What Makes Japan So Cool?: An Interview with Ian Condry

From time to time, I have shared with my readers some of the podcasts being generated by the Cool Japan Project, a joint research effort at MIT and Harvard, focused on understanding more fully Japanese popular culture -- especially anime and manga but also the culture around popular music and toys/collectibles. The project is sponsored by the MIT Japan Program, Harvard's Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, the Harvard Asia Center, MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures, and MIT Comparative Media Studies. Today, I thought I would introduce you to the man behind the Cool Japan Project -- one of the coolest guys I know at MIT, my colleague Ian Condry. I had the good fortune to go on a tour of the Japanese media industry a few years ago along with Condry and it certainly opened my eyes to the richness and complexity of what's going on in that part of the world. Now a junior faculty member in the MIT Foreign Languages and Literatures program who is affiliated with CMS, Condry was trained as an anthropologist and so his research into Japanese popular culture is shaped by extensive field work at sites of both production and consumption. His first major book, Hip Hop Japan: Rap and the Paths of Cultural Globalization came out earlier this year and is highly recommended to anyone who wants to better understand contemporary hip hop music, the globalization process, or the links between Japanese and American popular culture. He is now hard at work on a second book project, Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Culture, which has taken him behind the scenes into some of the key studios producing contemporary anime and has brought key players in that space to MIT to speak as part of the Cool Japan program. In this interview, he talks both about Japanese hip hop and about the process which has brought anime and manga to the attention of American consumers.

If American youth are drawn to Japanese popular culture, your book explores the opposite phenomenon -- hip hop culture in Japan. Why were the Japanese drawn initially to this form of American popular culture?

Hip-hop music and breakdance were mind-blowing to youth audiences worldwide when both appeared overseas in the early eighties. The sound was so different (where's the band? why isn't he singing?) that it drew many people who had grown tired of rock and roll. So too with breakdance which had a competitive energy that was impossible to miss. Both offered the promise of liberation into an uncharted realm. The dynamics have changed, now that hip-hop is bona-fide pop music, but the transformative impact was unmistakable. Interestingly, the first audiences in Japan didn't understand what was going one, but they saw it was something different, and that sparked curiosity that kept growing. The early days of transformative early cultures are a mysterious and wonderful thing.

In your book Hip-Hop Japan, you suggest that the Japanese use this musical form to explore their own themes. What kinds of topics does hip hop address in the Japanese context?

Some of the most interesting recent rap songs in Japan are addressing America's misguided "war on terror," and the complicity of the Japanese media and the national government. The group King Giddra, for example, has a song called "911," which uses images of Hiroshima's ground zero after the bombing as a way of rethinking ground zero New York. The group Rhymester raps about America's hypocrisy in always telling Japan to "follow the path of peace" but then starts bombing Baghdad. By the same token, they see the Japanese government as little more than "yellow Uncle Sam."

Many rap artists are addressing other aspects of Japan's changing society, from women trying to find a place in a patriarchal society, to rappers questioning the failure of the economy, to criticism of the pornography industry, youth violence, and drug abuse. There is plenty of Japanese rap that tends to light and poppy, or even pseudo-gangsta and tough, but there are also some of the most striking alternative voices in Japan appearing in Japanese hip-hop music.

Can you describe something of the research process that went into this book? How

were you able to get such access to the Japanese hip hop world?

Fieldwork is an amazing thing. Going to the nightclubs week after week, month after month, over a year and a half (1995-97), formed the basis of my research. There I met the musicians, record company reps, magazine writers, organizers, and all manner of fans, from the deep b-boys and b-girls, with their hair and clothes just so, to the "first-time checking out a club" kids. It was clearly the interaction among these groups that built the hip-hop scene, from the largely underground scene it was then, to the expanding underground and mainstream elements that have developed today.

Hip-hop clubs in Japan are active from midnight to 5 a.m., with the live show happening around 2am, well after the trains have stopped running for the night. That means everyone is stuck at the club to the first trains around dawn. This turned out to be a boon for fieldwork. By 3am, most of the people had told all the jokes and stories and gossip they had to tell to their friends already, and many people were willing to come up and find out what this gaijin (foreigner) with a notepad was doing there.

Access to the hip-hop in Japan kept developing over the years following during periodic trips to Tokyo once or twice a year. Over time, I got to know some of the artists more personally. Watching their careers change and develop over almost the 10 year span of the book's research meant that I could see the struggles of artists coping with a quixotic pop world, where youthfulness is highly valued.

Something curious must be going on with race as an African-American music form gets taken up in an Asian culture where there are relatively few black people. What do you see as the racial politics of Japanese hip hop?

Race is very important for understanding hip-hop in Japan. Young Japanese (and many white Americans, too, I would add) are drawn to the "blackness" of hip-hop, most visibly in the clothing styles, hair styles, but also in a widening sensibility towards a particular musical style, born of verbal dexterity and polyrhythmic nuance, as well as the creativity involved in sampling and remixing.

The images of African-Americans in Japan tend to reinforce stereotypes, and hip-hop can be viewed as one of vehicles for these stereotypes. But at the same time, the fans who get more deeply into the music and culture are forced to deal with questions of race, questions of where Japanese fit into the matrix of white and black, questions of how Japanese racial nationalism still influences the ways resident Koreans, Ainu, and Okinawans have been treated historically, and how they are treated today. In these ways, the impact of hip-hop on racial attitudes has been complex, at times contradictory, but, I believe, generally among hip-hop fans, moving in some right directions.

Your next project has you examining anime and manga more directly. What can you tell us about this new project?

My new book project is called Global Anime: The Making of Japan's Transnational Popular Culture. I'm interested in "the making of" anime culture as an entire global circuit of media production. I spent the summer of 2006 in several Tokyo animation studios, primarily Gonzo and Aniplex, but also with visits to Ghibli, Sunrise, Aniplex, Studio 4 Degrees C. and others. I observed the collaborative creativity that goes into anime production, how they divide the process - characters, premise, worldview - and how the ideas about creativity become enacted, actually made real, through the daily practices of making anime, frame-by-frame.

To me, Japanese anime provides an important, non-Western case study of the ways media goes global, both by speaking across cultural boundaries while retaining a kind of cultural difference (have you ever seen so many giant robots or transforming schoolgirls?). Anime's connection to the world of Japanese comic books, woodblock prints and ancient picture scrolls is often deemed sufficient to prove a kind of cultural particularity, but at the same time, the development of Japan's anime industry was closely linked to American comics, Disney and other pioneering cartoon creators.

I also explore the ways anime fans, first in Japan and then overseas, have been integral to the expansion of anime culture. Too often we are told to "follow the money" when we analyze media production, but what I see is that the money follows the creativity of artists who are able to capture audiences, and, at the same time, audiences can rescue lost gems in ways that many entertainment companies seem not yet to recognize. By looking at the case of Japanese anime, I believe we can come to a deeper understanding of national differences and global synergies, the evolving worlds of media, digital technology, and the ways artists, fans, and businesses interact.

How has this growing interest in "Japan Cool" impacted the study of Japanese

language and culture in the United States?

The idea of "cool Japan" really took off with the publication of journalist Douglas McGray's 2002 article "Japan's Gross National Cool" in Foreign Policy magazine. He argued that Japan had become a "cultural superpower," despite a decade-long recession that began in the early nineties. It has also changed the attitudes of American's interested in Japan

In the eighties, when I began studying Japanese language in college, my classmates tended to be Economics majors who planned to make a killing in international trade. They wanted to know how to bow and hand over business cards, but seldom seemed interested in Japanese history or culture Today, the majority, though not all, students of Japanese language and culture are drawn to Japan because of their experience with anime and manga. They are more interested in the culture, history, religion, and educational system of Japan. To me, it's a much more interesting group, more broad-minded, socially aware, and intellectually curious.

Some Japanese policy makers view the overseas interest in manga and anime as a vehicle for "soft power," political scientist Joseph Nye's term for political power that follows from the attractiveness of a nation's culture and ideals. I think the effect is in fact different. Manga doesn't convey "power" so much as it provides an entryway to a larger world, but one that is clearly conflicted and contradictory. The real power of popular culture is make stereotypes seems less compelling, and to force us to ask more complex questions about cultural differences.

Why do you think anime and manga have succeeded here while Jpop has largely

failed to generate the same level of interest?

I give American anime fans a lot of credit for driving the interest in anime through devoted, unpaid efforts to make the media available. In the eighties, they used VCRs, and today it's fansubs online through sites like www.animesuki.com.

Manga in Japan are such a powerful media because of the intense competition among manga artists. The largest weekly magazines carry about 15 serialized stories. Each week the publishers received about 3000 postcards, which list three most interesting and three dullest stories. A few weeks' of poor grades, and dull stories get cut. The manga stories that have survived for years are the ones that have maintained their edge. The fact that it is easy to read manga for free in convenience stores or borrowed from friends also means that fans are exposed to a lot of different manga and thereby become more sophisticated judges as well.

I think record companies in Japan haven't made much effort to break into the US market in part because US prices are about half that of Japan's, so they feel they won't make money. From the American perspective, Japanese CDs are simply too expensive, running about double the price of US albums. Both sides of the equation limit the flow.

The Future Isn't What It Used to Be: An Interview with Comics Creator Dean Motter

Later today, I am flying to Berlin where I will be speaking at a conference on "Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence." The conference will include talks on comics creators from around the world whose work has been particularly shaped by their conception of the city. My talk will center on the concept of retrofuturism and the works of Dean Motter (Mister X, Terminal City, Electropolis). I hope to be reporting on the conference in the blog next week but for those of you who are interested in what I mean by retrofuturism, you should check out this column I wrote for Technology Review a few years back, discussing the topic in relation to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Art Spigelman's In the Shadow of No Towers. Basically, Retrofuturism refers to a subgenre of science fiction which seeks to revisit older imaginings of the future. It is particularly fascinated with the iconography of the future city as seen, say, at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, on the cover of old science fiction and popular science magazines, in Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and so forth.

As I was getting ready to write my talk, I reached out to Dean Motter to see if he would be open to being interviewed (as part of my research and for the blog). What follows is the exchange, conducted over the past week or so, via e-mail. I have long been a fan of Motter's comics, which manage to be forward-thinking in their use of the comics medium and retro-thinking in their visual style, narrative elements, and themes. Mister X, which featured early artwork from the Hernandez Brothers and Seth, among many other collaborators, became one of the most influential American comics of the 1980s. His subsequent work has continued to explore the themes of that earlier work, pushing them in new directions, and personally, I think his exploration of what he prefers to call "antique futurism" reaches its peak in Terminal City, my favorite of the three series he has developed around this theme.

All three books, though, deal with the idea of a fallen utopia -- a great city, built with futurist intentions, which has stiffled in the face of social and cultural change, never achieving its full potential, and in fact, becoming deeply destructive to the people who live there. In this way, he is able to read the iconography of the technological utopians, which shaped early science fiction, through the lens of its critics, who have been influential in more recent work within the genre.

As I have dug more deeply into Motter's background, I quickly became interested in the fact that he was a student and intellectual ally of Marshall McLuhan, a connection which I still hope to explore more deeply when I turn my conference talk into a published essay. Motter has also worked extensively in publishing (where he helped to protect the literary legacy of some of science fiction's early masters) and in the design of record covers. In the following interview, I focus primarily on his images of the city but it also provides a good introduction to some of the central concerns in his comics career.

I was intrigued to read in the bio at the back of Terminal City that you "studied at Marshall McLuhan's Institute for Culture and Technology." Did you work directly with McLuhan or was this after his death? What drew you there to study in the first place?

I studied MEDIA under his son (and ghost-writer) Eric, while enrolled in a progressive art and media course at Fanshawe College in London. After I graduated I moved to Toronto and did continue to work with Eric, as well as his father. I was considered the resident expert on comics art the institute, consulted in a modest way on his final book The Laws of the Media, and was an invited participant in many, many seminars. McLuhan loved talking about comic art and its relation to iconics. (He loved Pogo, L'il Abner, Superman and always compared them to the Altamira Cave drawings, the stained-glass designs of St, George & the Dragon, and the illuminated manuscripts of medieval monks. It always made some kind of sense to those of us who listened. And still does.) He was a wonderful avuncular acquaintance and mentor of enormous influence.

What influence do you think McLuhan's ideas have had on your later work?

At his most popular, McLuhan's detractors (and they were everywhere- from faux-intellectuals like Walter Cronkite to his fellow Canuck Pierre Berton) were many and obstreperous--and all proven wrong today. They scoffed at his ideas as 'bad science-fiction.' His ideas simply could NOT be credible! (hhmph.) Imagine a world of electronic interactive media, where phones and television had merged into a seamless media, where every household had a terminal that connected them to some kind of 'world wide network.' Crackpot ideas. Could his critics have been more unimaginative? Marshall represented the worst low-brow 'Buck Rogers' stuff to the effetes who were thinking so last-century. Imagine! An electronic society where any citizen could one day broadcast their own videos to nearly anywhere in the world in some kind of crazy 'You-Tube 'venue.'. Where the printed version of the W.R. Hearst-style newspaper would shrivel into near impotence. Where the 'Global Village' (Marshall's own term!) was considered frivolous. Cronkite and Berton have been proven the gigantic ignoramae, Simply because they were supercilious stuffed -shirts. Not because they weren't informed.

I digress. I try to recast some of his notions in the vernacular of the technology- or the imagined technology of the 50s- when he first wrote The Mechanical Bride and Understanding Media. In the prescient words of Tom Wolfe back in the 70s - "What if he's Right?"

Oh, Tom....

Vintage science fiction authors and works have been a recurring theme across your work in a number of media -- going back to the comics you helped to produce for Andromeda comics, which adapted the works of Arthur C. Clarke and A.E. van Vogt. and continuing through your role as Editorial Art Director at Byron Preiss Visual Publications where you worked with Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. What connections do you see between this work with classic science fiction authors and texts and the themes that emerged through Mister X, Terminal City, and Electropolis?

Working 0n Andromeda and more importantly at Byron Preiss Visual Publications with so many great authors, especially Asimov, Bradbury and Ellison gave me a deep appreciation of how well-written science fiction could be 'exploited' by the then largely adolescent-male oriented media. At Byron's I also art-directed many great artists (Wayne Barlowe, Ralph McQuarrie, Matt Wagner, Dave Gibbons, Rian Hughes, David Lloyd, the list is almost endless, and I even had the chance to work with Eisner and Kurtzman. It was akin, it its own way, to sitting at McLuhan's feet and learning from true visionaries. )

You have coined the phrase, "antique futurism" to refer to the ways you base your fictional worlds on the utopian visions of the future from the mid-twentieth century American imagination. Can you explain what you mean by this phrase and how it relates to your work?

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, our society has been predicting the cultural future via the machine. Whether in gigantic architectural visions such as the World Fairs, or the near-whimsical Popular Science covers, dreams of flying cars, household robotic servants, or jet packs. These visions, while engineering achievements of varying degrees of success and accuracy, were often oblivious as to how the culture would change. McLuhan (as well as the fictions of Orwell, Huxley and H.G. Wells) considered what would happen to humanity itself, not simply the evolution or devolution of our artifacts. The same kind of mystery that the ancient Egyptians pose for us would certainly puzzle our descendants if civilization came to a sudden stop as it seems to have done for eons. So 'antique futurism' became my way of having some fun, while raising the questions.

What is it about these particular visions of the future which have so captured your imagination? What relevance do you see these visions having for our present society?

It's a kind of funhouse mirror of our persistent state of naivete when it comes to technology. Our blind faith in the idea that technology can act as a cure-all? I love how that concept is reflected the impossible Rube Goldberg contraptions and hallucinogenic reversals that have bent the standard laws of physics. Be it Gates & Jobs or Nikola Tesla.

How would you characterize the attitude your works take to those earlier visions of tomorrow -- nostalgic, ironic, campy, or some combination of all three?

Definitely the combination. Each approach has different nuances- different modes of entertainment. Some dramatically different from the others. German expressionist film, the 50's version of the 'house of tomorrow combined with a hard-boiled gumshoe pastiche-VERY different genres, but very compatible. In my mind, anyway. While exploring 'vintage sources' I have begun to think anything is game. Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theatre had the best take on it; in his introduction to Terminal City -- A city being imagined in the 30s, built in the 40s and stalled somewhere in the 50s. I'd add that is was forlornly recalled in the 80s ('dreamed in other men's bodies, I think he said'.)

Mister X (1984) appears at about the same time as Mirrorshades:The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) which included William Gibsons' "The Gernsback Continuium" and Rudy Rucker's "Tales of Houdini," both of which evoke themes I associate

with your comics. It is also telling that the phrase, "retro-futurism" that is often used to describe your work was coined by art critic Lloyd Dunn in 1983. Was there something in the air at the time which was leading to this reconsideration of "yesterday's tomorrows"? Is all this just a product of the anticipation that surrounded the year, 1984?

Of course, for me, there was approach of 1984, also the millennium looming on the horizon. But also it was the rise of Punk Rock and New Wave pop culture, the sudden ubiquity of synthesizers in music, 'theoretically' giving a single musician or two the power of an orchestra, the artistic mastery of technology and a non-chaotic, almost 'Aryan' control over their art (as opposed to the found art of Warhol, or action paintings of Pollock a few years earlier.) Very 'futuristic'-- combined with the Orwellian proletariat underpinnings of Punk Rock. It was an exciting time. Certainly Gibson and Rucker were operating in a milieu I was reading (Gibson's. The Differential Engine is one of my very favorite novels of all time. But J.G. Ballard, Thomas Berger and Harlan Ellison remain my literary patron saints. )

Some critics have linked your particular brand of "antique futurism" to the images of futuristic cities found in François Schuiten's Les Cités Obscures. What relationship, if any, do you see between Schuiten's future cities and your own work?

We both share a vision of gigantic, somehow old-fashioned urban landscapes populated by cold-hearted antagonists/protagonists- many 'temporally' disadvantaged'. That's obvious- we both derive it, I believe from Metropolis, and Hugh Ferris's drawings as well as newsreels of New York's golden age of skyscraper construction in the early part of the 20th century. I wasn't familiar with Schuiten's work until I was well into the creation of Mister X. His exposure at that time was minimal, maybe in the pages of Heavy Metal (Metal Hurlant) meaning his work was eclipsed at the time by their superstar, Moebius.

The visual style of Mister X becomes increasing abstract, stylized, and disorienting as the series continued. Is this growing abstraction a reflection of the mental state of the characters? Of the increased sophistication of readers now trained to read your book? Of the differences between the succession of the artists you were working with?

Again it was that combination of factors. Once Mister X went from being primarily a burlesque of a 'gangster crime story'- to a tale about existential madness, we could get away with more abstractions- It hit its peak with Seth's final issue (my penultimate issue- no. 13) where he had refined his style into a very elegant 'retro' look. The issue 14 finale was concocted with lackluster fill-in art (and my admittedly uninspired script.)- but it was SO unsatisfying I went back and did REDUX version myself a couple years back for the ibooks anthology - cribbing shamelessly from the Hernandez Bros, Rivoche, and Seth (as well as adding as much of my personal style I could fit)-- just to wrap it up properly- mind you some decades late - (but it is also available in a solo edition at www.lulu.com)

There are some very consistent elements in your conception of the city that run across the books, despite or perhaps because of the shifts in the visual styles with which these cities get represented. You have worked with artists who have their own distinctive approaches, many of whom share your interests with earlier graphic styles and conventions. How were you able to maintain such a consistent set of images across all of these collaborations? Can you describe something of the design process that went into the development of these cities?

Well, this is largely a question of 'chemistry' I have been lucky to have found simpatico collaborators. But I have always been careful to supply reference and inspiration when I had a particular vision in mind. As you can imagine I have a substantial library of such imagery, But usually my friends were already in possession of the source material and we enjoyed 'fanboy' discussions of Loewy, Hood, Corrbussier, Tesla, etc.

What similarities and differences do you see in the key cities that run through your works -- Radiant City, Electra City and Terminal City? You portray each of them as cities that have fallen short of their utopian beginnings, yet they seem to have fallen for somewhat different reasons. What draws you to this image of the fallen utopia?

It's a symbolic thing I suppose. The idea of a huge city that has seen better days isn't very 'realistic.' Except in antiquity. Modern cities are organic, evolving and constantly being re-invented. But often we can't say the same thing about the artistic culture.

Aesthetic values wax and wane. There are obvious peaks and valleys, and sometimes complete expirations. The same can't be said for the physical world we have constructed to live in. It remains, even if its inspirations fade from memory. "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair..." quotes Shelley in Ozymandias.

In one panel of Terminal City, you jokingly success that these cities co-exist in the same reality as Metropolis or Gotham City. What similarities or differences do you see in these different conceptions of cities in comics?

Very little can be said about cities in comics that I read in my youth.. There were a few exceptions. McKay, Williamson, Wood, Kirby, Eisner...until recently. It was all pretty generic, and illustrators rarely did more than draw boxes with windows. Architecture was boring to draw when compared to super-heroes, villains and monsters. Anatomy was a difficult enough to master- but perspective! That involved math, geometry. Schoolroom stuff, So only those with a native talent made a mark. Even Gotham City's architectural characteristics didn't take on any personality until after Mister Xcame out.

Tim Burton and art director Anton Furst told me that there were Mister X comics scattered all over the art department when I visited the set of the first Batman film. And I have to confess that as I wandered the studio with DC staff, the sets looked AWFULLY familiar. And I did get some furtive glances from my tour-mates.

When you draw on the iconography of the 1939 World's Fair, of Just Imagine and Things to Come, of Alex Raymond, you also evoke the social vision behind those design principles which often had to do with central planning, social engineering, and technocratic policies. I see your idea of "psychetecture" and its corruptions as a kind of critique of some of those earlier ideas that cities could be designed and human beings engineered. I also see Mister X as in some ways a response to Ayn Rand's own critique of those ideas in The Fountainhead. To what degree are you using the collapse of these utopian cities as a critique of the political, economic, and social philosophies which informed the works of the 1930s and 1940s that inspired them?

The great dream between the wars that mechanization could solve society's ills. War machines had after all won us the Great War. But I suppose it was the image of Hindenburg, and The War of the Worlds broadcast that caused the modern American culture to begin to lose their optimism --and then there was the Great Depression- We have never completely abandoned the central planning model. A concept our enemy in the following war championed to the extreme.

McLuhan CONSTANTLY warned that de-centralization was inevitable in the electric age. (Rhetorical question-- just where is the server for the site this interview is posted on? I'd be surprised if its downtown ANYWHERE. USA.)

Social historians have noted that at the 1939 Worlds Fair, the utopian images of Futurama and of the experimental architecture co-existed with a series of sideshow attractions which could not have been more earthy in their inspirations. Throughout your books, you seem as fascinated with those side show entrepreneurs and the night clubs of the era as you are with the utopian visionaries. Can you speak to the role that carnival showman, daredevils, boxers, and nightclub performers play in your stories?

That era of entertainment was rich with spectacle. Live public exhibition isn't much these days- With TV and the internet now doing most of the work. Arena shows and NASCAR are commonplace. But in the early part of the 20th century, show business was big, clumsy and dangerous (in the pre-Disneyland era,) and pretty 'rustic' (in terms of finish.) It was exotic, and not always predictable (Chris Angel notwithstanding.) The industry simply makes it easier and safer today.

There is a lesser parallel in my own business- when I was doing album cover design the craftsmanship was at once delicate and brutal. Emulsion stripping, airbrushing with toxic pigments, dye-transfer prints with the masking, burning, dodging, press-type (Letraset)- it was all about illusion, -creating the impression of masterful printmakers. It was simulation- ledger-main. All of that technology- now primitive and quaint- obsolete! It was replaced, just as McLuhan had predicted 30 years back. To pure scorn! It was all replaced with desktop publishing technology- accessible to amateurs and experts alike. The day of the self-trained, dedicated artisan had passed in a mere couple decades. A tiny bit earlier than McLuhan had forecasted.

If you draw on visual references to earlier constructions of the world of tomorrow, you also borrow stock characters and plots from pulp fiction and early comics across your books. Can you speak about the ways your characters and plots rework elements from the pulps or from Dick Tracy?

This was often more for my own amusement. These extraordinary environs needed to be populated by familiar, likeable characters. Archetypal, even cliché. This also kept the stories from becoming too grim. Strictly fun. McLuhan had something to say on such matters. From Cliche to Archtype remains one of the most useful reference books in my library.

Your books also make extensive use of verbal puns or visual in-jokes that make playful references to iconic figures of the utopian visions that shaped yesterday's tommorrows -- for example, your references to Edison, Tesla, Gernsback, Huxley, or Orwell, across the various books in the Terminal City series. The result is a layering of references and allusions which shape reader's expectations about your stories. How might you describe the expectations you place on the readers of your work? Do you expect them to know about all of these references coming into the book? Do you see the book as opening them up to a larger library of stories of which your tales are simply the most recent installment?

Of course I hope my readers are hip to my world by now. Initially the approach was to put as many of my influences on the table without the stories becoming scrapbooks for 'Professor Motter's hobbyhorses.' This was the way I gave a wink and a nod to those who were similarly inspired by the same subjects. It paid off, I think. I have met many like-minded creators as a result.

But I was trained by looking at the masters. The McLuhans were Joyce freaks. Eliot masters. Pound scholars. Finnegan's Wake was their Talmud. And it was (remains) FULL of treasures. I was convinced that I also had hidden treasures in my auxiliary 'influences.' Maybe not so profound but I was optimistic-though not overly so. The comic book arts are iconographic- as McLuhan ALWAYS insisted. R. CRUMB, Maus, Dark Knight, Watchmen proved that point in the 80's. In this millennium, the mixture of comic book media, the motion picture and the internet makes it a bit harder to distinguish the watersheds. So what? We comic-book folks have been laboring on that for years.

What did you think of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? Did you see this as a kindred project or do you see them as using retro-futurism in a different way?

A favorite film. I was asked to be involved in the project very early on, But I was more concerned with getting my (never-quite-viable) Terminal City film into the works- plus I didn't see how a film with THAT title would ever make it to the theaters. See? Predicting the future isn't as easy as it looks....

What are you working on now? Have we seen the last of Electropolis?

At the moment I have finished Unique, with Platinum, (a bit of a change pace- as it takes place in modern day Chicago and its counterpart nocturnal dimension), I am also well into writing and drawing next year's re-boot Mister X series for Dark Horse.

I am also at work on a children's fantasy book about houses around the world with long-time friend, collaborator and ex-sweetheart Judith Dupré,. She's written definitive titles on skyscrapers, bridges, churches and other icons of the built world. She uses the archetypal forms of architecture to comment on the book itself as an object to be revered or a vestigial cultural artifact to be mourned. Her commentaries more eloquently parallel many of my own.

Electropolis - It will be collected soon. And maybe another series down the road. As the omnipresent TV narrator reminded us way back when: 'there's a million stories in 'The Naked City'- this is just one of them..."

Cartoons -- Modern and Postmodern

Having spent much too much time this week setting up the Fan Boy/ Fan Girl Detante and getting involved in the debates surrounding FanLib, I hope I will be forgiven for a post which is mostly a series of interesting links that I have had stumbled on recently, all surrounding one of my favorite topics -- comics and animation. Modern

I recently had the pleasure of introducing CMS graduate student Andres Lombana to the astonishingly original cartoons which came out of UPA studios in the 1950s, including my personal favorite, Gerald McBoing Boing, or their highly stylized version of The Tell Tale Heart or their adaptation of James Thurber's The Unicorn in the Garden or the oft-neglected Christopher Crumpet and Family Circus or... Andres returned the favor by introducing me to a really interesting blog that author Amid Amidi has created around his book, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. The blog is a treasure trove of classic commercials and cartoons, often obscure early works by important animators, as well as storyboards, sketches, promotional materials, and the like, surrounded by interesting critical commentary. I strongly recommend this site to anyone who shares my interest in 50s animation or who is simply interested in understanding the intersection between modern art and popular culture.

