Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels 9781138548947, 9781138025158

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 6
Copyright......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
List of Illustrations......Page 12
Acknowledgements......Page 16
Introduction: Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels......Page 18
PART I Histories and Contexts......Page 34
1 Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture: Representing Racial Difference in Robert Crumb’s Underground Comix......Page 36
2 The Impact of Latino Identities and the Humanizing of Multiculturalism in Love and Rockets......Page 51
3 The Presidential Penis: Questions of Race and Representation in South African Comic and Satirical Art......Page 66
PART II Depicting Difference......Page 84
4 Recognition and Resemblance: Facture, Imagination and Ideology in Depictions of Cultural and National Difference......Page 86
5 “Badgers? We don’t need no steenkin’ badgers!” Talbot’s Grandville, Anthropomorphism and Multiculturalism......Page 100
6 The Image of the Foreigner in Historical Romanian Comics under Ceauşescu’s Dictatorship......Page 113
PART III Monstrosity and Otherness......Page 128
7 The Monster Within and Without: Spanish Comics, Monstrosity, Religion, and Alterity......Page 130
8 Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others: Stereotype and Narrative Form in British Adventure Comic Books......Page 147
9 Set Pieces: Cultural Appropriation and the Search for Contemporary Identities in Shōnen Manga......Page 163
PART IV Challenging Assumptions......Page 178
10 Narrative Exploration against Mentality Issues: Indirect Education for Multiculturalism in Tintin......Page 180
11 Embracing Childish Perspective: Rutu Modan’s A Royal Banquet with the Queen......Page 194
PART V Case Studies......Page 212
12 An Innocent at Home: Scott Pilgrim and His Canadian Multicultural Contexts......Page 214
13 The Lower East Side as Mishmash of Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images in Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn......Page 229
14 They All Look Alike? Representations of East Asian Americans in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings and Scenes from an Impending Marriage......Page 245
15 Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden: Speaking Local Identities in Persepolis and Tekkon Kinkreet......Page 257
Contributors......Page 274
Index......Page 280

Citation preview

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Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels

Multiculturalism, and its representation, has long presented challenges for the medium of comics. This book presents a wide-ranging survey of the ways in which comics have dealt with the diversity of creators and characters and the (lack of) visibility for characters who don’t conform to particular cultural stereotypes. Contributors engage with ethnicity and other cultural forms from Israel, Romania, North America, South Africa, Spain, U.S. Latino culture and Canada and consider the ways in which comics are able to represent multiculturalism through a focus on the formal elements of the medium. Discussion themes include education, countercultures, monstrosity, the notion of the “other,” anthropomorphism and colonialism. Taking a truly international perspective, the book brings into dialogue a broad range of comics traditions. Carolene Ayaka has a doctorate in social policy from the University of Chichester. She did her MA in gender studies and diversity at the University of Bradford. Her main area of interest is identity; how it is theorised and presented as well as its negotiations and diverseness (thus far having mainly focused on African female identity). Her interest in comics stems from her enjoyment of exploring how they are used to represent and translate people’s everyday lives and imagined lives. Ian Hague is the director of Comics Forum (http://comicsforum.org), an academic organization that promotes the study of comics and related forms. He is the author of Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels (Routledge 2014) as well as various articles and reviews, and he holds a PhD from the University of Chichester. He can be found online at www.ianhague.com and on Twitter @drianhague.

Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies

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For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

38 Global Perspectives on Tarzan From King of the Jungle to International Icon Edited by Annette Wannamaker and Michelle Ann Abate 39 Studying Mobile Media Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Jean Burgess, and Ingrid Richardson 40 Sport Beyond Television The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport Brett Hutchins and David Rowe 41 Cultural Technologies The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society Edited by Göran Bolin 42 Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in Hardcore Pornography Natalie Purcell 43 Ambiguities of Activism Alter-Globalism and the Imperatives of Speed Ingrid M. Hoofd

44 Generation X Goes Global Mapping a Youth Culture in Motion Christine Henseler 45 Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture Gender, Crime, and Science Lindsay Steenberg 46 Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media Historical Perspectives Edited by Siân Nicholas and Tom O’Malley 47 De-convergence in Global Media Industries Dal Yong Jin 48 Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture Edited by Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik 49 Reading Beyond the Book The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo 50 A Social History of Contemporary Democratic Media Jesse Drew

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51 Digital Media Sport Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society Edited by Brett Hutchins and David Rowe 52 Barthes’ Mythologies Today Readings of Contemporary Culture Edited by Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall

60 Radio’s Digital Dilemma Broadcasting in the Twenty-First Century John Nathan Anderson 61 Documentary’s Awkward Turn Cringe Comedy and Media Spectatorship Jason Middleton

53 Beauty, Violence, Representation Edited by Lisa A. Dickson and Maryna Romanets

62 Serialization in Popular Culture Edited by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg

54 Public Media Management for the Twenty-First Century Creativity, Innovation, and Interaction Edited by Michał Głowacki and Lizzie Jackson

63 Gender and Humor Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives Edited by Delia Chiaro and Raffaella Baccolini

55 Transnational Horror Across Visual Media Fragmented Bodies Edited by Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer 56 International Perspectives on Chicana/o Studies “This World is My Place” Edited by Catherine Leen and Niamh Thornton 57 Comics and the Senses A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels Ian Hague

64 Studies of Video Practices Video at Work Edited by Mathias Broth, Eric Laurier, and Lorenza Mondada 65 The Memory of Sound Preserving the Sonic Past Seán Street 66 American Representations of Post-Communism Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives Andaluna Borcila

58 Popular Culture in Africa The Episteme of the Everyday Edited by Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome

67 Media and the Ecological Crisis Edited by Richard Maxwell, Jon Raundalen, and Nina Lager Vestberg

59 Transgender Experience Place, Ethnicity, and Visibility Edited by Chantal Zabus and David Coad

68 Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels Edited by Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague

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Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels Edited by Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

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© 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Representing multiculturalism in comics and graphic novels / edited by Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague. pages cm. — (Routledge research in cultural and media studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. 2. Graphic novels—History and criticism. 3. Multiculturalism in literature. I. Ayaka, Carolene, editor. II. Hague, Ian, 1986– editor. PN6710.R387 2014 741.5′9—dc23 2014026404 ISBN: 978-1-138-02515-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77534-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels

xi xv

1

CAROLENE AYAKA AND IAN HAGUE

PART I Histories and Contexts 1

Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture: Representing Racial Difference in Robert Crumb’s Underground Comix

19

COREY K. CREEKMUR

2

The Impact of Latino Identities and the Humanizing of Multiculturalism in Love and Rockets

34

ANA MERINO

3

The Presidential Penis: Questions of Race and Representation in South African Comic and Satirical Art

49

ANDY MASON

PART II Depicting Difference 4

Recognition and Resemblance: Facture, Imagination and Ideology in Depictions of Cultural and National Difference

69

SIMON GRENNAN

5

“Badgers? We don’t need no steenkin’ badgers!” Talbot’s Grandville, Anthropomorphism and Multiculturalism MEL GIBSON

83

viii Contents 6

The Image of the Foreigner in Historical Romanian Comics under Ceauşescu’s Dictatorship

96

MIHAELA PRECUP

PART III Monstrosity and Otherness

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7

The Monster Within and Without: Spanish Comics, Monstrosity, Religion, and Alterity

113

SARAH D. HARRIS

8

Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others: Stereotype and Narrative Form in British Adventure Comic Books

130

IAN HORTON

9

Set Pieces: Cultural Appropriation and the Search for Contemporary Identities in Shōnen Manga

146

JACOB BIRKEN

PART IV Challenging Assumptions 10 Narrative Exploration against Mentality Issues: Indirect Education for Multiculturalism in Tintin

163

MARIA-SABINA DRAGA ALEXANDRU

11 Embracing Childish Perspective: Rutu Modan’s A Royal Banquet with the Queen

177

LILY GLASNER

PART V Case Studies 12 An Innocent at Home: Scott Pilgrim and His Canadian Multicultural Contexts

197

BRENNA CLARKE GRAY AND PETER WILKINS

13 The Lower East Side as Mishmash of Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images in Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn DANA MIHĂILESCU

212

Contents ix 14 They All Look Alike? Representations of East Asian Americans in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings and Scenes from an Impending Marriage

228

EMMA OKI

15 Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden: Speaking Local Identities in Persepolis and Tekkon Kinkreet

240

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ALEX LINK

Contributors Index

257 263

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Illustrations

2.1

2.2

3.1

3.2 4.1 4.2

6.1 6.2

7.1

7.2

7.3

Hernández, Jaime. Ten Years of Love and Rockets. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1992, p.7. Copyright © 2014 Jaime Hernandez, courtesy of Fantagraphics Books. Hernández, Jaime. Love and Rockets n.1. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2001, p.5. Copyright © 2014 Jaime Hernandez, courtesy of Fantagraphics Books. Zapiro, “The Rape of Lady Justice”, cartoon, Sunday Times, September 7, 2008. Image used with the permission of the artist. Brett Murray, The Spear, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 185 × 140 cm. Image used with the permission of the artist. Utagawa, Kunisada. “Hidenoyama Raigoro,” 1845. Dr Lakra, Untitled (Hiroshima Tomonohira-Take-Emon), 2007. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City. Photograph: Estudio Michel Zabé. Sandu Florea and Theodora Florea, “King Burebista gives a speech to his soldiers,” 1979. Public domain. Valentin Tănase, “Acornion of Dionisopolis, the emissary of a Greek colony, speaks to King Burebista, in the presence of High Priest Deceneu,” 1980. Public domain. Goya, Francisco de. “Que viene el coco” Los Caprichos. 1799. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Museo National del Prado. Web. 30 March 2014. Goya, Francisco de. “El de la rollona” Los Caprichos. 1799. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Museo National del Prado. Web. 30 March 2014. Goya, Francisco de. “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” Los Caprichos. 1799. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Museo National del Prado. Web. 30 March 2014.

44

45

56 58 72

75 102

106

118

119

121

xii Illustrations 7.4

8.1

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8.2

11.1

11.2

11.3

12.1

12.2

13.1

13.2

15.1

15.2

Manuel Gago, The Masked Warrior, Issue 1, “El Guerrero del Antifaz.” 1943. Editorial Valenciana, S.A. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid. Writer Unknown; Artist Harry Farrugia, “The Man with the Brazen Mask”, The Victor, No. 473, 14th of March 1970. © DC Thomson & Co. Ltd. 2014. Used by Kind Permission of DC Thomson & Co. Ltd. Writer Alan Moore; Artist Kevin O’Neill, “Captain Nemo: Scientific-Pirate and Butcher” (Frontispiece), Nemo: The Roses of Berlin. © Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. Published by Top Shelf Productions Inc and Knockabout Ltd. Modan, Rutu. A Royal Banquet with the Queen. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2010, n.p. [Hebrew]. Image used with the permission of the artist. Modan, Rutu. A Royal Banquet with the Queen. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2010, n.p. [Hebrew]. Image used with the permission of the artist. Modan, Rutu. A Royal Banquet with the Queen. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2010, n.p. [Hebrew]. Image used with the permission of the artist. “Fobby Knives.” O’Malley, Bryan Lee. Scott Pilgrim Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life. Black and white edition. Portland, OR: Oni Press, 2004, n.p. Image used with the permission of Oni Press. “Queenology.” Scott Pilgrim Volume 2: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Black and white edition. Portland, OR: Oni Press, 2005, n.p. Image used with the Permission of Oni Press. Leela Corman, Unterzakhn (New York: Schocken Books, 2012), 11. Courtesy of Leela Corman/Shocken Books, a division of Random House LLC. Leela Corman, Unterzakhn (New York: Schocken Books, 2012), 24. Courtesy of Leela Corman/Shocken Books, a division of Random House LLC. Disneyland in Tehran. Excerpt from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi, translation copyright © 2004 by Anjali Singh. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Black and the Minotaur, White and the Little Prince. Excerpt from TEKKONKINKREET © 1994 Taiyo MATSUMOTO/SHOGAKUKAN.

125

135

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206

216

218

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251

Illustrations xiii

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15.3

The Little Prince on Asteroid B-612. Illustration from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, translated from the French by Richard Howard. Copyright 1943 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1971 by Consuelo de Saint-Exupery, English translation copyright © 2000 by Richard Howard. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

252

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Acknowledgements

This book began life as the fourth installment of the Comics Forum conference series in 2012. Since then all of the authors whose work is presented here have worked extremely hard to put together chapters that are enlightening, engaging and exciting. We are immensely grateful to them for their time and effort, and their patience with our editing process! We would also like to thank Hugo Frey, Ben Gaskell, Mel Gibson, Hattie Kennedy, Emily Rabone and Hannah Wadle for their invaluable input into the 2012 conference itself. Without their help this book would not be a reality. We are grateful to the peer reviewers who provided helpful guidance on the direction the book should take, and the team at Routledge, in particular Nancy Chen, for their ongoing support of this project. We also very much appreciate the input of Roger Sabin, who was kind enough to offer us some very constructive feedback on a draft of our introduction. Finally we would like to thank our respective families and friends, who have been supportive throughout the sometimes difficult process of preparing the book for publication, and our partners, Ian Hayes and Hannah Wadle, for their endless patience! Thank you.

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Introduction Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels

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Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague

I: SHARED QUESTIONS Coexistence, interaction, integration, intersectionality, negotiation, power. Each of these terms could be used to formulate substantial questions about multiculturalism, or about comics and graphic novels. Each speaks to major issues in both fields, and each requires us to think about the ways in which categories of difference, whether they be ethnic identities or modes of visual representation, come into contact with each other within those fields. How can cultures coexist in modern societies? How do words and images interact upon the comic’s page? Is integration possible or desirable? How do different social categories intersect, and what is the outcome? Through what channels are the relationships between cultures negotiated in society and in the arts? Who or what holds power, and what are the claims to this power based on? This book seeks to draw together comics and multiculturalism, and to consider these and other shared questions. Importantly, although the book does consider specific representations of multiculturalism in comics, it also looks at the ways in which representation is possible in comics, and how strategies of representation (or nonrepresentation) can themselves constitute multiculturalism. In her classic work Vision and Difference, Griselda Pollock, paraphrasing Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, asks: “Is adding women to art history the same as producing feminist art history?”1 In a similar vein we might ask: Is studying representations of multiculturalism in comics the same as producing multiculturalist comics scholarship? Pollock argues for a rethinking of the structures of scholarship if we are to overcome gender hierarchies: Demanding that women be considered not only changes what is studied and what becomes relevant to investigate but it challenges the existing disciplines politically. Women have not been omitted through forgetfulness or mere prejudice. The structural sexism of most academic disciplines contributes actively to the production and perpetuation of a gender hierarchy. What we learn about the world and its peoples is ideologically patterned in conformity with the social order in which it is produced.2

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2 Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague Similarly, any study of multiculturalism in comics that considers what is shown without taking account of how it is shown and/or produced will fall short of multiculturalism itself since it will only serve to denote instances of multicultural expression within the medium, rather than dealing with the broader questions around the structural possibility (or impossibility) of multiculturalism in comics. Such an approach allows for the “redistribution” of representations and an increased visibility for multiculturalism within comics, but it does not enable the “recognition” of the very structures and systems within which that representation takes place.3 Yet this recognition is a key element of the “emancipatory movements that erupted on the scene in the 1960s and spread rapidly across the world in the years that followed” of which multiculturalism is one example.4 “Multiculturalists,” writes Nancy Fraser, “disclosed the oppressive character of social protections premised on majority religious or ethnocultural self-understandings, which penalize members of minority groups.”5 As Fraser goes on to make clear, though, emancipation is not wholly unproblematic since it “produces not only liberation but also strains in the fabric of existing solidarities.”6 Multiculturalism can be as disruptive and divisive as it is freeing, and the determination of the value of multiculturalism is not something that can be generalised universally. Thus, although a multicultural approach to comics is necessarily a structural one (in that it addresses structures of representation), it must also be a particular one and draw upon specific examples in specific contexts if it is to have any validity. It is not viable to speak broadly about, for example, the use of stereotypes in comics (a theme common in a number of the chapters of this book) as an absolutely negative or positive approach to representation. Rather, one must consider the specific implications and functions of stereotyping in particular examples even as one recognises stereotyping as a representational strategy that exists across multiple texts. This is something Andy Mason makes clear in relation to racial caricature in his chapter on South African comic and satirical art in this volume: [. . .] there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to assessing racial caricature, and [. . .] its acceptability is likely to depend on the intention that underlies it, the context in which it appears, and the attitudes of those who are on the receiving end of it. Whether racial caricature must invariably contain a trace of distaste, or whether it can function as the locale of positive representation, is a question that evades generalization, to be reconsidered in each instance it is encountered. This overt acknowledgement of the important relationship between the general and the particular as a means by which multicultural concepts are both produced and represented is also evident in other articles in the collection. Writing on monstrosity, for example, Sarah D. Harris asserts that: [. . .] monsters are simultaneously universal and particular: they emerge from universal societal needs, including the need to exteriorize fears

Introduction 3 and build an “us” in contrast to a “them,” but the particular form that monsters take speaks to the specificity of a time and place.

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Contributors to this collection address both sides of the universal/particular binary, and in so doing they enhance our understandings of both the structures that facilitate multiculturalism in comics, and specific examples of that multiculturalism. They tell us about both what is represented and how representation occurs. II: SOME GENERAL THEMES The medium of comics has been described as a “hybrid form” and, perhaps more satisfactorily, as a “nexus of cultures,” this latter term being more useful since it acknowledges that although “[a] comic combines text and pictures into something quite unlike either,” the comic also draws upon the cultural histories (plural) of text and pictures in its formation, and that these elements are never quite integrated in a way that fully precludes the possibility of their separate consideration.7 Hence it could be argued that comics is an inherently multicultural form, given that the modes of representation that it has available to it implicate both cultures of images and cultures of words, along with other modes of expression that are more or less culturally specific, such as book design (compare, for example, the American comic book, the European album and the Japanese manga “phonebook”). The histories of comics and graphic novels are not limited to the objects that we would presently collect under those names; they also draw upon broader histories: histories of sequential art, histories of the printed image and histories of the written word among others. Even if those forms do not accord exactly with the narrower categories of “comics” and “graphic novels,” they do inform our understandings of the techniques, strategies and functionalities of these more specific types of objects. It is unsurprising then, that these broader histories are addressed in this volume and brought into a dialogue with comics and graphic novels. Corey K. Creekmur considers the context of Robert Crumb’s work in the underground comics of the 1960s, arguing for a move away from understandings of comics as forms whose racism represents a pathology on the part of the creator and towards an approach that acknowledges the historical situations in which such comics arise. Sarah D. Harris discusses Francisco Goya’s Caprices and Manuel Gago’s The Masked Warrior in relation to the concept of the monstrous other. Simon Grennan considers Kunisada Utagawa’s 1845 colour woodblock portrait of sumo wrestler Hidenoyama Raigoro alongside one of Nick Bradshaw’s images from Wolverine and the X-Men as a means for understanding the nature of depiction, noting that, despite the vast differences in the periods and contexts of their productions, “we accept both as depictions of Japanese men, despite that fact that neither depiction resembles any Japanese man in our experience.” Mel Gibson discusses

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4 Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague language as an indicator of the complex power relations at work in Bryan Talbot’s Grandville series, showing how the presence of English in the book “undermine[s] the notion of national identity for those reading the book in English by detaching the English language from notions of Britishness.” Histories of cultures and cultural interactions are also in evidence throughout the volume. Ian Horton identifies depictions of British imperial concerns in the boys’ comics of the 1950s to the 1990s that speak more to the type of material found in the illustrated story papers of the early 1900s than they do to the post-imperial historical contexts in which they were actually produced. Contrarily, Mihaela Precup outlines the ways in which production within particular political, social or historical contexts can result in demands for certain types of presentation. She examines Romanian historical comics produced under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu (1965–1989), and shows not only how these comics presented particular, officially acceptable if factually questionable histories of Romania, but also how these presentations required comics’ readers to develop a kind of dual consciousness if they were to avoid becoming the naïve receivers of ideologically motivated histories. “Exposed from an early age to an educational system that was still relying on learning by rote, and witnesses to increasing dissatisfaction with the regime expressed by their families at home,” she writes, “Romanian children were raised in an atmosphere that enabled them to read history as fiction.” In her discussion of The Adventures of Tintin, Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru similarly emphasises the ability of children to parse out ideologies and the expression of them in comics, noting that “[Hergé] thought that children—his major audience—could understand a lot more than they were given credit for, and so the pressing issues of the world should not be hidden from them.” Accordingly, the Tintin comics serve a “subtle educational function, expressed through exposing [. . .] children to multicultural issues and implicitly questioning them.” Children are also a major topic in Lily Glasner’s contribution to this volume, which takes Rutu Modan’s A Royal Banquet with the Queen as a case study to explore the power relations that exist between adults and children, and the ways in which children’s voices might be heard (or ignored). Asserting that “[t]he basic issue that concerns the discourse on multiculturalism is the power imbalance that exists between the cultural standard that defines the majority and the cultural traits that characterize minority groups,” Glasner goes on to note that in recent years “discourse of this kind has expanded to include a critical examination of deprived groups in society, who may or may not be, technically speaking, minorities.” Under the purview of this expanded concept of multiculturalism, she argues that rather than treating children as “minors within minorities,” Modan’s book advocates a more dialogic approach “in which mutual respect leads to a genuine dialogue and to a mutual transference of values between [adults and children].” The notion of a broader and more nuanced understanding of multiculturalism as a concept also has echoes in other chapters of the book, with Maria-Sabina Draga

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Introduction 5 Alexandru, for example, arguing that “[m]ulticulturalism should [. . .] be repositioned in a worldwide, cross-border perspective, which implies its rethinking in transnational terms.” Jacob Birken takes the challenges around speaking of multiculturalism further still, noting that the idea of multiculturalism is complicated by the context of its emergence around the same period as postmodernism and post-colonialism were becoming dominant modes of philosophy and critique. These complications lead Birken “to suspend ‘multiculturalism’ as a paradigm for dealing with cultures in plural, and to retreat to a notion of *culture, whose qualifying or quantifying prefix remains a potential.” His subsequent discussion deals with the notion of appropriation and asks, “When does cultural appropriation become inappropriate?” drawing upon shōnen manga to formulate his responses. In other articles, governmental formulations or rejections of multiculturalism and citizens’ responses to them come to the fore. We have already mentioned Mihaela Precup’s work on Romanian historical comics, which “became part of the frantic effort to rewrite the image of Romania as a morally superior country whose ethnic and linguistic uniformity precluded even the European invention of the concept of the nation.” Similarly in Sarah D. Harris’s chapter, The Masked Warrior is outlined as a means by which Franco’s dictatorship in Spain sought to suppress awareness of the previously diverse and multicultural composition of the area that later became Spain, asserting that in the comic: “The legacy of the various languages and religions present both in the Medieval School of Translators of Toledo, and the long nineteenth century, was sacrificed in favour of order under Francoism. Spain was recast, as it had been under the Catholic Kings, as one nation, under Christianity, and under Castilian Spanish.” But even when a government does wholeheartedly support multiculturalism, to the point of enshrining it within state legislature, complexity arises as the various social groups in play seek to negotiate their relationships with each other. As Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins demonstrate in their contribution to the book, in Canada—the only “Western nation [to have] constitutionalized a commitment to multiculturalism”—principles of national identity and what it means to be Canadian can prove problematic when it comes to engaging with real diversity in society. “The Canadian story,” they argue, “asserts that we are better than Americans because we are more polite and diffident, and that peace, order and good government trump life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Except that they don’t, especially as a narrative of heroic self-assertion.” This contradiction and the complexity of Canadian identity come across particularly strongly in their case study, Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim, in which “Scott’s ‘heroic’ action on behalf of peace, order, and good government carries the taint of racist violence.” As Gray and Wilkins demonstrate, the ability of the individual to comprehend the implications of her/his own actions is not always assured. Elsewhere in the volume, identities within multicultural contexts, and the possibility of self-expression and self-determination come in for

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6 Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague consideration. Ana Merino looks at the career and publications of the Hernandez brothers and assesses the expressions of multiculturalism in Love and Rockets. Alex Link compares Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkon Kinkreet and finds that in both cases the relationships between the local and the global present challenges, and in some cases opportunities, for the formation of individual identities: “Both Persepolis and Tekkon Kinkreet show how one might express a difference between cultures while at the same time safeguarding the right to difference within them, in a manner that opposes other, global narratives that radically simplify and foreclose upon national and local identities.” In her chapter, Dana Mihăilescu deals with the ways in which elements of identity that transcend national or local contexts, such as religion, can also complicate integration or assimilation into societies. Taking Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn as her case study, Mihăilescu outlines the challenges that arose for Jewish women in the United States in the early twentieth century and demonstrates how these challenges are depicted and dealt with by Corman, “[tracing] the graphic novel’s varied and at times controversial representations of womanhood in relation to traditional Judaic Eastern European lore and American mass media views of the early twentieth century.” Emma Oki, meanwhile, considers the possibilities that are open to minorities in representing themselves and their experiences within multicultural contexts. Oki shows how the works of Adrian Tomine “[offer] an honest portrayal of multiculturalism in America but from the perspective of a Japanese American. His narratives,” she argues, “show that East Asian Americans continue to be perceived through the prism of their ethnicity and unlike other ethnic (but white) groups they are treated as perpetual outsiders.” Andy Mason’s chapter also deals with the issue of identity, but here it is the identity of the cartoonist and the question of who has the right to represent identities that are considered. In addition to providing a concise history of the satirical depiction of black subjects, Mason emphasises the challenges involved in representation and the difficult issue of who is able to represent subjectivity in comic art. Can a white artist unproblematically represent black subjectivity? Mason asserts that this question resists simple or universal answers; but it is important to note “that artists who work across what used to be called ‘the colour bar’ have a responsibility to engage in this practice in a very thoughtful and conscious way.” III: CONTEXTS This volume is not alone in addressing issues of multiculturalism in comics, and there are other texts that deal with the subject and related issues, though perhaps not as many as might be expected given the importance of multiculturalism in contemporary discourse. The most directly related book is Multicultural Comics from Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick

Introduction 7 Luis Aldama. Contributors to that volume deal with a wide range of issues surrounding multiculturalism in comics, albeit mainly (but not completely) in relation to multiculturalism in comics from the United States. Among the articles therein is “Finding Archives/Making Archives: Observations on Conducting Multicultural Comics Research” by Jenny E. Robb and Rebecca Wanzo, which provides an introduction to the situation of comics within US library archives, and offers a useful list of resources for researchers.9 The article is entirely oriented around the United States and a USbased conception of “the multiculturalist enterprise,” which the authors argue “has a particular genealogy as a U.S. theory emphasizing a diversity of voices, largely racial and ethnic, in the construction of a pluralist identity.” This is an understandable limitation to keep the study manageable but hardly an unproblematic view of the topic given the vast proliferation of debate and discourse on multiculturalism around the world.10 Nevertheless it is a valuable starting point for getting to grips with resources on the subject, and the challenges that researchers are likely to face in locating materials for study. Furthermore, since many of the resources listed are at least partially online, they are accessible to international researchers. Other articles in the collection address topics that are also dealt with in this book, albeit from different angles: Leonard Rifas’s “Race and Comix” (adapted from a piece previously published in the journal ImageText) represents an important contribution to studies of the underground comix of the 1960s, and as such is an excellent companion piece to Corey Creekmur’s contribution to this volume.11 Jonathan Risner’s “‘Authentic’ Latinas/os and Queer Characters in Mainstream and Alternative Comics” sits alongside Ana Merino’s chapter here in illuminating the work of the Hernandez brothers in expressing Latino/a identity in Love and Rockets, in Risner’s case through a comparison with DC Comics’ Batwoman and Blue Beetle characters.12 Finally, Jared Gardner’s article, “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim,” offers a valuable discussion of Asian American creators, which adds additional breadth to the work by Emma Oki that is presented in this book.13 Transnational Perspectives in Graphic Novels: Comics at the Crossroads, edited by Shane Denson, Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein, also represents an important contribution to the types of discussions presented in this book. Although not dealing with multiculturalism per se, that book does emphasise many of the same themes that arise in relation to it. In particular, the editors argue for a move towards an approach that would “urge us to explore the transnational dynamics that have come to shape contemporary forms of graphic storytelling at the crossroads of cultures.”14 This does not mean, however, that they are striving towards a wholly international approach to the field, something that has already been undertaken very successfully in publications such as The International Journal of Comic Art. Rather, their focus in the book remains “on largely American genres and

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8

8 Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague

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productions as an exemplary field of transnational exchange.”15 They go on to argue that: [. . .] comics and other forms of graphic narrative are predisposed toward crossing national borders and cultural boundaries because their unique visual-verbal interface seems to translate more readily—though not without transformation and distortion—across cultures than do monomedial forms of literature, nonnarrative artworks, or even such visual narrative media as film.16 Although (as Denson, Meyer and Stein acknowledge) this claim is somewhat controversial, we do not intend to challenge it specifically here. Nevertheless it is worth noting that this perspective, which suggests a relatively straightforward approach to border/boundary crossings, is not identical to multiculturalism with its emphasis upon the nature and negotiation of boundaries as well as the products of the cultures that they circumscribe. For this reason, the aims and approaches taken within the book do not fully accord with those presented here. This volume also differs from Transnational Perspectives in Graphic Narratives in its more international orientation that includes, but does not particularly foreground, US-based forms of multiculturalism and/or publications. That said, there is some overlap between Transnational Perspectives in Graphic Narratives, and, as with Multicultural Comics from Zap to Blue Beetle, we would recommend the volume as a good companion text to this one. Among the articles presented therein are Elisabeth El Refaie’s “Transnational Identity as Shape-Shifting: Metaphor and Cultural Resonance in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese,” which speaks to similar issues to those discussed in Emma Oki’s chapter here, and Mark Berninger’s “‘Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together’: The Cultural Crossovers of Bryan Lee O’Malley,” which bears reading alongside Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins’s chapter in this volume. Other discussions of multiculturalism and related issues in comics focus on specific subject areas or topics. One subject that has received substantial coverage is the representation of Jews and Judaism in comics, something that is also dealt with in Dana Mihăilescu’s chapter on Unterzakhn in this volume.17 Black subjectivity, discussed at length by Andy Mason here, has also received attention, with Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation, edited by Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II, being a significant recent collection on this subject, but far from the only one.18 In addition to editing Multicultural Comics from Zap to Blue Beetle, Frederick Luis Aldama has published extensively on representations of Chicano Americans in comics, as well as writing Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez, an excellent source for further information on the themes discussed by Ana Merino in this collection.19 Treatments of related subjects such as (post)colonialism as both a historical situation and a means for reading comics and graphic novels have also begun

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Introduction 9 to appear in recent years. Mark McKinney is particularly prolific in this area, having published two major volumes on the relationships between comics and French imperial concerns since 2011 (cf. Ian Horton’s article on British imperialism in this volume).20 Political propaganda, which represents a key means by which multiculturalism is expressed (or suppressed) in comics and cartoons, and the political contexts and implications of comics and cartooning, have also been discussed in some detail, with a variety of good sources to choose from (see also Andy Mason’s work in this volume).21 Academic journals, whether dedicated specifically to comics or not, have similarly been an excellent source for scholarship on multiculturalism and related subjects in comics and graphic novels, with extensive work being undertaken in European Comic Art, Image [&] Narrative, ImageText, The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, MELUS and Studies in Comics, among others.22 Finally, no discussion of multiculturalism in comics would be complete without a mention of the vast body of work contained within The International Journal of Comic Art. Although multiculturalism is not the primary focus of this series, it has nonetheless been implicit throughout the life of the journal, and its contents are so varied and inclusive that it might be argued that it is performing multiculturalism even when it is not expressly studying it. Of course in a short introduction such as this one it is impossible to give anything more than a sampling of the myriad ways in which multiculturalism in comics can be and has been dealt with by scholars. The titles mentioned above and the more extensive listing provided in the notes at the end of this introduction are intended to offer a starting point for further studies on the subjects discussed in this volume, but they are by no means an exhaustive bibliography, and we can only apologise to the authors of any studies we have omitted. In this book we have endeavoured to bring together a collection that is both international in its scope, thereby expanding somewhat on the breadth of work to be found in the more US-oriented Multicultural Comics from Zap to Blue Beetle and Transnational Perspectives in Graphic Narratives, and focuses specifically upon the questions that multiculturalism as a general subject poses in relation to comics and graphic novels. The parameters of some of these questions are outlined above in section I, and some indications of the ways in which our contributors have responded to these issues can be found in section II. IV: THE STRUCTURE OF THIS VOLUME The book’s structure is divided into five parts. In the first, Histories and Contexts, the authors situate their subjects within more or less specific moments in the development of comics and graphic novels and explore the ways in which multicultural societies or issues appeared and/or were explored in the medium at these points. Corey K. Creekmur’s article, which introduces this section, deals with the issue of multicultural representation in the underground comix

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10 Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague movement of the 1960s and asks whether the counterculture, and in particular the work of Robert Crumb, was multicultural. Ana Merino’s looks back over the thirty-year history of the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets and seeks to discover how the representations of multiculturalism within the series have evolved over the course of that period. Rounding out the section, Andy Mason outlines the history of political cartooning in South Africa before addressing recent outrage around the depictions of Jacob Zuma in a 2008 cartoon by Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro) known as “The Rape of Lady Justice” and Brett Murray’s 2012 painting The Spear. All three of these chapters emphasise the significance of history and context in understanding depictions of multiculturalism. Creekmur argues for the significance of historical context in a broad sense; history is not only a means for understanding whether an individual creator’s works were racist or not but also for understanding the pervasive structures that enable and sustain racism. In Merino’s case, contextualisation means looking back longitudinally over the history of Love and Rockets to understand the development of the title as a process of negotiation and renegotiation over cultural identities. She thereby emphasises that multiculturalism is a dynamic and evolving project that cannot be understood in terms of a single, fixed moment but must be constantly reevaluated as situations and societies change. Yet as Andy Mason’s discussion makes clear, it is also important to retain an awareness of the specific historical and political contexts in which representations of multiculturalism are produced if we are to understand why such representations might be seen as problematic or offensive. In the case of “The Rape of Lady Justice” and The Spear, political unrest arose (at least partly) because of the historical moments in which they were produced. Once those moments had passed, Mason indicates, similar subject matter could be represented with far fewer problems, something that was indicated shortly after the controversy surrounding The Spear in the relatively subdued response to Ayanda Mabulu’s painting Umshini Wam (Weapon of Mass Destruction). Part two of the book brings together three articles on the ways in which multiculturalism is depicted in comics, with a particular focus upon the means creators have available to them in depicting difference. Simon Grennan’s article considers how depictions embody their producers and readers, and in so doing engender situations and relationships that require careful thought if we are to understand the assumptions, implications and power relations at work within them. Mel Gibson, meanwhile, looks at Bryan Talbot’s Grandville series and unpicks the various strategies of representation at work therein. Her discussion takes in Talbot’s presentation of the economic reasoning for (or indeed against) multiculturalism, the ways in which Talbot employs language (and particularly the English language) as an indicator of cultural identity and a source of resistance and an overview of the artworks that are referenced in Talbot’s depictions and their significance. Mihaela Precup draws this section to a close with an in-depth look at how the Romanian historical comics produced under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dictatorship sought to consolidate a patriotic, if

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Introduction 11 unrealistic, representation of Romania and the ways in which these depictions were understood by their readership both at the time of their publication and today. In each of these essays, we find an emphasis upon the means of representation, and how what is depicted (and what is understood from these depictions) is determined by both the way in which they are physically produced and the social and cultural contexts that produce them. Importantly, these two aspects are inseparable, and so to deal with depiction we must also deal with the circumstances of depiction, or risk losing sight of the fact that the meanings of the depictions are as “produced” as the depictions themselves. In the third section of the book, we turn to look at two key themes for multicultural studies: monstrosity and otherness. Sarah D. Harris opens this section with a discussion that links back to Mihaela Precup’s chapter in its focus on the production of comics in the context of a dictatorial regime; in Harris’s case this means Spain under Francisco Franco (1939–1975). Harris draws comparisons between Francisco de Goya’s etchings and the comic book series The Masked Warrior, bringing both into a dialogue with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Theory in order to better understand the reasoning behind the creation of monstrosity and the monstrous other. She is followed in this section by Ian Horton, who deals with an enterprise that enacted othering and the creation of monsters on an industrial scale: the British Empire. Taking examples from the British boys’ comics of the 1950s–1990s, Horton illustrates how the remnants of imperialism and the ideas of the monstrous other of which the empire made such effective use persisted well after its decline. Indeed, he finds that even now these ideas have not fully dissipated, and he outlines a number of examples from the ongoing series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that indicate that imperialist imagery is in some ways still alive and well. Jacob Birken concludes this section with a consideration of the issue of cultural appropriation and the means by which the Other can be commoditised and made “consumable” in the context of postmodern approaches to culture. In each of these essays we find emphases on the procedures by which “Others” and “monsters” are created by regimes and societies, but we also see careful considerations of the reasons for these creations and indeed the purposes they may serve. The collection’s fourth section deals with subjects that challenge or expand on our notions of what multiculturalism is or can be. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru addresses Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin series and suggests that although some aspects of it may be controversial in terms of the representation of other cultures (with Tintin in the Congo being one obvious example), it actually offers a complex multicultural picture of the world that can, in the modern context, be more helpful as a means of educating children than harmful to them. Alexandru’s notion of multiculturalism is an expanded one, dealing with the concept as a transnational idea that must take into account people’s increased mobility across borders, and the ways in which the modern context of reading might affect the notion of the Other as presented in the series. Lily Glasner also works with an expanded

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12 Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague formulation of multiculturalism, placing her focus upon children as a cultural group, and seeking to understand the ways in which they communicate with adults. Of particular interest to her in her reading of Rutu Modan’s A Royal Banquet With the Queen is the way in which manners operate to regulate relationships between the two groups, and the disadvantageous position in which they often situate children. In both of these chapters we find arguments for dynamic and evolving conceptualisations of multiculturalism that take account of the changing contexts in which texts are read and produced, but also for understandings of the concept that take advantage of the benefits of multiculturalist thinking without seeking to restrict what is classed as culture in narrow terms. The final section of the book brings together four substantial case studies. Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins consider the issue of Canadian identity in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. Dana Mihăilescu addresses Jewish women’s possibilities for self-determination and expression in New York’s Lower East Side in the early twentieth century through a discussion of Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn. Emma Oki looks at the position and cultural depiction of Asian Americans in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings and Scenes from an Impending Marriage. Alex Link compares Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkon Kinkreet in order to understand the possibilities for individuals to retain a sense of local identity when confronted with globalising influences. In all four of these chapters, we see a strong emphasis upon the position of the individual in multicultural societies, and the challenges that broader narratives of identity can cause when they come into conflict with each other, whether these narratives are national, religious, ethnic or even commercial. In this regard, the case studies help us to understand the structural nature of multiculturalism and to see the subject as a site of negotiation between varied cultural identities. They also show how comics and graphic novels can be particularly helpful in addressing these ideas and demonstrate the power of the medium not just to show multiculturalism, but to enact it. NOTES 1. Pollock, Griselda. 2003 (1988). Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art. London & New York: Routledge. 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Fraser, Nancy. 2013. “A Triple Movement? Parsing the Politics of Crisis after Polanyi.” New Left Review (Second Series) 81: 119–132. 127. 4. Ibid. The other movements Fraser identifies among this group are: “anti-racism, anti-imperialism, anti-war, the New Left, second wave feminism [and] LGBT liberation [. . .].” 5. Ibid. 128. 6. Ibid. 129. 7. Berninger, Mark, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn. (Eds). 2010. Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives. Jefferson & London: McFarland & Company, Inc. 1–2.

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Introduction 13 8. Frederick Luis Aldama. (Ed.). 2010. Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Austin: University of Texas Press. 9. Robb, Jenny E. and Rebecca Wanzo. 2010. “Finding Archives/Making Archives: Observations on Conducting Multicultural Comics Research.” In Frederick Luis Aldama. (Ed.). 2010. Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Austin: University of Texas Press. 202–219. 10. Ibid. 202. For good overviews of international discussions around multiculturalism, see: Andall, Jacqueline. (Ed.). 2003. Gender and Ethnicity in Contemporary Europe. Oxford: Berg. Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Culture, Media and Identities series). London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Carby, Hazel. 1999. Cultures in Babylon, Black Britain and African America. London: Verso. Mirza, Heidi Safia. (Ed.). 1997. Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge. Modood, Tariq. 2003. “New Forms of Britishness: Post-Immigration Ethnicity and Hybridity in Britain.” In Sackman, Rosemarie, Peters, Bernhard and Faist, Thomas. (Eds.). 2003. Identity and Integration: Migrants in Western Europe. Hants: Ashgate. 77–90. 11. Rifas, Leonard. 2010. “Race and Comix.” In Frederick Luis Aldama. (Ed.). 2010. Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Austin: University of Texas Press. 27–28. See also: Rifas, Leonard. 2004. “Racial Imagery, Racism, Individualism, and Underground Comix.” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 1 (1): www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/rifas/, accessed August 19, 2014. 12. Risner, Jonathan. 2010. “‘Authentic’ Latinas/os and Queer Characters in Mainstream and Alternative Comics.” In Frederick Luis Aldama. (Ed.). 2010. Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Austin: University of Texas Press. 39–54. 13. Gardner, Jared. 2010. “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim.” In Frederick Luis Aldama. (Ed.). 2010. Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle. Austin: University of Texas Press. 132–147. 14. Denson, Shane, Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein. (Eds). 2013. Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 2. 15. Ibid. 3. 16. Ibid. 5. 17. See: • Andrae, Thomas and Mel Gordon. 2010. Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero, from the Creators of Superman. Port Townsend: Feral House; Baskind. • Omer-Sherman, Samantha and Raner. 2008. The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press. • Buhle, Paul. 2008. Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form. New York: New Press. • Fingeroth, Danny. 2007. Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero. London: Continuum. • Weinstein, Simcha. 2006. Up, Up and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero. Baltimore: Leviathan Press. 18. Howard, Sheena C. and Ronald L. Jackson II. (Eds). 2013. Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation. London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic. See also: • Brown, Jeffrey A. 2001. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics and Their Fans. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

14 Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague • Duffy, Damian and John Jennings. 2010. Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture. New York: Mark Batty Publisher. • Nama, Adilifu. 2011. Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. Austin: University of Texas Press. • Strömberg, Fredrik. Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Seattle: Fantagraphics.

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19. See: • Aldama, Frederick Luis. 2005. Brown on Brown: Chicano/a Representations of Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity. Austin: University of Texas Press. • ———. 2006. Spilling the Beans in Chicanolandia: Conversations with Writers and Artists. Austin: University of Texas Press. • ———. 2009. Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez. Austin: University of Texas Press. 20. McKinney, Mark. 2011. The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.; McKinney, Mark. 2013. Redrawing French Empire in Comics. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 21. See: Strömberg, Fredrik. 2010. Comic Art Propaganda: A Graphic History. Lewes: ILEX.; Packard, Stephan. (Ed.). 2014. Comics & Politik/Comics & Politics. Berlin: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag. 22. In European Comic Art see particularly: • Baetens, Jan, “North and South in Belgian Comics” (issue 1.2, 111–126) • Bumatay, Michelle, “Humor as a Way to Re-Image and Re-Imagine Gabon and France in La vie de Pahé and Dipoula (issue 5.2, 45–66) • Calargé, Carla, “Monsters and Spectacles: A Lesson to Learn and Remember” (issue 5.2, 23–44) • Giaufret, Anna, “‘Corsican Speak’ in Two French Bandes dessinées” (issue 4.1, 29–38) • Grove, Laurence, Mark McKinney and Ann Miller, “Editorial: Cultural Difference and Diversity in French-Language Comics (issue 5.2, 1–7) • Leroy, Fabrice, “‘Is There Any Boudin on the Moon?’ Depicting Cajun Ethnicity in Bec Doux et ses amis” (issue 1.2, 127–144) • Marshall, Bill, “European Comic Art and Quebec” (issue 5.1, 4–8) • McKinney, Mark, “The Frontier and the Affrontier: French-Language Algerian Comics and Cartoons Confront the Nation” (issue 1.2, 175–199) • Scully, Richard, “The Cartoon Emperor: The Impact of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte on European Comic Art, 1848–1870” (issue 4.2, 147–180) • Vann, Michael G., “Caricaturing ‘The Colonial Good Life’ in French Indochina” (issue 2.1, 83–108) In Image [&] Narrative see particularly issue 11.2 (which includes a thematic cluster on “New Horizons in the Analysis of US Ethnic and Postcolonial Film and Animation Narrative,” which includes articles relating to comics and graphic novels) and issue 12.1 (which includes a thematic cluster on “Visual Language of Manga”). See also: • Couch, Chris, “The Publication and Formats of Comics, Graphic Novels, and Tankobon” (issue 1.1) • Lefèvre, Pascal, “The Battle over the Balloon. The Conflictual Institutionalization of the Speech Balloon in Various European Cultures” (issue 7.1) • Rommens, Aarnoud, “C Stands for Censorship: ‘Dirty War’ Comics, Camouflage and Buscavidas” (issue 6.2) • ———, “Manga Story-Telling/Showing” (issue 1.1)

Introduction 15

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In ImageText see particularly issues 5.3 (a special issue entitled “Convergences: Comics, Culture and Globalization”) and 7.1 (a special issue entitled “The Worlds of the Hernandez Brothers”). See also: • Casey, Jim and Stefan Hal, “The Exotic Other Scripted: Identity and Metamorphosis in David Mack's Kabuki” (issue 3.1) • Costello, Brannon “Fascism and Mass Culture in Howard Chaykin’s Blackhawk” (issue 7.2) • Fanning, Charles, “George McManus and Irish America” (issue 7.2) • Gordon, Andrew, “Jewish Fathers and Sons in Spiegelman’s Maus and Roth’s Patrimony” (issue 1.1) • Hayton, Christopher J. and David L. Albright, “The Military Vanguard for Desegregation: Civil Rights Era War Comics and Racial Integration” (issue 6.2) • Meyer, Christina, “Urban America in the Newspaper Comic Strips of the Nineteenth Century: Introducing the Yellow Kid” (issue 6.2) • Myklebost Svenn-Arve, “Shakespeare Manga: Early- or Post-Modern?” (issue 6.3) • Norlund, Christopher, “Imagining Terrorists before Sept. 11: Marvel’s GI Joe Comic Books, 1982–1994” (issue 3.1) • Rifas, Leonard, “Racial Imagery, Racism, Individualism, and Underground Comix” (issue 1.1) • Rivers, Patrick Lynn, “Race, Space, and New Right Editorial Cartoons in the United States” (issue 4.2) In The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics see particularly: • Clementi, F.K., “The JAP, the Yenta and the mame in Aline Kominsky Crumb’s Graphic Imagination” (issue 4.2, 309–331) • Cunningham, Phillip Lamarr, “The Absence of Black Supervillains in Mainstream Comics” (issue 1.1, 51–62) • Edwin, Shirin, “Islam’s Trojan Horse: Battling Perceptions of Muslim Women in The 99” (issue 3.2, 171–199) • Gavaler, Chris, “The Ku Klux Klan and the Birth of the Superhero” (issue 4.2, 191–208) • Gravett, Paul, “From Iky Mo to Lord Horror: Representations of Jews in British Comics” (issue 1.1, 5–16) • Gueydan-Turek, Alexandra, “The Rise of Dz-manga in Algeria: Glocalization and the Emergence of a New Transnational Voice” (issue 4.1, 161–178) • Hopkins, David, “‘You can make them liars’—The World War Two Funny Pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, American’s Leading African American Weekly Newspaper [sic]” (issue 3.1, 1–17) • Khanduri, Ritu G., “Comicology: Comic Books as Culture in India” (issue 1.2, 171–191) • Lesk, Andrew, “Redrawing Nationalism: Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography” (issue 1.1, 63–82) • Meneses, Juan, “Reconsidering International Comics: Foreignness, Locality, and the Third Space” (issue 5.1, 58–69) • Whitted, Qiana, “‘And the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics’: Comics, Visual Metonymy, and the Spectacle of Blackness” (issue 5.1, 79–100) • Rich, Danielle, “The Institutionalization of Japanese Comics in US Public Libraries (2000–2010)” (issue 4.1, 134–145) • Whaley, Deborah Elizabeth, “Black Cat Got Tour Tongue?: Catwoman, Blackness, and the Alchemy of Postracialism” (issue 2.1, 3–23)

16 Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague In MELUS see particularly issue 32.3, which was a special issue entitled “Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” In Studies in Comics see particularly:

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• Brienza, Casey, “Taking Otaku Theory Overseas: Comics Studies and Japan’s Theorists of Postmodern Cultural Consumption” (issue 3.2, 213–229) • Dony, Christophe, “Towards a Vocabulary of Displacement and Utopian Possibilities: Reading Shaun Tan’s The Arrival as a Crossover Text” (issue 3.1, 83–105) • Oksman, Tahneer, “Visualizing the Jewish Body in Aline Kominsky Crumb’s Need More Love (issue 1.2, 213–232)

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Part I

Histories and Contexts

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1

Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture

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Representing Racial Difference in Robert Crumb’s Underground Comix Corey K. Creekmur Race remains a blind spot in critical discussions of underground comix, despite a few isolated essays that have addressed the otherwise neglected (if not actively dodged) topic.1 Even recent, welcome attention in comics studies to multicultural, ethnic, and racial representations, especially of African Americans, tends to neglect the important historical example provided by underground comix, which pointedly addressed many of the controversial topics that were then impossible to depict in mainstream comics produced and distributed under the strict restrictions of the self-imposed Comics Code.2 However, whereas most historical and critical accounts of underground comix celebrate their bold flouting of cultural taboos (in addition to their circumventing of established publication and distribution venues), race remains virtually expunged as a major critical concern in work such as Patrick Rosenkranz’s Rebel Visions (2002), an extensive oral history of underground comix between 1963 and 1975. Indeed, an inadvertent whitewash of the topic is announced when, in providing “the setting” for the historical and cultural emergence of underground comix, Rosenkranz mistakenly relocates “Martin Luther King speaking his dream at the Washington Monument” rather than on the actual and symbolically more appropriate steps of the Lincoln Memorial; it’s then unsurprising that King and the era’s prominent racial politics defined initially by the nonviolent Civil Rights movement and later extended into revolutionary expressions of Black Power, never resurfaces in this otherwise valuable documentation of the key period that produced underground comix.3 As this essay will argue, Rosenkranz is not alone in maintaining rather than closing the gap between the explicit racial tensions and countercultural aesthetics of the era: his implicit hesitation seemingly replicates the limited and ambivalent engagement with race found within most underground comix themselves, with few exceptions. Still, one might expect that any retrospective glance would now identify and reasonably criticize the limitations evident in the cultural politics of underground comix that went unrecognized in their historical moment. Although the 1960s counterculture often remains idealized, from the distance of over half a century we might now be able to temper residual nostalgia for the period with critical recognition

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20 Corey K. Creekmur of the movement’s blind spots or missteps. In other words, we might be in a position to not simply decry but to better understand the ways in which, as significant forms of cultural expression, underground comix often embodied the larger counterculture’s limited engagement with the promotion and celebration of racial and ethnic diversity commonly (if contentiously) summarized as multiculturalism. However, another retrospective survey, Dez Skinn’s Comix: The Underground Revolution (2004), also significantly downplays discussions of race alongside its more familiar focus on the staple topics of sex, drugs, and gender politics (in the form of the women’s and early gay liberation movements, which of course were also crucial to some articulations of multiculturalism): Skinn only quickly notes that Robert Crumb, the most prominent underground cartoonist, “. . . created a swathe of bizarre characters who, being way out racist and sexist, would have great difficulty being accepted were they created today.”4 Of all Crumb’s “bizarre characters” listed by Skinn—Angelfood McSpade, Honeybunch Kaminski, Mr. Natural, Shuman the Human, Whiteman and the Snoid—only the first, surprisingly absent from the text’s extensive illustrations, seems obviously open to the charge of being “way out racist,” and Skinn’s passing comment resists clarifying whether our current perspective, which would likely now find such characters unacceptable, stems from our enlightened progress or retrograde repression, or perhaps derives from that complex balance of social advance and intolerant prudishness we call “political correctness.” In fact, the only image in Skinn’s fully illustrated book that suggests any attention to racial difference in underground comix as a whole is Crumb’s cover (signed R. Scrum) for Snatch Comics #2 (1969), which depicts a largelip-smacking black woman (stylistically similar to the Angelfood McSpade character) with prominent nipples protruding beneath her clothing (a frequent Crumb detail): the image is drawn in Crumb’s then-familiar rounded, or bulbous “big foot” style that echoes earlier comic illustration and cartoon animation modes and that was typical of Crumb’s work throughout the late 1960s.5 As Leonard Rifas notes, while the earliest underground comix “sparked an exceptionally innovative movement . . . the accomplishments of the comix were nourished by comix artists’ antiquarian love for the works of earlier generations of comics.”6 That visibly antiquated style was in many cases steeped in the once-common images of African Americans produced in the context of explicit racial segregation and inequality, from slavery to at least the early 1960s: we now tend to immediately recognize such images, through their exaggeration, as offensively stereotypical, grotesque rather than amusing in their caricature of a limited and repeated set of physical characteristics (pitch black skin, large lips, kinky hair) serving to effectively reduce African Americans to an undifferentiated group rather than rendering their individuality through realistic detail.7 In comic strips like Crumb’s “Whiteman” from Zap #1 (1967), for example, the sort of details (including hair, glasses, and precise facial features) that differentiate the title character (although designed to parody normative white American masculinity)

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Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture 21 from all others in the strip aren’t employed to individualize the members of a “parade” of African American characters who arrive by the end of the narrative, who can only be distinguished by their clothing, and are even in one panel reduced entirely to five equivalent large-lipped mouths and button noses (with minstrel-style white-gloved hands) floating in a sea of pure blackness. Included in his book’s obligatory and fully illustrated chapter on sex—there is no equivalent chapter on race—Skinn deems the similarly styled cover to Snatch #2 “outrageous,” the result of “Crumb set[ting] out to offend everybody.”8 In the context in which Skinn places it, the outrageousness of the cover would seem to stem from its sexual transgression, but except for the innuendo of the cover’s timely declaration (“Hello ’69!”) and the character’s obvious lack of a bra—a detail perhaps associated with the myth of bra burning that plagued the women’s liberation movement—the cover hardly represents the extremely explicit sexual imagery (or sexism) to be found inside one of the most notorious of all underground titles. Skinn seems to be, instead, indicating—without naming it directly—the arguably far more “outrageous” racism of the image, which, again, draws directly upon the comic tradition of visual stereotypes for African Americans once common to earlier newspaper comic strips, comic books, advertisements, animated cartoons, toys, and other forms of popular culture.9 It’s worth at least noting that the “problem” of race in underground comix, while largely missing from recent accounts, was in fact noted earlier, if briefly, more or less at the time of their appearance: Mark James Estren’s pioneering A History of Underground Comics, first published in 1974, noted in a few admonishing (but seemingly ignored) paragraphs that “there is [a . . .] real absence of social awareness in the cartoonists’ general lack of sensitivity to the problems of blacks and other minority groups in the United States.”10 Writing in the midst of the underground era, Estren added that the rare “black characters who do appear in the underground comics are not given the sort of treatment one might expect from socially conscious young artists. . . .”11 On the whole, as I’ve emphasized, the decades following Estren’s brief but pointed criticism haven’t produced an adequate explanation of or convincing challenge to his serious claims. As Estren suggests, the problem doesn’t entirely lie with the critics and historians of underground comics who seem to have avoided the controversial subject of race in more recent, retrospective accounts: while the body of underground cartoonists included figures from a range of diverse social backgrounds, the most prominent creators in the movement, at least as it began, were almost exclusively male, straight, and, like the much larger counterculture in which they were embedded, white. (Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez, of Spanish descent, and the less prominent African American Richard Eugene “Grass” Green were perhaps the most notable exceptions, and as such their work perhaps deserves more focused attention than I offer here.) In what follows I want to revisit some of these images, emphasizing what other commentary on underground comix has often neglected, in order to

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22 Corey K. Creekmur try to recover the historical circumstances that may have determined the apparent mismatch between the popular representation of the counterculture in comix and the simultaneous emergence of a perspective that increasingly accepted and even celebrated the United States as multicultural, in a direct challenge to the dominant ideology of assimilation or the common myth of America as a “melting pot.” While previous scholars such as William H. Foster III and especially Leonard Rifas have gathered a range of relevant examples of African American representation in underground comix by various artists, I will limit my focus to the work of Robert Crumb, who remains the most visible and controversial underground cartoonist. My aim, however, is not to treat Crumb as entirely unique in this regard, but to view him as a (perhaps the) representative figure of the underground comix movement, a task made somewhat difficult by his distinctive personality and notorious eccentricities, some of which (like his disdain for rock music) often made him an odd figurehead for the counterculture. However, Crumb’s regular recourse to earlier, antiquated visual modes for representing African Americans was shared by a number of his colleagues, and given his massive influence, may have even motivated many of them to explore this sensitive topic in a similar way, drawing upon a shared cultural iconography. Most significantly, for reasons I will address below, I do not believe we can unhesitatingly treat the apparent “racism” of Crumb’s images as a clear index of his own, personal (even pathological) views on race. My perspective is primarily historical, and thus my goal is to try to understand these images in their cultural context rather than in individual terms, even if the strongly autobiographical element of many underground comics (such as Crumb’s) clearly tempts us to do so. I should emphasize that such an approach to better understanding controversial and even offensive images should by no means be taken as an attempt to simply “excuse” or “defend” images that remain understandably and perhaps irredeemably hurtful, especially to those they ostensibly represent. In my own experience, I have seen that many of Crumb’s images deeply offend African Americans, and that response is hardly naïve or inexplicable, and certainly cannot be casually dismissed. In many ways, the value of Crumb’s outrageous and confrontational images may be found precisely in the debates they generate: while their status has often been taken as self-evident, the accumulated response to them demonstrates that they in fact demand interpretation, and may not yield single, secure meanings. This point is most strikingly demonstrated within the pages of Fredrik Strömberg’s book Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History, which considers Crumb’s Angelfood McSpade with careful critical neutrality: “Angelfood was one of Crumb’s recurring characters, and he has used several other Black characters—often with extremely stereotypical features. Some critics [unnamed] have seen this as evidence that he is a racist, but the truth of the matter is probably that he uses these charged images to provoke a reaction from the reader, and force them to make up

