschool of the Dead (2011) to Mikasa of Attack on Titan (2013) to name a few of the more memorable … to what extent do all these beautiful fighting girls and their popularity obscure or obfuscate what else is out there, not only in terms of the broader sense of Japanese femininity but even just within the range of representations of the feminine in manga and anime?  As MacWilliams points out in his introduction to Japanese Visual Culture, manga and anime are part of mass art or mass culture and exist as industrial exports between capitalist economies; as such, artistic creation contends with or may be constrained by marketability.

Analogous to the photographer’s orientation with the “geisha” in Hasegawa’s yonkoma, to what extent do we in the U.S. primarily see manga and anime that fulfill our expectations?  Just as the American serviceman above misses seeing Sazae-san for the “geisha” on the bridge, so too do many in the U.S. miss seeing Machiko Hasegawa for the beautiful fighting girls so pervasively in our midst.  Consider how little known Machiko Hasegawa and her housewife heroine remain outside of Japan.  It’s a shame, given that her manga, Sazae-san, ran for nearly thirty years, leading to radio and anime adaptations over the course of her career as an artist (the anime series is actually still active as of 2017).  As well known as Charles Schulz is in the U.S., so Hasegawa is in Japan.  She even has her own museum.

Back in the Straddle

I found Kevin McDonough’s review of Riverdale‘s season finale interesting given my time spent reading Bart Beaty’s Comics versus Art.  McDonough seems to see comics straddling the line between art and immature entertainment:

As readers of this column may have concluded, I am not a big fan of comic book adaptations.  For starters, there are simply too many of them.  And, in full disclosure, I am no longer 12 years old.  But to give the art form its due, comic books and graphic novels are often works of art, featuring stunning drawing and inventive graphic design, not to mention a vivid use of color, light and shadows.  And, all too often, those elements are lost in movie and TV adaptations.  In the end, comic books without their graphic power are a bit like music without sound.  What’s the point?
Riverdale goes to some lengths to address this issue.  The show has a distinctive color palette.  It has rejected the sunny look of the original for a lurid tone as black as the roots of Archie’s red hair.  Frequently compared to Twin Peaks, Riverdale often looks like another David Lynch creation–his 1986 big-screen melodrama sendup Blue Velvet.

While it’s true that McDonough tries to give comic books and graphic novels their due, acknowledging in general ways their “stunning drawing and inventive graphic design,” as well as their “vivid use of color, light and shadow,” he also dismisses them as juvenile via his perception of their intended audience (“I am no longer 12”).  Even while praising Riverdale for addressing what’s often missing from comic book adaptations, he puts down comics in the same breath:  the achievement only comes by way of the television show’s rejection of the “sunny look” of the original comic book source material (perhaps a kind of reverse Lichtenstein form of irony).  Ultimately, for McDonough, Riverdale as a comic book adaptation finds its legitimacy via comparison with an identifiable great artist, auteur David Lynch.

I have to admit that without searching online I would have difficulty naming any graphic artist associated with the Archie line of comics, so the packaging and branding of the medium may well be contributory to the elision of the role of illustrators as artists, something Beaty examines via Disney’s relationship with Carl Barks and Marvel’s relationship with Jack Kirby, among others.

When are comic books and graphic novels art and when are they the source material for art?  How has that line moved from Lichtenstein to today, and where is the line drawn today?  Does having an underage audience exclude something by force from consideration of art?  To what extent does mass consumption exclude something from consideration as art?  What are the socio-cultural assumptions behind the need for identifiable great artists to recognize art objects?  Some of these questions, of course, bring to mind John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and the mystification of art, so it would probably be worthwhile to study how the introduction of comics and graphic novels into the art world operates in relation to Berger’s analysis.

Comics versus Art

For Free Comic Book Day, I offer a review of Bart Beaty’s Comics versus Art, which is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the history of critical debates about the cultural place of comics.