Postmodern 1

Have you seen A Fair(y) Use Tale? It's a provocative video circulating on YouTube and where-ever else fine mash-up videos can be found which explains core concepts in American copyright law, including, of course, fair use, through the appropriation and re-contextualizing of segments from classic Disney movies. The film was produced by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. The video is being distributed by the Media Education Foundation. (I don't always like the films produced by the MEF, which often seem to be heavy-handed and pedantic and tend to demonize both media producers and consumers, but this seems like an especially valuable contribution to our teaching about the current copyright wars and came just in time to be a welcome relief from grading papers.)

As the closing moments of the film suggest, Disney as a company has been the big bad wolf of American copyright law, bullying everyone from local daycare centers to the Academy Awards which seeks to quote images from their films. Some have gone so far as to describe the current copyright statues as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act because it essentially keeps expanding the period covered by copyright to insure that the rodent never falls into public domain. So, it seems only fair that Disney sounds and images be used to help the public understand its rights and responsibilities under current intellectual property law. That said, I'd watch this one now before the Cease and Desist letters start to fly.

Postmodern 2

The Apple vs. PC advertising campaign has become one of the most quoted themes in contemporary popular culture. Not since the "Whazzup" madness of a few years ago have we seen a commercial which provided such a rich and recurring template for grassroots appropriations. So, it is not surprising that fan boys are using it to comment on the ever-green debate about the relative merits of DC vs. Marvel superheroes. You can see the results in two very different videos making their rounds these days -- the first focuses on the two companies and their products, the second pits Batman against Spider-man, suggesting that Peter Parker has a way to go before he can match Bruce Wayne's record for pain and personal trauma.

Enjoy!

Ghetto Libretto: The Sexy Comics of Mexico

Today, I thought I would share one more example of the autobiographical essays on popular culture produced by the students in my Media Theory and Methods class. In this case, the focus is on Mexican comic books, a topic which I thought would be of particular interest to the sequential tarts and the other comics fans who read this blog.

Most of this covers are painted by cover star artist Bazaldua, and the rest by his imitators. The stylized stereotype of the female is always the central element, usually depicted in a pornographic fashion. Another important element in the compositions is the text, usually reinforcing the images with ingeniuos word games that could be understood in several ways, usually all dirty. It is evident by looking at this covers how the Librettos have incoporated all the other comicbook genres that were present in the mexican news stands before. Humor, Melodrama, Adventure and Science Fiction, Action thrillers, Police and Detective stories, Political Satire and Costumbrist Realism have all been embedded into the Librettos.

The Sexy Comics of Mexico

Luis E. Blackaller

Maria comes from a small village in the Lacandona jungle in south east Mexico. Like many more in the Mexican countryside, she decided to migrate north looking for better opportunities. She is pretty and naive, and has no problem finding a job after crossing the border, as a maid in a secret pentagon facility. The US military enjoys having her around, and the flirtatious officials try to get under her skirt all the time, but she always manages to avoid them in a quite innocent way. She is very proud of her new job, and gets paid top money that she sends to her village every Friday.

What she doesn't know is that, as any other secret pentagon facility, the place she works for hosts an ultra secret science project, and she is about to find out. Socrates is a genius gorilla developed by the military science as a genetic experiment. He is kept in secret for studies in the basement, where they treat him like a Harvard scholar. He has an extensive library, a record collection, a pool table, cigars, fine wines and cognac. All but his freedom, or a single ray of sunlight. He is more intelligent than every human being has ever been, but he doesn't suspect he has been held captive, because all he knows is what's around him since he was born. A story about a nuclear war has been fabricated to him so there is an excuse to live underground and still talk about the outside world.

One night, Maria gets lost in the corridors of the facilities, looking for a new bottle of Mister Clean, and she somehow manages to enter Socrates' quarters. Of course they fall in love immediately. After making out for a while, they hear a noise and he hides her in the closet. Just from talking to Maria for a few minutes, Socrates has been able to figure out everything.

During the following weeks, they devise an escape plan together, and using his intelligence and her charms, they get away with confusing the whole US military, the border patrol, and even some Mexicans. After a week of adventures they make it back to the Lacandona jungle, and settle down there, not having to worry about getting found ever again, because all 26 of Maria's cousins look just exactly like Socrates.

Yesenia is making out with her boyfriend under a tree by a small road in the outskirts of Mexico City. They live in a nearby slum, and visit their corner under the tree every afternoon to enjoy privacy time. They must be seventeen years old. It is getting late, and her boyfriend insistently tries to have sex with her, but she wants to wait for a better moment.

Suddenly, they get interrupted by a car crashing on a curve not faraway from them. They try to help the victims, but all the people in the car, a rich family it seems, are dead. Yesenia tells her boyfriend to call an ambulance or the police, but he stops her as he has a better idea. He starts looking for valuable stuff in the car and on the corpses. After collecting all the goods, he doesn't think they should call anyone anymore, because they would immediately be linked with robbing the victims from all their goods, and they are already all death, so what would be the difference anyway?

Yesenia still thinks he is wrong, but agrees with him, and they go back to her home, where her father, a big, nasty drunken man, is waiting for her because it is late. Yesenia's father threatens to beat both her and her boyfriend, but his eye spots their pockets full of stuff, and he changes his mind. He makes them give him everything, and makes them take him to the site of the accident. He's had an idea.

Yesenia's father runs a taco stand by the side of the road, and business has not been good lately because dogs and cats are too skinny and sick to make good tacos out of them lately. With the help of Yesenia and her boyfriend, he takes the corpses to the taco stand, chops them off, and puts them in the fridge. "Tomorrow is gonna be good business", he thinks. Indeed, so good it is that he gets greedy, and, after threatening Yesenia and her boyfriend with making tacos out of them himself, he forces them to devise a way of causing more accidents on the road, to provide him with more fresh corpses every week.

People are loving the tacos. Excellent recipe, excellent meat. But Yesenia, and even her boyfriend, are so disgusted with the whole situation, that they violently murder her father after a confrontation where they refuse to kill more people, and turn him into tacos as well. People didn't like the tacos that week. Yesenia and her boyfriend get together, and keep on running the business themselves, but they change the menu to seafood.

In Mexico, comicbooks and visual storytelling have had a life of their own. They have degenerated since the times of Posada, el Chango Garcia Cabral and many others to what they are now, a particular mixture of Mexican soap opera melodrama with softcore porn and pulp fiction. I want to explain how that happened through my experience as one that read his first comicbook when he could not still read words.

The two stories I have just summarized are from a couple of books from what in the US is called Ghetto Librettos. They were written by Juan Jose Hernandez Sotelo (1953-2002). Ghetto Librettos are only read by the Mexican servant class. They are called "sensacionales" in Mexico, but I chose to use the Ghetto Libretto term because it is more descriptive of what they are about. Ghetto Librettos are distributed weekly through the Mexican news stands as a small format, cheap form of entertainment for the male Mexican working class. Some of them are meant for the female reader, but those rely more in the melodrama than in depictions of sex. And today, the only comicbooks available in Mexico for children are imported from the north. It didn't use to be like that.

Ghetto Librettos can be purchased in a secondhand magazine stand by five a dollar. The second story I told was first mentioned in a book Daniel Raeburn wrote on the subject. It is relevant to mention Dan's work which called the attention of the US public to Ghetto Librettos; they are largely ignored by almost everyone in Mexico, even the people that read them.

Mexico is run by a somewhat subtle, but quite obvious caste system. Brown people use the subway, white people have cars, and you will never, ever find a white four year old child begging for money on the streets, it is that simple. This "master servant" relation was established during the conquest and colonization of "the New Spain", which is what Mexico was called back then. The "Indians" were placed in the bottom layer of society, treated like slaves without officially being labeled as such. Close to them were the few black people, concentrated mostly in the Caribbean and along the Gulf. Above them were all the possible mixtures of black-indian, indian-spanish and spanish-black. They were called mestizos and would run the indigenous population for the Europeans. The white people were separated too, in such a way that the ones with a pure European lineage, but born in America (called criollos) would manage the whole colony for their Spanish masters. These white Mexicans were the ones that eventually led to the independence wars, supposedly abolishing the caste system. One hundred years later they became the middle class that led the poor to another revolution, this time against the presidence-dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, which was, interestingly enough, of indigenous lineage.

Up to this day, the master-servant relation persists in the media, and is probably there, and in religion, where the different classes in Mexico share their cultures. Depictions of class separation are strong even in some of the most internationally renowned Mexican directed films -- Babel, 21 Grams and Amores Perros -- all derive their dramatic fuel from the collision of separate class worlds. They all borrow from The Rich Can Cry Too, a famous Mexican soap opera from the 70s, that epitomizes the structure of Mexican television melodramas. This is not a surprise, because the director of the three films started his career by working for Televisa, the studio that runs Mexico's soap opera global empire, for more than a decade. In the three films, the rich are suffering, and the cause of their suffering originates from the violent encounters with those wild and reckless poor, which curiously enough, will get out of control after interacting with an expensive commodity that was given to them by chance, in the form of a first class fighting dog, an expensive truck, or a cutting edge hunting gun.

Soap operas take a different path in their depiction of class separation by eternally repeating the story of impossible love between a rich man and a poor, usually beautiful, and most of the times white, woman. The rich brat and his maid fall in love and have sex. She gets pregnant. He means to marry her but his evil rich family has other plans. When a child is born they make her believe the child is dead, and they make him think she is dead. They also make her believe he hates her. After a few television seasons, they overcome all odds and get together again. It seems all the pain she is gone through somehow makes deserve a place in the new, upper class world.

One main difference Ghetto Librettos have with other expressions of Mexican popular culture is that Ghetto Librettos experience segregation. This might start from the fact that comicbooks in general are already a segregated medium in Mexico. They are not something people should be proud of reading.

When I was 5 years old, I would often spend my time in my parent's library browsing through art books. I was very attracted to depictions of naked people and got specially fond of the work by French romantic painter Euguene Delacroix. I couldn't help establish a connection between female beauty and male expressions of violence. One day back then, waiting with my mother in the grocery store to pay, I started browsing through the magazines they always have there, and found something that interested me: a Mexican comicbook, that happened to be quite a graphic interpretation of Jack the Ripper. It took a while for my mother to notice what I was looking at, and she quickly instructed me not to look at that filth ever again. It didn't took me long to realize that she would buy me superhero books (only when there was no other choice), but never the equivalent Mexican hero stories like Santo, Super Sabios, Chanoc, Kaliman, Aguila Solitaria, or even the very intellectual Fantomas. I would go back to my parent's library, where it was OK to look at pictures of knives puncturing naked bodies, and fantasize about my own incarnation of Jack the Ripper's story, illustrated by Delacroix and Caravaggio.

A few years later, when I started going to a private school, I realized nobody had contact with those comics at all, but I found a couple of good sources somewhere else: my father's driver started taking us to school instead of my mother, and the friendship we started with him opened a few doors to the lower class culture. At the same time, we started spending the evenings at a public sports club that, because of it being public, was mostly populated by working class people.

This way I started enjoying two totally separate lifestyles. During the mornings I would be the upper middle class intellectual kid, and during the evenings I would be the only blond in the working class gang. I was a target for bullies in both scenarios, but I was strong and I enjoyed fighting, so that was not really much of a problem.

And I got introduced to a world I found more colorful, more emotional and more lively than the one I was coming from. Little I would know that all those comicbooks and humor magazines I would read sitting on a sidewalk by the highway were about to disappear, in less than 15 years.

The only Mexican comicbook genre that survived the eighties was the so called Ghetto Libretto, absorbing all the other ones. I started buying a couple of them every once in a while around 1989, and it didn't take me long to identify the most talented writers and artists. Some years later, I got closer to the industry, when I decided to make one. I never could, because, not surprisingly, the editors didn't appreciate my drawing, even though I tried as hard as I could to adapt my style to their standards. But I made a few very good friends, and I learned a lot in the process.

There are two families controlling the comicbook business in Mexico. One of them quit producing content during the 80s, and is content with reprinting their classics and licensing comics from D.C., Marvel and even from Dark Horse, like Hellboy. The other one controls the realm of the Ghetto Librettos, which is probably the bigger business; there are zillions of different titles that run on prints of two hundred thousand every week. The average pay per page for an artist is 1 dollar, and each one has 96 pages, so you can aspire to a good minimum wage Mexico style, if you spit out one Libretto every couple of weeks. I don't know about the deal for writers, because I was not interested in writing stories for them back then.

It's hard to say where my interest in illustrating a Ghetto Libretto came from. In general, it was not until a little late in life that I decided to make comicbooks. I was looking for an opportunity to publish and there were no other options available, but there is a little more to it than that. I think I needed to reclaim the lower culture as my own. Most of the people working on Ghetto Librettos have no other choice than that. They just happen to be very good at it and for them it is just another way to make a living. They don't think of themselves as authors with an opinion, a message or a role as communicators. They don't think about why do they portray women or themselves the way they do, or if things could be at all different. They don't even think their work is worth more than a dollar a page, even if some of them are good enough illustrators to cast a shadow over the likes of Frazetta. The writers dream with writing for television, where they would get a better wage and the satisfaction of having television stars play their characters. In the old days a popular serialized comicbook would be adapted as a television soap opera, but there is no chance of that happening now, first, because there are no serialized stories in the market anymore, and second, because Ghetto Librettos are consolidated as the only way to make a comic that will get news stand distribution. Even the traditional wrestling stories have been molded into the Ghetto Libretto format, where exuberant women run the show instead.

Ghetto Librettos embody almost every social issue you can think of, but in a very superficial way, offering no suggestion to the possibility of actually dealing with them. Institutional corruption, domestic violence, social segregation, and exploitation of women are all exposed as mere plot devices that justify the erratic behaviors of their characters. Perhaps the reason why Ghetto Librettos are rejected by the rest of the Mexican society can be explained because their heroes are the people nobody wants to be: street kids, prostitutes, peasants, servants, taxi drivers, policemen, and working class people.

Starman, the libertarian, 1978.

Usually absent from his covers, Starman would leave that space alone to feature his damsel in distress. "They will torture me in front if everybody", thinks the asian princess Lyn Min, more concerned about public opinion than the torture itself. Very influenced by Star Wars, Starman will feature a lot of Darth Vader like robot creatures, with a catholic inquisitor twist.

Orion, the Atlantean, 1975.

Another science fiction hero with damsels in distress, Orion is made to fit the stereotype of the prehispanic warrior, with which must of his readers would identify.

Fantomas, the Elegant Menace, 1976.

Inspired by the french character, Fantomas is a world class vigilante that would orchestrate conspiracies with the top thinkers of his time, keeping the world safe from the greedy military powers and corrupt corporations that run the first world's interests. Octavio Paz, Michael Fucault and Gabriel Garcia Marquez are just three of the many personalities that assisted him in his adventures.

Kendor, the Man from Tibet, 1975.

Kendor came out as a reaction to the more popular Kaliman. The hero doesn't make it to be the main feature of his own covers. An endangered well featured female body will sell more.

Kaliman, the Incredible Man, 1979.

After almost 30 years of uninterrupted weekly running, Kaliman faces his biggest foe, suddenly overwhelmed by a pantheon of villians from another culture. The editors might have just been trying to rip off elements from the Marvel super hero books, but they delivered an interesting postmodern metaphor of what happened during the eighties, when Mexico opened its market to the US pop culture, allowing it to wipe many traditions out of the market.

Alma Grande, 1974.

Alma Grande, a countryside hero, facing natural disasters and other real problems, was probably, along with Chanoc, the last of its kind, finding it hard to compete with the growing popularity of science fiction fantasies.

Luis Blackaller is an artist from Mexico City with an interest in culture, technology and media. He studied mathematics at the National University of Mexico and has been working for the mexican film industry until 2006, when he took a break to join the MIT Media Lab to explore new paths under the mentorship of John Maeda. He has a special love for comic books and drawings. More information about his work can be found at the following sites:

luisblackaller dot com

luis blackaller at IMDB

blacklog

blacklab

tiny icon factory

picture XS

Immersive Story Worlds (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two-part excerpt from Sam Ford's thesis, focused around the concept of Immersive Story Worlds. The thrust of his thesis deals with issues of fan relations, brand integration, audience building, and transmedia storytelling in the realm of contemporary soap opera. But this passage compares soaps systematically with two other forms of expansive entertainment -- superhero comics and professional wrestling. Immersive Story Worlds

by Sam Ford

Multiple Creators

All three examples of immersive story worlds provided here are too large for any one creator to accomplish. Each of these worlds have passed through many creative hands over the years, with no one creator necessarily being THE defining vision of what this world means. In each case, there is a sense of the narrative world having a life of its own and being bigger than any particular creative regime. The fact that all three of these narrative worlds have stood the test of time is evidenced in the way they have weathered passing off from one creative hand to the other. Although Stan Lee is often credited with being a defining force in the initial creation of the modern Marvel Universe, along with Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby and others, many writers, artists, and editors have helped shape the trajectory of these characters through the following decades. Not only have various creative regimes had control of an individual series over the years, there are creative teams working on each title within the Marvel Universe at any one time, meaning that--although Marvel as a content producer has centralized control over the official narrative universe of its characters, there is still a decentralized process of creating the Marvel Universe and fleshing out all its corners, developed through the many creative forces who have passed through the company over what is now almost 50 years.

Soap operas may have a defining creator, such as Irna Phillips and Bill Bell and Agnes Nixon, and the creative vision of each of these people have often helped define the long-term feel for many of these shows. However, the number of writers that work on a show at any one time, from the creative influence of the executive producer to the overall stories of the head writer(s) to the way that is broken down into scenes and dialogue, demonstrates the hundreds of creators who have had an influence on soaps stories through the years. Consider how much impact the thousands of actors who have appeared on these shows have had as well, in addition to directors and other creative forces, and there is certainly no clear "author" of any of these soap opera texts. Even if fans have particular writing teams that they have preferred over others or certain periods of a show that they consider "golden eras," there is no single writer that can be seen as the single defining source of a show, especially once it has been on the air for decades.

As for pro wrestling, the fact that wrestling narratives often spilled over from territory to territory and that wrestlers who retain the copyright to their own characters would jump from one show to the other ensures that, in addition to the constant shifting of creative forces within the bookers of any particular wrestling organization, there was also a meta text that fans would follow which branched across every wrestling show in the country. In the regional days of wrestling, fans would follow characters as they moved across the country, being written by a variety of creative forces along the way. Now that the WWE is the major show left in wrestling, there are three WWE divisions, each with their own head writer; and there are still alternative wrestling promotions that often take characters who leave the WWE, like TNA wrestling on Spike TV. In addition, the wrestlers themselves are traditionally known for developing many of their own attributes, and the performance of the audience affects every show as well (and audiences often stray from the intent of the people who scripted the reactions they are "supposed" to have on live shows). It's hard to identify who "creates" the final product of any particular wrestling show, much less the ongoing narratives of the various characters.

Long-Term Continuity

Although fans in all three genres would likely sometimes debate that creators care enough about this category of immersive story worlds, there is at least some semblance of long-term continuity in developing these worlds. This is what sets the long-term development of iconic characters apart from these continued story worlds, in that these story worlds are only created if there is some idea of prior stories being relevant to the next one rather than a series of adventures that seem completely removed from the next. Continuity is the way writers are often graded in all three genres. Generally, creators in each genre both praise the creative potential gained by such extensive back stories and also complain about the restraints that history places on their creative abilities when fans are watching their current content closely with how it measures up to the history of characters and stories. For fans, though, since they know these story worlds were around long before the current creative team came along and believe that they will continue to be around long after they are gone, continuity is often considered the most important aspect of the product, and they see it as their job to uphold it through amassing their collective intelligence.

Soap operas--because they are the most blatantly serial of the three-- is where continuity often matters most. Certain aspects of the genre have been accepted as defying continuity. For instance, when the actor portraying a central character leaves the show, recasts are sometimes accepted as necessary evils. Also, fans accept what has been called the Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome (SORAS). Often, younger characters are SORASed when there is an actor switch, advancing their age by a couple of years. When a character leaves town to go to college, they sometimes return a few years older than they should be non-soap opera aging standards. For instance, Tom Hughes may have been born in 1961, but he somehow ended up in Vietnam before the end of the war. Various viewers combined their collective intelligence to construct both when characters first appeared or were born on the show and also their apparent current age, comparing this to the age of the actor playing the role, and particularly how the various numbers often do not add up.

Aside from these deviations, however, soap fans expect writers to research the histories of these characters and to write current storylines according to that history. Writers are most often graded with their ability to write characters consistently, both within their own duration with the show and consistent with the long-term history of the show. If characters appear in a scene who have had a long history with each other that the current writers seem ignorant of or if a long-time family member no longer on the show seems to be forgotten by the current writing team, veteran fans are vocal about what they feel is poorly researched writing. Conversely, if writers make subtle references to important stories in a character's past--as long as those comments are relevant to the current story and do not get in the way of contemporary fans' enjoyment of the story--writers are generally praised for having shown some degree of mastery of the text.

Soaps writers are often haunted by this legacy and the fact that the fans collectively have much stronger knowledge of the product than they do. In a Winter 2006 interview with Soaps In Depth, As the World Turns head writer Jean Passanante complained about the impossible learning curve involved with trying to write characters. Not surprisingly, bashed her for having been with the show for years and still not seeming to be able to dedicate the time to learn the history as well as she should. Since these fans are amassing their collective intelligence to understand the continuity of the show for free based solely on their own interest in the narrative, they hold the people who are paid to be the gatekeepers for the story world to higher standards.

Pro wrestling has been most notoriously lax in its use of continuity, especially with turning characters from good to bad and often having rivals one year be partners the next. However, fans still have long- term memories and try to make sense of the narrative, even when writers drop the ball. The WWE writers do sometimes make veryeffective use of history, however, especially in creating iconic moments at events that are then drawn upon again and again. The art of slowly building a feud, beginning with subtle hints and then arguments and then a major clash, with several plot twists along the way, is the way legendary characters and matches are created in wrestling, and they are most often successful when the writers have the strongest grasp on maintaining continuity with the characters and the feud.

Comic books have to maintain a somewhat slippery use of continuity. Because the characters cannot age with real time and must somehow be contemporary while also maintaining a degree of timelessness, there have been plenty of contradictions along the way. Particularly because comics are not tied to actors like the pro wrestling and soap opera worlds, there is more opportunities to create alternate universes and several versions of the Marvel Universe being produced simultaneously, for instance, so that there are multiple continuities from the Marvel creative team.

Fans are often known for trying to police continuity, and Marvel's interactive section of their comics was often known for rewarding readers when they catch continuity slips from the creative team and attempted to come up with their own explanations of how that seemingly discordant event somehow makes sense in the larger Marvel Universe narrative. Marvel writers sometimes tried to emphasize continuity by making random references to old issues, but the best use of continuity comes when writers demonstrate a mastery of the history of the universe and make reference to prior events when they are germane to the current story. Prolific contemporary Marvel creator Brian Michael Bendis considers maintaining the continuity of the universe both a blessing and a curse, giving him headaches but providing a wealth of inspiration from the past of each character.

Character Backlog

All three story worlds have many more characters in their histories than can be featured at any one time, yet fan activities often surround understanding and cataloguing the wealth of characters in the universe. Each character backlog is indexed and managed in much different ways and for divergent purposes, however. The soap opera universe is full of character histories, the majority of which are not currently featured on the shows. As shows have been on the air for decades, some characters drop completely out of relevance for the contemporary product, although fans interested in the history of a particular show might be interested in finding out the importance of that character in years past. However, many of the soaps characters not currently on a show are directly relevant to storylines that are still ongoing. Often, brothers and sisters, children, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, ex-husbands and wives, of current characters are no longer on the shows but must be acknowledged in current storylines. For fans, this means that the current official product they are watching on television is only a small part of the whole story world, and there is always the potential for characters who have not been killed (and sometimes even those who have) to return to the show or at least to be mentioned from time-to-time. In other words, the fictional world of Oakdale or Springfield or Genoa City or Salem or Llanview is much bigger than the town itself and its current inhabitants, and fans have that broader view in mind when they question what these various characters would think about storylines or if they will return to the show for the wedding of a relative.

Wrestling's character backlog is more complicated in its relevance, as competitors only have so many years in which they can perform at their physical prime. Legends in wrestling are often still used, either for nostalgia's sake or else as supporting players in the characters of the modern product (whether as commentators or managers or officials who play a part in the current drama, or as returning recurring characters from time-to-time). In wrestling, former competitors are built up as legends and often drawn upon for comparisons with modern stars or to evoke the history of the narrative. The nostalgia for this backlog of characters helps fuel publications, DVD releases, and the WWE 24/7 On Demand product, for instance, which airs "classic" matches featuring these various legends who may now be members of the WWE Hall of Fame.

The Marvel and DC universes likely have the most expansive character lists of all, and returning characters in these worlds are much more fluid, since these characters are not tied to portrayers. Any super hero or villain from the vast reserve of the history of each universe can be drawn upon at any time, and some of the best work of contemporary creators have been in restoring the validity of lesser- known characters from the past through current storylines, such as with Bendis' Alias or the Marvel Black Panther series, or DC's 52, in which a several relatively minor DC characters become the featured cast. As Henry Jenkins writes in Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, this modern revisiting of neglected characters from a comic universe's history in an alternate or contemporary text can reconceptualize characters "to up their 'coolness' factor," while still playing off the knowledge fans have of those characters in the long-standing narrative.

Contemporary Ties to a Deep History

As I have alluded to several times in the previous sections, the art of an immersive story world often lies in tying events from the rich pasts of these narrative universes into the contemporary product. Bringing up relevant back story and tying it into the current plights of featured characters highlight what many fans consider the art of creation within immersive story worlds. Particularly in the soap opera world, fans both simultaneously praise good use of history on the writers' part and, perhaps more often, use their communal knowledge of history to drive their collective creativity. The fans watch the story unfold each day and then go online to create an historical perspective on a character's action that day, both to rate the writers' use of continuity and also to help flesh out and unpack meanings they see hidden in the text based on knowledge of the characters' past, or else point out the contradictions in characters' current actions or statements based on their histories.

For instance, when the characters of Mike and Katie Kasnoff broke up on As the World Turns in November 2006, Mike was indignant that Katie had slept with her ex-husband. Many fans sided with Mike in the fight, pointing out the many times Katie had acted this way in past relationships. Conversely, other fans pointed out Mike's hypocrisy, based on the fact that he reunited with Katie while still married to Jennifer, thus making his moralistic tirade about fidelity somewhat ironic, since the most recent version of his and Katie's relationship began with an infidelity. In December 2006, when ATWT's Craig Montgomery had been shot in the chest and was lying in a hospital bed, telling everyone around him how Dusty Donovan was a terrible human being because he had shot Craig in cold blood and how Craig would never do something so vicious, veteran fans could alert more recent viewers to the fact that Craig had actually shot a man a few years ago in a crime that he was never punished for nor even suspected by the majority of people in town. While the show never gave any blatant evidence of the hypocrisy of either man's claim, the viewers were able to fill in the pieces for each other based on the seemingly endless wealth of material.