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Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture 23 their own minds about their attitudes toward racism.”12 This is cautious in the extreme, even qualifying the “truth of the matter” as “probable” before resting the issue in the individual minds of readers rather than attempting to assess Crumb’s intentions: most significantly, Strömberg does not directly ground Crumb’s images of Angelfood McSpade in their social and historical context, the source of the “charge” the images carry that typically informs even the most free-thinking reader’s “attitudes towards racism.” However, in the foreword to the same volume, the African American novelist and cartoonist Charles Johnson has clearly made up his own mind and requires no such equivocation: “[. . .] I cannot believe that Robert Crumb’s grotesque and pornographic character ‘Angelfood McSpade’ in the underground comics of the 1960s is avant-garde or provocative in any positive way.”13 Crumb’s images are thus included within the larger history of derogatory images in comics that Johnson calls “a testament to the failure of the imagination (and often of empathy too),” images that are now “unacceptable, hugely embarrassing for citizens of a democratic republic.”14 Should we be surprised that Johnson’s “black view” is countered most often—perhaps even exclusively—by white defenders? For instance, the Reverend Ivan Stang (Douglass St. Clair Smith) insists that “Crumb’s depictions of blacks and women . . . were understood by us (fellow white male artists) for what they were—far beyond racism and sexism, and in fact, violent reactions against both, using irony and horror as stylistic tools.”15 Underground cartoonist and editor Jay Kinney, without noting race specifically, similarly claims that “Crumb is fully capable of taking the worst stereotypes and pushing to such an extreme that they implode into ridiculousness,” though he allows that “that can be a joke that not everyone gets and it has earned him his fair share of censure over the years.”16 Both Stang and Kinney assert that, in effect, some people—specifically those Stang unhesitatingly identifies as “white male artists”—“get it” and some don’t, a hard distinction (you’re either in or you’re out) seemingly based on a shared subcultural sensibility and fully developed sensitivity to hip irony (especially sharp in the generation of white males trained by the examples of MAD magazine and “sick humor”) rather than any specific aesthetic claims or interpretive protocols that might be effectively demonstrated for those who still “don’t get it.” Such literal black and white oppositions are of course crude and reductive, yet inevitably compelling. If black folks tell white folks that Crumb’s images of blacks offend them, do whites really have convincing ways to counter such claims? Do white critics really wish to tell Crumb’s offended black readers that their responses are wrong or naïve? If Crumb’s images of blacks do not offend white audiences, so what? Again, in order to escape the stalemate that simply defends or denounces the depiction of racial difference in underground comix, I wish to emphasize that any critical understanding of this dilemma must seek historical grounding. In his 2002 essay on images of blacks in underground comix, Foster acknowledges that he found images of what most critics agree is Crumb’s most controversial

24 Corey K. Creekmur African American (or African) character, the Amazonian “native” Angelfood McSpade, “blatantly racist” upon first encounter, yet he also asserts:

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I don’t believe aiming negative criticism at art that doesn’t represent current political sensibilities is a luxury that any scholar of historical images can afford. It is instead our job to approach such images with a critical, non-biased eye and to appreciate the historical perspective the work or works were created in.17 Curiously, both Foster and Skinn imply that Crumb’s controversial images were more acceptable in the context of the late 1960s and early 1970s—“the historical perspective the work or works were created in”—than they would be “today”: this seems to me doubtful given, for instance, the slap in the face Crumb’s African American characters seemed to present to the era’s bold expression that “black is beautiful,” and, moreover, as I and others are emphasizing, the recourse to earlier visual styles by Crumb and others relied on images that were already significantly “dated” at the moment they appeared: as much as underground comix were clearly of their time—most obviously in their more “psychedelic” elements—their often antiquated visual style also often relied upon the historical displacement created by the invocation of earlier—increasingly offensive—modes of representation. This sort of tension seems especially evident in Crumb’s one-page (but eighteenpanel) story, “Those Goddamn Blues” in Black & White Comics (1973): although his main characters recognize “dis here’s ‘posed to be a activist radical comical strip here,” that will include criticism of President Nixon and “dem boos-wah middle-class muhfugs,” they are also a pair of “comic Negroes” reminiscent of blackface teams like Amos and Andy, and their social commentary takes place as they inflate a skinny African American woman in order to use her as a raft at the beach until she breaks wind and deflates before offering a final mock-feminist protest. The strip’s political satire (explicit here via dialog, albeit in “Negro dialect”) seems less reinforced by Crumb’s “offensive” images than in direct competition with them: the entertainment provided by lowbrow comedy with minstrel show roots shares the stage with a presumed critical function the images may contradict or undermine rather than support. I share Foster’s urge to historicize, and thus again want to insist that the charge that may at first seem obvious to us—that this or that underground comic is racist—should be made with critical hesitation (but not timidity) and within an articulated historical context, not, once more, in order to defend work that may indeed be indefensible, but in order to more carefully comprehend the work of racism as a social and systemic structure or dynamic rather than an individual (and perhaps easily cured) pathology. Put more directly, it seems more valuable to discuss how specific images from underground comix may or may not be described as racist in historical and cultural terms than to attempt to satisfactorily answer the specific and

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Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture 25 limited question, “Is Robert Crumb (for example) a racist?” I don’t know Robert Crumb personally, and, moreover, I don’t feel confident that I can know exactly what lies in his heart, soul, or brain entirely from the evidence of what he has drawn, despite, again, its often apparently autobiographical qualities (which, in Crumb’s case, can be misleading: the line between actual events and fantasies in his work is often thin). Put another way, I don’t believe the artist can be entirely summarized by his or her work, as personal and seemingly un-self-censored as that work may be. (Crumb’s many interviews also offer consistently contradictory evidence on this matter.) As anyone familiar with Crumb’s long career will recognize, as well, Crumb’s depictions of African Americans have ranged stylistically from early documentary-like sketches (his “Harlem: A Sketchbook Report” for Harvey Kurtzman’s magazine Help! in 1965) to outrageous exaggeration throughout the main period associated with underground comics (1967 to 1975), and relatively realistic (and perhaps respectful) representation, especially in his work for Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (1976–1990) often depicting Pekar’s African American co-workers, or when depicting historical figures, especially the African American blues and jazz musicians he claims to revere, in his magazine Weirdo (1981–1993) and elsewhere.18 Attention to the full and extensive body of Crumb’s work, therefore, should make any summary judgments difficult: but, again, even Crumb’s most ostensibly offensive images have their defenders. Perhaps following Crumb’s own lead in various interviews, even his strongest supporters readily acknowledge his sexism while defending him against (the much less common) charge of racism. There’s a curious, repetitive hierarchy of outrage at work here: Crumb’s sexism is always a primary concern for his critics, is often treated extensively, and is usually admitted (by both Crumb himself and his defenders), whereas his possible racism, if noted at all, remains a secondary concern, treated quickly, and as often challenged as affirmed. According to Alan Moore, one of the key figures in the generation of comics artists inspired by the free expression of underground comix, his initial encounter with Angelfood McSpade had a “personal impact” that led him to declare, “I was in love with Angelfood McSpade,” a “love” he links “firstly, and most obviously” to “the open sexuality” of her image. However, Moore notes: Sexuality aside, this drawing was subversive. For one thing, it was subversive in the way it commented upon race. Many cartoonists since Crumb have referred back, ironically, to the stereotyped image of black people that dominated the cartoons of the past. But this was the first time I’d seen a cartoon depiction of the Negro so exaggerated that it called attention to the racialism inherent in all such depiction.19 What logic so often acknowledges Crumb’s sexism but denies his racism, or, in Moore’s case, allows the sexuality of Crumb’s work to be affirmed

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26 Corey K. Creekmur while what might appear to be its racism requires clarification? At least two common answers are regularly offered: 1) either Crumb is a product of his (racist) culture, and just being (brutally) honest, or 2) his racist images are satiric, offensive only to those too literal-minded to recognize their critical function. The alternative cartoonist Mary Fleener, for instance, explains why she sent Crumb one of her earliest cartoons: “My character was ‘Li’l Mofo,’ a black flea that lived on a white dog and spoke in an exaggerated Afro-American dialect, which I guess could be considered ‘racist’ by kneejerk definition. But I knew Crumb would get it since he drew Angelfood McSpade.”20 Indeed, if I want to argue against the common (perhaps distinctly American) view of racism as a personal problem some people have and others don’t, to be addressed and “corrected” individually, perhaps via positive encounters with individuals of another race, then the claim that Crumb is a bluntly honest spokesman for his irremediably racist culture is compelling. In the most direct self-defense of his racialized images I have encountered, Crumb declares: “all this stuff is deeply embedded in our culture and our collective subconscious, and you have to deal with it. It’s in me. It’s in everybody! It’s there!”21 Without letting him entirely off the hook (or pursuing the spurious concept of what he terms the “collective subconscious”), I fully agree with Crumb that we must look “in our culture” as well as—in fact rather than—into the ultimately inaccessible mind, id, or soul of Robert Crumb in order to explore the significance of racial— perhaps racist—representations productively. Again, treating Crumb as a one-of-a-kind figure in this regard not only neglects other, similar images within underground comix, but also threatens to overlook his significant historical function as a cartoonist who inherits, reworks, and maintains rather than invents certain American comic and visual traditions. Deciding that the individual Robert Crumb—or Mark Twain or William Faulkner for that matter—is or is not a racist finally has little to contribute to our larger understanding of the social meaning or impact of his most troubling work. If we can avoid seeking to determine whether Crumb’s images are racist through the elusive support of the artist’s intentions or subjectivity, then these images must be located within larger explanatory contexts. Whether Crumb’s images are racist or not can then be addressed contextually and historically, even if to our present moment and political sensitivities they seems obviously so: their offensiveness is therefore a question of the context of reception rather than inherent meaning. Many of the critics who have confronted Crumb’s racial images, however, smugly insist upon a simplistic, obviously correct reading that denies the unstable dynamics of reception or the contingencies of historical context. I and other critics have already emphasized that Crumb’s racial/racist comics draw upon earlier historical modes and models once common among the sorts of cheap artifacts—mammy cookie jars, Uncle Tom figurines, Topsy dolls—the cultural historian Patricia A. Turner has called “contemptible collectibles,” but that could also be found in otherwise valorized cultural

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Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture 27 artifacts such as Disney’s animated feature film Dumbo (1941), featuring hipster black crows that seem to have directly influenced Crumb’s similar characters in his early “Fritz the Cat” stories, or within the visual and sonic elements of blues culture (especially the specific genre of comedy “hokum” recordings) beloved by Crumb and often celebrated as a major African American tradition.22 Notably, images of comic, stereotyped African Americans were also ubiquitous in comic strips (such as Will Eisner’s celebrated “The Spirit,” an innovative comic strip that also featured the “coon” sidekick Ebony White), comic books, and in animated cartoons, as well as popular cinema and early television.23 When these once-common images “returned” via underground comix, they had become blatantly offensive artifacts from a shameful past that now contrasted emphatically with long overdue, “positive images” of black power and racial pride. As Crumb’s defenders insist, his “recovery” of these images may have functioned as a direct challenge to their suppression (and repression), a confrontation with the past that undermined a naïve belief in the real power of progressive images such as those increasingly appearing on “liberal” television shows featuring inoffensive, assimilated African American characters or, soon, in the mixed messages offered by the cycle of “Blaxploitation” films that (for the most part) were the products of white filmmakers. However, my sense is that the reliance on these images in the wake of the Civil Rights movement was also related to tensions that defined the counterculture (increasingly focused on the war in Vietnam, among other social issues, rather than racial inequality) with which comix were deeply linked. Recent historical reevaluations of the period, such as Nadya Zimmerman’s Counterculture Kaleidoscope, seek to recover the complexity of the counterculture (or, in fact, countercultures) from both positive (liberal) and negative (conservative) mischaracterizations, arguing that what is identified as “the counterculture” “was populated by varied, heterogeneous groups, many of whom had nothing to do with one another, even within the smaller circles of the budding youth culture. . . . Unlike the civil rights movement, for example, large portions of the ‘counterculture’ were far from being an organized sociopolitical community: they were not oppositional in orientation, not bound by specific agendas, and not determined to bring about major changes in the system.”24 Without denying that some elements of the counterculture were organized and explicitly oppositional, this reminder of the complexity rather than unity of the counterculture might be reinforced by attention to the increased isolation, after the earlier and more integrated Civil Rights movement, of white and African American activists, especially marked by the establishment of explicitly militant Black Power groups like the Black Panthers.25 In her specific attention to San Francisco bands of the period, Zimmerman finds that “the countercultural sensibility was pluralistic, not oppositional; it embodied an anything-goes mindset, not an antiestablishment stance; it attracted people who sought, on the whole, to disengage from mainstream society, not to transform it.”26 While

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28 Corey K. Creekmur Zimmerman focuses on rock music and “the lifestyle” as the defining cultural products of the counterculture, one might add underground comix, especially in the San Francisco milieu that is her focus. Indeed, it seems as if the specific manifestation of the counterculture and the underground comix scene (despite significant activity elsewhere) in San Francisco played a crucial role not only in the general concerns of underground comix (sexual freedom, experimental drug use, and antiwar protest), but in their approach to racial representation. While it would be terribly misleading to suggest that issues of race and ethnicity haven’t been crucial to San Francisco’s cultural politics throughout its history, in the immediate post–civil rights era, marked by major “race riots” across the United States, San Francisco suffered a single such incident in 1966 after a police shooting in Hunter’s Point: while steeped in genuine racial tensions and inequities, the riot was characterized by relatively minor damage, and resulted in no deaths, in vivid contrast to the devastating 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles the previous year or the riot in Detroit in 1967. This does not mean that racial relations in San Francisco were much better than in other locations, but that racial tensions could be viewed a secondary concern there for much of the period. Among other cultural components of the counterculture, the rise of psychedelic or acid rock in San Francisco—led by local bands the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane—downplayed the African American basis of popular music (in the form of soul or rhythm and blues) that dominated other parts of the country (including Los Angeles and Detroit). In the period, the African American musician Jimi Hendrix was something of an anomaly since he was associated with rock rather than soul music, for instance. As many historians have demonstrated, as the hippie movement (in both its more and less political forms) rapidly grew, the alliance (such as it was) between young whites advocating for peace and a relatively small group of black militants (including the highly visible Black Panther party) became especially strained in and around San Francisco. The actual or symbolic affiliations that had linked black and white civil rights advocates in the recent past largely disappeared, and many African Americans found the hippie subculture an unappealing or simply irrelevant alternative: at its worst, the counterculture suggested an escape from rather than engagement with social problems, including the embrace of a middle-class fantasy of a bohemian lifestyle rather than the experience of genuine poverty. In the context of San Francisco, the growing lack of interaction between young blacks and whites also appeared in marked contrast to the most notable previous group of artistic bohemians associated with the city, the Beats, whose self-alienation from mainstream culture was frequently articulated through their self-affiliation with African Americans, especially the jazz musicians they fetishized. The Beats were among the first white Americans who fantasized about being black (although one can argue that this extends back to minstrelsy). Notoriously ridiculed by Norman Mailer as “white Negroes,” the Beats cultivated a self-imposed social alienation

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Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture 29 through an idealized fascination with African American life and culture: in many ways, they simply inherited the desire to go “slumming” that had characterized earlier generations of white Americans (and Europeans) and which had been labeled “negrophilia.”27 However, by the hippie era this desire was at best superficial, often no more than a residual attraction to cool style rather than genuine identification or empathy. The evident disaffection of an entire generation of white Americans allowed them to “drop out” en masse rather than as members or relatively small subcultures that cultivated their exile from the mainstream. Despite its internal differences, the counterculture was, in other words, too large to constitute a subculture and, it seems, no longer required the affiliation with African Americans to sustain its oppositional qualities (which, again, were increasingly directed at the government’s military rather than racial policies). The strength and size of the counterculture also deflected any desire or necessity to fully confront the United States (or even a location as racially and ethnically diverse as San Francisco) as multicultural in that moment, it seems. Zimmerman’s general point regarding the personalized politics promoted by the counterculture echoes Leonard Rifas when he suggests that the crucial, shared ideology of the underground cartoonists was not expressed through party politics or collective action, but a belief in the freedom of individual expression. As Rifas says, “Given the choice between organizing a large-scale coordinated action for institutional change or ‘dropping out,’ the comix generation generally opted for individual and communal do-it-yourself solutions. The strongly individualistic, nonrevolutionary bent of underground comix stood out in contrast to the other radical comics that were available in those years,” including Maoist comics from China, educational comics from Mexico, and even Emory Douglas’s cartoons for the Black Panther Party’s newspaper.28 Personal expression via uncensored cartooning was seen as primarily liberating for the individual artist, and then perhaps by extension for his (or more rarely in the underground, her) readers as well. Thus while some white artists may have allowed their racial fears and fantasies to surface in their comix, this bold honesty often only appeared in the familiar form of cultural stereotypes rather than genuinely individual fantasies or fetishes. Again, many of the underground artists, and most prominently Crumb, drew extensively upon an existing but somewhat repressed repertoire of increasingly discomforting images from the popular culture of the past, but perhaps with less historical consciousness than personal memory. Put on display again in the midst of radical and unprecedented claims for “black power,” stereotypical figures such as coons, mammies, and pickanninies were indeed startling, arguably forcing readers to recall and confront the not-too-distant cultural past that spawned them, but such images are also inevitably retrograde to some extent. While the sort of hip reader underground artists imagined themselves to be might find them ironic and satiric, a conservative reader might find them reassuring: if the latter were unlikely consumers of underground comix (despite frequent

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30 Corey K. Creekmur rumors of these images being appropriated for blatantly racist purposes), an even more troubling prospect is that such images allowed even hip and racially tolerant white readers to indulge in their residual fears and prejudices, protected by the shield of comic, ironic distance. In an astute summary of the legacy of underground comix for the independent or alternative comics to follow, Charles Hatfield notes that Crumb’s remarkable achievement was to “usurp” the format of the American comic book itself: “this is his signal contribution to American comics: the ironizing of the comic book medium itself.” As Hatfield recognizes, “Crumb’s larger project in the late sixties . . . was in effect to reclaim bygone images from American popular culture—from comics and animated cartooning in particular—and invest them with other subversive meanings.” However, in a perceptive aside, Hatfield also identifies the risk this audacious work of usurpation and subversion also ran: “Crumb colonized these received images (including virulent racist and sexist stereotypes against which he would push repeatedly and to which his work would often succumb) and made them ripe for adult treatment”29 (my emphasis). While the creative work of reappropriation presumably seeks to wrench images out of their original historical contexts and relocate them with critical effect, their historical origins may not be so easily, or fully, left behind: such images may not allow themselves to be entirely, in Hatfield’s terms, ironized. Although critics (as well as regular readers) of Crumb’s comix featuring highly stereotypical African Americans have tended to either defend them as subversive or condemn them as racist, perhaps they are always necessarily both, simultaneously. (Again, I don’t propose that this affirmation of an essential ambivalence in such images provides us with any reliable summary to Robert Crumb’s psychology.) What makes them both powerful and troubling, or powerfully troubling, is precisely the nagging sensation that their critical function is never complete, or free from what appear to be contradictory readings. Crumb’s racialized images draw upon a tradition of what we must recall was a popular, entertaining form of racism, serving more “serious” legal and illegal, frequently brutal, forms of discrimination, but also indulging in what now appear to be perverse forms of tribute and affection.30 As cultural studies, among other interpretive methods, has demonstrated, the encoding and decoding of cultural messages is by no means secure, and so the labeling of provocative images from underground comix as “obviously” racist (or sexist) or “obviously” satirical must remain precarious at best. Insofar as their reception seems to persistently allow for both responses (as well as others, perhaps), we may have to admit that both meanings are always allowed by images that draw upon a fraught and volatile history of representation. As historical objects from what we have recalled as the counterculture, they remain especially vivid reminders (alongside the much more prominent and also troubling images of women produced by the era’s male cartoonists) of the conceptual limits or borders of that social and artistic movement when it approached multicultural issues. And, if we can glimpse

Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture 31 that we still wear blinders that may be difficult for us to detect in what is sometimes said to be our own spuriously “post-racial” moment, then perhaps the lessons to be learned from the racialized images of the counterculture remain—necessarily, painfully—instructive.

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NOTES 1. See William H. Foster III, “The Image of Blacks (African Americans) in Underground Comix: New Liberal Agenda or Same Racist Stereotypes?,” International Journal of Comic Art 4:2 (Fall 2002): 168–185, and Leonard Rifas, “Race and Comix,” in Frederick Luis Aldama, ed., Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010): 27–38. An earlier, longer version of the latter essay appeared as Leonard Rifas, “Racial Imagery, Racism, Individualism, and Underground Comix,” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 1.1 (2004), accessed May 5, 2014, www. english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/rifas/index.shtml. In many ways, my essay is in direct dialog with and seeks to build upon Rifas. 2. See, in addition to the Aldama volume cited above, Adilifu Nama, Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), and Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II, eds., Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 3. Patrick Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963–1975 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002): 4. A second edition of the book from 2008 retains the error. 4. Dez Skinn, Comix: The Underground Revolution (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004): 34. 5. The cover image appears in Skinn, 83. For the cover in its original context, see Snatch Comics Treasury (Apex Joint Ventures, 2011), which reprints the entire series, including a number of additional African American figures by Crumb. 6. Rifas, 33. 7. Illuminating studies of African American stereotypes in American popular culture include Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise & Demise of an American Jester (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), Kenneth W. Goings, Mammy and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), and Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 8. Skinn, Comix, 83. 9. This is not imply that sexism and racism do not often intertwine, as they perhaps do notably throughout much of Crumb’s work: I am setting aside attention to the issue of Crumb’s “sexism” only because, unlike his “racism,” it is often alleged and discussed (and sometimes defended) in the large body of critical work on his career, including two notable documentary films. See, for example, Roger Sabin, Adult Comics: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1993): 224–227. Although Sabin identifies Crumb’s Angelfood McSpade as a “grotesque racist caricature” (37), he only summarizes feminist criticism of the misogyny of underground comix. 10. Mark James Estren, A History of Underground Comics, Third Edition (Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1993): 199–201. To my knowledge, this criticism on Estren’s part has gone unacknowledged. Estren’s work was first published by

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32 Corey K. Creekmur

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

Straight Arrow Books in 1974. However, another, even earlier, contemporary assessment of underground comix claimed, “The artist’s [Robert Crumb] treatment of blacks [in the Zap story ‘Whiteman’] is based on the stereotype common to an out-dated tradition, but it seems certain that this is less a reflection of prejudice than it is a commentary on the prejudice he sees around him. The point was emphasized by the introduction, in Zap 2 of ‘Angelfood McSpade,’ a voluptuous native of Africa whose existence is an endless series of exploitations by white lechers.” Les Daniels, Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (New York: Bonanza Books, 1971): 171. Estren, 201. Fredrik Strömberg, Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003): 133. Strömberg’s other main underground example is Richard “Grass” Green’s superhero parody Super Soul Comics (1972), one of the rare underground comix created by an African American. Strömberg, 13. Strömberg, 13. Monte Beauchamp, ed., The Life and Times of R. Crumb: Comments from Contemporaries (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998): 48. Beauchamp, 164. Foster, 168. While I provide original publication venues and dates for Crumb’s texts, most (but not all) can be most readily located in the seventeen chronological volumes of The Complete Crumb Comics (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 1987–2005), among many other reprints and collections of Crumb’s large body of work. Any suggestion that Crumb’s depictions of African Americans develop or progress in a clear direction is misleading, however: among his most provocative— blatantly offensive, or bitterly satiric—strips are the pair “When the Niggers Take Over America!” and “When the Goddam Jews Take Over America!” which appeared in the final issue of Weirdo #28 (1993), the anthology magazine Crumb co-edited between 1981 and 1993. These are reprinted in Robert Crumb, R. Crumb’s America (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1995): 72–77, and R. Crumb, The Weirdo Years 1981–93 (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2013): 249–254. Crumb’s drawings for Pekar are conveniently collected in Harvey Pekar and Robert Crumb, American Splendor Presents Bob and Harv’s Comics (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996). Crumb’s other prominent representations of African American musicians from Weirdo, RAW, and the final issue of Zap are collected in Robert Crumb, R. Crumb Draws the Blues (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1993). Crumb’s painted portraits of musicians (generally taken from photographs) are collected in Charles Kochman, ed., R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz, and Country (New York: Abrams, 2006) and his record album art is collected in R. Crumb, The Complete Record Cover Collection (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). Whereas the art in the former (typically derived from period photographs) tends to be realistic, the African Americans in Crumb’s images for record albums and advertisements ranges significantly from cartoonish and stereotypical to realistic. Beauchamp, 73–74. Beauchamp, 166. Peter Poplaski, ed., The R. Crumb Coffee Table Art Book (Boston: Kitchen Sink Press for Little, Brown and Company, 1997): 109. This claim is reinforced by a few brief comments in some of the interviews collected in R. Crumb (volume 3 of The Comics Journal Library) (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004). Patricia A. Turner, Celluloid Mammies and Ceramic Uncles: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1994). Although I don’t deal with it here, the stereotyping of African Americans through what

Multiculturalism Meets the Counterculture 33

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23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

is typically identified as “dialect,” (at one time producing a virtual genre of “dialect” poetry and literature) including attempts to render African American speech on the page, is arguably as significant and pernicious as the history of visual misrepresentation I am emphasizing. Although rarely noted, Crumb’s use of dialect for his African American characters is typically as outrageous as his images. In addition to the works cited above (note 7), see Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, Third Edition. (New York: Continuum, 1994). Bogle’s work is among the most widely cited studies of African American stereotypes in popular culture. Nadya Zimmerman, Counterculture Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013): 3. For a recent account that traces the wariness of interracial alliances during the period, see Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Zimmerman, 5. Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” was first published in Dissent (Fall 1957) and was frequently reprinted; for a historical overview of “negrophilia” in its European manifestations, see Petrine Archer-Straw, Negrophilia: AvantGarde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). Rifas, 30. Again, there were certainly exceptions, such as the four issues of Anarchy Comics (1978–1986), which, true to its name, expressed a rather coherent anarchist perspective. See Jay Kinney, ed., Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection (Oakland: PM Press, 2013). Anarchy Comics was also one of the relatively few anthology comics to which Crumb did not contribute. Other underground comix arose in direct response to the women’s and gay liberation movements, although their relation to the political agendas of those movements is often ambiguous. Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005): 11–12. This line of argument, emphasizing the deep ambivalence of racialized entertainment is most famously expressed in Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For more recent examples of a similar phenomenon, see John Strausbaugh, Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), and Greg Tate, ed., Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (New York: Broadway Books, 2003).

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2

The Impact of Latino Identities and the Humanizing of Multiculturalism in Love and Rockets Ana Merino Translated by Elizabeth Polli

During the celebrations of the opening of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University, held mid-November of 2013, the Hernandez Brothers, Gilbert and Jaime, were the guests of honor. The organizers arranged the opening of the new space at the Sullivan Hall library to coincide with the Festival of Cartoon Art, which has been celebrated every three years since 1983. Ohio State University is a pioneer institution regarding the conservation, analysis and promotion of comics in their academic context. The Festival, which included a varied list of authors including Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, Eddie Campbell, Jeff Smith and Hilary Price, included what they called the Academic Conference where different expert professors in comics debated themes from the works of Will Eisner to the marketing of Peanuts in Asia. The presence of the Hernandez Brothers was announced as one of the key presentations, promoted by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion as part of its Distinguished Lecture Series. The sponsorship of the Diversity Office at Ohio State University was a clear sign of the new academic understanding of the possibilities of comics as a tool that represents multiculturalism. The gathering was “an evening with the Hernandez Brothers”, the idea being to enjoy a freewheeling conversation with these alternative comic legends. With their series Love and Rockets they had been pioneers of the Latino voice within the context of comics. As a scholar and avid reader of the work of the Hernandez Brothers, I confess that I was very happy to learn that they would be included as keynote speakers of the museum’s inaugural program. In October 2011 when I co-directed a symposium at the University of Iowa entitled Comics, Creativity and Culture: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives with Corey Creekmur and Rachel Williams, we didn’t hesitate to include the Hernandez Brothers as keynote speakers and the pillars of our event because over the past thirty years, their comics have contributed a multicultural perspective and large doses of creative texture to the Anglo Saxon tradition of comics in the United States. The work of these brothers, perhaps the most innovative and multicultural of the generation of alternative artists to emerge from the 1980s, has not always been appreciated with the academic rigor it deserves. The reader

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The Impact of Latino Identities 35 of the Hernandez Brothers needs time to macerate and assimilate the magnitude of their work. The series Love and Rockets is tied to the tradition of comic book series that defines the traditional production of the twentieth century. While these authors have been able to restructure themselves to meet the editorial demands of the twenty-first century, centered on the concept of the graphic novel, they are considered the maestros of the alternative fictional comic series because of Love and Rockets. In 2013 the Department of English at the University of Florida dedicated Volume 7, Issue 1 of their web journal ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies to the Hernandez Brothers. Derek Parker Royal and Christopher González, editors of this special issue, gave it the title “The Worlds of the Hernandez Brothers”, and in his introduction Derek Parker Royal makes a forceful recognition of the work of the brothers, Jaime and Gilbert, including Mario as well. Mario, the older of the three, played a decisive role in their initial work. According to Royal, Love and Rockets is considered “the quintessential indie title”, but when analyzing the impact of these authors in scholarly studies, the scarcity of published articles is surprising. This is due, in Royal’s opinion, to the fact that the critics prefer texts by close-minded authors where there are clear limits to the outline of the work analyzed.1 The extensive complexity of the characters, universes and plots of the Hernandez Brothers seems to startle many academics who work on the study of comics from a pragmatic approach and who see the worlds of Love and Rockets as an infinite territory. Royal wants to break this dynamic and facilitate the understanding of this complex work through the publication of this special issue.2 It is composed of a meticulous series of six articles, four reviews and a select bibliography, which attempts to establish a field of theoretical analysis regarding the Hernandez Brothers, thus consolidating the academic space that their work of thirty years merits. Fantagraphics, the publishing house that has that embraced the work of the Hernandez Brothers for the last thirty years, also wanted to celebrate in its own way the key and inaugural titles of their collection. Accordingly, they published the thick volume The Love and Rockets Companion: 30 Years (and Counting), edited by Marc Sobel and Kristy Valenti, to the delight of readers and fans. In this case, as a widely circulated book, the contents centered on a compilation of four interviews, two classics that appeared in The Comics Journal (TCJ), issues #126 and #178 in 1989 and 1995, respectively, and two more recent articles from 2011 and 2012, written specifically for the publication. Sobel and Valenti also make an effort to create a “timeline” for “Locas” and another for “Palomar”, complemented with character guides for each of the series.3 The nostalgic tone of the book comes from the “Readers’ Letters” highlights, which gather some of the fan letters that appeared in the first fifty issues of the series. The letters section of the comic books marks the dynamics of this first period of Love and Rockets, when web culture didn’t exist; everything depended on the printed page and all that was gathered in each “letters” section of each issue. The publication closes with a checklist

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36 Ana Merino of detailed information from the series Love and Rockets, its reprints and other noted independent publications of the series. Together, these materials help constitute a recognizable genealogy of the wide thematic parameters of this charismatic fictional series, its bifurcations and intellectual commitment from a fictional perspective regarding the social problems of its time. The special issue of ImageTexT and The Love and Rockets Companion are publications that complement one another on an anniversary when Love and Rockets is at last recognized in the popular and academic context as the series that transformed the narrative reality of comics in the 1980s. And not just that: it also celebrates the fact that over the course of the years the series has not only evolved and transformed with each new installment but has educated its readers at the same time in a multicultural America. This chapter reflects on the forms in which the Hernandez Brothers have expressed the cultural multiplicity of their creative experience and the way in which, over the last thirty years, Love and Rockets has contributed to and strengthened the parameters of multiculturalism, which has impacted the reality of US comics. In the interview Derek Parker Royal conducted with Gilbert Hernández that appears in the special edition of MELUS dedicated to “Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Novels”, Royal directly addresses the themes of Latino identity. He underscores how Gilbert and his brothers were the first to give “a real voice to Hispanic community in comics”.4 This affirmation was an opportunity for reflection regarding the situation of ethnic and racial representation in comics in general as well as the importance of the series the brothers had been developing for years. Gilbert explained that his goal was to tell stories that would reach everyone, but it was true that he tried to “humanize Latinos, to give a different angle on Latinos from what is normally given in pop culture”.5 This concept of humanizing his characters is essential because it is the key that consolidates this series and makes it so important and transcendental. The Hernandez Brothers don’t resign themselves to creating stereotypical characters. They go into detail in their comics in the complex nuances of each character from a perspective with which they identify. This dynamic experience, linked to their clear Latino origins, is an integral part of them and develops naturally. Their first interview with Gary Groth, which had already appeared in TCJ #126 in January 1989, touched on these aspects of biographic density and the impact that the brothers’ creative voice was having. Groth looked for the origins in the personal collective imagination of the life experiences of the Hernandez Brothers. In this way he pointed out, as the idea that jump-started the interview, that their formative years were spent in Oxnard, California, within the structure of a large and extensive family comprised not only of brothers but uncles and cousins as well, in addition to the very present figure of the grandmother. Groth then highlighted the Mexican heritage that characterized them. Gilbert Hernández explained that while they had been born in the United States, their father was from Chihuahua, Mexico, and their mother was a Texan with Mexican roots, whose ancestors came from a Texas that

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The Impact of Latino Identities 37 was still part of the Mexican territory. Groth formulated questions that rummaged around in their Mexican roots searching for the parameters of identity that defined them and the awareness of what that implicated: “Do you have a sense of Mexican roots?”6 Groth’s idea was to educate the readers about the cultural peculiarities of the Hernandez Brothers through this first important interview at the end of the 1980s. He intended to underscore the identity felt and expressed in the narrative formulation of the multiple/ numerous characters of both universes, that of “Locas” by Jaime and that of “Palomar” by Gilbert. The majority of the brothers’ relatives came from Mexico to the Unites States, and they themselves were the first generation of children born in the United States; this permeates the seed of their creative imaginations. On the one hand there are those relatives who bring, as Gilbert explains, “those old ways, old superstitions, old ways of making food, stories of things that happened back home, simple things like that”.7 Gilbert articulates the seeds of identity in the simplicity of daily life and their domestic cultural practices, which also emerge in the narrative of his characters. The brothers grew up in a different world, and within this double life they complemented and enriched their imaginations. On the one hand they define life as “the little Mexican world” where all the neighbors were Mexican, people had affective and direct or indirect family ties, and where there was a very strong sense of community. This contrasts with their experience at school where all of the students made up a group of mixed cultures, where their friends were African American, white or Japanese; they didn’t linger, however, on establishing differences. As Gilbert pointed out, “One thing I can remember all the way back is that I never noticed the difference between races except skin color. That’s something I just learned”.8 In Mark Sobel’s recent interview for the anniversary volume, The Love and Rockets Companion, it’s interesting how Gilbert articulates the idea of multiculturalism from his personal perspective. Many of his ideas came from the “unconscious”, although now he is more “aware” of what he is doing and the resulting implications. Thus, when Sobel comments in other interviews that the brothers had stressed that part of the intention in writing Love and Rockets was “to depict Latinos in a realistic, humanizing way”, he now questions if after thirty years and the multitude of social changes in American society, whether the humanization of Latinos continues “as a goal of the comic, and also as an issue in general that needs to be addressed”.9 On this occasion, Jaime is clear that it continues to be a goal because “even if things have changed, things pretty much look the same”.10 The sensation that things have not changed is shared by his brother Gilbert who adds that during those first years there was no representation of Latinos that satisfied them and that in spite of the passing of time, “I still don’t see any depictions of the Latinos that we see ourselves and continue to put in our comics”.11 From there they looked to represent their own universe and fueled themselves with a personal imagination, which recognized parts of their own identity. This path to learning and development is tied to numerous experiences that bring them recognition in the alternative space not only as artists

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38 Ana Merino that introduce the Latino, but also as artists who opened the space of fiction to great characters with a feminine voice. These artists’ created universes of numerous characters are for the most part female, and the way those female characters develop and empower themselves will inspire and impact readers and other authors, who will recognize a great debt to Love and Rockets. There is an important consensus among alternative authors such as Joe Sacco, Charles Burns and Chris Ware, on the relevance and unique value of Love and Rockets. Scholars such as Charles Hatfield, Corey Creekmur and José Alaniz consider them the masters of a type of narrative fiction in comics.12 From my perspective, they are also the pioneers of a groundbreaking multicultural and diverse style that at the same time disseminates the possibility of a proto-feminist narrative adulthood in comics. The feminine audience of alternative comics discovers in these comics and in their protagonists a very rich variety of strongly humanized feminine perspectives, as Carla Sinclair explains with passion when she reflects about the importance of the Hernandez Brothers to the history of women in comics. Sinclair likes to mention the experience of discovering them for the first time in a comic store in the late 1980s, and the deep meaning and implications they represented in contrast with other productions: “there was more to comic life than violent one-dimensional superhero stories”.13 Sinclair explains that she was able to “relate to characters who were drawn as spunky as the girls in Archie (in an updated, eighties, goth-punk style) but were engaged in much deeper, truer-to-life situations”.14 The Love and Rockets comics were a key reference for Carla Sinclair, who wondered then about the new place of comics about women and opened herself to important questions: “Were there other engaging comix about women? If so, how long has this type of graphic novel been around? Is there a subculture of female comic readers that I don’t know about?”15 Artist Jessica Abel has also remarked in an interview with Greg Stump about the importance for her of reading of Love and Rockets during her freshman college year. For her, Jaime’s work was the largest influence because it made her felt that she “wanted to do something like that”.16 Sinclair and Abel read the characters they aspired to be themselves, and did not submit to the established patriarchal orders. This creative gaze of the Hernandez Brothers, which understands and delves into the feminine, is very clearly explained by Gilbert in the interview with Sobel, when he questions some tinges of Robert Crumb’s perspective. Gilbert respects the work of this great figure of the underground, but he also perceives the difficulties with some of the nuances: “Some of the things he’s drawn and written I completely disagree with. Some of the supposed parodies of racist and sexist stuff, that’s hard to take, and I can’t blame women for getting pissed off”.17 This is Gilbert’s skill, to put himself in the place of others, including women. The effort to understand the potential of comics as a new humanized prism is what makes them so revolutionary. Crumb brings to comics provocation and his own obsessions from the first-person perspective that separates what

The Impact of Latino Identities 39

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surrounds him, and he confronts others with an ambiguous satire. Gilbert is conscious of the difficulty of this misogynist and offensive expressivity that in some cases presents the masculine underground narrative model that preceded the alternative fiction that he and his brothers propose. He takes sides as well, in a very clear fashion, against misogynist attitudes, and he compares them to his own reality as a Latino: I can’t argue with a woman who gets offended because of how Crumb depicted a woman in a certain story. I can’t say, “Oh well, you’re dumb. You should learn to take a joke,” because it is insulting. Jaime and I are Latino, and we’ve heard that kind of shit about us. We don’t like it either. So why would women like that stuff?18 This multicultural sensibility that allows them to understand other realities and look for an expressive, dynamic space has been a key to consolidating their characters in continuous existential development over the course of three decades. The gaze through fiction feeds the lives of their characters from an elaborate gesture where the creator is a respectful and distant author who refuses to take prominence away from his characters. This compromise with the meaning of the plots and the nuances of their own fiction has left an extraordinary mark on various generations of readers who have incorporated the humanizing experiences of characters in their own affective memory. In his interview, Sobel commented on the legacy of Love and Rockets, mentioning the anecdote of a fan in New York who recognized that “he had ‘known’ Maggie and Hopey and Luba and her family longer than any of his real friends and he cared about them just as deeply”.19 The fan world that surrounds this series tends to incorporate their reading and the experiences of the characters into their own perspective of observing daily life: “You have such emotionally invested fans, perhaps unique within all of comics”.20 This fact, which Sobel highlights, can be traced throughout the length of the entire series with the number of fan letters that begin to appear in the Letters section starting with issue #4. The reader Steve Leialoha celebrated the fresh and unique novelty of the stories in these first issues: “Their stories have a naturalism that I’ve never see done in any comics and a ring of truth in all the situations and characters”.21 They connect with readers who feel, as Bob Stewart explains so very well, that these stories are the beginning of something very important: “My feeling right now is that Los Hernandez Brothers are going to get better and better with each successive issue”.22 In these first issues the readers emphasize their surprise at the ability the Hernandez Brothers have in representing the world of women. In issue #6 Steve Rude asks ironically about Jaime’s talent and motives that enabled him to understand the feminine reality so well: “I love the contemporary fashion and hair styles. Also, you seem to know women pretty well. What’s your secret, man? Eleven sisters, 12 girlfriends, or just hanging out on street corners?”23 But the female readers also demand their space. In issue #10 Kate

40 Ana Merino

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Coffee gives a wink alluding to this new group of readers that arises with the series: “So, women do read Love & Rockets—and I’m writing this to prove it”.24 In issue #10 Monica Sharp also delves into the aspect of the feminine and thanks the Hernandez Brothers for the way they represent women: As a woman, I wanted to thank you for portraying them as interestingly and believably as you do. [A girlfriend of mine] called the other day, and we talked about how we hate the stereotypical portrayal of women as creatures who need a man to get them out of trouble, and I told her that she had better read Love and Rockets.25 The series inserted itself into the daily lives of its readers, who saw in the stories and characters something different than what they saw in other comics. They encountered characters that were an assortment of models of independent women who didn’t subject themselves to the standard masculine stereotypes of existence. Already, in the first extensive article that Gary Groth wrote about the Hernandez Brothers, which appeared in TCJ #126 in January 1989, Groth tried to dig deep into this humanized femininity that defined the series. Groth asked if Jaime had gone out with women like the character Maggie, and what Jaime’s life process had been in relation to the feminine gender. In this process we discover how Jaime’s shyness initially put women on a pedestal. In order to hide his timidity, he speaks with them and understands that they are just people: “I learned to like girls so much, actually like them as people, instead of beautiful things”.26 Readers also recognized and appreciated the imprint of the Latino. In issue #11, Christy Marx reflected on this aspect: “I’ve learned a lot about Hispanic thought, life and feeling from these books. At the same time, you’ve created characters and situations that are universal”.27 The readers enjoyed this multicultural dimension where the realities of the Hispanic culture and characters and the narrative textures of the stories, all of high literary quality, became universal. Another aspect that Marx welcomed was the bilingual gesture, where Spanish words were translated into English: “And please continue to add the translations for us poor gringos and gringas out here. We need the education”.28 It’s interesting to see how the reader’s perspective opened up new cultural nuances and valued the allusions to linguistic realities and differences between the Hispanic and the Anglo Saxon cultures. But along with these nuances of the Hispanic, of the Latino, which underpinned the feminine experiences celebrated by the readers, the urban culture of punk and the naturalness with which it was represented is also prominent. In issue #13, Albert Godot, from his own experience as a member of the hard-core punk scene, appreciated that “the punks in Love and Rockets are portrayed as human beings with gen-yoo-wine personalities, rather than the switchblade-wielding Nazi-vermin we were in the mainstream publications”.29 Once again, readers celebrated the concept of humanizing the characters. In this case this humanity is associated with the punk community, which normally takes on the stereotypical form of a

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The Impact of Latino Identities 41 problematic and anti-systems group. All of the realities that are expressed through the fictitious plots and that are so celebrated by the readers are, nevertheless, fruit of the vital experience of the Brothers. Jaime poignantly describes his personal process with music and his culture from an outward position looking in: “I’ve always lived my life from the outside looking in. While we were growing up Mexican, we were outsider Mexicans because we were rock’n’rollers, and most of the Mexican kids we knew liked funk and soul and stuff like that”.30 Punk culture is another field that defines him as well: “I got into the punk thing and I had my punk friends”.31 Jaime goes on sharing his life experiences, indicating that in his real life he doesn’t mix groups: “I had different factions of friends that liked different things, I kept it all separate on purpose”.32 Nevertheless, all of these experiences come together in his fabricated plots, lending originality and depth to the characters. Another key element that strengthens the originality of this series is the representation of sexuality and the universe of affections. The two great narrative universes, that of “Palomar” by Gilbert and that of “Locas” by Jaime, delve into human relations and the affective construction of identity. The varied cast of protagonists tackles their lives with impulsive naturalness, without prejudices. This new dynamic of sexual representation breaks with the phallocentric vision of the underground masculine comic and the formulation it made of women as objects of desire against which numerous frustrations are projected. The underground comic combined a provocative counterculture pose with a strong autobiographical aspect where the personal dimension of the authors prevailed in many cases over the narrative plot. The type of alternative plot that the Hernandez Brothers introduce offers an adult view from fiction itself and the desire to delve deeply into the existential plot of each character. There is graphic development, aesthetic evolution and narrative depth as much in the plots as in the characters that live in the vignettes that these brothers draw. The quality of the stories, the characters and the themes they cover build an essential base in this new wave of alternative comic fiction with a literary density. For the publishing house Fantagraphics, which took off in the 1980s publishing the works of young writers, supporting this series represented one of the best decisions of their history. In Gary Groth’s interview with Mark Sobel, he remembers with great satisfaction the moment in which he bet on this work and what it meant: “[. . .] it wasn’t like underground comics, it was the next generation, and, in that sense, it was revolutionary because nothing had been done like it before”.33 Groth is conscious of the key legacy that these brothers have left in their work of literary textures. It transformed the sense of adult fiction in the universe of comics: I think one day Jaime and Gilbert’s work will be recognized as the next aesthetic landmark, in the wake of which followed the next generation of alternative or literary cartoonists (for want of any better identity). They’re quintessential cartoonists who distilled the language of cartooning into a strikingly original dramatic maturity.34

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42 Ana Merino The literary enters fully into the debate focused on comics and stylized fiction, and what the Brothers offer is a key link that defines new tendencies. Their complex topics, which delve deeply into multicultural American and the Latino reality, blend with modernized aspects of representation of sexual identity. Female homosexuality is one of the characteristics that most called the attention of the early readers who were accustomed to the dynamics of masculinity found in superhero, adventure and underground comics.35 It’s true that underground comics had aspects of representation of homosexuality from the personal parameters of some creators, as is the case in the 1980s with Howard Cruse and his work Wendel. Cruse also stands out for his work as the first editor of the magazine Underground Gay Comix, which promoted the works of Jerry Mills and Roberta Gregory. The work of Allison Bechdel and her strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which describes the universe of a series of lesbian characters, also came out in the 1980s. Bechdel, however, connects with a precise audience linked to the community it represents. It wasn’t until decades later that she connected with a generalized audience with her graphic novel of autobiographic confession, Fun Home, which alludes to and reflects on the homosexuality of her father. Sexual inclination as a core idea of these characters’ personalities evolves thanks to the human nuances that these authors of alternative comics offer. They search for a dense reality to normalize a type of affective human experience. In the world of “Locas” by Jaime, Margarita Luisa Chascarrillo, known as the character Maggie, at times referred to by her nickname Perla or Perlita, represents the aspect of sensuality most involved with the concept of love. She is the character who jump-starts the series, when she appears in the first stories about “the mechanic,” where the adventures of this professional female mechanic are impregnated with an air of futuristic science fiction. Little by little, however, we see that the plot unravels in a realistic context where life in the barrio of the Latino community in California sets the pace. Maggie feels love and she gets involved, mixing friendship with bisexual relationships. Esperanza Leticia Glass, known as “Hopey,” will be her best friend and lover during different times of her life. Hopey is a lesbian who is not looking for love as a space of idealized existence; her punk heart is organized around rebellious and experimental friendships. Hopey, who plays bass in several bands searching for all types of life experiences and testing boundaries (putting herself at risk taking drugs or doing illegal things), is the daughter of a Scottish father and a Colombian mother. The friendship between these two charismatic characters is hatched through Isabela María Ortiz, “Izzy,” a childhood friend of Maggie’s who was also her babysitter. Izzy is perhaps Jaime’s most literary character and the one that shows the greatest existential complexity of the three. Izzy is never satisfied with her lot in life and is always constructing internal journeys of suffering in her eternal search for who she is. While still young, she marries and divorces Jack Reubens, her English teacher; she has an abortion and she takes a trip to Mexico to try and invoke her ghosts. She also becomes a cult writer, always overwhelmed by the traces of her existential anxieties.

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The Impact of Latino Identities 43 In 1992, the comic book Ten Years of Love and Rockets was published to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the series. Katy Macrae reminded us in her essay entitled “Bienvenidos a Love and Rockets”, which included the word “Bienvenidos” (“welcome” in Spanish), of the importance of these stories with Hispanic characteristics within the context of US comics. Present was the idea that these black and white comics offered to the reader characters with dynamic characteristics that were impossible to imagine in the superhero comics. The multicultural aspect was one of the key features of the setting. In the case of Jaime, the crux of the stories took place in a suburban section of the Hispanic area of Los Angeles called “Hoppers 13,” while in Gilbert’s world the main focus was the Latin American town called Palomar. In Jaime’s comics the stories center on the lives of those who live in the barrio and their daily activities, mixing traits of Latino culture with the punk experience and the counterculture dynamic coming from the city of Los Angeles. There is an interesting display of Latino cultural traditions linked to family and religious values, or the weight of masculinity expressed through machismo. These aspects contrast with the attitudes of the female protagonists who are extremely independent—women who have been brought up with the values and social standards of the Latino culture, but who, nevertheless, absorb other elements from the American society in which they live. For them the value of friendship is the essence of the community, which establishes the fact that these characters build a network of affective relationships and loyalties that last over the years. In addition, their sexuality, accepted in a natural fashion, will mark the parameters of their intimate lives. That is why the relationship between Hopey and Maggie works so well, because it is a space of passionate support between two people who celebrate, above all, friendship. On the page of nine vignettes that Jaime drew in 1992 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Maggie and Hopey, he joked about the topics that seemed to bother some of the readers. One of the biggest topics was the physical transformation of Maggie, who over the length of the series continues to gain weight. Maggie herself speaks of this very point in third person, asking herself if it’s possible to lose weight: “When’s Maggie getting skinny again?”36 Hopey adds her commentary to this question, which brings in the general prejudice against overweight people as a generalized trait: “Is everybody gonna get fat?”37 What is fascinating about Jaime Hernandez is the depth he gives to Maggie, a character whose emotional maturity develops as much as her physical maturity. He laughs at the reactions his readers have to his characters. The characters allude with humor as well to the title of the series and to the fact that one rock band took the name of “Love and Rockets” without asking for permission. Another aspect was the relationship between Jaime Hernandez and the large companies and the recognition of the alternate, independent experience. Presenting Maggie and Hopey with irony, Jaime reminds us that he could have worked for Disney or even for Marvel or DC. Jaime reminds us of Hopey’s strength and charisma through Maggie’s voice, and how her being a lesbian back

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44 Ana Merino then was one of her identity traits. The last two vignettes, which celebrate the impact the characters had on their readers, also return to the fascination they had generated. Maggie herself joked when she said, “I think I have a crush on Maggie”, and Hopey sent kisses with hearts to those readers who had said so often that they never thought they would fall in love with a comics character38 (see figure 2.1). The last vignette reminds us that even though ten years have passed, these two friends have just begun to show us their universe: “We’ve only just begun . . .”.39 In 2001, when the first number of the second season of Love and Rockets came out, we discovered all of Maggie’s facets in the fabulous cover that takes us through the diverse silhouette of weight changes combined

Figure 2.1 Hernández, Jaime. Ten Years of Love and Rockets. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1992, p.7. Copyright © 2014 Jaime Hernandez, courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.

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The Impact of Latino Identities 45 with her different hairstyles. In one glance we see styles and moments in Maggie’s life drawn and contained on a cover that pays homage to the cover of that first number that came out with Fantagraphics in the decade of the 1980s. In this new number of the second period, we find a mature Maggie letting her friend Izzy spend the night at her house so they can go film a cable television program that is being broadcast near her house. It’s Julie Wree’s program, Hopey’s enemy since adolescence when their different life perspectives caused them to begin hating each another, as Maggie explains so well to Izzy: “They were like, best friends when they were little but then Julie got popular and Hopey got weird and from then on they pretty much became mortal enemies . . . the end”.40 With this return to the series, the younger, provocative years are evoked, the years that characterized the dynamics of these independent women. Hopey is furious when she discovers Maggie’s plans to take Izzy to see her archenemy’s program, but at the end of the chapter the differences between Hopey and Maggie are resolved through jokes and affectionate words during a phone conversation. These two friends know that in spite of the years, in spite of the parallel stories, the essence of their unconditional love is always there (see figure 2.2).41

Figure 2.2 Hernández, Jaime. Love and Rockets n.1. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2001, p.5. Copyright © 2014 Jaime Hernandez, courtesy of Fantagraphics Books.

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46 Ana Merino The geography of the small Latin American town invented by Gilbert is also conceived around a group of characters where the female protagonists have incredible strength. Luba stands out among all of them. She is the mother of Maricela, Guadalupe, Doralis, Casimira, Joselito, Socorro and Concepción. Her older cousin Ofelia Beltrán, a woman with a communist ideology who was very active in her youth, educates Luba as a child and over the years, and helps her raise her numerous children. Luba was a charismatic character in this village of Palomar, working first as a bañadora (a “bather”), and later becoming the owner of her own movie theater and then mayor of the town. Her trajectory does not stop in the universe of Palomar, and when she crosses the border of the United States, she starts her own business processing immigration papers and tax documents. Luba represents the solidity of a matriarchy filled with contradictions. Her cousin Ofelia represents a key support in her trajectory and is perhaps one of the characters with the most intellectual and ideological training of the group. Luba, on the other hand, is passionately impulsive through and through, and she lets herself get carried away by human intensity without measuring the consequences. She had many moments of bitter misunderstanding with her eldest daughter Maricela because she was not able to understand what it meant for her daughter to be a lesbian and the need she had to be herself outside of Palomar. Maricela needs to leave Palomar and escape to the United States with her lover, Riri. The world of Palomar combines the melodramatic plot of many characters with a committed literary texture. This double dimension lends an intensely dramatic originality to this comic series where the metaphysical powers itself with the most basic human instincts. For the critic Juan Poblete, the work of Gilbert Hernandez is a conscious effort that aims to transform the patterns of representation of the ethnic “other”.42 There is a clear political ethnic conscience that links the existence of the characters to a multicultural reality that attempts to rethink the map of America. From the naturalness of affect, from the margins of multiple identities and the genuine commitment with authenticity (the way of representing their culture with truthful feelings to educate others), the Hernandez Brothers have helped new generations of readers understand the literary possibilities of comics as a multicultural space of essential reflection because they took the risk to adapt their critical thinking about the contradictions of the American society to their own creative fiction. They were pioneers in the representation of multicultural femininity with a sense of active engagement with their own personal knowledge. Their work is a constant lesson for the white Anglo Americans who never thought about diversity in an active way. Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez claim a true and necessary agency to all their characters. NOTES 1. Derek Parker Royal. “The Worlds of the Hernandez Brothers”, Image TexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 2013: 7 (1): 2.

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The Impact of Latino Identities 47 2. For Derek Parker Royal there is a tendency to study creators such as Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Lynda Barry or Marjane Satrapi—“authors who have created singular and clearly identifiable texts that can be read outside of the context of their larger oeuvre” (2013: 1), in the case of the Hernandez Brothers the complexities of their universe of plots and characters will be a challenge and difficult task for numerous scholars; like the world of the superheroes of DC and Marvel Universe, they are “vast and quite intimidating” (2013: 2). 3. The complex dimension of different plots and characters related to the works of Love and Rockets is now divided, for practical editorial reasons, into two main lines of stories under two charismatic titles: Palomar and Locas. In 2003 Fantagraphics published a 522-page volume of Gilbert’s work entitled Palomar, which contained stories from the fictional town of Palomar, located somewhere in Latin America, and with a cast of characters including the matriarch Luba and her older cousin Ofelia, and Luba’s numerous daughters: Maricela, Guadalupe, Doralis, Casimira, Conchita and Socorro, and son Joselito. In 2004 Jaime’s volume Locas appeared containing 704 pages and compiled the stories of Hopey, Maggie, Penny, Isabel and their friends, offering an original vision of the punk rock Latina femininity of the 1980s and their personal changes in the 1990s. The complete reference for both books are: Gilbert Hernandez. PALOMAR. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2003; Jaime Hernandez. LOCAS. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2004. 4. Derek Parker Royal. “Palomar and Beyond: An Interview with Gilbert Hernández”. MELUS: Special Issue. Coloring American: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative, 2007: 32 (3): 222. 5. Ibid: 223. 6. “Gary Groth and the Brothers”: From TCJ #126 (January 1989), in The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 12. 7. Ibid: 12. 8. Ibid: 12. 9. “Marc Sobel and the Brothers”. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 123. 10. Ibid: 123. 11. Ibid: 123. 12. Since 1995, the ICAF (International Comic Arts Forum) has been an annual symposium devoted to the study of comics and held at different American venues. The presence of the scholars such as Charles Hatfield, Corey Creekmur and Jose Alaniz at different moments reinforced the critical debate about the Hernandez Brothers. In 2002 Jaime and Gilbert Hernández were guest artists at the conference (ICAF), opening important dialogues with scholars. In Charles Hatfield’s book Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), there is an entire chapter on Gilbert Hernandez that gives a complete vision of the importance of the work of Gilbert Hernandez and the projection of Love and Rockets. 13. Carla Sinclair. “Introduction” in Trina Robbins. From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999: 4. 14. Ibid: 4. 15. Ibid: 4. 16. Greg Stump. “The Jessica Abel Interview”. The Comics Journal #270: 80. 17. “Marc Sobel and the Brothers”. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 138–139. 18. Ibid: 139. 19. Ibid: 157. 20. Ibid: 157.

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48 Ana Merino 21. Steve Leialoha. Letter Column Highlights. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 279. 22. Bob Stewart. Letter Column Highlights. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 279. 23. Steve Rude. Letter Column Highlights. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 280. 24. Kate Coffee. Letter Column Highlights. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 280. 25. Monica Sharp. Letter Column Highlights. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 280. 26. “Gary Groth and the Brothers”: From TCJ #126 (January 1989), in The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 38. 27. Christy Marx. Letter Column Highlights. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 280. 28. Ibid: 280. 29. Albert Godot. Column Highlights. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 281. 30. “Marc Sobel and the Brothers”. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 122. 31. Ibid: 122. 32. Ibid: 122. 33. “Marc Sobel and Gary Groth”. The Love and Rockets Companion. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013: 166. 34. Ibid: 177. 35. As Trina Robbins explained in her book From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999: 107–109, the Hernandez Brothers had a unique female appeal that connected with new female audiences. The sexual dynamic among them was groundbreaking and inspiring among readers and fellow comics artists. 36. Jaime Hernandez. Ten Years of Love and Rockets. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1992: 7. 37. Ibid: 7. 38. Ibid: 7. 39. Ibid: 7. 40. Jaime Hernandez. Love and Rockets no.1. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2001: 5. 41. Jaime Hernandez, “Maggie”, in Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. Love and Rockets no.1. Seattle: Frantagraphics Books, 2001: 13. 42. Juan Poblete. “Los comics en un país tropical: Palomar de Gilbert Hernandez”. Revista Iberoamericana, 2011: Núm. 234. Enero-Marzo.