Beaty begins by observing how comics are often taught as literature and expresses a desire to consider them more from a graphic perspective as art.  As he notes, “[o]ne of the significant consequences of the literary turn in the study of comics has been a tendency to drive attention away from comics as a form of visual culture” (18).  His desire to examine comics in relation to art pushes back against historical assertions by Sterling North, David Carrier, Reinhold Reitberger, Wolfgang Fuchs, and others that comics are not art.  Beaty quotes Karl E. Fortress, who even goes so far as to state that “[t]he comic strip artist is not concerned with art problems, problems of form, spatial relationships, and the expressive movement of line.  In fact, a concern with such problems would, in all probability, incapacitate the comic strip artist as such” (19).  Over the course of Comics versus Art, Beaty presents example after example that undermines Fortress’ low placement of comics.  Beaty seems to root his framework for the exclusion of comics from art in the five symbolic handicaps that Thierry Groensteen believes contribute to the devaluation of comics as a cultural form, in short;  1. being a bastard genre, 2. being juvenile in form an audience, 3. being associated with degraded forms like caricature, 4. the non-integration of comics into the visual arts, and 5. their mass production and tiny form.  The placement of mass culture within the high/low hierarchy of the art world plays a big role in Beaty’s project.  He argues that the diminution and disparagement of mass culture and with it a feminization (or emasculation) of comics vis-a-vis the proper (and therefore more masculine) field of the high arts sets up a gendered framework through which the contentious relationship between comics and art can be best understood.

Beaty then examines a range of formal definitions of comics that have been proposed by Martin Sheridan (1942), Colton Waugh (1947), David Kunzle (1973), Will Eisner (1985), M. Thomas Inge (1990), Scott McCloud (1993), R.C. Harvey (1994), Paul Sassienie (1994), Bill Blackbeard (1995).  While this mostly seems like an offset for his eventual argument that understanding comics as art cannot rely upon formal definitions of comics but instead on the consideration of whether a comics art world has developed to validate comics as art, the excursion proves more interesting than mere contrast material.  For example, he compares the national interests of the likes of Blackbeard, who would like to foster national claims of comics being a particularly American genre beginning with The Yellow Kid, with the art history approach of the likes of Kunzle and Sassienie, who would have us date comics back to cave drawings and tapestry work (though perhaps really taking formal shape with Rodolphe Topffer).  Toward the end of this excursion, he credits McCloud with the most well known formal definition of comics, but takes him to task for its limitations:

While his attention to formal properties has helped to reorient discussion of comics away from their strictly social functions, McCloud’s overly expansive conception of “art” (“any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts:  survival and reproduction”) serves to obscure the aesthetic element of comics by regarding almost all human activities as art. (35)

In part, I find Beaty’s dismissal of the formal definition of comics to be a somewhat artificial maneuver to set up his own project of examining whether a comics art world has developed to affirm comics as art.  However, he does offer a strong historical overview of the attempts at formal definitions that in and of itself can be a useful resource for the projects of others, so if it is a straw man it is a substantially filled one.

When Beaty launches into his comics art world project directly in Chapter Three, he starts off with the Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment, which “suggests that, among subordinated peoples, the ego creates the illusion of an enemy that can be blamed for one’s inferiority, the rationalization that one has been thwarted by ‘evil’ forces, and the eventual creation of an ‘imaginary vengeance'” (52).   It is in this context that Beaty argues that the comics world resents the art world as best manifested by the resentment many comics artists seem to feel toward Roy Lichtenstein, who rose to pop art fame by extracting individual frames from actual comics, enlarging them, making them more colorful via his treatment of them, and receiving high art acclaim for the sense of irony that he brought to the surface.  Via Lichtenstein, comics became the raw cultural material from which “real” art could be made.  The manifested resentment can perhaps be best summed up by a wartime story by cartoonist Irv Novick that Steve Duin and Mike Richardson relate in Comics between the Panels, from which Beaty quotes:

He had one curious encounter at camp.  He dropped by the chief of staff’s quarters one night and found a young soldier sitting on a bunk, crying like a baby.  “He said he was an artist,” Novick remembered, “and he had to do menial work, like cleaning up the officers’ quarters.
“It turned out to be Roy Lichtenstein.  The work he showed me was rather poor and academic.”  Feeling sorry for the kid, Novick got on the horn and got him a better job.  “Later on, one of the first things he started copying was my work.  He didn’t come into his own, doing things that were worthwhile, until he started doing things that were less academic than that.  He was just making large copies of the cartoons I had drawn and painting them.  (56)