What sets immersive story worlds apart, what makes them immersive indeed, is that the well of backstory is so deep that no one person can masterfully plumb its depths. Veteran fans may serve as memories, but no one of them can fill in all the pieces of the puzzle. Web sites that provide back stories, or books that attempt to summarize major plot developments over the years, would be impossible for one person to internalize and--even if one could-- still only provides a summary and not the rich details of each character and plot. These three worlds are set apart because there can be no expert who can quote almost every comic book or episode or pay-per-view. Not even a Rainman-style memory could recite every villain Spider-Man has faced in order, much less all of the developments of the Marvel universe, nor could they rattle off the results of every episode of Monday Night RAW for the past decade.

In the wrestling world, fans are equally as obsessed with filling in backstory, not necessarily always to be directly relevant to the current feuds but to draw comparisons between a feud or match of contemporary competitors with their predecessors. Wrestling fans have major web projects such as Kayfabe Memories, newsletters like" Wrestling as We Liked It, and a wealth of books from wrestling historians, wrestling journalists, and a growing number of memoirs from wrestling legends, all of whom provide a small piece of the puzzle of the history of the meta pro wrestling text, even if many are unreliable narrators. This act of preservation and navigating wrestling's deep history has been important to fans both because promoters for so long did very little of it and also because many of the major matches in wrestling history are no longer available for viewing, since arena shows were not often taped and the weekly television shows in most territories were not considered valuable at the time and often taped over with the next week's show.

In comic books, the huge archives drive much more than professional collectors and sales of graphic novels. The backstory fleshes out the histories of characters and their nuances, as well as relationships with supporting characters. There is a feeling that the subtle secrets to a character's history may be hidden in the pages of the archives and that understanding the present requires a reader's own willingness to dig into the past. In newer projects like the Ultimates universe or other Marvel or DC Universes that provide alternatives to the main universe, there is also a need to read the narratives from the main universe in order to compare the parallel stories. For instance, Bendis' recreation of many of the important Spider-Man plots over the years is a much richer experience for those who have already read and are intimately familiar with the original, thus meaning that Marvel and DC have an even deeper wealth of content if fans want to be able to understand alternative universes within the Marvel and DC worlds to their fullest extent. Of course, even if a fan were to collect every extant issue available in digital or tangible form, there would be no way to internalize that amount of material, even for the most ardent fan.

Permanence

Some of the categories listed above may also apply to some novel series, primetime television shows, online worlds, or other narrative universes. However, what these three share that perhaps no other particular media product does is a feeling of permanence. With the amount of time these narrative universes have lasted so far, there is a feeling of fans that these media properties will long outlive the current creative forces in charge of their gatekeeping, that the product will continue to have an audience long after the current fan base is gone, even. This sets these three worlds apart from any other narrative universe I can think of, where a decade is often considered an amazingly long run for a television show and four or five movies is considered a feat for a movie franchise. Since these worlds have been around for decades, it is important to emphasize--as P. David Marshall does in The New Media Book when writing about a related phenomenon of "the intertextual commodity"--that this concept has been around for some time and is perhaps just more overt in today's convergence culture.

Some worlds--like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Harry Potter--will likely live on in varying degrees either through descendant series that bear little resemblance to their past with hiatuses in between or else through fan fiction and fan videos, but soap operas, pro wrestling, and the Marvel and DC universes are the only immersive story worlds which have been running for decades now, without any hiatus, and with the continuous output being solely at the hands of the official rights holders to the narrative world.

Many comic book characters have produced thousands of issues by now, with some characters having three or four dedicated titles to their individual story within the Marvel and DC universe, not counting the alternate universes like the ultimate title runs a character may be involved in as well. While fans know that there may be switches in creative forces or major changes in the stories of characters or even certain characters who wax and wane in prominence, there is a semblance that the current narrative world will continue and that the fans' lifetime investment in reading the comics will continue to be rewarded with no risk of sunk cost in a story world that eventually comes to an end. While some have speculated that the Ultimate story world may eventually replace the old Marvel narrative universe, the two worlds are running side-by-side at this point, and fans will only become fully invested in the Ultimates universe if and when they feel that the wealth of material in that world so far surpasses the confusing original Marvel world that they are willing to make a switch. At this point, though, both worlds are continuing to gain a deeper reserve every month, as fans immerse themselves in both.

The entire conception of pro wrestling seems odd, a con game that fans know is a ruse yet watch both for its narrative potential and its athletic exhibition. The fact that this version of professional wrestling is at least a century old now, though, gives fans the feeling that, even if a current promoter goes under, pro wrestling will live on. Since pro wrestling's history is tied to actual athletes and careers, there is no one company that can control wrestling history, and fans feel that pro wrestling as a performance art will remain a staple of American and international culture for centuries to come. That feeling of permanence drives much of the obsession with archiving and preserving "wrestling history."

Soap operas are often called "worlds without end." Now that some shows have been on television every day for more than 50 years, fans often feel that there is or at least should be a permanent niche for these shows. In recent years, with slowly declining ratings, some fans realize that may not be the case. They blame what they see as incompetent marketers and lazy creative regimes as ruining many shows, and they worry about rumors for cancellation for various shows. Still, even amidst a looming concern that the network could pull the plug, fans consume the daily text as if there is no chance for this to happening, talking often about the future as well as the past and seeing these narrative worlds of One Life to Live or The Young and the Restless as a permanent part of their lives.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the Marvel or DC universe would still be alive and well a century from now. There is an increasing fear that Procter and Gamble Productions or Corday or Bell or a variety of others will decide to pull the plugs within a few years, much less decades. And what's to keep wrestling from going the way of roller derby or various public carnival events that--once a staple of popular culture--is either no longer a part of our culture at all or else an historicized form of popular art? Nevertheless, the fans, performers, and producers of these shows have participated in these worlds for so long that a looming end does not haunt them in the same way that the producers of a primetime television series must be thinking about a semi-distant ending shortly after they have begun.

Master's candidate Sam Ford is originally from a small town named McHenry, Ky, located in the suburbs of the twin cities, Beaver Dam and Hartford, in the Home of Bluegrass Music, Ohio County. A weekly columnist for The Ohio County Times-News, Ford writes a column entitled "From Beaver Dam to Boston." His undergraduate work at Western Kentucky University led to four majors in English (writing), news/editorial journalism, mass communications, and communication studies, as well as a minor in film studies. His research interests include American television, rural journalism, professional wrestling, and soap opera.

Ford has published research on pro wrestling and is conducting his Master's thesis on transmedia storytelling and producer/fan interaction surrounding the soap opera As the World Turns. In addition, he is a licensed professional wrestling manager and performs for Universal Championship Wrestling in Kentucky. He is a member of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT and is co-teaching a course on pro wrestling in Spring 2007. He lives in Boston, MA, with his wife Amanda and his two Pekingese, Brando and Sissy.

Immersive Story Worlds (Part One)

It's thesis time at the Comparative Media Studies Program -- always a period of great pride and intense stress for me, since I end up serving on an overwhelming number of committees and have the joy of watching my students complete projects which drew them to MIT two years ago. Over the next few weeks, for both reasons, I am going to be sharing with you some of the highlights of the work produced by these students. Doing so allows me to showcase some really exceptional students and it also allows me to shift a little of my focus away from maintaining the blog and onto my day job reviewing student work. Today and tomorrow, I am running an extended excerpt from Sam Ford's thesis, "As the World Turns in a Convergence Culture." Some selections of this thesis have already appeared in my blog when Sam took over as guest host while I was traveling to Poland last fall. Ford has been the key person who maintains the Convergence Culture Consortium blog over the past two years, helping him to establish his own reputation as an important commentator on industry trends. He also taught our course this term on professional wrestling which we discussed in the blog a week or so back. Here, he draws on three of his interests -- soaps, wrestling, and superhero comics -- to extend on the concept of an immersive story world. You will see here as well some of the legacy of my assignment getting students to think about ways to draw more deeply on their own personal experiences as a source for their theoretical projects.

Immersive Story Worlds

by Sam Ford

My History with Immersive Story Worlds

Growing up an only child with a stay-at-home mom, I spent my childhood days engrossed in what I have come to call immersive story worlds. In truth, I began my relationship with popular culture with no more than an antenna connection and a collection of toys. For me, it was G.I. Joe. I have never fancied being a military man and really do not remember too many playground days spent pretending to be a soldier, but the world of G.I. Joe fascinated me nonetheless. The dozens of characters I found for $2.97 apiece at Wal-Mart drove my interest in the alternate military reality these characters inhabited. Every toy included a biography of that character on the back, which I clipped and kept--in alphabetical order no less. I ended up with a group of friends who also collected and kept up with the world of G.I. Joe.

My love for G.I. Joe soon spilled over into the Marvel G.I. Joe comic books, where these characters came to life. I read those comics until the covers fell off, hoping to learn everything I could about each character and apply that knowledge to the games I played as well. I soon became engaged with the whole Marvel comic book universe, and I spent most of my $10 weekly allowance following the weekly or monthly adventures of Spider-Man, the X-Men, Hulk, and a slew of other colorful characters. Yet again, I found contemporaries at school who shared my interest in comic books. They wanted to be comic book artists, and I wanted to be a comics writer, so we set about to create a comic book universe of our own.

At the same time, I was becoming familiar with another immersive story world, that of the superstars of the World Wrestling Federation, now known as WWE. My cousins had long told me the legends of Hulk Hogan and "Macho Man" Randy Savage and The Ultimate Warrior, but I didn't know where to tune in to glimpse into this universe from a syndication window. However, my parents' decision to get a VCR opened me up to a slew of videotapes my cousins mailed to me and the growing collection of wrestling shows available at the local rental shops and convenience stores. Finally, I even convinced my neighbors to let me come over and start watching the Monday night wrestling shows since they had cable television. The Marvel superhero universe and the World Wrestling Federation were my media fascinations, and they both fit into this category I now write about as immersive story worlds, a concept I will flesh out in the next couple of posts.

Enter As the World Turns

There was another immersive story world that I had been involved with as well, one that I was not completely cognizant of being a fan of at first. It was what my grandmother always referred to as "the story" and probably the narrative in which I first came to know a slew of familiar faces, an immersive story world that predated my interest in G.I. Joes, super heroes, or professional wrestling. That narrative was Procter & Gamble Productions' As the World Turns (ATWT), a daily daytime serial drama that has been on the air since 1956. For as long as I can remember, ATWT was a part of my weekday afternoon, and the familiar faces of the Hughes family, joined by the evil James Stenbeck, the scheming Dr. John Dixon, the incomparable Lucinda Walsh, the down-to-earth Snyders, the lively Lisa Grimaldi, and a host of other characters were regular parts of my childhood.

I may not have realized that I was immersed in the fictional world of Oakdale, Illinois, until I started wondering what was happening to those characters when the school year began and I was no longer home in the afternoons. By the mid-1990s, I convinced my mom to record the show so I could watch it when I came home from elementary school every day. In fact, I was a somewhat closeted soap opera viewer all the way through most of high school. By my junior year, though, I had started a night job after school and lost contact with the residents of Oakdale.

By the end of my senior year of high school, I was married. My distance from ATWT didn't last, though, and my wife and I were dedicated viewers of the soap opera again a couple of years into college. With so many familiar faces and back stories to remember, it was hard not to get pulled back into the narrative and eventually join fan communities to find out what had happened in the world of ATWT while I had been away. My continued interest in this show is closely connected to the social relationships I built around it. The conversations I would join with my mother and grandmother about "the story" have continued over dinner every night with my wife. In the process, I have come to understand soap viewing as a social activity, which helped tremendously in understanding and becoming a part of the fan community built around ATWT.

Perhaps just as importantly, I have come to understand soap operas as primarily powered by character-driven storytelling. The strength of this genre lies in relationships, including the relationships characters have with one another, the relationships between these characters and the fans, and the relationships fans build around these texts. Soap operas are hindered by plot-driven storytelling because the permanent nature of the soap opera, with no off-season and 250 original hours of programming each year, emphasizes slow storytelling that examines the emotion and nuances of events rather than just "what happens." Comic books and pro wrestling are personality and character-driven genres as well, and good storytelling is consistently determined by the fan base of each genre as those in which the relationships among characters (and the performances of the actors or artists depicting those characters) are logical, well-written, and fleshed out.

These three narrative types--the daytime serial drama, the pro wrestling world, and the DC and Marvel universes--share a set of similarities I have grouped under this category of immersive story worlds. By this term, I mean that these properties have a serial storytelling structure, multiple creative forces which author various parts of the story, a sense of long-term continuity, a deep character backlog, contemporary ties to the media property's complex history, and a sense of permanence. I will examine each of these aspects over the next few pages.

This thesis concentrates particularly on the immersive story world of As the World Turns and its current status in a shifting media landscape. My interest in this soap opera text is heavily tied to my fascination with this type of immersive story world in general, in which one can never truly "master" the material. Immersive story worlds provide a space particularly rich for interaction between a text and a vibrant fan community that critiques, energizes, maintains, and fills in the gaps of that official canon. Further, as Henry Jenkins writes in Convergence Culture, the "extension, synergy, and franchising (that) are pushing media industries to embrace convergence" have long been a part of these narrative worlds in one fashion or another, so that these marginalized texts have a lot to offer for informing other media producers. These worlds are unusually ripe for transmedia content, user-generated content, and a wealth of online fan forums. However, they also generate a distinct niche fan environment that is both energized by and suffers from being considered somewhat fringe, even as each has long been a massive cultural phenomenon. In order to understand exactly what is meant by immersive story worlds, however, it is important to examine each characteristic of this categorization.

Seriality

All three types of worlds within this category share a strong sense of seriality. While soap operas have best taken advantage of seriality and have made that never-ending unfolding of drama part of their very definition, they are often tied together with telenovelas and other forms of melodrama which do not have the same type of long- term seriality that soaps have. Soap operas can master storylines that unfold over weeks, months, or even years in a way few other texts can. For instance, there is a

long-running feud on As the World Turns between characters Kim Hughes and Susan Stewart that began after Dr. Stewart slept with Kim's husband Bob--back in 1990. That plot point often creeps up in current storylines and will not be forgotten in the show's history. Similarly, in 2006, the explosively popular Luke and Laura supercouple from General Hospital in the 1970s were reunited for a short time in storylines, drawing on 25 years of history for the couple, still portrayed by the same actors.

Over time, seriality has become a conscious part of creating immersive story worlds, and strong utilization of quality serial storytelling was not a requirement of any of these media forms in their infancy but rather the way in which creators constructed these worlds over time. For instance, according to Bradford W. Wright in Comic Book Nation, Marvel deserves much credit for creating a loosely cohesive narrative universe. Many comic book stories before that time were each standalone tales, with the characters returned to a static point at the end of each issue, from which the next story would drive from as well. Even after the creation of the Marvel Universe, creators often failed to capitalized on the potential for seriality, and most monthly installments were isolated stories. However, t Marvel titles featured an increasing number of crossovers and ongoing storylines, not just in the battle between good and evil but in the personal lives of the characters as well--work relationships, romantic entanglements, and supporting family members whose personal dramas were as compelling at times as the main narrative.

One can see how important seriality is particularly in the Ultimates Marvel universe that has become popular in recent years. At the beginning of the decade, Marvel decided to relaunch the stories of several of its characters in contemporary times, telling familiar stories of the origins of Marvel staples like Spider-Man while being able to map out a more coherent continuity. Now that the Ultimate Spider-Man title has passed its centennial issue, the new universe is building its own continuity and makes particularly good use of seriality, with the personal lives of the characters of each title run often much more important in the long-term than the hero's battle with super-villains or else interwoven so completely between the various parallel plots that the continuity from issue to issue is much more developed than the comic book series in previous decades.

The rise of the graphic novel relates closely to these changes. The strength of the Marvel universe is that it has created a more viable archiving system than that of pro wrestling or soap operas, which are still struggling with ways to make previous content readily available for viewers. The popularity of the graphic novel has given fans an easy way to collect and archive their favorite comic book runs, and the format of the graphic novel--grouping together multiple issues from a comic book run--encourages writers to work even harder at developing serial storytelling from issue-to-issue.

Pro wrestling has long used seriality in booking various wrestling feuds. Television shows were used to create storylines to make people want to go to the arenas and pay for a ticket to see the matches that were set up from television interviews and angles. Often, a contested ending between two wrestlers at one show made fans want to return to the arena next month to see the rematch and the drama continue between two competitors. For instance, at Madison Square Garden in 1981, then WWE Champion Bob Backlund was defending his title against a grappler named Greg "The Hammer" Valentine. During the melee, the referee was accidentally hit and knocked to the mat, groggy. The referee saw that Backlund had his challenger pinned and counted the three. Because he still had not recovered from his own fall, the referee did not distinguish which wrestler had the other pinned (both men were wearing the same color tights), so when Valentine started celebrating as if he had been the one who had scored the pin instead of being the one who was down for the count, the referee handed him the championship belt. Backlund, of course, contested the finish, and the decision was made to have a rematch for the held up title when the WWE returned to Madison Square Garden the next month. In this case, there was both a standalone storyline on that particular card and also an ongoing story that fans would return to see from one month to the next.

However, the WWE and other wrestling organizations have developed the serial format of wrestling over the years much further, especially as the television product became more important in itself rather than just driving fans to watch the wrestlers perform in person. The writers discovered that they way to get fans to tune in from one week to the next and purchase the culminating pay-per-view events was to build ongoing feuds in serial fashion, with the each episode always pointing toward the next and each pay-per-view not only producing the climax for some feuds but creating ongoing chapters in others or creating new storylines that would play out in the coming months.

Just Men in Tights (Part Three)

Today, I offer up to readers the third and final installment of my essay in progress on the superhero genre. In this installment, I continue friday's discussion of the different strategies adopted by three recent graphic novels -- JLA: Year One, The Final Frontier, and Unstable Molecules -- in trying to encourage a revisionist perspective on the Silver Age of American comics, the period that more than any other defined the American superhero tradition. For those of you who are not comic buffs, the Wikipedia offers this definition of the Silver Age:

The Silver Age of Comic Books is an informal name for the period of artistic advancement and commercial success in mainstream American comic books, predominantly in the superhero genre, that lasted roughly from the late 1950s/early 1960s to the early 1970s. It is preceded by the Golden Age of Comic Books.

During the Silver Age, the character make-up of superheroes evolved. Writers injected science fiction concepts into the origins and adventures of superheroes. More importantly, superheroes became more human and troubled, and since the Silver Age, character development and personal conflict have been almost as important to a superhero's mythos as super powers and epic adventures.

DC: THE NEW FRONTIER

Darwyn Cooke's DC: The New Frontier depicts the transition between the scientific and military teams of the early 1950s and the Silver Age Superheroes who emerged by the end of the decade. In doing so, Cooke takes a creative risk, centering so much of the book on groups like The Losers, the Suicide Squadron, The Challengers of the Unknown, and the Black Hawks, who are less well known to contemporary readers. Many fan critics have suggested that the first part of the book, dominated by these characters, is less satisfying than the second half, when the Justice League characters come into their own. The climax comes when all of the superheroes of the Silver Age join forces to battle alien monsters. Along the way, however, we kill off many of the characters associated with the previous decade or, in the case of the supernatural figures, they retreat from direct involvement in earthly affairs. The book's first part is fragmented, built up from eclectic materials, since it must deal with the generic diversity in postwar comics, where-as the second part narrows its focus into a tauntly drawn superhero comic.

In the opening sections, we see war stories (Hal Jordan's experiences during the Korea War, Lois Lane's perspective as a military correspondent), detective stories (a film noir style interlude as J'ohn J'onzz takes up his secret identity as a beat cop and goes on some of his very first cases), science fiction (The Loser's deaths on a lost world full of dinosaurs, a subplot involving a secret military mission to send men to Mars), and romance (a moonlit date between Hal Jordon and Carol Ferris). Darwyn Cooke captures these genres in lushly colored images - more interested in evoking a mood or a milieu then digging in deep into the characterizations. His artwork borrows little from actual postwar comics, tapping the popular futurism associated with magazine ads and the technicolor images of Hollywood movies. A chase along the rooftops borrows from the opening of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), while a wartime sequence in which Hal Jordon finds himself in arm-to-arm combat with a North Korean quotes from Harvey Kurtzman's Two-Fisted Tales (1950-1955).

In particular, Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) emerges as a key transitional figure: a hot shot test pilot with a military background, he could easily have served on one of the postwar teams and yet instead, he gains superpowers when he rescues a dying alien in the dessert and becomes the Green Lantern. Cooke depicts Jordan through the lens of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff (1975), starting with a sequence where Hal as a boy tracks down Chuck Yaeger and gets his autograph, which foreshadows his involvement in the aerospace industry and his secret training for a potential space mission. Cooke's Green Lantern evaluates his new powers with the eyes of a test pilot: "It's like my heart's eye come to life - perfect, immaculate, pure - flight. The kind of light that fills your spirit in a way only a dream can....I become intoxicated with this glorious new destiny." (Book Five)

Cooke seeks to resituate the fictional history of the DC superheroes in relation to actual historical personalities and events which would have occurred simultaneous to the release of the original comics. There is a compelling sequence when many of the alter egos of the early DC superheroes and their girl friends visit Los Vegas, watching an early bout by Casuius Clay and a performance by Frank Sinatra. Another sequence involves a visit to a Motorama trade show where the protagonists admire the wing-tailed automobiles, hinting at the fascination with aerodynamic and streamlined forms that would influence the design of their costumes. In each of these cases, the links are evoked through the visual style rather than directly stated. Superman's battle with a giant robot in postwar Tokyo is represented through screaming neon lights, while Hal Jordon's arrival at Ferris captures the painted colors of the southwestern desert and the wild patterns of 1950s Hawaiian shirts. Acute observers may notice, for example, the Paul Klee prints hanging in the background as The Martian Manhunter watches black and white television in his apartment.

Cooke's fascination with 50s Americana goes beyond matters of style, linking the earlier action teams with the Eisenhower era and the formation of the Justice League with the first stirrings of the New Frontier. If some of the characters - notably Hal Jordon -embody the rugged individualism and square-jawed masculinity one associates with Cold War America (even as he questions the establishment every chance he gets), others struggle with the issues of their times. The Martian Manhunter is constantly investigating how America deals with issues of racial and cultural difference, trying to figure out how much acceptance he would receive if Earthlings knew of his alien origins. At one point, he goes to the movies to see Invaders from Mars (1953), hoping to learn what Americans knew and thought about his native planet. Before the film starts, he is intrigued to see the open support for Superman who makes no secret of his origins on another dying planet: "Lucky fellow. He's from another planet but his face doesn't scare people to death. It must be so easy for him. I can feel the crowd's love for him. It's like that of a parent." (Book Three) Yet, once he gets into the feature film, he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry: "I could feel their fear of the unknown, their hatred of things that they can't control or understand." Later, he is moved by an Edward R. Murrow style newscast depicting Steel's attempts to strike back at the Klansmen who murdered his family: "If Americans react this violently to people for a difference in skin color, then I fear they'll never be ready to accept me." (Book Four)

Similarly, Cooke uses Superman and Wonder Woman to debate America's involvement in IndoChina (Book 2). In a scene which could have come straight from Appocalypse Now (1979), Superman has been sent up river to find Wonder Woman. The Amazon has liberated a group of rebel women who have been held in tiger cages and then looked the other way as they slaughtered their captors. We see Wonder Woman surrounded by the revolutionaries, standing atop a table, and lifting a glass to their victories. Superman wants to hold her accountable to U.S. rules which prohibit direct intervention in these women's struggles for liberation. She has been sent there for propaganda purposes, to build up morale or as she puts it, "hand them a smile and a box of flags," whereas she has taken it upon herself to "train them to survive the coming war." When Superman urges her to set a better example, Wonder Woman responds, "Take a good look around. There are no rules here, just suffering and madness." Later, when she returns to the United States, she wants to share with Nixon and Eisenhower what she observed but they have no interest in hearing the truth. She is quickly sent back to Paradise Island. Superman is unable to understand why Americans would force her into retirement because he sees truth as central to the American way; the more world-weary Amazon urges him to fight for ideals and not put his trust in any given administration. The debate is a classic one: whether the superhero should act above the laws of any given nation and in pursuit of higher values or be subordinate to Earthly authorities even if they have flawed judgments and faulty morals.

The climax links the formation of the Justice League with the emergence of a more youthful and proactive administration as if the superhero alliance could be read alongside the formation of NASA or the launch of the Peace Corps. The final pages weave together Kennedy's "New Frontier" speech, images of superheroes battling evil and rescuing people and scenes of humans working together to overcome "ignorance, hate and fear." In Kennedy's words, the Justice League embraces not simply a "set of promises" but a "set of challenges," including "uncharted areas of science and space, unresolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus." (Book Six) If Cooke has previously used the superheroes to question America's cold war and civil rights era policies, he now uses Kennedy's powerful rhetoric to express the ideals which defined the Silver Age heroes as a product of their times.

If we can see Mark Waid's work as reconstructing the superhero mythos to satisfy contemporary expectations, we might see Cooke as recontextualizing the genre, creating a new awareness of the historical forces which shaped its development. If early Silver Age comics seem strangely isolated from the political debates and social changes of the early Kennedy era - at least on the surface, Cooke suggests the way that they nevertheless embody the ideals and aspirations of that post-war generation.

UNSTABLE MOLECULES

James Sturm's Unstable Molecules is the most radical of these three projects - a fusion of the content of the superhero comics with the thematics and style of alternative comics. As Sturm puts it, "I feel like I went to the Marvel universe, kidnapped some characters, brought them back to my side of the street." Like Cooke's New Frontier, Unstable Molecules situates the origins of the superhero team - in this case, the Fantastic Four - in its historic context - the early 1960s. Sturm's book constantly revisits problems of inspiration and origins, never allowing us to have a stable or coherent perspective on the narrative. Whereas Cooke embraced the ideals of the Kennedy era as something to which we should return, Sturm sees the ideals - and lived experiences - of the earlier era as fundamentally inadequate as a basis for heroic action - something to escape from. For all of its play with multiple genres and historical perspectives, New Frontier ultimately falls into line with the core genre conventions while Unstable Molecules remains, well, unstable.

Much as Cawelti wrote about Chinatown, Unstable Molecules "deliberately invokes the basic characteristics of a traditional genre in order to bring its audience to see that genre as the embodiment of an inadequate and destructive myth." If the blurring of the lines between alternative and mainstream comics production is a key factor in the current moment of genre multiplicity, Unstable Molecules may be one of the most accomplished and spectacular examples of that process at work.

Unstable Molecules presents itself - from the cover of its first issue forward - as "the True Story of Comic's Greatest Foursome." The cover, designed by Craig Thompson (Blankets), combines iconic Jack Kirby era images of the Fantastic Four with a more realistic, less powerful depiction of Reid Richards. Richards is seated next to an American flag, yet his posture - hunched over, eyes turned upward - is anything but heroic. Other covers similarly contrast the Four as depicted in the comics with the characters as they might be depicted in the pages of an alternative comic.