3

The Presidential Penis Questions of Race and Representation in South African Comic and Satirical Art

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Andy Mason

“History is important, partly because every complex organism, every human being and every society carries the baggage of its past.” Geoffrey M. Hodgson1

1. ACTIVISM OF A SPECIAL TYPE Twenty years after the birth of democracy, most of South Africa’s cartoonists and satirical artists are still white. But then so are most of the members of the national cricket and rugby teams and most of the country’s corporate executives, business and property owners, doctors and professors. The tenacious race-based economic structure that was forged during the colonial and apartheid years continues to underpin the country’s social and political systems. While a number of significant black political cartoonists and comic artists have emerged during the course of the last two decades, South Africa’s most visible, headline-grabbing satirical artists are white.2 These artists face a historically specific variant of a dilemma that probably concerns—or should concern—all white artists whose work delves from time to time into the domain of black subjectivity. In a challenging and much-quoted 1999 article, the renowned Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor wrote: “Despite the sincerity of the artists who have brazenly maintained a relationship in their work with the black body, there is a certain over-determination that accompanies their gestures.”3 He was referring specifically to two white South African women artists who tried in their work to make sense of black history and experience, but his comments may still be relevant to contemporary white cartoonists and satirical artists whose work targets the country’s politicians, most of whom are black. Theorizing the black body as “a grotesque bearer of traumatized experience” and “the abject vessel of race as a point of differentiation”, Enwezor is intrigued by the “fascinating usage” of the African body as “subject and prop” in postapartheid artistic representation.4 In this chapter, I am interested in whether and how Enwezor’s concerns apply to satirical works in which the putative penis of the South African president, Jacob Zuma, is depicted or implied.5

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50 Andy Mason This question is related to a more general one familiar to students of South African literature: is the representation of the black subject by the white writer inherently a depiction of “the Other” and, as such, automatically problematic? I first came face to face with this question as a trainee editor at the radical Black Consciousness literary magazine, Staffrider, in Johannesburg in the early 1980s, when I heard Nadine Gordimer, the doyenne of South African literature, say that it was impossible for a white writer to authentically portray life in the black townships. As a white writer myself, and in my work as a cartoonist and publisher, these questions, since then, have never been far from my mind. Hodgson’s notion of historical specificity seems apposite to the South African experience of race and its representation in art, culture, politics and ideology.6 It calls to mind a phrase used by the exiled South African historian, Harold Wolpe, in his seminal 1988 work, Race, Class and the Apartheid State, which has since become an ideological pillar of ANC policy.7 The South African liberation struggle was seen as a struggle against “colonialism of a special type”, in which the colonizers lived permanently amongst and continued to exploit the colonized. A discussion document on the subject, dating back to 1987, makes the ANC position quite clear: “in every respect, the features of classic colonialism are the hallmark of the relations that obtain between the black majority and white minority”.8 Furthermore, colonialism of this special type, officially abolished in 1994, was not just a political dispensation that endowed white citizens with rights and withheld them from black noncitizens. Its effects went much deeper. According to a 2012 document of the South African Communist Party (SACP): “It was also marked by other forms of stark duality— administrative, economic, social and spatial. These latter forms of duality, including persisting dualities within the anatomy of our new democratic state itself, remain deeply embedded and are continuously reproduced in our present reality”.9 The anti-apartheid struggle was about racial domination and the oppression of “non-European” cultures. Given the resilience of the economic realities that continue to underpin relations between predominantly middle-class or wealthy white people and predominantly working-class or poor black people, it is unsurprising that the most fiercely contested discourses of postapartheid society tend to revolve around the dualities of race, class, culture and identity. Most South Africans are more than familiar with these discourses—they are continually subjected to them and, very often, vociferously involved in them. And South African cartoonists and satirical artists have dipped consistently and fearlessly into this cauldron of contestation and taboo. The work they have produced in the post-apartheid period, while sometimes harsh and hard to stomach, has a lot to tell us about the complexities of race, class and inequality in a multicultural, post-colonial society. Enwezor implies that any attempt at the depiction of black subjectivity by white artists is likely to be compromised—either by the reproduction of

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The Presidential Penis 51 what he calls “that postcolonial litany of the wounded black subject” or by the deployment, intentional or inadvertent, of “a structurally codified narrative of dysfunction”.10 These sentiments are echoed by Achille Mbembe: “the African human experience constantly appears in the discourse of our times as an experience that can only be understood through a negative interpretation”.11 But, for Mbembe, Africa, the domain of the monstrous, is also the domain of intimacy, of real humanity, a domain that Europeans, who grapple with understanding “the idea of a common human nature, a humanity shared with others”, cannot really comprehend.12 This, according to Mbembe, is the dichotomy of Africa propelled into the post-modern, post-colonial world. What makes post-apartheid South Africa so special, I would argue, is that, thanks to colonialism of a special type, whites and blacks are forced to share a common geopolitical space and rub up against each other in ways that make it very difficult to ignore each other’s humanity, although some try as hard as they can to do so. In our present discomfort, we often tend to forget the terrible days and nights of apartheid. Nadine Gordimer reminds us in a 1994 essay: “The past stands for the denial of the lives of black people by whites; the long discounting of their existence as thinking and feeling beings”.13 Enwezor’s concerns become especially challenging when tested against the work of Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro) and Brett Murray, two white satirical artists who have mobilized the presidential penis as a symbol of what is going wrong in post-apartheid South Africa. These artists, who are not afraid of the wounds their work might reopen, or of reiterating the narrative of dysfunction, do not see themselves as outsiders looking through a window of European privilege at the agonies of Africa. They are, quite literally, “in the thick of it”, and the personal consequences they have risked include death threats, lawsuits and defacement of their work. Far from being removed or passive observers, they are activists, deeply involved, intellectually, emotionally and artistically, in the politics of the day. I would like to suggest that their artistic practice, which eschews apologism and toys insultingly with sacred cows and sexual taboos, constitutes “activism of a special type”. 2. THE SATIRICAL DEPICTION OF BLACK SUBJECTS From the colonial period until the third quarter of the twentieth century, satirical portrayals of black subjects by white South African artists tended in the main to be negative and demeaning, giving visual expression to the prevailing ideology of white supremacy. In my previous work on this subject I have documented variations of this tendency.14 These range from the virulent depictions of swart gevaar (black peril) in Afrikaans political cartooning during the heyday of apartheid, to more complex humanist portrayals of

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52 Andy Mason African subjects by English-speaking cartoonists in whose work the liberal dilemma (what Gordimer calls “the moral agony of being at the same time both us and them”) is articulated.15 Taking a long view, it is not difficult to apprehend how these variations, despite their surface differences, are linked together under the broad umbrella of white supremacy. I have found that a useful way to identify and categorize these variations is by looking at the recurrent stereotypes through which black subjects have historically been interpellated by white cartoonists and satirical artists.16 J. M. Coetzee records the virulent disgust evinced in descriptions of the “Hottentots” by the earliest European settlers at the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-1600s, who reckoned that the local inhabitants should “be counted more among the dumb beasts than among the company of reasoning men”.17 It is interesting, however, that the “fantastical and negative images of Africans” presented in the travel writing of the period seem generally to be unmatched in the quasi-ethnographic sketches produced by early documenters such as the French explorer François le Vaillant (1753–1824), whose penmanship was shaped and limited by the neoclassical conventions of the day, and whose portrayals of indigenous South African people are, with some exceptions, generally benign.18 One of the earliest and most significant stereotypes in the iconography of South African cartooning, which I call the Cannibal Ogre, is to be found in a famous cartoon by British caricaturist George Cruikshank entitled “All Among the Hottentots Capering Ashore”. Published by T. Tegg of London in 1819, the cartoon ridicules the British government’s 1820 settlement scheme in South Africa.19 Cruikshank’s cannibal Hottentots are monstrous creatures that resemble the man-eating giants and ogres of the European fairytale tradition and bear little or no relation to the quasi-ethnographic illustrations that accompanied the exotic travelers’ tales of Africa so beloved by the British public. In a companion cartoon by Cruikshank, published on the same day, another enduring stereotype makes its debut.20 This is the Mock Englishman, an African person “incongruously attired in European clothing and mimicking the conventions of ‘civilized’ society”.21 Many versions of this stereotype exist. One particularly interesting example, entitled “Civilization”, adorns the cover page of an 1885 issue of The South African Illustrated News.22 Gracefully rendered by Heinrich Egersdorfer, it depicts an African man dressed in Western clothes with a top hat and an umbrella, but without shoes or shirt, presenting himself to a group of village elders. This figure is echoed in a resonant hybrid of African and European dress codes created by William Schroeder as the mascot for his weekly humor paper The Knobkerrie, also published in the Cape Colony in the mid-1880s.23 This figure sports a top hat, a monocle and a dinner jacket with a stiff collar, with his legs and feet bare, a beshu covering his loins and a Zulu spear, shield and knobkerrie held aloft.24 The stereotypes of the Cannibal Ogre and the Mock Englishman are rich repositories of ideological content that have been recycled in various forms

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The Presidential Penis 53 since the colonial period, and can be identified, for example, in Zapiro’s pungent caricatures of the bookish, briar pipe-puffing Thabo Mbeki (South African president from 1999 to 2004) and the menacing ogre-like Jacob Zuma with his double-domed head, squint eyes and ominous teeth. There are many other stereotypes that deal with aspects of the black subject, some very well known (such as the Noble Savage, the Hottentot Venus and the Zulu Warrior), which stand alongside stereotypes of other national and ethnic groups to constitute a pantheon of iconic figures from which cartoonists and satirical artists have constantly drawn in their humorous or fantastical depictions of historical moments. In assessing the work of today’s satirical artists, especially with regard to the way they depict their human subjects, it is important to be mindful of the origins of these representations, and of the historical baggage they carry. Very often political cartoonists borrow and recycle graphic codes and conventions without fully understanding or interrogating where they come from, the kinds of ideological material they contain or the attitudes and ideologies to which they refer. Because South African cartooning was pretty much a whites-only affair until the 1970s, it yields relatively few positive images of blackness before then. But there were white artists who produced cartoons and comics specifically for black readers, and these offer interesting critical challenges. Of interest are the strident woodcut-style cartoons attributed to Eddie Roux, which appeared in the Communist newspaper Umsebenzi in the 1930s, but more intriguing are the cartoons of Len Sak, which appeared in Drum, the Sowetan and other newspapers and magazines aimed at African readers from 1959 until the mid-1990s. Sak’s African subjects are often very sympathetically rendered, revealing the artist’s deep humanist concerns, but his black Everyman character, Jojo, unmistakably exhibits some of the conventions of racial caricature. Jojo was nevertheless extremely popular among township readers and has been lauded by many commentators, including then Sowetan editor Aggrey Klaaste, who described it in the introduction to a 1991 collection of Sak’s work as “a part of black life”.25 When I first encountered the figure of Jojo, I struggled to reconcile Sak’s usage of the conventions of racial caricature with his humanist concerns. After much reflection, I concluded that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to assessing racial caricature, and that its acceptability is likely to depend on the intention that underlies it, the context in which it appears, and the attitudes of those who are on the receiving end of it. Whether racial caricature must invariably contain a trace of distaste, or whether it can function as the locale of positive representation, is a question that evades generalization, to be reconsidered in each instance it is encountered. Enwezor questions “the wisdom of enacting any kind of representational corrective through a recourse to ‘positive’ images of blackness”.26 I am intrigued, however, that this is exactly what happened in the post1976 period, particularly in Staffrider magazine and other Black Consciousness publications, at a time when writers and visual artists were strongly

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54 Andy Mason influenced by the writings and political example of Steve Biko. Staffrider artists like Mzwakhe Nhlabatsi, Fikile Magadlele and Charles Nkosi strove to represent strong, attractive images of black subjectivity in their work, but this response was not limited to black artists. Positive images of blackness can also be found in the trade union posters of the 1980s, in which the conventions of Soviet realism were combined with the so-called township art style to entrench a genre of political illustration that is still common in South Africa today. Notably, some wonderful examples of this genre were produced by Zapiro and Brett Murray in collaboration with the Community Art Project (CAP) in Cape Town in the 1980s.27 During this period, I drew a number of comics for alternative press publications aimed at black readers, including a cartoon history of South Africa and a serialized strip about township life, while working at the same time in the intensely politicized Staffrider office.28 As a young white person amongst a vibrant group of black intellectuals, most of whom were competent in several southern African languages, I was ridiculed for my monolingualism and subjected to racial banter, some of it light-hearted, some not so. These experiences, and others since then, have left me with a sense of how complex and intractable the problems of race and representation are, and that artists who work across what used to be called “the color bar” have a responsibility to engage in this practice in a very thoughtful and conscious way. The alternative press titles of the 1980s were funded by anti-apartheid organizations outside the country and linked to the rapidly growing mass democratic movement. They were part of a wave of progressive, politically motivated publishing that provided opportunities for the emergence of a new generation of “committed” writers and artists. Political activists who chafed under media restrictions that denied them access to state-controlled radio and TV turned to comics as a way to communicate political and educational messages to black readers. In this context, a new set of South African stereotypes emerged, in which the black working-class hero was pitched against cruel policemen and military officers, Kafkaesque bureaucrats and corrupt white businessmen. A good example of the tenacity of these stereotypes is the figure of Hoggenheimer, a corpulent Jewish mining magnate created at the turn of the twentieth century by the Afrikaans cartoonist Daniel Boonzaier to satirize the hated Randlords who controlled the mining industry. This figure evolved over subsequent decades into a general symbol of racial capitalism, without the obviously anti-Semitic slant. But this was not the first time that a turning of the ideological tide had given rise to vitriolic cartoon stereotypes. During the Anglo-Boer war of 1899–1901, French and Dutch satirists had portrayed British imperialists like Cecil Rhodes, Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Kitchener as evil monsters, while lionizing the Afrikaner president Paul Kruger and his Boer generals. Fifty years later, Englishspeaking cartoonists were portraying the descendants of these Boer heroes as jackbooted fascists.

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The Presidential Penis 55 From this very brief survey, it should be evident that, by 1990, when National Party president F. W. de Klerk agreed to unban the ANC and release Nelson Mandela and hundreds of other political prisoners, cartooning and satirical art were well entrenched as forms of political engagement in South Africa. As the terms of the transition were negotiated, comic artists working in both the alternative and mainstream press became adept at using cartoons and comic strips for a wide range of political and educational purposes, from hard-hitting editorial commentary in the country’s newspapers to nuanced educational comic stories on social themes. Throughout the 1990s, comics and cartoons were used for voter education, human rights and democracy education; conflict resolution; entrepreneurial development and to tackle the new challenge of the post-apartheid context—the struggle against HIV/AIDS. As the 1990s progressed and the anger and despair of the apartheid decades was replaced by the gut-wrenching tension of transition, buoyed by the euphoric mythology of the Rainbow Nation, new spaces opened up for South African cartooning and satirical art, which experienced something of a renaissance. A key development here was the repeal of the draconian censorship laws that had restricted creative expression during the apartheid years, and an anarchic period of “anything goes” publishing provided fertile ground for new adventures in graphic expressionism. The most significant of these were the political cartoons of Zapiro, the daringly political newspaper cartoon strip Madam & Eve; the confrontational and transgressive Afrikaner comic art project, Bitterkomix, and the hyper-engaged satirical work of fine artists like William Kentridge, Norman Catherine, Brett Murray and others who employed visual metaphors of damaged landscape, demonic portraiture, mutilated flesh and distorted architecture to convey the extreme and unstoppable forces pulsing through South African society. 3. UNDER THE BESHU Stephen C. Dubin employs the notion of “culture wars” to refer collectively to “impassioned confrontations” between social groups around issues of “race and ethnicity; the body, sexuality and sexual orientation; religion; and patriotism and national identity”.29 He posits South Africa, with its “feelings of social anxiety, the breadth of situations needing to be renegotiated, and the frequency and intensity of cultural battles” as an ideal location for the eruption of culture wars.30 This pervasive sense of social anxiety has indeed provided plenty of stimulation for daring artworks that interrogate the national malaise. And since so much of the nation’s hope and anxiety has of late been centered on the personality of its embattled president, who since assuming power in 2009 has constantly been embroiled in controversy and sexual scandal, it is perhaps unsurprising that the most talked-about satirical artworks of recent years have been about him, or, more precisely, his penis.

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56 Andy Mason The first of these comic art controversies erupted in response to a cartoon by Zapiro known as “The Rape of Lady Justice”, published in the Sunday Times in September 2008. This very famous cartoon, certainly the most controversial cartoon in South African history, shows Zuma unzipping his trousers, about to rape Lady Justice, who is being held down on the ground by leaders of the Tripartite Alliance, while the secretary general of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe, calls out, “Go for it, Boss!” (figure 3.1).31 An enormous amount has been written about the public reaction to this cartoon, but the core of the debate is crystalized in the tension between Zapiro’s constitutional right to freedom of expression (which was eventually upheld by the South African Human Rights Commission) and Zuma’s right to his reputation and dignity. The cartoon was also the subject of a massive lawsuit, advanced after Zuma became president in April 2009.32 It was Zuma’s second legal attack against the cartoonist, whom he first sued, also for a very large amount, in 2006. According to Glenda Daniels, the lawsuit was an instance of an ANC strategy to close down democratic spaces of public debate “through ideological interpellations, lawsuits, interdicts against publishing, the Protection of State Information Bill and the proposed media appeals tribunal”.33 Daniels sees the attack on Zapiro as a component of the ANC’s attack on the press. She argues that the ANC and its Alliance partners attempted to “interpellate Zapiro ideologically” by calling him a right-winger, racist and enemy

Figure 3.1 Zapiro, “The Rape of Lady Justice”, cartoon, Sunday Times, September 7, 2008. Image used with the permission of the artist.

The Presidential Penis 57 of the people. However, she suggests, Zapiro sidestepped these interpellations by “misrecognizing” them, thereby refusing to accept the identity of right-winger that was being thrust upon him, and continuing to produce an unending barrage of merciless cartoons aimed at the Zuma government, while holding fast all the while to the unshakeable belief that he had never deviated from his subject position as a democrat, or from the principles he had consistently adhered to since his youthful days of opposition to the apartheid regime.35 A national discussion about the balance between the need for freedom of expression on the one hand and the need for dignity, privacy and respect, on the other, was fueled by this incident. There was an enormous outpouring of public opinion, including a vociferous commentary by ordinary citizens in the letters columns of the country’s newspapers, on radio talk shows and on online platforms. Crucially, public opinion was and continued to be mixed, with some voices calling for greater sensitivity to the dignity of others, and some upholding the cartoonist’s right to be insulting and to speak truth to power. During this period I was working on my book What’s So Funny? Under the Skin of South African Cartooning, which includes a chapter on the “The Rape of Lady Justice”, and had several opportunities in conversation with Zapiro to voice my concerns about the wounds of the past and the long history of hurtful depictions of black subjects by white artists. While appreciative of these concerns, Zapiro’s view was that they should not be allowed to override the crucial issue of freedom of expression and the protection of the South African Constitution, which he presciently perceived to be under attack by the ANC Alliance. Three and a half years later, the same concerns and contradictions were mobilized once again, this time in response to Brett Murray’s painting, The Spear, part of a solo exhibition entitled “Hail to the Thief” at the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, in May 2012 (figure 3.2). By then, Zuma was securely in the president’s office and experiencing the challenges of that office. Dubin points out that Zuma was at that time in a tight spot politically, with reelection for a second term coming up, and stood to benefit from a wave of public sympathy generated by his portrayal as the victim of a racist affront by agents of the white establishment.36 This was exactly how the ANC Alliance chose to respond to the painting, and the brouhaha that erupted was even more exaggerated and intense than the controversy around “The Rape of Lady Justice”, including the defacement of the painting, death threats against the artist, and an ANC march on the Goodman Gallery. Goodman Gallery director Liza Essers described the public response to The Spear as an instance of “manufactured rage”.37 Dubin calls it “an example of a proxy battle, fought over a work of art, but about much deeper matters” (original emphasis). It was, he writes, “a classic case of the politics of diversion”, and a clear instance of the culture wars phenomenon.38 A more nuanced analysis is provided in an article by Steven Robins in the Cape Times: “The Spear controversy quickly became all about the ANC’s

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34

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58 Andy Mason

Figure 3.2 Brett Murray, The Spear, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 185 × 140 cm. Image used with the permission of the artist.

attempts to mobilise ‘raw anger’ in order to defend the reputation and dignity of a besieged president, all in the name of ‘the nation’”. Robins argues that “[t]he genius of the ANC was its capacity to transform and channel a widespread, but largely inchoate, sense of shame and grievance into carefully orchestrated and contained expressions of collective anger”.39

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The Presidential Penis 59 Robins’s comments are particularly useful because, while exposing the ANC’s Machiavellian exploitation of the incident for political gain, they also point to the existence, at a mass level, of “raw emotions”, which were “available” to the ANC for mobilization, allowing it the opportunity to transform “genuine grievances” about The Spear into “a populist politics of outrage”. These genuine grievances effectively provided an entry point through which the ANC leadership could mobilize public anger, according to Robins, because they derived from “deep histories of racist representations of black bodies and African sexualities”.40 A third opportunity for public airing of the same debate occurred three months later, during a group exhibition entitled “Our Fathers” at the AVA Gallery in Cape Town. The exhibition included a large action portrait of Jacob Zuma in Zulu tribal dress by Ayanda Mabulu, a black South African artist who in a previous work had stripped away costumes of power to reveal grotesque or wounded genitalia.41 Mabulu’s painting Umshini Wam (Weapon of Mass Destruction) depicts the South African president, literally larger than life, in the midst of a traditional Zulu dance step, his genitalia provocatively exposed under a flapping beshu at the center of the canvas. Had you gone there to view it, as I did, with the recent controversy surrounding Brett Murray’s The Spear fresh in your mind, you might well have expected the gallery to be surrounded by a toyi-toying crowd. But in fact there were no public protestations, barring a few mandatory official condemnations in the press. After its overblown response to the Murray painting, the ANC’s response was formulaic: “We condemn this painting in the strongest terms. Any portrayal of President Zuma in this way is disrespectful”, said ANC spokesperson Keith Khoza. “It makes a mockery of the president’s office, his status as a father and a husband, and is an absolute abuse of the arts”.42 Apart from this statement, there was no further action from the ANC. In a week or two, the whole episode had vanished from the headlines and slid off the social media pages. Comments about the two paintings by ANC Secretary General, Gwede Mantashe, are instructive. Mantashe called The Spear “rude, crude and disrespectful”, but was dismissive about Umshini Wam. About The Spear, he said: “It has an element of racism. It says that black people feel no pain and can be portrayed walking around with their genitals in the open. They are objects of ridicule. I can tell you that if you were to draw a white politician in that way the outcry would be totally different”.43 About Umshini Wam, he said: “Sometimes people think derogatory gestures are a beauty contest. If that artist wants to be in that contest, allow him”.44 A few newspaper and online articles compared the public and official reactions to the two paintings. Rebecca Davis, writing in the Daily Maverick, attributed the relative lack of interest in Umshini Wam to “a severe bout of Spear fatigue”.45 This assessment may well be accurate, but it should be borne in mind that, if the overreaction to The Spear was motivated by a

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60 Andy Mason political agenda, aimed at presenting the president as the victim of a racist insult, there would have been no equivalent benefit to be gained from attacking Mabulu in a similar way, since he is black. Dubin’s contention that political motivation played a role in the extreme public responses to both Zapiro’s cartoon and Murray’s painting is not easily discounted and is widely shared by other commentators. If this is indeed the case, then the opportunity to use public reception to these works as a barometer of public feeling about them and the concerns they raise is compromised. According to Daniels, South Africans did not respond to “The Rape of Lady Justice” along racial lines, which she sees as an indication that the “contest within democracy” is not necessarily a racial one and that South African society is “fluid and diverse—a state of being that can only be deemed to be good for the deepening of democracy”.46 While Daniels’s comment could be construed as a “feel good” conclusion to the discussion, an element of disquiet remains. This disquiet relates to the “genuine grievances” and “deep histories” referred to by Steven Robins. The fact that these genuine grievances have been misused by the ruling party to win a particular political battle does not mean that they are no longer valid. In an article adjoining Robins’s article in the Cape Times, and under the same headline, Achille Mbembe asks: “Why has the phallus become the privileged language of our collective anxieties?”47 It’s an important question. At first glance, the presidential penis represents patriarchy, an oldfashioned traditional culture out of step with the modern world, while also making reference to Zuma’s profligate and licentious tendencies. But the penis also carries a powerful symbolism of its own. To some it may symbolize virility and procreative power, as it does in some art traditions such as the traditional sculpture of Mali, but it also has extremely negative connotations, calling up the stereotype of the black sexual predator, the deeply feared Other—in effect, the Cannibal Ogre of the colonial period. Many people viewed “The Rape of Lady Justice” in this light and were outraged by the recycling of this damaging stereotype. South Africa is a country ravaged by the sexual abuse of women and children, and there was widespread anger at Zapiro’s characterization of Zuma as a rapist, despite the cartoonist’s reassurances that no reference was intended to a previous case in which a young HIV-positive woman had accused Zuma of rape, of which he was eventually acquitted.48 The use of such a powerful symbol for satirical purposes is laden with so many overlapping and contradictory significances that, to revisit Enwezor’s terminology, it can readily be described as “overdetermined”. But amongst the plethora of possible interpretations, certain principles stand out quite clearly. The presidential penis is a powerful symbol of patriarchy, which alongside rigid authoritarianism can also denote kindly paternalism. By humanizing the Lady Justice figure and turning her into an ordinary young South African woman, Zapiro set up a sexual frisson between the masculine authority of the executive and the feminine qualities of the judiciary. At

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The Presidential Penis 61 the time of writing, a similar thing was happening in the public domain, as Zuma and the ministers of his “security cluster” fended off the Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela, whose report on unlawful public expenditure on the president’s private residence dominated the headlines in the run-up to the 2014 national elections. The Public Protector is an institution set up under the Constitution to safeguard the public against abuses of power. Madonsela is a woman, a darling of the liberal press. Seen through a gender lens, Zuma’s dismissive reaction to her findings, which are supposed to be binding upon him, has had the effect of feminizing certain democratic values such as honesty, transparency and accountability, and portraying them as being directly challenged by masculine values such as discipline, conformity and aggression. Similar discourses flow through and around The Spear. Murray’s depiction of Zuma as Lenin, after the iconic 1967 Soviet propaganda poster entitled Lenin Lived, Lenin Is Alive, Lenin Will Live by Soviet artist Viktor Ivanov, calls up the rhetoric of the Soviet state and its promises of a better life for its citizens, redolent with implied authoritarianism. Layered upon this, the penis symbol refers to both patriarchy and the implied threat of sexual abuse. In light of the concerns aired by Enwezor, and given the long history of demeaning representations of black subjects in South African satirical art, the necessity to engage thoroughly with these problems, which have tended to be sidelined by the primacy of the freedom of expression argument, remains as urgent as ever. In particular, the position of the white political cartoonist, whose daily work involves satirizing black leadership figures, is clearly a difficult one, and can only benefit from thoughtful analysis. A scan of contemporary South African political cartooning demonstrates that some South African cartoonists continue to produce demeaning representations of black leadership that perpetuate the conventions of racial caricature.49 The tendency to mobilize narratives of dysfunction (also known as Afro-pessimism) is also widely visible in the work of South African cartoonists, both white and black. According to SACP General Secretary and South African Minister of Higher Education, Blade Nzimande, this narrative, “propagated mainly by imperialist countries, but unfortunately adopted almost subconsciously and internalized by many Africans”, perpetuates the idea that “African governments are inevitably doomed to become victims of corruption, that liberation movements will inevitably deteriorate once they get into government”.50 Nzimande attributes the pervasiveness of this view to “the neo-liberal view that the state is inherently inefficient”, but this argument may be rather too sophisticated to gain traction with a public whose major concerns are government corruption, lack of service delivery and heavy-handed security action in the face of legitimate public protest, all presided over by a president whose example seems to stimulate rather than discourage this kind of behavior.51

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62 Andy Mason While the ANC’s support amongst the poor, who are by far the nation’s majority, remains unquestioned, it is amongst the burgeoning middle class that changes in political allegiance are most evident. As Daniels points out, political attitudes in South Africa today cannot be assumed to be arranged by race, and ongoing demographic realignments will continue to move the “contest within democracy” into an arena where class increasingly interacts with race in the shaping of political attitudes.52 In this changing context, traditional patriarchal attitudes will increasingly be contested, and it is within such areas of contestation that cartoonists and satirical artists are most at home. As long as they continue to benefit from the freedoms entrenched in the Constitution, which no democrat can stand to see tampered with, South Africa’s visual jesters will continue to jab their pens at the most painful aspects of the nation’s life. Cartooning and satirical art, by their very nature, tend to do this, sometimes with painful results. That South African satirists have chosen to mock their president, to strip off his trousers to reveal his problematic manhood, is because the public whose views they represent perceive this president to be corrupt, and because they fear for the future. Humor and fear are often linked in reflexive outbursts of emotion, such as those evinced by “The Rape of Lady Justice” and The Spear. However, it must be said that, alongside Murray and Zapiro, who are deep and articulate thinkers, are lesser cartoonists who lack their political acumen but nevertheless take pleasure in depicting Zuma with his pants off. If in mocking Zuma they are mocking the stereotype that he represents, it is perhaps for the president himself and those who support him to ask why it is that these influential visual jesters see him this way. This question becomes more pointed when representations of Zuma are compared with the reverent portrayals by most South African cartoonists of Nelson Mandela, in which demeaning racial caricature is seldom to be seen. There is a well-heeled joke that people get the politicians they deserve, and it might equally be said that politicians get the cartoons they deserve. 4. CONCLUSION The reproduction of racial and ethnic stereotypes has long played an ideological role in South African comic art. The longstanding stereotype of the African male as a threatening savage endowed with prodigious erotic power has endured into the post-apartheid period, where it is used “knowingly” (in the post-modern sense) by cartoonists and satirical artists. But this tendency has seldom been as visible as in the scandalous images in which Jacob Zuma’s penis has been symbolically employed to refer to the state of South African politics and society. While South African cartoonists and satirical artists have, since the end of apartheid, enjoyed higher levels of freedom of expression than their counterparts in many other African countries, and indeed across the world, this level

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The Presidential Penis 63 of freedom of expression and experimentation has been accompanied in some instances by intercultural insensitivities that reinforce negative racial attitudes. However, the right of cartoonists to reproduce demeaning stereotypes and perpetuate narratives of dysfunction is an inevitable function both of the freedom of expression entrenched in the South African Bill of Rights, which many commentators believe to be under threat, and the sad fact that many politicians, through their own behavior, themselves continue to reinforce these negative narratives and stereotypes. In a perfect society, the desire that how people see each other should be free of demeaning racial stereotypes would not be antithetical to freedom of expression. In South Africa today, however, they are unfortunately linked, in that freedom of expression implies that people are free to say and draw what they want, as long as it does not constitute hate speech or inflame violence. In this context, South African cartoonists and satirists have every reason to think carefully about the need for special sensitivity in their depictions of members of other racial groups. We all look forward to a day in which the defense of democratic freedoms and the celebration of racial and cultural diversity cohere, and demeaning racial stereotypes and outmoded narratives of dysfunction are consigned to the dustbins of history. NOTES 1. Geoffrey M. Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science (London, Routledge, 2001), 1. 2. South Africa’s leading white cartoonists and satirical artists include Conrad Botes, Anton Kannemeyer (Joe Dog), William Kentridge, Brett Murray and Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro), each of whom has published a number of books and achieved international recognition. None of the country’s leading black South African cartoonists and satirical artists, including Wilson Mgobhozi, Brandan Reynolds, Sifiso Yalo and Ayanda Mabulu, has yet seen a book dedicated to their own work in print. 3. Okwui Enwezor, “Reframing the Black Subject: Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation” in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to Marketplace, edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (London, Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999), 397. 4. Enwezor, Reframing the Black Subject, 377. 5. The two exhibitions by white women artists to which Enwezor is referring here are “Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen” (1996) curated by Pippa Skotness, and “Rainbow Series” (1995) by Candice Breitz. See Enwezor, Reframing the Black Subject, 391–397. 6. See Hodgson, How Economics Forgot History. 7. Harold Wolpe, Race, Class and the Apartheid State (London, Africa World Press, Inc., 1988). 8. ANC, 1987. “Apartheid South Africa: Colonialism of a Special Type”. ANC Discussion Documents (24 March 1987). Accessed May 7, 2014 at www.anc. org.za/show.php?id=4518. 9. SACP, 2012. The South African Road to Socialism: 13th Congress Political Programme of the SACP 2012–2017, 39. PDF document accessed May 7, 2014 at www.sacp.org.za/docs/docs/2012/draftpol2012.pdf.

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64 Andy Mason 10. Enwezor, Reframing the Black Subject, 397. 11. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001), 1. 12. Ibid. 13. Nadine Gordimer, Writing and Being (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1995), 41. Original emphasis. 14. See Andy Mason, What’s So Funny? Under the Skin of South African Cartooning (Cape Town, Double Storey Books, 2010). 15. Gordimer, Writing and Being, 31. 16. The very useful notion of interpellation, borrowed by Althusser from Marx, is employed by South African journalist Glenda Daniels in Fight For Democracy: The ANC and the Media in South Africa (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2012) to refer to the ANC’s tendency to pejoratively label its critics. I have adopted it here to refer to the way in which cartoonists and satirical artists employ visual stereotypes, including racial caricature, to label or “hail” their subjects. According to Althusser, “interpellation or hailing . . . can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1971. Accessed on May 7, 2014 at www.marx ists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.) 17. J. C. Hoffman, 1680, quoted by J. M. Coetzee in White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988), 23. 18. See Mason, What’s So Funny?, 15. The quotation is from Envisioning the Worst: Representations of “Hottentots” in Early-Modern England by Linda E. Merians (London, Associated University Presses, 2001), 32. 19. This cartoon is one of a pair, first published as large format, limited edition hand-colored prints by London printer and publisher T. Tegg of Cheapside, on September 7, 1819. These cartoons have been widely reproduced in various forms in South African history textbooks. Various prints, including an unauthorized hand-drawn copy, are held in the William Fehr Museum, the Library of Parliament in Cape Town, and other collections. See Mason, What’s So Funny?, 12–20. 20. Mason, What’s So Funny?, 12–13. 21. Ibid. 22. The South African Illustrated News was a local imitation of the London Illustrated News, published in the Cape Colony in 1884–1885. See Mason, What’s So Funny?, 19. 23. The Knobkerrie was a humor magazine edited, illustrated and published weekly in the Cape Colony between 1884 and 1886 by W. H. Schroder. See Mason, What’s So Funny?, 49. 24. A beshu is a traditional Zulu skirt of animal hide covering the loins. 25. Quoted in Mason, What’s So Funny?, 71. 26. Enwezor, Reframing the Black Subject, 398. 27. See Roger van Wyk, 2013, “From Agitation to Agit-Prop and Back Again” in Brett Murray (no editor cited) (Johannesburg, Jacana Media, 2013). 28. These comics included Sloppy, a serialized strip about township life, in collaboration with Mogorosi Motshumi (1981–1983) for Learn and Teach magazine; Vusi Goes Back, a cartoon history of South Africa for The People’s Workbook (Environmental and Development Agency, 1981), as well as various strips for New Ground, Upbeat and other alternative press titles. See Mason, What’s So Funny?, 90–106. 29. Stephen C. Dubin, Spearheading Debate: Culture Wars and Uneasy Truces (Johannesburg, Jacana Media, 2012), 4. 30. Dubin, Spearheading Debate, 14.

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The Presidential Penis 65 31. The Tripartite Alliance consists of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). 32. Zuma claimed R7 million from Zapiro, R5 million for defamation and R2 million for damage to his dignity. 33. Glenda Daniels, Fight for Democracy: The ANC and the Media in South Africa (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2012), 205. 34. Daniels, Fight for Democracy, 208. See also Footnote 16. 35. Ibid. 36. Dubin, Spearheading Debate, 178. 37. Liza Essers, quoted by Dubin, Spearheading Debate, 178. 38. Dubin, Spearheading Debate, 178. 39. Steven Robins, “The Spear That Divided the Nation” (Cape Times, June 5, 2012). 40. Robins, “The Spear”. 41. According to Unathi Kondile, writing in the online edition of Amandla! magazine (May 29, 2012), a previous work entitled Ngcono ihlwempu kunesibhanxo sesityebi (loosely translated as “Better to be a fool than a rich man’s nonsense”), exhibited at Worldart Gallery, Cape Town, in 2010, features “President Jacob Zuma’s manhood in crutches and Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s manhood tied up as if it’s injured”. Accessed on May 7, 2014 at www. amandla.org.za. 42. Nickolaus Bauer, “‘Abuse of the Arts’: ANC Bristles at New Zuma Painting”, Mail & Guardian Online, August 28, 2012. Accessed on May 7, 2014 at http://mg.co.za/article/2012-08-28. 43. Sipho Hlongwane, “The ANC’s Best Friend: Brett Murray & The Spear”, Daily Maverick, May 22, 2012. Accessed on May 7, 2014 at www.dailymav erick.co.za/article/2012-05-22. 44. Aziz Hartley and Solly Maphumulo, “Artist Paints Zuma with Genitals Exposed”, IOL News, August 28, 2012. Accessed on May 7, 2014 at www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/western-cape/artist-paints-zuma-withgenitals-exposed-1.1370792#. 45. Rebecca Davis, “From The Spear to Umshini Wam, a Trip Less Expected”, Daily Maverick, September 3, 2012. Accessed on May 7, 2010 at www.daily maverick.co.za/article/2012-09-04. 46. Daniels, Fight for Democracy, 106. 47. Achille Mbembe, “The Spear That Divided the Nation” (Cape Times, June 5, 2012). 48. See Mason, What’s So Funny? 49. The regularly updated website www.africartoons.com provides an opportunity to review current work by most of South Africa’s political cartoonists. In addition, some cartoonists, such as Zapiro, Jerm (Jeremy Nell) (www.jerm. co.za) and Brandan Reynolds (brandanreynolds.com), have their own regularly updated websites. 50. Blade Nzimande, “The Post-Liberation Phase in Southern Africa: Problems and Prospects”, Lecture delivered to Southern African Political Economy Series (SAPES) Dialogue Forum, and published online by the South African Foreign Policy initiative (SAFPI), August 2012. Accessed on May 7, 2014 at www.safpi.org/news. 51. Ibid. 52. Daniels, Fight for Democracy, 106.

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Part II

Depicting Difference

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4

Recognition and Resemblance

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Facture, Imagination and Ideology in Depictions of Cultural and National Difference Simon Grennan This chapter will explore the idea that depictions embody their producers and readers in specific relationships between subject, social institution, material and idea, in order to examine depiction in the context of narrative drawings of cultural and national differences. Bringing together theorisations by Michael Podro, Louis Althusser, Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Hodge and Gunter Kress, the chapter aims to elucidate the roles of imagination and habituation in the production of ideology and consider the implications of objectification in cases where depictions are approached as resemblances of the situations that they depict. Michael Podro titles the functions of depictive drawing the “. . . synoptic view . . .” in which recognition of content relies on adjudicating the particular properties of graphic marks in relation to the world they depict. This function provides “. . . our sense of the subject emerging . . .” in an environment with which we are habitually familiar. That is, within the context of other experiences of being within the world.1 For Podro, it is a cognitive mechanics of recognition that underlies this capacity to understand the relationships between depiction and what is depicted, rather than any putative resemblance between the content of depictions and the situations that they depict. In this sense, cognition constitutes the process by which a depiction is recognised as the situation that is depicted. Hence, comprehending depiction is first an act of imagination, or “. . . the capacity to recognise through difference . . .”2 However, Podro also claims that the meaning of drawings derives from the types of material that constitute them: the traces of the activity of depiction relative to any viewing or reading environment in which depiction is an habitual expectation on the part of viewers and readers. Together with an imaginative capacity for recognition, he reasons, the functions of depiction require the use of this capacity in situations in which a comprehension of depictions is a constituent part, “. . . so the viewer waits upon the suggestions the [depiction] will offer within the framework of other recognitions.”3 Although there are different types (and indeed canons) of depictive mark, there is no absolute index of recognition that meaningfully substitutes a depiction for the situation depicted. Rather, this recognition is derived from

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70 Simon Grennan the life experiences and habits of makers and viewers in making, situating and encountering depictions. Therefore, Podro contradicts theorists of depiction such as Ernst Gombrich and Kendon Walton who, while sharing his conception of the comprehension of depictions as an act of imagination, pursue the idea that the imaginative act is grounded in resemblance or the capacity of depictions to offer a range of more or less successful illusions of the situations they depict.4 Rather, he includes depictions in the broadest schema of experience, so that “. . . the functions that the life of the [depiction] serves or the life in which they participate may be recruited to the internal organisation . . .” of the depiction, opening its analysis to wider theorisations of communication and connecting the functions of depiction to the fields of social as well as semiotic and perceptual studies.5 Taking this stance, theoretical distinctions between the content of drawings and facture are no longer viable. The imaginative act of viewing a depictive mark in a situation in which depiction is expected to occur is not a matter of creating or experiencing visual illusions, in which facture must efface itself in order for an illusion to appear, but rather an act in which we “. . . seek out the procedures of [depiction] in the subject and not only the subject in the procedures.”6 Depictions do not provide the illusion of removal from the situations in which we make and encounter them. It is essential that we know that we are looking at material, the traces of another’s production, as much as we comprehend that what we see is some other time and place depicted through an imaginative act of recognition. Theorising in this way, Podro recognises that “. . . the line relates itself to the figure (depicted) twice over, once by its shape and once by its apparent impulse.”7 Depiction is a not a method for transmitting meaning, nor a means of creating perceptual illusions in which it dematerialises. Facture is as crucial to our comprehension as our act of imagination. In the case of narrative depiction in particular, Podro’s theorisation confounds distinctions often made between plot and drawing. For example, a character in Ed Brubaker’s 2001 anthology, A Complete Lowlife, muses that in comics “. . . the art supports the story.”8 In this view, depiction is doubly self-effacing, being occluded first by a plot that is always tacitly verbal, or pre-verbalised distinct from its depiction, and second by an exposition of the plot for which facture has no significance. In this view, “the art” presents something akin to an illusion of the plot, rather in the way that Gombrich proposes that depiction aspires to create a visual illusion that effaces the moment of viewing and replaces it with another time and place. The comment made in A Complete Lowlife is theoretically untenable according to Podro’s conception of the functions of depiction, for a number of reasons. First, it disembodies plot by effacing facture (locating it solely in the realm of verbal language); second, it cannot account for the temporal relationships between reading and making, which arise from different types of facture (or what are often called the stylistic variation between depictions)

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Recognition and Resemblance 71 and third, because depiction is meaningfully effaced, it cannot locate the experience of depiction in a specific situation, rather imagining depictions as trans-cultural, meaningful in specific social contexts only according to the culturally specific meaning of a plot. However, following Podro, facture is the material of plot. Depiction does not efface itself due to the fact that, as Gombrich et al. propose, it is either more or less similar to the situations depicted or superseded by content somehow located outside the relationship between mark and viewer. It is a new situation, expected but categorically dissimilar to the situation it depicts, with its own material constraints and opportunities, upon which we habitually expect to exercise our imagination. Podro notes that the use we make of depictions is limited only to “[. . .] what the image affords us.”9 In the “synoptic view” depictions embody subjectivity in iterative relationships between active subjects: the producers and readers of the depiction. Iteration is structured by the precise relationship between subjects and the situation depicted, relative to the rest of the world. Consider a cell drawn in colour by Nick Bradshaw, that appears on an unnumbered page in the Marvel comic floppy series Wolverine and the X Men, closely cropping a depiction of the head of a character called Fat Cobra, seen full face with no details of a background.10 Fat Cobra is an obese Japanese gang boss whose personal appearance throughout the series melds aspects of the traditional costume and hairstyle of sumo wrestlers with tattoos and the usual accoutrements of villains in the genre of crime drama: guns, liquor and drugs. The cell also contains Fat Cobra’s speech: “Fat Cobra does not understand. What do you mean there aren’t classes devoted to wine, carnal intimacy or the fine art of human skull stomping?” and a cry emanating from someone outside the frame “Hrrrrghh!!!” Let us consider Bradshaw’s drawing alongside a colour woodblock portrait of sumo wrestler Hidenoyama Raigoro, made as a stand-alone product for commercial sale to collectors by Kunisada Utagawa in 1845 (Figure 4.1). The depiction of Hidenoyama is also closely cropped, although he appears full-figure in the wrestling arena, the boundary of which is indicated by a straw lip. He is both massive and fat and wears the traditional costume of a sumo wrestler prior to starting a wrestling bout. He adopts a recognisable stance of a sumo wrestler displaying himself to his opponent and the crowd. The image also contains Hidenoyama’s name and Kunisada’s name and signature stamp. We could rehearse a wide variety of types of analyses interrogating the authenticity, status and even ethics of the production of both drawings. What concerns us here are depictive conventions relative to an experience of nationality, that Bradshaw’s and Kunisada’s drawings share, accumulated and maintained over a period of at least one hundred and eighty years. Although metatext tells us that Hidenoyama existed beyond Kunisada’s woodblock and Fat Cobra is a character in fiction, that the real sumo was a popular and successful sportsman and Fat Cobra a despicable comic-strip

Figure 4.1

Utagawa, Kunisada. “Hidenoyama Raigoro,” 1845.

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Recognition and Resemblance 73 criminal, we accept both as depictions of Japanese men, despite that fact that neither depiction resembles any Japanese man in our experience. These two drawings, then, are both undeniably recognisable as iterations of nationality and implausible as resemblance, at the furthest ontological horizon. Yet we accept both iterations as depicting nationality. Encompassing all problematics and contradictions of race, culture and history, our comprehension of these depictions is literally tendentious: that is, in recognising a national identity in both depictions, we are rehearsing, enacting and fulfilling our own subjectivity within the kind of limits to which Podro refers. Part of their meaning lies in the fact that we have obeyed a prescription to situate ourselves relative to conventions of recognition and, in doing so, relative to these depictions, we are self-fulfilling. In this context, consider a page of colour character drawings, titled Peanuts Revival Pic #1 by cartoonist gNAW.11 On this page, gNAW presents depictions by comic strip artist Charles Schultz of three of his most famous characters, full-figure: Charlie Brown, Linus Van Pelt and Lucy Van Pelt, alongside a small written statement confirming Schultz’s ownership of copyright of the images. Below each of Schultz’s characters, gNAW depicts Charlie, Linus and Lucy in the drawing style of manga comics. gNAW ages the characters so that Schultz’s children are teenagers. The three, dressed in teenage versions of their famous childhood costumes, are depicted utilising the recognisable morphologies of manga characters, including large eyes and mouths, tiny noses and the typical gestures and postures of manga action and characterisation. The “manga” Charlie, Lucy and Linus are shown three-quarter figure filling two-thirds of the page. In gNAW’s drawing, conventions pinning depictive tropes to particular national characteristics are self-consciously confounded. Charles Schultz’s American children, Charlie, Linus and Lucy are rendered in the style of mainstream contemporary manga. Do they remain Charlie, Linus and Lucy when they are drawn in this way, that is, do they remain American children? gNAW has aged them, certainly: the morphology of the drawings creates, by a rationale internal to the page, a relationship between Schultz’s children and gNAW’s teenagers. But more has changed. We habitually recognise Schultz’s characters as Americans (despite that fact that they do not in any way resemble them). Does gNAW depict Americans, or does the style of drawing itself transform them into Japanese teenagers? This is not a question of the skin tones, body masses, face shape or environments in any world other than the world of the depiction. Not only do styles of depiction constitute specific visions of the world and of relationships between people, but consequently different social groups display different forms of expression from each other, that evidence and produce this vision, not only in the world, but as the world. They use their bodies differently from members of other groups and are afforded differently, in a dynamic network of opportunities and prohibitions. These differences

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74 Simon Grennan both embody and are identified with different social fields, according to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.12 However, we must also keep in mind that, as with Bradshaw’s and Kunisada’s depictions of Japanese people and Schultz’s depictions of American children, the manga Charlie, Linus and Lucy resemble no Japanese person we have ever met. Now consider a drawing by artist Dr Lakra, made in 2007, Untitled (Hiroshima Tomonohira-Take-Emon), exhibited in the exhibition Goth: Reality of the Departed World at the Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan 2008 (Figure 4.2). It is a palimpsest ink drawing in which the artist has drawn over a midnineteenth-century colour Japanese woodblock print, in itself very similar in depictive style, date of production and content to Kunisada’s portrait of Hidenoyama. Tomonohira-Take-Emon was also a celebrated sumo wrestler. To the existing depiction, Dr Lakra adds drawings of tattoos, so that Tomonohira appears to have tattoos on the tops of his feet, body and arms. On his feet, Dr Lakra has depicted tattoos of an eye talisman and a man’s jacket in the fashion style of the early 1950s. On Tomonohira’s body are depicted tattoos of glamour models (one of whom has a nipple that is also Tomonohira’s right nipple), a death’s head, marijuana leaves, Our Lady of Guadalupe, a spider’s web, a Christ in Passion, a rose, prison bars, an eye at a keyhole and famous images of praying hands and an Aztec stone carving, among others. His additions do not erase the existing depiction, but appear relative to it. This activity itself requires Dr Lakra’s ownership or right over the existing material which, in this case, is a drawing made by someone else. His overdrawing might suggest social co-option, suppression or violence, but this is not an erasure or annulment of the existing drawing; rather it is an accumulation and coexistence in which it develops a new and fundamental role. Dr Lakra creates a set of relationships similar in schema to those that gNAW produces in depicting Charles Schultz’s characters in the depictive style of manga, although the situations are utterly different. He employs one set of depictive conventions, with its particular history, social derivation and social expectations of use, within the context of another set of depictive conventions with a different history and different expectations. Dr Lakra draws a body tattoo consisting of recognisable depictions of another type. Here, we comprehend that the depicted tattooed faces and marks belong to a canon of western depictions to which the existing woodblock print does not belong, in particular Latin American body tattoos. Because they are depictions of depictions, they do in this case resemble tattoos that we have seen in the world, we don’t simply imaginatively recognise them as depictions of tattoos. In this case, Dr Lakra has in fact both depicted a nineteenth-century sumo wrestler with tattoos and tattooed the existing drawing itself. The implausibility of Tomonohira actually having or being depicted as having Mexican tattoos in the Japan of the 1850s underlines the subjective

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Figure 4.2 Dr Lakra, Untitled (Hiroshima Tomonohira-Take-Emon), 2007. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City. Photograph: Estudio Michel Zabé.

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76 Simon Grennan relationships that both generate and contextualise each aspect of Dr Lakra’s altered depiction, and the balances of opportunity and constraint that are so deftly manipulated in it. Crucially, we also understand that two quite different groups of people have worked on this depiction: that two bundles of conventions are operating at once as material traces of two different productions, times and ethos. The model of depictive functions that Podro proposes falls along the axis of debate about the relationships between social structure, individual agency and the struggle to influence others motivated by semiologists Robert Hodge and Gunter Kress, Louis Althusser and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu enabling a deeper exploration of the connection between habit, situation and material in depiction than he intuits.13 Because depictions are meaningful in the ways in which they emanate from the social environments in which they are made and seen, it is possible to approach them as though they “. . . declare a specific version of social relations . . .” in themselves, as Hodge and Kress claim about the social significance of style variations, further extrapolating that “. . . social control rests on control over the representation of reality which is accepted as the basis for judgment and action.”14 Hence, depiction has an ideological aspect subject to both sociological and philosophical theorisation bringing together semiotic theory and theorisations of power. The encompassing theoretical frame into which Podro steps, alongside Althusser, Bourdieu, Hodge and Kress, describes the relationship between subjects, social institutions, material and idea (which Podro calls “imagination”) as ideology, deriving from Karl Mannheim’s and Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s critiques of ideocracy, the promotion of or resistance to ideas on the grounds of the degree to which they reproduce or contradict a dominant social structure.15 In this sense ideology is not a set of ideas, but rather the consolidatory or antagonistic relationship between sets of ideas and people’s different experiences of the world, which these ideas might or might not contradict. Central to this conception of the role of ideas, relative to the material production of society, is a theorisation of the acceptance by one social group of the practices and ideas of another social group, contrary to their benefit in the continual struggle to influence others that constitutes discourse, termed cultural hegemony.16 Hence, the relationships between the dominant ideas of one group of people and the world experiences of other groups include misrecognition. Those ideas that dominate social discourse in any particular circumstance are not actively misrepresented by the dominant order, according to this model, but rather misrecognised by others for whom they are materially disadvantageous. The process of this misrecognition is important to Althusser because it adds complexity to the foundational idea in his model: that embodied social discourse in the form of practices and institutions generates systems of ideas rather than the reverse. In cultural hegemonic relationships, however,

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Recognition and Resemblance 77 imagined relationships motivate practices, apparently counter-intuitively. Althusser identifies one of the functions of this misrecognition as an imaginative projection of timelessness upon hegemonic ideas, undertaken by both dominant and materially disadvantaged members of society. As a result, the function of cultural hegemony is to inculcate a cognitive consensus identifying particular ideas not with the interests or behaviour of one social group or other, but with a pan-historic, a-temporal and pan-social concept such as “nature,” “human” or “male” for example.17 However, this aspect of ideology is itself made more complex if it is broadened to include every type of practice. Then, not simply ideas, but the broadest range of activities and situations are liable to contribute to cultural hegemonic effect. Bourdieu enlarges Althusser’s theorisation in this way, to include bodily practices and every type of social manifestation and institution. He argues that the promotion or resistance to ideas occurs alongside an hegemonic inculcation of material practices through habituation, not only through cognition or acts of imagination, but through the perpetuation and reproduction of types of actions and responses, even at the most micro level, such as gestures. This introduces a directly intersubjective, that is, embodied as well as material, aspect to Althusser’s theorisation of the relationships between our experience of the world and the struggle to promulgate ideas about it. Different groups of people utilise different types of expression from each other and utilise their bodies differently. As a result, these practices literally embody comprehensions of social differences and take a part, alongside the imaginative projection of ideas identified by Althusser, in hegemonic relationships, the reproduction of social structures and the broader struggles of ideology.18 According to this theorisation, what occurs in the depictions that I have exemplified is the creation of a series of situations in which we are located subjectively, relative to the facture of the drawings and their makers. Facture is a means by which we experience them as embodied subjects. As Bourdieu describes, it is because facture embodies social differences that our response to them is literally self-fulfilling. We become ourselves by recognising them, whether we already belong to the social group from which they emerge or position ourselves differently through our relationship with them. Even where a type of expression seems monologic, that is inevitable and unassailable, this sense of inevitability itself simply “. . . signals the active suppression of difference . . .”, as Hodge and Kress note.19 Of course, the ideology described by Althusser and Bourdieu is dynamic, to whatever extent people relating to each other through its hegemonic function pretend to the immutable universality of dominant ideas. Hodge and Kress join philosopher Anthony Giddens in identifying that “. . . logonomic systems are by no means irresistible: on the contrary, the extent to which they hold sway or break down . . . is itself (a) symptom of the state of society” so that levels of equilibrium between the capacity to influence, on one hand, and the effect of constraint on the other hand, articulate mutually

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78 Simon Grennan antithetical affects and sustain dynamic contradictions, producing both social structures and individual agency.20 The model of ideology explored by Althusser at al. underpins Podro’s conception of depiction, in which a series of new situations, the habits and conventions of the subjects involved constantly dictate what is depicted. However, if we set aside this model and, for the sake of argument, consider the degree of comprehensibility of depictions to be rooted in a universal ontology, a way remains open to theoretically objectify the experience of depictions. This objectification mirrors the promulgation of hegemony in as much as it seeks to place particular types of experience outside the relationship between ideas and material experience, that is, outside the realms of ideology. In particular, Hodge and Kress write that “[. . .] ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ [. . .] mark agreement over or challenge to the temporary state of the semiotic system,” so that “‘Truth’ is therefore a description of the state when social participants [. . .] accept the system of classification [. . .]” and “[. . .] a ‘realistic’ visual representation is also likely to be seen as true.”21 Truth and realism in this sense indicate the very acceptance of depictions made in a particular way, offering an agreed type of material for recognition, as acceptable propositions of a complete, stable and above all successfully dominant worldview. The misrecognition generated in situations of cultural hegemony, identified by Althusser as a means of reproducing and sustaining social dominance, is open to instrumental use in any struggle to influence. According to this approach, the social antagonism between different propositions about the world requires that competing propositions insist on the truth of their particular vision, in opposition to others, as a prerequisite of struggle itself, rather than understanding that contingency is the single condition by which hegemony is undermined. Then, depictions become objects without a subject, which are theoretically disembodied, in which specific tropes are identified with specific, hierarchically arranged meanings, emerging with pan-subjective, pan-cultural consistency across all human times and places. They become fixed tools used in social struggles between different types of misrecognition. There is still contemporary currency in this approach, in some traditions within the academic discipline of art history, for example. Art historian Claire Bishop describes succinctly a tenet of this theorisation when she writes “. . . art is given to be seen by others.”22 This description outlines the way in which the experience of a work of art is placed theoretically beyond the discourse of the work in any way other than as a distinct situation in which, alone, a scopophillic view can be taken. In effect, this theoretical delimitation of the experience of an audience is an art-historical definition of the work of art itself, or an approach to cultural experience that misrecognises and effaces social relationships by objectifying and instrumentalising them.