Beaty argues that Irv Novick, whose work only made its way into the art world via Lichtenstein’s “ironic” treatment, positions himself as the real man against Lichtenstein’s “crying like a baby” in order to try to reverse the way in which Lichtenstein’s fame and stature feminized comics and comic artists.  He calls this a “crisis of masculinity” for comics posits that, contrary to claims by Andreas Huyssen that we’ve moved past the positioning of mass/commercial/popular culture as feminine and high culture as masculine, pop art’s relationship with comic books is one of gendered hierarchy:  “It was clear, therefore, that Lichtenstein’s success stemmed, at least in part, from the association of his work with masculine–that is to say legitimated–values while his source material was held up as an example of the feminized traits in American (mass) culture that the artist had successfully recovered and repatriated.” (64).  The irony that Lichtenstein’s work itself attempts to identify irony in traditional American gender roles is not lost on Beaty.

In ensuing chapters, Beaty looks for identifiable artists and masterpieces in the comics world.  For example, in Chapter Four, after an interesting consideration of the public perception of the comics artist as represented in cinema via Artists and Models (1955) and How to Murder Your Wife (1965), he looks at the cases of Fletcher Hanks and Carl Barks, who could be identified as important cartoonists.  While Beaty uses Hanks to pose the question of the thin distinction between naive art and comics art, his consideration of Barks is more expansive.  Carl Barks was a Disney artist that the Disney studio did not credit but whose fans began to identify via his rendering of Donald Duck being distinct and better drawn than the rendering of other illustrators, enough so that the fans themselves eventually identified Barks as the artist.  While not necessarily deeming Barks’ work to reach masterpiece status, Beaty holds this out as a turning point whereby a community of fans was able to recognize an artist and make his identity as an artist public.  While Beaty spends much time discussing the role of fans in relation to the comics world and the development of a comics art world, I don’t think he ever fully resolves the implicit dichotomy of fans of comics versus patrons of the arts, itself a gendered component of his framework.

In the same chapter, he examines the artistic versus commercial battles of Jack “King” Kirby to own and possess his original works from Marvel, resulting in the return of just 1,900 out of 13,000 pieces for signing a waiver renouncing any claim to characters that he helped create.  Beaty then considers in contrast the rise of Charles Schulz, who maintained full artistic and commercial licensing control over the Peanuts.  What Beaty seems to find most interesting about Schulz is the way in which the comics world positions Schulz as perhaps the first great artist of the comics world.  Nonetheless, the mantle seems to be an awkward one at best, for while The Complete Peanuts stands out as “a connoisseur’s product,” it seems “like an incongruous way to celibrate the work of a man who sold more than a million copies of a book titled Happiness Is a Warm Puppy” (95).  Perhaps ironically, given his framework of the gender dichotomies surrounding high brow art and low brow or mass entertainment, Beaty never quite resolves within his own theorizing the mass-produced commercial aspect of comics that the art world itself seems to hold against the comics world.

In the remaining chapters, Beaty moves to identify comics masterpieces, the post-Lichtenstein debate of high versus low art in the formation of art objects and the role of collectibility (especially vis-a-vis Gary Panter) in the formation of a comics art world, and the place of comics in museum shows and exhibits.  While George Herriman‘s Krazy Kat may be argued to be the first comics masterpiece and EC Comics may have offered masterpiece aesthetics, Beaty’s consideration of Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman is especially worth calling out from the remainder of the book:  “Comics Journal editor Gary Groth contrasted Spiegleman with Robert Crumb, citing the latter as a ‘landmark cartoonist,’ and the former as someone who has produced a ‘breakthrough work,’ which is to suggest that Spiegelman lacks Crumb’s natural drawing gifts but has, on the whole, produced a more significant piece upon which to hang his overall reputation” (117).  In the context of Beaty’s gendered framework, Robert Crumb proves to be the defiant blue collar type man who rejects the high art world as corrupt at best and a big con at worst.  As Crumb puts it, “I’m not interested in a bunch of cake eaters that go sniff around museums” (207).  Meanwhile, Art Spiegelman via Maus proves to be the comics artist who achieves legitimation for himself and comics by producing what is arguably the first fully recognized masterpiece.  This isn’t to say Crumb doesn’t have footing in high art, as his many showings in museums (documented by Beaty) would well attest to, but rather that Crumb even in finding acceptance rejects any need for validation, which for Beaty would be another form of ressentiment.   Rather, via Spiegelman you can track a lineage from George Herriman’s Krazy Kat to Bernard Krigstein’s “Master Race” to Maus that may well elevate appreciation of the formal aesthetics of comics and what they’re capable of expressing in general.  While Lichtenstein may have stood upon comics by highlighting their then perceived limitations, Spiegelman elevates them by showcasing their expressive capacity.