In the notes at the end of the issue, Storm sets up his central conceit - that the author stumbled onto yellowing newspaper clippings about Johnny and Sue Sturm while flipping through a family scrapbook, was surprised to discover that the Fantastic Four comics had some relation to these actual historical figures, and tracked down documents via the Freedom of Information Act in order to reveal who they really were: "However wonderful the Kirby/Lee version of the Fantastic Four was, there was often stringent restrictions upon what could and could not be told. Scripts had to be approved by the Fantastic Four's public relations office and, on several occasions, the U.S. government... My intention with this cartoon biography is to revisit the Fantastic Four's beginnings with a historian's eyes." (Book One) In a later issue (Book Two), Sue Sturm is described as one of the primary architects of the Fantastic Four's public persona. Strangely, Sturm also provides a fictional bibliography full of nonexistent books studying one or another member of the team and their place in American history. The "real" Fantastic Four were at once unknown and often researched. As Reid Richards remarks in the book's opening, "If anything, I know far less now than when I began. The Closer I look, the greater the confusion." (Book One)

At some points, it is suggested that Sue Sturm is already part of comic book history - a neighbor, who is a comic book artist, has a crush on her and has used her as an inspiration for the Vapor Girl comics which run through the story. At other points, it is implied that the Fantastic Four took shape during a riotous party, the emotional climax of this narrative, which was attended by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and most of the rest of the Marvel bullpen. At another place, Mantleman, the overweight fanboy who is Johnny's best friend, explains, "In June of 1983, during a particularly manic episode, I was convinced that it was me, not Stan Lee or Jack Kirby, that had created the Fantastic Four. Don't misunderstand me. I knew I didn't draw or write the comic, I just believed that my brain, my memories, were being scanned and used by Marvel." (Book Three). And the issue of inspiration does not end there, since the story (Book Three) also suggests that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was inspired in part by an encounter with Sue Sturm. Sturm thus depicts a world without clear origins or stable truths, a world constructed through quotation, allusion, and delusion.

Interestingly, this sequence about Mantleman's delusions is the only place other than the covers where we see the Fantastic Four in their superhuman form. This story never depicts any heroic aspects of their personalities whatsoever. In an interview with Comics Journal, Sturm explains that he was strongly encouraged to link his characterizations more directly to the superhero tradition but found himself unable or unwilling to do

so:

Initially, [Marvel's] Tom [Brevoort] asked me to explore the idea that at some point these people actually get superpowers. And I was trying to wrap my brain around that. Maybe I could do six issues and I'll have them get their powers. And I realized that, the whole conceit is that they never get their powers. These aren't the same people....I don't think I can write a superhero book but there is that correspondence with what people imagine they'll become. But really, Sue Sturm is not Sue Storm. They're different but Lee and Kirby's fictional foursome are imbedded in mine, or vice-a-versa.

Sturm's characters are like the Fantastic Four, may have inspired or been inspired by the Fantastic Four, but at the end of the day, they are not the superheroes who have fascinated comics readers since the 1960s.

What fascinates Sturm is this notion of the superhero team as dysfunctional family; he depicts the four as living in fundamentally different realities with different aspirations and values. In the comics, they are able to work together despite these differences, whereas in Unstable Molecules, they are unable to understand or even tolerate each other and they are destined to self-combust. As such, they are emblematic of the forces which would fragment and divide America in the 1960s. Johnny Sturm is depicted as a kind of Holden Caufield figure who is awakened by the end of the book when the beat poet whispers in his ear "Johnny, it is the fiery night and you are a holy flaming flower" in a moment which is ripe with homoerotic overtones (Book Three).

Reid Richards is depicted as a cool, distant man, who has somehow attracted a much younger fiancé, but who never understands or satisfies her desires. Far from elastic, Richards is someone who expects her simply to obey him and put his career above everything else. And by the end of the book, it is clear that he has never fully trusted her, calling her "promiscuous", "amoral," "a harlot" and perhaps most damningly, "beneath my distinction." (Book Four) In the final images, we see Richards contemplating his life through a microscope but unable to understand the "chaotic" forces driving him away from the people he thought he knew and loved (Book Four). Professionally, he lacks the intellect or the drive which makes Kirby's Richards one of the greatest thinkers of all time. Instead, he is someone whose research interests are more pragmatic than imaginative: "A theory is only valuable if it has practical applications. Science is about textiles, not time travel." (Book One). Even when more or less ordered to give up his own research to contribute to the early NASA program, he is reluctant to embrace a higher purpose.

Ben Grim is, as Richards describes him, "a train wreck of a man" - a down and out boxer, a sloppy drunk, a misogynist, and an abuser of women, who makes a move for his best friend's fiancé. At one point, he is trying to convince a Marvel artist that he would be a suitable comics protagonist. Upon being told that Boxer comics don't sell and that horror is the rage, he confesses that his ex-girlfriends all see him as a monster and that he could be depicted as "the Thing from the Black Hole" (Book Four). If the Thing who is beloved by comics readers is a gentle man embittered because he is trapped in a monstrous body, Unstable Molecules shows him to be a brute even without the rocky form who would be unhappy no matter what happened to him.

Perhaps the most powerfully drawn character is Sue Sturm, who has been neglected in most other versions of the Fantastic Four. She is a young woman who has recently lost her mother and is trying without much success to take on her roles and responsibilities, to mother her brother who shows her no respect, to integrate into a community of small minded women, and to hold onto a fiancé who shows her little interest. She struggles to maintain some sense of herself and to preserve some notion of her sexuality while everyone around her is trying to mold her to their expectations. On the surface, she is compliant; underneath, she is beginning to rage.

Her conflicting feelings are most vividly depicted through the Vapor Girl comic she is reading throughout issue. Sturm juxtaposes images of her showering, shaving her underarms, plucking her eyebrows, putting on a slip, with the more adventuresome images of her comic book counterpart; at the same time, the text of the comic offers ironic commentary on her own feelings - "A second blast will separate her mind from her physical form," "One final blast and my mind will control Vapor Girl's Body," etc (Book Two). The notes compare her struggle to maintain some sense of identity in these numbing circumstances with the early tremors of second wave feminism. One might connect R. Sikorak's pastiche superhero comicbook images with Ray Lichenstein's appropriations of images from romance comics of roughly the same era: Lichenstein's canvases are often read as depicting the banality and emptiness of the world prescribed for middle class women in an age of domestic containment. It is no wonder that a tipsy Sue Sturm gives in to temptation when a drunken but still attentive Ben Grimm comforts her. She is not, as Reid calls her, "promiscuous" so much as she longs to be "seen" as a woman. There is a precedent for these feelings in Sue's ongoing romantic entanglement with Namor, the Submariner in the Lee-Kirby originals. In the comics, Sue ultimately returns to her husband but there remains a hint that she sometimes fantasize about how her life would be different if she had become Queen of Atlantis. Lichenstein's images work because they are decontextualized, speaking to broader feelings of cultural discontent, where-as the Namor analogy anchors the depicted actions within comics continuity. As Sturm explained, "I think there's a lot for hard-core FF people to get into, but I also think that if you don't know anything about the FF, you might enjoy it just from this 50s domestic drama." Either way, we find a Sue Sturm who is deeply unhappy about her invisibility.

Unstable Molecules is much more interested in emotional dynamics than high adventure: the only fisticuffs thrown constitute various forms of domestic violence, dysfunctional families can not be magically transformed into superhero teams. Lee and Kirby sought to introduce elements of melodrama into the superhero genre, depicting their heroes as imperfect human beings; Sturm and his collaborators pushed that interpretation a bit further, destroying the ties that bind those characters to each other, and showing how these same people would have become losers in the real world. It is that core pessimism and skepticism which makes this an alternative comic even though it was published by the most mainstream of companies.

CONCLUSION

I hope the above discussion has moved us beyond thinking of revisionism as simply a phase in the development of the superhero genre. We have seen that from the beginning, the superhero comic emerged from a range of different genre traditions; that it has maintained the capacity to build upon that varied history by pulling towards one or another genre tradition at various points in its development; that it has maintained its dominance over the comics medium by constantly absorbing and appropriating new generic materials; and that its best creators have remained acutely aware of this generic instability, shifting its core meanings and interpretations to allow for new symbolic clusters. Through all of that, I have shown that comics are indeed more than "just men in tights."

Just Men in Tights? (Part Two)

Today, I am running part two of the serialized version of my essay, "Just Men in Tights?" This segment takes us on a historical survey of how the superhero tradition emerged, suggesting that the characters we know today emerged through borrowings from a range of pulp genres, including swashbuckler, science fiction, and hardboiled detective traditions. Again and again as we study the history of American comics, superhero writers and artists have returned to their roots in these various pulp traditions -- not to mention melodrama, courtroom drama, newspaper stories, fantasy, gangster crime fiction, horror, and political drama, to cite only a few of the other influences. Near the end of this installment, I discuss the first of three recent graphic novels which have sought to re-examine the Silver Age of the superhero genre in relation to the history of the 1950s and 1960s.

REVERSE-ENGINEERING SUPERMAN

This mixing, matching, and mutating of genre categories has a much longer history within popular culture. As Rick Altman notes, ""Genre mixing, it now appears, is not just a postmodern fad. Quite to the contrary, the practice of genre mixing is necessary to the very process whereby genres are created." Our current tendency to describe works retrospectively based on the contemporary genre they most closely resemble has the effect of repressing the more complex process by which new genres emerge from existing categories of production. Altman concludes,

"The early history of film genres is characterized...not by purposeful borrowing from a single pre-existing non-film parent genre, but by apparently incidental borrowing from several unrelated genres....Even when a genre already exists in other media, the film genre of the same name cannot simply be borrowed from non-film sources, it must be recreated."

The superhero comic, in fact, undergoes this process of recreation not once but multiple times: first, in the early Golden Age, when the superhero genre takes shape from elements borrowed from pulp magazines and second, in the early Silver age, when superhero comics re-emerge from the generic soup which characterized comic production in the post-war era.

The most common accounts for the emergence of the superhero genre stress the fledgling comics industry's response to the commercial success of Superman. In The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier & Klay (2001), Michael Chabon vividly depicts the process by which comics creators sought to reverse engineer Superman to generate new characters:

"If he's like a cat or a spider or a fucking wolverine, if he's huge, if he's tiny, if he can shoot flames or ice or death rays of Vat 69, if he turns into fire or water or stone or India Rubber. He can be a Martian, he could be a ghost, he could be a god or a demon or a wizard or a monster. Okay? It doesn't matter because right now, see, at this very moment, we have a bandwagon rolling."

Yet, a somewhat different picture emerges within Gerard Jones's account of early superhero comics. Jones uncovered a handwritten note from Joe Simon and Joel Schuster, the teenage boys who created Superman, suggesting they were rehearsing possible publicity slogans:

"The greatest super-hero strip of all time!... Speed-Action-Laughs-Thrills-Surprises. The most unusual humor-adventure strip ever created!... You'll Chuckle! You'll Gasp! It must be seen to be believed!"

Superman is already being read against a larger genre tradition ("the greatest super-hero strip of all time!") and at the same time, the comic is being promoted through a diverse range of emotional appeals ("Speed-action-laughs-thrills-surprises.", etc.)

Siegel and Schuster correctly describe their creation ('the most unusual humor-adventure strip ever created!") as, in effect, bounding over the walls separating various genres. Thomas Andrea has, for example, noted that the superhero figure emerged from a range of different science fiction and horror texts. Gerard Jones cites even more influences - including Popeye in the comic strips, the pulp novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the Scarlet Pimpernell. We might note the ways that masked heroes from the pulp magazines, including The Shadow, the Phantom, The Spider, and Zorro, modeled the capes and masks iconography and the secret identity thematic of the subsequent superhero comics. The pulp magazines have been described as developing and categorizing many 20th century genres yet the economics of pulp magazine production also meant that the same writers worked within multiple genre traditions and in the many cases, the same story was revised slightly in order to be sold to several different publications. In early comics, a writer - say, Jack Kirby - might produce work across the full range of pulp genres in the course of their career and thus would be able to draw on multiple genre models in their superhero work. The intensity of comics production - new stories about the same characters every month and in some cases, every week - encouraged writers to search far and wide for new plots or compelling new elements while the openness of comics, where you draw whatever you need, made it cheap and simple to expand the genre repertoire.

The titles of the publications which gave birth to the earliest superheroes have become dead metaphors for later generations of readers who have taken for granted that Detective Comics (1937) is where Batman stories are found, Action Comics (1938) plays host to Superman, and Marvel Mystery (1939-1949) is where the Human Torch first emerged. Yet, each of those titles defines a somewhat different genre tradition. As a result, Superman, Batman, and the Human Torch, while all read as superheroes today, were originally understood in somewhat different contexts.

The Silver Age restored the relations between the superhero genre and other closely related traditions. The superheroes had been so over-used for patriotic purposes during the Second World War that they seemed dated by the post-war era. At the same time, GIs had found comics a light weight and portable means of popular entertainment and were continuing to read them as they returned home, creating a strong pull towards adult content. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, superhero books competed with horror, romance, science fiction, western, true crime, jungle adventures, swordplay, and so forth. This push towards more mature content provoked backlash and moral panic (best embodied by Frederick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocents) as reformers struggled to make sense of the presence of adult themes in a medium previously targeted to children. The Comics Code cleared away many of those emerging genres, paving the way for a re-emergence of the superhero by the end of the 1950s at DC and in the early 1960s at Marvel. Or so the story is most often told.

Yet, again, this story simplifies the ways that the superhero comics of the Silver Age emerged from a more diverse set of genre traditions. As Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs note, for example, the 1950s saw the rise of a range of books like Challengers of the Unknown (1958-1971), Mystery in Space (1951-1966), the Sea Devils (1961-1967), and Black Haw (1957-1968); their teams of scientists, soldiers, and adventurers were prototypes for the later superhero teams such as the Justice League, The Avengers, The Defenders, or the Fantastic Four. It is no accident, given DC editor Julius Schwartz's history as a science fiction fan and as an agent for important writers in that genre, that the first significant superhero to emerge in almost ten years was the Martian Manhunter. When Schwartz began to retool and relaunch such established DC characters as The Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom, he first tested the popularity of these characters through anthologies which cut across multiple genres: The Flash first appeared in Showcase (1956-1970) while the Justice League emerges in The Brave and The Bold (1955-1983).

Similarly, Marvel had a distribution contract with DC which limited how many books could be issued each month and somewhat restricted their use of superhero content. The earliest issues of the successful Marvel franchises situate these protagonists in relationship to other genre traditions with the heroes dwarfed on the original Fantastic Four (1961- ) cover by a giant green monster, with the Incredible Hulk (1961-1962) depicted as a "super-Frankenstein" character, with Iron Man built around the iconography of robots and cyborgs, and Spider-man first appearing in the pages of Amazing Fantasy (1962). While these characters today are viewed as archetypical superheroes, they had previously been read - at least in part - in relation to these other genres.

These various franchises carry traces of those other genres even as they are reread within a now more firmly established superhero tradition. Jonathan Letham, for example, writes:

"Kirby always wanted to drag the Four into the Negative Zone - deeper into psychedelic science fiction and existential alienation - while Lee, in his scripting, resolutely pulled them back into the morass of human lives, hormonal alienation, teenage dating problems and pregnancy and unfulfilled longings to be human and normal and loved and not to have the Baxter Building repossessed by the City of New York."

By the same token, as Jason Bainbridge has noted, the two companies which dominated superhero production, then and now, have chosen to pull towards different genre conventions with DC embracing action-adventure stories with their focus on plot and Marvel embracing melodrama with its focus on character. What I am describing here as the era of multiplicity exaggerates and extends the generic instability which has been part of the superhero comic from the start.

HISTORICAL FICTION, FICTIONAL HISTORY

There are so many different forms of generic restructuring going on in contemporary comics that it would be impossible to discuss them all in this essay. I hope to flesh out this argument across an entire book in the not too distant future. For the moment, I will restrict myself to one important way that contemporary superhero comics are playing with genre history in the context of this new era of multiplicity. If one factor contributing to the multiplicity of superhero comics is a growing consciousness of genre history, then it is hardly a surprise that this historical reflection occurs often within the pages of the superhero comics themselves. An important subgenre of superhero comics might be described as a curious hybrid of historical fiction (seeking to understand the past through the lens of superhero adventures) and fictional history (seeking to understand the development of the superhero genre by situating it against the backdrop of the times which shaped it.) For example, Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen constructs an imaginary geneology of the superhero team, seeing 19th century literary figures (The Invisible Man, Dr. Jeckyl, Quatermain, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo) as prefiguring the 20th century Justice League. Matt Wagner's Sandman Mystery Theater (1995-1999) revives an obscure golden age protagonist to examine historic constructions of race, gender, and class, resulting in what Neil Gaiman describes as "a strange and savvy meeting between the fictive dreams of the 1930s and the 1990s." Michael Chabon's Cavalier & Klay has inspired a series focused on the Escapist (2004- ), which not only pastiches comics at a variety of different historic junctures but also has a running commentary situating the stories in an imaginary history of the franchise.

As Jim Collins wrote about the Batman comics of the mid-1980s:

Just as we can no longer imagine popular narratives to be so ignorant of their intertextual dimensions and cultural significance, we can no longer presuppose that the attitude towards their antecedents, their very 'retro' quality can be in any way univocal. Divergent strategies of rearticulation can be discerned not only between different 'retro' texts, but even more importantly, within individual texts that adopt shifting, ambivalent attitudes towards these antecedents.

In what remains of this essay, I want to examine three recent attempts to re-examine the Silver Age (JLA:Year One, DC: The New Frontier, and Unstable Molecules), each representing a somewhat different balance between historical fiction and fictional history, each deploying the "retro" appeal of its caped protagonists to different effect, and each demanding different degrees of knowledge and knowingness on the part of its readers.

Here, the current logic of almost unlimited multiplicity builds upon details and events which were well established in the continuity era. Certain events had to occur within these universes - say, the death of Bruce Wayne's father, the destruction of Krypton, or the formation of the Justice League - but we are invited to read those events from different perspectives. The plays with genre and history I am describing are only possible because the "actual" history of these events is well-known to long-time comics readers who want to return to these familiar spaces and have fresh experiences.

JLA: YEAR ONE

As Cawelti notes, the wave of revisionism and genre transformation which hit the American cinema in the 1970s was accompanied by enormous nostalgia for Hollywood's past:

"In this mode, traditional generic features of plot, character, setting, and style are deployed to recreate the aura of a past time. The power of nostalgia lies especially in its capacity to evoke a sense of warm reassurance by bringing before the mind's eye images from a time when things seemed more secure and full of promise and possibility."

Deconstructionist approaches to genre provoke a sense of insecurity which in turn makes us long for what is being critiqued. Cawelti argued, "A contemporary nostalgia film cannot simply duplicate the past experience but must make us aware in some fashion of the relationship between past and present." Often, this takes the form of exaggerating or transforming those traits which defined genre production in an earlier period.

In his introduction to Astro City: Life in the Fast Lane (1999 ), Kurt Busiek argued for a reconstruction of the superhero genre:

"It strikes me that the only real reason to take apart a pocket watch, or a car engine, aside from the simple delight of disassembly, is to find out how it works. To understand it, so that you can put it back together again better than before, or build a new one that goes beyond what the old model could do. We've been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it's time to put it back together and wind it up, time to take it out on the road and floor it, see what it'll do."

One author who followed Busiek's call was Mark Waid. Across a series of books, Waid has sought to recapture the spirit of the silver age DC comics, tracing the friendship between the Flash and the Green Lantern in The Brave and the Bold (2001), mapping the trajectory of the Barry and Iris Allen romance in The Life Story of the Flash by Iris Allen (1998), and showing how the Justice League came together in JLA: Year One.

When I read Waid's books, I have the sense of returning home - of re-encountering the comics I remembered from my boyhood. And that is perhaps the best way to put it since in fact the mode of storytelling here is very different from actual Silver Age comics, having more in common with the ways these characters were fleshed out in our backyard play or in our tree house speculations than anything one would find in the pages of an actual Silver Age comic. As Busiek explains,

"The original JLA tales, for all that they are crisply drawn, deftly plotted, and full of inventive twists and turns, were creations of their time --and it was a time that emphasized plot over characterizations....Today's readers want their plot twists and bold heroes -- but along with that, they also want to get to know their heroes, to see what makes them tick, what goes on beneath the heroic facades."

Rather than simply retelling a favorite plot, the book charts a twisty path "through, between, and around existing JLA history, preserving as much of the work of their predecessors as they could, while exploring that history and those character in a new way."

Indeed, Year One books - starting with Frank Miller's influential Batman: Year One in the mid-1980s - have a paradoxical mission: on the one hand, they want to strip down encrusted continuity so that they can introduce the classic characters and plots to a new generation but at the same time, these books are going to be avidly consumed and actively critiqued by the generation of comics readers who grew up with these figures. In many ways, the emotional impact of Year One stories depends on our knowledge of what is to follow (or more accurately, what has already happened in earlier books). To cite a few examples, JLA: Year One explores a potential romance between the Flash and the Black Canary, which longtime readers know is doomed, because Barry Allen needs to return to his faithful fiancée Iris and the Black Canary will soon fall under the devil-may-care spell of the Green Arrow. (After all, the Flash was one of the very first superheroes to get married and we know it wasn't to a woman wearing black leather and fishnet stockings.) Or the book has the boyish Hal Jordon and Barry Allen, fresh from an early success, gush that they will both live to "ripe old ages" (p.85) cuing the hardened fan to recall how they each died. The book rewards this kind of fan expertise by tossing in background characters without necessarily explaining how they fit within the DC universe. Most readers will know who Lois Lane, Clark Kent, and Bruce Wayne are, fewer will know Vickie Vale and Oliver Queen, and even fewer, Ted Kord, Maxwell Lord and Snapper Carr. The book overflows with "first times" including, perhaps, most powerfully the scene when the heroes reveal their secret identities to each other, which works because the readers are all already invested in those alteregos. Year One stories are never about creating first impressions even though they are often fascinated with documenting the first encounters between various characters.

Waid does critique some of the ideological assumptions which shaped the earlier books, using a press conference, for example, to subject the hero team to some serious challenges about their nationalistic rhetoric and establishment politics. Yet, the criticisms remain mostly on the surface. Waid respects what these men and women stand for and wants those values to be passed along to another generation. Elsewhere, Waid has spoken of his affection for these Silver Age characters and admiration for the men who created them:

"I am very reverent towards the characters of the past, but not just because of nostalgia. It's logical; these characters, as interpreted in the forties, fifties, and sixties, sold a hundred times more comics than they sell today. They appealed to a much wider range of readers and were targeted more towards a healthier, younger audience, which we have a potential to reach and grow with. Frankly, the guys back then knew what the hell they were doing and we don't any more."

Such affection comes through in running gags and inside jokes - a series of pranks pulled at the expense of the humorless and often perplexed Aquaman, Black Cannary's growing frustration with the way that the male protagonists always want to rescue her when she's not in any real distress, or the absurdity of Green Lantern's inability to deal with anything yellow (Black Canary wonders at one point whether this extends to blondes.) One of the funniest moments comes when the Martian Manhunter who has not yet revealed to the group his shapeshifting powers passes himself off as Superman. His startled and amused teammates, then, want him to imitate a range of other popular culture icons, "do Yoda!" (p. 89.)

As the reference to Yoda suggests, Waid has little interest in placing these stories in the historical context of the early 1960s; locating these events within the continuity of the superhero's careers is central to his efforts to revive the spirit of the Silver Age but situating them in a precise historic period is not. The title of one chapter "Group Dynamics" (p.52), suggests the book's overarching concern. We watch the superhero team evolve from "a garish gang of well-meaning amateurs" (as Batman calls them on p.67) into "five brave champions" (as Clark Kent declares in the book's final passage on p. 316) and in the process, we see special partnerships or leadership styles emerge which we recognize from the classic books. Critics have often stressed DC's distanced and god-like perspective; Waid wants to take us inside their clubhouse. Waid, for example, lets us see the various superhero's excitement and anxiety about finally having a chance to interact with fellow capes. For some, trusting the other heroes come easily, while others - notably the Martian Manhunter - has more difficulty letting down his guard. We watch a team of Alpha males jockey for position with the Green Lantern convinced he is the leader of the pack when everyone else has long since decided that the Flash has won the right to command.

At the same time, Waid enacts the passing of the torch from one generation to another, primarily through the figure of Black Canary whose mother held that same identity in the original Justice Society and who has thus grown up thinking of its members as so many aunts and uncles. At the start, Black Canary keeps comparing her new comrades negatively against the original team and the Flash is awe-struck by her access to the idols of his youth. Canary discovers that her mother had an affair with another masked hero, damaging her respect for the entire group. By the end, the Justice League seeks the help of the Golden Age characters, the JSA overcomes "any concerns we may have had about handling the baton to you youngsters" (p.315) and Black Canary declares herself liberated from her mother's oppressive shadow.

Just Men in Capes? (Part One)

The following essay is being serialized here in part in response to a request from my friends, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, fantasy writers and key players in the Interstitial Arts movement. They heard me give a talk based on this research at Vericon, the Harvard University science fiction, fantasy, comics, and games event last year. They had shared their notes with the readers at their site and have wanted ever since to a way to link to it since it seems so relevent to their ongoing discussion of forms of popular fiction which straddle genre categories. I am going to be running this essay, which remains, as they say, a "work in progress" in the blog in three installments. Basically, in the passage that follows, I will see what happens when we apply genre theory to the challenges of understanding superhero comics. What's the problem? Most often, we use genre theory to define and chart differences between genres (as in the case of literary, film, and television studies) but as I argue here, the superhero genre has so dominated the output of American comics in recent years that we need to develop a form of genre analysis that speaks to difference within the genre. Those who don't read comics might imagine that all superhero comics are more or less the same. But in fact, there is a continual need to generate diversity within the superhero genre to retain the interest of long-standing readers and to capture the interest of new ones.

In this first section, I suggest that there has been a shift in recent years in how the comics industry looks at the superhero genre -- a shift away from focusing primarily on building up continuity within the fictional universe and towards the development of multiple and contradictory versions of the same characters functioning as it were in parallel universes. In effect, the most interesting work here could be described as commercially produced fan fiction -- that is to say, it involves the continual rewriting and reimagining of the established protagonists. One can find here parallels to many of the kinds of fan rewriting practices I discussed in Textual Poachers, although in this case, this rewriting operates within the commercially produced content. Producers often claim that fans disrupt the coherence of the narrative because they generate multiple and contradictory versions of the same characters and events. The case of comics suggest, however, that readers are interested in consuming alternative visions of the series mythos.

"A creation is actually a re-creation, a rearrangement of existing materials in a new, different, original, novel way." - Steve Ditko

In late 2004, Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, Planetary) launched an intriguing project - a series of one shot comics, each representing the first issue of imaginary comics series. Each was set in a different genre -- Stomp Future (Science Fiction), Simon Spector (supernatural), Quit City (aviator), Frank Ironwine (detective). In the back of each book, Ellis explains:

"Years ago I sat down and thought about what adventure comics might've looked like today if superhero comics hadn't have happened. If, in fact, the pulp tradition of Weird Thrillers had jumped straight into comics form without mutating into the superhero subgenre we know today. If you took away preconceptions about design and the dominant single form....If you blanked out the last sixty years."

Ellis's fantasy, of a world without superhero comics, is scarcely unique. Several decades earlier, Alan Moore's Watchmen (1986-87) constructed a much more elaborate alternative history of comic genres. In a world where superheroes are real, comic fans would seek out alternative genres for escapist entertainment. Moore details the authors, the storylines, the rise and fall of specific publishers, as he explains how the pirates' genre came to dominate comics production. Passages from the imagined DC comic series, Tales of the Black Freighter, run throughout Watchmen, drawn in a style which closely mimics E.C. comics of the early 1950s.