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Recognition and Resemblance 79 This theorisation of depiction has important implications, not least of which are the opportunities that it allows for the culturally and socially antagonistic employment of depictions as though they had intrinsic meaning. For example, a type of these fixed depictions correlates to a history of the political relationship between black and white Americans and depictions of black experiences of America, the interrogation of which forms part of the work of American artist Kerry James Marshall. Consider an unnumbered page from the comic strip Black Metropolis by Marshall that appeared in New York–based Esopus Magazine in 2010.23 The black and white strip comprises two cells that split the page horizontally. In the upper cell, a young black woman is depicted close up, so only her head is visible. Across four integrated speech balloons, which overlap both upper and lower cells, she says “Like I was sayin . . . The problem is not that there are black folks who embrace a particular socio-political or even essentialist identity . . . What troubles me is how ‘negroes’ who believe they’ve ‘transcended’ don’t seem to know what the game is all about, and ignore the net implications of the whole assimilationist logic.” In the lower cell, the woman and another woman are depicted from the back, in a street. In another speech balloon that overlaps the lower cell, the other woman says, “There’s a continuum here from Vesey to Dubois, from Malcolm to West-Side Connection [sic].” In a narrative box within the cell, a narrator says, “To be continued, for sure.” The strip relies on an objectifying conception of depiction relative to what is depicted that loses much of its power if considered via Podro’s theorisation. But Marshall’s drawing requires us to comprehend that he is adopting both a parodic stance towards prior depictions of black American experiences and to locate his depiction as a co-option within an inverted ideological framework. Hence, his depiction of black skin proposes that black skin is inky black and very shiny: the opposite of the light matte skin rendered desirable in black people in America through the operation of an imperial, patriarchal white social hegemony. As a political act, Marshall’s drawing successfully conflates depiction with what is depicted. Paradoxically, this requires membership of a consensual social group that cuts across experiences of race in an American present in order to be understood. However, as with the depictions of Japanese people we discussed earlier, Marshall’s depiction of black Americans do not resemble any black Americans we have met because they are depictions. We recognise them in spite of the fact that there is no resemblance. This approach cannot be taken beyond specific circles of consensus, even if such circles encompass mutually antithetical points of view, ways of life or social struggles, as in the case of Marshall. For example, consider the top two cells of an unnumbered colour page from the anonymously drawn English-language comic Death of a Spy, published and sold in India by SP Ramanathan in 1974.24 The cells read horizontally, left to right, and are similar in size. Both cells depict Ian Fleming’s character British MI6 agent

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80 Simon Grennan James Bond and a young, fashionably dressed woman called Mirella, in three-quarter view. The characters are in her apartment, which contains a potted plant and a drink bar. In speech balloons in the left-hand cell, Mirella says, “Come in. It is not big but this is my home during the festival. Drink?” James Bond’s thoughts appear in a thought balloon: “She thinks I have fallen for her, quickly!” In the right-hand cell, Bond prepares a drink, saying in a speech balloon, “Let me handle this! I’m very particular about drinks!” Death of a Spy and Black Metropolis are curiously similar in their theoretical objectification of depiction, assuming consensus on the part of all of the constituent subjects in the situation in which the depiction appears. The crucial distinction between Marshall’s strip and Death of a Spy is their motive. Whereas Marshall’s strip employs a range of consensually agreed depictive tropes to identify and undermine a prevailing set of social relationships, Death of Spy uses a similar range of tropes in order to embolden readers to aspire to conformity. Social aspiration rather than social dissent is its text. One could argue that Death of a Spy is a fantasy text, whereas Black Metropolis is contemporary drama, but this distinction supports rather than diminishes the similarity of the way in which they utilise and consider depiction as an objectified means. Therefore, objectifying depictions, rather than comprehending them as mutable materialisations of subjective relationships, provides opportunities for the elision of depictive forms with the relative capacities of producers and readers to either influence or be influenced by each other within a political economy. Hence, any distinction collapses between depictions and the power relationships that exist between the subjects involved in their making and viewing. A categorical shift takes place, in which making or viewing a drawing is considered to be affecting in the same way as publishing a political text or coercing an opponent. Consider two further drawings in light of this elision. The first is the colour cover of the South African comic Mighty Man number 1, 1977, by Joe Orlando, published by Afri-Comics.25 The cover of Mighty Man follows the style of American comics covers originating in the post-war period, having a central image, a super-title and a bar of minor “inside” features running down the left-hand side. The central image depicts five black people, three criminals (identifiable by the knives and gun that they brandish as they lie in wait), waiting for Mighty Man to walk through an open door to an apartment, Mighty Man and a young woman. Mighty Man wears a superhero costume including a cape and mask. In a speech balloon that overlaps the edge of the image, Mighty Man says to the woman, “Once we get the stolen police files we can prove you are innocent!” Above, the super-title reads, “Afri-Comics presents Mighty Man. The Human Law Enforcement Dynamo.” The second is a black and white 1948 strip by Zhang Leping from his long-running series San Mao.26 The strip comprises a single cell depicting a street scene in Shanghai in the 1940s. Twenty or so men, women and

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Recognition and Resemblance 81 children of all ages, classes and occupations have stopped to watch a street entertainer balancing the child San Mao (“Three Hairs”) on his upraised hand. Although the people in the street have paused to watch, some are eating, some are on their way to work, some are working and some are at their leisure with their children. The street entertainer is muscular and shirtless. San Mao is also shirtless and looks deeply unhappy. In the background are city office blocks and/or apartment buildings. We are compelled to adopt a specific political stance in order for the depiction in Mighty Man to make sense. Both its readers and its producers are subsumed by this stance, even in the present day. It is a complex one: Mighty Man is a black South African superhero who upholds law and order and fights crime. Of course, at the time, law and order in South Africa meant “apartheid” and all of the other murderous and repressive state engines of an ethically abhorrent political system. Political dissent was de facto antisocial and hence criminal. Mighty Man is an empowered black South African (he is a superhero after all) who upholds a social order that represses its black members. He is a role model for political co-option. Without this objectification, the depiction makes little sense. In other words, without the elision of a specific series of experiences and ideas with the depiction, Mighty Man is nonsense. On the other hand, if we look at Zhang’s strip, no such elision between is necessary for comprehension. Rather, Zhang’s depiction seems to depend upon the accumulation of social relationships akin to that outlined by Giddens.27 Recognition of the depicted situation does not rely upon the same types of politically motivated objectification required in Mighty Man. Rather, the depiction encompasses them. Power relationships are both represented and embodied by readers and makers, certainly, but these are mutable and propositional. It is as easy to ascribe meaning to the depicted boy eating the banana as it is to the plight of San Mao (forced to earning a living as a street entertainer’s stooge) or to the drawing style itself. To return to Michael Podro, depictions are not the situations they depict. Neither can they be approached as fixed tropes for other situations, although the recognition in them of other people, times and places is the function of their particular facture. Rather, they are situations themselves in which producers and readers are materialised subjects. Facture is the material of plot not through a function of resemblance or objectification, even where objectification results from hegemony or self-conscious dissent, but as a result of habitual recognition in agreed situations of which they are the continually mutable expression.

NOTES 1. Podro, M. 1998. Depiction, New Haven: Yale. 13. 2. Ibid.: 5.

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82 Simon Grennan 3. Ibid.: 15. 4. Gombrich, E. H. 2002. Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London: Phiadon; Walton, K. 1991. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge: Harvard. 5. Podro, M. 1998: 87. 6. Ibid.: 87. 7. Ibid.: 87. 8. Brubaker, E. 2001. A Complete Lowlife, Marietta: Top Shelf Productions. 9. Podro, M. 1998: 5. 10. Bradshaw, N. and Aaron, J. 2012. Wolverine and the X-Men Volume 1, Number 19, New York: Marvel. 11. gNAW, Peanuts Revival Pic #1. Accessed November 18, 2013. www.furaffinity. net/view/70742. 12. Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Polity Press. 13. Althusser, L. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press; Bourdieu, P. 1991. 14. Hodge, R. and Kress, G. 1988. Social Semiotics, Cambridge: Polity Press: 79; Ibid.: 147. 15. Ibid.; Mannheim, K. 1985. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, Chicago: Mariner Books; Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1967. Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (Edited by Easton, L. D. and Guddat K. H.), New York: Anchor Books. 16. Gramsci, A. 1992. Prison Notebooks (Edited by Buttigieg, J. A.), New York: Columbia. 17. Althusser, L. 1971. 18. Bourdieu, P. 1991. 19. Hodge, R. and Kress, G. 1988: 83. 20. Ibid.: 120; Giddens, A. 1993. New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of interpretative Sociologies, London: Polity Press. 21. Hodge, R. and Kress, G. 1988: 122; Ibid.: 122; Ibid.: 130. 22. Bishop, C. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso: 241. 23. Marshall, K. J. “Black Metropolis” Esopus Magazine September 2010. 24. Anonymous. 1974. Death of a Spy, Madras: SP Ramanathan. 25. Orlando, J. 1977. Mighty Man number 1, Cape Town: Afri–Comics. 26. Leping, Z. 1996. San Mao Past and Present, Shanghai: Shanghai Century Publishing. 27. Giddens, A. 1993.

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5

“Badgers? We don’t need no steenkin’ Badgers!” Talbot’s Grandville, Anthropomorphism and Multiculturalism Mel Gibson

This chapter investigates how issues around multiculturalism are explored in the Grandville series of graphic novels by Bryan Talbot. Grandville, Grandville Mon Amour and Grandville Bête Noire depict a steampunk world in which animals are dominant and every species is considered equal, whether duck, fish or horse.1 This does not stop intolerance or prejudice, however. Humans also exist within this world, but they are a minority seen by the animals as lesser beings. The setting for the series is a Europe in which France won the Napoleonic Wars and then invaded the rest of Europe, creating the French Empire. As a result, along with human-animal and inter-animal tensions there are also national ones. Here, Britain has been begrudgingly given independence after a campaign of civil disobedience and bombings. Consequently British animals, irrespective of species, are seen as problematic by the Empire and are labeled as terrorists. That the Empire is French does not, of course, signify that this is a book about Anglo-French relations, but rather that the genre allows discussion through distancing issues from their “real world” settings. The chapter will look at some aspects of the relationships and tensions between the British and the French, humans and animals and between animal species. These are not animal rights narratives, nor a simple reversal of human and animal positions. Instead anthropomorphism is employed as a lens to examine human interactions in our world. The initial inspiration for the anthropomorphic approach taken by Talbot in these books was the work of early nineteenth-century French illustrator Jean Ignace Isadore Gerard, who drew under the name of JJ Grandville. Grandville’s images, as Talbot says, “typically satiriz[ed] the contemporary mores of French Society”, and Talbot combined JJ Grandville’s satirical intent, anthropomorphism and the notion of Grandville as a possible nickname for an alternative Paris in creating the series.2 In considering these relationships and tensions, the chapter first looks at how economics and multiculturalism are linked in Grandville and then turns to a brief consideration of how language and national identity operate. It next looks at Talbot’s use of color and art as a mechanism for signifying difference and diversity. Finally, it will focus down on issues of cultural intolerance, dominance and the terrorist other.

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84 Mel Gibson These are multilayered texts combining various genres and drawing on a very wide range of other texts, including novels and films, children’s books, illustration and fine art, as well as comics. The central character, Detective Inspector LeBrock, for instance, is a badger, with all the connotations of tenacity, loyalty and strength that the animal carries from literary references beyond Grandville, as Angela Cassidy suggests.3 Talbot particularly references Badger of The Wind in the Willows who is wise, brave, and a skilled fighter.4 In addition, that actual badgers are currently under threat from government culls in Britain, gives an additional charge of vulnerability to the character.5 The politicized elements of the series are just one aspect of the narratives, but significant, as this chapter demonstrates. MULTICULTURALISM, ECONOMICS AND GRANDVILLE There is no one way to read these narratives in relation to multiculturalism. For instance, the series can be seen as critiquing the swift growth of Islamophobia after “9/11” and the British “7/7” attacks and abortive bombings of “21/7”, or as being about the changing nation state or empire and imperial legacy, or rights and activism. This chapter works predominantly with European models of multiculturalism, especially that of Britain, in part because Talbot is a British comic creator operating within specific national views and debates about multiculturalism, even when he applies such ideas to a wider stage. In effect, what Talbot explores in these texts is not various approaches to multiculturalism, but what Stuart Hall identified as the “multicultural question”, that is: [. . .] whether it is possible for groups of people from different cultural, religious, linguistic, historical backgrounds, to occupy the same social space, whether that is a city, or a nation, or a region—applied by circumstances. What are the terms on which they can live with one another without either one group [the less powerful group] having to become the imitative version of the dominant one—i.e. an assimilation, or on the other hand, the two groups hating one another, or projecting images of degradation. In other words, how can people live together in difference?6 The Grandville narratives explore in particular how living together in difference might, or might not, work in a period of severe instability. In relation to Britain, imperial legacy had an impact upon the development of multicultural policies. As Ali Rattansi states, “In . . . Britain, there is an oft repeated shorthand history that suggests that the country treated its post-1945 immigrants . . . rather like it had treated them when they were ‘natives’ in the colonies [so] treating the immigrants as if they needed ‘civilizing’”.7 Certainly the notion of the British as in need of “civilizing” is flagged

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Anthropomorphism and Multiculturalism 85 up by the Empire at many points. For instance, the quotation featured in the title of this chapter reflects a French view of the British LeBrock.8 Whilst the Empire contains diverse communities, assimilation rather than integration, social cohesion or multiculturalism is the intended policy of those in power in the first book. The latter three imply retaining elements of “home culture” and having an impact upon the host culture, but the former is about the total adoption of the host nation’s culture. However, as outlined by Nira Yuval-Davis, Floya Anthias and Eleonore Kofman, in the case of notions of social cohesion an acknowledgement of “difference” is typically found alongside a requirement that “others” conform to the central cultural and value systems of mainstream hegemonic Englishness, such as learning English.9 There are key examples of conformity in relation to culture in the Grandville series that show consequences of such policies. The French Empire can be seen in the light of the Parekh Report, which asserted that Britain “is not and has never been the unified, conflict-free land of popular imagination”.10 Talbot’s narratives use his fictional Empire to comment on our world, to show that such a notion of the unified and conflict-free land is a myth employed to colonize, subjugate and repress, just as Hall stated. For Hall, “All so-called modern, liberal nation-states thus combine the so-called rational, reflective, civic form of allegiance to the state with a so-called intuitive, instinctual, ethnic allegiance to the nation. That heterogeneous formation, ‘Britishness’ grounds the United Kingdom, the political entity, as an ‘imagined community’”.11 He further argued that “the neutrality of the state works only when a broad cultural homogeneity among the governed can be assumed”.12 In the Empire the attempts to stop its decline deny everyone the possibility of creating new definitions of “Frenchness” and so of potential futures. This limited “Frenchness”, as Hall suggested of “Britishness”, “is literally driving some of its citizens crazy”.13 The madness of some of Talbot’s characters comes about, in part, as a result of their battle for national control. The Grandville series offers an overarching narrative in which powerful individuals attempt to maintain power by manipulating tensions between the Empire and the British ex-colony, attempting, in effect, to demonize a specific ethnic group, the British, to distract attention from internal policies and the abuse of power. Wars beyond the Empire are also waged with that specific intention. These narratives may act as a critique of recent British and other governmental policies, which might be seen as constructing the poor, the young or those from specific cultural groups as problematic and thus, as Phil Jones argues regarding young people in particular, “othering” them.14 Seen in this light, characters within the series who embrace a more multicultural approach are the heroes, in contrast to those aligned with the assimilation model of the Empire. This is particularly clear in the third book, where, after revolution in France, the ex-Empire industrialists, arms dealers and others, along with what could be described as “old money” join together to try to undo the changes through waging, in effect, civil war.

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86 Mel Gibson Their objections to the new and legitimate government include the government’s wishes to introduce pensions, nationalize industries, introduce antipollution legislation and offer free schools and hospitals, paid holidays and other rights for workers.15 Again, this can be seen as pithy commentary about social change and the erosion of such rights and resources in Britain in recent years. The narratives can collectively also be read as, as Hall et al. argued in the 1970s, a time “when the whole basis of political leadership and cultural authority becomes exposed and contested”.16 Hall argued that multiculturalism is “a deeply contested idea”, and Rattansi states that multiculturalist policies have been largely rejected recently, placing this against a backdrop of changes to the nation state, deindustrialization and the reduction of welfare state provisions.17 In effect, Rattansi sees multiculturalism as a scapegoat, arguing that “many of the worries caused by growing economic insecurity, and more general social fragmentation, have been displaced onto issues of immigration. In the process, ‘multiculturalism’ appears to have become the container into which Western European nations have poured anxieties whose origins often lie in social and economic changes”.18 This fragmentation and economic insecurity chimes with the world of Grandville, especially given the recent achievement of independence for Britain from the Empire. It also chimes with the way that economic change is used within the books. War is used to shore up existing industry and stimulate industrialization. Simultaneously, animal workers are replaced with robots. For example, in the first volume Talbot depicts a protest demanding that troops leave French Indo-China.19 Further, one of the first events LeBrock sees on checking into a hotel in Grandville is an arms dealers’ convention and later an arms dealer confirms that war drives the Empire.20 As to welfare state provisions and civil liberties, as suggested above, these are minimal given that the ruling elite sees them as eroding profits. That world’s equivalent of “9/11” is a supposed terrorist attack on a building named Robida Tower in Paris.21 Whilst the protagonists travel across Britain and France, the main focus is the city of Paris, and the narratives show how the cosmopolitanism of that city, is, as Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabiran and Ulrike Vieten argue with regard to multi-faith, transnational London, “confronted with new racialising strategies as a result of the 7 July 2005 terrorist murders and some of the governmental responses to them”.22 The new French government, after the attacks, curtails civil liberties and puts severe restrictions on travel both around the Empire and beyond, again a comment upon our world. LANGUAGE AND NATIONAL IDENTITY In the first Grandville, the slipperiness of the concept of national identity is made clear in relation to language in one jarring moment. In this Talbot offers

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Anthropomorphism and Multiculturalism 87 the reader an opportunity to reflect upon notions of cultural dominance and multiculturalism. When reading the original English-language edition, the initial scenes introducing Detective Inspector LeBrock and his adjunct Detective Ratzi (a rat) show them investigating the murder of Honourable Citizen Raymond Leigh-Otter (an otter), which has taken place in Nutwood, fictional home of British classic children’s character Rupert the Bear. These British scenes focus on accent and the use of language. They involve a foul-mouthed Sergeant Nutkin (a squirrel) thereby drawing on and subverting The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and further evoking notions of Englishness or Britishness through literature.23 The scenes contrast Nutkin’s use of slang and the way that he drops the letter “h” from words with LeBrock’s more standard use of language and Ratzi’s upper-class English historical slang. However, this initial use of British accent as an indicator of class or competence allows the author to create a purposively jarring moment when LeBrock and Ratzi later stand on Nutwood railway station. In response to Ratzi’s question, “I say, DI, what’s that funny lingo those coves are conversing in? Sounds jolly quaint, what?” LeBrock responds, “Uh? Oh, you’ve never heard it before? It is still spoken in some rural communities. It’s English”.24 This makes one aware that one is reading, in effect, a translation from the French. While this is playful, it disrupts expectations about linguistic dominance. Ratzi’s style of speech, then, may be read as an indicator of class in England, but must be understood as French. That the English language continues to exist might be seen as evidence of multiculturalism in the policies of the Empire, but it is signaled as an old-fashioned and largely forgotten language. One could argue that this shows the impact of the assimilation model of the Empire on a colonized country. While that is the first key moment based around language and national identity in the series, later scenes also show the dominance of the French language in Britain, with several images juxtaposing the Houses of Parliament with the French-language adverts on passing trams and a number showing street signs in French. This all serves to undermine the notion of national identity for those reading the book in English by detaching the English language from notions of Britishness. DIFFERENCE, DIVERSITY, COLOR AND ART Talbot expresses national difference and diversity through a number of elements within the series, particularly his use of color and line, in the depiction of landscapes and characters. In relation to color, the first book of the series begins with an action sequence, a chase through a darkened, industrial cityscape (with the Eiffel Tower immediately locating the reader in France), followed by a sequence in a rural English setting. The England and France of the first Grandville graphic novel have distinctive palettes. In the former, the landscape is dominated predominantly by lighter and more delicate colors,

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88 Mel Gibson with an emphasis on greens, greys and pale blues. The drawn style is flatter, reflecting that of the images in the Rupert the Bear series. This is also emphasized through the appearance of Rupert’s father in several panels, depicted as mowing his lawn and trimming his hedges, stereotypical British activities. This is in contrast to the use of color and texture in the landscape of France, in which Talbot makes much use of dense browns, blacks and reds, plus the dark blues of night skies. In addition, the images of France emphasize depth and movement and have a more photographic “feel” to their backgrounds. Thus color and depth are used to signify national difference and diversity. In addition, he makes references to specific fine art in suggesting difference, as well as playfully challenging readers to identify the originals. Artworks from Britain and France feature throughout the books, with reworkings of paintings and other images significant both through dominating the composition of various panels in which the characters interact, and featuring in the backgrounds. The styles and schools are used to show national divides, but also tensions within France over art, thus acting symbolically as a representation of social instability in a shifting economic and political space. To give examples of the reworking of images where characters interact, in the first book traveling to France by train via the Channel railway bridge, LeBrock and Ratzi enter a compartment, disturbing the two ducks seated inside.25 The composition of the image directly works with that of the painting by Augustus Egg, The Travelling Companions, painted in 1862. An English creator, then, features when England is still nearby. However, once in France the choice of images changes. One example of reworking an image from fine art as part of the narrative draws on the painting Édouard Manet’s 1882 painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.26 In this context, however, rather than a girl behind the bar, there is a tall, male hawk, and the reflection in the mirror is of LeBrock as he questions the bird. In forming the backgrounds, art is incorporated in many ways; for instance, there are portraits throughout the first book of Napoleon recreated as a lion. In the third graphic novel, the central female character, Billie (also a badger), works, in part, as an artist’s model, and at one point LeBrock is confronted by a number of paintings of her including an adaptation of Édouard Manet’s 1863 Olympia.27 While this division is not totally consistent throughout the series, it does form part of the differentiation of cultures within it. Art and ideology are significant within the narratives too, especially the third graphic novel, which focuses on the use of art as propaganda in the hands of the state. A key plot point regards a commission for a huge figurative mural of the wider community working together on the side of the d’Orsay railway station (an action moving toward representing multiculturalism under the new government) and the sabotage of the project. This reflects two historical events. The first, as outlined by Talbot, occurred in 1933 when Diego Rivera was commissioned by Norman Rockefeller to design a mural. Rockefeller was “taken aback by the prominent inclusion

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Anthropomorphism and Multiculturalism 89 [of] Lenin in a design which openly pitted socialist ideology against capitalism. In 1934, the mural was hammered into rubble [. . . .] Thereafter, Rockefeller actively promoted abstract expressionism, a form that could carry no overt political message”.28 The second was the use of abstract art as a propaganda weapon by the CIA during the Cold War as a riposte to the figurative art of the Soviet Union and “proof” of the freedom offered to artists in the United States.29 A further representation of diversity and difference around characters is embedded in the series through the use of line and color. This is achieved specifically through the ethnic group, the “doughfaces”, a name intended both as an insult and a categorization. These characters are all from classic Franco-Belgian bande dessinée. They are colored in a different way to the animals, in fairly flat color, serving to emphasize difference. However, they are also a multicultural group, as, for instance, blue-faced Smurfs are included, and the style of the characters echoes that of the original artists. Smurfs walk alongside Tintin and other characters on the march for citizenship.30 As such, Talbot makes the point that not all bande dessinée characters are the same and that the various species of animals’ categorization of them as such is simply racist. The first bande dessinée character introduced is Spirou, who is working as a bellboy in the Hotel Marianne. When Ratzi comments about the “dashed queer looking creatures”, LeBrock explains that they are “Menial workers. Not allowed passports, y’know”, adding that they have “Never been granted citizens’ rights”.31 T. H. Marshall defined citizenship as “full membership in a community with all its rights and obligations”, and it is to this idea of citizenship that Talbot alludes.32 The bande dessinée characters are intellectual equals of the animals, but their appearance has led to segregation. They are considered subhuman (or rather, subanimal) and sanctioned economically and socially. Many are in fear of their replacement in their jobs by automatons, a threat used to keep them subservient. This acts as a comment on the treatment of those identified as “different” by the dominant culture. To further extend this analogy, on the rare occasions that a bande dessinée character is allowed a degree of autonomy, that character is closely monitored. For instance, in the third volume, the narrative begins with industrialist co-conspirators attempting to control both population and industry using a secret team of scientists including a “doughface”, based on Philip Mortimer of Blake and Mortimer, who is killed when he threatens to go to the police. As one of the conspirators says, “A doughface speaking like that to his betters? Infernal impudence!”33 This can also be seen in the light of debates about the “other” in that, as Anne-Marie Fortier articulates it, the us and them can be played out as: “‘We’ have culture, ‘they’ are culture; ‘we’ are citizens, ‘they’ are a people’”.34 That Talbot applies such a model to animals in commenting upon bande dessinée characters who can be seen as very representative of a particular comic culture serves to push this point home further.

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90 Mel Gibson Talbot moves far beyond the articulation of an ethnic other when the theme of human rights emerges in the third book of the series. This is derided by many animal citizens, one of whom comments, on seeing the bande dessinée characters march, “It’ll be pets demanding equal rights next”.35 With a few minor alterations to the group referred to, one can clearly hear the words of a racist commenting upon an ethnic minority in a way that homogenizes all members of that minority. Referring to the bande dessinée characters as just that, and as little better than pets, echoes imperial legacy in regarding them as innately inferior. This reference to pets does not signify a simple reversal of animal and human positions in an animal rights context, given the animals and humans in the series are similarly intelligent. The depiction of the bande dessinée characters here explicitly addresses notions of suppressing an ethnic minority. The issue of rights and equal opportunities regarding the bande dessinée characters may link to a notion of multiculturalism as racialized. Whilst the bande dessinée characters come from within the Empire, their position is very similar to that of the guest worker, without rights or security and their “racial” difference is used to marginalize them. Talbot’s depiction of the bande dessinée characters here avoids the weakness critics implied regarding some multicultural policies in that he does not represent them as sharing a common culture, or even color, thus working against essentialism. He also emphasizes, through the differences between the British and the bande dessinée characters, that not all groups are groups in the same way in relation to communities, economic structures or culture. THEM AND US: CULTURAL INTOLERANCE, DOMINANCE AND THE TERRORIST OTHER Intolerance of the British is flagged up throughout the series, as some of the comments by French citizens indicate. For instance, when LeBrock asks for a Full English Breakfast, the waiter returns to reply, “The chef says that he’d rather slash his own wrists, sir. He respectfully suggests that you stick your Full English Breakfast up your hairy English bottom”.36 Similarly in the bar at the Folies-Bergère, the response to LeBrock’s question also indicates the tensions between France and Britain, as the bird says, “British, are you? Why don’t you just piss off back where you came from?”37 Perhaps inevitably, the French are not welcome in Britain either. LeBrock holds a moral high ground throughout the series, in working across nations and with all citizens. LeBrock is also an excellent investigator, perhaps in part because of his position as someone from a minority culture (who additionally has outsider status through being working class) for, as Tariq Modood argues, “minorities can be the bearers of distinctive knowledge. . . . They have a take on their societies that the majority does not experience and offers to the majority a very different perspective on their shared society, its institutions, discourses

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Anthropomorphism and Multiculturalism 91 and self-image. They hold a critical mirror up to that society”.38 Such a critical mirror represents a dialogue that indicates “that multiculturalism is much more than toleration or the co-presence of mutually indifferent communities”.39 LeBrock is successful because he engages in dialogue with all, so uncovering new insights. Class, as mentioned above, is another factor in the series, and LeBrock reflects this in a number of scenes, including one where he is seated unhappily at a dinner table contemplating the huge range of cutlery. In addition, he is also concerned about the manners of the hostess, who clearly sees him as a “bit of rough”, as the ethnic, national and classed “other”.40 The increasing tension around Britons visiting France is noted by the British Ambassador in Paris, who says, “It’s just cynical exploitation, designed to sell newspapers. All that nationalistic claptrap spouted by Napoleon’s government. Disgusting I call it. Bloody opportunistic politicians whipping up Anglophobia!”41 The reference here is clearly to Islamophobia, a neologism used generally to refer to prejudice against, hatred toward, or fear of Muslims or of ethnic groups perceived to be Muslim. The term also incorporates economic and social discrimination and the positioning of Islam as a violent political ideology rather than a religion. It is still very much a debated term, but it does offer a shorthand for the increasingly hostile attitudes and incidents that developed during the 2000s, attributed by commentators to the aftermath of the “9/11” and “7/7” attacks. Here, using a similar term to reflect Anglo-French relations allows Talbot to comment directly upon increased intolerance and prejudice. He also points to the culpability of the media in making one of the villains a newspaper proprietor. In further references to Islamophobia, as mentioned, the first volume allegorizes the various mobilizations of political rhetoric surrounding the “9/11” and “7/7” attacks. In the series, the result of an attack on the Robida Tower is described as Ground Zero a direct reference to “9/11”.42 Here, the British are positioned by the French media and politicians as dangerous extremists who failed to integrate, again returning to the Empire policy of assimilation, and indeed are positioned as having continued terrorist activities after gaining independence. The books offer reflections and analysis of other “Empires” of the past and present and the way that they deal with ethnic minorities and foreign powers. The larger narrative in the first book links the murder of the Honourable Citizen Raymond Leigh-Otter with Robida Tower and the machinations of various powerful French figures, initially identified in the book as the Knights of Lyon, in their attempts to maintain (or gain) hegemonic power. For instance, Jean-Marie Lapin (a rabbit), a minor right-wing politician, became the French Prime Minister by promising a “War on Terror” and a hard line against “British Anarchy”.43 However, Lapin and others used automatons to destroy the Robida Tower to ensure their rise to power. The series explores the ways in which those in power may try to “create” a notion of an “alien” enemy to control or unify their population from

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92 Mel Gibson the first book onward. In doing so Talbot also starts to articulate what Fortier asked: “When does ‘respectable diversity’ turn into unrespectable ‘difference’? What kinds of mixing are acceptable, which are not?”44 For the Knights, the shift from diversity into difference is marked by what one of their number describes as decadence, citing alongside atheism and the use of drugs, that “promiscuity and inter-species fornication are rife!”45 Talbot shows LeBrock and Billie, the central badger couple of the later volumes, falling in love across national lines and also offers images of mixed animal couples (who may be French or English) as a positive counterpoint to the Knights’ viewpoint. Their view is also articulated by other characters, like the ducks who turn Billie down when she is working as a prostitute because she is “not even water fowl”.46 While in the real world a badger and a duck are physically incompatible, in Grandville they are, so the comment above is about prejudice rather than practicality. In a further point, another member of the Knights cites Britain’s oil as the motivation for starting war, again referring obliquely to events in our world.47 In the third volume, in addition, crossing class boundaries is seen as problematic by at least one authority figure. The Knights of the first book, and their successors, fear both “mixing” and fragmentation (as represented by Britain’s independence). The concerns of such characters can be seen as related to some of the more excessive commentaries on multiculturalism made in the mid-2000s in Britain. For instance, Modood states that Muslim migrants were seen as enacting a policy of “cultural separatism and self-imposed segregation . . . and that a ‘politically correct’ multiculturalism had fostered fragmentation rather than integration”.48 This view of fragmentation and radicalism as emerging from multiculturalism was taken to extremes. For instance, according to Modood, media commentator William Pfaff argued that the “British bombers are a consequence of a misguided and catastrophic pursuit of multiculturalism”.49 Here again, multiculturalism takes the blame for changes caused by economic shifts. In the first graphic novel, finding that the recently declared war on the Communards in French Indo-China is failing to unify the Empire as they hoped, the Knights plan other terrorist actions framing the British in addition to Robida Tower, which they hope will lead to a war on Britain and so to both access to resources and sales of munitions. The focus is to be the bombing of the Trans-Empire Song Contest. This is a reference to the Eurovision Song Contest, a contest and institution that can be seen as both cross-cultural and multicultural. The increasing excessiveness of the Knights’ actions flags up to the problematic nature of calls for social cohesion and integration in the world beyond the books. The second volume moves toward revealing high-level government corruption in Britain and delves further into the history of the fight for independence and looks at the guilt of various high-level government figures in a massacre of British citizen-soldiers. Here Talbot argues that elites in both

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Anthropomorphism and Multiculturalism 93 countries have been attempting to shore up their own power at the expense of the wider population. The intolerance of the “other” actually masks an “us” and “them” based around power elites and class. Again, Talbot argues optimistically that in contrast to the elites, the general public will, even given their small acts of intolerance toward each other, support a broader international unity. The discussion of difference and the need for common ground is shown in conversations between Billie and LeBrock in the later books, a huge contrast to the intolerance of the ruling classes. This too might be seen as having parallels in the world outside the series, in that, in the critiques of multiculturalism Fortier identifies, it was argued that some commentators saw tolerance as problematic, seeing it as “a sign of the nation’s weakness and an affront to the nation’s narcissistic love: we should resent the other and the diversity that he/she brings”.50 In contrast, Talbot focuses in a romantic and optimistic way on the possibilities for understanding and reconciliation at national, international and personal levels. To conclude, what Talbot suggests through the Grandville series is what Fortier described as “how messy, slippery and fragile ‘racial’ differences actually are, how porous cultural boundaries can be, how fluid cultural practices are and how experiences of racialized or culturalized differences are uneven across class, gender, and urban/regional divides”.51 The complexity of the multicultural mix of the series demonstrates that “difference” can take many forms (not exclusively “race” or religious ones), and acts as a counterpoint to prejudice. Species and “race” relations are conflated here, but the aim is to make points about human intolerance, not about animal rights. In addition, the use of various styles of art in making the first book, and the reworkings of kinds of art within all the books also show complexity, diversity and difference. Throughout the series, the tensions between the various groupings of characters are explored in ways that can be seen as linked with the scapegoating of multiculturalism in Britain, and of various groups of people, in times of instability, particularly in urban environments. As such, Talbot sees multiculturalism as a potential tool in creating new ways of acknowledging diversity and difference, new ways of being French, or animal, or human, rather than a dangerous policy leading to cultural collapse. It is conservatism and control that leads to chaos here. Further, in Grandville, the narratives suggest that the creation of a dangerous “other” might be a governmental and national policy or strategy. In drawing on alternative history and anthropomorphism, Talbot makes direct comments on the impact on communities of using fear as a way of controlling a diverse population. Talbot, while creating adventure stories, flags up ways in which those who have power may seek to maintain it, particularly through attempting to create divisions, waging what they position as “just” wars, and through the manipulation of economic and media structures. He sees the latter as maintaining or creating stereotypes, here of the “British

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94 Mel Gibson terrorist”, in much the way that the Parekh Report identified that the media coverage of Islam typically juxtaposed the adjective Islamic, with “militant”, extremist “fundamentalism” and “terrorism”.52 Talbot also depicts an erosion of civil liberties and a resistance to human rights for all citizens, using the curtailing of travel, the violent disruption of peaceful marches and the bande dessinée characters to make these points. Further, he suggests that the result of such policies may be revolution and the collapse of existing national structures. Policies of assimilation, or of social cohesion, become, from his point of view, a rallying point for individuals and groups against those imposing such policies, even when, as in the case of the English language, the battle is lost. His pessimism about entrenched powerful elites, always the enemy here, is counterbalanced by a romantic faith in the potential and ability of some members of the general population to start overcoming prejudice, to make connections and respond to change. He also firmly positions himself as believing that diversity and difference can create strength and that acknowledging it is a political necessity. These narratives, then, suggest a need for, as Helen Davis notes, summarizing aspects of Stuart Hall’s work, “A multiculturalism that recognize[s] the real cultural diversity which is the essential condition of the modern world”.53 NOTES 1. Bryan Talbot, Grandville (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). Bryan Talbot, Grandville Mon Amour (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010). Bryan Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012). 2. Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire, 99. 3. Angela Cassidy, “Vermin, Victims and Disease: UK Framings of Badgers In and Beyond the Bovine TB Controversy” Sociologia Ruralis 52, 2, (2012): 192–214. 4. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (London: Methuen, 1908). Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire, 99. 5. Helen Briggs, “Q&A: The badger cull,” BBC, accessed February 26, 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22614350. 6. Stuart Hall with Nira Yuval-Davis, “Rethinking Multiculturalisms” (Address presented at the conference Racisms, Sexisms and Contemporary Politics of Belonging, International Sociological Association Ethnic, Race and Minority Relations Committee and Women in Society Committee, London, August 25–27, 2004). 7. Ali Rattansi. Multiculturalism: A Very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21. 8. Talbot, Grandville, 55. 9. Nira Yuval-Davis, Floya Anthias and Eleonore Kofman, “Secure Borders and Safe Haven and the Gendered Politics of Belonging: Beyond Social Cohesion” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, 3, (2005): 513–35. 10. Parekh Report of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (The Runnymede Trust/Profile Books: London, 2000): 26.

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Anthropomorphism and Multiculturalism 95 11. Stuart Hall, “The Multicultural Question”, in Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglement, Transruptions, ed. Barnor Hesse. (London: Zed Books, 2000), 229. 12. Hall, “The Multicultural Question”, 228. 13. Hall, “The Multicultural Question”, 238. 14. Phil Jones, Rethinking Childhood: Attitudes in Contemporary Society. (London: Continuum, 2009), 36–45. 15. Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire, 6. 16. Stuart Hall, et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan Press, 1978), 217. 17. Hall, “The Multicultural Question”, 211. 18. Rattansi, Multiculturalism, 5. 19. Talbot, Grandville, 35–36. 20. Talbot, Grandville, 20, 85. 21. Talbot, Grandville, 34. 22. Nira Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabiran and Ulrike Vieten. The Situated Politics of Belonging. (London: Sage, 2006), 5. 23. Beatrix Potter. The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (London: Frederick Warne & Co, 1903). 24. Talbot, Grandville, 16. 25. Talbot, Grandville, 17. 26. Talbot, Grandville, 22. 27. Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire, 49. 28. Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire, 99. 29. Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire, 99. 30. Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire, 60–61. 31. Talbot, Grandville, 19. 32. T. H Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950) and T. H. Marshall, The Right to Welfare and Other Essays (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1981). 33. Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire, 8. 34. Fortier, Anne-Marie. Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation (Oxon: Routledge, 2008), 5. 35. Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire, 60. 36. Talbot, Grandville, 31. 37. Talbot, Grandville, 22. 38. Tariq Modood, Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 65. 39. Modood, Multiculturalism, 65. 40. Talbot, Grandville Bête Noire, 38–39. 41. Talbot, Grandville, 32. 42. Talbot, Grandville, 34. 43. Talbot, Grandville, 51. 44. Fortier, Multicultural Horizons, 17. 45. Talbot, Grandville, 61. 46. Talbot, Grandville Mon Amour, 47. 47. Talbot, Grandville, 85. 48. Modood, Multiculturalism, 11. 49. Modood, Multiculturalism, 12. 50. Fortier, Multicultural Horizons, 17. 51. Fortier, Multicultural Horizons, 85. 52. Parekh Report, 169–70. 53. Helen Davis, Understanding Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 2004), 188.

6

The Image of the Foreigner in Historical Romanian Comics under Ceauşescu’s Dictatorship1

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Mihaela Precup

There are several reasons why the conversation about multiculturalism in comics needs to include an examination of the body of work produced by cartoonists under the censorship and particular ideological duress of dictatorship. The case of Romania, which after World War II found itself assigned to the Soviet sphere of influence, is particularly significant, considering its position at the confluence of several cultural spaces and its belated geographical coalescence into its approximate present-day shape. Post-1945 Romanian comics went through two ideological changes of pace: the dictatorship of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1948–1965), a Stalinist dictator, during whose time comics publication was quite sparse, and the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu (1965–1989), who continued his predecessor’s violent repression, and whose rampant cult of personality and nationalist obsessions led to the rewriting of Romanian history and memory.2 It was during Ceauşescu’s long dictatorship that Romanian comics—and historical comics in particular—became part of the frantic effort to rewrite the image of Romania as a morally superior country whose ethnic and linguistic uniformity precluded even the European invention of the concept of the nation. Thus, in historical comics Romania was pruned of all ethnic diversity, and its (proto)citizens formed a superior race content (but never allowed) to live in peace in their own territory. This chapter will begin by examining both the communist comics audience and the particular representational code it was taught to operate with, but also the possible implications of the recent revival of communist comics in Romania through exhibitions, books, public talks, and the creation of new “Romanian comics” sections in bookstores.3 COMICS CENSORSHIP UNDER CEAUŞESCU’S DICTATORSHIP (1965–1989) On October 18, 1977, Nicolae Ceauşescu called a special meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to discuss the grave situation of Romanian children’s magazines, the main sources of Romanian comics at

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The Image of the Foreigner 97 the time. The dictator had the layouts of several magazines right in front of him and was clearly upset. There were a few things that seemed to be angering him in particular: 1. the science magazine for children Minitechnicus had a name that did not sound Romanian, and he was concerned that children would be encouraged “not to respect their own language”; 2. magazines such as Luminiţa and Arici Pogonici were much too light in tone and easy to read, and consequently needed to be improved, especially since it had already been decided to turn one of them into the more ideologically laden Şoimii Patriei; 3. the contents of the first issue of an unnamed magazine made it seem “like a magazine edited in other countries, on another planet”; 4. he had asked for some previous revisions but he could tell they had not been made because the samples he had in front of him even contained “the same caricatures,” by which he must have meant comics. A closer look at Ceauşescu’s tone and language shows how little he thought of playfulness or humor in children’s magazines. Without being in any way interested in the history of comics, he was keen on placing the medium outside the realm of humor, not because he may have agreed with Will Eisner’s contemporary plea that comics should be taken seriously as an art form, but because the ideological education of children and adolescents was part of a supremely serious grand plan of invasive population control, as he himself put it during the same meeting, “What we set out to do in the first place is make sure we produce serious magazines, especially since they are targeting children. If they were for adults, then I would understand, I would be more accepting, but when I think that we are creating magazines addressed to children, they need to be very well-designed, to their level of thinking, and help children better solve their learning, work, and life issues.” He even went further and rhetorically asked, scolding his subordinates for the way their neglect had negatively impacted the young generation of Romanians, “Is this our answer [. . .] to teaching them about life and work, shaping their socialist consciousness, acquiring and putting into practice the principles and norms of socialist ethics and equity, developing the love and devotion of the young generation for their country, party, and people?”4 These details are relevant because they also indicate the politics behind editing comics during Ceauşescu’s dictatorship: child-focused content needed to be in keeping with Ceauşescu’s own brand of nationalism, i.e. without any foreign words (even if one of his subordinates indicates that the term Minitechnicus is from Latin, one of the sources of the Romanian language) and reflect the geographical, linguistic, and cultural realities of Romania, with as little foreign intervention as possible. At the same time, the question of seriousness clearly indicates that Ceauşescu’s was indeed a humorless regime, where a subversive political joke could get you jail time or at least a memorable interview at the headquarters of the Securitate, and where much attention was given to the political education of children.5 Six years before, in June 1971, Ceauşescu had drafted seventeen proposals meant to regulate written and visual public representation in the press.

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98 Mihaela Precup Although he used the blanket term “socialist humanism” to refer to this new method, it was evident, as Dennis Deletant shows, that he was actually enforcing a return to the principles of socialist realism from the 1950s. For Romanian comics, as well as illustrated children’s books and textbooks, this meant an adherence to a realism that often emphasized stereotypical notions of masculinity and created the illusion that they were trustworthy portraits of actual historical figures.6 Also, in December 1971, Ceauşescu initiated a piece of legislation that forbade the publication abroad of any type of text that might have damaged the image of his regime. This latter measure reflected the dictator’s desire to preserve the good name of the country by censoring potentially uncomfortable artists. It appears that both this and the rewriting of Romania as a paragon of virtue were attempts to compensate for an inferiority complex that was both voiced (in that part of the nationalist ideology that is still popular today and that claims, falsely, that Romania never attacked another country, but was always forced to defend itself from foreign enemies) and hidden (by promoting Romanian exceptionalism and exaggerating the country’s role in world history). This type of “protochronism” also involved denying or underemphasizing all foreign influence on Romanian culture or identity; this went hand in hand with Ceauşescu’s discreet but firm measures against the Hungarian minority, who saw its publications and educational programs slowly reduced.7 However, in spite of the dictatorship’s best efforts to efficiently teach a version of history dictated by nationalist rhetoric, the audience of communist comics was not naïve, even if they were children and teens. Exposed from an early age to an educational system that was still relying on learning by rote, and witnesses to increasing dissatisfaction with the regime expressed by their families at home, Romanian children were raised in an atmosphere that enabled them to read history as fiction, as Adrian Oţoiu also shows: Hybridity, double-codedness, and ambiguity were ingredients of everyday life under the Ceauşescu regime, when experience was doublecoded from the earliest age. Six-year-old children already knew that the Ceauşescu vilified at home as the ogre-that-cuts-gas-and-electricity was unmentionable at school, where the sinister Mr. Hyde turned into a benign Dr. Jekyll, “most beloved son of the nation” and “magisterial Helmsman.”8 However encouraging it may be that children were not passive receivers of ideology, but had probably learned to discern between the public and the private space as sources of very different versions of past and present events, one cannot help but ponder the long-term effects of the ritual practice of this type of double-codedness. I will, however, come back to this in my conclusions to this chapter. In fact, the nationalist rhetoric of the communist dictatorship was not altogether new, although its visual and verbal representation created a

The Image of the Foreigner 99

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particularly surreal space where fact was difficult to separate from fiction without serious research. A large portion of the interwar Romanian intelligentsia, some of whom were fascist sympathizers, had promoted a nationalist interpretation of the Romanian past. In a way, Ceauşescu was merely giving new scope and tremendous energy to a nationalist movement whose members had already been imprisoned for their anti-communist beliefs, as Maria Todorova shows: The theme of Romania’s uniqueness was continued in the postwar period and reached its frenetic culmination under Ceauşescu, as a compensatory mechanism for the self-conscious and troublesome feeling of being trapped in an ambiguous status, the in-betweenness of East and West. One would have thought that the performance of Romania in the last decade of Ceauşescu’s rule would have sobered somewhat the exclusiveness of Romanian intellectuals, at least in their rapport to the other Balkan nations, at least for some time. There are some indications for that; there are others against.9 Todorova’s observation shows that communist expressions of nationalism, enforced upon the population as they were, need to be reexamined in a context that draws attention not only to the aesthetic achievement of the cartoonist, but also to the way in which the methods of socialist realism worked together with the imposed script to use comics as an educational strategy that would shape future generations. FOREIGN ALLIES AND FOES IN COMICS OF THE ROMANIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION10 Most of the books and comics addressed to children contained historical episodes from the Romanian past or simply from the past of identifiable Romanian ancestors, from before Romania started thinking of itself as a nation. The main purpose was for comics—specifically historical comics—to teach a version of the Romanian past that would boost nationalist sentiment and justify a negative perception of the outside, while Romania was painted as a country of pure-hearted valiant and hard-working men and women, permanently assailed by evil forces. The first communist children’s magazine came out in 1947.11 Licurici (1947–1953) was a weekly magazine that only contained comics for two years, after which they were avoided because of the suspicion that they may be repositories of Western capitalist ideas.12 After Stalin’s death in March 1954, the name of the magazine was changed into Cravata Roşie (1953), thus reflecting a common trend in early children’s magazines, i.e. the authorities’ attempt to constantly revise and repackage their ideological content. Cravata Roşie was edited by The Central Committee of the Union of Young

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100 Mihaela Precup Workers, and it was a thirty-two-page black and white monthly publication (since 1954; before that it had been bi-monthly) with two or three pages of comics per issue.13 On October 1, 1967, Cravata Roşie was replaced by a new title, Cutezătorii, which became the longest-standing children’s magazine in communist Romania. Cutezătorii was a weekly magazine, and it published an assortment of comics, short stories, poems, games, reportages, and letters from readers. The magazine targeted older readers, and it also collaborated with Pif Gadget (1969). Together with José Cabrero Arnal (the creator of one of the most popular children’s comics in communist Romania, Pif et Hercule, published by Éditions Vaillant), it organized the first comics competition where readers were invited to submit their own work.14 It may be worth mentioning here that Editions Vaillant, a left-wing French publishing house, was welcome in Romania at the time because of its political orientation. Through Vaillant, other comics were introduced to Romanian cartoonists and comic book readers as well, such as, to mention but a few names that are relevant for this chapter: “Teddy Ted (drawn by Gerald Forton), Davy Crockett, Loup Noir (drawings by Kline), Fanfan la Tulipe (Gaty-Nortier), Robin des Bois (Martin Sièvre), Dr. Justice (Carlo Marcello), Rahan (André Chéret) and [. . .] Corto Maltese.” The realistic representational style included in these readily available French comics clearly influenced Romanian cartoonists, who worked under the obligation of keeping comics as close to realism as possible (and who thus found the influence convenient).15 Thus, in a country where visual representations of foreign nationals— and particularly noncommunist foreign nationals—were scarce, comics provided children with the most constant presence of whatever lay outside Romania’s borders. There were two main types of comics where foreigners were featured: travel comics and historical comics, but the latter was considerably more frequent. Historical comics were clearly well researched for period detail, including various types of weaponry, army ranks, and battle strategies. Sometimes, when a military leader’s portrait was already established or popular enough, it was also used in the comic, so as not to upset the referential link to lived history that the regime clung to, while at the same time pressuring writers to create scripts whose interpretation of historical events was fanciful. The events were mainly accurate, with a few notable omissions in those situations that might have stained the national image. For instance, the question of Romania’s alliance with the Axis powers during World War II was hardly ever represented, and since it was quite difficult to make up other events that would replace the fascist alliance that was fracturing the unblemished image of Romania, it was generally avoided. World War II comics simply started after Romania switched sides late in the war, in 1944. The plot of historical comics was broadly accurate if one was not a historian (in that some events had indeed taken place), but it always gave the proto-Romanian or Romanian “heroes of history” an uncanny

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The Image of the Foreigner 101 anticipated knowledge of the future greatness of Romania, and a type of anticipated national consciousness that was pure invention. The cartoon entitled Burebista features a favorite figure of communist rewritings of history, and, not coincidentally, a character who is still invoked by neo-fascist groups in Romania, King Burebista (82BC–44BC), who was supposed to have created a proto-national unit of Getae and Dacian tribes on some of the territory of present-day Romania, and who resisted the Roman conquest. Romanian historian Lucian Boia notes the communist utilization of the foundational myth of Burebista’s unification of tribes: The Dacians were put to work by Communist ideology in its intensification of nationalism, around 1980, the year in which the 2,050th anniversary of the foundation of the first Dacian state ruled by Burebista was celebrated with great pomp. [. . .] The Institute of History of the Communist Party [. . .] started (with a degree of competence that may be imagined!) to deal with the problem of origins. The line the Institute adopted was decidedly pro-Dacian. [. . .] Thus Romanization was done away with, while the value of Dacian civilization was amplified beyond measure [. . .].16 Burebista was celebrated as an iconic figure of the patriotic leader who holds foreign invasion at bay, and thus a worthy forerunner of Ceauşescu’s, whose nationalist stance during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, when he warned the Soviets not to invade Romania as well, made many think of him as a defender of Romania’s national integrity.17 It is thus possible to pinpoint the beginning of Ceauşescu’s rampant nationalism, and claim, with Victor Neumann, that it is the very fact that Ceauşescu confiscated nationalism (which, in Romania, had belonged to the anti-communist intelligentsia) that greatly delayed the formation of a coherent anti-communist ideology during his time in power.18 The image of Burebista was important enough to justify the production of two versions of the cartoon bearing his name. The first appeared in installments in 1979, and it was drawn by Sandu Florea (occasionally with Theodora Florea), who moved to the United States and has since worked for Marvel, DC, and other comic book publishers. The second appeared in 1980 and was drawn by Valentin Tănase, an artist who not only illustrated a large number of historical comics and children’s books, but also produced a few portraits of Ceauşescu and his wife. In both cases, Burebista finishes at that point in history where Caesar is assassinated and Burebista no longer needs to fear a Roman invasion. The cartoon ends with the larger-than-life figure of the Dacian commander who did not, in fact, create a cohesive state later mirrored by Ceauşescu’s Romania, as the cartoon suggests, following the line of thought imposed by state propaganda.19 The rhetoric used in all these speeches, accompanied as they are by wide hand gestures meant to suggest a leader’s sweeping domination of crowds is, for anyone who is at

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102 Mihaela Precup all familiar with Ceauşescu’s rhetoric or official speeches, strikingly similar. Burebista, whose description is often accompanied by adjectives such as “brave” and “wise,” stresses the strategic importance of unity, which is meant here (in the 1979 version, Fig. 6.1) to be read as an prefiguration of national unity, by using the unsophisticated metaphor of the lone, broken tree that is not strong enough to withstand a powerful storm. However, in spite of this contemporary intrusion in service of the (proto) national rhetoric, Burebista’s enemies are represented by artists who did not stray from what would have been historically accurate. For instance, the Celts are engaged in wild frontal attack, and they sport axes and carefully drawn breastplates. Other foreign enemies of Burebista appear briefly (such as Ariovist, a Germanic tribe leader, and Caius Iulius Caesar, the Roman leader) in small ID-photo-sized panels. In this cartoon, Burebista’s enemies’ efforts seem to be useless, either because they are no match for the protoRomanian king or because their behavior is too flimsy to be taken seriously. For instance, in one scene, in their attempt to deliver a threatening message from Burebista meant to curb the allegiance to Rome of the Greek inhabitants of Olbia, two Dacian messengers are quite shocked by the improper conduct of their addressees, who are dancing around, skimpily dressed and clearly intoxicated. The two virtuous Dacians stand somewhere to the side, judging the flippant foreigners from behind the reassurance of the previously stated fact that Burebista had forbidden the consumption of wine in his provinces. Oştenii lui Mihai Viteazul is a comic that focuses on another protoRomanian leader, Michael the Brave (1558–1601), who in the year 1600 unified the three Romanian provinces (Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia) for a few months. The comic does not focus on the Romanian leader, but rather on a male heroic figure, Dan Buzdugan, or Dan the Mace, so

Figure 6.1 King Burebista gives a speech to his soldiers. The text in the speech bubble reads: “Seuthes, Recilis, see how the storm broke that lonely tree. . . . Only forests can stand up!” (from Burebista by Sandu Florea and Theodora Florea, 1979)

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The Image of the Foreigner 103 named after the two maces he always has on him and aptly uses. Dan Buzdugan is a slender yet muscular young soldier, a light-hearted hero who fashions rhyming couplets as he thrusts his maces at various Tartar and Turkish enemy skulls. The violence is minimized in the comic, as no graphic images are shown (but merely suggested as panel after panel focuses on the hero swinging his maces toward an invisible target), and as the audience is clearly invited to laugh at the hero’s witty poems. This was, apparently, the place where humor was allowed: when Romania’s enemies’ skulls were brutally smashed with a mace. Such scenes are quickly replaced by minute drawings of period details. For instance, a scene inside the enemy’s camp from Nicopolis shows an attempt to accurately depict not only costumes, but also architecture and weaponry. The main lessons that are taught by this comic seem to be that the Turks are sly people who will not keep their word, but also that even Turkish education cannot make blood thinner than water, as Dan Buzdugan discovers his long-lost brother, who had been kidnapped by the Turks. A kidnapped damsel in distress also makes an appearance and is saved; dressed as a sultan’s slave, complete with short veil and generous cleavage, she is one of the rare female presences in historical comics.20 Eroii de la Plevna (1977) is a good example of one of those historical comics that approach an event meant to not only put Romania in a good light, but also suggest a long-standing tradition of Romanian-Russian cooperation. It covers the battle of Pleven (from August–November 1877), when the RussianRomanian armies defeated the Ottoman armies, following which Romania (or rather, the United Romanian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, as it was known at the time, minus Transylvania) is recognized as an independent state. The Russian general Skobelev, who looks quite a lot like Lenin (another little hint at historical anticipation), dictates strategy, and Osman Pasha, the Turkish commander, surrenders to the “young and brave Romanian army,” thus acknowledging not only their superior fighting power but also an implied moral superiority (since the Romanian fight was anti-colonial).21 The problematic category of World War II comics is held together by the uniform negative portrayal of German officers and soldiers, who are either extremely tough or very foolish, but they are always evil. For instance, in Balada Eroica (written by Octav Pancu-Iasi; drawn by Puiu Manu, 1974), the German officers look very thin, grim, and serious. No mention is made of the Romanian alliance with the Nazis; instead, all we know is that the German officer in question has somehow amassed a fortune in Romania and is worrying about how to get it back home. August de foc (1989) is a story told in the first person by a fictitious Romanian teacher to his pupils. He had been a young communist in August 1944, when Romania switched sides (a moment that is quickly glossed over), and he tells of a botched attempt by the Germans to occupy a school. In this case, the Germans are portrayed as smirking dunces who smoke cigars in anticipated celebration of what they think will be their victory (which is prevented by Romanian ingenuity and valor). Escadrila nemuritoare (written by Dinu Alexandrescu; drawn by

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104 Mihaela Precup Puiu Manu, 1982) is one large air fight scene, and the story of a legendary squadron that fights Nazi aircrafts that bear no swastikas and are mysteriously ineffective against the plucky Romanian pilots.22 One category of historical comics dealt specifically with foreign history, and it remained quite popular throughout the communist dictatorship, i.e. comics that focused on Native American tribes in order to suggest an invisible trans-temporal alliance between Romania and, for instance, the Incas. Marele drum al incaşilor (1969, written by Darie Novăceanu; drawings by Mihai Sînzianu), in which the story also offers a good pretext for an antireligious stance, tells the story of how, in November 1532 Spanish conquistador Francesco Pizarro captures Incan emperor Atahualpa and keeps him in captivity for almost a year until he executes him by strangulation (rather than burning him at the stake, as a “heathen” would have been). In the Romanian cartoon, Pizarro is described as “brave, sly, and cruel, illiterate and greedy who, in his youth had been a pig keeper in his youth in Caceres, Spain.” Stories about the Native Americans were clearly interesting to the regime because communist nationalism was writing an image of Romania as a small but sturdy signpost of defense (never offense) against various empires and invading tribes and armies. At the same time, through their lack of sufficient particulars or in-depth knowledge of the culture, coupled with the contemporary lingo of the communist regime (produced by every heroic figure in comics), the good intentions behind these texts, whatever they may have been, resulted in an offensive oversimplified version of Native American cultures, which were props in the staging of the uniqueness of Romania.23 The persistent visual rhetoric behind Romania’s greatness clashed with the image of a nation that, during Ceauşescu’s regime, became increasingly isolated from the outside world, and where one’s separation from reality/ the “real news” was so great that one could not objectively tell fact from fiction. One could of course play an always tentative and dangerous detective game in search of the real news by listening to Radio Free Europe and learning to read between the lines to tell the completely made-up from the actual event.24 The comics contained a similar mixture of fictitious characters and actual participants in history, all of them treated as if they were equally “real.” There were no superheroes, but instead there were virtuous protoRomanians endowed not only with heightened moral sense, but also with uncommon physical prowess and uncanny awareness that their bravery would help build something grand in the future (i.e. Ceauşescu’s Romania). There seemed to be a constant effort being made to consolidate Romania’s apparently threatened national credibility by pushing its awareness of itself as a nation as far back as possible. The comics thus reflected a double consciousness that seemed to both pinpoint and hide a serious inferiority complex. They were full of muscular young men and equally muscular older men who were prone to giving long speeches about the glory of the nation, as well as rare images of young women who were almost never romantically

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The Image of the Foreigner 105 involved with any of the male heroes (the suggestion being that they would have been a distraction) and whose purpose was to function as minor characters, either as damsels in distress or as auxiliaries to the heroes. Since caricature was not encouraged, as demonstrated by the regime’s preference for socialist realism and Ceauşescu’s belief that child-related content should serve a serious educational purpose, I believe the presence of openly racist stereotypes in Romanian comics was not encouraged by the regime not because Ceauşescu wanted the artists to be fair in their representations of Romania’s former enemies, but because it was believed that caricature would be unsuitable for demonstrating the inferiority of Romania’s enemies. Thus, the figure of the foreigner (rarely a friend, generally an enemy) was always tied up with the figure of the Romanian or protoRomanian hero, who always outshone everybody, so that the enemy was never a larger-than-life figure, but rather an episodic nuisance. In this carefully orchestrated representational strategy, it was important not to fetishize the negative features of the enemy, but rather the grand positive features of the hero. The artists occasionally stray from the all-important code of realistic representation when they draw proto-Romanian heroes as members of the Beatles (Fig. 6.2), but they do so within the strict policing of a visual regime that makes the viewer constantly wonder if the artist has just winked at them from behind the curtain of official representation or if the viewer has hallucinated Paul McCartney and George Harrison. Either way, Romanian comics during the communist regime are a good sample of the type of manipulation of visual codes that totalitarianism can produce. The viewer is thus poised like a detective over the details with a magnifying glass, eager to find subversion or just make it up. Still, making up subversion would simply replicate the communist rewriting of history. Thus, the presence of the Beatles, who are part of a very different ideological register, in the context of a comic like Burebista, which was read primarily by children and teenagers who may not have had access to enough photographic representations of the band to recognize them, does not, in fact, amount to much. It is one of those many cases of doublespeak that Romanian artists had learned to perform, winking at select members of their audience for the sheer pleasure of getting away with it because the censors were often unaware of what they were looking at. However, the political effect of these gestures is difficult to quantify. One could argue that they brought a glimmer of hope and a sense of community through complicity and mutual recognition in a society where atomization was encouraged, for fear that people might form political alliances and work to topple the regime. But it is difficult not to compare the soft example of the Beatles with the work of writers and protesters who spoke out openly and directly against the dictatorship, and who were imprisoned and persecuted as a result. Coming as it does from Valentin Tănase, whose visual repertoire also contained, to give only one example, a socialist realist painting showing Ceauşescu as a luminous figure of progress teaching

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106 Mihaela Precup

Figure 6.2 Acornion of Dionisopolis, the emissary of a Greek colony, speaks to King Burebista, in the presence of High Priest Deceneu (in the background). The caption reads: “Burebista himself welcomed him with the highest honors, in the presence of High Priest Deceneu, and an agreement was reached. The guest brought many interesting news of Thracia and Rome” (from Burebista by Valentin Tănase, 1980).