Perhaps also worth mentioning in Beaty’s project is Chapter Six, “Highbrow Comics and Lowbrow Art?  The Shifiting Contexts of the Comics Art Object,” which examines the way in which the rise of publications like RAW and Blab! challenged the prejudices of kitsch and made comics into the low culture objects of choice for highbrows.  For example, according to Beaty, RAW‘s selection of what to include or not to include in the way of comics art “allowed the editors to positon RAW within a particular comics lineage that was at once international, highly formalist, and, given the interests and reputation of mid-century cartoonists such as Wolverton, Rogers, and Hanks, irreverently outside the mainstream of American comics publishing” (135).  Part of what RAW and Blab! did best was to create a space for comics art that sat alongside but separate from the central commercial models of publishing.  Perhaps a shortcoming is that Beaty doesn’t really consider the gendering of this space given his larger framework.

In his final chapter, Beaty acknowledges that the book is difficult to conclude as the “legitimating process that comics are involved in remains very much ongoing” (212).  However, in way of offering a conclusion he focuses on the work and place of Chris Ware, who serves as a significant and necessary bridge between the comics world and the high art world:

Insofar as he so perfectly occupies the space allotted to a cartoonist in the art world at this particular moment in time–innovatively cutting edge in formal terms, technically brilliant as a designer and draftsman, but viciously self deprecating in his willingness to occupy a diminished position in the field, strongly masculinist in his thematic concerns and aesthetic interests, and willfully ironic about the relationship between comics and art in a way that serves to mockingly reinforce, rather than challenge, existing power inequities–it can be said that if Chris Ware did not exist, the art world would have to invent him.  (226)

I don’t know whether that last creative turn of phrase, suggesting that we’ve arrived at a point where the art world has need of the comics world and its artists, does enough to fulfill the promising theoretical framework with which Beaty sets out his project.  And the insertion of “masculinist” there certainly feels more artificial than an organic part of his gendering critique.  However, the sum of its parts (many of which I haven’t even touched on in this blog post, like the effect of attempting to censor comic books in the mid 20th Century) makes Comics versus Art well worth the read.

Tenshi no Tamago (Angel’s Egg)

I watched Tenshi no Tamago (Angel’s Egg) yesterday.  It poses provocative philosophic and spiritual questions and seems fairly existentialist most of the time. Don’t expect a lot of dialogue or a lot of easy answers. Much, apparently, has been made of Mamoru Oshii’s own loss of faith prior to production, but I think leaning too heavily on that can produce an over-read, as can be found online.

In quick summary, the plot revolves around a girl with an egg and a man with a weapon.  Most of the point-of-view is from the girls perspective, but at the beginning and the end it is arguably from the man’s.  The central tension seems to revolve around whether the man intends the girl or her interests regarding the egg any harm.