Would a filmmaker conjure up an imagined history of Hollywood in which the western or the musical never appeared? Would a television creator imagine a world without the sitcom? Why would they need to? In both cases, these genres played very important roles in the development of American popular entertainment but they never totally dominated their medium to the degree that superheroes have overwhelmed American comic book production.

In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud demonstrates what we would take for granted in any other entertainment sector - that a medium is more than a genre: "When I was little I knew EXACTLY what comics were. Comics were those bright, colorful magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories, and guys in tights....If people failed to understand comics, it was because they defined what comics could be too narrowly....The world of comics is a huge and varied one. Our definition must encompass all these types."

I fully support McCloud's efforts to broaden and diversify the content of contemporary comics. I fear that what I am about to say might well set back that cause a bit. But what interests me in this essay is the degree to which comics do indeed represent a medium which has been dominated by a single genre. After all, nobody really believes us anyway when we say that comics are "more than just men in tights." So, that if we accepted this as a starting premise - "you got me!" - and examined the implications of the superhero's dominance over American comics.

Understanding how the superhero genre operates requires us to turn genre theory on its head. Genre emerges from the interaction between standardization and differentiation as competing forces shaping the production, distribution, marketing, and consumption of popular entertainment. A classic genre critic discussing most other media provides a more precise description of the borders and boundaries between categories that are already intuitively understood by media producers, critics, and consumers. Genre criticism takes for granted that most works fall within one and only one genre with genre-mixing the exception rather than the norm. The genre theorist works to locate "classic" examples of the genre - primarily works which fall at the very center of the space being defined - and uses them to map recurring traits or identify a narrative formula.

Comics are not immune to industrial pressures towards standardization and differentiation yet these forces operate differently in a context where a single genre dominates a medium and all other production has to define itself against, outside of, in opposition to, alongside that prevailing genre. Here, difference is felt much more powerfully within a genre than between competing genres and genre-mixing is the norm. The Superhero genre seems capable of absorbing and reworking all other genres. So, The Pulse (2003- ) is about reporters trying to cover the world of the Marvel superheroes, 1602 (2003) is a historical fiction depicting earlier versions of the superheroes, Spiderman Loves Mary Jane (2004- )is a romance comic focused on a superhero's girlfriend, Common Grounds (2003-2004) is a sitcom set in a coffee house where everyone knows your name - if not your secret identity, Ex Machina (2004- ) deals with the Mayor of New York who happens to be a superhero, and so forth. In each case, the superhero genre absorbs, reworks, accommodates elements of other genres or perhaps we might frame this the other way around, writers interested in telling stories set in these other genres must operate within the all-mighty Superhero genre in order to gain access to the marketplace. And alternative comics are defined not simply as alternative to the commercial mainstream but also as alternative to the superhero genre. As Brian Michael Bendis explains, "In comics, if it don't have a cape or claws or, like, really giant, perfect spherical, chronic back-pain-inducing breasts involved, it's alternative." Yet, to be alternative to the superhero genre is still to be defined by - or at least in relation to -- that genre.

FROM CONTINUITY TO MULTIPLICITY

Writing about Chinatown in 1979, John Cawelti described a crisis within the Hollywood genre system. Classic genres were being deconstructed and reconstructed, critiqued and parodied, mixed and matched, in films as diverse as Chinatown (1974), Blazing Saddles (1974), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and The Godfather (1972).. These films, Cawelti argues, "do in different ways what Polanski does in Chinatown: set the elements of a conventional popular genre in an altered context, thereby making us perceive these traditional forms and images in a new way."

What happened to film genres in the 1970s closely parallels what happened to superhero comics starting in the early 1980s. Geoff Klock's How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, for example, identifies what he calls the "Revisionary Superhero Narrative" as a "third moment" (after the Golden and Silver Ages) that runs from Dark Knight Returns and Watchman (both 1986) through more recent works such as Marvels (1994), Astro City (1995), Kingdom Come (1996) and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999), among a range of other examples. Starting with Miller and Moore, he argues, comic books re-examined their core myths, questioning the virtue and value of their protagonists, blurring the lines between good guys and bad guys, revisiting and recontextualizing past events, and forcing the reader to confront the implications of their long-standing constructions of violence and sexuality. Caweti's description of what Chinatown brought to the detective genre might easily be describing what Dark Knight Returns brought to superhero comics: "Chinatown places the hard-boiled detective story within a view of the world that is deeper and more catastrophic, more enigmatic in its evil, more sudden and inexplicable in its outbreaks of violent chance."

Underlying Klock's argument is something like the theory of genre evolution which Cawelti outlines:

"One can almost make out a life cycle characteristic of genres as they move from an initial period of articulation and discovery, through a phase of conscious self-awareness on the part of both creators and audiences, to a time when the generic patterns have become so well-known that people become tired of their predictability. It is at this point that parodic and satiric treatments proliferate and new genres gradually arise."

We might see the Golden Age as a period of "articulation and discovery," the Silver Age as one of classicism when formulas were understood by producers and consumers, and Klock's "third age" as one where generic exhaustion gives way to a baroque self-consciousness. Yet, subsequent genre critics have argued for a much less linear understanding of how diversity works within genres. For example, Tag Gallagher notes that the earliest phases of a genre's development are often charged with a high degree of self-consciousness as media makers and consumers work through how any given genre diverges from other and more established traditions. Cawelti himself acknowledges that the forces of nostalgia hold in check any tendency to radically deconstruct existing formulas.

Rather than thinking about a genre's predetermined life cycle, we might describe a perpetual push and pull exerted on any genre; genre formulas are continually repositioned in relation to social, cultural, and economic contexts of production and reception. Genres are altogether more elastic than our textbook definitions suggest; they maintain remarkable abilities to absorb outside influences as well as to withstand pressures towards change, and the best authors working in a genre at any point in time are highly aware of their materials and the traditions from which they came.

That said, there are shifting institutional pressures placed on genres which promote or retard experimentation. David Bordwell has described those pressures as the "bounds of difference" noting that even moments in production history which encourage a high degree of standardization (understood in terms of adherence to formulas and quality standards) also are shaped by countervailing pressures towards novelty, experimentation, and differentiation. Bordwell notes, for example, that the Hollywood system always allowed what he calls "innovative workers" greater latitude for experimentation as long as their films enjoyed either profitability or critical acclaim and preferably both. The so-called revisionist superhero narratives reflected a growing consumer awareness of authorship within the medium. Historically, comics publishers imposed limits on that experimentation in order to preserve the distinctive identities of their most valuable characters in a system in which multiple writers work on the same franchise and there was constant and rapid turnover of employment. Here, the mainstream publishers loosened those constraints for at least some creative workers. Rather than looking for a period of revisionism, we might better be looking for how far creators can diverge from genre formulas at different historical junctures.

Painting with broad strokes, we might identify three phases, each with their own opportunities for innovation:

1) As the comic book franchises take shape, across the Golden and Silver Ages, their production is dominated by relatively self-contained issues; readers turn over on a regular basis as they grow older. Franchises are organized around recurring characters, whose stories, as Umberto Eco has noted in regard to Superman, get defined in terms of an iterative logic in which each issue must end more or less where it began. Under this system, creators may originate new characters or totally recast existing characters (as occurred at the start of the Silver Age) but they have much less flexibility once a comic franchise starts.

2) Somewhere in the early 1970s, this focus on self-contained stories shifts towards more and more serialization as the distribution of comics becomes more reliable. Readers have, by this point, grown somewhat older and continue to read comics over a longer span of their lives; these readers place a high value on consistency and continuity, appraising both themselves and the authors on their mastery of past events and the web of character relationships within any given franchise. Indeed, this principle of continuity operates not just within any individual book but also across all of the books by a particular publisher so that people talk about the DC and Marvel universes. The culmination of the continuity era might well have been Marv Wolfstein's Crisis of Infinite Earths (1985), a 12 issue "event" designed to mobilize all of the characters in the DC universe and then cleanse away competing and contradictory continuities which had built up through the years. Instead, as Geoff Klock notes, the "Crisis" led to more and more "events" which further splintered and fragmented the DC universe but also accustomed comic readers to the idea that they could hold multiple versions of the same universe in their minds at the same time.

3) Today, comics have entered a period where principles of multiplicity are felt at least as powerfully as those of continuity. Under this new system, readers may consume multiple versions of the same franchise, each with different conceptions of the character, different understandings of their relationships with the secondary figures, different moral perspectives, exploring different moments in their lives, and so forth. So that in some storylines, Aunt May knows Spider-man's secret identity while in others she doesn't; in some Peter Parker is still a teen and in others, he is an adult science teacher; in some, he is married to Mary Jane and in others, they have broken up, and so forth. These different versions may be organized around their respective authors or demarked through other designations - Marvel's Ultimate or DC's All Star lines which represented attempts to reboot the continuity to allow points of entry for new readers for example. In some cases, even more radical alterations of the core franchises are permissible on a short term and provisional basis - say, the election of Lex Luther as president or the destruction of Gotham City. Beyond the two major companies, smaller comics companies - Image, Dark Horse, Top Cow, ABC, etc. - further expand upon the superhero mythos - often creating books which are designed to directly comment on the DC and Marvel universes by using characters modeled on comic book icons. And beyond these direct reworkings of the DC and Marvel superheroes, there are, as noted earlier, any number of appropriations of the superhero by alternative comics creators.

In each case, the new system for organizing production layers over earlier practices - so that we do not lose interest in having compelling stories within individual issues as we move into the continuity era nor do comics readers and producers lose interest in continuity as we enter into a period of multiplicity. Even at the present moment, DC remains more conservative in its efforts to produce a coherent and singular continuity across all of the books it publishes, and Marvel is more open to multiple versions of the same character functioning simultaneously within different publications.

Writing in 1991, Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio use the Batman as an example of the kinds of pressures being exerted on the superhero genre at a moment when older texts were continuing to circulate (and in fact, were recirculated in response to renewed interests in the characters), newer versions operated according to very different ideological and narratalogical principles, a range of auteur creators were being allowed to experiment with the character, and the character was assuming new shapes and forms to reflect the demands of different entertainment sectors and their consumers. They write, "Whereas broad shifts in emphasis had occurred since 1939, these changes had been, for the most part, consecutive and consensual. Now, newly created Batmen, existing simultaneously with the older Batmen of the television series and comic reprints and back issues, all struggled for recognition and a share of the market. But the contradictions amongst them may threaten both the integrity of the commodity form and the coherence of the fans' lived experience of the character necessary to the Batman's continued success." The superhero comic, they suggest, may not be able to withstand "the tension between, on the one hand, the essential maintenance of a recognizable set of key character components and, on the other hand, the increasingly necessary centrifugal dispersion of those components." Retrospectively, we can see Pearson and Uricchio as describing a moment of transition from continuity to multiplicity.

DO SUPERHEROES GET EXHAUSTED?

In his Chinatown essay, Cawelti identifies three core factors leading to the genre experimentation in 1970s cinema:

"I would point to the tendency of genres to exhaust themselves, to our growing historical awareness of modern popular culture, and finally to the decline of the underlying mythology on which traditional genres have been based since the late nineteenth century."

Each of these pressures can be seen as working on the superhero genre during the period that Uricchio and Pearson were describing. Individually and collectively, these forces led to the current era of multiplicity.

For example, comics writer Ed Brubaker falls back on a theory of "generic exhaustion" to explain Gotham Central (2003- ), his series depicting the everyday beat cops who operate literally and figuratively under the shadow of the Dark Knight. Brubaker argues that by shifting the focus off the superhero and onto these everyday men and women, he can up the emotional stakes:

"Batman is never going to get killed by these guys, and he's not going to allow them to kill the ballroom of people they're holding hostage. Because Batman, by the rulebook you're given when you're writing it, has to be infallible. He can't get frozen solid and broken into pieces and have Robin become the next Batman. But you can have a Gotham city cop frozen and broken into pieces in front of his partner, and suddenly Mr. Freeze is scary again."

Kurt Busiek, on the other hand, has stressed the elasticity of the superhero genre, arguing that superheroes can take on new values and associations as old meanings cease to hold the interest of their readers:

"If a superhero can be such a powerful and effective metaphor for male adolescence, then what else can you do with them? Could you build a superhero story around a metaphor for female adolescence? Around midlife crisis? Around the changes adults go through when they become parents? Sure, why not? And if a superhero can exemplify America's self image at the dawn of World War II, could a superhero exemplify America's self image during the less-confident 1970s? How about the emerging national identity of a newly-independent African nation? Or a nontraditional culture, like the drug culture, or the 'greed is good' business culture of the go-go Eighties. Of course. If it can do one, it can do the others."

We can see this process of renewing the core meanings attached to the superhero figure in such recent books as the Luna Brother's Ultra (2004-2005), which depicts superheroes as celebrities whose relationships become the material of tabloid gossip magazines (with its central plotline clearly modeled after the Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez romance), or Dr. Blink, Superhero Shrink (2003- ), where superheroes are neurotics who need help working through their relationship issues and suicidal tendencies (including a suicidal superhero doomed to disappointment since he is invincible and flies whenever he tries to throw himself off tall buildings). In both cases, we see the genre's building blocks being attached to a new set of metaphors.

Second, Cawelti argues that the Hollywood's generic transformations were sparked by a heightened audience awareness of the history of American cinema through university film classes, retro-house screenings, television reruns, and serious film criticism. More educated consumers began to demand an acknowledgement of genre history within the newer movies they consumed. Similarly, Matthew J. Pustz contends that the fan's interest in comic continuity reflected a moment when older comics became more readily accessible through back issues and reissues. A focus on continuity rewarded fans for their interest in the full run of a favorite franchise, though it might also act as a barrier to entry for new readers who often found continuity-heavy books difficult to follow. The contemporary focus on multiplicity may similarly reward the mastery of longtime fans but around a different axis of consumption.

More and more, fans and authors play with genre mixing as a way of complicating and expanding the genre's potential meanings. Writing about television genres, Jason Mittell has challenged the claims made by postmodernist critics that such genre mixing or hybridity leads to the dissolution of genre; instead, he suggests that these moments where two or more genres are combined heighten our awareness of genre conventions: "the practice of generic mixture has the potential to foreground and activate generic categories in vital ways that 'pure' generic texts rarely do." Mittell's prime example is the merging of horror and teen romance genres within Buffy the Vampire Slayer but he could just as easily be talking about DC's Elseworlds series, which exists to transform the superhero genre through contact with a range of other genre traditions. For example, The Kents (2000) is almost a pure western linked to the Superman franchise through a frame story where Pa Kent sends a box of family heirlooms to Clark so that he will understand the history of his adopted family. Red Son (2004) deals with what might happen if the rocket from Krypton had landed in Russia rather than the United States and thus works through how Superman would have impacted several decades in Russian history. Superman's Metropolis (1997) mixes and matches elements from Fritz Lang's German expressionist classic with the Superman origin story. As the series is described on the back of each issue,

"In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places - some that have existed, or might have existed and others that can't, couldn't, and shouldn't exist. The result is stories that make characters who are as familiar as yesterday seem as fresh as tomorrow."

The Elseworld books read the superheroes as archetypes which would assert themselves in many different historical and generic contexts; they invite a search for the core or essence of the character even as they encourage us to take pleasure in their many permutations. If we can tinker with his costume, his origins, his cultural context, even his core values, what is it that makes Superman Superman and not, say, Captain Marvel or Captain America? Speeding Bullets (1993) pushes this to its logical extreme: fusing the origins stories of Batman and Superman to create one figure - which is bent on using its super powers to exert revenge for his parent's deaths.

Third, Cawelti reads the genre transformations of the 1970s cinema in relation to a declining faith in the core values and assumptions which defined those genre traditions half a century earlier. Alan Moore made a similar argument for the cultural importance of the revisionist superhero comics: "As anyone involved in fiction and its crafting over the past fifteen or so years would be delighted to tell you, heroes are starting to become rather a problem. They aren't what they used to be...or rather they are, and therein lies the heart of the difficulty. We demand new themes, new insights, new dramatic situations. We demand new heroes."

This search for "new heroes" is perhaps most spectacularly visible if we examine how the comics industry has responded to the growing multiculturalism of American society and the pressures of globalization on its markets. So, Marvel has created the "mangaverse" series focused on how their established characters would have looked if they had emerged within the Japanese comics industry: the Hulk transforms into a giant lizard and Peter Parker trains as a ninja. Similarly, Marvel released a series of Spider-Man: India (2004) comics, timed to correspond with the release of Spider-Man 2 (2004) in India and localized to South Asian tastes. Peter Parker becomes Pavitr Prabhakar and Green Goblin becomes Rakshasa, a traditional mythological demon. Marvel calls it "transcreation," one step beyond translation. Such books appeal as much to "pop cosmopolitans" in the United States (fans who are seeking cultural difference through their engagement with popular culture from other countries) as they do to the Asian market - indeed, Spider-Man India appeared in the United States more or less simultaneously with its publication in South Asia.

At the same time, the mainstream comics industry has begun to experiment with giving alternative comics artists a license to play around with their characters. For example, David Mack, a collage artist, has ended up not only doing covers for Brian Bendis's Alias (2001-2004) series but also doing his own run on Daredevil (2003). Peter Bagge, whose Hate (1990-1998) comics epetimized the grunge influence on alternative comics, was hired to do The Monomaniacal Spiderman (2002) in which Peter Parker reads Ayn Rand and gets fed up with the idea that he has any kind of "great responsibility" to look after less powerful people. DC comics, on the other hand, has published a series of Bizarro (2001, 2005)collections where alternative artists tell their own distinctive versions of the company's pantheon of superheroes with the framing device that these are what comics look like in the Bizarro world where everything is the exact opposite of Earth. In no other medium is the line between experimental and commercial work this permeable.

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part Two)

Yesterday, I ran the first part of a two part interview with comics journalist Joe Sacco (Palestine) as conducted by CMS Masters student Huma Yosef (herself a former professional journalist from Pakistan). Today, I continue this interview. It occurred to me as I was putting this together that it represents a fascinating contrast to the interview I ran a week or so back with comics Creator Rob Walton (Ragmop). Both artists are very interested in using comics to explore political issues but they approach these issues from very different vantage points: Sacco creates realist comics that document the everyday lives of people from war-torn countries while Walton uses fantasy and comedy to encourage us to reflect on the American political process. Between them, they suggest some of the ways that comics may function as civic media. I now turn you over to Huma for the rest of her interview.

In what ways is your method of working akin to that of a journalist?

I conduct lots of rigorous, sit-down interviews, one after the other. Lots of things happen that aren't part of the interview process, and I'm often in situations where I can't take notes. In those instances, I duck behind a wall and frantically take as many notes as I can. In the evenings, I translate all my notes into a journal.

I also take photographs whenever I can. I'm currently doing a book about the Gaza Strip for which, after interviewing someone, I'd take his or her photograph. If someone refused to have a picture taken, then I'd try to quickly draw an image of the person in the margin of my notebook. Sometimes, there are things I realize I need to draw only after I start working. In that case, I visually research places later on. When I was working on Palestine, I wasn't aware of a lot of things and had to draw a lot from memory. With Safe Area Gorazde, my process has evolved. Now, if anything, I take too many pictures.

On the job in Palestine, I also started following stories as they unfolded. Like any reporter who has a little freedom, you follow your nose and try to cover the stories that you don't think anyone else will tell. For example, Gorazde opened up while I was there - I didn't know I would write about it until I arrived in Bosnia. Once I identified my subject, I conducted preliminary interviews about what happened, then broke it down into component parts. No doubt, the second time around was a more methodical process as I was a little more self-conscious about what I was doing.

What extra measures do you have to take given the visual nature of your work?

I have to ask a lot of visual questions about what a street or a camp looked like. Still, you're not always aware in the field of what visual stuff you'll need when you start drawing. Over time, my method has been honed, and I'm more aware of what I'll need later on.

I also need to do extra research sometimes. For example, the work I'm doing right now is sent in Gaza in 1956. I've made trips to United Nations archives to gather photographic evidence of Gaza city at that time. When I was interviewing people about what happened, I spent a significant amount of time talking about the visual details. I had people taking me around and showing me old houses, some of which had been built over, but still gave me a sense of how things looked.

Do you struggle with issues of journalistic integrity when drawing something that you haven't seen or been able to find photographs of?

I've never had a situation where I couldn't visualize something to some level of accuracy. I may not know exactly if there were trees or a hill there, but I'm not going to drop material because of details like that. I like to compare myself to a film director who's making a movie about the 1700s: you just have to recreate something to the best of your ability sometimes. Granted, not every twig is going to be in the right place, it won't literally be the same thing. But I'm clear about the fact that my work is an artistic rendition of something, a mixture of art and journalism. If I start obsessing about the details, I may as well be a photographer.

How do you respond to critics who argue that your work cannot be considered journalism because of its artistic dimension?

It's perfectly valid to argue against what I do and wonder whether it can be considered journalistic. I describe my work as comic journalism, other people call it documentary journalism, but these are all just labels to me. The fact is that no one can tell an entire story, everyone concentrates on what they want to, details are cropped out of photographs, stories go through an editing process. Every portrayal is to some extent a filter, and on that level something that someone might find problematic. Ultimately, I try to be as accurate when putting down quotations and describing things. I'm not making things up even though there is an interpretive element to my work.

You told The Guardian that you do "comics, not graphic novels". Could you elaborate on that distinction?

A novel to me is fiction. I think of myself as working in the non-fiction world and don't like my work being considered fiction. I think of the term 'graphic novel' as a marketing moniker geared towards adults who are scared of comics. But it doesn't bother me to talk about my work as comics. I consider myself a comic book artist. The notion of comics still has an underground feel to it, which is fun.

Have you had trouble explaining the medium that you work in to interviewees who may not be familiar with comics?

The main problem I've had is with myself. When I was working on Palestine, I would tell people I was working on a 'project' because I felt sheepish and unsure about what I was doing. By the time I was in Bosnia, things were different. Younger people were more open to me as they have a history of comics there. Moreover, by some weird coincidence, someone in Sarajevo reviewed my work just before I got there, so people were greased for it.

During my last few trips to Gaza, I would bring my book along and show it to people. Especially with older people, having my work with me worked to my advantage since they don't speak English but can recognize the streets or camps that I've drawn. Different cultures might be different, but in the Middle East they can get their head around the idea of drawing and depicting historical events. In Iraq, when I was with marines, there was no getting around what I was doing because they could easily google me and find out exactly what I was up to. So I did meet some lieutenant colonels who were skeptical about my method but were willing to give it a shot because I had press credentials.

Do you manipulate comic conventions such as framing to express meaning?

Yes. My drawing is a very conscious process. The choice of frames, the decision to put captions in little bursts, each angle is very thought out. In Palestine, I feel I overdid some things and have since learned how to discipline my drawing. While working on Palestine, I'd get tired of drawing the same angle so I'd change angles. But now I know to stick with something if I need to maintain a tone.

Does your process involve much revision?

I try not to revise much. I write the script of the comic first and spend a while on this stage. Most of the editing occurs when I realize that I don't need to write out something because I can draw it instead. Other than that, I try to keep the script as it is. In the drawing, on the other hand, I let myself be loose and problem solve as I'm working. I don't story board the whole comic, which makes the process a little more lively and spontaneous. If it were a matter of connecting the dots, I don't think I could carry on working without losing interest.

Where and how were you introduced to comic books?

I grew up in Australia where I read British war comics and some American western comics. I didn't read many super hero comics, other than perhaps strips about The Phantom. It became a hobby because I'd draw my own little figures, mimicking the ones I saw in the comics I was reading.

Do you think working in the medium of comics liberates your journalism from the constraints of the 24-hour news cycle?

I don't think the freedom from the conventional news cycle is peculiar to comics. Herr's Dispatches, for example, is liberated from the constraints of time. I think it's about the approach rather than the medium. With my work, it has to be about the approach. I look for stuff that people will respond to even if the material is dated. That said, I try to make my shorter pieces for magazine publication timelier.

What can traditional print journalism learn from your work?

I

've been trained in classic American objective journalism, but I feel like a reporter should not treat a reader like a repository for facts, rather as someone you're talking to across a table. When I'm reading about a place, I want to know what it's like, what it feels like to be there. I think American journalism lacks the human element that is a bit more prevalent in the British press.

When I'd be sitting with US correspondents in Jerusalem, they'd tell me a story about something that happened to them, but would never write about it. They're so focused on getting all the right quotes, telling this side of the story, that side of the story, interviewing the right spokesperson, and working by the numbers, that they end up doing a disservice to their readers by being objective. They're so focused on being balanced, they don't tell you what they know themselves. It's difficult to maintain objectivity when you start writing that way, but I think reporters should be human beings with an opinion. Why can't a reporter tell me exactly what he or she thinks? Why is all the talking left up to pundits who never leave their desks in DC?

How do you decide which events to cover?

The hardest thing about this kind of work is how much time you spend on the desk. There's that impulse to always see more, but I have to choose the things that matter to me personally for whatever reason. To some extent, it used to be a financial thing. But it's ultimately about what hits you in the gut. The Palestine issue really hit me in the gut. When you start thinking about it, you realize what a disservice has been done to the issue by its media coverage in the US, you realize how many tax dollars go into perpetuating the situation. Similarly, I felt compelled to go to Bosnia. And when I had the gut instinct to go to Iraq, I started calling up agents to see if anyone would be interested in my work about the war.

Of course, there are other things that I'm compelled to do, but if you spend three, four, or even five years on a book, the years start to go by and you can't get to everything, even if it is compelling and interesting.

You also need to prepare yourself before you go, and it can take years of reading to learn the ten per cent you need to know so that you can be open to what's happening there and not waste time asking the simple questions. That basic historical context is important, even though you learn the rest when you get there. That said, I now want to do some shorter pieces for magazines and get out more.

Do you consider returning to the territories you've covered in order to keep your work up to date?

I feel I've already gone pretty deep into the places I've covered. Ultimately, I don't think I can really go much further than I've gone without becoming an Arabist. I think I'd need an academic base to go much further. But then question arises: am I a cartoonist or an Arabist? Also, I feel the urge to cover new ground and be creative for my own sake.

Do you think you've created a market for comic journalism that didn't exist when you started working?

I just tried to do what I wanted to do and didn't think about whether it would work out commercially for me. I thought I was committing commercial suicide with Palestine. Then, half way through Safe Area Gorazde, I had no success at all and was about to give up. But it's always been about doing what I want to do and so I stuck with it. Other people have come to see value in it. It's been a long road and it has taken many years for it to happen, but now I can pick and choose a lot more than I ever imagined possible. It helps that there's been increased interest in comics too.

Does your methodological approach change as you cover topics as varied as rock bands and the Balkan war?

With most of my work, I try to draw relatively realistically, and that's been a struggle since I've largely self-taught myself. When doing the rock band book, then, I've got a looser style and I enjoy doing it more. When doing funny work, I'm less worried about accuracy, the stakes are lower, and I can have more fun with the material.

Has there been a political backlash to your work?

Not really. Once in a while a store won't put my work on the shelves, but I've never had to deal with anything I've been bothered about. When Palestine came out, it was under the radar. My next book may not be under the radar, but we'll just have to wait and see what happens with that.

Given that your work reflects a political stance that is uncommon in the mainstream media, are you concerned about broadening your audience?