Romanian architects how to level Bucharest, it is difficult to read his quote as anything more than a tribute to a band whose music he liked and whose looks—from the long-haired bearded period—fit the standard profile of the (proto)Romanian farmer and fighter.25 The demonization of the aggressive foreigner coming to invade the peaceful Romanian land was later interestingly paralleled by Romania’s new status after December 1989 as a demonized post-communist nightmare whose citizens would flee to invade the West through the democratic opening of the country’s borders.26 At the same time, the examination of the visual rhetoric of the communist dictatorship from Romania can serve to demystify the construction of a national ideology whose rhetoric is still quoted today. Romanian exceptionalism has a lot in common with other versions of national exceptionalism, but it is also the product of an underexamined specific political regime that successfully used censorship and historical revisionism as part of a large oppressive mechanism to control the entire population, with a special focus on the social and ethnic other.27

The Image of the Foreigner 107

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NOTES 1. The research for this chapter was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS-UEFISCDI, for project PNII-RU-TE no. 64/2011 titled Cross-Cultural Encounters in American Trauma Narratives: A Comparative Approach to Personal and Collective Memories. 2. Romania’s first postwar leader, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, was mainly interested in consolidating the frail new regime by—to name but one of many human rights violations—exterminating and imprisoning the anti-communist dissenters and his own rivals. The next Romanian leader was dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, who continued the persecution of dissenters and who slowly developed a cult of personality, which, coupled with his nationalism, led to him using the media almost entirely for the purpose of demonstrating his own greatness at the helm of an exceptional nation. Romanian exceptionalism was touted on TV, in newspapers, in the entire educational system, as well as the arts. Ceauşescu remained in power until December 1989, when the communist regime was overthrown. During Ceauşescu’s time, as nationalism became an increasingly important part of the official party line, the stress fell less on cultural diversity and more on national myths of origin that would demonstrate Romania’s uniqueness. As historian Lucian Boia shows in his book Romania (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), this country is, in fact, “at one and the same time, Balkan, Eastern European and Central European, without belonging wholly to any of these divisions—which are in any case somewhat artificial” (12). The effects of this location at the intersection of several cultural spaces were denied by the communist regime, as the historical comics discussed in this chapter will demonstrate. For a full list of comics publications during Gheorghiu-Dej’s regime, see the first history of Romanian comics, Alexandru Ciubotariu and Dodo Niţă, Istoria benzii desenate româneşti, 1891–2010 (Bucureşti: Vellant, 2010), 56–62. For a full list of comics publications during Ceauşescu’s regime, see Ciubotariu and Niţă, Istoria benzii desenate româneşti, 1891–2010, 62–157. 3. At present, in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, with a population of roughly 4 million people, there is only one comic book store, Librăria Jumătatea Plină (the name translates as “The Bookstore Is Half Full”). It is devoted mainly to independent French, Canadian, and English-language comics, but it is also the main supporter of the independent Romanian contemporary scene. Anthony Frost is the only other bookstore that boasts a substantial comics section, but it has a smaller number of Romanian comics. Generally speaking, the Romanian audience of comics is split into two broad categories: the nostalgic admirers of the substantial number of comics produced during communism, and those who prefer the newer generation of artists, often influenced by the English-language underground tradition. The two do not generally overlap, and sometimes even engage in online arguments over what qualifies as comics. In many ways, this is not only a struggle over establishing a canon, but also an attempt by the older generation to provide a space for the rereading of comics produced during communism. There also appears to be a generational clash. Thus, younger audiences usually do not have any affective bonds that may tie them to communist comics, which are difficult to come by, despite attempts to re-edit them and online databases with scanned comics from people’s private collections (see, for instance, http://revistacutezatorii.blogspot.ro/). 4. This particular speech of Ceauşescu’s is reproduced in Ciubotariu and Niţă, Istoria benzii desenate româneşti, 1891-2010, 258. The translation is mine. The language is awkward because it reflects Ceauşescu’s personal brand of oratory,

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108 Mihaela Precup

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

a mixture of repetitive phrases and truisms. The names of the children’s magazines translate as follows: Luminiţa—“the little light”; Arici Pogonici—a play on the word “arici,” which means “hedgehog”; Şoimii Patriei—“the country’s falcons.” This last name deserves an additional explanation, as it reflected the careful division and labeling of the country’s population into ideologically scripted age groups: children from ages four to seven were “falcons,” then they became “pioneers,” a category they belonged to until they turned fourteen or fifteen, when they became “young communists.” The switch from one category to the next was performed during a solemn ceremony where the child/teenager had to pledge allegiance to the communist party. “Young communists” had the option to become full communist party members, but some avoided this dubious honor, as a way of showing their disapproval of the regime. The Securitate was the ever-present secret police, which contributed actively to the censorship not only of the media, but also of everyday life. Voicing opinions against the regime in public was quite dangerous, even if they were “just jokes,” as the Securitate also pressured nonmembers to offer information about their work colleagues. Thus, everyday life during communism was quite full of plainclothes detectives who acted—usually under duress—as the branches of the regime’s network of information and social control. For more on everyday life during communism, see Adrian Neculau, Viaţa cotidiană în comunism (Iaşi: Editura Polirom, 2004). Dennis Deletant, România sub regimul comunist (Bucureşti: Fundaţia Academia Civică, 2012), 184–198. The historical data from this paragraph is taken from Deletant, România sub regimul comunist, 184–198. The largest ethnic minority in Romania, the Hungarians—who live mostly in Transylvania—complained that not only did Ceauşescu create measures that led to the closing of schools where all subject matters were taught in Hungarian, but he also attempted to undermine the unity of areas where the Hungarians were a majority by encouraging population shifts. Adrian Oţoiu, “An Exercise in Fictional Liminality: The Postcolonial, the Postcommunist, and Romania’s Threshold Generation,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (23: 1 & 2, 2003), 93. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 48. Historical comics became one of the main areas of interest of the Ceauşescu regime, partly because, after 1971, when he visited China and North Korea, he became interested in emulating the cultural revolution. The historical data (the year when a magazine came out, the full number of issues and pages) from this subsection are taken from the impressive archival work included in Ciubotariu and Niţă, Istoria benzii desenate româneşti, 1891–2010. Ciubotariu and Niţă, Istoria benzii desenate româneşti, 1891–2010, 263. The titles of the magazines translate as follows: Licurici as Firefly and Cravata Roşie as The Red Tie. The information about the competition was taken from Ciubotariu and Niţă, Istoria benzii desenate româneşti, 1891–2010, 68. The title Cutezătorii translates as The Bold. It claimed to encourage bold initiative and exploration, rather ironic notions for children who were growing up in a country that was very difficult to leave, mostly only because of the near-impossibility of obtaining a passport. The magazine could probably be read by children and teenagers roughly between eight and fifteen years old. It was on hiatus from the end of the communist regime in 1989 until 2006, when it was relaunched. The

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The Image of the Foreigner 109

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

“about” section on their website (www.cutezatorii.ro/index.php?id=34), displays a few covers from the magazine’s communist existence alongside newer ones. The rather unfortunate unsigned text vaguely says that “although many things have changed since then, since the parents of today were children, many have stayed the same: the joy of playing, spontaneity, curiosity” (my translation). However, Pif is much more celebrated in present-day Romania. In June– July 2012, a large exhibition celebrated Pif ’s presence in Romania, as part of the recent revival of the interest in comics I mentioned near the beginning of this chapter; it was organized in Bucharest at Sala Dalles (its title was “Pif in Romania, a Hero of the Golden Age”). The list of popular Vaillant comics was provided by Adrian-Silvan Ionescu, “Arte vizuale. Generaţiile Pif,” Observatorul cultural (663, July 2012) (accessed December 1, 2013), www.observatorcultural.ro/*articleID_27318articles_details.html. The author, a well-known Romanian art historian who speaks autobiographically about his great love of Pif and other French comics, does not mention the comics included in Romanian magazines at all. Instead, he claims that Pif worked as an educational tool that helped teach Romanian children about world history (a subject that Romanian comics rarely approached). I would like to thank David Huxley for suggesting that I look closer at what Romanian cartoonists were reading and that they must have been influenced by contemporary French creators like those from AdrianSilvan Ionescu’s list. Lucian Boia, Romania, 42. Deletant, România sub regimul communist, 171–179. Deletant convincingly argues that Ceauşescu’s foreign policy during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia made him very popular at home for a few years. Victor Neumann, Ideologie si fantasmagorie. Perspective comparative asupra istoriei gîndirii politice în Europa Est-Centrală (Iaşi: Editura Polirom, 2001), 130. Boia, Romania, 60. For a reading of how the figure of Burebista was used protochronistically in film by the communist propaganda, see Bogdan Jitea, “Protocronismul în cinematografie. Cazul Burebista.” Revista Destin Românesc 67–68 (2010): 252–260. Soldaţii lui Mihai Viteazul translates as The Soldiers of Michael the Brave. Eroii de la Plevna translates as The Heroes of Pleven. Balada eroică translates as The Heroic Ballad; August de foc as Fiery August; Escadrila nemuritoare as The Immortal Squadron. Marele Drum al Incaşilor translates as The Great Path of the Incas. For more on the multicultural presence in English-language comics, see Frederick Luis Aldama, ed., Multicultural Comics. From Zap to Blue Beetle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010). See Lucian Boia, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001). In fact, this is not even the most glaring example of the presence of empty subversion during the Ceauşescu dictatorship. In the period between 1973 and 1985, the communist propaganda found a new and efficient voice in the artistic collective “Cenaclul Flacăra,” translatable as “The Flame Art Workshop.” It organized a series of increasingly popular concerts and poetry readings, where one could hear both, say, Romanian covers of Beatles songs, and original Romanian folk music compositions of nationalist persuasion, where Ceauşescu’s name would also be praised. I would like to thank historian Bogdan Jitea for suggesting I think of the presence of the Beatles in Valentin Tănase’s comic in conjunction with Cenaclul Flacăra. I believe the regime encouraged the incorporation of “Western” elements in communist

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110 Mihaela Precup propaganda in the 1970s and 1980s in order to monitor their influence over the younger population, who had been clandestinely listening to music from the other side of the Iron Curtain on Radio Free Europe, broadcasting the “real news” from Munich since 1950. 26. This was not only the case in Romania, but also in other post-communist neighbors. For more on this, see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 133. 27. More recently, apolitical nostalgia for “childhood cartoons” and toys has helped de-contextualize historical comics by placing them in the ideologically foggy world of childhood. This is possibly one of the reasons why the budding tradition of Romanian superhero comics, which continue the realistic representational mode of communist historical comics, does not seem to be interested in addressing the frequent xenophobia of their predecessors. For instance, the only successful superhero comic published in Romania at the moment is based on a Romanian fairy tale, possibly in an attempt to create an identifiably Romanian superhero. Harap-Alb Continuă contains negative images of the foreign other used unproblematically and unapologetically, much as communist cartoons had done. Since the series is not yet finished, it is difficult to say whether the creators will reexamine their choices or not.

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Part III

Monstrosity and Otherness

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7

The Monster Within and Without Spanish Comics, Monstrosity, Religion, and Alterity

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Sarah D. Harris

Comics and stereotyping have a long shared history, with the prevailing idea being that comics use visual shorthand, and in so doing, zero in on racial and ethnic difference. As Leonard Rifas writes in “Race and Comix,” for example, “Cartoonists often defend the stereotypes in their work by saying that the art of cartooning fundamentally relies on simplification, generalization, distortion, and exaggeration.”1 On the other hand, many cartoonists also use these same exaggerations of difference to call attention to them, not as a means to support or reinforce stereotypes, but rather to critique the practice of using them. Stereotyping based on ethnic and racial difference has also led to a practice whereby artists represent, and viewers understand, the “Other” as monstrous in comics and cartoons. Building on the idea that comics rely on physical exaggeration, on Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s seven theses on monstrosity, and on Spain’s multicultural and multi-ethnic history, this chapter explores the depiction of monstrosity and alterity from two divergent moments in Spain. More specifically, it argues that two chosen examples represent the extremes of a range of practice in using stereotypes to depict monsters, from near absolute appropriation of monstrous characteristics, on the one hand, to unadulterated “othering” of the monstrous enemy on the other. As with many cultural products, Spanish comics have certain similarities and other peculiarities in comparison to those produced in other countries. For instance, as on the global scale, there has been some debate among scholars over what was the first example of a comic on the Iberian Peninsula; in both cases, the answer changes depending on our chosen definition of comics. As Dirk Vanderbeke also notes, “Over the last decades, comics and graphic novels have accumulated quite a number of ancestors from high culture, chiefly in the attempt to boost the medium’s respectability in the face of the traditional accusations of mediocrity, if not outright degeneracy.”2 The intent here is not to ride on the coattails of this trend, but nonetheless, if we declare comics to be sequential art, one could argue that Alfonso X (the Wise)’s School of Translators, working across at least three different languages and religions in Toledo in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, produced the first examples of sequential art in Iberia. Not made for reproduction, the School’s Cantigas often bore illuminated and sequential images along with the text of

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114 Sarah D. Harris poems or other forms of the written word. Its use of illustrations has roots in the fact that beginning as early as the tenth century, European scholars had sought out the multicultural richness of the Iberian Peninsula, and especially the city of Toledo, as a site for study. The period of Alfonso X (King of Castile and León from 1252 to 1284), significant to the second part of this article, was one of convivencia, the simultaneous living together of languages and religions within the geographical confines of what is today Spain. The Translators used illustrations in response to the difficulty inherent to linguistic translation, and also because of their desire to communicate clearly to a broad and linguistically diverse audience. Similarly, when Alfonso the Wise of Castile had declared that the School of Translators would abandon Latin in favour of the vernacular Castilian language, this move revealed the underlying desire that the School’s works reach a broad readership. It also anticipated the later dominance of the Castilian language and Christian religion over those of the other groups present in Toledo at the time. The cultural and historical reality of this complex period has caused longterm and ongoing debates among scholars and the public at large, with interpretations ranging from those based in nostalgic longings for convivencia to those who deny any multi-ethnic or multi-religious elements to Spain’s “true” national identity.3 However, despite the interesting characteristics and context of the School of Translators, their works were certainly not modern comics. Most scholars consider modern comics the product of the western industrial modernity that emerged along with the printing press. Neither were the etchings of Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) modern comics, but they, too, rely on the interplay of image and text and therefore have significance for a discussion of visual representation of otherness in Spanish comics. Francisco de Goya’s most famous proto-comic, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” (1799), is one of the etchings in a series of prints called Caprices, implying whimsical playfulness.4 Notwithstanding the connotations of their name, these prints were far from frivolous. Meant to reveal, through the interplay of images and ironic captions, “the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance, or self-interest have made usual,” this series suggests that Goya’s Spanish contemporaries were more monstrous than the literal and figurative bogeymen they invented.5 In this way, these pieces directed Goya’s critique not outwards to elements that “contaminated” or caused problems from without, but back towards himself and his kinsmen. A court painter, he was unflinching when producing critical representations of the court. For example, the Caprices critique his community’s exaggerated belief in superstition, the predominant ignorance among the Spanish peasantry, abuses of power by the church, hypocrisy of courting and other rituals, failings of the educational systems, and the weak and ineffectual ruling class. Goya also wrote a brief textual explanation to accompany each image, and prints of the Caprices are now displayed side by side with these explanations in the Prado Museum in Madrid.

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The Monster Within and Without 115 As this chapter will explore in its next section, in contrast to the critique Goya had proposed in his Caprices, more than a century later and published under totalitarian fascist rule, several early twentieth-century Spanish adventure comics villainize and make monsters of the same religious elements present in Spain’s multicultural period of convivencia. One of the best-known series, Manuel Gago’s The Masked Warrior (1944–1980), pits a medieval Christian hero against his duplicitous and Muslim murdererrapist stepfather.6 Working within the confines of totalitarianism, the comic distances itself, in time and place, from Francisco Franco’s modern enemies to promote the same values as the dictator promoted: shorthanded by “One Spain, One Race, One Religion.”7 The absolute othering of the monstrous enemy in Gago’s series contrasts sharply with the position that Goya’s Caprices take against his Spanish society in the long nineteenth century. As context for Goya’s work, Spain, like many of its neighbours, was still under the shadow of the Inquisition at the time that Goya created this series. Therefore, any critique of the establishment, especially of the church, could be dangerous to one’s life and livelihood. However, the Spanish Inquisition was also nearing its end, and Goya enjoyed the protection provided by his recently acquired position as court painter to King Carlos IV (in 1789). In fact, it was the very attention afforded Goya from this series of etchings that led to this appointment. In apparent contradiction to this fact, Goya withdrew the series from public sale shortly after its creation, apparently fearful of possible repercussions by the Inquisition.8 Overall, Goya seems to have found himself in a complicated web of being inside the structures of power through his court appointment, being willing to critique the social fabric from which he came, while also being constrained by the oppressive environment that this power structure represented. As do the illuminated manuscripts of the Toledo School of Translators, Francisco de Goya’s work exists as an important precursor to modern comics, especially with his designs (called cartoons) for tapestries, but even more so with his Caprices and other etchings. Goya, who went deaf due to severe illness at the age of forty, witnessed firsthand both the Spanish Enlightenment and the violence of the Napoleonic wars, eventually becoming haunted by his own dark imagination. In the words of Birgit Ellefson, “In a world that no longer believed in witches, Goya captured the dark forces of witchcraft that are present within humanity.”9 Around the time he lost his hearing, Goya began to critique especially destructive elements in his own society through his painting and etching. The etchings central to the discussion in the present chapter show social criticism while combining images and text but don’t include the sequential component common in many definitions of modern comics. My intent here is not to wonder whether or not these definitions are accurate, nor to consider these prints as modern comics (which, of course, they are not), but rather to use them to highlight the range of practice in othering monsters.

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116 Sarah D. Harris Of Goya’s monsters in the Caprices, Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Goya’s great merit consists in having created a credible form of the monstrous [. . . .] All those distortions, those bestial faces, those diabolic grimaces of his are impregnated with humanity.”10 Rafael Argullol has noted that in Goya’s dark paintings, “lo terrible se presenta como la norma” [“the terrible is presented as the norm”].11 As I hope will become clear, these statements support my analysis that the monstrous distortions of Goya’s etchings come from his identification with deeply human flaws, such that classifications stereotypical of monstrosity break down. I would also expand on what these two quotations say, for whereas Baudelaire emphasizes the humanity present in the monsters that Goya illustrated, and Argullol notes the monstrous normality that Goya represents, the critiques I see in many of Goya’s etchings also point more specifically at the contemporary Spanish society that surrounded him and included him. This series is not simply a reflection of the monstrosity of humanity (though it is this), but also an accusation levelled at several specific components of the environment of the long Spanish nineteenth century, including the church, aristocratic parents, courtesans, and the superstitious populace. Not entirely unlike the critique in the Caprices, it is my assertion that monsters are simultaneously universal and particular: they emerge from universal societal needs, including the need to exteriorize fears and build an “us” in contrast to a “them,” but the particular form that monsters take speaks to the specificity of a time and place. For example, the Caprices represent monstrous hypocrites, abusers of power, and gluttons, likely arising from underlying fears of uncertainty, powerlessness, and lack of control. Each one of these fears, I would argue, represents a universalized human tension. However, the Caprices also depict these monsters in specific ways that are recognizable especially by an audience that knows something about the historical and cultural context from which Goya arose. In addition to summarizing the works’ context, to organize the characteristics of monsters, my analysis also draws on some of the seven theses delineated in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Theory. Cohen shares my assertion that monsters are particular and universal. For instance, he writes, “The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment.”12 Cohen remarks that the “monster is best understood as an embodiment of difference, a breaker of category, and a resistant Other,” an assertion that bears out in some of Goya’s etchings.13 Cohen further postulates that the monster “dwells at the gates of difference,” the “incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond—of all those loci that are rhetorically placed at a distance but originate Within.”14 In other words, the characterization of certain people, beasts, or phenomena as monstrous represents an attempt to externalize the cause of fears. Meanwhile, the fears themselves are revelatory of the values of the society that gives rise to the monsters. In support of this thesis, Goya’s etchings quite literally illustrate as monsters full members of the Spanish system of power, of the Catholic

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The Monster Within and Without 117 Church, and of the nobility of the late eighteenth century. Further, in my first example, Goya’s written explanation of the image draws his viewers’ attention to the problematic practice of making monsters. “Que viene el coco” or “Here Comes the Bogeyman,” number three in the series of eighty etchings, critiques the common practice of parents who tell their children horror stories to induce obedience, while failing to admit that humans are, themselves, the true monsters (see figure 7.1). The explanation beside the print in the Prado Museum, written by the artist himself, states, “Abuso funesto de la primera educación. Hacer que un niño tenga más miedo al Coco que a su padre y obligarle a temer lo que no existe.” [“Deplorable abuse in a child’s early instruction. Making the child be more afraid of the Bogeyman than of his parent, obliging him to fear what does not exist.”]15 It is clear from Goya’s inscription that the critique here has to do with the very othering of monsters. Parents lie to their children, a practice that likely sparks a universal fear of uncertainty and unreliability. The lie in question here is specifically about causing children to fear a nonexistent monster, when in truth the lying parents are the real monsters. Several interpretations of this print have suggested that the cloaked figure could be the mother’s lover, an interpretation that suggests it is also the breakdown of the structures of family that underlie the warning. Here, the figure that the mother calls the “Coco” or “Bogeyman” faces away from the viewer of the print, highlighting the uncertainty that lies and sexual transgressions can cause. Cohen’s fifth thesis states, “The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible [thus preventing] mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual), delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move.”16 We can see that the mother in this image takes advantage of this innate power of monsters to delineate limits of behaviour, scaring her children into obedience by allowing their fear of this made-up monster to keep them in line. As evinced in the interaction of the image and text, Goya disproves of the practice of causing fear of things that don’t exist, when the true monster, here, is most certainly human. While we cannot see the face of the monster, he is not important (except in relation to his effect on children). Our inability to see the figure’s face also echoes the metaphor of masks and hidden identity that runs through the series. Overall, I see this print as a sharp critique of the practice of naming as monsters those who are different or unknowable (i.e. El coco) when human foibles are the root of real monstrosity.17 A second example of Goya’s depiction of monstrosity is in the fourth of this series, “El de la rollona” or “Nanny’s Boy.” This figure comes closer to echoing (rather than deconstructing) some of Cohen’s theses in that the child depicted is a monstrous deformation of the social order. Whereas the children in the earlier print are attractive and vulnerable, this child is, through no fault of his own, a visual abomination (see figure 7.2). The explanation from the Prado states, “La negligencia, la tolerancia y el mismo hacen a los niños antojadizos, obstinados, soberbios, golosos, periotosos e insufribles;

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Figure 7.1 Francisco de Goya, “Que viene el coco” (“Here Comes the Boogeyman”) from the 1799 series Los Caprichos (Caprices)

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Figure 7.2 Francisco de Goya, “El de la rollona” (“Nanny’s Boy”) from the 1799 series Los Caprichos (Caprices)

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120 Sarah D. Harris llegan a grandes y son niños todavía. Tal el de la Rollona.” (“Negligence, tolerance, and spoiling make children capricious, naughty, vain, greedy, lazy and insufferable. They grow up and yet remain childish. Thus is Nanny’s boy.”) This child exists at the uncomfortable intersection between maturity (he has a moustache) and infancy (he sucks his thumb), thus illustrating Cohen’s third thesis, “The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis [because it] refuses to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things,’” instead presenting a disturbing hybrid emerging from a time of crisis.18 This child’s monstrosity exists because of very human practices, however—those of spoiling the children of the rich, leaving the parenting responsibilities to nannies, and pacifying with sweets that promote gluttony. Like in the earlier etching, this image uses a specific composition of lights and darks to emphasize or spotlight, as an inquisitor might, the target of the main “problem area.” Here, the spotlight falls on the child’s distorted face. Though “Nanny’s Boy” is not a particularly personal reflection, Goya was not an artist to shy away from self-examination. He completed many self-portraits and lived in the very face of dark and nightmarish personal paintings (e.g. Saturn Devouring His Son). In fact, he painted several of the works of his “Black Paintings,” noncommissioned works that were not intended for sale, directly on the surface of the walls of his own home. The paintings on the walls of his home (known as the “Deaf Man’s Villa”) suggest that Goya was willing, perhaps even compelled, to come face to face with the demons he saw around him. Taking yet another tactic in (what I would deem) the non-othering of monsters, the forty-third Caprice is “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” or “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” one of several selfportraits. In the most famous etching from the Caprices and one of Goya’s most famous pieces overall, the artist sits, head in hands, attempting to protect himself from the onslaught of animals associated with witches (see figure 7.3). Again, the composition creates a sense of accusation or interrogation, with brightness illuminating the problem area, here Goya himself. The artist, in critiquing through his Enlightenment ideals, his time and place, is haunted by the very tools of his trade, the animals he evokes through art. Although, due to its evolution (and the dual meaning of sueño) there is debate about the meaning of this etching, it seems to affirm the ideals of the Enlightenment, for when reason sleeps (the critical, rational artist rests), the monsters of his creation torment him, potentially leading him to madness. In Goya’s accompanying text, we read that “La fantasia, abandonada de la razón, produce monstrous imposibles; unida con ella es madre de artes y origen de las maravillas.” [“Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.”] In other words, Goya proposes that fantasy and reason must exist together to maintain a healthy and sane society. Here, the monster comes from within the artist himself but takes on the exteriorized form of an Other (another species, a hybrid of species). As in “Nanny’s Boy,” this

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Figure 7.3 Francisco de Goya, “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos” (“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”) from the 1799 series Los Caprichos (Caprices)

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122 Sarah D. Harris etching calls attention to the practice of projecting outwards something that originates within. In all three of these pieces, the monster is recognized as part of Goya’s own society, and finally, as part of his own mind, thus calling into question the very tendency to other monsters rather than claiming them as our own. This message, potentially very dangerous for an artist to promote, survived only through some of the very corruption Goya critiqued (the simple-mindedness of the royal family and the connections he had to them with their patronage). To preface a large chronological leap, I should note that my next examples from Manuel Gago’s The Masked Warrior are, unlike Goya’s prints, without a doubt modern comics. Modern Spanish comics reached an apotheosis in popularity and production in the 1940s and 1950s, when they were, because of political, technological, and economic realities in the country, the most popular entertainment medium.19 Further, because of the extreme poverty that prevailed following Spain’s Civil War, comics were traded, and resold, such that several fans often read each copy printed. During this time, only publishing houses authorized by the official and state-run political party had the right to access resources, such as paper, printing presses, and ink, necessary to print comic books. The importation of American comics was, likewise, strictly limited to those properties that didn’t present the Axis Powers as enemies. Overall, the climate was one of powerful control over production, and consumption by a large readership. In stark contrast to the phenomenon depicted in Goya’s etchings, whereby the artist points out his own and his countrymen’s monstrosity, Manuel Gago’s comic book sensation, El guerrero del antifaz or The Masked Warrior (1944–1980), became a bestseller by fully endorsing the othering of evil, both in time and cultural identity.20 The national government that controlled and censored the production of comic books declared its mission of seeking cultural uniformity essential to reestablishing Spain’s moral well-being, even if this meant ignoring or rewriting large swaths of history. Illustrative of Cohen’s fourth thesis about monsters, that “Representing an anterior culture as monstrous justifies its displacement or extermination by rendering the act heroic,” this series locates the action of the Masked Warrior in the Middle Ages.21 It recasts the pluralism of the Medieval period as a battle of good versus evil, justifying the original events of the Christian Iberian Reconquest and Inquisition, while also rendering the recent Civil War heroic in its purportedly analogous battle for purity and uniformity, and against difference and chaos. Spain’s twentieth century had brought propagandistic publications of comic books from both sides of the Civil War. During the subsequent totalitarian dictatorship, “tebeos,” on the one hand cheap and escapist means of gaining adventurous and funny entertainment, and on the other, a component of the propagandistic apparatus of the regime, rose to great popularity. In the case of the masked Christian hero, a medieval Lone Ranger who fought against Muslim enemies, the regime promoted the dominant mythology, one

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The Monster Within and Without 123 that depended on revisionist history and homogenization of Spain’s people. This series was also part of a broader group, one that included such comic book best sellers as El Capitán Trueno [Captain Thunder], El Cachorro [The Lion Cub], El Jabato [The Wild Boar], and El Coyote.22 The Spanish action hero, unlike American superheroes of the same era, exhibited no superpowers. Owing to the political climate of the time, the image of a hero that stands up to power, or that takes on divine-like powers, was ill suited to Spain’s early or mid-twentieth century.23 Rather, this hero and others of his ilk were men of perfect virtue and ideal attributes, as defined by the fascist ideology that controlled the country’s publishing houses. A “Spaniard” from a time when Spain didn’t yet exist, the Masked Warrior wore armour and defended Christianity through the liberal use of his sword. Yet another manifestation of the sword/cross hybrid, the Masked Warrior was also a replica of the dictator’s public image. In fact, Franco was represented in an official painting wearing armour, under the protection of an avenging angel, preparing to eradicate the “tentacles of the evil that were corroding national-Catholic Spain (communism, the Republican party, freemasons . . .).”24 Another “tentacle of evil,” was, of course, the perennial Other of non-Catholics. In this simplified and falsified version of the Medieval historical context, everyone inexplicably speaks the same language, and the fight against Islam occurs anachronistically and in geographical regions that don’t reflect the historical reality of Spain in the era of the Reconquest, before the kingdom of Granada (the final remaining part of Al-Andalus) was reclaimed by the Christian kings. Further driving home his Christianity, the protagonist of the series goes by the historically relevant nickname el león cristiano [Christian Lion]. His sidekick is named Fernando, like the Catholic King whose 1469 marriage to Isabel had consolidated the monarchy across much of Iberia.25 Nonetheless, by displacing the battle of good and evil to a faraway time and place, in relation to Spain of the twentieth century, the apparently escapist comic managed to name a monster that spoke to the fears and dangers of the current situation as well.26 Thus, this property provides a compelling example of Juan Marsé’s statement that “some of those comics [. . . that the children read to escape their reality . . .] contained the Falangist seed of the nightmares lived by the children.”27 The comic books, in other words, provided an apparent—yet false—escape for the children of the brutal postwar period. In fact, I would further argue that the Masked Warrior also enforced the same values of rigid delineation of national identity that the Catholic Kings and Francoism promoted, and that the instructive characteristic of postwar adventure comics demonstrates Cohen’s fifth thesis, “The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible.”28 Essentially, in a time of obvious cultural repression, the limits of acceptable behaviour were illustrated through apparent escapist entertainment that was actually quite directive in its message. Under the dictatorship, and as supported by its many popular slogans, repeated ad infinitum, Spain

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124 Sarah D. Harris was to return to the ideals of the “Reinado de los Reyes Católicos,” the Kingdom of the Catholic Kings, in which this comic book story explicitly locates its action. This hero fights against the very religion that the Catholic Kings of the late fifteenth century, and the dictator of the twentieth century, and conservative anti-immigration politicians of today, considered a main threat in defining Spain as a purely Christian nation. Through promoting a revisionist and idealized version of the Christian hero, the Falangist doctrine effectively delineated the very narrow limits of permissible “social space” as “One Spain, One Race, (One Language), One Religion.” The legacy of the various languages and religions present both in the Medieval School of Translators of Toledo, and the long nineteenth century, was sacrificed in favour of order under Francoism. Spain was recast, as it had been under the Catholic Kings, as one nation, under Christianity, and under Castilian Spanish. In the comic book fiction that Manuel Gago wrote and illustrated, and that millions of young Spaniards read, then, who is the monster? While the Masked Warrior takes on many different opponents throughout the decades of his storyline, his raison d’être is vengeance against a monstrous stepfather, the Muslim petty king Alí Kan. In this simplified war of good (Christian) against evil (Muslim), the enemy is almost laughably obvious. Alí Kan, the story goes, kidnaps the young and faithful bride of a Christian Count, taking her to his exotic palace, raping her, and then treating her as both wife and slave. When she gives birth to Adolfo, the future Masked Warrior, Alí Kan raises the boy as his own, believing him to be so. He trains him in the secret (in other words, different, frightening, yet desirable) techniques of his people, with the intent being that he is training him to kill Christians.29 The complex situation of simultaneous repulsion and attraction by the Muslim people is further illustrated by the Masked Warrior’s eventual fascination with the exotic beauty of Zoraida, Aixa, and other Muslim women. When Adolfo comes of age and discovers the truth of his (pure Christian) bloodline, he turns his training against his former teacher. At the hands of their kidnapper, Adolfo’s mother dies for betraying the truth to her son, thereby giving rise to the Masked Warrior and causing him to spend the rest of his life seeking vengeance against his sworn enemy (see figure 7.4). Like a traitor spy who has immersed himself in the mind of the Other, the Masked Warrior is able, then, to take the powerful dark arts he has learned under the tutelage of his mother’s captor and use them for good. Overwhelmed with guilt and regret over his mother’s death, the Masked Warrior dons a mask to hide his identity, contributing to his mystery and attractiveness, and he dedicates his life to battling against his former cohort of Islamic warriors. The mask and the large cross on his chest indicate this character’s entire modus operandi. The mask both hides and becomes the mark of his identity, while the cross represents the weight of his past and the strength of his moralizing quest for vengeance. Meanwhile, Alí Kan bears the symbol of the half-moon, both on his helmet and on his tunic, as well as the beard and

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The Monster Within and Without 125

Figure 7.4 Manuel Gago, The Masked Warrior, “El Guerrero del Antifaz,” Cover for Issue One, 1943. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VEGAP, Madrid.

turban that signify his religious beliefs. These markers are also, along with the cross and mask of the Masked Warrior, visual shorthand for their heroic and anti-heroic status in the comic. The character of Alí Kan also illustrates many of the classic characteristics of the monstrous Other. First, “The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body.”30 This comic’s enemy is clearly defined by the era from which it came, while also representing universal fears. Alí Kan is one of the approved enemies of the Francoist regime, just as the Masked Warrior is one of its approved heroes. In fact, anxiety and disproval of religious difference, and a reappropriation of the models of Medieval Christianity by the totalitarian regime make an Islamic petty king the ideal enemy. Further, his transgressions slide easily from one realm to another, as Alí Kan, in classic Orientalist depiction, is both a religious and sexual other, overly sexualized to the extent that he destroys the bonds of Christian marriage in kidnapping and raping the wife of another man.31 At the same time, Alí Kan represents the universal fear of the perceived unknowability of one’s patrilineage, as represented in the Roman law principle Mater semper certa, pater nunquam (“The mother is always certain, the father never”). The man Adolfo has considered his father during much of his upbringing is in fact an evil and duplicitous kidnapper, and not his biological father at all. Therefore, the figure of Alí Kan represents a monster bred of universal and particular fears.

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126 Sarah D. Harris Second, like all monsters in Cohen’s postulates, Alí Kan always escapes.32 Time and again, the monster prevents the Masked Warrior from fully avenging the rape and murder of his mother. This perennially thwarted satisfaction is a classic characteristic of both comic book series and also of monsters generally. The series requires an ongoing battle, “To Be Continued,” while some monsters, the “revenant by definition” go so far as to return from the dead.33 Third, as Cohen notes, monsters are a threat to the existing power structure (especially as “they threaten to mingle” and jeopardize “group ‘purity’”).34 Alí Kan threatens the official status quo imposed by Francosim in his very relationship with the Christian mother. It is through intermingling, biblically and familially, with the Christians that Alí Kan becomes such a despicable and disturbing character. The capture and rape of the mother in The Masked Warrior is both the impetus for the main conflict in the series, and a representative fear of the period in which the comic arose. Francoist propaganda specifically harkens back to the same purity of Christian blood and Castilian Spanish that the Catholic Kings demanded. While The Masked Warrior imagines a medieval space in which all characters communicate without linguistic difference, this comic property also brings to the forefront the notion of barbaric as unintelligible (and its etymological connection to the Berber people of Morocco).35 In the comic, the spoken language of Alí Kan is Castilian Spanish, but his behaviour is unintelligible, foreign to the acceptable social norms of twentieth-century Spain. Throughout the comic, the patriarchal values that the dictatorship extols also prevail. Violence is the answer to the protagonist’s problems, as he draws upon the skills in battle learned under the tutelage of his enemy, and a plethora of women find him irresistibly attractive. Also in accordance with the moral restrictions of Francoism, the Masked Warrior’s relationship with his beloved (Christian) Ana María is absolutely chaste. Finally, it is important to reiterate that, first designed by Gago as a teenager, this comic book was immensely popular and long lived, a popularity that speaks to its ability to pinpoint the very fears and needs of its readership as well as those behind the relevant rules of the censors. In addition to its liberal use of the “Continuará” [“To Be Continued”], which left readers hungry for more, and its portrayal of nonstop action, this property clearly underscores a specific social and cultural moment. It is not simply that the dictatorship prohibited all other discourse, then, but also that the characterization of Alí Kan resonated with a generation (or more) of Spanish readers indoctrinated to see their Muslim multicultural past as foreign. Following the death of the dictator in 1975, the series (then at the hands of new artists) eventually strayed from its national-Catholic principles of conformity and anti-Islamic sentiment. By then, however, the series had lost much of its fan base to other modes of entertainment. Overall, these two examples represent extremes in practices of othering an enemy that threatens Spanish society. Of course, there are myriad other differences that contrast the creation, reception, and relevance of each of these

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The Monster Within and Without 127 two series, but the intention of this chapter has been to highlight the range, from intentional appropriation of the monstrous, to its projection outwards in time and place. Perhaps this particular contrast can be read to suggest that Francisco de Goya, even though he lived under the Inquisition, had relative freedom, due to his protection within the system, to critique himself and his own people. This same type of criticism, meanwhile, would have been impossible for Gago under the strict and specific censorship of Francoism. Further, the fact that Goya attempted to have the Caprices removed from sale, while Gago’s series enjoyed wild and long-lived commercial success, speaks to the dangers of claiming monsters as our own. In ongoing and current debates surrounding the financial crisis in Europe, and the frequent scapegoating of immigrant “others” in this crisis, it bears keeping in mind the ways in which imagery makes monsters of the dangers to perceived national well-being. Comics, but not only comics, exaggerate and stereotype the Other to undermine his or her humanity. Recast as a War on Terror, or the need to protect national borders, this perennial battle comes to the fore regularly in a variety of media. Within this milieu, comics and proto-comics still contain powerful messages that can reveal values underlying their creation and consumption, so understanding them within their context allows for a fuller appreciation of their messages. When it comes to representing the enemy of a society’s well-being, especially in creating a monster of the other, we should consider the fears, both universal and particular, underlying monstrous representation. For Goya and other like-minded Enlightenment thinkers during the creation of the Caprices, the monster is acknowledged within us, or it flows from us. The monster comes from within the Catholic Church, within the superstitions and hypocritical social practices of Goya’s kinsmen, as the composition of his etchings casts a bold accusing eye on all of us. However, Goya’s approach might also be taken with caution, as the monsters he saw within and around him seemed to come to haunt the walls of his own home and mind, thereby leaving him no safe haven. In contrast, for Gago and, as such, pro-Francoist ideology, the monster is foreign, known but unknown, the ghost of Spain’s true multicultural past condemned to return and remind twentieth-century children of the danger that attracts and repels. As they often do in recent media portrayals of immigration, images of penetration permeate this story; there is physical penetration of Adolfo’s mother, emotional invasion of the secret stepson, military penetration in the conquest of Al-Andalus, along with constant stabbings and swordplay. More generally, the monster defines and penetrates the borders between “Spanish” and “non-Spanish,” an ideology that the Francoist doctrine so carefully cultivated. Similar rhetoric, echoing in classrooms, movie theatres, and in political speeches under the dictatorship, delineated an “us” in contrast to a foreign and undesirable “them,” a dynamic that played out perfectly in the most popular adventure comic of the Spanish Golden Age of Comics. Thus, in presenting itself as “escapist,”

128 Sarah D. Harris the comic book series actually reveals the regime’s revisionist attempts to exteriorize through stereotyping the Islamic presence in Iberia’s past, present, and future.

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NOTES 1. Leonard Rifas, “Race and Comix,” in Frederick Luis Aldama, ed., Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 33. 2. Dirk Vanderbeke, “In the Art of the Beholder: Comics as Political Journalism,” in Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn, eds., Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 70. 3. For a more thorough introduction to this phenomenon, see María Rosa Menocal’s Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston, New York, and London: Little, Brown, 2002). 4. Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos. 1799. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Museo National del Prado. Web. 30 March 2014: My translation. 5. Linda Simon, “The Sleep of Reason,” World and I, accessed November 29, 2013, www.worldandi.com/newhome/public/2004/february/bkpub1.asp. 6. Manuel Gago. El Guerrero del Antifaz. Editorial Valenciana. 1943–1980. Print. 7. Cf. David Herzberger, Narrating the Past: Fiction and Historiography in Postwar Spain (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 8. See Robert Hughes, Goya (New York: Knopf, 2003) for more biographical information about the artist. 9. Birgit Ellefsen, “Representations of Madness and the Irrational in the Age of Enlightenment” (paper presented at the annual global conference of InterDisciplinary.net, Mansfield College, Oxford, England, September 2011), accessed November 29, 2013, www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/makingsense-of/madness/project-archives/4t/session-9-madness-and-the-arts-1/. 10. Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art, 2: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire (New York: Routledge: 1990), 381. 11. Rafael Argullol, “Goya en su infierno,” Revista Colombiana de Psicología No 2, 1993, 137–142. 12. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: U Minnesota Press, 1996), 4. 13. Ibid., x. 14. Ibid., 7. 15. Francisco de Goya. Los Caprichos. 1799. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Museo National del Prado. Web. 30 March 2014: My translation. 16. Cohen, Monster Theory, 12. 17. For more on monsters and borders, see Michael Uebel’s compelling chapter in Monster Theory, “Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to Saracen Alterity,” where he writes referencing Michel de Certeau, that “borders simultaneously partition reality, by separating continua into discrete entities [. . .] flickering between contact and avoidance, interaction and interdiction, border lines are thus spaces in between, gaps or middle places symbolizing exchange and encounter” (265). Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: U Minnesota Press, 1996). 18. Cohen, 6.

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The Monster Within and Without 129 19. Viviane Alary, “The Spanish Tebeo,” European Comic Art 2.2, 2009, 254. 20. Gago wrote and illustrated the series without interruptions until 1966, at which time the series was paused. The original series was re-edited in full color starting in 1972, and then reborn as Las nuevas aventuras del Guerrero del Antifaz [The New Adventures of the Masked Warrior], which continued being published until 1980. 21. Cohen, 8. 22. Alary, 267. 23. Ibid., 15. 24. Ibid., 16. 25. Though it is likely the material for another article, and not the purview of this one, there are odious characters that represent stereotypes of Jewishness as well. 26. Javier Conde, Del tebeo al cómic: Un mundo de aventuras (Madrid: Libsa, 2001), 42–53. 27. Carlos Giménez, Todo Paracuellos (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2007), 1. 28. Cohen, 12. 29. Thesis VI: Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire: “the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden” (17); there is simultaneous repulsion and attraction. We distrust and loathe at the same time we envy the monster freedom, and perhaps its sublime despair. “Escapist delight gives way to horror only when the monster threatens to overstep these boundaries, to destroy or deconstruct the thin walls of category and culture” (Cohen, 17). 30. Cohen, 4. 31. Ibid., 8. 32. Ibid., 4. 33. Ibid., 5 34. Ibid., 15 35. For more on the Muslim religion as “the culmination of all heresies,” see Uebel, 269 in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: U Minnesota Press, 1996).

8

Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others

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Stereotype and Narrative Form in British Adventure Comic Books Ian Horton “My basic point [is] that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world. . . .” Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism1

This chapter explores the continuing representation of colonialist stereotypes and the colonised “Other” in British comic books. It argues that from the 1950s to their demise in the early 1990s traditional British weekly adventure comic books, such as the Eagle, Hotspur and Victor, contained stories that used exotic locations and representations of colonialist stereotypes, both visual and textual, to shape narrative structure. These comic books continued the traditions, and imperialist outlook, of the adventure stories contained in boys’ illustrated story papers of the early twentieth century. Colonialist values, most notably represented by dominant westerners and subjugated Orientals, were still evident in traditional British boys’ adventure comic books right up to the 1990s, long after the collapse of empire. It is remarkable that similar colonialist stereotypes and Orientalist mythologies are also central to narratives within more innovative British comic books from the 1990s to the present such as Rogan Gosh and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In these more adult comic books, colonialist stereotypes are conjoined with the concept of an erotic and highly sexualised “Other”, a factor that is also central to their narrative structure. In both cases this “Otherness” is conceptualised as monstrous in contrast to Western moral codes of behaviour. Using Edward Said’s concept of the “Other” and his analysis of Orientalist discourses within literature, this study will examine the ways in which outmoded representations of racial stereotypes and colonialist mythologies have been used to govern narrative structure in British comic books up to the present day. By the end of the twentieth century, Britain had withdrawn from its colonial “possessions”, but these comic books, both traditional and innovative, still use representations of the “Other”, both visual and textual, to communicate concepts of “Britishness” and national identity.

Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others 131 ORIENTALISM, STEREOTYPE AND THE “OTHER”

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In his seminal text, Orientalism, published in 1978, Edward Said explores the concept of a clearly definable colonised “Other” that he regards as being Orientalised: The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilisations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other [. . .]. Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world.2 Following Said’s notion that these narratives tell us more about the coloniser than the colonised, it is suggested that the survival of these stereotypes and mythologies is indicative of Britain’s difficult relationship with its colonial past. From this perspective such representations of the Orient are constructs that use stereotypes to create and sustain mythical concepts such as the typical or archetypal Oriental and to maintain a political order closely allied to Western colonialist discourses. Said had previously explored this point in “Shattered Myths” where he stated that: According to Orientalism, Orientals can be observed as possessing certain habits of mind, traits of character, and idiosyncrasies of history and temperament [. . .]. As with all mythologies theirs (the Orientalists) is a structure built around a simple set of oppositions [. . .]. On the one hand there are Westerners and on the other there are Orientals: The former are (in no particular order) rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, without natural suspicion and distrust, and so forth. Orientals are none of these things.3 For Said these characteristics are related to behaviour rather than appearance, but in comic book studies these two elements have been directly linked. Since the 1980s, several authors have examined similar cultural and ethnic stereotyping with a focus on the American superhero genre.4 An explanation for the direct link between comic books as a medium and stereotypes in the superhero genre was provided by Singer who argued: [. . .] comic books rely upon visually codified representations in which characters are continually reduced to their appearances [. . .]. This system of visual typology combines with the superhero genre’s long history of excluding, trivialising, or “tokenizing” minorities to create numerous minority superheroes who are marked purely for their race.5

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Both Scott McCloud and Will Eisner have made the point that comic books rely on highly codified visual representations to engage with the viewer.6 In his introduction to Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Edward Said notes:

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. . . the comic draughtsman’s uncanny ability to catch the telling detail, a carefully sculpted moustache here, overly large teeth there, a drab suit here, Sacco manages to keep it all going with almost careless virtuosity.7 It is difficult to avoid using visual stereotyping in the comic book medium even when producing sympathetic representations of different ethnic groups, as with Sacco’s work. For this reason this study focuses on the ways in which the use of stereotype impacts on the narrative structure rather than caricature as a mode of representation. REPRESENTING THE “OTHER” IN TRADITIONAL BRITISH BOYS’ ADVENTURE COMIC BOOKS In his essay Boys Weeklies of 1940, George Orwell addressed issues of ideology and class, noting that many illustrated story papers, the precursors of adventure comic books, reflected outdated political attitudes throughout the interwar period: To begin with, there is no political development whatever. The world of the Skipper and the Champion is still the pre-1914 world of the Magnet and the Gem [. . .]. It is worth noting that in papers of this type it is always taken for granted that adventures only happen at the ends of the earth, in tropical forests, in Arctic wastes, in African deserts, on Western prairies, in Chinese opium dens—everywhere, in fact, except the places where things really do happen. That is a belief dating from thirty or forty years ago, when the new continents were in process of being opened up.8 Orwell’s argument has been criticised because he fails to account for the way ideology might be conveyed through the specific medium of illustrated adventure story papers and comic books.9 However, this does not invalidate his claim that these exotic locations act to structure narrative and reflect colonialist beliefs from an earlier expansionist age. As regards the direct representation of colonialist stereotypes in these story papers, Orwell identified the following patterns: In reality their basic political assumptions are two: nothing ever changes, and foreigners are funny. In the Gem of 1939 Frenchmen are still Froggies and Italians are still Dagoes [. . .]. It is assumed that foreigners of

Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others 133

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any one race are all alike and will conform more or less exactly to the following patterns: Frenchman: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly. Spaniard, Mexican, etc: Sinister, treacherous. Arab, Afghan, etc: Sinister, treacherous. Chinese: Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail. Italian: Excitable. Grinds barrel organ or carries stiletto. Swede, Dane, etc: Kind hearted, stupid. Negro: Comic, very faithful.10 These stereotypes are explained in terms of visual elements, such as beards and pigtails, but for Orwell it is the behavioural characteristics and the impact they have on the stories that matters. The archetypal colonialist locations and stereotypical characters noted by Orwell continued to structure the narrative in British boys’ adventure comic books post–Second World War. After the war, some illustrated story papers such as The Hotspur (1933–1959, story paper; 1959–1981, comic book) were transformed into adventure comic books and many new titles were released. The shift from illustrated story papers, such as The Rover (1922–1973) and Champion (1922–1955), to comic books, such as The Comet (1946–1959) and Sun (1948–1959), is outlined by Sabin and Gravett and Stansbury.11 They suggest that in the late 1940s the emergence of these boys’ adventure comic books was influenced by three main factors: the popularity of adventure newspaper comic strips, film and later television and the stimulus of story magazines and comic books from America. A key reaction to this influence from America was the publication of the Eagle in 1950 by Hulton Press. This was: [. . .] intended as wholesome boys’ entertainment, and had a highly moral tone (with an overt Christian religious bent): it was also very “British”, and imperialist/coldwar overtones were never far from the surface.12 James Chapman’s recent evaluation of the Eagle’s cover feature comic strip, Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, expands on this issue and notes that most villains in this strip were foreign, being mainly of Asiatic descent.13 He notes that the World Government in Dan Dare is multiracial but the stories are “. . . at best patronizing, and at worst downright racist” and that “[t]he chief ideological strategy of Dan Dare is its promotion of Britishness”.14 The adventure comic books that followed the Eagle took the same imperialist formula but tended to be tougher and omit the Christian moralising. The first publisher to challenge the Eagle was Amalgamated Press with the release of Lion (1952–1974) and Tiger (1954–1985). These were followed a

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decade later by Valiant (1962–1976) and Hurricane (1964–1965). The other major British comic book publisher, D.C. Thompson, followed with The Victor (1961–1992) and Hornet (1963–1976) to expand their own adventure comic book line.15 When reviewing these postwar adventure comic books, Sabin stated: The war comics were undoubtedly the biggest sub-genre, re-fighting the Second World War in every issue with an unprecedented blood-lust and lurid xenophobic language (the Germans were “Krauts”, “jerries” even “sausage eaters”; the Japanese, “nips”, “slant-eyes”, “yellow-skins”; and so on).16 The names given to Japanese characters are obviously directly based on racial features, and the xenophobic tendencies present in these war stories certainly had a direct influence on adventure stories in terms of the Orientalist stereotypes and settings used.17 This is evident if we examine in detail two issues of The Victor, one from its heyday in 1970 and the other from 1987 (before being rebranded as a sports comic book in the early 1990s). Issue No. 473 of The Victor, published in March 1970, contained eight comic strips. Three were based on war, three on sport and two were adventure stories.18 Three of these eight comic strips, “The Man with the Brazen Mask”, “The Lost Warriors of Tartary” and “Three on the Terror Trail”, used Orientalist stereotypes to sustain the narrative. “The Man with the Brazen Mask” is a First World War story set in what is now Iraq, concerning a group of Australian soldiers and their mission to kill a German spy, Captain Huth, who is inciting the Arabs to join the Turks and fight against the British forces.19 Interestingly, there is a direct reference to the area being called Mesopotamia. This was not the region’s name during the First World War when under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The term Mesopotamia was, however, used by the British following the war when the region became a British protectorate. The story contained visual elements such as be-fezed Turks, and stepped pyramids and other stereotypical features dominate the storyline (see Figure 8.1). There is mutual distrust between Arabs and Turks and a mistrust of both groups by the Australian soldiers and by the German spy who is ostensibly their ally. Overall, the colonisers, German and Australians, are the dominant figures and drive the narrative forward, whereas the Arabs and Turks serve only as a passive counterpoint. More positively the Aboriginal Australian character Billie Tuesday is treated as an equal by his comrades and has a more active role, at one point coming out of the desert to rescue them. This, of course, relies on another form of stereotyping suggesting he is innately better equipped for survival in this environment. The strip “Lost Warriors of Tartary”, set in Mongolia in 1932, follows the story of Iron Haig and Swat Lewis, two railway engineers.20 Their nationality is not disclosed, but the names seem Scottish in origin, which suggests another colonialist stereotype that the British Empire was built on Scottish

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Figure 8.1 Writer Unknown; Artist Harry Farrugia, “The Man with the Brazen Mask”, The Victor, No. 473, 14th of March 1970. © DC Thomson & Co. Ltd. 2014. Used by Kind Permission of DC Thomson & Co. Ltd.