Two aesthetic features which stand out among many are:  Oshii’s willingness to hold a shot for longer than most viewers would find comfortable and his lingering on mostly still moments with only one or two elements that suggest movement or time.  Among the former, we have scenes where the girl looks at shadowy reflections in the water, a scene where the girl is waiting for a loud mechanized vehicle to approach and pass, a scene where the girl and the man walk in silhouette, and a scene where the man sits and the girl sleeps–the last is the longest of the held shots.  I notice that anime in general seems more willing to use such technique than American animation.  For example, I recently watched episode two of Gunslinger Girl, which many might consider fluff, and yet there’s a held shot early on in a car with a profile and the view passing by the window; it lasts for nearly twenty-five seconds with nothing else happening.  In the case of Tenshi no Tamago‘s scene with the girl sleeping and the man sitting, the shot lasts almost two and a half minutes, with the only things moving most of the time being the fire and the girl (barely).  The lingering quality combined with the limitation of movement to one or two things perhaps presages what we today call cinemagraphs, but here the effect is more than mere accent.  In the case of the girl and the man walking in silhouette and the girl sleeping while the man sleeps, the visuals lay out better than any dialogue could the ambiguous and fraught tension that exists between the girl and the man.  Our understanding of what’s transpiring pivots on the things that resolve from such shots.

Going back to Oshii’s loss of faith and a consideration of the story, there are definitely spiritual elements in Tenshi no Tamago, such as the cross-like weapon the man carries, a seemingly omnipotent eye/orb at the beginning and end, the recitation of the Noah’s Ark story, as well as the silhouetted appearance of an ark, and, of course, the young girl’s apparent faith in the life and eventual hatching of the egg.  At the same time, I think there’s much more going on here than Oshii’s wrestling with Christianity.  I’ll try to keep any spoilers vague, but the following probably contains some degree of story reveals, so you may want to watch the video linked in the anime’s title above before proceeding.

The girl exists in a dystopian world, seemingly post-apocalyptic, and she has with her a large egg.  Initially, when she awakens, the egg is clearly presented as separate from her, though there’s enough ambiguity that one might wonder whether the egg came from her.  Regardless, she places it under her dress, and draws it close to her body,  such that it appears to be a part of her, a pregnancy.  Her interests seem always to lie with the egg.

While I don’t think the man intends the girl or her interests any harm, his interests as manifested in curiosity about the egg and a need to know what is in it do eventually cause her and her interests harm.  The man, unnamed and without memory, can perhaps be seen as an everyman who stands in for men who aspire to a Christ-like stature vis-a-vis his injured hands (see first image above) and his cross-like weapon (below).

The man’s desire for concreteness or knowledge proves ultimately destructive, and if he is to be taken as an everyman it has larger implications.  This isn’t to say that men are necessarily destructive, but perhaps that dominant forms of masculinity that know the world through manufactured symbols or probes or weapons tend to be far more destructive than creative.  It probably does not bode well that the man initially arrives in the presence of the young girl by hopping off one of a series of phallic looking tanks being drawn by a tractor.

The association of men with destruction also lies in one of the most haunting sequences of Tenshi no Tamago, wherein men who otherwise seem dead or mere statues come fervently alive in the pursuit of gigantic shadowy fish that they can never catch.  The shadowy fish swim through the streets of the city.  The men’s obsessive pursuit (perhaps ala Moby Dick) results only in destruction to the city.  The girl is wary of the presence of these men, whether static or in motion.

The girl herself is repeatedly associated with water.  She gathers water, consumes it when the man rejects it, and seems to store it along passages and stairwells. Water arguably has associations with purity, femininity, and life.  From a feminist perspective, it perhaps proves no surprise that when the girl first sees herself as a woman reflected in water it is after she experiences a grievous violation by the man, a violation that resolves the ongoing central tension.

All the religious iconography in the anime is either dead, dying, in decay, or deathly static.  There’s even the skeletal remains of some great bird that the girl hopes to replace from the egg; this great skeleton has a skull like a human head–so extinct angels, perhaps?  The possible critiques of religion, of misplaced or misapplied faith are various, but undeniably any creative energies or life drive within the anime’s allegory reside with the girl/woman, and for this she is ultimately valorized like the Virgin Mary.  Whether you see her final recuperation as affirming and hopeful or as hypocrisy and damning is surely open to interpretation and many shades of gray in between.

In any case, there are enough visual cues to suggest that the events of the anime have happened over and over, repeatedly and in the context of humanity being lost and/or trapped, which may suggest a Sisyphean quality to human efforts and perceived duties, gendered or otherwise.

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.