I probably get a bigger audience now, in this medium, than I would otherwise. No other medium is going to publish or broadcast this stuff. I also feel that if you popularize the material, you have to dumb it down. Overall, I think if I was to try any other tactic, I wouldn't have gotten done what I have managed to do.

An Interview with Comics Journalist Joe Sacco (Part One)

Every year, I ask students in my graduate proseminar on Media Theory and Methods to apply what we are learning in the class and do an interview with a media maker. The goal is to pull to the surface their "theory" of the medium in which they operate -- the often unarticulated, sometimes well considered, assumptions they make about their audience, their creative context, their techniques, their technology, their cultural status, and so forth. I will be getting a chance this week to see what my students have produced. I knew going into the process this year that I would be interested to see what Huma Yusuf produced. Huma Yusuf graduated from Harvard in 2002 with a degree in English and American Literature, and returned to Pakistan to work as a journalist. She specializes in writing about social trends as represented in media and media and society issues, in addition to addressing subjects such as low-income housing, 'honor' killings, gang wars and the state's ineffective prosecution of rape cases. Her writing garnered the UNESCO/Pakistan Press Foundation 'Gender in Journalism 2005' Award and the European Commission's 2006 Natali Lorenzo Prize for Human Rights Journalism. Yusuf is interested in investigating the interface among media, local politics and global trends - an intersection that she will explore through sites such as community radio, trends in media consumption, and online environments. With the support of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, she is currently launching a first-of-its-kind webzine, the goal of which is to provide an alternate forum where journalists, academics, and media students can examine and critique the Pakistani media industry at large.

I knew because Huma is an interesting person with a journalist's impulses but also because she was connecting with Joe Sacco, the journalist who has used comics as a vehicle to capture the perspectives of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Occupied Territories and to tell the story of the Bosnian War. We had been lucky enough to have Sacco as a speaker at a CMS colloquium event several years ago (alas, before we started our podcasts!) and I thought interesting things might happen if the two of them got on the phone together. When I heard she was doing the interview, I asked if we could run it on the blog.

Everything from here comes from Huma's account of the interview:

Working as a reporter in Karachi, Pakistan, I was often frustrated by the limitations imposed on my work by the parameters of traditional journalism. When I filed an interview with the Police Surgeon of Karachi, the man who oversees all forensic evidence gathering and related medico-legal issues in the city, I hated that I couldn't describe the homophobic graffiti that had been scratched onto the surface of his desk and filing cabinet, the best indication of the kind of pressure under which his team operated. While reporting on a horrific rape case, I would have given anything to describe the self-satisfied way in which the police official I interviewed scratched his crotch using a fly swatter throughout our conversation. That one crude yet probably unconscious gesture said more about the sense of physical entitlement that Pakistani men enjoy than anything I ever wrote. Similarly, if I could have admitted in print that I found myself throwing up in a back alley after visiting the sewage-ridden tin shacks of hundreds of homeless Karachiites, perhaps more people would have been outraged by a government scam that denied access to low-income housing.

I wasted many evenings arguing with my editor about the value of first-person narrative journalism and the shortcomings of objectivity. Unfortunately, neither of us could conjure a reporting template that would be considered appropriate within the standards set by the mainstream media, yet simultaneously capture everything that was raw and repulsive about the reality I was documenting.

Enter Joe Sacco. At the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism in Boston last fall, soon after my arrival in the US, I happened upon Palestine, Sacco's comic journalism tour de force. Although conference participants had spent the weekend brainstorming ways in which to make journalism more textured, insightful, and human, no one had come close to suggesting a technique that could rival the satirical, brutally honest, and profoundly immersive experience that is Sacco's work.

Often compared to Art Spiegelman's Maus, Sacco's award-winning Palestine: In the Gaza Strip (1996) has been hailed for setting new standards in the genre of non-fiction graphic novels, or, as Sacco terms it, comic journalism. With his follow-up effort Safe Area Gorazde: The War In Eastern Bosnia 1992-1995, Sacco established himself as a journalist to be reckoned with. He has since covered all manner of "compelling" events from Ingushetia to Iraq, from rock bands on the road to raids in Ramallah. Each comic is reportage at its best, daring to go behind-the-scenes of journalistic objectivity, using alternating visual chaos and clarity to render a reporter's all-encompassing experience of a situation. Even better, Sacco's frames are replete with the adrenaline and anxiety, humor and humanity that are never granted any column inches.

While it would be inappropriate for me to compare Pakistan to Palestine, I do believe that there are some realities so absurd that they demand new ways of telling. Sacco's work serves as a reminder to all journalists that they should strive to recount the reality that drives their investigations by whatever means necessary. Sacco is currently working on another comic on the Gaza Strip. Until that hits bookstores, we can content ourselves with some thoughts from the cartoonist:

You've been described as a pioneer in the field of comic journalism, yet one could argue that your work is part of a long tradition, an evolution of the political cartoon. How do you contextualize your work?

I primarily think of myself as a cartoonist, but also as someone who is interested in political matters and what's going on in the world. I know there's a long tradition of illustrators dating back to the London Illustrated and Harper's coverage of the Civil War as well as another tradition of artists who deal with political matters, political cartoons, and editorializing news through pictures. In the end, though, my interests have just come together. I wanted to be a journalist and then fell back on an intense hobby to make a living. I don't think too much about where I place myself and I never really had a theory about what I was doing. People keep asking me about my work, so I'm coming up with something to say post-fact. But the truth is, it's quite accidental. If you've done something for 15 years, you need to build some theory around it, but I wasn't aware of what I was doing when I started doing it

.

Who or what has influenced your work?

George Orwell, Robert Crumb, Hunter S. Thompson, and Michael Herr's Dispatches. I really care about journalism and it's very important to me to get the facts. But I also like getting the taste of something in my mouth, being a part of the same swirl that the writer is in. Herr's work, for example, is more atmospheric and so tells more about war from a universal standpoint that can be accessed in different ways.

Given your influences, do you consider your work to be in line with that of the New Journalists?

I hesitate to make the direct connection. I studied standard American journalism and wanted to write hard news. I only wrote feature material later on. I discovered Herr half way through college and Thompson long after graduating. Other people have assigned me a place among the New Journalists, whatever that means. In my work, I'm just trying to create the flavor of a place I've been.

Did the New Journalists influence your decision to insert yourself into the narrative?

My work process has always been organic so I never made the conscious decision to appear in the narrative. When I started doing comics, I was doing autobiographical material. When I went to the Middle East, however, I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do. But it wasn't such a stretch to think that I would reflect my own experiences in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, along the lines of a travelogue.

Looking back, I think having myself in it is a strong part of the work, not because I want to be a character, but because I want to point out that this material isn't objective, this is my point of view, these are the impressions I got. I'm interested in the facts, but that's not the same as being objective. My figure represents the personal pronoun 'I' and emphasizes that this isn't 'fly on the wall' journalism.

By inserting yourself in the narrative, you can also write the stuff that journalists don't, for example, about how people interact with you. I want to get away from the pretense of the reporter as artificial construct. Reporters have feelings about a situation and that impacts the way they write. My work is a way to demystify a process that may otherwise seem strange to people.

Capitalism and Cartoons: An Interview with Ragmop's Rob Walton (Part Two)

Yesterday, I began the first of a two part interview with Rob Walton, creator of the recently completed graphic novel, Ragmop. Greg Smith, whose research interest extend from cognitive theory of emotion to the translation of The Maxx for television, conducted this interview. Smith is the author of a great forthcoming book on Ally McBeal and the aesthetics of serial television, which is coming out later this year. Yesterday, Smith and Walton took us deep into the political and economic theories behind the book. Today, they explore some of the influences -- from Samuel Beckett to Jack Kirby -- that shaped this idiosyncratic story. Many of you, of course, live in areas where the comic book shops are sub par and don't stock Walton's Ragmop. I should note that the book is of course also available from Amazon and other online bookdealers.

Lest people think that Ragmop is an economic treatise, we should point out that it's incredibly funny too. The rhythm of the jokes feels a lot like the jokes in classic animation. What did you learn about joke structure from animation?

Drawing storyboards for ten years definitely helped refine my comic timing as well as what I absorbed as a kid watching Monty Python, Bugs Bunny, the Marx Brothers, and reading MAD Magazine. Animation also taught me how to use "beats". Those are moments of silence when a character suddenly clues into something, like when the Tetragrammaton realizes that there are dinosaurs in Heaven (page 241) or Alice's spit-take on page 178 (you don't see too many spit-takes in comics, do you?). Ragmop appropriates all of this material, which originates for our purposes with Vaudeville and Silent Film comedy. It was amazing to be able to distill eighty years of comedy culture in a comic like Ragmop. I don't think it could have been done any other way. It was a cartoon comedy or nothing. I was dealing with such grand themes and extreme viewpoints that it never once occurred to me that this would be anything other than a comedy.

Aside from animation I did read up on the history of comedy going back to the Greeks. I was happy to learn that what I was doing in Ragmop was nothing more than what was done at the original festivals, where ancient comedians would parody and lampoon the figures of establishment in their day. That's where comedy seemed to begin. It's also why it has always been reviled and suppressed over the centuries by the various targets of its humor.

I'd like to hear you pick an influence and talk to me about how you worked that through your comic.

I suppose I could talk about two influences, one from stage--Peter Barnes--and one from television--Monty Python. I don't think it's surprising that they're both British. British stage and comedy had an enormous influence on me as a teenager. Plays like Marat/Sade and The Ruling Class blew my mind, man, as they tackled subjects that seemed to me to be reserved for university lecture halls. Even Waiting for Godot and Endgame by little Sammy Beckett showed that comedy could convey big ideas and do so in a way drama could not touch. Monty Python showed me that comedy could be equally intelligent and downright silly at the same time. The Life of Brian exposes the absurdities of both religious institutions and revolutionary movements while making us laugh hysterically.

Barnes' The Ruling Class is a savage black comedy that says that given the choice society would choose hate and fear over love and compassion by choosing Jack the Ripper rather than Jesus Christ to rule us. His play Red Noses is a heartbreaking comedy about bringing comfort to people's lives through laughter in a world beset by war and plague and religious extremism. Meanwhile Chuck Jones had made cartoons about bullfighting, Opera, and transvestism. Bob Clampett had made his cartoon masterpiece Beanie & Cecil, and Jay Ward had brought new literary madness and a beat sensibility to my youthful generation with Rocky & Bullwinkle. MAD Magazine would tackle anything. MAD's influence is keenly felt throughout Ragmop from the front cover aping Jack Davis to the musical numbers that parody The Music Man. So is it any wonder that when I came to start drawing Ragmop it all came pouring out of me?

I'll make a shameful confession: I've never liked Jack Kirby. I grew up as a DC guy, and so when I finally read the great Kirby arcs as an adult, it all seems so overblown, the mythic stuff seems silly to me. And yet I like the Kirby stuff in Ragmop for some reason. Can you help me like Kirby?

I didn't start reading Kirby myself until his return to DC in 1970 or so. My primary reading focus was Spider-man, and I didn't start reading Kirby's Fantastic Four until it was reprinted in World's Greatest. I also caught up on Spidey through the reprints in Marvel Tales. Included in Marvel Tales was Kirby's Thor. I loved Thor. It was pure science fiction. It was totally groovy, especially inked by Chic Stone. The first Kirby Fantastic Four I read in reprint was "The Gentleman's Name is Gorgan" (FF #44). I was knocked off my socks. FF's # 55, 57, and 63 remain some of my favorite single issues of all time. I never tire of re-reading them.

The thing about Kirby (no pun intended) is that there were no limits to his imagination. Literally. If Marvel Comics is the House of Ideas, then it was the house that Jack built on the foundation of his ideas. The High Evolutionary, The Negative Zone, Galactus, the Silver Surfer: these were characters and concepts that inspired a generation of new creators. Jack's mind was so beyond anyone else's that few creators have been able to continue his creations with any satisfactory success. Both DC and Marvel have failed in my opinion to cope with the themes raised in The New Gods and The Eternals respectively. The New Gods in particular was Jack's attempt to use comics to achieve literary greatness. Unfortunately his writing skills were never equal to his ability to conceptualize, and his work is constantly marred by cornball dialogue.

Even so, Jack had something serious to say about religion (Judaism), technology, war, and totalitarianism. "The Pact" (New Gods #7) and "Himon" (Mister Miracle #9) were exceptions. In these two issues Kirby found his muse and wrote movingly about war, the freedom of the individual, and parentage. Only the writing of Alan Moore has equaled Jack's accomplishment on these two books as far as I'm concerned. For me, these are the two greatest single mainstream comics ever produced.

It wasn't to last, of course, but that was all right. There was plenty of Kirby to go around. Kamandi, the Demon, OMAC, The Losers, The Eternals, and even Devil Dinosaur proved that Kirby could take even the lamest of concepts and turn them into pure entertainment while lacing them with ideas that are still fueling comics to this very day. It's ironic that Kirby's OMAC ("Are you ready for the world that's coming?") is far more prevalent for us today than DC's current re-imagining of the character.

Captain Victory was one of the last books Kirby produced. Although his art was deteriorating by this time, his mind wasn't. Captain Victory harkened back to the themes of The New Gods and in a way brought them to some resolution. His trilogy of "Big Ugly" "The Lost Ranger" and "Gangs of Space" (issues 11- 13) proved that when it came to themes of war and sacrifice Kirby still had it in him to surprise, shock, and move this university educated reader. I proudly own the page where Captain Victory discovers the corpse of Alaria on the battlefield in issue 13. I find it profoundly moving as the last scene in the long drama that concludes his origin story, turning the boy into a man, and the soldier into a leader: "Triumph and loss too elusive to measure--and the burden of the strong."

Kirby showed me that all of time and space were open to me as a cartoonist, and I took that to heart in Ragmop. I never would have had my characters enter what I call "the Punyverse" had Kirby not first shown me worlds within worlds. The O-ring is sister to Kirby's Cosmic Cube. Kirby's kickboxing Devil Dinosaur is ancestor to my own trio of knuckle-headed dinos. Would I be waging a war in Heaven had I not read the mighty Thor? 'Fraid not.

Kirby saw it all first. Kirby paved the way and opened every door for every future writer and artist of comics. I can appreciate that Kirby is of his time and not to everyone's taste, given how the medium has evolved since the advent of Frank Miller, Chris Claremont, and Alan Moore in the early 1980's. But on the other hand, his time was so far ahead of us it could be decades still before we catch up to, let alone fully comprehend and appreciate, his massive perspective.

Nuff said.

So what's the meaning of the title Ragmop?

Why Ragmop? At the time I was developing the story, I had no title. That was the last thing that came to me. This was in 1993-94. Seth was publishing Palookaville, Chester Brown, Yummy Fur and Joe Matt, Peep Show. I liked those titles because they conveyed the artists' personalities while providing them with broad canvas to do a variety of stories. My wife Lucy and friend Mark Askwith and I all brainstormed on a title that could encompass the breadth of the comedy I was attempting to do. At the eleventh hour I remembered Beanie & Cecil. It probably happened accidentally as I was humming "Ragmop" to myself. Eureka! That became the title. It was jazzy. It was about animation and kooky, smart humor. It conveyed my personality. It was a title that said: "Anything goes."

Capitalism and Cartoons: An Interview with Ragmop's Rob Walton (Part One)

Today's interview with comics creator Rob Walton was conducted by my good friend, Greg M. Smith, who teaches media studies at my undergraduate home, Georgia State University. Whenever I come to Atlanta to visit my family, I make a point to get together with Greg, who takes me to the local comic shops and shows me what I have been missing all of these years. He's introduced me to a broad range of books that had otherwise slipped my grasp but one of the best was Ragmop. When Smith learned that the long unfinished Ragmop was going to be completed and reprinted as a graphic novel, he asked if I'd be willing to let him interview Rob Walton for my blog. What could I say? Wild Horses couldn't stop him and in any case, I was as excited as he was at helping to introduce my readers to this fascinating book. Everything from here is Greg's. Ragmop was one of the great unfinished comic stories until recently, when creator Rob Walton completed and published his 450 page graphic novel. Picture the love child of comic book great Jack Kirby and economist Adam Smith, all done as a Looney Tunes cartoon. Or maybe the best story of an interstellar conspiracy ever done by ALL the Marx brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Zeppo, AND Karl).

Ragmop is the story of the chaotic pursuit of the "O-Ring," an emblem of power that keeps the current pretender to divinity named Tetragrammaton (you know him as "God") in heaven. Everyone wants the O-Ring: the American government (where an idiotic president is under the sway of the evil Mr. Black), insane lobotomizing psychologists, former Nazis, beatnik poet/physicists, the Pope and his cabal of assassin cardinals, an alien race known as the Draco (based on real life aliens!), and even Uncle Walt (yes, THAT Walt). Most importantly, our heroine Alice Hawkings (after her unsuccessful career as the super-villain Thrill Kitten) and her three dinosaur sidekicks (Darwin, Einstein, and Huxley) are also in pursuit, with the fate of the world in the balance.

Ragmop mixes pratfalls and economic theory in a way that is utterly distinctive to comics. Rob Walton can be reached at robwaltoon@sympatico.ca, or at his blog. Ragmop can be purchased at finer comic shops everywhere.

Tell us about the publishing history of Ragmop.

Ragmop began as a serialized comic back in June of 1995 published by my own imprint Planet Lucy Press. That lasted ten issues before moving over to Image Comics for two issues. The second issue could not carry the sales needed for it to remain with Image, so I published a final issue before abandoning the series to return to animation full time sometime in 1998.

Over the years people kept asking me when I would finish the book. I told them I had no plans to return to the material, especially since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Too much had changed on the political scene, and I felt the story would have to be completely updated to reflect the new realities of the War on Terror. Then came a bout of underemployment in 2004-2005. To fill the gap I began to pick away at Ragmop trying to find a new way back into the story.

I had reread the published issues and had a good idea of what worked and what didn't. I knew I needed a new opening, something that would plunge the reader right into the action. I also wanted to introduce the political angle immediately as a way of being honest and upfront with the reader. I also knew I wanted to incorporate and expand upon the "Plunder Blunder" backup story from issue six that told us a little of Alice's past criminal activity as a way of better establishing her as the main character of the story. This process alone took four to six months to resolve. My first pass at this material was modeled on the narrative structure of Rocky & Bullwinkle with a lot of stops and starts in the story as well as having a "voice over" narrator. Those who read that first version didn't like it at all. Thankfully they were right and that I had the good sense to trust their judgment. I excised the Rocky & Bullwinkle shtik and found myself off to the races.

Updating the script turned out to be a fun exercise and gave me a chance to correct a lot of the art and story. It took me a further year to complete the final edits and new pages required to bring the story to its soul-shattering conclusion. Having it complete in one volume I can finally appreciate the accomplishment. I think I did exactly what I wanted to do even if it falls short of some people's expectations. I'm personally proud of the book.

One of the main themes in Ragmop is how capitalism collaborates with democracy, how American democracy makes American imperialism possible. For those who haven't read the book yet, can you summarize the argument? How did your thoughts originate on these matters?

Alice actually does a good job summing up the argument on page 376 of the novel: "Capitalism alienates the human psyche while democracy is the toothless servant of authoritarianism." I should point out that the type of democracy we're talking about here is what's known as a "market-based democracy"; that is, the equating of democracy with the market where the function of democracy is not participatory politics but the management of economies for private profit. Now hopefully this should strike most readers as odd. Our common reaction should be, "Wait a second, that doesn't sound right." And it isn't. After making her summation Alice goes on to describe the Greek ideal of democracy: one in which we have a say in how our governments rule and make decisions on our behalf.

This was something I only began to research after I returned to the story a second time. Back in issue two of the Image run a character describes democracy as a form of social control (page 275 of the graphic novel). At the time I wrote that it was only an intuition based on some historical reading I was doing. Something wasn't right with democracy. What exactly, I couldn't fully tell. If democracy was such a good thing, then why were democratic reforms constantly paid for in blood? Think of the fight for the five-day workweek or the eight-hour day or the women's vote. Those weren't things that were bestowed upon us by benevolent governments after peaceful referendums had been held. These were concessions made to us only after men and women had won the rights with their lives.

Another thing that bothered me was that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet-style communism; capitalists quickly fixed their sights squarely on their own Western democratic governments as if democracy was the next thing to go. And as it turned out it was. Through their elected representatives they began stripping governments of any democratic power that would impede upon the growth of the new global market. This plan of action was followed by Democrats and Republicans alike. It quickly became obvious that democracy, while good for people (in theory), was bad for business.

I began to better understand what was going on when I read up on the 1930s. Back then Fascism was quite popular. After all, they were beating up the communists. They were also busting unions, depressing wages, shutting up the opposition, and partnering governments with business. During the early 1930s everyone was falling over themselves to invest in Germany. In 1932 a group of Wall Streeters planned and nearly executed a coup to oust Roosevelt in favor of their own Hitler-inspired American dictator. The plot failed thanks to General Smedley Butler, but no one was arrested because what was left of the American economy would have completely collapsed. It was then that I began to realize that Fascism is the true political partner of Capitalism. Which is why Mr. Black is so nostalgic about fascism in the book. If only Hitler hadn't given it a bad name! So where did that leave democracy?

My answers were found in several books published between 1998 and 2005. As it turned out, democracy was the most reviled political system of the last two thousand years. It was considered to be the politics of dictators and mobs. Remember, America was founded as a Republic (Rule of Law), not a Democracy (Rule of Masses). Then around 1905 democracy was given a total and deliberate makeover. "Democratic" elections allowed the business community to maintain control of their governments to further their globalizing markets.

The first wave of globalization actually took place in the 1880s when American production began to outgrow American consumerism. The basic idea is that to control worker revolts you give them some participation in decision making through an election. Unfortunately, candidates for election almost always come from business boardrooms or are fronted by business interests, and it is those interests that they end up representing in governments. It just goes on from there. We elect governments that increasingly use power carte blanche, as we have witnessed most notably with the current Bush administration. This aids Imperialism because we then start spreading "democracy" around the world. Originally Imperialism was about goods, labor and resources. It still is, but you can't say that. You can't say we're invading Iraq for their oil and cheap labor. You have to say we're bringing "democracy" to the uncouth masses when what we are bringing is in fact capitalism.

Which came first, the philosophy or the story?

People may be disappointed to learn that the story came before the philosophy. Since writing Ragmop I've earned the reputation of being something of a leftist-whatever, but I didn't start out that way. The evolution of the ideas came from the story itself and not from my political views at the time.

The original concept for Ragmop had to do with man's desire to control nature; not just the weather but of all physics itself. I began thinking about this the day the space shuttle Challenger exploded. Then Richard Feynman dropped the O-ring into a glass of water to show how the cold would cause the hinge to break and lead to the recent disaster. It was a simple and dramatic demonstration typical of Feynman. It was then both he and the O-ring became central to my developing story.

With that in place along with Alice (I don't remember where the dinosaurs came from) I began to think of a villain. Once I decided that the villains were going to be in government, I began researching their point of view. I also had to give Alice an opposing point of view, which is where the ideas or philosophy began to develop from. Now to be honest I did and do have a natural leaning toward the rights of my fellow brothers and sisters, so taking the side of the Global Justice movement was an obvious direction for me to follow and one that grew out of my own concerns for the common misery and exploitation of the majority of humankind. Now that Ragmop is done I feel as if I've said what needed to be said, so I can move on and let others follow up on the concerns that I've raised.

How do you lay out the structure for a 450 page graphic novel?

How do I do it? I'm not sure I want to say. I did work off a general outline but the comic series was very undisciplined and went off on a lot of tangents. It was both a strength and weakness of the book. When I returned to it I really had to reel it in and imposed a strict structure on the story. I treated the original material like raw film footage and edited it as I would a film. I was ruthless with the cutting to make sure the pacing was always brisk--except for those moments of exposition, which was always problematic, but I did the best I could. I also scripted everything before I drew it, something I don't think I always did with the original series which I wrote and drew on the fly to give it a sense of cartoon anarchy.

I read and reread the story as I went along rewriting and redrawing as needed. The biggest change was that I had a better ending for the book than the comic. Once I had read about the Draco that gave me the ending I needed. It was the perfect vehicle to present my thoughts on capitalism and democracy in the form of a master plan by an invading alien horde to take over the earth. Structuring and writing the ending became very easy after that. All I had to do was stick to the story. Some of my favorite material was cut for the sake of the story.

The epilogue to the book was the original epilogue to the comic that set up the second storyline. I left it in because it's playful and I liked the idea of an open ending. The graphic novel doesn't have a big resolution because there is no resolution. Where we go from here is up to us. That part of the story remains to be written.

The Escasy of Influence and the Power of Networks

Today, I want to call to your attention two recent articles which speak to themes that have been recurring interests in this blog since we launched last June -- the first deals with the relationship of intellectual property and creative expression, the second deals with web comics as a site of experimentation and innovation. Both warrant closer looks. Jonathon Lethem , an author whose fiction consistently plays around with themes of fandom and popular culture, has published a provocative essay, "The Ecstasy of Influence," in the most recent issue of Harpers, which explores the ways that copyright has operated to constrain and plagiarism and appropriation to expand the richness of our culture. Lethem's statement is impossible to summarize here because it expresses its ideas as much through its form (composed of remixing a range of writers who have dealt with the contemporary debates about copyright, including Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Richard Posner, Lewis Hyde, David Foster Wallace, and Henry Jenkins).

Something of the piece's argument can be determined by its opening quote from John Donne:

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated."

For those who are curious, Lethem mashes up a passage from Textual Poachers with the Michel DeCerteau's The Practice of Everyday Life, the book which provided me with my theoretical underpinnings:

Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own--artists are no more able to control the imaginations of their audiences than the culture industry is able to control second uses of its artifacts. In the children's classic The Velveteen Rabbit, the old Skin Horse offers the Rabbit a lecture on the practice of textual poaching. The value of a new toy lies not it its material qualities (not "having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle"), the Skin Horse explains, but rather in how the toy is used. "Real isn't how you are made. . . . It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real." The Rabbit is fearful, recognizing that consumer goods don't become "real" without being actively reworked: "Does it hurt?" Reassuring him, the Skin Horse says: "It doesn't happen all at once. . . . You become. It takes a long time. . . . Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby." Seen from the perspective of the toymaker, the Velveteen Rabbit's loose joints and missing eyes represent vandalism, signs of misuse and rough treatment; for others, these are marks of its loving use.

As a fan of Lethem's fiction (The Fortress of Solitude), I am tickled pink to see my own writing included in this context. Every so often, journalists, who see me as an advocate of very loose copyright protection, ask me how I would feel if someone took and used my work without my permission as if it were a kind of gotcha question. In reality, I am delighted to see people engage with my ideas; I give much of my own intellectual property away on a daily basis -- here in the blog and elsewhere -- because I care much more about having an impact on the debates that impact our culture and in providing resources for my readers than I am interested in regulating what they do with my text. Of course, it is nice when they acknowledge that I wrote the material, as Lethem does here, but I also understand as the quote from Donne suggests that new works get built on the shucks of old works and that to be part of the conversation is to become the raw materials out of which new texts get generated or perhaps simply the compost that allows them to grow.