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engineering achievements. They are working in the Tagh mountain range in Mongolia and encroach on the territory of Kaba Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan. He plans to take over the world using an army of warriors in a drug-induced sleep beneath the mountains and a flamethrower called the Breath of Genghis Khan. Haig and Lewis, although pitted against an army of thousands, destroy the flamethrower and defeat Kaba Khan through the use of modern technology. Kaba Khan is clearly depicted as sinister, and his potential treachery is used as a plot device enabling the two engineers to defeat vastly superior forces. In contrast to the other two stories, “Three on the Terror Trail” is contemporaneous rather than historical and set in England, not an exotic location.21 It concerns the last three surviving Dacoits, members of the Brethren of Death—a group of thieves and murderers. They have come to England to kill Sir Stanley Brand, who was responsible for the eradication of their group while Chief Commissioner of Police in Khandan, a fictional British Protectorate in the Himalayas. Even though the setting is contemporary England, the references are to fictionalised colonialist settings. The focus of the story is the Dacoits’ attempts to kill Sir Stanley using a katroot, a fictional poison. The only true term used in the story is Dacoit, an Anglicised version of a Hindu word meaning “bandit” and closely allied to the term Thuggee in Orientalist discourses. This particular narrative blends fact and fiction to bring the colonialist past firmly into the present. When examining issue No. 1371 of The Victor from May 1987, one might expect the number of stories influenced by colonialist discourses to have declined in the intervening seventeen years. In fact they increased in number with eight of the nine stories in this issue using representations of Orientalist or colonialist stereotypes.22 Four of these, “A True Story of Men at War”; “Spitfire!”; “The Ten Sacred Symbols of Buddha” and “‘Charge the Gun!’” were Second World War stories and used supposed traits of Japanese and German national identity to drive the narrative. Discounting these war stories from the analysis leaves four stories using Orientalist or colonialist stereotypes. In “Crimebuster Craig”, set in contemporary Britain, and “The White Samurai”, set in the seventeenth-century Japan, Orientalist representations of Chinese, Arabic and North African characters are notable, but their “Otherness” is secondary to the overall narrative. In the remaining two strips in this issue of The Victor, the “Otherness” of key characters is central to the narrative. “Hallam’s Hardest Mission” is set post–Second World War in fictional war-torn Kalanistan. It concerns Sergeant Tom Hallam’s search for Doctor Batory, an American academic.23 Batory has been captured by a Kalani army patrol and forced to lead them to “Eskanderia, the fabled lost city of Alexander the Great”. The Kalani soldiers are shown as sinister and treacherous with no ability to hold Western values. When they discover the lost city, they are unable to understand that the treasure sought by Doctor Batory is not gold and gemstones but ancient Greek architecture and statuary. This cultural misunderstanding

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Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others 137 regarding treasure is illuminating. It is used to differentiate between cultured Westerners—even Sergeant Hallam can see the aesthetic and civilising worth of the statues—and heathen Kalani who are only concerned with material values. “Tough at the Top” is a story from the “Tough of the Track” series that appeared regularly in The Victor throughout its entire run. The series focuses on Alf Tupper, a working-class middle distance runner, often featuring his travails against an elitist athletics establishment.24 In this episode Alf has moved to Tanzania to work as an engineer on the Kilimanjaro Mountain Railway in order to be able to search for a witch doctor, Meru, who can cure his injured leg. Meru is a clichéd representation of the African witch doctor, but this is a subterfuge. He is in fact a fellow runner, Serapho Kibo, who is helping Alf to recover by setting him difficult running challenges in search of ingredients for a magic potion. The representation of Meru/Serapho Kibo is central to the narrative and breaks with conventional of the superstitious “Other”. He has no intention of making a magic potion and believes the exercise itself will allow Alf to recover. Other aspects of the story are more problematic. Most of the black workers are depicted in Orwell’s “comic, very faithful” mode and even working-class Alf Tupper is seen as superior to the African workers because of his abilities as an engineer. Very little changed in the way the “Other” was represented in The Victor between 1970 and 1987. Chapman noted this sense of continuity in relation to “The Wolf of Kabul”, which started as an illustrated story in the Wizard in 1930 and was still running in comic strip form in both Hotspur and The Victor in the 1980s.25 He explains this continuity of Orientalist and colonialist representations in two ways. Firstly, he notes the parallels with similar representations in Hollywood and British cinema of this period. Secondly, he suggests that both cinematic and comic book forms focus on policing and maintaining the empire rather than empire building. This may well be the case, but the key features of using exotic locations and Orientalist or colonialist stereotypes still remain relatively unchanged. REPRESENTING THE “OTHER” IN INNOVATIVE CONTEMPORARY COMIC BOOKS In the 1970s, sales of British weekly adventure comics rapidly declined. In a bid to appeal to a changing marketplace, grittier and more realistic comics such as D.C. Thompson’s Warlord (1974–1986) and IPC’s Battle (1975–1988) emerged. The key publication for this changing landscape was IPC’s Action (1976–197-7), which has been described by Sabin as “. . . cynical, anti-authoritarian and very violent—and an instant success”.26 Action was the direct precursor of 2000AD, released in 1977, which itself led to the emergence of a range of innovative comic books in the 1980s and into the 1990s such as Warrior (1982–1985), Escape (1983–1989), Deadline

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(1988–1995), Crisis (1988–1991), Revolver (1990–1991) and Toxic (1991). At one level they were innovative because they engaged with subject matter such as sex and politics and were aimed at adult audiences.27 They were also innovative in their visual treatment, with the narrative more directly explained through the drawings in contrast to traditional British comics where the drawings tended to illustrate the story.28 In the 1980s, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill worked for 2000AD amongst other titles in this developing innovative comic book scene. Their series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–ongoing) is a prime example of the use of Orientalist and colonialist constructs to underpin the narrative in innovative contemporary comic books.29 The first volume of the series is set in late Victorian England, at the culminating point of British colonialist expansion. Some covers and full pages are executed in the fin de siècle style of Aubrey Beardsley, and the credits are presented in the style of Victorian music-hall advertisements. In a throwback to the pre-comic form it also includes illustrated adventure stories relating to the main narrative. The frontispiece of this volume is an image of Britannia, stressing its nationalist and colonialist content from the outset. The narrative opens with a full-page illustration of Campion Bond, an English Intelligence Officer, at the foot of the white cliffs of Dover. This is accompanied by a quotation, supposedly taken from his memoirs, that reads, “The British Empire has always encountered difficulty in distinguishing between its heroes and its monsters”, a narrative theme that is explored throughout this comic book. Bond has been tasked with forming a superhero team, comprised of such monsters, to investigate the theft of the government’s Cavorite, a fictional anti-gravity material originally appearing in H. G. Wells’s The First Men on the Moon. Campion Bond references Margery Allingham’s detective Albert Campion and Ian Fleming’s spy James Bond. There are direct references to literature of the late Victorian period in the main characters of the comic book. The team formed by Bond consists of Mina Murray, Jonathan Hawker’s fiancée in Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Alan Quatermain from H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines; the title characters from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Hawley Griffin from H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man and Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and its prequel The Mysterious Island. These characters allow Moore to play with the conventions of the superhero team, the members having the outsider status, superpowers and psychological flaws that have become stereotypes within the genre. Invisibility is a commonplace superpower, and the Jekyll/Hyde combination has many superhero equivalents such as the Incredible Hulk. Moore also subverts the stereotype of the superhero team by having a female, Mina Murray, as its leader. As colonialist stereotypes, the most important characters are Captain Nemo and Alan Quatermain. Captain Nemo stresses the tension between

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Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others 139 them when he suggests to Quatermain that one is “the great colonialist and the other the great colonial rebel”. Quatermain’s character is the prototype for the colonialist “Great White Hunter” that that is evident in earlier British adventure comics.30 King Solomon’s Mines is an example of the lost race/world genre of fiction, a genre that links directly to Orwell’s comments concerning exotic locations. Quatermain’s character has also been noted as the archetype of “muscular Christianity”, a point that contrasts well with representations of Captain Nemo.31 In the comic book Captain Nemo is depicted as a Sikh, a racial identity he was only given in The Mysterious Island, the character having Polish origins that were suppressed in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea due to commercial concerns.32 In several scenes Captain Nemo is juxtaposed with representations of multiple-limbed Hindu gods, which is at odds with the monotheism of Sikhism. Several scenes show him as a worshipper of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and the cosmic dance.33 The most dramatic image in relation to his religious beliefs is when Captain Nemo is framed against an aggressive-looking wall-hanging depicting Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and motherhood and delivers the line, “I fear he collects monsters” when referring to the actions of Campion Bond. Partha Mitter in Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art outlined eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalist reactions to such multiple-limbed Hindu gods and suggested that “the Western world still has to find a way to appreciate the values of Indian art in its own context and in its own right”.34 This Orientalist approach reveals other dichotomies in the portrayal of Nemo’s character such as the fact that a self-professed colonial rebel is working for the British secret service. The tensions in Nemo’s character, both colonialist and religious, are also evident in relation to the negative representation of Arabian characters in the first volume of the series. Mina Murray is sent to find Alan Quatermain, who has become addicted to opium, and enlist him as a member of the group. This takes her to Cairo, depicted as an archetypal labyrinthine Islamic city where two sinister and treacherous Arab characters attempt to rape her. The narrative justification for this attempted rape is to rouse Quatermain from his opium-induced stupor to rescue her and establish his credentials as a viable heroic character. Both are rescued from an Arab mob by Captain Nemo and his submarine the Nautilus at the waterfront. At this point he directly refers to the pursuing Arabs as a Mohammedan rabble. Now Nemo has become the heroic lead and takes an Orientalist perspective towards the Arab characters, thus allowing colonialist conventions to be subverted. Other forms of Orientalist discourse, focused on supposedly Chinese characteristics, develop the narrative surrounding the theft of the Cavorite by one of two underworld crime lords. One is in fact Professor Moriarty, the archenemy of Sherlock Holmes, who is head of British Intelligence and Campion Bond’s boss. The other is a Chinese character known only as

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“The Doctor”, a reference to Dr. Fu Manchu.35 The “Otherness” of this character is emphasised in several ways. Although central to the narrative, he only makes three fleeting appearances and has no dialogue, factors that shroud him in mystery and support notions of Chinese inscrutability. In two scenes the Chinese kowtow to “The Doctor”, clearly displaying their pigtails, forming a rather caricatured representation of their “Otherness”. In the remaining scene, set in an opium den in Limehouse in London, Quatermain sees “The Doctor” torturing a man by writing on his body in Chinese characters using red-hot brands heated in a ting, a Chinese ornamented ritual bronze vessel. Other characters in the scene speak to “The Doctor” in Mandarin Chinese without translation, so heightening their “Otherness”, a point visually reinforced by the ritualistic writing on the man’s body. It has been argued that in this scene a close-up of the eye of “The Doctor”: [. . .] seems entirely alien and not at all human [. . .] extending their (Moore and O’Neill’s) satire of Victorian British attitudes towards the Chinese by portraying Fu Manchu as exaggeratedly non-human in appearance.36 As they leave the Chinese quarter, Quatermain describes this scene to Jekyll in the follow terms: “I say ‘man’ but . . . Jekyll, he turned to look at me. His eyes were . . . very much like hell . . . and he (‘The Doctor’) was very much like Satan”, a point that stresses the monstrous qualities of this character. In using Victorian sources, both textual and visual, to structure the narrative of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore and O’Neill knowingly engage with the Orientalist discourses of the period, both textually and visually, and play with its moral and cultural value system. Even though this series of the comic book highlights these problematic issues, its critical intent is less certain, and it perhaps replicates these values in its treatment of colonial subjects as much as it might subvert notions of the “Other”. THE SEXUALISED “OTHER” Some of the innovative comic books that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s started to deal with more adult themes, including sex. This impacted on representations of the “Other” by introducing another stereotype, the erotic and highly sexualised Oriental. Edward Said, when examining the writings of the nineteenth-century Orientalist Edward William Lane, considered the sexualised “Other” in some detail: In most cases, the Orient seems to have offended sexual propriety; everything about the Orient—or at least Lane’s Orient-in-Egypt—exuded dangerous sex, threatened hygiene and domestic seemliness with an excessive “freedom of intercourse” as Lane put it more irrepressibly than usual.37

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Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others 141 Said continues his analysis of the sexualised “Other” with a detailed examination of the work of two French nineteenth-century writers: Flaubert and Nerval. He addresses issues of sexual hygiene and homosexuality while emphasising these authors’ reactions to what they perceived as the unbounded fecundity and sexuality of the archetypal Oriental woman.38 This archetypal Oriental woman is also evident in two recent volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, Century: 1910 and Nemo: The Roses of Berlin.39 Both narratives focus on Janni Dakkar, the daughter of Captain Nemo. In the opening title splash page of Century: 1910, she dives naked into the sea framed by a full moon, which emphasises her sexuality. After visiting her father on his deathbed, she escapes to London where she works as a cleaner in a hotel-cum-brothel at the docks. The piratical crew of the Nautilus track her down, tell her that Captain Nemo is dead and request that she now become their captain. Initially she refuses, but after being raped by a group of men in the brothel, she takes up the mantle as the new Captain Nemo. She then takes on the role of Shiva/Kali as a vengeful goddess and lays waste to the docks. Here Jenni is central to the narrative and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen merely reacts to her story in trying to prevent a predicted disaster, which is in fact her destruction of the docks. Her naked dive into the sea on the opening pages can be interpreted as an origin or rebirth story setting up her transformation into the new Captain Nemo. Her sexuality and outsider status as an Oriental drive the narrative, and she is cast as a monstrous and ultimately destructive “Other” through her act of vengeance. The idea of vengeance is also central to Nemo: The Roses of Berlin where the narrative has moved on to the 1940s. Captain Nemo is now a mother herself, her young daughter is married to a French aerial pirate, Armand Robur, and together they are fighting the German forces in a reenvisioned Second World War. Jenni’s lover, Broad Arrow Jack, is killed while rescuing their captured son-in-law in Berlin, and both mother and daughter gain revenge by laying waste to the city. The idea of sexualised vengeance is here most evident in a German pseudo-propaganda poster that acts as a frontispiece to the volume. In this image Captain Nemo is represented as a barebreasted Kali-inspired sea-monster, with tentacles in addition to arms, and the title “Captain Nemo: Scientific-Pirate and Butcher” (Figure 8.2). The highly sexualised “Other” was also evident in Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy’s Rogan Gosh, first published in 1990.40 By Milligan’s own admission as writer, this is a complex and virtually incomprehensible narrative with four interwoven strands. These strands are: 1) Rudyard Kipling in colonial India discovered sleeping with a servant boy, subsequently being blackmailed and the boy then committing suicide. Kipling visits a holy house to be rid of the bad karma, takes narcotics and has visions of the other three strands of the story. 2) Rogan Gosh, a Karmanaut who is tricked by Soma Swami, in the guise of Kipling, into taking the bad karma of Swami’s evildoing. To escape this bad karma he is reborn as Raju Dahwan. 3) A boy

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Figure 8.2 Writer Alan Moore; Artist Kevin O’Neill, “Captain Nemo: ScientificPirate and Butcher” (Frontispiece), Nemo: The Roses of Berlin. © Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. Published by Top Shelf Productions Inc and Knockabout Ltd.

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Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others 143 in a bedsit mourning the loss of his girlfriend, Mazzy, and eventually committing suicide. 4) The story of Dean Cripps and a waiter, Raju Dahwan, who meet in the Star of the East Tandoori restaurant; they enter a dream world and make love.41 There are numerous sexual references in this story and two specifically homosexual. In the first example it is implied that Kipling just could not resist the servant, and in the second Raju is seen as the dominant partner in his homosexual union with Dean. Both instances stress the role of the highly sexualised Oriental within the narrative in leading to moral corruption.42 As with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Kali is used as a key figure, in this case seen at her most destructive in pursuing Raju and Dene through different time spheres. The Kali-type figure seems to have become a significant cultural trope in other innovative comics. An alien science fiction version of Kali appeared in the 2000AD story “Torquemada’s Second Honeymoon”.43 More recently a character titled Kalifornication appeared in a graphic novel about a punk band titled Raygun Roads. Kalifornication is the guitarist in the band, and, as the character’s name implies, she is highly sexed and fecund and stands as an iconographic representation of Orientalist “Otherness”.44 CONCLUSION This study set out to explore the representations of Orientalist mythologies and colonialist stereotypes used to govern narrative structure in British comic books from the 1950s to the present day. These stereotypes continue to be a powerful device in telling stories even though the field of comic books has transformed over the past sixty years. Comic books have become more innovative in terms of the subject matter and the forms of representation used, but the “Other” is still a powerful cultural trope within the medium and continues to be used to represent an outmoded view of Britain and its imperial past. When discussing the shift from illustrated story papers to comic books in the 1950s and 1960s, Chapman used Raymond Williams’ concept that cultural shifts contain both residual and emergent forms.45 This concept is useful to explain the persistence of residual forms because the process of transformation is slow, but from this Chapman concludes that most residual forms in comic books do eventually disappear. Yet the study of The Victor and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen presented here shows this is not always the case, as exemplified by the survival of Orientalist and colonialist stereotypes in these adventure comic books. These stereotypes did then transform as comic books dealt with more adult themes such as sex. Both male and female representations of the eroticised Oriental emerged as new forms of representations of the “Other” in British comic books. These did not completely replace previous versions of colonialist and Orientalist stereotypes but rather supplemented and reinforced them.

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NOTES 1. Edward Said (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage. p. xii. 2. Edward Said (1978) Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan. p. 1. 3. Edward Said (1973) “Shattered Myths”, in Alexander Macfie (ed) (2000) Orientalism: A Reader. Edinburgh: University Press. p. 90. 4. For the issue of race and the representation of superheroes in comics, see Martin Barker (1989) Comics, Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.; Ian Gordon (1998) Comic Strips and Consumer Culture 1890–1945. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press.; M. Thomas Inge (1990) Comics as Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.; Cornel Perewardy (May 2002) “From Subhuman to Superhuman: Images of First Nations Peoples in Comic Books”, in Studies in Media and Information Literacy Education, Volume 2, Issue 2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 86–93. 5. Marc Singer (Spring 2002) “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race’, in African American Review, Volume 36. St Louis: St Louis University, pp. 107–126. 6. See Scott McCloud (1993) “Chapter 2-—The Vocabulary of Comics”, in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. London: Knockabout Comics.; Will Eisner (2008) Chapter 5, in Expressive Anatomy in Comics and Sequential Art. New York: W. W. Norton and Company (Revised 2nd Edition). 7. Edward Said (2003) “Homage to Joe Sacco”, in Joe Sacco (2003) Palestine. London: Jonathan Cape. p. iv. 8. George Orwell (1940) “Boys Weeklies”, in Peter Davison (2001) Orwell and the Dispossessed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. p. 258. 9. Martin Barker (1989) Comics, Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. p. 13. 10. George Orwell (1940): Boys Weeklies”. p. 251. 11. Roger Sabin (1996) Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels. London: Phaidon.; Paul Gravett and Peter Stansbury (2006) Great British Comics. London: Aurum Press. The best source on this transition from illustrated story paper to comic book in relation to the war comic genre is Adam Riches (2009) When the Comics Went to War. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing. 12. Roger Sabin (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction. London: Routledge. p. 25. 13. James Chapman (2011) British Comics: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Press. p. 60. 14. Ibid, pp. 65–69. 15. Roger Sabin (1996) Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels. p. 46. 16. Roger Sabin (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction. London: Routledge. p. 26. 17. Note for the purpose of this study that adventure is seen as the dominant genre, with war, sport, sci-fi, etc., seen as significant subgenres. 18. The Victor, “No. 473”, 14th of March 1970. DC Thomson & Co. Ltd. 19. This story was drawn by Harry Farrugia and ran from issue No. 466 through 474. 20. This story was drawn by Matias Alonso and ran from issue No. 464 through 480. 21. This story was drawn by Tony Colman and ran from issue No. 467 through 480. 22. The Victor, “No. 1371”, 30th of May 1987. DC Thomson & Co. Ltd. 23. This is a similar use of fictional Middle-Eastern place names as in The Victor of 1970 examined earlier.

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Colonialist Heroes and Monstrous Others 145 24. His character first started in the Rover as an illustrated story before transferring to The Victor as a comic strip in 1961. 25. James Chapman (2011) British Comics: A Cultural History. pp. 86–89. 26. Roger Sabin (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction. p. 52. For a detailed account of the controversy surrounding Action, see Martin Barker (1990) Action: The Story of a Violet Comic. London: Titan Books. 27. For an overview of this development, see Chapters 4 and 6 in Roger Sabin (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction. 28. Charles Hatfield (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University of Mississippi.; Charles Hatfield (2011) Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jackson: University of Mississippi. The idea of narrative drawing is developed in these two works by Hatfield. 29. Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (2000) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Volume One. La Jolla, California: America’s Best Comics. The entire series now includes the following: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Volume 2. (2004) America’s Best Comics; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Black Dossier. (2007) America’s Best Comics; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Century: 1910. (2009) Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Century: 1969. (2011) Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Century: 2009. (2012) Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics; Nemo: Heart of Ice. (2013) Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics; Nemo: The Roses of Berlin. (2014) Top Shelf Productions and Knockabout Comics. 30. Jess Nevins (2003) Heroes & Monsters. The Unofficial Companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. London: Titan Books. p. 153. 31. Ibid. p. 155. 32. Ibid. p. 35. 33. Ibid. p. 42. 34. Partha Mitter (1977) Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. viii. 35. Jess Nevins (2003) Heroes & Monsters. The Unofficial Companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. p. 187. 36. Ibid. p. 69. 37. Edward Said (1978) Orientalism. p. 167. 38. Ibid. pp. 162–190. 39. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910. (2009) and Nemo: The Roses of Berlin. (2014). 40. Peter Milligan and Brendan McCarthy (1990) “Rogan Gosh”, first published in Revolver. Fleetway. Reprinted in graphic novel form by DC Comics Vertigo in 1994. 41. Peter Milligan (1994) “Afterword: Karmachanics for Beginners”, in Rogan Gosh. New York: Vertigo. 42. Lena Roos (Spring 2010) “Religion, Sexuality and the Image of the Other in 300”, The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. Volume 22, Issue 1. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. This article examines homosexuality and the “Other” in the graphic novel 300 and raises similar issues regarding power. 43. Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill (1988) “Torquemada’s Second Honeymoon” 2000 AD Annual 1988. London: IPC Magazines. 44. Owen Michael Johnson and Indio (2013) Raygun Roads. London and Paris: Changeling Studios. 45. James Chapman (2011) British Comics: A Cultural History. p. 84.

9

Set Pieces

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Cultural Appropriation and the Search for Contemporary Identities in Shōnen Manga Jacob Birken 1. SOME NOTES ON *CULTURE When does cultural appropriation become inappropriate? Usually, a question like this will enter cultural discourse at its more scandalous periphery, as a site of conflict between hardliners of “political correctness” and conservative reaction; yet it stands near the center of the issue of life in a “globalized” world, which is conventionally addressed using the term of “multiculturalism”. In general, “multiculturalism” describes the situation of different cultures being practiced within a single society, or by the totality of a nation state’s citizens, of people performing different aesthetic practices, following different values or using different means of communication, but sharing the same sites and institutions. If we thus ask about the representation of multiculturalism in graphic narratives, we are confronted with a set of additional questions—starting with the fact that graphic narratives themselves are a very specific means of communication, which can thus either mediate different “cultures” (how?), or itself be the expression of a single, particular culture (why?). Or, to reiterate the initial question of “appropriateness” in this narrower context—if a graphic narrative is the expression of, or emerges from, a particular culture, is it able or even allowed to depict the particularities of another culture? These questions, while they might appear convoluted or even paradoxical on their own, are already based on several presumptions regarding culture, narrative and politics. While the general idea of coexisting cultures has various predecessors in world history, “multiculturalism” in its strictest sense emerges against the backdrop of twentieth-century post-modern philosophy and post-colonial critique. Both of the latter attempt to rectify the world order determined by “western” modernity; doing this, both constitute political projects, but also modes of interpreting cultural and socio-political contexts. Post-modern discourse rejects the visionary “master narratives” of the early twentieth century as futile and eventually leading to the (anti-)cultural dead-end of totalitarianism; post-colonial critique points out their involvement in imperialist conquest. In this sense, both operate through deconstructing cultural codes: post-modernism debunks the credibility of a

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Set Pieces: Cultural Appropriation 147 nonnegotiable truth (i.e., an absolute unity of signifier and signified), while post-colonial discourse explicitly attacks language as a means of oppression and segregation (e.g., racial slurs that negatively stereotype certain people, and thus predetermine their role and options within society). In regards to “multiculturalism”, we might say that post-modern thinking passively enables it, while post-colonial critique actively enforces it. Yet some parts of the overall model outlined here do not fit: for example, Marxist strands of post-colonial discourse contradict the post-modern deconstruction of the “master narrative”, and allegedly anti-ideological post-modernism’s structural affinity to capitalism does, as a matter of course, not sit well with radical, activist practices of emancipation.1 This brings us back to the initial question. While post-modernism deconstructs the “master narrative” in order to make culture(s) globally available, post-colonial critique questions its control over culture. In post-modernism, cultural appropriation can never be inappropriate; rather it would be inappropriate to hinder appropriation. Even though the post-colonial critic will acknowledge that mono-culture has to be deconstructed in order to abolish historically developed, hegemonic misrepresentations of the “Other”, he or she must analyze every new act of cultural appropriation as a transgressive display of power, or empowerment.2 From this viewpoint, it becomes necessary to refocus the question in regards to graphic narrative onto the role of its actors: What does the depiction of an “other” culture by a graphic narrative’s artist say about the relation of power between that artist and his “Other”? The visual disposition of comics deepens this issue, as the graphic medium will inevitably necessitate the construction of “stereotypes” as soon as it departs from mimetic realism—an “accursed necessity”, as Will Eisner puts it.3 In effect, the abstracting representation of people within graphic narratives can, even if inadvertently, repeat negative stereotypes from popular media or propaganda. Furthermore, “multiculturalism” implies a connection between politics and culture that is usually only explored on an administrative and empathetic level: society (or the nation state) has to provide structures that accommodate “multiple cultures” without conflict, while multiculturalism in itself is seen as fostering peace, and “enriching” the lives of those who can now profit from the diversity of aesthetic choices and means of cultural production (and, not to forget, cuisine). This, however, says nothing about an immediate relation of culture(s) and politics, i.e., whether the notion of culture in general is tied to a particular practice or just denotes an expressive residue or surplus of mankind’s activities, which might not even be of relevance for the species’ survival.4 I will return to some of these questions in regards to comics, and in the light of several diverging opinions from philosophy and political writing in the course of this chapter; for now, it might be helpful to suspend “multiculturalism” as a paradigm for dealing with cultures in plural, and to retreat to a notion of *culture, whose qualifying or quantifying prefix remains a potential.

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148 Jacob Birken The questions of *culture and of cultural appropriation, of course, also apply to scientific writing, and thus to this chapter. Analytic approaches toward the culture of “others” remain controversial, and the controversy hardly solvable: the interpretation of the “other” can be criticized as an extraneous construction unrelated to its (unwilling or uninvolved) “subject”, while the converse concept of culture being unintelligible for anyone bar the “initiated” can be reduced to an essentialist model unsuitable for both science and general human dialogue. Additionally, this controversy is part of more general quarrels between the different established and emerging disciplines within humanities and social sciences, with their respective ties to a hegemonic world order.5 In this context, some words on the character of my text seem advisable. While my ultimate aim is to tackle the elusive prefix of *culture in the context of specific graphic narratives, I have chosen a subject that is not only “foreign” to myself as a Central European scholar, but itself concerned with creating an image of the “other”: contemporary shōnen manga that incorporates images and narratives from European culture, and particularly Christianity. Yet my intent is not to analyze these manga as specifically “Japanese”, which would make it necessary to trace the connections between graphic narrative and what is “Japanese” by definition, i.e. either the nation state and its institutions, or the language—an approach that is beyond both the scope of the essay and my methodical possibilities. To classify any other historical or aesthetic continuities as “Japanese” (culture) is, of course, tempting, as is “the current fantasy or imagination of Japan as the heaven of postmodernism” that Stephen Melville criticized in 1989, and which even today readily offers itself as an explanation to many questions arising in our overall context.6 I have three objections to such classification: a) the lack or impossibility of a nonessentialist theory supporting such claims; b) the high probability that the narratives of pop and subculture actively divert from, or contradict the narratives forged by the nation state and c) my hope to derive a model of *culture from the following analysis, which will refute such claims both on a descriptive and a political level. This said, I will now introduce my central case study, which, as we might already imagine, will eventually be intercepted by an appeal against “inappropriate appropriation”. 2. WHOSE CROSS IS IT, ANYWAY? In 2004, mangaka Katsura Hoshino—then in her mid-twenties—publishes the first chapters of her Gothic fantasy manga D.Gray-Man in the highly popular anthology Weekly Shōnen Jump. D.Gray-Man proves to be a success and is subsequently translated into various foreign languages. An anime series based on the manga is aired between 2004 and 2008, reaching the number of 103 episodes before eventually being canceled; the manga itself remains in production, spanning twenty-four tankōbon volumes as

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Set Pieces: Cultural Appropriation 149 of December 2013. D.Gray-Man follows the adventures of young Allen Walker, his induction into the militant “Black Order” of exorcists and his continuing conflict with the “Millennium Earl” and his demonic cohorts. In this, the manga retells the established narrative of a teenager’s coming of age against the backdrop of global, possibly apocalyptic conflict, his or her responsibilities within a somehow “institutionalized” group of peers, and the struggle to control his or her own extraordinary power. Manga and anime have told such stories of troubled, potentially “messianic” youths against settings as diverse as worlds shaped by competing ninja clans (Naruto, since 1999; Nabari no Ou, 2004–2010), alchemy and military intrigue (Fullmetal Alchemist, 2001–2010), future mecha warfare (the various Gundam series; RahXephon, 2002, Eureka Seven, 2005–2006, or Code Geass, 2006–2008) or witchcraft in a modern world (Witch Hunter Robin, 2002).7 Of course, these various retellings also differ in tone, the individual characterization of their protagonists (goofy, megalomaniac Naruto is an exact opposite of the angsty heroes of Nabari no Ou, Witch Hunter Robin or many a Gundam) and the socio-political implications of their settings. Within this spectrum, D.Gray-Man focuses on an elaborate fantasy world inspired by Gothic horror, its aesthetics and popular tropes interspersed with moments of slapstick humor. The central conflict within the storyline pits holy and demonic powers against each other, the former being represented by a militant religious organization loosely associated with Christian iconography and narratives; in chapter 7 of the manga, we are told that the “Black Order” was founded by the Vatican to counteract the Millennium Earl’s plan to end the world, and the European branch of the worldwide order resides in a building resembling something in between a Romanesque campanile and Renaissance imaginations of the Tower of Babel. Despite these motives, D.Gray-Man is obviously not an attempt at a historical manga, and its relation to history is made clear from the outset—explicitly, in the two panels of the first narrative page in chapter 1. The top panel, which takes up nearly two thirds of the pages, shows a dilapidated church, distinguished as Christian by architecture and a cross above the door. Thick white fog and the black silhouettes of leafless trees and bats add to the scenery. A slightly angular moon is a departure from the realistic depiction of the building and landscape below; it reminds us that we are about to witness a fantastic story and opens up a separate set of aesthetic references, complementing and subverting the picture’s realism and Gothic ambience. A voice from off-panel informs us about several occurrences of people disappearing after spending a night inside this church. The second panel below shows a glimpse of one of the story’s minor characters, and, in a rather pointed way, sets the overall frame for the series with one short sentence: “imaginary end of the 19th century.”8 This fin de siècle, we are being told, is not real; the real nineteenth century remains but a reference, a vague set of aesthetic fragments that can be modified or replaced. Congruity will only be accounted for in regards to the story, but not in regards to

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150 Jacob Birken a truthful representation of nineteenth-century life and culture. Just like the angular moon above the church, this sentence reminds us that in fiction realism might be probable, but it is not necessary. Severing representation from historical fact can also apply to specific symbols. In D.Gray-Man, the Christian cross is a common element. On this first page, it serves as a quick hint toward the region and culture used as a setting; it will take on different narrative or aesthetic roles in progression. Later in chapter 1, a core concept of D.Gray-Man’s fictional demonology is presented through a sequence of flashbacks: a minor character succumbing to grief over the death of a loved one and being granted her resurrection by the evil Millennium Earl (which, of course, turns out as a particularly bad deal usually resulting in the death of the “petitioner” at the hands of the resurrected). In this instance, the course of events is set off by nothing else than a monolithic Christian cross, hanging in the not-yet-ruined church—and, then, plunging to the floor and crushing a troubled nun exactly in the moment in which she regains trust in providence. The subsequent meeting between her grieving partner and the Millennium Earl is captured in a remarkable image that pushes the manga’s style far away from realism, including an anthropomorphic moon and allusions to reprographic technique—large halftone dots blot out the sky, and the Millennium Earl’s cloak is filled with a simple star pattern that seems to betray the manga’s hand-drawn aesthetic. Historical realism is overwritten by a reference to the history of the graphic arts themselves, while distorted crosses as tombstones provide an atmospheric backdrop. Apart from being a contextualizing or atmospheric part of scenery, the cross is ubiquitous within what I would call a “narrative iconography” of D.Gray-Man, i.e. symbols that help to create a continuous, coherent world of fiction. It appears as insignia on the Black Order’s uniforms, and is inscribed on the back of protagonist Allen Walker’s deformed, haunted hand; Allen’s mentor and senior Black Order officer even carries it as his name: Cross Marian (クロス マリアン). Finally, the cross appears as a “special effect” triggered by Allen Walker’s demon-killing attack. It is worthwhile to take a look at the original panel; Allen Walker’s battle cry, “Cross Grave”, appears both as a phrase in kanji using the appropriate Japanese words (十字架の 墓, Jūjika no haka), and as a phonetic transcription of the translated English phrase (クロス グレイヴ, kurosu gureivu) in small katakana. The occurrences of the cross in D.Gray-Man thus range from simple pieces of scenery to integral and symbolic elements of the plot and the overall visual inventory of the manga. They do not, however, make D.Gray-Man a Christian narrative. The crosses in the manga do not represent a Christian institution; they represent a “holy symbol” of an imaginary nineteenth century, which we can identify as such because of its real historical counterpart. “Christianity” has to be read in quotation marks in this case; it remains as a trace, and its symbols as markers of abstract religious meaning—as performative symbols, these crosses are relevant only within the world of the manga itself.

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Set Pieces: Cultural Appropriation 151 Accordingly we could argue that, as D.Gray-Man does not reference the historical “meaning” of such symbols but only an iconic trace of their being “meaningful”, its references remain in the realm of fiction. Rather than real history and culture, D.Gray-Man references genre: it is not historical Europe or the Christian religion that we see as a source of images and narratives, but the distinct and popular fictional world of Gothic fantasy, internationally popularized through authors like Mary Shelley or H. P. Lovecraft, or the films of Tim Burton. The “imaginary nineteenth century” is not set in the nineteenth century; it is set in the imaginary. Following this logic, the cross we see in D.Gray-Man is separated from a Christian cross through layers of appropriation and reception, and its interpretation would be a subject for genre historians rather than those in the context of cultural politics. The de- or re-contextualization of a symbol in fiction does not, however, overwrite its historical context beyond its reception in fiction and correspondingly does not preclude a reading that would interpret the crosses in D.Gray-Man as explicitly Christian symbols. Given the otherwise fantastic story, such a reading will inevitably lead to irritation. In this sense, a reviewer on the German website of a large Internet bookshop indeed felt that Hoshino had gone too far in appropriating European culture. “What [. . .] got horribly on my nerves”, she writes, “were the many Christian elements, interspersed among her Gothic-fantasy-story in obviously cheerful ignorance, and which make not much or no sense here. [. . .] I can understand that most Japanese haven’t got much of a clue of Christianity, and regard the entire thing just from an exotic perspective, but for me, even with Manga there is a certain pain barrier”.9 This critique poses a fairly complex dilemma. It is easy to dismiss the reviewer’s opinion as cultural essentialism; obviously, she follows a model of culture in which specific elements “belong” to a certain group of people—in this case, Christian believers—and do not “make [. . .] sense” outside the range of interpretations defined by this very group. Christianity is unintelligible to “most Japanese”, and therefore its elements should not be used by a mangaka in a fictional setting. This model of culture as commodity is difficult to maintain, as it links interpretative processes to social categories and institutions whose authority is by no means universal. Nevertheless, the reviewer’s (mis-)reading of D.Gray-Man places the manga inside our debate on cultural politics, or even transforms the manga itself into a political text. As the reviewer herself classifies the Japanese view of Christianity as coming from an “exotic perspective”, we could, somewhat counterintuitively, subject the curious case of the crosses in an imaginary nineteenth century to the framework of post-colonial critique. In the system of knowledge about the Orient, the Orient is less a place then a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of these.10

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152 Jacob Birken This passage by Edward Said could easily apply to the world shown in Hoshino’s manga, as soon as we simply exchange the word “Orient” with the word “Europe”. However, post-colonial critique necessarily implies a power relation between those who imagine the “Other”, and those being subjects of and subjected to this imagination; we would thus have to describe a much larger Japanese project of establishing global cultural hegemony to support this claim, in which D.Gray-Man would appear as but a single instance.11 The popularity of Manga abroad as a means of Japanese “soft power”, and eclecticism as a strategy to ease the border-crossing by inserting fragments of “familiar” cultures for non-Japanese readers could indeed reinforce this argument.12 Within a larger equation of Japan as “the heaven of postmodernism”, and postmodernism as an expression/condition of ever-expanding consumerism, the deconstruction of cultural signifiers and their reuse as décor and set pieces for the entertainment industry would appear as a central technique within the programme of debunking historical meaning in general. The fascination for foreign history apparent in D.Gray-Man would comply with the preferred (or, available) nostalgic modes of post-modern creativity; as Fredric Jameson writes in 1991, “the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.”13 In a post-modern world, our angry critic would be but a voice from the past, caught unawares by the general decoupling of cultural signifiers and the signified. D.Gray-Man would, also, be a paradigmatic example for multicultural entertainment in which—between free trade and democracy—any expression of difference is restricted to the difference of taste. If we, Katsura Hoshino and her reviewer are denizens of the same capitalist sphere manifesting through globalized entertainment culture, the European Christian cannot qualify as the political, exotic “Other” of “the Japanese”, and thus is in no position to engage them through anti-hegemonic critique. This does not mean that anti-hegemonic critique cannot target this system in general. “Multiculturalism has acquired a quality akin to spectacle. The metaphor that has displaced the melting pot is the salad. A salad consisting of many ingredients is colorful and beautiful, and it is to be consumed by someone.”14 Activist writer Angela Davis’s suspicion hints toward a remaining relation of power: the “someone” most likely being capital and the neo-liberal nation state: “Workers may look different and talk (even signify), eat, dance, and act differently from one another, but they will be expected to be as productive ‘as if’ they were all the same.”15 D.Gray-Man’s remix of European culture would, in this sense, be just a different serving of multiculturalism as salad. Yet there is something amiss in this interpretation. Rather than further discussing the manga’s eclecticism against the backdrop of multiculturalism and its ties to capitalism and the post-modern condition, I would like to focus on a specific narrative aspect already mentioned above, which might ultimately point toward a different understanding of *culture, and a different legitimization of cultural appropriation.

Set Pieces: Cultural Appropriation 153

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2. POSSESSION AND THE LIFE CYCLE D.Gray-Man, as the few scenes described above have already shown, is a story of conflict—not only external conflict between the protagonists and their adversaries, but also the internal conflict of the protagonists coming to terms with their supernatural powers, which ultimately make them not less “inhuman” than their demonic enemies (in a later chapter, Allen Walker turns out to be a possible host for the reincarnation of one of the “Noah”, the Millennium Earl’s evil family). This brings us to a term central for both this and comparable stories, and for the general question of *culture: identity. The reflection of a historical conflict within the person of the protagonist is a popular trope in the narrative subset of manga outlined earlier. Allen Walker is not only blessed/cursed with an arm that turns into various powerful weapons, but, as a child, had also succumbed to “resurrecting” his deceased adoptive father—being able to destroy the resulting demon merely through the power of his haunted arm, and against his own will. In Blue Exorcist, a more recent manga by Kazue Kato, protagonist Rin Okumura realizes that he is the son of Satan and enters an order of Exorcists to defeat his “biological” father, who had brutally murdered Rin’s priestly caretaker and mentor, Shiro Fujimoto (who, as Rin and the readers learn in chapter 11, was actually a high officer and “Paladin” of the Exorcist order). Due to his heritage and demonic powers, Rin remains under close scrutiny—or rather a suspended death sentence—from the politically ambiguous Exorcist order, while his bravery and commitment gradually win him the sympathy and friendship of his peer group. Blue Exorcist is set in contemporary Japan, but replicates the militant “Christian” Exorcist order from D.Gray-Man while simultaneously integrating it in an even more eclectic world of coexisting mythologies (in chapter 19, Rin’s future friend/rival Ryuji Suguro abandons his father’s temple to enter Exorcist school, claiming that one won’t get far today by sticking to Buddhism). Set in what might be another “imaginary nineteenth century”, the earlier, best-selling manga Fullmetal Alchemist (2001–2010) by Hiromu Arakawa follows the path of the brothers Alphonse and Edward Elric on their search to regain their human body (respectively, parts thereof), which they lost in a horribly misguided attempt to resurrect their mother by means of alchemy. Although they serve as constant reminders of trauma, the prosthetic limbs make Edward a more efficient alchemist (and combatant), while the huge set of armor that houses Alphonse’s disembodied soul renders him all but invincible. The world of Fullmetal Alchemist does not rely on Christianity as an iconic repository, although its concept of alchemy derives from the European tradition (e.g., Robert Fludd’s Sephirothic Tree of Life is appropriated for the design of the Gate of Truth, a pivotal piece of scenery; the main antagonists are artificial super-humans—“Homunculi”—named after the Christian seven deadly sins). Interestingly, the fictional “Europe” of Fullmetal Alchemist is, in later chapters, complemented with a fictional “Asia”, represented by a couple of figures hailing from the country of “Xing”, and

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154 Jacob Birken practicing a different strand of alchemy. Fantastic Geopolitics play a fundamental role in Fullmetal Alchemist; the vaguely “European” country of “Amestris” that serves as a home for the Elric brothers and as the setting for most parts of the story, has been—unbeknownst to its population—founded as something akin to a gigantic sacrificial site, while its military actively incites or even stages ethnic uprising at its peripheries in order to provide a huge alchemical contraption with blood (regarding the representation of one of these suppressed peoples, the Ishbalans, as dark skinned and highly religious, this can be read as a not-so-subtle political commentary at the time of the manga’s publication, especially as they are murdered in order to provide “fuel” for the antagonist’s megalomaniac plan). The narrative of a youth burdened by his own power and drawn into a historical conflict mirrored in his own biography and “origin” story is, of course, not tied to eclectic worlds that play with the “foreign” as a setting; the manga possibly pursuing this narrative in the most explicit ways, Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto, is set in a generic science-fantasy martial arts world with many local trappings, such as super-powers based on the Chinese zodiac or scroll writing, and a ramen noodle restaurant as a regular backdrop. Here, titular hero Naruto is a vessel for the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox, which was banished inside his body by his parents after it went on a rampage in Naruto’s village. Dying in the process, the parents leave Naruto in the custody of the village, which treats him with hostility until he proves himself through various heroic deeds. Outside manga, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is an obvious parallel, although the double nature of a wondrous gift/curse is not as strongly articulated within Harry’s story as in the others. Apart from this narrative, all mentioned stories share further elements. In each, the teenage (male) protagonist enters a “uniformed” institution, which—in the cases of Blue Exorcist, Naruto and Harry Potter—also doubles as a school or academy (to concede a point to the idea of “national character”, this particular trope will surely be more meaningful in Japan and the United Kingdom, as opposed to countries such as Germany, in which a school uniform has never been part of institutional tradition). The institution itself remains ambiguous or is revealed as downright flawed: the Black Order in D.Gray-Man and the Ninja villages in Naruto harbor a dubious weakness for experiments on human subjects, and the (secret) governments of Fullmetal Alchemist or Harry Potter are dens of intrigue and corruption. The protagonists will thus eventually come into conflict with at least some representatives of these institutions; regarding their self-image, this is reflected in their fear of being instrumentalized as “a weapon”, and reduced to their exploitable super-powers within the institution’s historical conflict (“Fullmetal Alchemist” Edward Elric voluntarily applies for military service to, as “a dog of the army”, get support for his scientific research; although he initially renounces political consciousness in favor of the quest for personal, or rather fraternal redemption, he is unable to escape political responsibility in the course of the story). In short, at the core of the narrative lies an experience of adolescent

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Set Pieces: Cultural Appropriation 155 identity crisis: a “normative crisis” that is—following psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson’s classical definition—not only a phase of increased conflict, but one that also provides considerable potential for growth.16 The coming-of-age story responds to the projected audience of shōnen manga, to which all of the mentioned comics belong, and which is aimed at male teenagers—as opposed to shōjo manga for female teenagers, or seinen manga for (young) male adults (the possibly relevant gender and sexuality discourse must be left aside here for reasons of brevity; we might also note that with the exception of Naruto, all manga mentioned in this section above have been created by women). Yet, we should not neglect the political content of these stories, which is not sufficiently covered by the coming-of-age narrative, and classical psychoanalysis; it is only at the end of Identity and the Life Cycle that Erikson mentions the need to develop analytical instruments to deal with the mutual reactions between humans and their environment’s boundaries. This, however, constitutes the narrative of many shōnen manga, whose heroes, as Angela Drummond-Mathews argues, cannot progress solely by clearing out obstacles (and essentially remaining the same themselves): “The manga hero will have grown, matured, and learned something that not only enriches herself but also the world around her [my emphasis].”17 In Naruto, this becomes a crucial, repeated narrative moment, when the titular hero defeats his adversaries not only through power and persistence but also by exemplifying the possibility to overcome trauma and marginalization through his own struggles. In this way, Naruto’s social integration corresponds with the ever-growing circle of friends and acquaintances whose initial hostility toward Naruto (or the world in general) is alleviated once they have accepted both their own alterity and their social responsibility, learning to dismiss ostracizing “public opinion” on the one hand, and to care—or even sacrifice themselves—for their friends on the other. In a later story arc, Naruto eventually comes to terms with the Demon Fox captured within his body, and its being the source of his marginalization and powers. Their friendship only begins when Naruto learns to address his magical inhabitant/prisoner by his given name, Kurama, and not via the technical or racial identifier of “Nine-Tailed Demon Fox” or “Nine-Tails”. In several of the anime episodes, a short song is introduced alongside the opening or ending sequences, in which Naruto recites the names of Kurama and the other eight demonic animals to a sing-along tune, adding a short description that stresses the positive qualities of his (and mankind’s) former arch-enemies. The option to overcome conflict by accepting the others’ (and your own) alterity is thereby delivered didactically to the audience. 4. CONCLUSION Where, then, does this all leave us in regards to *culture? The manga in question—most notably, D.Gray-Man, Blue Exorcist and Fullmetal Alchemist—have two defining features in common. For their setting, their

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156 Jacob Birken authors have chosen a fantastic world either based on, or incorporating elements from, European history, or Christian iconography and narrative; this, they share with other manga, e.g. Berzerk or the Dungeons & Dragons– derived Record of Lodoss War. The interest in such cultural appropriation could lie, as others have argued, in an expansion of the target group for this “brand” of popular culture, or the addition of an exotic flavor for the local audience.18 In both cases, symbols or fragments from other cultural regions are used as visual cues for “world culture” or a nostalgic re-creation of “history” in quotation marks, which neglects any real and meaningful historical continuities in favor of a cursory, “touristic” view. Shilpa Davé offers a symptomatic anecdote for such strategies in her analysis of SpiderMan: India—“The cover of the second issue features Spider-Man in front of the Taj Mahal even though he is in the western coastal city of Mumbai and not in the northern city of Agra [. . .]. In order to market Spider-Man India as Indian, the art needs to reflect what a mass global population consumes as Indian (the Taj Mahal, for instance), and the result is that images tend toward Western stereotypes of Indians.”19 In chapter 43 of D.Gray-Man, a group of exorcists is dispatched to seek out their traveling senior officer; on their way, they halt in an unnamed city overshadowed by what one of the characters calls “these strange huge towers”, otherwise easily recognizable as the building site (or ruins) of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia. In contrast to the dominant graphic style of the manga, the building is depicted in a nearly realistic style, as though it had been adapted from an old photograph— ominous, romantic scenery (but no more) even by visual means. This “tourist gaze” fits into an egalitarian but consumerist concept of multiculturalism, or even into the more radical mode of hyperculture, as described by philosopher Byung-Chul Han.20 In hyperculture, culture becomes identical with itself, being finally detached from any “factual” bonds to biology (e.g., race) or essentialist concepts, as the idea of a nation state derived from geographic division. It is evident that such concepts can exist only against the backdrop of a post-modern “end of history”, in which conflicts regarding such categories have been effectively put to rest; but, as Alan Wolfe writes: [. . .] for nations and peoples in daily struggle with Western and Japanese imperialism, it must come, if they hear about it, as a surprise to learn that the game or story “is over”. For the third world, the idea that Japan or the first world has no system, no structure, no content, no signifieds does not induce apathy as so much as vigilance; the view of the postmodern as a postnarrative, hence postpolitical stage is itself a dangerous narrative ploy designed to defuse the potential of political struggle.21 Yet in our admittedly frivolous context of fantasy manga, the very idea of struggle stands at the center (of course, even this could be subsumed under the ideology of contemporary capitalism, in which the primacy

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Set Pieces: Cultural Appropriation 157 of competition creates a new subject, which—to borrow Asada Akira’s definition—“having internalized the model/rival, has begun to compete with himself”22). It is, as I would argue, the notion of the “fantastic” that is pivotal for the discussion, as it fuses the normative crisis of (adolescent) identity with a broader epistemological crisis, which is expressed through a certain attitude toward representation in general. At the heyday of postmodern theory in the 1980s, the diagnosis of epistemological crisis was deduced from the shock of a worldwide information society, and ideas of digital media creating a Simulacrum detached from reality. While such concepts still inform media theory, and, eventually, popular culture, we have to now ask if the diagnosis of this crisis was not but a mirage itself. As early as the 1990s, science historian and sociologist Bruno Latour attempted to debunk the entire progression of pre-modernity, modernity and postmodernity, describing how our concept of modernity was based on the false assumption of a “clean” differentiation between concepts of nature and culture, or science and society.23 It might very well be that fragmented, eclectic worlds of fantasy manga reflect this epistemological crisis, which becomes more evident every day through mankind’s possibly fatal alterations to the ecosystem. In this sense, the fragmentation of culture(s) in fantasy manga and elsewhere is not a sign of an inappropriate decoupling of narratives and images from meaningful history, but the recognition of a necessity to renegotiate such means of representation from scratch—just as the manga’s heroes struggle to create a positive identity through building relations to their antagonistic, or antagonized peers. To borrow Slavoj Žižek’s terms, such conflicted characters invite the reader to identify with the symptom by taking on the perspective of “the point of inherent exception/exclusion, the ‘abject’, of the concrete positive order”, thus subverting the oppressive system relying on this order—a genuinely political gesture, even though the antagonisms presented in fantasy manga might barely correspond to those in contemporary society.24 As to *culture: in his aptly named book, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting, Marxist historian Vijay Prashad promotes the term of polyculturalism, which “uncouples the notions of origins and authenticity from that of culture” in order to tackle difference as disagreement to be overcome, and culture as a means to foster solidarity and dignity during the struggle.25 Inevitably, such cultures will mix, merge and transform, set into motion by the respective gestures of solidarity while facing a mutual oppressor. If postmodernism, in regards to changes of things and their representations, “only clocks the variations themselves, and knows only too well that the contents are just more images”, the content of every fleeting, temporary cultural signifier in polyculturalism refers to the very necessity of change.26 Historically, and today, polyculturalism as a political project targets racist oppression and class inequality. In allegory, and for a future barely imaginable within our crisis-ridden epistemology, we might very well think of it as including the struggles of alienated, possessed youth, demon foxes and the rejects of any other kind of *centrist culture.

158 Jacob Birken

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NOTES 1. For multiculturalism and (capitalist) post-modernism precluding political practice, see Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism”, New Left Review, I/225 (September–October 1997), 28–51. 2. The idea of (violent) cultural appropriation as empowerment even predates post-colonial discourse in Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago”, Revista de Antropofagia (São Paulo: 1928); Oswald de Andrade and Leslie Bary, “Cannibalist Manifesto”, Latin American Literary Review, 19/38 (July– December, 1991), 38–47. 3. Will Eisner, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (New York/London: W.W. Norton, 2006), 11. 4. An acerbic compilation of the paradoxical relations of culture and politics within “multiculturalism” can be found in Avery F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield, introduction to Mapping Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), 1–16; here esp. 6–10. 5. For a good overview and possible outlook, see John Lie, “Asian Studies/Global Studies: Transcending Area Studies and Social Sciences”, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, E-Journal No. 2 (March 2012). 6. Stephen Melville, “Picturing Japan: Reflections on the Workshop”, in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 1989), 279–288; here 281. 7. Mecha are giant, anthropomorphic weapons piloted by humans; more often than not, the most powerful mecha require an especially “gifted” or even trans-human pilot to realize their potential. The current anime Valvrave the Liberator is very vocal about this: The pilot has to formally “resign from being a human” via the mecha’s touchscreen interface in order to start the machine. 8. 仮想19世紀末 in the original. 9. Judith Schmidt, “Auf Teufel komm raus”, Review of D.Gray-Man Vol. 1 on Amazon.com, accessed December 10, 2013, www.amazon.de/dp/3865808514/ [my translation]. 10. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 177. 11. More pertinent, of course, would then be the depictions of cultures and societies formerly subjected to Japanese colonial rule; see Jaqueline Berndt, “Historical Adventures of a Post-Historical Medium: Japan’s Wartime Past as Represented in Manga”, in Contested Views of a Common Past. Revisions of History in Contemporary East Asia, ed. Steffi Richter (Frankfurt am Main: Campus), 287–320. 12. Cf. Jason Bainbridge and Craig Norris, “Hybrid Manga: Implications for the Global Knowledge Economy”, in Manga, ed. Toni Johnson-Woods (New York/London: Continuum, 2010), 235–252; here esp. 241. 13. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 17f. 14. Angela Y. Davis, “Gender, Class, and Multiculturalism”, in Mapping Multiculturalism ed. Avery F. Gordon, Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), 40–48; here 45. 15. Ibid., 46. 16. Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle (1959; repr. New York/London: W.W. Norton, 1980), 125. 17. Angela Drummon-Mathews, “What Boys Will Be: A Study of Shōnen Manga”, in Manga, ed. Toni Johnson-Woods (New York/London: Continuum, 2010), 62–76; here 74. 18. Cf. Bainbridge and Norris, “Hybrid Manga”.

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Set Pieces: Cultural Appropriation 159 19. Shilpa Davé, “Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translating/Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives”, in Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives, ed. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 127–144; here 137. 20. Byung-Chul Han, Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung (Berlin: Merve, 2005). 21. Alan Wolfe: “Suicide and the Japanese Postmodern: A Postnarrative Paradigm?”, in Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1989), 216–233; here 231. 22. Asada Akira, “Infantile Capitalism”, in Miyoshi and Harootunian, Postmodernism and Japan, 273–278; here 274. 23. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 24. Žižek, “Multiculturalism”, 50f. 25. Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting. Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 65. 26. Jameson, Postmodernity, ix.

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Part IV

Challenging Assumptions

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10 Narrative Exploration against Mentality Issues

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Indirect Education for Multiculturalism in Tintin Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru In “Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative,” an introductory article to an issue of the journal MELUS dedicated to comics addressing ethnoracial social matter, Derek Parker Royal expresses his opinion that comic strips can be a highly unambiguous and efficient way to manipulate the reader. While the effects of such manipulation can be negative when it comes to transmitting stereotypical views, for example, they can also be turned to good account when the purpose is education. Significantly, the issue of MELUS introduced by Royal’s article came out around the same time as the reprinted 1946 edition of Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo, probably the most controversial book in the celebrated Tintin series.1 As the summer 2007 Journal of Blacks in Higher Education points out, Tintin in the Congo has seen a wide variety of reactions, and the heated debate around it in the United Kingdom on accounts of racism spectacularly increased sales of the book.2 Reading the comic in the United States nowadays can trigger criticism of the racist hints associated with the stereotypical graphic representation of black people, but it can also draw attention to the changes in understanding race rather than promoting racism. In a book chapter on “Ideology: The Construction of Race and History in Tintin in the Congo,” which comes very close to a defense of Hergé’s book against accusations of racism, Leonard Rifas stresses the historical inevitability of changing assumptions: “A work created under one set of social assumptions, such as Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo, may find itself closely re-examined decades later in a world in which some assumptions have changed.”3 Hergé admitted in an interview given to Numa Sadoul that, to a certain extent, he could not avoid falling prey to conservative attitudes of the time, yet the Tintin series was meant to expose children to a variety of situations and attitudes with a clear educational intention. He thought that children—his major audience—could understand a lot more than they were given credit for, and so the pressing issues of the world should not be hidden from them.4 As I will attempt to show, even though he was employed to perpetuate the conservative mentality represented by Le petit vingtième (the supplement for children of the Catholic magazine Le XXe siècle where Tintin was originally serialized), Hergé uses the hybrid verbal and visual

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164 Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru textuality of comics to question some received assumptions about the world for the benefit of his young audience. This chapter will argue that Hergé’s classic comic strip series, The Adventures of Tintin, which spans several decades of spectacularly changing attitudes in the world, can be read as an indirect (and all the more subtle) transmitter of a far more pluralism-friendly message than it was associated with when it was first published. Even though the Tintin books cannot be considered an instance of educational comics as such, they are not devoid of a subtle educational function, expressed through exposing their primary audience of children to multicultural issues and implicitly questioning them. I will address multiculturalism not so much as a demographic condition of ethnic plurality in a country, but rather as a function of people’s increasing mobility across borders, which, as Steven Vertovec argues, has become particularly visible in the contemporary global world, to which contemporary perceptions of Hergé’s protagonist’s many travels to distant lands can be related.5 This chapter proposes a rereading of Hergé’s representations of the Other in Tintin. I will argue that, despite some accusations of emulating conservative attitudes such as racism, the series shows an understanding of and a tolerance for difference well beyond the general outlook of the time (such as represented by Abbé Wallez’s magazine Le XXe Siècle). This endows the series with the capacity to expose and address contemporary conflictual issues related to the survival of racist attitudes (such as the 2007 debate over Tintin in the Congo in the United Kingdom and Belgium), but also to cultural emancipation (such as the Catalan case, discussed in the last section of this chapter). In his “Coloring America” article, Royal argues that, as “comics rely on a visual language that encourages a more immediate processing time within the reader and, on the level of interpretation, a more ‘efficient’ exchange between author(s) and audience,” they represent an art form that can trigger immediate, often strong audience responses and can inform some of the audience’s beliefs.6 Immediacy has played an important part in the educational function of some comics especially recently, as education has tended to incorporate various alternative, more lively and interactive methods. Negrete and Lartigue describe such methods as teaching science as “hard fun” and using “resources that encourage students’ minds to burst into action,” which “present scientific information through stories, novels, comics and plays.”7 When used in education, comics keep students’ attention alive through their visual dimension and their entertainment function and can thus be more successful than conventional teaching in communicating information that might otherwise be perceived as difficult or boring. While there is a difference between fiction comics (meant to tell a story and engage the readers’ imagination and fantasy) and educational comics (meant to communicate information), fiction comics can also be used to transmit educational messages. To define educational comics as “simply those comics that deal in ‘facts’ instead of ‘fiction’” is considered by Leonard Rifas to

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Narrative Exploration 165 be limiting, since “comics have combined factual and fictional elements in many ways” and the “quality of being educational can be found in some degree in any comic book.”8 This is especially true when comic books are addressed to children and teenagers, as a significant range of literature on their use in primary and secondary education points out. Canada and the United States are good examples, history being a subject that seems to lend itself particularly well to teaching through comics. As part of history teaching in Canada, Alyson King signals the use of nonfiction graphic texts in the portrayal of historical events, issues, and characters in magazines such as Kayak, issued by Canada’s History Society.9 Katherine Aiken notes the use of comics in history teaching in the United States but criticizes comics for their contribution to the reinforcement of stereotypical gender archetypes.10 Through being more entertaining, fiction comics can reach a wider audience than purely educational, informative comics. Unlike them, Heike Jüngst shows, educational comics are designed for specific target groups and are not usually meant to circulate across cultures through translation, unless they transmit a critical, usually political, content of wider interest.11 The question of racism and of its accompanying stereotypical attitudes addressed by Royal is such a critical political issue. In another introductory piece—his Foreword to Frederick Luis Aldama’s edited collection Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle (2010)—he argues that stereotypes are at home in comics, where they are employed “as a kind of shorthand to communicate quickly and succintly.”12 More than other types of narrative that rely more on verbal expression, comic strips, with their emphasis on the visual, may either reinforce stereotypes (as in the case signaled by Aiken) or, on the contrary, signal problematic attitudes such as racism and exclusion and open them up for exploration through the very act of exposing them. COMICS AS MULTICULTURAL NARRATIVES The potential to question assumptions about society and, in doing so, open debates around multiculturalism, implies a discussion of comics as a particular type of narrative. In the introduction to one of the recent collections of essays on the ways in which comics increasingly represent a plural world, Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn explain their relevance to such plurality through their formal narrative fragmentariness: Despite its sequential nature, the comic may also be best suited to illustrate the fragmentary nature of time. By breaking the flow of their stories into panels, comics draw attention to the fragmentary nature of narrative, and indeed of experience. They have, despite their name, been used to tell very serious stories about the fragmented experience of revolution, war, and terrorism, but have also been employed to capture the very mundane fragmentation of autobiographical memory.13

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166 Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru This correspondence between fragmentary narrative and the fragmentariness of experience has made comics an unexpectedly appropriate medium to discuss issues that are normally difficult to tackle, such as Holocaust trauma (see Art Spiegelman’s 1991 classic Maus). Due to the apparently light, entertainment-oriented nature of the medium, comics seem to be particularly able to take the edge off problematic aspects of reality, expose them and open them up for debate. Recent collections of essays that address the topic of multiculturalism in comics tend to be specifically focused on contemporary equality issues, increasingly situated in a wider, more international or transnational perspective. In Aldama’s book multiculturalism is viewed, as Royal puts it in his Foreword, as a way of exploring “the crossroads of narrative and ethnicity”: “Indeed, one of the book’s greatest strengths is its willingness to enlarge our understanding of ‘multicultural’ (a term that is usually linked to U.S.-based culture) and expand its scope beyond the confines of comics produced in or related to American ethnicity.”14 A similar widening of the concept of multiculturalism seems to have been the intention of two other recent collections on comics—Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives, edited by Shane Denson, Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein (2013), and Comics as a Nexus of Cultures, edited by Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn (2010). Looking at comics as a genre inevitably evolving toward transnationalism (through the global circulation of topics), they both also suggest that the internationalization of comics audiences is one way in which cultures are becoming more tightly connected. As multiculturalism is increasingly perceived more as a set of strategies of negotiation between self and other, transnationalism as a category of thinking has been used to describe situations produced by contemporary cross-border movement and to provide new perspectives on the study of practices, discourses and products associated with this movement. In his article “Towards Post-Multiculturalism,” Steven Vertovec shows that, since the turn of the millennium, important changes have occurred in the understanding of the (currently problematic) term “multiculturalism,” caused precisely by the changing of “the nature of global migration and modes of immigrant belonging.”15 Multiculturalism should consequently be repositioned in a worldwide, cross-border perspective, which implies its rethinking in transnational terms. HERGÉ, TINTIN AND MULTICULTURALISM The Tintin series displays a fascination with foreign, sometimes distant, lands, most of which the author never visited. Michael Farr considers Hergé a reporter manqué, as he displayed significant interest in social observation of an impressive variety.16 Like Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, Hergé’s Tintin is a succession of spectacular adventures in which the protagonist—a

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Narrative Exploration 167 rather neutral (up to a point even characterless) figure who never ages, never enters a relationship, never uses foul language and never fails—is faced with numerous forms of otherness. He reports on them as part of a rather conservative boy scout–like world-saving mission, which in the later books turns into a sheer thirst for exploring the world. Hergé might also have used this as a strategy—not always a successful one, considering the accusations of Nazism and anti-Semitism of which he was a target—to avoid becoming involved in politics he disagreed with.17 Any discussion of Hergé’s views with respect to other cultures has to take into account the official ideology represented by his employer. In an article on “Photography, Belgian Colonialism and Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo,” Rachael Langford calls Tintin and Milou/Snowy the “archetypal ‘seeingmen’” of Belgian colonialism in Africa.18 Over the course of the series Tintin travels to the (then) new Soviet Union, the Congo, the United States, China, various countries in South America and Eastern Europe (mostly fictional ones, like San Theodoros and Syldavia), the Sahara, the Middle East, Tibet and even the Moon. In all these places and situations, Tintin, seconded by Snowy and later on by other characters, of which the most prominent is the eternally revolted Captain Haddock, represents to a certain extent the European mission to civilize the wilderness, yet also, increasingly, a thirst for knowing other cultures, which justifies the variety of his destinations. In his 2001 book, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, Graham Huggan adds a coda suggestively entitled “Postcolonial Tintin,” where he shares his surprise at “the cult of Tintin in black Africa, the stereotypical ‘Dark Continent’ derided in Hergé’s colonialist fiction,” standing proof of how colonialism still functions as the white man’s discourse on the reflection of his own image in the black Other. Huggan sees Tintin’s success in Africa as a clear instance of the postcolonial exotic, a kind of commodified strategic exoticism “designed to show the workings of a globalised alterity industry and to repoliticise exotic categories of the cultural other as an unsettling force,” which ultimately amounts to a questioning of the current state of colonialism as an identity issue:19 “Cultural products operating under the sign of the ‘exotic’ are likely to raise the challenging question: what really is exotic about me? My ‘Tintin’ asks that question, eyebrows raised in obvious mischief: ‘so, you find me exotic; and what does this say, my friend, about you?’”20 While ideologies depend on the perceiving subject’s position (see Leonard Rifas’s view on this in the following section), the desire to expose colonial or generally exclusivist attitudes can often reveal, paradoxically, that one is influenced by the precise colonial attitudes one is trying to counteract. As Patricia Hill Collins shows, othering is based on a process of objectification that underlies the formation of oppositional difference and raises important questions about the conventions of the master’s subject position.21 As Farr points out, Hergé is accused of displaying racist views with respect to Native Americans in Tintin in America (1932). Yet after he visited the Pine Ridge

168 Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru reservation in 1971, he became, in his rather discrete, nonmilitant way, an advocate of Native American rights.22

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ATTITUDES TOWARD THE OTHER IN TINTIN BOOKS Three of the Tintin books that seem to address Hergé’s attitudes with respect to a multicultural view of the world most directly are Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929), Tintin in the Congo (1930), and The Blue Lotus (1946). I will focus on these titles to follow the evolution of Hergé’s perspective on otherness. However, in later books references to otherness are also present, and even become more complex, as the complexity of the plots increases too. Some examples are the abovementioned Tintin in America, The Red Sea Sharks (where Captain Haddock’s calling people names is very politically incorrect and neo-slavery practices are mentioned), The Castafiore Emerald (where a colony of Gypsies set up camp on Marlinspike grounds), the stories set in the imaginary lands of San Theodoros in South America (in The Broken Ear and Tintin and the Picaros) and Syldavia and Borduria in Eastern Europe, where some of the realities of those parts of the world (such as totalitarian dictatorship or the manipulation of science for political purposes) are alluded to (in King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Destination Moon, Explorers on the Moon and The Calculus Affair). Hergé’s first Tintin book, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1929), was almost a direct reflection of the anti-communist obsession of the time and so it was not very accurate. The information was derived exclusively from one source: Joseph Douillet’s Moscou sans voiles (1928),23 written after its author spent nine years in revolutionary Russia as Belgian consul at Rostovon-Don. In writing the comic, Hergé responded to the call of Le XXe Siècle to warn Belgian children against the dangers of communism. As Farr emphasizes, Hergé repeatedly states that he only “knew things about these countries that people said at the time” and that Tintin is a declared pacifist, as even Snowy says, “I can’t stand scenes of carnage.”24 The book presents a gloomy image of the Soviet Union, where Snowy remarks there are no bones (a dark comment on the poverty of the country), where people are forced to elect the Communist party to which there is no counter candidate and where factories seem to be working to full capacity, yet this impression is given by burning bundles of straw that make smoke come out of false chimneys. Through the poignancy of details describing the conditions of life under communism, the book, alongside George Orwell’s 1984, was one of the most trenchant warnings against the atrocities of the communist regime throughout the twentieth century, even though both books were (understandably) forbidden in Eastern Europe before 1990. In contrast, the next book, Tintin in the Congo, is in some ways “milder” and more in line with Le XXe Siècle’s official political line. Benoît Peeters points out that at the time, the Congo—Belgium’s colony, eighty times bigger

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Narrative Exploration 169 than the colonizing power—was facing a shortage of skilled labor.25 Hergé was asked by Le XXe Siècle’s editor, the Abbé Wallez, to produce a comic that would encourage people to go to the Congo and would enlighten his audience of children as to the civilizing mission of the Belgian empire and its unquestionable superiority. The book is a revealing document on the then paternalistic Belgian attitudes toward its colonies, yet noticeably affected by Hergé’s lack of interest in this topic, which he was commissioned to address. On the ship on its way to Africa, a black sailor calls Snowy “Mister dog,” a funny and rather extreme instance, possibly an implicit tongue-in-cheek comment on the exaggerated politeness due to a white man, extended even onto his dog. In the following images, the same black man acts in a very servile manner toward Tintin. Tintin, in his turn, takes full responsibility of what Kipling famously called “the white man’s burden,” protecting his black servant, Coco, and helping the black Africans on a train that collides with his car to repair their train.26 This is based on an implicit assumption of Tintin’s superiority as a white man, which often leads to characterizations of black Africans as lazy and stupid. Tintin calls the train “chuff-chuff” and proves to be more industrious and technologically efficient than they are, which makes him very popular, being taken in a litter to their king, Babaorum. However, accusations of extreme colonial attitudes might be tempered by the observation that it is an intrinsic part of the plot of every Tintin book that the hero becomes a legend. This happens as much in Africa as in Brussels (on occasions such as his glorious return from Russia) or, for that matter, in Chicago (where the crowd greets him for unmasking Al Capone’s gangsters). If we compare the Soviets book with the Congo one (both narratives about Tintin’s rise to fame), inhabitants of Brussels and Congo are on a par, as both groups are equally impressed by Tintin’s exploits and ready to turn him into a legend.27 This is actually common in children’s books in general, where the hero always prevails, the more so as the adventures become increasingly complex.28 To illustrate the controversial nature of attitudes toward race and racism, Rifas describes the 2007 Tintin in the Congo debate in terms that expose its inconsistency from the very beginning: An international uproar over this book began in July 2007, north of London, when human-rights lawyer David Enright, shopping with his young mixed-race children, found a copy of a new edition of this old book on sale in the children’s section of a chain bookstore. He reported feeling “aghast to see page after page of representations of black African people as baboons or monkeys, bowing before a white teenager and speaking like retarded children.” In response to this complaint, the bookstore moved Tintin in the Congo to the graphic novels section. The taxpayer-supported Commission for Racial Equality released a short statement that repeated Enright’s concerns. The issue was kept alive when a Swede of Congolese descent, Jean-Dadou Monya and (with greater persistence) a Congolese man in Belgium, Bienvenu Mbutu

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Mondondo, sued its publishers for violating laws against racist publications. The issue was revived once more when the Brooklyn Public Library responded to a complaint that this Tintin book includes racially offensive images of Africans drawn to look like monkeys by moving the book to their special collections section. Web-posted comments greeted the news that some people had complained about alleged racism in Tintin with a howl of anger against those who had complained.29 Rifas uses this to demonstrate that ideological analysis most of the time depends on the analyst’s position more than on the characteristics of the object being analyzed. He quotes Stuart Hall in maintaining that “ideology works by linking ideas together in certain ways and denying or ignoring other kinds of links that might be made.”30 As Rifas shows, opinions held on the book in the debate were sharply divided between people who accused the book of obvious racism and people who opposed this idea as absurd, in the name of freedom of expression. Moreover, this bias did not depend on the observers’ race, but purely on personal attitudes: “People who defended Tintin in the Congo sometimes pointed to the popularity of the book in the Congo itself, and some who posted comments defending Tintin identified themselves as black.”31 Rifas takes three episodes in Tintin in the Congo as samples for his analysis and seems to suggest in his conclusion that, as all ideology is subject to interpretation, the capacity of the book to raise issues for such ardent debate decades after it was first published is a lot more valuable than its being allegedly “right” or “wrong.” Representations of otherness become a lot more complex in The Blue Lotus, which, of all of Hergé’s work, probably makes the most serious claims to authenticity. Peeters considers it the most politically involved of Hergé’s books and points out Hergé’s careful documentation.32 To Rifas, it is an example of an objectivity and precision that Tintin in the Congo had been accused of lacking; he praises it as Hergé’s “first recognized classic.”33 The book is celebrated for its accurate depiction of China (the result of Hergé’s well-documented research with the help of his Chinese friend Chang Chong-Chen, a fine arts student at the University of Louvain at the time the book was being written).34 On account of it—and as proof that his depiction of China was seen as anything but derogatory—Hergé received an invitation to visit China from Chang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist government in 1939, in recognition of the help he gave the Chinese cause with The Blue Lotus, although he was only able to take it up thirty-four years later.35 How a book is read with hindsight does not always coincide with how it was read at the time it was first published. The passage of time, recontextualization and, even more so, translation may lead to important reinterpretations. In the last section of my chapter I will analyze Tintin in translation, and I will look at one particular case of re-contextualization, namely its rather unexpected career in Catalonia, where, more perhaps than anywhere else, it served an explicit multicultural cause.

Narrative Exploration 171 REREADINGS AND TRANSLATIONS: TINTIN IN CATALONIA

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Translation can play a very important part in mediating conflict situations, as Mona Baker states in her 2006 book Translation and Conflict: Wherever we happen to be in the world and whatever type of activity or profession we may be involved in, we now live and function in a climate of conflict that cuts across national boundaries and constantly forces itself on our consciousness. In this conflict-ridden and globalized world, translation is central to the ability of all parties to legitimize their version of events, especially in view of the fact that political and other types of conflict today are played out in the international arena and can no longer be resolved by appealing to local constituencies alone.36 Baker understands narrative as “the everyday stories we live by,” through which we legitimize our “version of events” wherever we are. Translation (whether linguistic, social or, indeed, of any other kind) plays a key mediating part in presenting a certain view of the world:37 Narratives, as understood here, are dynamic entities; they change in subtle or radical ways as people experience and become exposed to new stories on a daily basis. This assumption has a number of consequences. First, narrative theory recognizes that people’s behaviour is ultimately guided by the stories they come to believe about the events in which they are embedded, rather than by their gender, race, colour of skin, or any other attribute.38 This generally accepted “normalizing function”39 of narratives (whether original or translated), which partially accounts for their capacity to manage conflict situations, is to Baker one by virtue of which they inform our perceptions of the world. As a mediator between versions of a story, a translator informs the audience’s opinion on a certain matter, which may not necessarily coincide with the respective work’s original intentions. The Tintin series has traveled remarkably well across cultures. A constantly updated site, significantly entitled “Tintin around the World,” lists 110 languages into which books from the series have been translated.40 In the process of translation, the text was often adapted, altered, even tamed to serve local purposes in the target cultures. Tintin’s career in the United Kingdom, for example, is a very successful instance of a translation that relocates the original plot to England. Though very credible and well accomplished, this is an instance of significant domestication. The series, translated into English for Methuen by Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper and Michael Turner, was thoroughly Anglicized to the point of changing place and character names. We can almost talk about an English Tintin who is

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172 Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru not exactly the same as the Belgian one. Starting in the late fifties, the series also entered the American comics market, a lot vaster at the time than the British one. Yet the Tintin series—possibly unable to face competition with American comics—never attained the same level of popularity as it had in the United Kingdom. The Catalan version, however, was among the most successful, also proving Baker’s point about the function of translation in situations of conflict (in this case, between a minority language and culture and the Castilian center of authority in Franco’s Spain). Joan Manuel Soldevilla proposes a thorough examination of the evolution of Tintin’s reception in Catalonia in a 2012 article, which led to his 2013 book Som i serem (tintinaires).41 The title draws the reader’s attention to the connection with the Catalan independence movement: “som i serem” (“we are and will be”)42 is an old slogan stating the century-long presence of Catalans on the mainland Catalan territory (the northeast of Spain, with Barcelona as a capital) and was borrowed by the representative football team FC Barcelona. Soldevilla, a Hergé specialist and an enthusiastic tintinaire (a Catalancoined term describing a Tintin fan), describes the evolution of the Tintin phenomenon in Catalonia in highly respectful terms. He calls the series “a capital work of the twentieth century,” “a reference work for understanding the twentieth century and the world as we know it,”43 in recognition of its worldwide success, but also in light of its connection with the promotion of Catalan as a literary language. The phenomenon “Hergé a casa nostra,” as Soldevilla calls it (which was far from reaching similar proportions in the rest of Spain) led to an activist association called Tintin.cat or even Tintincat (Tintin a Catalunya, currently renamed 1001, pronounced “Milú,” like the Catalan name of the dog Milou/Snowy). The association was founded in 2003 and quickly became very popular as a promoter of Hergé in Catalonia and, through it, of comics for Catalan children in Catalan rather than Spanish.44 Tintin had originally been imported into Catalonia from France (a country that Catalans, in their traditional anti-Spain attitude, have always looked up to and where many Catalan intellectuals were in temporary exile from Franco’s Spain). Catalans first read Tintin in French, and then the series was among the first works to be translated into Catalan in the late fifties and early sixties (when the Franco regime was opening up to Europe more than it had before). It became very familiar to children because it was in the language of home and not the official language of the regime, with some not even realizing that Hergé was not Catalan.45 It was in Paris that Joaquim Ventalló discovered Tintin and decided to translate the series into Catalan.46 He adapted the original to the Catalan environment and used a lively, authentic Catalan language, which avoided the Castilianizing tendencies of the sixties (desperately trying to survive under the inauspicious conditions in Franco’s Spain) and found authentic Catalan equivalents to the many puns in Hergé’s original.47 His translation

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Narrative Exploration 173 was thus faithful to Catalan intellectuals’ struggle to reestablish a language that Franco’s dictatorship had tried to extinguish. Ventalló’s own commitment to the promotion of Hergé’s work in Catalonia continued with his translation into Catalan of Numa Sadoul’s book of interviews with the Belgian author, a crucial reference book in Hergé studies, very soon after the publication of the French original.48 The reasons why Tintin was so successful are clear to Soldevilla: documentary detail mixed with the characters’ almost caricatural graphic simplicity; perfectly balanced plots, combining adventure, emotion and humor; unforgettable characters, who feel like old friends to the faithful reader; the many facets of the world depicted in these adventures, which attract children nowadays as much as they did in the past and the impressive documentation carried out by the author in order to make his adventures believable: “Whether located in real or imaginary countries, Hergé depicted an autonomous world per se, which however was born from known reality; this is why reading any of the Tintin books has always meant opening a window towards the world that surrounds us.”49 Apart from these objective qualities, however, Tintin was published in Catalan at the end of the fifties and was widely acclaimed as a European import coming to Catalonia via France, its esteemed neighboring country. Despite Tintin’s never having been to Catalonia in any of his adventures and Hergé’s few trips to this Spanish region with a language and culture of its own, the Catalan book market took to Hergé’s comic strip series a lot more than the Spanish market, where, at least at the beginning—in the sixties to which Soldevilla refers—it almost passed unnoticed. Ever since, Tintin has been further promoted by Catholic children’s magazines such as Tretzevents (though in an adapted rather than original form) and a whole variety of exhibitions, of which the most recent—Aquell jove repòrter belga que tenia un fox terrier blanc (That young Belgian reporter who had a white fox terrier)—toured the country starting in 2010 and was housed by the Museu d’Història de Catalunya in Barcelona throughout the summer of 2013. The choice of location and the focus on Tintin’s accurate real-life inspiration (with photographs matching extracts from the comic) thus stressed once more the position held by Hergé’s series in Catalonia’s cultural history. A similar, though less vast case (one book rather than the whole series), is that of the 1995 edition of Tintín al país de l’or negre (Land of Black Gold) in Alguerés (the Catalan variety spoken in Alguer, the Sardinian city of Algherro) where Catalan is the language of a minority living within another minority culture (the Sard one). The Alguerés version, an adaptation (on which sixteen people worked together) of Joaquim Ventalló’s 1965 translation of Tintin into mainland Catalan, was a statement of cultural autonomy on the part of the Catalan minority in Alguer, who claimed a Catalanized Tintin, reinvented as an emblem of emancipation for their own culture.50

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CONCLUSION This chapter has attempted to show that Hergé’s Tintin series can be read as a successful promoter of a multicultural education. I have relied for this on evidence from Hergé’s texts, but also on the reception of the original and of some of its translations into other languages and cultures. The case of Tintin in Catalan, maybe more than any other of these translations, shows how a comic can serve an educational function with which it can become associated indirectly, through historical re-contextualization. If the issue of Catalan cultural emancipation was not one of Hergé’s intentions, however, making children (not necessarily just Belgian ones) sensitive to issues such as the plural nature of the world probably was, as the wide variety of experiences in the Tintin books suggests. What we read in the series nowadays is not necessarily what called the attention of Hergé’s contemporaries. It is in the dynamic nature of all narratives, as Mona Baker argues,51 to be subject to changing interpretations. When their main audience is made of children, the fact that multiple interpretations exist unquestionably contributes to these narratives’ educational value.

NOTES 1. Rifas, Leonard. Chapter 16, “Ideology: The Construction of Race and History in Tintin in the Congo.” In Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, edited by Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan. New York and London: Routledge, 2012, 223. 2. “Racism in Children’s Books: Tintin in the Congo,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education No. 56 (Summer 2007), 14. 3. Rifas, “Ideology,” 227. 4. “Je suis persuadé que les enfants d’aujourd’hui comprennent beaucoup de choses: les grands problèmes actuels ne doivent pas leurs être cachés, car leur sensibilité s’est considerablement affiné par rapport à la sensibilité de la génération précédente” (Hergé in Sadoul, Numa, Entretiens avec Hergé, Paris: Casterman, 1983, 40). 5. Vertovec, Steven, “Super-Diversity and Its Implications,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 6, 30 (2007), 1024–1054. 6. Royal, Derek Parker, “Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative,” MELUS 32, 3 (Fall 2007), 7, accessed July 15, 2102, doi:10.1093/melus/32.3.7. 7. Negrete, Aquiles and Cecilia Lartigue, “Learning from Education to Communicate Science as a Good Story,” Endeavour 28, 3, 120, accessed March 3, 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2004.07.003. 8. Rifas, Leonard, “Educational Comics,” in Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels, Vol. 1, edited by M. Keith Booker, Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2010, 161. 9. King, Alyson E., “Cartooning History: Canada’s Stories in Graphic Novels,” The History Teacher 45, 2 (February 2012), 189. 10. Aiken, Katherine G., “Superhero History: Using Comic Books to Teach U.S. History,” OAH Magazine of History (April 2010), 46.

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Narrative Exploration 175 11. Jüngst, Heike, “Translating Educational Comics,” in Comics in Translation, edited by Federico Zanettin, Manchester: St. Jerome, 2008, 172 and 188. 12. Royal, Derek Parker, “Foreword; Or Reading within the Gutter,” in Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010, ix–x. 13. Berninger, Mark, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn, “Introduction,” in Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines and International Perspectives, edited by Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke and Gideon Haberkorn, Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2010, 2–3. 14. Royal, “Foreword,” x. 15. Vertovec, Steven, “Towards Post-Multiculturalism? Changing Communities, Conditions and Contexts of Diversity,” International Social Science Journal 61, 199 (Spring 2010): 83, accessed November 15, 2013, doi:10.1111/ j.1468-2451.2010.01749.x. 16. Farr, Michael, Tintin: The Complete Companion, London: John Murray, 2001, 11. 17. The issue of Hergé’s being accused of Nazism and anti-Semitism is controversial and has met with widely differing attitudes on the part of critics (see Garen Ewing, “In Defence of Hergé,” www.tintinologist.org/articles/defence. html, posted in 2001, accessed February 15, 2014, or Hugo Frey, “Trapped in the Past: Anti-Semitism in Hergé's Flight 714,” in Mark McKinney, ed., History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, Jackson, MS: The University Press of Mississippi, 2008, 27–43). 18. Langford, Rachael, “Photography, Belgian Colonialism and Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo,” Journal of Romance Studies 8, 1 (Spring 2008): 77, accessed July 15, 2012, doi:10.3167/jrs.2008.080107. 19. Huggan, Graham, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, 263. 20. Ibid., 263. 21. Hill Collins, Patricia, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, New York and London: Routledge, 2000, 70–71. 22. Farr, Tintin, 30. 23. Douillet, Joseph, Moscou sans voiles, Paris: Soufflot, 1928. 24. Farr, Tintin, 22. This line is translated as “I don’t like scenes of bloodshed” in the British edition, Tintin in the Congo, in Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin, Reporter for Le petit vingtième, Vol. 1, London: Egmont, 2007, 182. 25. Peeters, Benoît, Tintin and the World of Hergé. An Illustrated History (1988), Boston, Toronto and London: Little, Brown and Company, 1992, 30. 26. Kipling, Rudyard, “The White Man’s Burden,” McClure’s Magazine 12 (February 1899), 290. 27. Hergè, The Adventures of Tintin, Reporter for “Le Petit Vingtième”: Volume One (Compact Editions): Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo, London: Egmont, 2007. 28. Peeters, Tintin and the World of Hergé, 45. 29. Rifas, “Ideology,” 223–224. 30. Hall, Stuart, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in The Media Reader, ed. Manuel Alvarado and John O. Thompson, London: British Film Institute, 1990, 7–8, quoted in Rifas, “Ideology,” 225. 31. Rifas, “Ideology,” 228. 32. Peeters, Tintin and the World of Hergé, 48. 33. Rifas, “Ideology,” 232. 34. Peeters, Tintin and the World of Hergé, 46. 35. Ibid., 22.

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176 Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru 36. Baker, Mona, Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, London and New York: Routledge, 2006, 1. 37. Ibid., 3. 38. Ibid., 3. 39. Ibid., 11. 40. “Tintin around the World,” www.tintinaroundtheworld.info/, updated March 26, 2014, accessed March 30, 2014. 41. Soldevilla, Joan Manuel Som i serem (tintinaires), Barcelona: A Contra Vent, 2013. 42. All translations from Catalan are mine. 43. Soldevilla Albertí, Joan Manuel, “Tintin a Catalunya,” Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 25 (2012), 31. 44. Soldevilla Albertí, “Tintin a Catalunya,” 45. 45. Soldevilla, Som i serem (tintinaires), 9. 46. Ibid., 30. 47. Ibid., 34. 48. Sadoul, Numa Converses amb Hergé, trans. Joaquim Ventalló, Barcelona: Joventut, 1986. 49. Soldevilla Albertí, “Tintin a Catalunya,” 31–32. 50. Bosch i Rodoreda, Andreu, “A propòsit de l’edició de Tintín en alguerès i dels problemes de codificació,” Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 25 (2012), 49–57. 51. Baker, Translation and Conflict, 3.

11 Embracing Childish Perspective Rutu Modan’s A Royal Banquet with the Queen

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Lily Glasner

In 2010 Rutu Modan, a renowned Israeli illustrator and comic book artist, published a comic book for children: A Royal Banquet with the Queen.1 The book tells the story of Nina, a little Israeli girl, who surprisingly is being invited to dine with the Queen of England and her guests. In this chapter, I will argue that Modan uses the cultural differences between traditional English decorum (exemplified by the figure of the Queen and her retinue) and Israeli nonformal manners (exemplified by the figure of Nina) to illustrate the clash and inequality between adults and children and to suggest a solution. In effect, Modan’s comic book demonstrates the dynamics of communication and power relations between members of two different social groups distinguished by age criteria, and it will therefore be fruitful to consider this through the lens of multicultural discourse. At the same time, Modan’s book will enable us to reevaluate children’s role within the frame of multicultural discourse. However, before diving in a certain clarification is due. In the following pages my argument employs that which can be characterized as stereotypes with regard to both nations. A study that makes use of both multiculturalism and stereotype notions may seem at first glance a paradoxical one. There is, however, a double justification for this: the first being the nature of comics, which, it has been argued, is based on the use of stereotypes.2 Secondly it must be remembered that if there is evidence for the existence of a certain worldview, Englishness being a case in point, multicultural discourse cannot write it off without destroying the philosophical foundation of multiculturalism itself. Furthermore, as the social anthropologist Kate Fox recently indicated in her study on Englishness (both as a general concept and in relationship to rules of politeness), stereotypes are not necessarily false; they may indeed correspond to certain behavior patterns in a given culture.3 It is also noteworthy, for the present study, that among the examples she gives in passing, to the “emblem of Englishness”, she numbers monarchy.4 On the opposite pole, in Modan’s creation, we have Nina as the stereotypical representative of Israeliness. The common term for a Jewish person born in Israel is Tzabar (Sabra), a prickly cactus. Amongst other things this term denotes the rejection of social rules of politeness in favor of “spontaneity, sincerity,

178 Lily Glasner directness and expression of inner truth”.5 Modan, I argue, is not creating stereotypes but using “ready-made” ones, a common practice in literature in general and in particular in comics.

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CHILDREN AND ADULTS WITHIN THE FRAME OF MULTICULTURAL DISCOURSE The basic issue that concerns the discourse on multiculturalism is the power imbalance that exists between the cultural standard that defines the majority and the cultural traits that characterize minority groups. It is thus not surprising that a discourse of this kind has expanded to include a critical examination of deprived groups in society, who may or may not be, technically speaking, minorities. The most significant example is that of women,6 but one other disadvantaged group that has come under the examination of this critical approach is that of children. The focus here is mostly on children as “minors within minorities”. And the question is: when the norms and the laws of a majority culture regarding minors clash with the norms and the laws of a minority culture, which set will win precedence?7 Articles by prominent scholars such as Michael Freeman and Rob Reich demonstrate that studies on multiculturalism and children usually adopt the paternalistic perspective of an adult world, which recognizes adults’ responsibility to support, protect and educate children.8 While the objective of such studies is the welfare of children, there is no reference to the child’s point of view and consequently there is no attempt to create a dialogue with children. Yet dialogue is fundamental to multicultural thought. In his influential article, “The Politics of Recognition”, Charles Taylor addressed the issue of individual identity, claiming that the discovery and formation of one’s own identity depends on a “continuing dialogue and struggle with significant others”.9 Alongside this common approach—adopted within the frame of multicultural studies with a political theory orientation—another perspective is developing in a neighboring field. In recent decades, more and more studies focusing on children’s legal rights and written by specialists in various academic fields such as law, social work, education and philosophy, reveal a special attentiveness to the excluded voice of children. Thus for example, Hilary Lim and Jeremy Roche advocate the recognition of the importance of the child’s point of view. They refer to the European Network of Ombudsmen for Children, “which calls upon States to create societies which recognise children as rights-holders and not mere objects of concern”.10 They also draw attention to an innovative tendency to include children as active participants in policy dialogues on issues concerning their lives.11 Finally, they write, “It is about respecting and valuing the contribution children make to the world which children and adults share; a world hitherto defined and imagined primarily in adult terms”.12 In spite of the radicalism of this attitude, Lim and Roche limit their analysis of the inclusion of a child’s

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perspective and voice in the world of adults to the positive effects to be achieved in the welfare of children. Their approach still doesn’t take into consideration the possibility that a child’s perspective and voice can positively affect the welfare of adults—adults as autonomous human beings and not merely as child protectors, child providers or child educators. OUT OF THE MOUTH OF BABES: THE CHILD’S VOICE IN WESTERN LITERATURE The idea that a child’s perspective has a substantial intrinsic value that can affect the world and life of adults is an issue I haven’t yet come across in a theoretical political discourse concerning multiculturalism. This idea, however, is not altogether foreign to Western thought at large. In Western literature there are significant examples of a willingness to listen to the voice of a child or to embrace a child’s wisdom once it is acknowledged as beneficial to adult interests. A few brief references taken from diverse sources will suffice to illustrate this point.13 In St. Augustine’s famous autobiography, the author narrates how the voice of a child led him to conquer his earthly desires and dedicate himself completely to God.14 Arabian Nights and The Book of Sindibad both relate stories in which a child performs the role of a judge. In each story the wisdom of the child is acknowledged by the adult who maintains the highest authority and consequently rescues an otherwise helpless grown person fallen victim to an act of cheating (“Story of Ali Khwajah”, “Story of the Stolen Purse”).15 In a prominent Jewish religious text, the Babylonian Talmud, a Rabbi learns a valuable lesson from the mouth of a boy: when faced with choosing one of two ways, one should not be tempted by the one that appears to be easiest, for the short way will turn out long—whilst the long way is in fact the shortest one.16 Yet the children in this kind of story are giving voice not to a childish but rather to a mature way of thinking, and in some stories they seem to function more as a symbol than as the illustration of an actual child.17 Perhaps the most obvious place to look for the presentation of a child’s perspective as a contribution to the world and life of adults is in children’s literature, given the fact that many works written for children assume a child’s perspective, and that children’s literature empowers the fictional child to both act and express an opinion. Yet a close look shows that here too a child’s voice is not free of the adult’s perspective and influence. Consider, for example, Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. In this tale it is seemingly adults who learn a valuable lesson from a child’s innocent cry, which exposes and reveals “the naked truth”. Yet as indicated in a new and radical reading of the tale, the child does not utter an authentic truth but a conservative conviction regarding the concepts of being clothed and being naked, which in itself exemplifies that this child has already been socialized, at least to some degree.18 Another memorable

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180 Lily Glasner fictional child’s voice is to be found in Eleanor Porter’s classic Pollyanna. The spirited little orphan girl, Pollyanna, is able to teach the adults around her to cope with the difficulties of life through her special diversion, the “just being glad” game. However, we are repeatedly reminded that originally this game was invented by Pollyanna’s father in order to ease her disappointment, caused by the missionary’s barrel that contained a pair of crutches instead of a much-longed-for doll.19 Furthermore, not only is the game not a reflection of an authentic child’s perspective, but it is in fact part of a moral scheme that seeks to promote the successful completion of the socialization process: one must always be happy and content with one’s situation in life and accordingly play his/her part in society. Recently, children’s literature scholar Maria Nikolajeva coined the term aetonormativity (normativity that pertains to age), which recognizes the power imbalance between adult normativity and child normativity. “Aetonormative inquiry”, she explains, “suggests that childhood and adulthood are both normal human conditions. In practice, however, adult normativity is still given priority in texts intended for young readers”.20 Furthermore, Nikolajeva considers children’s literature to be a “refined instrument used for centuries to educate, socialize and oppress a particular social group”— children.21 The argument presented by Nikolajeva, concerning children’s literature, seems to stand in agreement with the psychological term poisonous pedagogy. FROM POISONOUS PEDAGOGY TO RECIPROCAL INTERACTION In a book first published in 1980, psychologist Alice Miller examines traditional western parental pedagogy as illustrated in texts from the eighteenth century on and as experienced in her patients’ stories, and she terms it “black/poisonous pedagogy”.22 This pedagogical approach, which was advocated openly by educators and accepted and exercised by parents, sets two goals: to crush the vital spirit of the child by subduing any authentic feeling, desire and response judged by adults as improper, and to remold the child’s psyche in order to produce an obedient and “a faithful subject of his parents”.23 This repression may take on different forms and methods, amongst them: manipulations, facial expressions and tone of voice, corporal punishment including beatings, humiliation and shaming.24 Regardless of the mode of action in which “poisonous pedagogy” is carried out, its underlying justification is one and the same: the deceptive motto “[it is] for the child’s own good”,25 accompanied by the false belief that “[p]arents are always right”.26 Miller also points to the fact that the success of this pedagogical strategy depends on the child not being aware of what is being done to him.27 Furthermore, if the parent conceals his methods under a mask of amiability, “it is only the adult’s friendly manner that remains in the child’s

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Embracing Childish Perspective 181 memory, accompanied by a predictable submissiveness on the part of ‘the little transgressor’ and the loss of his capacity for spontaneous feeling”.28 One of the areas in which poisonous pedagogy manifests itself is eating. Miller cites texts and testimonies in which food is used as a taming instrument to suppress feelings and to advocate self-control and self-denial.29 According to Miller, even though the conscious ideals of contemporary young parents are no longer in agreement with “[o]bedience, coercion, severity and lack of feeling”, it is still not certain that they are ready to confront their own childhoods in order to overcome the impact of their strict traditional upbringing.30 Miller’s study is therefore a call for the emancipation of our worldview and beliefs from the chains of traditional “poisonous pedagogy”. In place of predetermined goals and manipulations, Miller suggests an alternative based mainly on respect, empathy and listening on the part of parents. These essential elements should be combined in “a dialectical process involving dialogue”.31 Towards the end of the twentieth century, psychotherapist Piero Ferrucci published a book in which he described the lessons he learned from his children.32 Ferrucci does not mention Miller or the term “poisonous pedagogy”. His observations, however, regarding himself and his reactions to his children’s behavior, also reflect a new awareness of the destructiveness of that which was unconsciously embedded in him in childhood, namely: values, beliefs and expectations as well as the “normative” adults’ use of manipulations.33 As Miller did, Ferrucci too perceives that food and the mode of eating are charged zones, loaded with expectations and exhibiting the power imbalance between child and adult.34 While he felt that his perspective, as an adult concerned with the proper nutrition of his baby, was focused solely on the issue of healthy nourishment, for the little child “eating is a party. [. . .] A meal is also a time for dancing, relating to people, enjoying, speaking, studying the laws of gravity, exploring all his senses, playing, everything at once”.35 He perceived that this gap revolved around a difference in point of view and in the way we experience the world, and as long as the parent does not realize that and be open to accept the child’s point of view he/she will not be “participating in the party”.36 As a result of this newly acquired awareness, Ferrucci acknowledges a strong desire to break free from past chains, in order to allow his children to experience the world in an authentic manner and afford himself the chance to regain this lost ability.37 Within this alternative frame of thought Ferrucci’s insights offer a genuine possibility for reciprocal interaction and communication between adults and children since both parties contribute to each other. Ferrucci’s book was not written within the frame of a multicultural discourse. The term does not emerge in its pages. Nevertheless, his analysis provides us with a clear articulation of the idea that a child’s childish perspective has a substantial intrinsic value that pertains to the world and life of adults. Adhering once again to Charles Taylor’s words, surely this is an essential step towards establishing a “continuing dialogue [. . .] with significant others”.

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A ROYAL BANQUET WITH THE QUEEN By now we have assumed a triple awareness: awareness of the unequal balance of power between children and adults, both in society and in the family unit; awareness of the pedagogical tendency to silence the authentic voice of the child and finally awareness of a new possibility, that of a conscious educational process characterized by dialogue and respect, first and foremost on the part of the adult towards the child. Thus equipped we can turn to Rutu Modan’s comic book. A Royal Banquet with the Queen opens with a splash page showing a family, a couple with their young child and her dog, dining. Both parents rebuke the child for her lack of proper table manners.38 This is followed by a series of six panels, which concentrate solely on the child. Each panel includes one speech bubble originating from an unseen parent delivering more rebukes and instructions (Fig. 11.1). Reading these images in light of Miller’s “poisonous pedagogy” theory suggests that they reflect the traditional western parental pedagogy, which endeavors to quench in the child any authentic response and behavior that is judged by adults as “improper”. This is in order to remold the child’s psyche according to adults’ values and beliefs (which, we remember, were instilled in them in childhood when they were forced to give up their own authentic selves). Furthermore, if we look at the panels again we see that the parents do not initiate a dialogue with their child: they are not interested in her point of view but only in remolding her behavior. The annihilation of her authentic self is intensified by the fact that in the only speech bubble she is given, on the first two pages (on the opening splash page), she is not producing words but only a sound, “mmm . . .”, reminding us that the Latin word infans from which the English word infant is derived, means “unable to speak”.39 The child is thus portrayed as a baby who has neither the ability to contribute to a conversation with adults nor the capability of having any worldview that may be of interest to them. If we turn to the second page (Fig. 11.1) we see the speech bubbles, of the now unseen parents, hovering over the child’s head. Note especially the second panel in which she is ordered to “Sit up straight”.40 The positioning of the speech bubbles over her head suggests that the hunched back might be the result of the enculturation process, which aims to bend the child’s natural behavior. In order to straighten up one needs to be allowed the freedom to express oneself. The composition in this series of panels, then, well illustrates the pressing force of the well-intentioned but poisonous pedagogy and hints at its probable future consequences: becoming an adult herself, the child will not be able to escape the authoritative voice even when her parents are no longer in the “frame”. At present, however, the child is still capable of expressing her authentic feelings: “Ugh! All these manners! Who needs them!”

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Embracing Childish Perspective 183

Figure 11.1 [Reading order top right to bottom left] Translation: “Ask and I will pass you the salt”./“Sit up straight”./“Don’t rock on your chair”./“Don’t speak with your mouth full”./“I told you not with your hands!”/“Don’t feed Sammy”.

The way Nina sits and her facial expression (Fig. 11.2) clearly represent the indignation and frustration she feels towards the limitations that are imposed on her by the representatives of the adult world. This panel also exposes one of the methods adults use in the process of enforcing their worldview on children. Modern parents, as observed by Miller, no longer use corporal punishment, yet they still turn to manipulative

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184 Lily Glasner

Figure 11.2 Translation: [Nina] “Ugh! All these manners! Who needs them!”/ [Dad] “And what will you do if the Queen of England invites you to dinner at Buckingham Palace?”

methods in order to achieve their goals. Thus when Nina expresses her reluctance to live according to the rules of politeness, her father asks calmly: “And what will you do if the Queen of England invites you to dinner at Buckingham Palace?” Had Nina’s father genuinely believed such an invitation could indeed be bequeathed upon his daughter, his would have been a fair question. But this is not the case, therefore his utterance, pleasant as it may sound (and indeed the father probably means to be pleasant), is in essence misguiding and manipulative. Once again we are not witnessing a dialogue with the child but a paternalistic infliction of adult beliefs on his unaware and unsuspecting child. The opposition is quite clear: the child who acts in accordance with her authentic nature versus authoritative adults who know what’s best for her and have the power to enforce that. Soon after the father’s manipulative response, the doorbell rings, and a Royal Announcer from Buckingham Palace arrives with an invitation for Nina to join the Queen and her guests at a banquet that very evening (a plane is waiting for her in the yard). Her father’s first response is, understandably: “I do not believe it!” Both parents look astonished. From their rational point of view, such an occurrence is, of course, unbelievable. From the child’s point of view, however—since she takes her parents’ words at face value— the reality of such an invitation is perceived as entirely natural. Therefore Nina says her goodbyes and is off to London without reservations. From the moment the Royal Announcer appears on the stage a shift is made. The opposition child–adult turns into the opposition English

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Embracing Childish Perspective 185 decorum–Israeli nonformal attitude. The figure of the young child who is not yet fully enculturated on the one hand and the formal figures who serve as an epitome to all that is traditionally held to be English on the other hand, allow Modan to visibly and distinctly illustrate the cultural differences between these two nations. A panel in which the untidy Nina, wearing nonmatching clothes and no shoes, and the well-groomed Royal Announcer appear together well exemplifies this point. Upon landing Nina is personally welcomed by the Queen and by the young prince and princesses who seem to be about her age. At the banquet Nina is seated between the Queen and a grumpy old admiral. This positioning (between adults and not amongst children) also emphasizes the opposition shift I have indicated above. A magnificent feast is now brought in by the royal waiters: curlews stuffed with almonds, quails in pineapple sauce, asparagus profiteroles, crab salad, goose liver soufflé etc., etc. But alas there is nothing to Nina’s liking. A well-mannered English subject would have probably suffered this ordeal bravely and eaten whatever was being served.41 Nina, however, true to her origin, simply, though politely, asks if she can have pasta with ketchup. Her wish soon fulfilled, Nina is faced with a new puzzle (which would have puzzled most grown up Israelis invited to a multicourse dinner): which knife and fork should she use? Modan enhances the bewilderment by ignoring table setting etiquette and drawing no less than eight forks to the left of Nina’s plate and five knives and six spoons to the right. Nina is hungry but wishes to avoid insulting the Queen; therefore she politely tries to consult with the grumpy admiral, who responds concisely that she should eat in the manner she is accustomed to. “Well”, thinks Nina, “that is easy”. The next panel shows her standing up and pouring ketchup over her pasta from a very generous-sized bottle. Then she plunges happily into her food, using both hands and stretching the pasta in all directions. Every noble eye in the hall is looking at her in shock. Aghast, the Queen avows: “Never, not even in the most desolate islands of the kingdom have I seen such bad manners”. In light of the Queen’s reproach and the general reaction to Nina’s mode of eating, the admiral’s earlier reply to the child “eat as you are accustomed to”, becomes ironic, and at the same time and in a wider sense it also becomes an illuminating and suggestive remark regarding the possibility of maintaining a genuine dialogue with “the other” (needless to say, the speaker as well as the direct addressee are unaware of any such second meaning). Table manners, like all manners, are social conventions and, following the words of Shakespeare, there is no such thing as absolute etiquette.42 Norbert Elias has placed manners in the wider frame of “civilization”, a social process that is still in motion (thus, “It might well happen that our stage of civilization, our behavior, will arouse in our descendants feelings of embarrassment similar to those we sometimes feel concerning the behavior

186 Lily Glasner

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of our ancestors”).43 Considering table manners in the age of Erasmus, the sixteenth-century author of A Handbook on Good Manners for Children, Elias affirms the following: Everyone, from the king and queen to the peasant and his wife, eats with the hands. In the upper class there are more refined forms of this. [. . .] In good society one does not put both hands into the dish. It is most refined to use only three fingers of the hand. This is one of the marks of distinction between the upper and lower classes.44 In fact, following Elias’s argument, it is possible to maintain that in a broader sense manners not only define classes but also differentiate between we/us and “the other”.45 Being open to accept the peculiar manners of others, therefore, marks an openness to create a genuine dialogue with them.46 Thus, as we shall see, the Queen’s reaction to Nina’s mode of eating is not simply a matter of decorum or aesthetics but a fundamental issue of communicating with “the other”. Upon hearing the Queen’s rebuke, Nina is fearful that she might be cast into a dark prison cell and served toast and water for the rest of her life. Modan materializes the child’s fears by means of words and image. In the foreground of the panel Nina is positioned between the Queen and the admiral. Issuing from the child’s head is a thought bubble expressing her fears in words. In the background the artist has embedded a large thought balloon displaying the child’s fears by means of image. The visualization of Nina’s inner picture of herself in a prison cell is not painted in colors but mostly in grey hues, thus differentiating it from the “present moment”, which is frozen and captured in vivid colors (the Queen’s red wine, Nina’s yellow sweatshirt, the admiral’s blue uniform, etc.). This differentiation, based on color effect, creates a second level (background) and a second dimension in the panel, both of which are visible only to the reader (the “outside” viewer). The second dimension functions as a visualized internal monologue of Nina’s thoughts. Furthermore, the composition of this panel focuses the viewer’s attention on the child: she is placed in the center of the foreground, she is the object of gaze to those present in the picture and she is the only one to be given visible thoughts in the picture. Her slightly bent position, as she is being scrutinized and judged by those who tower on her from right and left, gives the impression of her being trapped. Ultimately, the picture that this panel reflects is one that resonates with the effects of “poisonous pedagogy”. Even though her father and mother are not “in the frame” the child, inwardly and involuntary, acknowledges the authority of her elders and responds to the training she received from her parents by imagining a severe punishment for her “misconduct” in grim colors. From Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter to Jan Fearnley’s Mr Wolf ’s Pancakes, to name just two popular examples, children’s literature is interlaced with such stories of child figures who “sinned” by exhibiting bad manners and misbehavior and

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Embracing Childish Perspective 187 consequently suffered damage or were severely punished.47 However, as we shall see, this panel—which serves as a reminder to manifestations of “poisonous pedagogy”—leads to a different path. Before taking action, the Queen demands to know: “Were you not taught table manners, child?”—and upon learning that she was, she proceeds to ask why Nina has chosen to eat that way. “Because”, Nina answers truthfully, “that way the food is much more delicious”. The Queen is so impressed by the answer that to everybody’s astonishment she instructs the child to show them all how it is done so that everyone, including the Queen herself, will join in. In terms of communication this is the first time that a true dialogue is being conducted with the child. The Queen honestly wants to understand the child’s actions and perspective. “Buckingham Palace”—the narrator tells us—“had never witnessed such a banquet. The Earl of Rockingham ate with an open mouth the Marchioness of Queensbury leaned on the table the Duke of Winchester ate with his hands and the Baroness of York ate with a teaspoon from the main dish” (Fig. 11.3).48 However, words seem pale in comparison to the image. Looking at the image of the feast, the viewer cannot miss the extremity of the scene, which is intensified by the fact that it is represented on a double splash page. It is this very extremity, I would like to claim, which playfully and effectively reflects the Queen and the Court’s willingness to embrace the sensual celebration suggested by Nina. A celebration free of the chains of repressing manners, free of the demands to exercise self-restraint, free of the warnings against exhibiting gluttony. Indeed, in “real life” consuming a

Figure 11.3 Translation: [Top of page] “Buckingham Palace had never witnessed such a banquet. [. . .]”/[Bottom of page] “As ever, the Queen out topped everyone”.

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188 Lily Glasner bottle of ketchup would probably be considered an odd choice (not to mention the unusual inclusion of a plastic bottle of ketchup at a royal banquet); however, within the frame that Modan created, the Queen’s posture as well as her choice of “edible/drinkable” item symbolize the totality of her willingness to experience eating according to the childish way.49 Finally, the Queen, having topped everyone, declares that from that day on, this would be the manner of eating in England, though only at festive events. It seems to me that the Queen’s remarkable decree corresponds to Piero Ferrucci’s insight: that a child’s childish perspective has a substantial intrinsic value that pertains to the world and life of adults. And indeed, in Modan’s creation every noble in the hall (including the grumpy admiral) claps his hands. The Queen then rewards Nina, in response to the child’s heart’s desire, by ordering dessert to be served at once. Nina’s unexpected gift to the Queen and indeed to the entire adult gathering is thus becomingly and generously returned. CONCLUSION Exploring the nature of the iconic image and the possibility of employing different levels of abstraction, Scott McCloud writes: “When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning’, an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t” [emphases in original].50 On a larger scale, which includes image, word and story, McCloud’s analysis well describes Modan’s technique in her book. While she displays a festivity of details and colors in many of the images— especially those that portray the Royal Banquet—the portraits of the figures and their relationships, as well as the breadth and depth of the story are “stripped down” as to include only that which is “its essential ‘meaning’”. The figure of Nina, therefore, rather than that of an individual girl, becomes the icon of everychild on the path of becoming enculturated,51 and in A Royal Banquet with the Queen we are more concerned with the exploration of a universal idea then with the life and experience of a specific child. From this perspective perhaps it is not a mere coincidence that the child’s name is Nina, a name that derives from a Spanish word meaning “a young girl”.52 Furthermore, the cartoon form also allows for a deeper level of identification: “We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it!” [emphases in original].53 A child reader whose authentic feelings have not been (completely) quashed will probably identify with Nina; an adult reader who recognizes parents’ responsibility towards their children, but at the same time is open to reevaluate his/her childhood and reconsider his/her values might identify both with the figures of authority in the story and with the child, and consequently may find an inspiration as well as a consolation in the Queen’s final solution.

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Embracing Childish Perspective 189 Modan, I would like to conclude, illustrates the opposition and inequality between the dominant group culture, Adults, and the subordinated group being enculturated, Children. She uses the cultural differences between the traditional English decorum, which maintains certain codes of dress and manners, and the Israeli nonformal attitude, in order to advocate a new path in which mutual respect leads to a genuine dialogue and to a mutual transference of values between the two groups: children, though not unreservedly, will adapt to social norms; concurrently, adults, while maintaining their responsibilities towards children, will be open to experience the world through a childish perspective and thus regain the forgotten flavors of life. NOTES 1. The book has been translated into English under the title: Maya Makes a Mess. Many changes have been made in the wording, which were not due to differences between source and target languages (including changing the main character’s name). These changes, which under a noncritical reading may seem insignificant, have in fact produced a story with a different bearing. This, however, is beyond the scope of the present chapter, which is based solely on the original Hebrew text. Rutu Modan, Maya Makes a Mess (New York: Toon Books, 2012). 2. Will Eisner, Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (New York: Norton, 2008), chapter 4; Will Eisner with Peter Poplaski, Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative (New York: Norton, 2008), chapter 14. 3. Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), 22. 4. Ibid., 169. 5. Raphael Nir, “Now We Are Slaves, Next Year May We Be, Polite,” Yakinton 239 (2010): 6–7 [Hebrew]. 6. By using the word “women” my immediate implication is multicultural discourse applied to gender issues. It is certainly true that such a discourse may not necessarily be of a feminist orientation. It is, however, also true that feminist critics have in fact explored gender issues in light of multicultural attitudes in which case the differentiation (feminism versus multicultural discourse applied to gender issues) is no longer applicable. See, for example, Susan Moller Okin et al., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 7. Michael Freeman, for example, presents the problem through four different case studies: child marriages, corporal chastisement practices, child labor and child female circumcision. Michael Freeman, “Children and Cultural Diversity,” in Revisiting Children’s Rights: 10 Years of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ed. Deirdre Fottrell (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2000), 15–29. 8. Freeman, Ibid. Rob Reich, “Minors within Minorities: A Problem for Liberal Multiculturalism,” in Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity, ed. Avigail Eisenberg and Jeff Spinner-Halev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 209–226. On the attitude of “justified paternalism” towards children, see Ludvig Beckman, “Public Justifiability and Children,” The International Journal of Children’s Rights 16 (2008): 144–146.

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190 Lily Glasner 9. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 32–37. Citation, Ibid. 37. 10. Hilary Lim and Jeremy Roche, “Feminism and Children’s Rights: The Politics of Voice,” in Revisiting Children’s Rights: 10 Years of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, ed. Deirdre Fottrell (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2000), 70 note 103. 11. Ibid., 70–71. 12. Ibid., 71. 13. For the centrality of the Confessions and of the Talmud in the West see, respectively: Henry Chadwick, Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Edward Kessler, An Introduction to Jewish-Christian Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For the centrality of the Arabian Nights and The Book of Sindibad see hereafter note 15. 14. Augustine, Confessions, vol. 1, Introduction and Text, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 8.12.29. 15. Oriental by origin, both Arabian Nights and The Book of Sindibad have long since been cultivated into Western culture; see Ulrich Marzolph, “The Arabian Nights in Comparative Folk Narrative Research,” in The Arabian Nights and Orientalism: Perspectives from East and West, ed. Yuriko Yamanaka and Tetsuo Nishio (London: Tauris, 2006), 3–6, 11–12; Richard Francis Burton, trans., “Story of Ali Khwajah and the Merchant of Baghdad,” in Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night; with Notes Anthropological and Explanatory, vol. 3 (Benares: Kamashastra Society, 1887), 405–416. Accessed January 23, 2014, http://dbooks.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/books/ PDFs/503317168.pdf; W. A. Clouston, ed., “Story of the Stolen Purse, and the Child of Five Years,” in The Book of Sindibad, OR The Story of the King, His Son, The Damsel, and The Seven Vazirs: From the Persian and Arabic (Glasgow: Priv. Print J. Cameron, 1884), 94–96. Accessed March 26, 2013, http://dbooks.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/books/PDFs/590913508.pdf. See also W. A. Clouston, “Precocious Children,” in Popular Tales and Fictions: Their Migrations and Transformations, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1887), 12–14. 16. B. Erubin 53b. I would like to thank Rabbi Shlomo Shefer who has pointed out this story to me. 17. The anonymous faceless child in Augustine’s narrative is, as suggested by Augustine himself, an instance and a manifestation of Divine Providence. The wise children in the stories of the Sindibad and the Arabian Nights demonstrate a reasoning that is based on mature concepts of justice. The child in the Talmud story demonstrates an abstract reasoning. The narrator concludes by presenting the boy’s wisdom as a manifestation of the virtue of the entire nation. 18. Hollis Robbins, “The Emperor’s New Critique,” New Literary History 34.4 (2003): 669. Hans Christian Andersen, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in Andersen’s Fairy Tales (1837; Project Gutenberg, 2008). Accessed February 16, 2013, www.gutenberg.org/files/1597/1597-h/1597-h.htm. 19. Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna (1913; repr., Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 30–31. 20. Maria Nikolajeva, “Theory, Post-Theory, and Aetonormative Theory,” Neohelicon 36.1 (2009): 16. 21. Ibid. 22. Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum (New York: Farrar, 1983), 3–102. The term “black pedagogy” (Schwarze Pӓdagogik) was coined

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23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

by Katharina Rutschky and adopted by Alice Miller. In the American version of her book Miller retermed it “poisonous pedagogy” (ibid. 9). Ibid., 15. Ibid., respectively: 18–21; 37; 11, 13, 14–16; 22, 47. See also Miller’s summary of the matter (ibid. 59). It is important to note that the abuse of power is not necessarily physical. Furthermore, towards the end of her argument, Miller concludes that “all pedagogy is pervaded by the precepts of ‘poisonous pedagogy’, no matter how well they may be concealed today” (ibid., 96). See, for example, ibid., xiii, 6, 17. Ibid., 60. Ibid., 12–14, 33. Ibid., 24. See, for example, ibid., 26, 48–49, 95. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 100–102, citation 101. Piero Ferrucci, What Our Children Teach Us: Lessons in Joy, Love, and Awareness, trans. Vivien Ferrucci (New York: Warner, 2001). See, for example, ibid., 16, 19–27, 33–34, 59–60, 65–66, 70–71. See, for example, ibid., 65–66, 128–129 180–182. Ibid., 17–18. Ibid., 17. See, for example, ibid., 36–39, 84–85, 133–134, 156–157. Rutu Modan, A Royal Banquet with the Queen (Hebrew; Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2010). There are no page numbers in Modan’s book. Hereafter all translations from it are mine. Capital letter, indicating the beginning of a new sentence, does not exist in Hebrew. It is therefore an interpretive decision on my part to mark in translation the beginning of the parent’s sentences with a capital letter (Fig. 11.1) but to transliterate the sound that Nina makes in small letter. Thus I wish to emphasise the difference between speech and mere sound. I would also like to point out that the Hebrew word for baby (tynok) is not derived from the Latin but from a Semitic root meaning “to suckle”; therefore the implication suggested above may be less immediate for the common Hebrew reader. Hebrew reads from right to left therefore, customarily, one should read Hebrew comic panels: right to left and up to down. Will Eisner and Scott McCloud pointed out that the order of reading in comics corresponds to the one assumed by the language in which the comics is written in. See Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 2008), 24, 41–42; Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper, 1994), 105. This convention holds too with regard to the reading of Modan’s book. However, the panels on the particular page discussed above can actually be viewed and read in every possible sequence—the meaning and the effect on the reader will remain the same. According to Debrett’s etiquette guide: “If you are confronted with a plateful that is not to your taste, try to soldier on to avoid hurt feelings”. Debrett’s. “Basic Rules of Table Manners.” Accessed March 14, 2014, www.debretts. com/british-etiquette/food-drink/table-manners/basic-rules-table-manners. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Methuen, 1975), III.2, 44–47. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 59.

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192 Lily Glasner 44. Ibid., 57. Erasmus’s Handbook, it should be noted, indicates that “poisonous pedagogy” not only existed but was openly advocated long before the eighteenth century. Thus, for example, Erasmus instructs the following: “A child should be kept waiting for a while, so that he gets used to controlling his appetite”. Erasmus of Rotterdam, A Handbook on Good Manners for Children, trans. Eleanor Merchant (London: Preface, 2008), 49. Compare with Miller, Own Good, 27, 48–49. An even earlier admonition regarding table manners, intended for a young audience, is to be found in the twelfth-century Disciplina Clericalis (Instruction for the Clerics). Petrus Alfonsi, The Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi, [German] trans. and ed. Eberhard Hermes, trans. into English P. R. Quarrie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 150–151. On Alfonsi’s book as children’s literature, see Gillian Adams, “A Medieval Storybook: The Urban(e) Tales of Petrus Alfonsi,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 23.1 (1998): 7–12. 45. For Elias’s argument, see especially Elias, Civilizing Process, 62–63. 46. Discussing medieval table manners, Elias relates the story of an eleventh-century Byzantine princess who married a Venetian doge and brought with her a fork to lift the food to her mouth. “This”, Elias explains, “gave rise in Venice to a dreadful scandal” (Elias, Civilizing Process, 68). The ecclesiastics condemned her “refinement”. Soon after she was taken ill, and “St. Bonaventure did not hesitate to declare that this was a punishment of God” (ibid., 69). The reactions of the ecclesiastics and later on of St. Bonaventure, in this anecdote, can serve to illustrate how the refusal to accept the peculiar manners of “the other” becomes a stumbling block to dialogue. 47. Der Struwwelpeter (Slovenly Peter), first published in Germany in 1845, became through its many translations, an international bestseller. See, Jack David Zipes, ed. “Struwwelpeter and Classical Children’s Literature.” Special Issue, The Lion and the Unicorn 20.2 (1996). Mr Wolf ’s Pancakes, first published in the United Kingdom in 1999, has won success both in the United Kingdom and in the United States. According to Journal, it “was shortlisted for the Blue Peter Book Award and the Children’s Book Award and won the Stockport Children's Book Award.” “Award-Winning Writer Grew Up in the North.” Journal: 3. July 31, 2007. ProQuest. Web. Accessed March 17, 2014. 48. My translation reflects the fact that there are no punctuation marks between the descriptions of the noble persons in the original text, although according to the Hebrew grammatical rules, there should have been commas. The fact that Modan choose to omit them is significant, as it stands in accordance with the breaking of the other set of rules, namely table manners. 49. Analyzing English table manners, Kate Fox detects two essential principals: “small is beautiful” and “slow is beautiful”, which, she explains: “appear to be designed to ensure that only small amounts of food are transferred from plate to mouth at a time, with clear pauses between mouthfuls for cutting, spearing and so on. [. . .] Now that we’ve identified the pattern and the principle behind it, the purpose becomes clear. What it all boils down to is not appearing to be greedy, and, more specifically, not appearing to give food too high a priority. Greed of any sort is a breach of the all-important fair-play rule. Letting one’s desire for food take priority over making conversation with one’s companions involves giving physical pleasure or gratification a higher value than words. In polite society, this is frowned upon as un-English and highly embarrassing. Over-eagerness about anything is undignified; overeagerness about food is disgusting and even somehow faintly obscene. Eating small mouthfuls, with plenty of pauses in between them, shows a more restrained, unemotional, English approach to food”. (Fox, Watching the English, 317–319).

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Embracing Childish Perspective 193 50. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 30. 51. McCloud points at the universality of cartoon imagery and observes: “The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe” (ibid., 31). 52. See, for example, Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela Redmond Satran, The Last Word on First Names: The Definitive A–Z Guide to the Best and Worst in Baby Names by America’s Leading Experts (New York: St. Martin, 1995), 127. The name Nina (stress on the first syllable) should not be confused with the Hebrew word nina (stress on the second syllable), which means “great-granddaughter”. 53. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 36.