This blog has periodically touched upon the artistic innovation which has occurred in and around web comics in recent years as well as the various scenarios which might support their future development. I wanted to flag for readers a very interesting overview of the space of web comics today which was developed by Joshua Pantalleresco over at the ComicBloc. Again, this is apt to seem self-serving since I was one of the people he interviewed for the story but Pantalleresco's article is most interesting for the comments he was able to gather from the web comics artists themselves, talking about what they see as the benefits of working in this medium. What follows are just a few of the better quotes from the article:

"I think the biggest advantage is also, ironically, the biggest disadvantage: distribution... The glory of online comics is that readers don't have to go to a comic book shop to read them and can instead read them at home, at work, the library or anywhere there's a computer with a high-speed Internet connection." -- Dirk Manning, creator and writer of both Nightmare World and Tales Of Mr. Rhee

"Really the sky is the limit at this point for self publishing. If you really have the will to put your stuff out there, the tools are all available...There's nothing to stop you except maybe fear. Fear of rejection, fear of taking risks, fear of failure.... Creators can get there work out there without the constraint of publishing or distribution companies. Sure, there will be more books out there that probably never should have existed, but the good books, the really good books will rise to the top.--Tom Stillwell, creator and writer of Honor Brigade

"You MUST have a website that looks professional and is user friendly...Blog on this site, post images, give free previews ...provide as much information about you and your books as possible. You also MUST make sure people can find this site. If you build it, they won't come. They won't know it exists. You need to bring them there. You get people there by self promotion. You aren't just selling the book. You are selling you as a creator."-- Stillwell

If you want to read what I had to say, you need to actually read the article.

What struck me about the two articles is that they both emphasize some of the skills we have been discussing through our work for the MacArthur Foundation. The first makes the argument that artists learn and grow through a process of appropriation and transformation of existing materials, the second that networking constitutes an important aspect of contemporary authorship. These are core insights we should be making available to our students, especially those who aspire to enter the creative industries.

And, oh, while I have your attention, MIT World recently posted a webcast of a very interesting lecture by John Seeley Brown, the former Director of Xerox-PARC and a key thinker on the social life of information. I was in the audience when Brown delivered these remarks which speaks about collective intelligence, participatory culture, and digital education. I recommend this webcast to anyone who regularly reads and enjoys this blog. Here's part of the summary that MIT World posted:

We learn through our interactions with others and the world, he says, and there's no more perfect medium for enabling this than an increasingly open and organized World Wide Web.

In a digitally connected, rapidly evolving world, we must transcend the traditional Cartesian models of learning that prescribe "pouring knowledge into somebody's head," says

John Seely Brown. We learn through our interactions with others and the world, he says, and there's no more perfect medium for enabling this than an increasingly open and organized World Wide Web.

While the wired world may be flat, it now also features "spikes," interactive communities organized around a wealth of subjects. For kids growing up in a digital world, these unique web resources are becoming central to popular culture, notes Brown. Now, educators must begin to incorporate the features of mash-ups and remixes in learning, to stimulate "creative tinkering and the play of imagination."

With the avid participation of online users, the distinction between producers and consumers blurs. In the same way, says Brown, knowledge 'production' must flow more from 'amateurs' - the students, life-long learners, and professionals learning new skills. Brown describes amateur astronomers who observe the sky 24/7, supplementing the work of professionals in critical ways. A website devoted to Boccaccio's Decameron welcomes both scholars and students, opening up the world of professional humanities research to all.

The challenge of 21st century education will be leveraging the abundant resources of the web - this very long tail of interests - into a "circle of knowledge-building and sharing." Perhaps, Brown proposes, the formal curriculum of schools will encompass both a minimal core "that gets at the essence of critical thinking," paired with "passion-based learning," where kids connect to niche communities on the web, deeply exploring certain subjects. Brown envisions education becoming "an act of re-creation and productive inquiry," that will form the basis for a new culture of learning.

The Shape of the Page: More Thoughts on Haw Par Villa

I am writing this as I am hiding out in my hotel in San Francisco -- jet lagged and under the weather from some evil germ that was working its way through the airplane's ventilation system -- and I can't get the Haw Par Villa out of my mind. In my previous posts, I wrote about it in terms of its thematic content -- the antimodernist impulses, the representation of classically Chinese conceptions of transgression and punishment, and the place of violent representations in moral instruction. But what interests me today has to do with the formal organization of the exhibits themselves. Remember that these exhibits were built in 1937. I'm going to go all art history on you for a moment so read at your own risk. Consider this image (taken by William Uricchio) which allows us to see one of the tableaus in its largest possible context. The first thing which may strike you is that the space breaks down into a series of different frames which can be read sequentially but which may be taken in as a whole.

In that sense, I am reminded of comic book creator and theorist Will Eisner's arguments about the ways comics might be read -- both in terms of the organization of information into a series of framed boxes and in terms of "the shape of the page" which we take in through peripheral vision and which shapes our interpretation of each framed image. It is this notion of the "shape of the page" which got dropped when Scott McCloud reworked Eisner for Understanding Comics and for my money, it may be Eisner's most significant contribution to the theory of the medium.

Eisner's own work was very good at exploiting the relationship here between information communicated sequentially -- panel by panel -- and simultaneously -- through the shape of the page. Consider this example taken from one of Eisner's very last published pieces -- note how he weaves the Spirit and the Escapist, his two protagonists, across the page in multiple ways. We can take in an overall impression of what's happening here at a glance but as we examine the page more closely, we see that it does contain a series of implicitly and explicitly framed actions which can be read sequentially to form a narrative.

In the case of the Haw Par Villa vignette depicted here, some of the frame lines are defined very emphatically -- there are two separate scenes staged side by side here -- while others are more ambiguous -- see the way features of the space function as implicit frames encouraging us to focus on one part of the action at a time. And there is even some activity taking place in the space between frames -- in what we might describe as the gutter if we were talking about comics. We are to see the people drowning below as at once a separate scene and part of the larger scene being depicted. Even within a single space, we are invited to scan the image, break it down into clusters of figures (such as some of the specific examples of combat depicted here), create a narrative context for the interplay of the figures, and then draw them back into the larger scene. The demands which this places on the viewer are quite complex. We can take in the scene as a whole on first impression but we really only understand it when we work it over with our eyes over a more prolonged period.

Other vignettes depend upon relatively straight forward juxtapositions within the same space -- as in the contrast here between the chaste peasant couple in the background and the more sexually transgressive modern couple in the foreground. We can read each scene individually but we only really understand the moral message when we understand the significance of this juxtaposition.

I find it productive to compare my first example here to a surprisingly similar aesthetic effect in a work better known to western readers -- Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

Bosch's painting is a triptych, allowing for the use of framing to create a similar play between simultaneity and sequentiality.Here's how one art-history-focused website tells us to read the image:

The triptych depicts the history of the world and the progression of sin. Beginning on the outside shutters with the creation of the world, the story progresses from Adam and Eve and original sin on the left panel to the torments of hell, a dark, icy, yet fiery nightmarish vision, on the right. The Garden of Delights in the center illustrates a world deeply engaged in sinful pleasures.

One's first impression upon looking at any of the framed segments is one of total visual chaos. The image is not organized for us in the ways we anticipate -- there is no central focus, no coherent whole. We are staring into a space that defies human comprehension -- and we can only begin to experience the painting by breaking it down into smaller narrative chunks, clusters of figures or bits of terrain which take on local significance as we scan across the image.

Bosch is one of those artists that I have always had trouble situating inside any coherent mental map of the trajectory of western painting. I love his work but what makes them interesting are all of the ways they break from the representational structures one associates with other classical paintings of the period. He seems to look towards the work of surrealists like Salvador Dali rather than having much to do with the realist impulses that would shape so many of his contemporaries.

Increasingly, though, I am wondering if there might not be some value in looking at a range of these "eccentric" forms of expression side by side as I am trying to gesture towards here and see if we might identify an alternative aesthetic system -- one which is more often than not associated with popular forms of representation and one which has to do with simultaneity of impressions or to go back to Eisner, "the shape of the page".

There has been a tendency to see the introduction of framing in comics, for example, as a step forward in organizing the chaos of the page -- with the resulting fascination with all of the wild experiments in framing and segmentation done by an early comics pioneer like Windsor McCay. But I have always been fascinated with the work done by R. F. Outcault on the early Yellow Kid strips. Here, the entire page of the newspaper may be given over to a single image (and some loosely affiliated text) which is so dense in details that one can not take it all in at once but rather must scan across it, slowly forming logical links between different actions which at first seemed unrelated, and thus working through the sequence of what must have occurred.

Most writers on comics have seen Outcault's work as more primitive than McCay's but what if we saw them as operating according to a different aesthetic principle -- one which is interested in capturing the sensation of living in a city where many different things may be occurring at the same time at the same space and may only have a loose connection to each other, even if they intersect or interrupt each other at various points. Read in these terms, the goal of the artist is only superficially to tell a story or to lay out information for the viewer; rather, the artist seeks to create a rich, immersive world. Each of these works I am discussing here represent consummate examples of spatial stories of the kind that I have discussed regularly in my writing on games -- most notably in my essay, "Game Design as Narrative Architecture."

I made a similar point about the relationship of games to other forms of world building activities in popular art in a column I wrote with Kurt Squire for Computer Games magazine after a trip to Japan, where I encountered yet another example of this world-making practice:

To get to the new Ghibli Museum, I (Henry) had to travel by train to Mitaka, a sleepy little suburb of Tokyo. The world outside is green and lush, full of Japanese school girls giggling on their way to class. The world inside is unlike any place I'd ever been: A physical embodiment of the great Japanese filmmaker Hiyao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away). Miyazaki personally designed or supervised almost everything in this enchanted, maze-like building. It's not just the big things -- a giant stuffed version of the flying cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro, an even bigger giant robot soldier from Castle in the Sky -- but also the little things, like the snack foods in the recreation of Miyazaki's cluttered studio.

Panorama boxes -- small windows into imaginary microworlds with titles like "The Great Underwater Adventure," "Monman the Water Spider," and "The Ogre's Snack Box" sit close to the ground forcing adults to get down on their hands and knees to look inside. On a plaque, Miyazaki explains, "Just as people wished to make pictures move, they also wished they could look inside a different world. They yearn to enter the story or travel to a faraway land. They longed to see the future and landscapes of the past. The panorama box with no moving parts was made much earlier than the zoetrope." Cinema, for Miyazaki, originates from a desire to step inside these microworlds and become a part of the story.

The next day, I had the rare privilege of talking with Toshio Suzuki, Miyazaki's long time producer. Suzuki is a thoughtful man, passionate about cinema and knowledgeable about its history. I shared my observation that every scene in Spirited Away centered around an interesting space and a compelling task and that the scene continued until the characters had fully explored that space and completed their assigned goals. His eyes sparkled as he completed my thought, "Like a video game."

But Suzuki wanted to talk about space. First, he sketched a Western Cathedral, reminding us that from above, the configuration resembled a cross and that every object was organized in relation to that overarching shape.

He sprang up to use the chalk board, and drew a tiny little room, and then a hallway, and then another room, until he had drawn a complex maze. This, he said, was how the Japanese designed a space -- one interesting detail at a time. The whole was an unpredictable but aesthetically satisfying conglomeration of details. This space makes no sense from above. One can only map it by walking down the hallways and being surprised -- and delighted -- as you turn each corner. Then, he pointed to a poster from Howl's Flying Castle, and said that this was how Miyazaki approached designing its mechanical world -- one detail at a time. It is a world so rich that the human mind can't take it all in at once but can only explore

it, one space at a time.

Finally, returning to my question, he revealed that Miyazaki is a close friend of Shigeru Miyamoto, the master video game designer. And suddenly it was clear to me that Miyazaki-sen and Miyamoto-sen share something in common: both design complex and compelling microworlds that we want to explore. Miyazaki's heart contains only cinema; his films have never been adopted into games. They don't need to be -- in a real sense, they already

are games.

Many unusual things about Tokyo suddenly made sense: the 8-9 stories high manga shops in Akihabara with one whole floor devoted to scale models anime robots, spaceships, and characters; the rows of Gachapon machines which yield a plastic ball with a toy anime figurines; the kids who gather on the outskirts of YoYogi Park on Sunday afternoons playing cos; the toy kits depicting levels from early Nintendo games. All across Tokyo, Otaku are

obsessing over the details.

Such richly detailed worlds allow multiple points of entry, routes for exploration, and things to carry back into everyday life. Media scholars talk about Japan's "media mix" culture, starting from the idea that story details get scattered across multiple media products.

Miyamoto's games (think Mario Brothers or Zelda) follow the same principles: they are micro-worlds built from detail to delightful detail. In his Master's Thesis for Georgia Institute of Technology, Chaim Gringold describes Miyamoto's works as "miniature gardens": "Gardens, like games, are compact, self-sustained worlds we can immerse ourselves in... A miniature

garden, like a snow globe, model train set, or fish tank, is complete; nothing is missing, and nothing can be taken away... Miniatureness makes a garden intelligible in the mind of a player, and emotionally safe in his heart. Miniature scale, clear boundaries, and inner life help players to wrap their heads, hands, and hearts around a world."

Miyamoto's games are a later-day variation on Miyazaki's panorama boxes -- microworlds that delight us in their details and invite us to get down our hands and knees to see inside. Seen in that way, the computer game predates the cinema -- at least in Japan.

This is all heady stuff -- and it may just be the cold medicine talking here -- but I hope it provokes my readers to look at some of these works from a somewhat different point of view.

Sampling the Polish Comics Scene

According to Tim Pilcher and Brad Brook's The Essential Guide to World Comics, "Of all the countries in the former Eastern Bloc, Poland has perhaps the largest comics scene -- you could almost call it an industry." My host and translator, Miroslaw Filiciak , took me to several comics shops on my visit -- the largest of which was located in the railroad terminal at the center of the city, a location which reflects the connection in many people's minds between comics (and other forms of popular fiction) and railroad transportation. This picture was taken of me reading some of the local product outside the train station in front of some murals (covered with graffiti) that suggest several of the other graphic arts traditions in Poland.

And here's a somewhat more traditional form of graphic arts -- some remarkable murals painted on the fronts of buildings in the old section of Warsaw. This one is signed and dated in the mid-1950s.

(By the way, thanks to Cynthia Jenkins for all of the great pictures of Warsaw I have been running over the past few entries).

Pilcher and Brooks tell us, "As in most countries, comics in Poland have been looked down upon as trash for subnormal people and slow children. Much of this attitude was created by the communist regime, which on one hand dismissed comics as imperialist garbage and on the other used them for propaganda amongst children and adolescents. During these years, such morally edifying comics like Kapitan Kloss, Kapitan Zbik, and the still published Tytus Romek I A Tomek had their salad days." Kapitan Kloss and Kapitan Zbik were among those works of Communist era popular culture whose loss was being lamented by nostalgia buffs at the Kultura 2.0 conference.

After the collapse of communist, independent comics emerged to fill a gap left by the end of state subsidized publishing of comics. In some cases, these new companies simply reprinted comics from abroad -- including the pulpy Prince Valiant inspired Thorgal series which happened to have been co-created by a Polish comics artist, Grzegorz Rosinski. Rosinski was the star of the Polish comic market (he prepared some of the best books of the Kapitan Zbik series) and wanted to cooperate with publishers on the other side of the iron curtain, but after the fifth part of Thorgal the martial law began in 1981 and there was no more possibility for postal cooperation. So he moved to Belgium where the author of the series lived. As a result, Thorgal is the Polish comic best known in the west.

This image suggests the larger than life heroics and blood and thunder fights that characterize the Thorgal series as a whole. Thorgal continues to be enormously popular if its high visibility not only in the comics shops but also the bookstores across Warsaw are any indication. It commands almost as much shelf space in the comics shop we visited as the entire output of DC comics.

This page comes from a graphic telling of the adventures of Janosik, who has been compared to Robin Hood (Text by Tadeusz Kwiatkowski and illustrations by Jerzy Skarzynski, 1972). The comic is an adaptation of a popular television series about the folk hero. Jerzy Skarzynski has been a member of the artistic elite of Poland and the most known theatre's stage designer -- given the work a reputation in both high art and popular culture circles.

Here's what one website tells us about this traditional Polish folk hero:

Juro (George) Janosik was a robber, who with a group of friends, plundered, robbed, and burned the houses of the rich. And was said to operate on those on both sides of the Tatra Mountains, Polish and Slovak, and hide out in the forests at the foot of the Tatra mountains. However, according to legend he never harmed the poor in any way; on the contrary, he gave them money and gifts. Hence, the story circulated that Janosik robbed the rich to feed the poor, and the comparison with Robin Hood. Folk tales present Janosik as a hero who had supernatural powers; a magical resistance to arrows, bullets and wounds achieved with the help of a herb he carried in his pocket, an ability to move from one place to another quicker than any other human being; and was able to leave the impression of his palm in a slab of stone.

To my western eye, this graphic style -- including the intense use of color shading -- owes something to the American horror and adventure comics produced by E.C. in the 1950s -- especially the work of B. Krigstein. Here, Janosik does battle with a bear, using only his belt, an image that recalls Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett as much as it does Robin Hood.

Another popular early comics series in Poland, Janusz Christa's Kajko i Kokosz, has been compared to the Asterik books from France. It was so successful at its peak in the 1970s and 1980s that it ran to 20 volumes and has since been adopted into both films and video games.

As one might expect, given the country's history of ideological ferment and turmoil, many of the independent comics are deeply political in their content -- though the subject matter may range from student protest movements, as in the case of Ryszard Dabrowski's Likwidator & Zeielona Gwardia which reminds me a bit of Manuel "Spain" Rodriguez's Trashman, a key icon of the American underground comics movement.

to gender politics, as in the case of Agata "Endo" Nowicka's inventive and stylistically diverse Projekt:czlowiek, an autobiographical comic dealing with a young woman's pregnancy and the breakup with the child's father. The book mixes and matches stylistic elements with wild abandon but in the process gains the immediacy one associates with the best cultural projects of third wave feminist world wide.

The haunting Achtung Zelig! (Krzyszlof Gawronkiewicz and Krystian Rosenberg) uses surrealistic images -- including the metaphor of the rounding up and slaughter of kittens -- to depict the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. One can not help but compare its use of animal imagery to Art Spigelman's Maus which offered a much less sympathetic depiction of the relationship between the Poles and the Jews during this period. The Kultura Gniewu publishing house is currently preparing a book which pairs artists and writers from Poland and Israel on stories that comment on their shared historical experiences.

Some of the books deploy images one might associate with the Socialist Realist art of the Stalinist era and deploys it either to comment on contemporary political issues, as in the case of this page from ComX, an important underground comicbook...

Or these images from Poznanski 1956 Czerwiec (Maciej Jasinski, Jacek Michalski, Witold Tkaczyk, Wiktor Zwikiewicz) which depict an uprising against the Soviets through images which might have come from Soviet poster art or juxtapositions which recall the work of Sergei Eisenstein.

At the same time, we can see signs of Polish appropriation and transformation of images from American popular culture, ranging from the use of hip hop iconography in Adoptuj Rapera (Pierweza Paracirafowa and Gra Komiksowa), a work which is also designed to function as a choose your own adventure style game....

Or the use of superhero characters (borrowed liberally from both DC and Marvel, a sure sign that they didn't get permission) in Piotr Drzewicki's "Good Morning U.S.A." (which was reprinted in Komiks: Anthologia Komiksu Polskiego (edited by Najlepsi Mtodzi Rysownicy).

The Komicks anthology which features work by younger Polish artists includes an exciting array of visual styles and techniques, suggesting that Polish comics, like their counterparts in Western Europe, are understood at least in part within an avant garde context. There are wild experiments in color, as in these images from Marek Adamik's Weronika Sama W Domu....

or in Piotr Kowalski's "Niebezpieczne Zwiazki" which captures the excitement of the Polish rock scene.

There are stories which show strong gothic influences, such as this work by Aleksandra Czubek...

or in Rafal Szlapa's "Spotkanie"....

Or there may be surrealist influences as in this panel from Andrzej Janicki's "Przypadek Rajmunda K"....

On the other end of the spectrum altogether, there can be lyrical painted images, such as Piotr Kania's "On Obraz i Ona"...

Each of these images give us a glimpse into the artistic traditions shaping contemporary Polish comics. Some people I spoke with on the trip were surprised that I was bringing back comics in a language that I can not read. I will admit at times to frustration in wanting to know more about these books, but the pictures are so evocative that they communicate a great deal about Polish culture. (Not that I wouldn't welcome any Polish readers who wanted to send us a translation of the texts contained in these images). I always try to collect comics when I visit other countries and by this point, I have a pretty far ranging collection, but this is one of the best hauls of comics I have ever brought back from a trip to a foreign culture.

Niech zyje polski komiks!

Odds and Ends

It's Awards Season... Many of you are already starting to second guess which films are going to be nominated for Academy Awards. The past few days we are starting to see the major film critic's organization weigh in on the best films of the year -- so far, they are all over the map with no strong consensus behind any particular title. But my own focus is on the Edublog awards. As it happens, two of my projects this year got nominated. The white paper we wrote for MacArthur and which we serialized here on the blog is being considered for Best Research Paper 2006. And the public conversation which I did with danah boyd about MySpace and the DOPA act is being considered for Most Influential Post, Resource or Presentation 2006. Thanks for everyone out there who nominated me -- I am flattered!

Here's how the awards are described:

As the reality and potential of distributed learning and distributed learner identities and communities are increasingly acknowledged, articulated and understood education moves further towards facilitating truly learner-centered and learned driven environments. A lot has changed in the world of educational technology since this time last year. The continuing rise and mainstreaming of easy to use network-as-platform applications, and increasing access to affordable online speed and space, have seen the continued expansion of users of all ages creating and communicating online. Learners and educators still however face difficult issues around network restrictions, around data protection and ownership, and around commercial protectionism. This year has also seen a marked increase in hostility towards social networking sites in the US, demonstrating a widespread lack of appreciation of the informal and formal educational value of user-centered applications. The Edublog awards are more relevant than ever in this climate - a space for us to refocus the debate surrounding young peoples use of technology as irresponsible, dangerous or illegal, and look at the positive, powerful and transformative work which continues to be demonstrated.

Voting amongst the finalists will continue through December 14 with the winners announced on December 15. There are nominees in ten different categories representing a really interesting catalog of some of the most interesting writing online this year concerning youth and digital media. Many of my readers who are concerned with media literacy will find the nomination page a useful resource for further reading and reflection.

That's Transmedia Entertainment!

Paul Levitz, the President of DC Comics, shares some speculations about the future of comics in a fascinating interview with Newsarama.com. Levitz references his participation in the Futures of Entertainment conference and continues some of his thinking about comic's relationship to transmedia entertainment. Levitz thinks deeply about the comic's medium and clearly prepared himself thoroughly for his role at our conference, making a series of very thoughtful comments.

Here's what he said about the experience:

NRAMA: Thinking about the larger picture of the management of the characters and properties, are comics leading the charge in charting new territory? While there are

older properties and those that are as, if not more popular, like Mickey Mouse, but

Mickey Mouse hasn't had continuity or a line of stories that stretch back nearly 70

years.

PL: I was at a seminar at M.I.T. a couple of weeks ago on the futures of entertainment. The panel I was on was titled "Transmedia" which they defined as moving creative ideas from one medium to another. The professor who was running the conference made a similar point - how come comics have been doing all of this? What is special and peculiar about comics? He made the point in terms of superheroes, and I argued back that I felt it was really true about all comics.

I think there are a few characteristics that are relevant. One, by the nature of what comics are, we've generally had to create open- ended stories. Think of the differences between Batman and The Fugitive. Although the founding tragedy might be as tragic, the character of Batman was designed to go on to a seemingly infinite number of adventures.He wasn't restricted to just taking place in a certain narrowcast, or a certain narrow geography. Many of the great comics characters, not just the superheroes, were built with fairly complicated and interesting fictional worlds around them. Uncle Scrooge - for example.

There's also an interesting argument to be made, and I'm not sure if it's right, but McLuhan raised the issue that the less well-defined a character was initially, the more the reader or views has to interpolate into it, and therefore was not stuck in a specific image that they would measure against. Comics, with their rather raw visual structure, work very powerfully into that argument, that is to say that when you're introduced to Batman as a drawn character, you're able to more easily transform your vision between Adam West, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale and the different approaches those take, as well as the different visual styles that are developed over time. Compare that to a character you fell in love with because a particular actor was playing him or her in a particular role. That's not a well-researched issue, and there are arguments to be had about it, I'm sure, but there's something in there somewhere.

So I think we've had some natural opportunities available to us because of all of this. We also have the advantage in some comic characters, including Superman and Batman, that for them to succeed from early on, they had to open themselves to different creative talents. That's a very important issue in this world of Transmedia. If you've got something that is being guided uniformly by one great creative mind - which can yield terrific creative results - it's harder to make the jump to multiple other media, because the thing is so intimately reliant on the idea that one person so closely "gets" or sees...or understands.

So, for better or for worse, from early on, it was sort of battle- proven that Superman and Batman were ideas that multiple writers and multiple artists could get into and do good, creative work with.

As I suggested here in some of the outtakes from Convergence Culture, comics have a special relationship to convergence -- indeed, comics have been transmedia from their inception. Today, Buster Brown is best known as a brand of children's shoes but the character spanned across comic strips, Broadway musicals, and a range of other commodities at the turn of the century -- one of the first comic strip characters to make a significant impact on the public. In the first few years of his history, Superman moved from comic books to comic strips, radio shows, live action film serials, and animated short subjects, with each of these media making distinct contributions to the evolution of his mythology. Many historians argue that the character would not have had the same impact on our culture if he had not been so well designed to play out across such a broad range of media platforms. Levitz makes a good case here that it is not just the superheroes but a range of other serialized comic characters (including Uncle Scrooge) have also enjoyed extensive transmedia careers.

Today's No Prize goes to CMS graduate student Geoff Long for spotting this interview and calling it to my attention.

Speaking of Japanese School Girls...

We have been lucky enough to have a distinguished scholar of Japanese manga and popular culture, Sharon Kinsella, teaching in the Foreign Languages and Literature Program at MIT this term. Kinsella, the author of Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society, spoke at the last CMS colloquium of the term, sharing some of her work in progress, Girls and the Male Imagination: Fantasy of Rejuvenation in Contemporary Japan. Her talk, "Girls as Energy: Fantasies of Social Rejuvenation," might have been called "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Japanese School Girls But Were Afraid to Ask," crisscrossing between different media and across political discourse and popular culture, to argue about the ways that the schoolgirl becomes a figure of desire, dread, and fantasy identification among adult males in that society. Her talk included some interesting insights on texts which will be known to many of my readers, including Spirited Away, Battle Royale, and Sailor Moon, but also a broad range of b-movies and soft-core porn titles which helped me to read these cult classics through some new lens. The podcast version of this talk has just gone up on the CMS homepage and is recommended to anyone interested in Japanese popular culture.

While you are at it, you might also be interested in checking out some of the other programming on anime and other forms of Japanese popular culture which my colleague, Ian Condry, has put together through his Cool Japan program. For example, here's the transcript of a fascinating session he hosted on Violence and Desire in Japanese Culture: Anime Capitalism. Podcast of this and other Cool Japan events can be found at the Anime Pulse website.

Sharon Kinsella will be repeating her talk on Japanese school girls at Harvard University through an event being hosted by the Cool Japan program. Here are the details:

Prof. Sharon Kinsella's talk

"Men Imagining a Girl Revolution"

will be held

THURSDAY, December 14

4-6pm

William James Hall, Room 1550

Harvard University

My Mii -- Oh My!

Alice J. Robison, who just finished her doctorate working with James Paul Gee at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been working this year as a post-doc in the Comparative Media Studies Program. This term, she has taught a course for us on games criticism and next term, she will be offering a course on new media literacies. When she's not teaching in the program or contributing to our various games and new media literacy initiatives, she has been spending time playing with her new Wii. I am still among the uninitiated among the ways of the Wii, despite being very enthusiastic about the concept of the new interface. As I understand it, the Wii ships with an avatar creation tool and players can build their own distinctive anime style characters known as Mii.

Here's what Wikipedia tells us:

In certain games (including Wii Sports, WarioWare: Smooth Moves, Wii Play, and The Sims Wii), each player's caricature will serve as the character he or she controls in game play. Miis can interact with other Wii users by showing up on their Wii consoles through the WiiConnect24 feature or by talking with other Miis created by Wii owners all over the world. This feature is called Mii Parade. Early-created Miis as well as those encountered in Mii Parades may show up as spectators in some games. Miis can be stored on controllers and taken to other consoles. The controller can hold up to a maximum amount of 10 Miis.

Inspired in part by the Second Life Avatar which I featured here the other week, Alice has created a Mii in the likeness of, well, me. You might call him a mini-me/mii. The pun's just keep coming folks. Here's what it looks like:

Thanks, Alice. (I am told that she has also built Mii for some other prominent games scholars. Maybe some day we can create a collector set of leading media theorists which graduate students can pit against each other. It will certainly result in my much lively seminars.)

On Hobbits, Hiro, and Other Matters

Today, I wanted to call attention to several online resources which will be of interest to the Aca/Fan community.

Hoping for Hobbits

A week or so back, I got an e-mail from Kristin Thompson telling me that she and her oft-times collaborator and my graduate school mentor, David Bordwell, have launched a new blog. Together, Bordwell and Thompson have written and continually updated what is certainly the most important textbook in cinema studies, Film Art: An Introduction. If I got started describing the full range of their contributions to cinema studies, I'd be here for a long long time: this dynamic duo, individually and collectively, are enormously prolific, cranking out a big scholarly book about once a year, and between them, they have expertise on the entire world cinema. Whatever they turn their attention to, they master thoroughly and break dramatic new ground. In fact, I am teaching a contemporary cinema class at MIT this term primarily as an excuse to dig deep into Bordwell's most recent book, The Way Hollywood Tells It. So, I will be reading what they have to say in their blog about cinema and other media matters with great interest.

So far, they have tackled a range of topics, including some really provocative comments by Bordwell on Scorsese's The Departed and its relationship to Internal Affairs, the Hong Kong film upon which it was based, and by Thompson about contemporary cinema and the push towards interactive narrative, to cite just two examples.

Thompson is in the process of putting her finishing touches on a forthcoming book about Peter Jackson and the making of the Lord of the Rings trilogy called The Frodo Franchise. I was lucky enough to read an early draft of the book and found it an absolute treasure. Thompson had access to pretty much every key contributor to the LOTR films: she turns out to be a very engaging storyteller but also is able to put what happened into a much larger context of shifts in the contemporary film industry -- including some very good writing about the ways Jackson courted the fans of the original Tolkien novels and the forms of fan cultural production which have grown up around the franchise. (In a recent post, Thompson struggles with whether or not she is an aca/fan in the ways that I have been using it here but she is certainly someone with a fan's mastery over the books and films and with a long standing passion for the content. When she tells me about going behind the scenes in New Zealand to meet with the production team, you do get the sense that there's a fannish tingle going up her spine.) I will be doing an interview with Thompson about the book once it is released in 2007. But she is already updating her account, using the blog to share some great insights into the announcement the other week that they will indeed be producing a film based on The Hobbit and that Peter Jackson is currently considering whether to direct it. She takes us back through the complex history of negotiations around the rights for the film, describes all of the many Peter Jackson projects that have been announced in recent months, and pulls together many of the scattered interviews with Jackson which shed some clues about his thinking in regard to the timing of the various projects.

Here's some of what she has to say:

Could someone that busy take on The Hobbit as well? Jackson's talking as if he could. In a long interview posted on Ain't It Cool News September 16, he said that no one had contacted him about making the film, but he was already tossing out ideas about bringing back some of the characters from LOTR to fill out the plot. A week later, Jackson chatted with EW.com, sounding even more enthusiastic and brushing aside the idea that his current lawsuit against New Line (over DVD payments) would be a factor: "I'd love to make another film for New Line. And certainly The Hobbit isn't involved in the lawsuit." He also pointed out, "We've still kept the miniatures of Rivendell in storage, and the set of Bag End, Bilbo Baggins' house, has also been saved" ("Action Jackson").

So how could he do it? Whether with an eye to a possible Hobbit project or not, Jackson has organized his projects in a remarkably flexible way. Halo (to be distributed by Universal in North America and Twentieth Century Fox abroad) and The Dam Busters (co-financed by Universal and StudioCanal) are being directed by others, and an executive producer doesn't necessarily have to do a whole lot of hands-on work. As Jackson pointed out to his EW interviewer, Steve Daly, "That's one of the reasons we're producing a number of things now rather than directing. Producing is fun and it's not as all-consuming."

As to the "Temeraire" series, that is a long-range project that Jackson speaks of putting into pre-production when Halo and The Lovely Bones are substantially finished. He's not sure yet whether he'll direct the resulting film or films. The Lovely Bones is not all that far advanced, either, with Jackson, Walsh, and co-writer Philippa Boyens having only recently finished a first draft of the script. The rights for both of these projects are owned entirely by Jackson and Walsh, with no studio yet attached--which means they have no deadline. In another remark that sounds calculated to encourage MGM and New Line, in the same interview Jackson remarks, "We're not imposing any deadline on ourselves with all these projects. They'll take as long as they need to until we're happy with them." It sounds a lot like he's hinting that they could also be put off if another attractive project comes along.

It sounds an awful lot like this was written by an aca/fan to me.

Holding Out for a Hiro

In Media Res is another great new online resource which will be of interest to the aca/fan community. In Media Res is being organized by the editors of Flow and by the Institute for the Future of the Book. As their FAQ explains:

In Media Res plucks fragments out of the media stream and revolves them in a critical conversation.

Every week, a different media scholar will present a 30-second to 2-minute clip accompanied by a 100-150-word impressionistic response. The goal is to promote an online dialogue amongst media scholars and the public about contemporary media through clips chosen for either their typicality or atypicality in demonstrating current narrative strategies, genre formulations, aesthetic choices, representational practices, institutional approaches, fan engagements, etc.

Jason Mittell and I were asked to provide content for the launch of the site. I chose to focus on the segment from Heroes when Hiro, superfan/superhero, teleports from Tokyo to Times Square and discovers that his experiences are already being enshrined in a comic book, 9th Wonders. You can watch the clip and read what I have to say at the Media Commons site. I will just note that I wrote about this series here midsummer, after getting a sneak look at the pilot, and Heroes has more than lived up to my expectations for a television show which takes an indie comics slant on the superhero genre. It has emerged as one of the most popular new series this season with good reason.

Jason, who is a sometime reader and contributor to the blog, focuses on a telling moment from 30 Rock which he suggests both parodies and enacts the synergies that are defining contemporary media culture.

A fan friend described the 100-150 word essays as an academic form of drabble. Drabble is a highly condensed form of fan fiction where writers take on the challenge of conveying a complete story in just a few hundred words. I know that I found it very difficult to say anything original and interesting about the clip in such a tight word count: I ended up cheating and going to around 250 words -- this is probably no surprise to regular readers of this blog.

In Media Res is taking a bold stance on intellectual property rights:

MediaCommons is a strong advocate for the right of media scholars to quote from the materials they analyze, as protected by the principle of "fair use." If such quotation is necessary to a scholar's argument, if the quotation serves to support a scholar's original analysis or pedagogical purpose, and if the quotation does not harm the market value of the original text -- but rather, and on the contrary, enhances it -- we must defend the scholar's right to quote from the media texts under study.

This goes well beyond, for example, what MIT's lawyers have allowed on the Open Courseware initiative. I know many of us are going to be watching closely to see what happens here and keeping our fingers crossed.

Check It Out...

It's been a while since I have reported back on the various colloquium events we have been hosting through the CMS program but I wanted to remind folks that we are preparing our events for download as podcasts this term. I heard from some people at the Flow conference that they are finding these to be useful resources or just interesting things to listen to while jogging. Here's a few of the events I haven't linked to here before.

Chris Boebel and David Tames talk about MIT's new efforts towards video podcasting, a project called Zig Zag.

Scott Donaton, associate publisher and editorial director of the Ad Age Group and author of Madison & Vine talked about why user-empowerment is the key trend in business, and the ways marketers are adapting to it, including the rise of branded entertainment.

A roundtable discussion on New Media and Art put together by my MIT colleague Beth Coleman and featuring Lauren Cornell, director of Rhizome.org; and Jon Ippolito, media

Making Comics: Nick Bertozzi as Exemplar

Several weeks ago, I wrote here about the New Media Exemplar Library -- a digital filmmaking project that is being funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of our larger project to develop curricular materials and activities to support the teaching of new media literacies. The Exemplar Library will consist of a series of short films showing media makers discussing the core choices they make -- both craft decisions and ethical dilemmas -- as they create their work. Our goal is to produce films that educators can use in classes and after school programs and that young people who are enthusiastic about media production might seek out on their own via the web. The first one I introduced to my readers centered on blogger, science fiction writer, and digital activist Cory Doctorow. Today, I wanted to share a second exemplar -- this one focused on independent comics creator Nick Bertozzi as he shows us the process by which he created a single page of his forthcoming graphic novel, The Salon The Salon centers around the circle of friends who helped generate the cubist movement and includes vivid portrayals of Gertrude Stein, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Alice B. Toklas, Erik Satie, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The Salon was not created as a kids comic and indeed, much of the content deals with mature themes, but it's melding of fact and fiction makes it a rich text for us to examine in the context of a project on new media literacies.

Having gotten to know Bertozzi through the years, one can't help but wonder if his fascination with this circle might have something to do with the tight circle of comic book artists in Brooklyn with whom he hangs out and sometimes collaborate, a circle which includes Jessica Abel, Paul Pope, Dean Haspiel, and Matt Madden, among others. Several years ago, these friends piled into a car and drove to MIT to visit Nick's sister, Vanessa Bertozzi, a Comparative Media Studies Masters Student, and to talk at our colloquium series. Various combinations of that circle have passed through the program in the years that have followed and this exemplar grew out of those conversations. In the interview, Bertozzi talks about why cartoonists and other artists need to work within creative communities:

You need a community of other artists of other cartoonists who understand, because nobody else will understand the insanity that you go through. And they're people who don't bug you too much because they're doing the same thing you're doing and they want to be left alone a lot of the time. But we do need to come together, because we are human after all believe it or not.

His former roommate Dean Haspiel described what he got out of working side by side with a fellow artist:

What was really good about when Nick lived with me, was we were really able to share that space and maximize the energy of that room. And turn what a lot of what we were doing separately into this combined force of this infectious, vibrant kind of brain trust. It was a really good time. I really miss those days of when I could look over my shoulder and see Nick drawing when I didn't feel like drawing and that would just inspire me to keep trudging on when I was struggling, facing that blank page and not knowing what to do next.

The video was produced and filmed by Vanessa which allowed her to achieve real trust and intimacy with her interview subject. Bertozzi turns out to be extremely good at explaining his creative process in language that is broadly accessible and there's a real fascination in watching this page take shape step by step across the videos. He takes us from the scripted concept, through the research into the historical period that insures the accuracy of his details, through penciling, inking, coloring (which occurs on the computer), and the final proofs. Bertozzi's comfort in explaining the creative process reflects his own experiences teaching and mentoring young would-be comic book artists in Brooklyn. The video also features his fellow comics artist and former roommate Dean Haspiel and one of his former students sharing their impressions of his work and creative process.

Here's how one of Bertozzi's students described the first day of class:

I was sitting in a class with all these kids who were interested in Spiderman comics, and Thor and Green Lantern. and in walks this guy, Nick. He said, the other guy who was supposed to teach this class, he's not teaching it anymore and I'm the replacement. And he comes in with this book On Directing by David Mamet and this other book called Story by Robert McKee. The first things he writes on the board are "ARCHETYPE! STEREOTYPE!" So he was talking about story structure in comics and saying that linear comicbook narrative structure has been done many, many times. And he said that what we're going for is something more, something more experimental. And I remember the first day of class he brought in a pile of superhero comics and he passed one out to everyone. And some of these students were like, "Oh, these are great, I have these in my own collection." And he said, "Now pick up the comic book and TEAR IT TO PIECES!" He said, "We're going to destroy these old idols and we're going to make new!"

One of the themes which will run across the series is an emphasis on how contemporary artists build upon the past, sampling and remixing pre-existing work as a source of inspiration for new expression. We hope to help teachers and students understand the difference between plagiarism and creative appropriation, providing a context for thinking about the ethics of what we do with other people's creative content. Comics fans will be relieved to see Bertozzi has a large library of classic comics to which he returns for inspiration whenever he confronts creative problems . Teachers will probably be gratified by the degree to which Bertozzi stresses throughout the project the importance of doing research. As he explains:

A good cartoonist has to have a lot of reference materials because you're going to be drawing a ton of things. And it's a lot easier to draw it from reference than it is to make it up out of your head.

I was taking an art history class and I was learning about Cubism, which is an art movement that was started by Pablo Picasso and George Braque. And I'll be honest, I paid attention in class but I never really understood what cubism was. So I always wanted to do a story that was about cubism so I could do the research and so I could spend a lot of time figuring out why cubism was so important.

Another fascinating part of the interview has to do with Bertozzi's choices to draw and ink the comics panels by hands but then to scan them and digitize them for the coloring process. As he explains, "You don't have to do the coloring on a computer, but I do because it saves me a lot of time." As a project, we are placing a lot of stress on the ways artists choose which tools to use and are especially interested in the hybrid nature of contemporary production practices, where some things are done physically and others digitally.

Bertozzi is not the only member of that circle who is strongly committed to introducing comics to young readers and artists. We have spent a good deal of time on Project NML discussing Matt Madden's recent book, 99 Ways to Tell A Story: Exercises in Style, which we think would be an outstanding tool for teaching storytelling techniques in any medium. Madden took a very basic situation and restaged it using different narrative devices, reading it through different points of view, accepting different artistic restrictions, and fitting it within a range of different genres. His focus clearly is on how a fairly simple set of building blocks can be used creatively to generate new stories simply by tweaking different variables in their presentation. This book teaches us how to see the choices which storytellers make in producing their work while inspiring us to think of other variations that he has not yet considered.

Comics and Micropayments: An Interview with Todd Allen

Yesterday, I ran an outtake from Convergence Culture which centered around the efforts of Scott McCloud to build public interet in micropayments as a means of supporting digitally distributed comics. Like McCloud, I believed that micropayments offered perhaps the best way to provide a commercial infrastructure which would preserve the diversification of content that currently characterizes the web while at the same time allowing artists to make a living off of their work. When McCloud spoke at MIT last week, he told me that Reinventing Comicswas designed to be a book about the future when it was published more than five years ago and it was still a book about the future now. We are just moving towards the future at a slower rate than any of us might have imagined. The success of iTunes suggests that people are willing to pay small amounts of money online to consume content they want (and thus suggests that some micropayments model might still make sense). At the same time, they are doing so through a central distribution channel which could easily become a gatekeeper locking lots of content producer out. I have not been paying as much attention as I should lately to developments in the debates around micropayments and other ways of paying for online content. A few years ago, I served as a member of a thesis committee for Todd Allen, a student at New York University's Gallatin School, who was doing a project focused on business models for digital comics producers. He has since self-published the thesis as a printed book and made it available online Allen is now a Chicago-based consultant and author on matters related to digital media and its business applications. He teaches E-Business for the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management Department at Columbia College Chicago. Allen's writing on technology has been seen in the Chicago Tribune and Iconocast. Allen has worked with a diverse group of companies including the American Medical Association, National Parent Teacher Association, Modem Media and the Marketing Store. Outside of technology, Allen spent two seasons covering the New York Knicks for New York Resident, a Manhattan weekly paper, where he also penned a humor column. He once appeared on MTV in a futile attempt to explain computer science to Pauly Shore.

Todd is someone who follows digital comics very closely and so I decided to check in with him this week to see if he could bring us up to date about developments in that area.

You investigated alternative ways of funding digital comics through your thesis research. What models offered the greatest promise and why?

If I had to point to one, I'd point to merchandising. T-shirts, posters, printed collected editions (graphic novels, if you prefer)... selling things seemed to be the highest revenue generator when viewing the area from a high level.

That said, the more popular web comics - your PVPs and Penny Arcades - do quite well with advertising. In these cases you have high page view counts and higher than average CPM rates for the advertising, owing to a desirable demographic, particularly to gaming companies.

Ultimately, different revenue streams will work for different web comics. There will be differences in audience demographics and merchandising options from property to property that cause variations in the productivity of a revenue model. There's no reason not to mix the models until one clearly overtakes the other. Initially, merchandising will be a better option for more web comics. Advertising becomes a more viable option as your strip's traffic grows.

I would also caution against the use of contextual advertising for web comics. Contextual advertising is based on the _text_ elements of a web page, not the graphic elements. While theoretically, you could structure the text of the page to sync with the individual strip, I haven't heard a lot of success stories about cartoonists striking it rich with AdWords. Feel free to correct me on that one if a few instances have popped up.

What did you learn about the effectiveness of micropayments? What has happened in this space since Scott McCloud launched his experiment with BitPass?

You really don't hear much about Bit Pass these days. There seem to have been two nails in the coffin:

1) The Goats.com boys tried a download experiment last year with BitPass. They weren't happy with the response they got, which didn't translate into a lot of money (owing to the nature of micropayments requires a lot of transactions to start adding up to significant money). They also found their normal merchandising sales took a significant hit. It wasn't immediately apparent whether this was due to a focusing of attention on download distracting attention away from the t-shirts or whether people bought the low-margin download, instead of the higher margin merchandise, but the experiment did not go well and Goats.com is a site that's serious about its income, so people paid attention.

2) PayPal now lets you do micropayments with a credit card. This speaks to what, in my mind, is the biggest problem with BitPass - namely you're dumping $3.00 into a glorified bus pass to spend on their system. What if, like me, the only thing you want to get off their merchant system is Scott McCloud's "The Right Number" web comic? Then you've spent fifty cents on the first two parts and you have $2.50 in an account just sitting there, gathering dust. Having to open a separate account is a deterrent to sales. Having to open that account and drop in 12x the amount you intend on actually spending is silly. The power of their network wasn't strong enough to overcome the barriers... and I'm still waiting for the final part of "The Right Number" to come out, for that matter.

But we should back up and talk about micropayments in a more braod sense. People define micropayments a few different ways. Could be a payment under $3. Under $2. Under $1. Under $0.50.

By and large, iTunes and their $0.99 downloads are considered proof that micropayments work. Downloading the pilot for Aquaman at a $1.99 price point may or may not be considered a micropayment, depending on who you talk to.

There has not been a great deal of micropayment experimentation done in comics, past BitPass and I would argue that having that bus pass/minimum deposit system does not make BitPass a valid test.

In a very recent development (as in, within the last two weeks) Slave Labor Graphics has started offering some of their titles as digital download for $0.69 cents a pop. That price not only qualifies as a micropayment, you can also use it as a punchline.

What have been some of the more interesting recent efforts to provide support for the production and distribution of comics?

A few things. Web comics, traditionally, have followed the comic strip model, more than the comic book model.

On the strip side, the syndicates are expending a bit more energy to talk you into buying a subscription to their content. You can get the strips in an e-mail. You can access a deep archive. You have access to a few strips that are web only, including reprints of classic, discontinued strips.

It was a long time coming, but the syndicates are experimenting with what they can do online... after all, if the newspapers are having problems, then the syndicates are having problems.

The most interesting thing on the comic book side of web comics would be the migration of independent comics away from print and onto the web.

I should probably preface this with a thumbnail recap of the foibles of the direct market for comic books.

Most comic books are bought in specialty stores these days, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of direct market sales is controlled by a single distributor - Diamond Comics. Diamond has a catalog which features a handful of the larger publisher (who they have special contractual relationships with) in individual sections in the from of said catalog. Everyone else is mixed in the back of the catalog, alphabetical by publisher name. It makes it very hard to stand out in the catalog, and since there's a lot of crap (and I'm being nice when I say crap... trust me, I've seen the catalog) in that amalgamated section, many retailers don't even bother to read through it, making it even harder for a book to stand out. Sound like a mess for a small publisher? It is.

So when you add the retailer apathy towards independent/small product lines that exists in any industry to the problems with catalog placement in such a centralized distribution market, you can see where your independent artists who publish there own material might get squeezed out.

Well, Diamond recently put some minimum sales requirements on their catalog. This scared some people and we're seeing a migration to web of a few critically acclaimed books that didn't sell well in single issues, but did just fine in trade paperback editions (collected editions, graphic novels, pick your term of preference).

Phil Foglio was the pioneer for this trend _prior_ to Diamond throwing down the sales minimum with http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/ , a continuation of his Girl Genius comic.

This has been followed by Carla Speed McNeil's "Aboriginal SF" feature Finder at http://www.lightspeedpress.com/ and Batton Lash's self-explanatory Supernatural Law at http://www.webcomicsnation.com/supernaturallaw/. There will, doubtless, be more to come.

Foglio is more aggressive with embracing non-collected edition merchandising (t-shirts, pins, etc), but over-all, what we're seeing is a shift away from small-print-run monthly comics to web publications aiming for a graphic novel as the end product. Placing material online, one page at a time, and offering an archive offers an infinitely wider distribution network than depending on the owners of an already-small network of comic book shops to stock your product.

Anecdotal evidence is that it helps the sales of the collected editions and the artists haven't felt an additional pinch for not having the traditional comic book's income. (In fairness, the income off the "monthly" editions for a series selling under 3000 copies would likely be minimal and there's a great deal of production and solicitation work that goes away in the straight-to-web scenario).

Do you believe Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory applies to comics? Why or why not?

Absolutely.

At the most basic level, you have the very existence of the collected edition. That's someone buying a book that's really 4 - 12 issues of OLD MATERIAL.

Kick it up a level, and look at Sin City or V for Vendetta. They've been around for years, selling a decent amount of books each year. Then they have films come out, based on the originals, and suddenly you're selling a LOT of Sin City and V for Vendetta. In bookstores, too.

Old properties sitting around and suddenly find an audience? That's the Long Tail in full force.

Back issue sales in print comics could be construed to be the Long Tail, although the collectors market makes it a bit different.

As fiction, and usually serial fiction at that, comics fit into the Long Tail model much better than news periodicals. New readers will seek out the backstory. And with web comics, since the back issues are, essentially, an on-demand feature for most strips, the Long Tail is built in.

Have DC and Marvel backed off of web-based distribution of their content altogether? Does the web have more to offer smaller publishers or independent artists than major companies?

DC offers little more than a few pages of previews. One occasionally hears rumblings, but DC seems to be a little on the web-phobic side, to look at their actions.

Marvel continues to waffle. They stepped back from their web comics, then returned to them with a strategy geared more towards promotion of upcoming collected editions. Their initiative of late have been establishing a wiki and instituting some editorial blogs. On the other hand, Marvel also issued a survey about attitudes towards digital downloads, including questions on how much the consumer would be willing to pay for one. So with Marvel, they're definitely thinking about it, if not jumping to action.

As to what the web offers to whom, that would depend on the context. If you were just looking at the world of people who go to comic shops, the web has a lot more to offer the independents. After all, most of them have trouble getting good physical distribution. This is a no-brainer.

If you look at the whole world, the web opens up possibilities to all, but more to DC and Marvel. Why? Because DC and Marvel are recognizable brands. You will have a magnitude more people seeking out Batman and Spider-Man online, than you will something like Fear Agent or Queen & Country. Your smaller publishers will need to do more marketing to catch up, when using brands that are, effectively, unknown to the mass market. That's not to say that something like Fear Agent couldn't become popular with the mass market, similar to how the Sin City film turned people onto the comics, but its a longer and harder road.

On the flip side, independent comics have more non-super hero fare, and could potentially play to a wider audience. Or at least so goes one line of thinking.

The web does not appear to be a zero sum market for comics at this point.

You've been doing some experiments lately with comics as download. What were the results?

Promising. Again, this is a story that needs some framing, particularly since your blog will have some people far removed from the comics scene.

Rich Johnston is a London (UK)-based ad man who writes copy for radio advertisements by day and also does a gossip column about the comic book industry ( http://comicbookresources.com/columns/?column=13 ). Every year or two, Rich will produce a comic, usually as the writer. While the do alright for small press titles, these aren't books that set the sales charts on fire. After all, Rich is known as a journalist, not a comics scripter, in these circles.

This year, Rich wrote a comic called The Flying Friar. A mild satire of the Superman legend co-mingled with the history of an actual Catholic saint, the book received an unusual amount of publicity in Europe, prior to publication. And when I say unusual, I'm referring to the BBC and the London Times.

It was obvious this book would sell out quickly in a fair number of venues and the publicity would definitely reach areas it wasn't stocked, so it was decided we would offer a PDF download of the book for sale.

As there was a copy on the store shelves, we decided to offer the download for cover price, as not to be undercutting the shelf copies (which would be unethical to do without first announcing the cheaper online version during the solicitation period). We also gave the book a few days on the shelves before announcing the online offering (on Super Bowl Sunday, actually).

Net effect was we've sold a bit over 2% of the initial print orders. The raw number isn't all that amazing, but when taken in context of a small press book, 2% is definitely significant. This was also a month AFTER the media mentions in Europe.

More interestingly, links coming in from comic book websites converted to purchase at a 2% rate. Ask anyone in web retailing, 2% is a healthy conversion percentage. People who came to the site, came with their wallet open. For an eBook, essentially. 20-25% of the audience was from Europe.

As a proof-of-concept piece, this suggests that there is an audience for online comics, and one willing to pay full cover price for an item they can't find locally (or just prefer to have in a digital edition).

It goes without saying that there are no print costs or distributor fees with digital downloads, so the margin is superior to the print version.

This was all accomplished with a slightly known, if not unknown creative team. One wonders what the percentages would be like with a known brand or "name" creative team. The only marketing done was shotgunning some press releases. Again, one wonders what would be possible with a marketing budget. The concept played out soundly.

(Interested parties can view the book at www.richjohnston.com.)

If you were to predict the future of digital comics distribution five years from now, what changes do you expect to see and which present models will have disappeared?

The ball is definitely moving and more people are talking. No two ways about that.

The micropayment "networks" like BitPass will be gone.

PayPal will have forced other credit card processors to adopt micropayment-friendly policies.

At least 50% of monthly comics will have a digital download available. The question here being whether the publishers handle it themselves or farm it out to stores, ala iTunes.

Comic book stores will become more firmly entrenched as a collector-specific market, not a medium-specific market. (That is to say, right now, if you want to read comics, you have to go to a comic shop. In the future, if you want to _collect_ the print editions, the monthlies, you'll need to go to a shop, as will casual readers who have a strong preference to print. Casual readers without the strong preference for print will start migrating to online, where its easier to find the material.)

You will see more creator-owned properties starting out as web properties and migrating to print, much like PVP has, but starting out this way with the expressed intent of following that path.

You will see the web and print industries actually admit that they're both in a market aimed at collected editions/graphic novels as the enduring product.

The wild card here is what happens with the newspaper market and the traditional syndicates.