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Part V

Case Studies

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12 An Innocent at Home Scott Pilgrim and His Canadian Multicultural Contexts

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Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins

INTRODUCTION Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series of comics engages with a complex network of Canadian symbolism and ideology in its critique of selftransformation and cultural identity. Casual and/or non-Canadian readers may have a hard time seeing the series as seriously addressing cultural issues, but our analysis shows O’Malley taking on some Canadian ideological chestnuts, such as the notion that Canadians are kinder and more polite than Americans and the idea that Canada is a tolerant, multicultural society that embraces people of all races and ethnicities. We observe a double, sometimes self-contradictory movement in Scott Pilgrim: the desire to establish Canada as a “cool” place with its own positive cultural markers that Canadians can feel good about, alongside a desire to undercut Canadians’ delusions of goodness and blindness to discrimination. O’Malley embodies the problems he is trying to illuminate in his own person. When we presented this chapter at the Comics Forum 2012 conference, several people told us that they were not only unaware that Scott Pilgrim was a Canadian text but also that O’Malley was a “hyphenated” Korean-Canadian. We argue that O’Malley takes on and relates these two “secrets” in Scott Pilgrim: the hidden Canadianness of Canada and the repressed hostility towards Asians in Canada. The result is a new kind of specific Asian-Canadian biculturalism that displaces the conventional amorphous and content free notion of multiculturalism in Canada.1 Multiculturalism in Canada needs to be situated in its own particular cultural context within a larger trend towards multiculturalism in the late twentieth century. Indeed, multiculturalism as government policy began in Canada in 1971, when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau enacted his vision of a “multicultural society within a bilingual framework”; this was a direct response to the rise of bilingualism in Canada under the same government.2 Many non-English, non-French Canadians saw themselves unrepresented in these discussions, and multiculturalism emerged as a means by which the government could demonstrate inclusivity while protecting a space for a unique Quebecois identity. Official multiculturalism in Canada affirms

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198 Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins what is termed “inclusive citizenship” and guarantees equal treatment from the government as well as awareness of issues of cultural diversity. When the Constitution was repatriated in Canada in 1982, official multiculturalism was enshrined in the country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms; no other Western nation has constitutionalized a commitment to multiculturalism. 1988’s Multiculturalism Act further defined multiculturalism in Canada, and in 1991 the Broadcasting Act required Canadian media to work towards representations of multiculturalism in programming. In these ways, successive Canadian governments both on the right and on the left have succeeded in entrenching multiculturalism not just in Canadian law but also in Canadian identity. Where support for official multiculturalism has begun to contract in Australia and Western Europe in recent years, in Canada it remains—at least superficially—a significant aspect of what it means to be “Canadian.” As Will Kymlicka notes, “We tell each other that accommodating diversity is an important part of the Canadian identity; it is a defining feature of the country.”3 James E. Cameron and John W. Berry’s surveying in this area points out that Canadians tend to show “a broad congruence between Canadian collective self-definition and the appreciation of ethnic diversity,” a finding consistent with the history of research in this area.4 In other words, according to this research Canadians identify strongly with multicultural policy—perhaps as a result of its constitutional entrenchment—even when the reality of life for the average member of a visible minority in Canada is still plagued by structural challenges. For example, 26 percent of all visible minority families in Canada live below the poverty line, compared to 12 percent of the general population.5 COMICS AND CANADIAN IDENTITY Indeed, this tension in Canadian identity—what we tell ourselves about racial tolerance and diversity versus what the reality is for nonwhite Canadians— makes it vitally important to understand Scott Pilgrim as a Canadian comic book character and within the pantheon of Canadian comic book superheroes, for these superheroes are themselves emblematic of both Canadian notions of tolerance and racial construction. In short, the Tolerator, to invent a Canadian ur-superhero, is pretty much always an easy going white guy, much like Scott Pilgrim. Comics in Canada began with nineteenth-century political cartoons, which primarily tackled an issue key to the emergent identity of the new nation: the relationship between Canada, Britain, and the United States. Fatherly John Bull or Mother Britannia was typically depicted protecting tender Miss Canada and her virtues from the encroaching wiles of Uncle Sam. In showing Canada as feminized and idealized and America as threatening and aggressive, these cartoons represent some of the earliest examples

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An Innocent at Home 199 of comic depictions of an oppositional relationship between Canada and the United States. Importantly, the idealization of Canada is about her virtue and her morality; she is something better than America and needs to be ever vigilant against becoming as tainted and corrupted as Uncle Sam. Such cartoons also uphold the Canadian fantasy of being the object of American desire, an inversion of what has increasingly been the truth of contemporary Canadian experience. This inversion is key to Bryan Lee O’Malley’s underlying discussion of Canadian identity and American desire in his Scott Pilgrim series, represented in the relationship between Ramona and Scott. These early political cartoons document the origin of a Canadian ideology of national identity: a paradoxical one of resisting assimilation with the United States while also enviously yearning for American status and power. The Canadian story asserts that we are better than Americans because we are more polite and diffident, and that peace, order, and good government trump life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Except that they don’t, especially as a narrative of heroic self-assertion. Bart Beaty has traced this ideology through the figure of the Canadian superhero, specifically Captain Canuck, a “heterosexual, middle-class, white, male government employee” who shuns violence: What is clear [. . .] is the way that Captain Canuck is celebrated by critics and Canadian cultural institutions precisely because it represents a form of domestic popular culture that resembles American mass culture, while at the same time repudiating American culture and society and valorizing the Canadian model.6 In short, the Canadian superhero is a “nice guy” whose niceness is a screen for anxiety and resentment. This repudiation of American culture is essential to the Captain Canuck story, and this need for validation visà-vis Canada’s relationship to the United States is reenacted in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s depiction of Toronto in the Scott Pilgrim series. With the Scott Pilgrim series, Bryan Lee O’Malley is repeating the Captain Canuck Canadian hero story in order to critique it from his own perspective as a Korean-Canadian. O’Malley not only exposes the “nice guy” myth, as Scott turns out not to be the man he thinks he is or presents himself as, but he also inverts the gender balance of the early Canadian cartoons by representing the United States as desirable female in Ramona Flowers, Scott’s main love interest and the plot driver of the comic: Scott must heroically battle her seven evil exes. O’Malley pokes fun at Canadian assimilationist desire by equating it with the “fobby” Asian variant that Knives Chau, Scott’s pre-Ramona girlfriend, represents. The term “fobby” signifies the failed attempt to transform oneself in order to assimilate with the dominant culture, a familiar narrative in the Canadian-Asian immigrant experience. An adjectival form of the expression “fresh off the boat,” fobby appears a couple of times in Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life: first when

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200 Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins Knives is describing a Korean boy at school and second when Tamara tells Knives that dyeing her hair is fobby. The term has two connotations: acting like someone from the country of origin, or trying too hard to assimilate. So, in her effort to win Scott back, Knives draws attention to, and perhaps even exacerbates, her cultural predicament as outsider desperate to be an insider. But because so many characters in Scott Pilgrim are attempting to transform themselves into more culturally acceptable entities, fobby becomes something of a Canadian condition (see Figure 12.1). By making this ironic gesture and using the visual dimension of the comic to plant Canadian references that both undercut the aspirational story and rewire Canadian ideology, O’Malley does not just break down Canadian illusions

Figure 12.1 “Fobby Knives.”

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of multiculturalism; he creates a new Asian-Canadian hybrid form that links Manga and Nintendo with the Tragically Hip. In his Guardian review of the Scott Pilgrim film adaptation, Edgar Wright’s 2010 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Chris Michael paraphrases a famous 1969 phrase of Trudeau’s when he writes: Many Canadians feel towards their country exactly what the Scott Pilgrim comic/film feels towards its protagonist: fond contempt. Not taking yourself too seriously seems to be key when you’re lying in bed with a cultural elephant that could not only squash you, but doesn’t even know you’re there.7 And at its crux, this relationship between Canada and the United States, between crippling inferiority and smug superiority, between snowy parks and subspace highways, is exactly what Scott Pilgrim is all about: the Canadian characters yearn for an American identity, but the text undercuts this desire by making the diegetic world a consciously constructed representation of Canadian identity. Americans have a cultural identity that Canadians want, and in their striving for it, the characters reject an existing national identity. Indeed, perhaps O’Malley’s most challenging assertion is that there is a Canadian identity—rooted in recognizable spaces, shared pop culture references, and specific stories—to reject. Canadian identity is an oft-discussed but nebulous thing, simultaneously obsessed over in Canadian media and obliterated in American popular culture. When Canadians go to the movies, we are used to seeing our cities represented on screen as elsewhere. Toronto stands in for Chicago, Quebec City is a vague construction of somewhere European, and Vancouver is pretty much anywhere that is not Vancouver.8 When our cities represent these other spaces, US directors make little effort to erase their Canadianness, suggesting that no one will notice, which generally appears to be true, except for audience members who actually inhabit these Canadian spaces. For example, in 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx, filmed in a suburb of Vancouver, the scenes of rough-and-ready New York are set against a backdrop of the North Shore Mountains. The director does not need to edit out the mountains because most audiences seem to be able to do it themselves. This image of place is a significant symbol of Canada disappearing within American popular culture, subsuming Canada under a larger, generic, and American-dominated North American identity. Consequently for global and American audiences, Canadianness is a non-thing. So in movies about Boston you see ads for local Halifax bands, and episodes of Fringe feature billboards and shop windows in the background bearing ads for Vancouver Film School. Because Canada does not exist in the North American imagination, these signs are insignificant ephemera rather than anchors of place. While this is largely a phenomenon of film and television (and the ability to produce it more cheaply in Canadian cities than American) and is

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202 Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins significant because of the widespread consumption of American popular culture in Canada, it occurs in other media as well. In comics, Canadianness also tends to disappear; as Ryan Edwardson observes, comics remain “a cultural arena where New York overwhelms New Brunswick, and one rarely sees a maple leaf.”9 The Canadian experience of being subsumed by a cultural behemoth is not unique in an era of globalization, but it has a long and convenient history for American producers of culture, as Canada’s history on film can attest. In the world of comics, consider, for example, Marvel’s Wolverine character, who is ostensibly Canadian, but according to Vivian Zenari, his “patriotism might be less than Canadian verisimilitude and more like narrative necessity”; the Canada represented in Marvel’s comics is not really Canada in any recognizable sense, instead a shorthand for wilderness, “a netherworld, uncharted, unmarked, slipping boundaries of time and culture.”10 And, of course, more often Wolverine’s national identity is not referenced at all; indeed, Wolverine was part of a larger attempt to globalize the Marvel universe with an internationalized X-Men team whose nationalities are more convenient than significant. But Americans are not the only ones to ignore signifiers of Canadian culture. Canadians themselves seem quite willing to abandon them in the face of an “America of the mind,” fittingly exemplified in Scott Pilgrim by the exotic Ramona and her subspace highways, that is infinitely more powerful and alluring than Canada. Indeed, it sometimes appears as if the ephemeral cultural signifiers are all there is to Canadian national identity. In his Souvenir of Canada project, Canadian writer and visual artist Douglas Coupland refers to ephemeral bits and pieces of Canadian culture as the “secret handshakes” that construct national identity; these are the very items—local posters on a wall or bilingual labeling on a product—that film and television makers rarely take the time to edit out when reconstructing Canadian spaces as American. Coupland asserts that “sometimes Canadian stuff is truly impossible to explain to outsiders.”11 Rather than trying, Coupland’s project asserts, we should revel in “images only understandable to Canadians” as a place to root identity.12 Bryan Lee O’Malley similarly uses the pages and panels of Scott Pilgrim to pay attention to—even occasionally foreground—these “secret handshakes” in the visual text without interrupting or intersecting the written narrative; we are taken to Toronto-specific settings, walls are plastered with ads for Canadian indie rock bands, and characters wear obscure Canadian logo tees (like the logo of the Ontario provincial government circa 1994). Every volume contains dozens of visual markers of Canadianness, most of them primarily recognizable to Canadian audiences. For example, the video store where Kim works—while she sips her drink from Coffee Time, a smaller competitor to Tim Horton’s in the Toronto area—is full of obscure Canadian films and TV shows, like Cube 2: Hypercube; from there, Scott proceeds to Second Cup, a Canadian version of Starbucks; later, at band practice, the members of Sex Bob-omb examine a copy of NOW Magazine, a Toronto alternative weekly, whose cover features a headline

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An Innocent at Home 203 reading, “Halifax: Threat or Menace?” Through all of this, Scott is talking with his friends about how to connect with Ramona, the central representation of Americanness in the text, and avoiding news about Envy, his aptly named ex-girlfriend who has successfully transplanted herself in the United States. The effect is to create an in-group, layering a sense of visual irony on the text’s focus on reaching America as the aspiration of all Canadians. Canadian ephemera is quietly and subtly rendered cool by this in-grouping, and simultaneously manages to appear richer and more complex than the alternative; a quest for an American identity, through Ramona, seems even less defined than Canadianness. So, in comic book form, Scott Pilgrim offers an ironic inversion of the insignificant mountains in Rumble in the Bronx and Vancouver Film School advertisements in Fringe, for the ephemeral signs become something to look for and recognize rather than something to overlook and ignore. At the same time, the main thrust of the narrative is transformation, becoming something other than what one is in order to be recognized. Characters like Envy and Knives are busy discarding their cultural markers in order to gain stardom or acceptance. The very idea of a cultural marker becomes a check to this unreflective transformation. Scott Pilgrim questions whether these characters are willing to abandon the secret handshake of Canadian (or Chinese) identity to achieve a reward that self-transformation offers. Furthermore, it poses the possibility that self-transformation may be the most significant indicator of cultural insecurity in the first place. O’Malley uses the comics form so that the visual representation of Canadian ephemera undercuts the verbal narrative of the hero fighting to win his woman, who represents an idealized American identity. Furthermore, O’Malley undercuts both the narrative of heroism and the supposedly benign “Canadian” character by exposing Scott’s repressed racism. SCOTT PILGRIM AND THE CANADIAN SUPERHERO Scott Pilgrim belongs to the wave of superhero comics that began in the late twentieth century with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns: self-reflective comics that critique the whole notion of heroism. While Scott Pilgrim’s participation in the Canadian superhero genre is not immediately obvious, O’Malley connects Scott with a history of Canadian superheroes who are defined by the very narcissism of minor differences that seems to drive Canadian cultural identity. While Bart Beaty argues that “the temptation to provide the Canadian superhero with a distinctly nationalist identity [. . .] has been one of the dominant hallmarks of the Canadian superhero genre,” Scott seems to resist this just as O’Malley’s series resists easy categorization within the superhero genre itself.13 Similarly, Beaty points out that Canadian superhero comics have often been imbued with a snarky or incipient anti-Americanism—eschewing

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204 Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins violence, asserting the impossibility of civil war in Canada—but this is absent from Scott Pilgrim, where Canadian chauvinism of the 1970s has no place. Indeed, the Canadian identity O’Malley wrestles with, while seemingly simplistic in its basis in ephemera, is in reality far more complex and nuanced in its relationship to the United States than previous comics efforts have been. This ephemera deconstructs the un-ironic quest narrative in which the hero seeks the girl and the mysterious identity she embodies. The loss of identity through self-transformation, national or otherwise, is more significant to the comic than a jingoistic assertion of it. The use of comics as a space for nationalist constructions of identity in Canada has a short history, so short there is basically one entry: Captain Canuck. While other characters in superhero comic books (Wolverine, the Alpha Flight team) have been Canadian, and for a brief period in the Second World War when American comics could not be imported, we had Nelvana of the North and Johnny Canuck to fight the Nazis, only Captain Canuck was a series with overtly nationalist aims. Since then, institutions like Canada Post have sought to force a canon of Canadian superheroes through the issuing of stamps, but as Beaty notes, many of the supposed icons thus canonized were “less familiar” and perhaps even unrecognizable to most Canadians.14 Captain Canuck has had larger national resonances, as Edwardson describes: Captain Canuck, clad in a red and white suit and maple leaf emblems, used his strength derived from a healthy diet and fitness to fight for Canadian “peace, order, and good government.” He avoided violence when possible, prayed before missions, and dedicated himself to protecting Canada and the world from evildoers. Canadian readers enjoyed the familiarity of national images, symbols, and locations infused with the action-adventure format established by American comic books.15 This familiarity should not be understated in a cultural context like Canada’s. The Canadian cultural marketplace was in the 1970s completely overwhelmed by content produced primarily for American audiences. As Jason Dittmer and Soren Larsen argue, “the use of Canadian places and a Canadian hero in the pages of Captain Canuck was aimed at de-centering the hegemonic position of the USA vis-à-vis Canada”; an examination of the letters to the editor demonstrates the extent to which the comic was for readers concretely “validating their own identities and potentials.”16 While O’Malley’s project is not the overt foray into post-Centennial nation building that Captain Canuck was, there is a similar impact on readers; superheroes, even reticent ones, remain “specific exemplars of nationalist ideologies.”17 In fact, Scott Pilgrim is an ironic critique of Captain Canuck and other Canadian superheroes as exemplars of the differential “nice guy” construct vis-à-vis the United States. While Scott’s name comes from the Plumtree

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An Innocent at Home 205 song “Scott Pilgrim,” the comic’s engagement with Canada’s relationship to the United States gives it an extra valence. The American ideological origin story, of course, begins with “the pilgrims” and their movement west. Scott’s pilgrimage leads him to confront his own ideological origin story, and perhaps Canada’s too. O’Malley turns the series into a disciplinary narrative in which Scott’s repressed racism undoes him as morally superior hero. Furthermore, Scott’s (and Canada’s) desire for American status identifies him with what he wants to repress: the “fobby” Asian who is willing to sacrifice cultural identity in order to assimilate. O’Malley ultimately asserts that what Scott represses is the basis for Canadian identity. THE AMERICAN WOMAN VERSUS THE CHINESE HIGH SCHOOL GIRL While Ramona Flowers can be read stereotypically as a “manic pixie dream girl” (at least from Scott’s perspective), O’Malley intriguingly contrasts her with Knives Chau to riff on an inverted orientalism. Knives’s problem is that everyone has already categorized her as “Chinese high school girl” in a way that puts her in a cultural straitjacket. She is all too real and hardly the stuff of fantasy. Or, to put it another way, the fantasy of the Chinese high school girl has become so prefabricated that it has lost all exoticism. In contrast, Ramona evokes a fantasy world that is contingent on her American origin: she travels subspace highways on roller blades, wears goggles, and appears to Scott out of a dream. Who Ramona is, where she comes from, and her history are mysteries that lend her an exoticism that Knives can only dream of and attempt to emulate; Knives’s efforts to transform herself from Chinese high school girl to hipster girl who can compete with Ramona for Scott’s attention becomes a significant subplot as the mysterious South thus replaces the mysterious East in the orientalist model. Furthermore, Ramona functions as a reminder of Scott’s Canadianness: she makes jokes about the Queen and surmises that subspace highways must not be available in Canada, like certain TV channels (see Figure 12.2). Canada thus appears parochial and quaint, a bywater far off the subspace highway. While other Canadian comics producers have done their best to pump up Canada’s global significance—think of Captain Canuck being set in a future where Canada is the dominant superpower—O’Malley’s sly comedy pokes fun at Canada’s second-rate “middle power” status, by equating Scott’s pursuit of Ramona with Knives’s pursuit of him. For Ramona, dating Scott “the Canadian” is roughly equivalent to Scott dating a Chinese high school girl. Furthermore, both Scott and Knives focus on Ramona as object of desire. Ramona’s role in the narrative is mostly a symbolic one: she is the occasion for Scott’s “pilgrimage” and the epiphanies that do or do not follow from it. His battles with her evil exes are structured like those of an epic or

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206 Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins

Figure 12.2 “Queenology.”

romance, except that Scott does not go any place, physically or mentally. Although Scott fights for her love, Ramona is no damsel in distress—that role belongs to Kim Pine. Ramona, instead, is simply the occasion or catalyst for the battles Scott must fight. As such, Ramona is the perfect figure for the United States in Canadian consciousness. That is, what matters is not who or what she really is, but how Scott responds to her. Knives anchors the narratives of cultural aspiration in Scott Pilgrim because her desire is so naked, as if she is the repository of the displaced desire of the other characters. Although Scott fights Ramona’s evil exes to win her love, his actions appear more as a structural obligation than passionate commitment. Knives, meanwhile, is a confirmed “Scottaholic” who will do anything to win Scott back after he dumps her for Ramona. This nakedness of desire is a function of Knives’s cultural and social position in the narrative: “Chinese high school girl.” From the beginning of the first volume, the other characters typecast Knives. They chastise or praise Scott for dating such a person, but they never allow her to transcend her category. And because Knives associates her cultural category with the reason Scott has dumped her, she tries to transform herself and shift into a category that Scott will find appealing. Goodbye Chinese high school girl, hello urban hipster. But the transformation doesn’t quite work. Knives is a cultural innocent in Scott’s world. She has never been to Goodwill, the secondhand shop, and does not know any rock musicians; she only knows kids who play the piano. Scott gets a chance to be someone “in the know” who educates Knives: “It ain’t all that,” he says about Goodwill.18 When Knives goes to Goodwill with Scott, she is reluctant to buy anything that would change her high school girl look. That all changes when Scott dumps her. And when Knives sees Sex Bob-omb perform, she

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An Innocent at Home 207 becomes enthralled to Scott’s rock and roll status: “I’ve never gone out with someone so talented.”19 Knives thus puts Scott on a pedestal, placing herself beneath him in just about every way. For readers, this elevation of Scott makes almost no sense. Like Goodwill, Scott “ain’t all that.”20 It’s a joke that Knives views this nonentity—a jobless, directionless, white-boy bass player in a crap band—through such rose-coloured glasses. But the joke has a serious side to it: Scott occupies a world that Knives cannot access, no matter how quiet she is in band practice or what jackets she buys from Goodwill. She will always be the “Chinese high school girl.” When Knives invites Scott to her family’s house for dinner, he says, “You mean Chinese food?” and questions whether she is allowed to date outside her race.21 The link between the obscure Canadian visual metonymies and ephemera and these more obvious Chinese-Canadian stereotypes is that while the dialogue of the text roots Knives to the “Chinese high school girl” straitjacket, the images make her represent a more expansive “Asianness” as a kind of blurry concept. Her father collects Samurai swords and appears as a “ninja,” and in one panel, Knives appears in the style of a Japanese manga character. When we add these to the myriad Nintendo references, we see that Scott Pilgrim, as text, maps out a hybrid, multimodal cultural territory that the characters live in but seem barely aware of. On the verbal level, the characters are stuck in conventional aspirational cultural narratives, but on the visual level something else is going on. We could say that O’Malley is poking fun at non-Asian Canadians’ lumping together of all things Asian, but an alternative reading is that he is ironizing the stereotypes imposed by his characters. We should note here that Scott Pilgrim reflects O’Malley’s interest in shōnen style manga and anime, with influences that include Sailor Moon and Ranma 1/2, and Nintendo video games. Hence his comic is a curious hybrid of traditional Canadian cultural issues and Asian influences. The hidden “Asian” plays off of the hidden “Canadian” in the hybrid structure that O’Malley creates. His own name, “Bryan Lee O’Malley,” is a case in point, as we could see the “Lee” as a hidden Korean or Asian signifier in an otherwise Anglo-Canadian name.22 This sort of play on names occurs overtly in the character of Jason Lee, whom O’Malley initially draws without features that might mark him as Asian and then later with such features, transforming the cultural context of the surname. So we get two “secret languages,” Canadian and Asian, which compete with each other for attention in the shadow of American culture that renders both Canadians and Asians “fobby.” If to be “fobby” means to try too hard to transform from one identity to another, Knives is hardly the only one who fits the adjective. Envy Adams, the lead singer of The Clash at Demonhead, exemplifies this kind of transformation at its most thorough and successful. Indeed, her new stage name says everything we need to know about what drives this sort of transformation. She started out as Scott’s nerdy girlfriend, Natalie V. Adams, at university.

208 Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins

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She won’t go out partying with the others; she just stays home and studies. But one day, she gets rid of all her “toys and anime stuff,” buys some “wicked boots,” and before you know it, she is a glossy pop star who leaves Canada and returns as a conquering heroine.23 What makes Envy significant for the comic’s commentary on Canadian culture is that Envy represents the desire of both Scott and Knives: the desire to transcend one’s oppressive cultural category and assert oneself as master of the universe—at once an American Dream story, a Canadian success story, and a fobby triumph. THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED ASIAN OTHER Scott Pilgrim at first appears an unlikely hero, but a slight twist of perspective allows us to see the bass-playing slacker as a millennial version of the “fighting civil servant,” a valorization of the “nice guy” whose niceness is what distinguishes him from his American counterpart. The undercutting of Scott’s self-perception and self-presentation as nice guy is, however, the epiphanic moment of the whole series. When he travels to Northern Ontario to visit Kim Pine, he confronts the “Negascott” who represents “nice guy” Scott’s repressed truth, and therefore O’Malley’s vision of the repressed blond and bland Canadian truth: our niceness is a screen not only for callow self-interest but also our repressed racism. Up to this point in the comic, Scott’s flaws have been presented as sins of omission rather than sins of commission: he is lazy, unfocused, and uncommitted. These traits seem excusable or dismissible because they are characteristic of the slacker dude archetype: inoffensive if not exactly desirable, like the traits of the Canadian superhero. Negascott opens up a new way of looking at Scott as actively evil; his benignness appears as a screen for something nastier. O’Malley presents a psychic revision of Scott’s schooldays battle with Jason Lee.24 In volume 2, Jason is presented in Scott’s retrospective imagination as a villain, a protoGideon, as it were. But in volume 6, Kim reveals that Jason was just a Chinese kid she once dated.25 In volume 6, O’Malley draws Jason with “Chinese” racial characteristics, whereas in volume 2, these characteristics are absent, so Jason’s race comes as something of a surprise. The surname Lee functions as a clue, perhaps, but it is bivalent, and could equally be an Anglo surname or a Chinese one. Indeed, the “Lee” invokes O’Malley’s own middle Korean name.26 The difference is as striking as when O’Malley presents “manga” Knives, and it shows how powerful the cartoonist’s hand is in triggering racial signifiers. The revelation of Jason’s race corresponds with Freud’s definition of the “uncanny [unheimlich],” something familiar yet repressed returning as something unfamiliar.27 And the fact that the climactic battle with Gideon “replays” the earlier one with Jason Lee is another uncanny event: Scott’s “heroic” action on behalf of peace, order, and good government carries the taint of racist violence. Furthermore, the

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An Innocent at Home 209 revelation of Jason Lee’s race transforms our understanding of Scott’s rejection of Knives: the metonymical associations of Chinese high school girl and Chinese high school boy mirror each other in a way that suggests how all of the comic’s mirroring works. Everyone has a counterpart or a set of counterparts, opposites that are not really opposites, but rather the truth of the other. Furthermore, each character contains an opposite within him or herself, like Negascott. The simplest way to discuss this mirroring is to say that in Scott Pilgrim identity is relational within and among the characters. The good guy is simply the repression of the bad guy in the same bodily and psychic space. All battles Scott fights are now dubious. Scott’s participation in evil, his ditching of Knives, and his beating of Jason Lee associates his epiphany that he is not a nice guy with a repressed hostility towards Asians. This hostility has everything to do with their “fobbiness,” itself a slang term for the uncanny in that it represents a desire to render the unheimlich heimlich. While fobbiness is associated with Asians in the comic, Envy Adams’s transformation from “ordinary girl” into pop star shows us that the concept works for white Canadians as well, Scott included. Envy says, “[W]e are all changing”: but from what into what? Envy’s and Knives’s transformations show a desire to kill off a previous persona in a symbolic suicide. When Envy humiliates Knives and banishes her from the dressing room, it is because she recognizes her old self in her. The “fobby” Asian represents the motivation behind her transformation. The same is true for Scott: Knives is a reminder of his own unconscious desire to associate himself with Ramona’s American mystery. The key to O’Malley’s irony is that he refuses to allow these repressions to work. The visual dimension of the comic keeps reasserting what the characters want to repress: the “Asian” and the “Canadian.” CONCLUSION David Murphy argues that Scott Pilgrim as transmedia franchise—comic, video game, and film—“intertextually construct[s] a vision of EnglishCanada based on a selective interpretation of Toronto that poses the city as a cultural filter for internationally produced media.”28 Furthermore, he states that Scott Pilgrim is “attempting to redefine Toronto’s place within a broader post-national globally networked culture.”29 We argue, however, that the transmedial aspects of the Scott Pilgrim franchise are not necessary for these ideas to function: they are already there in the multimodal presentation of the comic through the visual “cultural” elements planted in the panels, the iconic representation of racial features and cartoon styles, and the video game narrative structure that work together to present O’Malley’s cultural critique and, more importantly, his vision for Canadian culture. In this vision, the Canadian desire for transformation, “levelling up,” is exposed as the truth behind the benign myth of Canadian politeness and

210 Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins “niceness.” Meanwhile, the comic creates the possibility for a hybridized world that splices together local and global, creating a new definition of “Asian-Canadian” that gets us out of Scott Pilgrim’s fobby little world.

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NOTES 1. For a related take on the representation of the “Asian” in North American comics, see Emma Oki’s “They All Look Alike? Representations of East-Asian Americans in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings and Scenes from an Impending Marriage” also in this volume. 2. S. V. Wayland, “Immigration, Multiculturalism and National Identity in Canada,” International Journal On Minority & Group Rights 5.1 (1997): 33. 3. Will Kymlicka, “Canadian Multiculturalism in Historical and Comparative Perspective: Is Canada Unique?” Constitutional Forum 13.1 (2003): 4. 4. James E. Cameron and John W. Berry, “True Patriot Love: Structure and Predictors of Canadian Pride,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 40.3 (2008): 33. 5. John Samuel and Kogalur Basavarajappa, “The Visible Minority Population in Canada: A Review of Numbers, Growth and Labour Force Issues,” Canadian Studies in Population 33.2 (2006): 262. 6. Bart Beaty, “The Fighting Civil Servant: Making Sense of the Canadian Superhero,” American Review of Canadian Studies 36.3 (2006): 434. 7. Chris Michael, “Location Location Location: Scott Pilgrim’s Love Letter to Canada,” Guardian Film Blog, September 2, 2010, accessed December 4, 2013, www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2010/sep/02/scott-pilgrim-canadafilm-setting. 8. See Mark Berninger, “Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together: The Cultural CrossOvers of Bryan Lee O’Malley” in Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, ed. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 251; for a discussion of how Edgar Wright plays with this phenomenon in the film adaptation, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. 9. Ryan Edwardson, “The Many Lives of Captain Canuck: Nationalism, Culture, and the Creation of a Canadian Comic Book Superhero,” The Journal of Popular Culture 37.2 (2003): 199. 10. Vivian Zenari, “Mutant Mutandis: The X-Men’s Wolverine and the Construction of Canada,” in Culture and the State 3: Nationalisms, ed. James Gifford and Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux (Edmonton: CRC Humanities Studies, 2003), 65, 62–3. 11. Douglas Coupland, Souvenir of Canada (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2002), 14. 12. Coupland, Souvenir, 3. 13. Beaty, “Fighting Civil Servant,” 429. 14. Ibid., 427. 15. Edwardson, “Captain Canuck,” 184. 16. Jason Dittmer and Soren Larsen, “Captain Canuck, Audience Response, and the Project of Canadian Nationalism,” Social and Cultural Geography 8.5 (2007): 736. 17. Beaty, “Fighting Civil Servant,” 428. 18. Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vol. 1: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life (Portland, OR: Oni, 2004), n.p. 19. Ibid, n.p.

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An Innocent at Home 211 20. Ibid, n.p. 21. Byran Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vol. 2: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Portland, OR: Oni, 2005), n.p. 22. Bryan Lee O’Malley, “This isn’t meant to be an insult or a rant or . . .” Radiomaru.com, June 25, 2013, accessed February 27, 2014, http://radiomaru. tumblr.com/post/53857149606/q-this-isnt-meant-to-be-an-insult-or-a-rant-or. 23. Byran Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vol. 3: Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness (Portland, OR: Oni, 2006), n.p. 24. O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vol. 2, n.p. 25. Byran Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vol. 6: Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour (Portland, OR: Oni, 2010), n.p. 26. See Berninger, “Scott Pilgrim”: “The marginality of Asian characters is remarkable when one considers O’Malley’s own half-Korean background [. . . . T]he Asian part of O’Malley’s identity is split from the protagonist and relegated to secondary and tertiary character” (250). In contrast to Berninger, we argue that the marginality of Asian characters in the text is a mark of repression and is therefore central to the narrative. 27. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 14: Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey (Markham: Penguin, 1985), 339–376. 28. David Murphy, “Virtual Canadian Realities: Charting the Scott Pilgrim Universe,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 45–46 (2012): 496. 29. Ibid., 505.

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13 The Lower East Side as Mishmash of Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images in Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn Dana Mihăilescu New York’s Lower East Side, the most congested place of residence for the great wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants coming to the United States between 1890 and 1920, has been widely documented in historical literature as a place of diversity rather than a local, limited Jewish phenomenon. In seminal works by Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, Beth S. Wenger or Deborah Dash Moore, images of the Lower East Side as a heterogeneous location emerge almost exclusively from exploring the complicated process of Jewish assimilation in the United States and the relations between the WASP mainstream and minority groups.1 Leela Corman’s 2012 graphic novel Unterzakhn proposes a complementary, largely unexplored representation of the early twentieth century multicultural Lower East Side that also touches on the process of assimilation but is primarily filtered through women’s images and private lives. This chapter explores ways in which multiculturalism is visually represented in Corman’s graphic novel by foregrounding issues of women’s looks, sexuality and everyday existence. The chapter will trace the graphic novel’s varied and at times controversial representations of womanhood in relation to traditional Judaic Eastern European lore and American mass media views of the early twentieth century. In this sense, I will especially consider the tensions between the by-and-large traditional and still family-centered woman of the 1890s–1910s (portrayed as a Gibson girl in mainstream American media) and the emergent independent 1910s–1920s woman (portrayed via flappers in mainstream American media). In doing so, I will follow the trajectories of the protagonist Feinberg family, representing two generations of Jewish Americans that are struggling with similar goals. IMAGES OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE, JEWISH WOMEN IN GRAPHIC NARRATIVES AND LEELA CORMAN’S CONTRIBUTION In graphic narratives, the earliest full-length representation of the early twentieth century Lower East Side is due to well-known innovator and theoretician of the genre, Will Eisner. In an essay describing the main shifts one

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Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images 213 could delineate in Eisner’s graphic narratives, Jeremy Dauber notes that A Contract with God represented Eisner’s important innovation to the medium of graphic novels in the sense of establishing it as “a genre suited both to autobiographical expression and [. . .] ethnographic exploration,” thereby spotlighting individual as well as collective experiences.2 While the former affinity of graphic narratives to autobiographic, specifically traumatic experiences, has been wonderfully tackled by Hillary Chute, their ethnographic aspect including broader, multicultural and ethical perspectives, is equally fascinating to investigate.3 In this sense, A Contract with God (1978) and To the Heart of the Storm (1991) are Eisner’s flagship narratives of the immigrant and first-generation Jewish American urban experience, mostly related to Bronx and Lower East Side tenements, which appear as places of confinement with a huge impact on people’s freedom of representation. Dauber particularly notes how Eisner held a deterministic view about God’s power over people’s selves and sensibilities by confining them to crowded places like New York City’s Lower East Side in which early-twentieth-century Jewish American “tenement life” appeared as “a place of dreams often denied, promises broken, and pain, suffering, and poverty triumphant.”4 In like manner, in an interview about reasons for creating Unterzakhn, Leela Corman expresses her interest in exposing a city’s toll on people’s lives, by stating: “I’m interested in people’s lives, the way that place really pushed people into a new way of living, and this is true not only of the Lower East Side but a lot of neighborhoods in American cities.”5 Simultaneously, Corman’s graphic narrative should be placed in conversation with the profusion of “revealing autobiographical comics produced by a new generation of young, female, Jewish graphic novelists” as first identified in a December 2008 Forward article by Michael Kaminer, and further developed, since October 2010, in a highly successful touring museum exhibit he has co-curated with Sarah Lightman, Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women.6 As Kaminer rightly postulates, the emergence of such “frank,” “blunt confessional comics” by Jewish women artists dates back to the 1970s, when it functioned as a means to challenge the “brutal sexism” of the time’s underground comics that mostly relied on stereotypical, misogynist constructions of female characters largely destined for a male readership. The dominant theme of recent autobiographical comics by Jewish women, however, has supplanted “gender politics” with a deep, honest insight into “personal problems” in which women artists present “their bodies as nakedly as their emotions.”7 In a way, Leela Corman seems to have remained outside this niche of autobiographical visual storytelling since she created Unterzakhn as a fictional piece after giving up a straightforwardly autobiographical project, one focusing on the pre–World War II life of a showgirl in Poland, the place from where her family came to the United States before the Holocaust. Instead she kept the “showgirl idea” but in relation to the early-twentieth-century history of the Lower East Side and especially Jewish women’s mundane, everyday lives.8 Nevertheless, close to the case of contemporary Jewish women artists explored by Kaminer and Lightman, there

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214 Dana Mihăilescu is a personal ring to Corman’s new project too. In her acknowledgments at the end of Unterzakhn, she finishes by thanking “the countless ghosts of the disappeared past, the world before this one, among whom dwell my grandmother Ann, who taught me to swear in Yiddish and made the best pierogn [sic], and my grandfather Mendl, the original (and far more successful) Isaac Feinberg” (unpaginated). Put differently, there is at least a partial attempt on Corman’s part to create a fictional work that indirectly connects her to a distant family history she only partially knew, one in which the use of Yiddish has remained a cross-generational legacy she has inherited, and one that capitalizes on Jewish women’s bodies, anxieties and conundrums, just as in the works of the abovementioned contemporary authors that make up the “golden age” of women comic artists in Kaminer’s view.9 Divided into six parts titled after various years (1909, 1912, 1895, 1896, 1917, 1923), Unterzakhn focuses on the image of the Lower East Side over a fourteen-year span as well as on its various points of contact with Eastern Europe (in the parts devoted to 1895 and 1896, which refer to Isaac Feinberg’s life in Russia-run Poland before emigration to the United States). Most importantly, the book engages the image of the Lower East Side as developed by the adult immigrant generation of the Feinberg parents, Isaac and Minna, with that of the first-generation of Jewish Americans represented by the two Feinberg twin daughters, Fanya and Esther, whose experiences and views from nine years old (in 1909) to twenty-three years old (in 1923) are presented. Offering simultaneous insights into two generations’ viewpoints, the narrative manages to shed significant light on the complex intergenerational dynamics of early-twentieth-century Jewish American life on the Lower East Side. In this endeavor, Corman’s book upholds the formulaic representation of terrible living conditions and anti-Semitic discrimination as main reasons for Eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.10 The part of the book dealing with the year 1895, for example, depicts the life of young Isaac Feinberg as an onion-peddler in a Russian shtetl who one day returns home to find his house ransacked and his mother and sister raped and killed by completely insensitive Russian Cossacks. Yet apart from this archetypal representation of Eastern Europe, Corman’s book is particularly relevant for recording patterns of people’s physical behaviors in Eastern Europe and the United States, especially in relation to three articles of women’s clothing: headscarves, shirts and waists, and corsets. As forcefully indicated by curator Barbara Schreier in a 1993 exhibition about how Jewish women became American via the clothes they chose to wear, women’s headscarves were a fundamental part of the traditional Jewish way of life in Eastern Europe. Schreier explains: “Most Eastern European women arrived at Ellis Island wearing a kerchief as part of their native costume. While more elaborate head-dresses [. . .] might be worn on holidays and festive occasions, the simple scarf had survived intact as part of an

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Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images 215 Orthodox Jew’s costume from its beginnings in the eighteenth century.”11 In a similar vein, Corman’s graphic novel visually expresses the differences between Eastern European and Lower East Side markets through women’s appearance.12 In Eastern Europe, for instance, when Isaac goes to the market to sell onions, all women wear headscarves, whether they sell or buy, while shawls or thick winter coats almost completely envelop them, a sign that is often used to represent a coupling of the poorer classes’ need for “durable fabrics and functional styles” with a pious sense of “modesty by covering the shoulders and arms.”13 In the United States we notice degrees of changes in women’s appearances: sellers have generally kept their head kerchief (e.g. the pickle lady from panels 2 and 3 in figure 13.1); the buyers usually wear their hair uncovered or feature fashionable feathered hats, a symbol of women’s respectable social status (see, for instance, one woman on page 18). We can also observe a change of dresses, which are tightly fitted to the body for the upper classes while the majority of working class women wear more comfortable shirts and waists. At the same time, however, Corman’s narrative complicates the discussion of styles first available to Jewish women in America. Not only are Mrs. Feinberg and Jewish American women dressed in shirts and waists on the Lower East Side (see figure 13.1), but Isaac’s mother back in Russia is presented as already wearing the same articles of dress and rolled sleeves, usually associated in the United States with the 1910s Gibson girl image and understood as a liberating piece of apparel to be used for work, study, walking in the street or staying in the home.14 This can be explained by Jews’ dominant role in the garment industry starting with the end of the nineteenth century not only in the United States but also in Eastern Europe. Given this, even prior to emigration many of them were likely to have a clear fashion consciousness that led them to veer away from strictly traditional modes of dress, at least in the case of secular families like Isaac’s. This association of a style usually related to women’s liberation in the United States, with its earlier existence in Eastern Europe in the 1890s nuancing the discussion of a linear progress achieved by Jewish women in America.15 Instead of maintaining a straightforward narrative, it upholds a more complicated history, which encompasses individual modernizing forms that arose prior to their wearers’ arrivals in the United States, but which in autocratic Eastern Europe were likely to be openly flaunted only in one’s home while traditional outfits predominate in public. In contrast, in the United States we see these women’s more courageous parading of such styles in the street and public life and not only in the private space of one’s family. Undoubtedly, the almost complete absence of privacy characterizing the crowded Lower East Side tenements was an important factor contributing to this publicizing of one’s more comfortable dress. These images are therefore particularly important for suggesting the inconsistencies and tensions between theory and practice, appearance and true beliefs, that started to dominate Jewish women’s lives in the early twentieth century and epitomized the complex paths toward modernization that they needed to traverse.

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216 Dana Mihăilescu

Figure 13.1 Leela Corman, Unterzakhn (New York: Schocken Books, 2012), 11. Courtesy of Leela Corman/Courtesy of Schocken Books, a division of Random House LLC.

WOMEN’S IMAGES IN US MASS MEDIA AND JEWISH AMERICANS’ CROSS-GENERATIONAL GENDERED RESPONSES It was not only comfortable clothes, but also stylish ones that became a generalized part of Jewish women’s lives in early-twentieth-century America. In Corman’s narrative, this becomes obvious in the case of the protagonist

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Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images 217 Feinberg family since twins Fanya and Esther grow up around their mother’s corset shop, which offers lace waists for women as depicted in the shopwindow display, “Zilber, Corset and Foundation, Latest Fashion from Paris.”16 Barbara Schreier explains the importance of the corset in Jewish American women’s “acculturation process because embracing the American ideal meant accepting a new body type” involving a lean, hourglass silhouette, “good-sized hips” and the “tightly-laced wasp waist” of the time’s fashionable American Gibson girl.17 Early in Corman’s book, we get a glimpse inside Mrs. Feinberg’s corset shop as she is working on such a WASP look and hip line for a client whom Esther admires (panels 2 and 7 in figure 13.2). This body-tight look closely follows the Gibson girl image that was becoming dominant in American mass media after 1898 and was featured in widely read women’s magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. As media historian Carolyn Kitch notes, the Gibson girl was tall, with a clear and fearless gaze, her nose slightly uplifted, and a slim waist; she represented a transitional figure that was trying to make a passage from the Victorian Cult of True Womanhood, which was based on women being the epitome of “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity,” toward a New Woman look in which social outreach and a self-centered interest in forging a tempting, fashionable appearance became equally important.18 In the early twentieth century this progressivist Gibson woman especially highlighted the importance of bodily forms and beauty as commodities, and forms of consumption underlying dignified American women. Of particular interest is the way in which Corman’s narrative traces the positioning toward this new woman’s image on the part of Jewish American immigrant adult women and their first-generation American daughters. This can be seen in Mrs. Feinberg’s reaction to Esther’s fascination with the client’s look and accompanying jewelry: the mother drives her daughter away, saying, “You stay away from her and pritzes like her unless I ask for your help,” while Esther overhears the mother telling the lady that despite the girl’s plain looks she will find a match for her at the right time.19 In that, the mother occupies the position of most adult Jewish immigrants to the United States in relation to progressive new American images of women; these immigrant adults saw themselves as merely being facilitators of the creation of the new woman’s image culture without openly embracing it. They were external shapers of a new look, one that they did not identify with but appropriated for pragmatic reasons. Instead of adopting the new look they kept relying on more traditional goals, as represented by the mother’s talking about Old World–style arranged marriages for her daughter, just as she had married her husband. Relevantly, however, Corman’s narrative suggests that this traditional penchant of adult immigrant Jewish women in America did not itself spring out from a deeply internalized piousness but was more likely the result of a need to keep up appearances as to one’s dignified status. Evidence for this first comes from the mother’s associating the lady whom she dresses with the Yiddish word “pritze,” a term that is unknown to her nine-year-old daughters

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218 Dana Mihăilescu

Figure 13.2 Leela Corman, Unterzakhn (New York: Schocken Books, 2012), 24. Courtesy of Leela Corman/Courtesy of Schocken Books, a division of Random House LLC.

and confuses them, and one that she previously applied to Bronia, the ladydoctor that helped women who didn’t want to keep their pregnancies. With time, the girls realize the word stands for a prostitute, suggesting how the mother sees these sexually attractive outfits as signs of women’s loose morals. Even though on one level this could place Mrs. Feinberg within a conservative, traditional cohort of Jewish women’s views in America, we learn

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Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images 219 that her public opprobrium of such practices does not result from deeply felt convictions. Immediately after the episode detailed above, the narrative continues with the mother’s leaving the girls at home to supposedly get to the corset shop for more work. Once there, though, the panels speak about her secret extramarital love affairs. The way in which the panels are drawn suggests that she is particularly careful to keep her affairs hidden. We first get an image of her shop window with the shades completely drawn; from inside Mrs. Feinberg’s voice can be heard, “Mach schnell, boychik . . . I’ve got things to do.”20 In the following panel, we see Mrs. Feinberg buttoningup and a silhouetted young man putting on his pants in the background, while she cautiously adds, “Don’t forget your hat.”21 Such instances show that the supposedly clear-cut attitudes about gendered behaviors on the part of the immigrant and first-generation Jewish women in the United States did not necessarily result from older women’s deeply entrenched Judaic convictions. Mrs. Feinberg’s situation could also be a result of her having been subjected to an arranged marriage, and of an acute sense of cautiousness against openly confronting the traditional outlook of one’s community, which have made her decide to keep up appearances. This was no doubt exacerbated by the fact that these women’s lives were largely running on lines set by a Jewish community centered around one’s immediate and extended family and by the fact that these women had led a good part of their life in the autocratic atmosphere of Eastern Europe in which double and hidden lives were their only paths to survival. In contrast, the new US-raised generation represented by the Feinberg twins pertained to a cohort of “young girls [who] lived a more public life than their mothers” and who were much more open and frank about their attitudes.22 Leela Corman’s graphic narrative thereby manages to complement historians’ portrayals of the Lower East Side by not simply capitalizing on clear-cut generational differences between Jewish American mothers and daughters in relation to Jewish and American values. Her main contribution consists in providing a detour from straightforward historical interpretations of the Lower East Side as a battleground between traditionally minded older generations and progressively minded younger offspring. Instead she suggests that there is a difference in degree rather than kind between older and younger Jewish women in America; both seem to have embarked on a path toward a more liberal life, one in which older women are more cautious and reliant on hidden individual deviances pursued along similar trajectories to those they had followed in autocratic Eastern Europe. Younger girls, by contrast, more openly embrace the desire for change even if this makes their situation more difficult in public. Considering all the above aspects, I argue that the main distinction between the old and new generations featured by Unterzakhn is one of public acknowledgment. In this respect, Esther and Fanya suggest two different paths for publically changing women’s lives. Esther focuses on embracing the American look, clothes and appearance promoted by mainstream media

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220 Dana Mihăilescu following her first visit to Miss Lucille’s Show House and her later city strolls during which she passes in front of theater posters of corseted and made-up women. This clearly visible change in women’s physical appearance is coupled with another more traditional possibility: the comfortable and pragmatic Gibson-mediatized wearing of shirts and waists that allowed women the possibility to more easily move in private and in public, at home, at work and in the street. This style of clothing arises in the narrative through Fanya’s embracing of the fight for women’s rights to use birth control; women in this movement wear the latter form of clothing rather than the corset preferred by Esther.23 Unlike Fanya’s limited identification with the functional Gibson look till well into the 1920s, Esther becomes an incarnation of the flapper, with her short hair, curvy dress style, excessive make up and accompanying ornaments.24 If the Gibson girl still emphasized women’s commitment to caring for others, the flapper indulged in excess and self-pleasures irrespective of what others said. Historian Carolyn Kitch sees the flapper as the symbol of a moral revolution, which “redefined American women’s freedom as sexual rather than political” as a result of the flapper’s “self-absorbed and silly” manner and her sex appeal, which arose from her short dress, “girdle-bra that bound the breasts and minimized the hips; roll-top silk stockings; a handbag [. . .] and make up.”25 Epitomizing this look, Esther becomes an incarnation of the flapper as a successful actress leading a life of luxury and excess. If Esther upholds women’s sexual freedom, Fanya’s acknowledgment of new ways is represented by her decision to fight for women’s rights by helping Bronia, the so-called lady-doctor, in assisting women with birth control. At first, the twelve-year-old girl is exposed to Bronia’s mindset about the gender issue as one in which marriage necessarily represents women’s enslavement by men based on an essentialist view according to which only men have sexual drives and women’s only freedom can be achieved by abstaining from sex in order to avoid pregnancy.26 Fanya’s posture throughout all the panels in which Bronia gives this radical speech encompasses an earnest curious gaze (as rendered in the last panel on page 59 and the first panel on page 60) as well as the image of a dutiful student engrossed in the instructor’s lessons (following her position in panel 2 on page 60). Given this, despite the fact that the following panel calls Bronia’s theory into doubt in real-life terms through the presentation of Mrs. Feinberg’s leggings and open legs after another instance of adulterous intercourse (panel 3 on page 60), a large part of Fanya’s life will be dominated by the internalization of the above teachings. This becomes obvious when she refuses to marry her boyfriend, Italian American Sal, completely discarding marriage as women’s enslavement by noting, “So you want me to whelp out a brood of screaming little angels for you, and cook you blintzes every night?”27 Despite Fanya’s sustaining a progressive image of women beyond the confines of marriage, she is further characterized by a deep struggle between

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Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images 221 her beliefs in such rights as female freedom and her conservative rejection of her sister Esther, when the latter comes home for the funeral of their younger sister, Feygl, and asks for help since she has become pregnant. Fanya drives Esther away as a prostitute, saying, “You have no sisters” and “Get out of here, you disgusting whore! You’re dead to us.”28 This episode best epitomizes Fanya’s strained position between the progressive attempt to fight for women’s rights and her simultaneously being the victim of the community’s traditional views, thereby publically denying her sister with invectives like “cockroach.” Thus, for a long time, Fanya strongly upholds traditional beliefs inculcated in her by Bronia and her mother, which almost completely annul her attempts at helping women. However, Fanya later goes to Miss Lucille’s house, where Bronia would never set foot, and helps her sister get an abortion. It is also later, in the wake of her mother’s death, that she completely cuts off from Bronia after several quarrels in which Fanya is vilified for trying to help all women, irrespective of whether they are married or not. Throughout the story, Bronia’s attitude is one in which progressive help is strictly limited to women of the middle and upper classes who must necessarily be married; she is not trying to aid the large masses of poor or unmarried women who actually needed such help at the time, and about whom she has prejudicial views. In stark contrast to this, we see Fanya in bed with Sal, now married to another woman because of her refusal to become his wife, yet the two could not stop seeing each other. On one hand, this shows how Fanya has been a victim of Bronia’s anti-marriage and limited teachings—she refused marriage, and has now ended up in an adulterous situation that could have been prevented if she had accepted Sal’s proposal five years before.29 On the other hand, she is now doubting Bronia’s ways, wondering, “Am I really to ask these poor women if they are married, and deny them assistance, if not? She doesn’t even approve of marriage.”30 The last sentence in particular indicates Fanya’s growing consciousness about having taken in Bronia’s inconsistent, unfair ideas. Historically, the need to fight for all women’s rights to birth control has been especially related to the work of Margaret Sanger (1879–1966), the well-known Irish American activist, social reformer and pioneering sex educator who devoted her life to legalizing such rights following a personal incident.31 She especially hoped to help poor women by making contraceptives widely available and thus ending the dangerous practice of back-alley abortions and self-terminated pregnancies. Significantly, after moving to New York in 1910, Sanger started a column to educate women about sex through a newspaper column entitled, “What Every Girl Should Know,” several Yiddish editions of which circulated in New York’s Jewish American neighborhoods and triggered the publication of Yiddish-language articles on sex hygiene.32 This in turn led to the active participation of many Jewish American women in the birth control movement for its “benefits in terms of health, marital relations, and social mobility,” as in the case of thirtyfive-year-old immigrant Rose Heiman Halpern, mother of six children who

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222 Dana Mihăilescu volunteered to distribute Yiddish, Italian and English handbills about birth control prepared by Sanger around 1915.33 In Corman’s graphic narrative, Bronia is constructed as a helper of women whose positive role is reduced by her class-based prejudices, while Fanya largely corresponds to a more egalitarian reformer image after the model of Sanger and Jewish volunteers like Halpern, especially in her later attempts to help women irrespective of their marital or social status, even though she is initially largely constrained by other limitations. In an interview with Jessa Crispin, Corman acknowledged drawing inspiration from Sanger’s history as a nurse in the area in constructing the character of Fanya, who finally starts going to anywhere she is needed and gives contraceptives to unmarried women even though Bronia attacks her for it as a mode of “contributing to their oppression” or helping those “who aren’t worth the risk” of getting arrested.34 In response to this, Fanya finally leaves Bronia in a belated gesture of courage and independence, but this comes with a price: she herself has become pregnant. At the end of the story it is Esther—whom Fanya and the Lower East Side Jewish American community had previously discarded as morally problematic—who generously takes her twin sister into her luxurious house and helps her give birth to a child, but Fanya dies in the process. Esther’s explanation of her gesture—“You’re not the only do-gooder in New York”— places her in a similar position to her sister. Her attitude is not one of radical dismissal of other people on moral, social or traditional lines, however. Rather she combines the realization of some people’s complicity and guilt with an acknowledgment of their uplifting capacity to help at important moments. In this respect, when Fanya complains of Meyer, the old man who constantly comes to Esther, the latter straightforwardly retorts: “When you and Mama wouldn’t even spit on me, Meyer saved me, and it’s Meyer who keeps me working.”35 Esther goes on: “You and Mama, [were] so full of yourselves, so false and pious,” while in fact the mother was a shandeh/loose woman with “the hottest pants on Hester Street” who told Esther when she was twelve that her reputation was saved when her parents found a greenhorn man ready to marry her, just off the ship to the United States, i.e. their father.36 Fanya only learns of this now, belatedly realizing that her reformist and moral ideas do not correspond to reality and largely follow a binary, black-white grid of understanding learned from her mother and Bronia. Instead, Esther proposes a more nuanced view of people, in which receiving assistance at important moments in life makes one feel responsible for helping people back and not judging them so harshly. In line with this, even though she hints at Fanya’s pretentions and her rejection of Esther because of the community’s attitude, at night, in bed, on slippery satin sheets, Esther is the one who prevents Fanya from falling and lovingly embraces her.37 She thereby suggests that women’s lot in the early-twentieth-century United States could only be amended by stepwise changes that avoided radical and categorical binary verdicts like those that had directed Fanya’s life to a high degree, just as they had directed her mother’s life. Instead, Esther uses

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Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images 223 understanding and personal affinities so that in the long run women’s situations can become less exploitative. Unterzakhn also encompasses the positioning towards this new women’s image and Jewish Americans on the part of American women representing the dominant WASP culture of those times, one which involves the use of a lot of anti-Semitic stereotypes. This is most strongly evident in the case of Esther trying to become a performer in theater and dance pieces alongside youths representing the dominant culture. The preference for her over others makes some of the theater colleagues critique her for one aspect of her appearance which is at fault with the Gibson girl image, namely the lack of a snub nose. In 1912, when Esther is barely twelve, one Lynn attacks her for her supposedly Semitic and unappealing “hook nose,”38 using the racist vocabulary of genetically and physically superior and inferior kinds of people. She remarks, “I’m serious, Ethner. You could open your own house for that nose alone [. . .] with a honker like that, she’ll be a charity case unless a kind soul like me lends a hand.”39 Here Lynn betrays her disdain for Esther in calling her a different name to her real one and in associating her “Jewish nose” with a case of charity, since at the time many of the Jewish people in America had to rely on charity institutions in order to make a living, thereby suggesting her race’s inferiority and the prospect of Jews being destined to remain part of the poor classes, without a real future in America.40 It is also at twelve that Esther starts to work as a prostitute in Miss Lucille’s house not because she wants to, but after being fooled into the arms of a client by another one of the girls who is envious of Miss Lucille’s favoring of the “pretty” girl. This initiation behind Miss Lucille’s back is, however, used by Miss Lucille to make Esther a company girl like the rest, stating, “I’d been hoping to debut you to one of our more . . . discerning clients, but since you’ve beaten me to it, you may as well continue. Tomorrow you start working in the house, like the other girls.”41 There is no mention of Esther’s being trapped here, instead all the blame is placed upon her and her destiny is to change for good, as suggested by the completely black panel following the one in which Esther entered the room of Mr. Vanderhoff, the man who sexually abused her, before a girl belatedly came to her rescue.42 Later on, when the seventeen-year-old Esther, now Delilah, is given the leading role of Aphrodite in a play, she is the victim of the other colleagues’ even more virulent anti-Semitic comments during rehearsals. Their remarks range from outwardly accusing Jews of being unfair tricksters (“You’re a tricky little kike”) to decrying their unfamiliarity with “soap and water” (“Did you bathe today? It smells like herring in here. [. . .] Oh, maybe that’s just your people’s natural fragrance”).43 Confronted with these instances of open discrimination, Esther behaves like her mother in front of the Jewish community’s conservative ways—she does not react and seems not to hear the others’ imprecations. The major differences between Esther and her mother, though, reside in the fact that Esther leads her life among these WASP people while Mrs. Feinberg remains

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224 Dana Mihăilescu within the confines of the Jewish community on the Lower East Side, and in the fact that Esther keeps dressing and behaving in line with the image culture of mainstream America, in direct competition with these girls. Once she has become an acclaimed theater star among mainstream American audiences in 1923, she finally changes this passive attitude toward those continuing to use anti-Semitic comments. In one case she overhears two pretentious-looking, snobbish men making fun of her on the grounds of her poor, Jewish, Eastern European accented Lower East Side ghetto origins: “Enchanté? She sounds like a Basque choking on a Russian! [. . .] Do I detect a hint of Eau de Tenement?”44 The stylish flapper does not remain silent in front of these ironic comments on her cheap appropriation of the latest French and American fashions given essentialist, anti-immigrant feelings that dominated American society from the 1910s onward. During this time, what had appeared as mild nativism against the large wave of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe started to escalade in a more serious proliferation of racial pseudoscience, theories of Nordic supremacy and popular nativism. Texts discrediting new immigrants were now widely published, such as Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916). In his book, Grant, a member of the Immigration Restriction League, promoted racial inferiority by distinguishing between three races in Europe: the Alpines, the Mediterranean and the Nordics, praising the last as being the fittest for the American lifestyle and recommending an immigration restriction policy for the “lesser races” from Southern and Eastern Europe.45 It is within this generalized context of suspicion on Eastern Europeans that Esther enters the entertainment business of America. Only after she becomes a recognized star, in the example above, does she go straight to the two men and speak with as sharp a tongue as they, asking, “Either of you tight-lacing wits have a light?,” and flicking her cigarette in the eye of one of them.46 Esther’s uptake of a streetwise response to anti-Semitic remarks in America suggests early-twentieth-century Jewish American women’s gradual and complicated grasping of the courage to speak and ask for equal rights and recognition.47 As the example of Esther suggests, an outwardly active stance and sanctioning of prejudiced discourses and acts only occurred if they managed to acquire a safe position of respectability and power, which marked their being recognized as integrated and relevant members of American society. CONCLUSIONS Given the above considerations, Corman’s graphic narrative engages interestingly with the work of Will Eisner, the acclaimed graphic artist who was a pioneering author in including Jewish sexuality and explicit images of visual nudity and intercourse in his work. As Josh Lambert has shown, though, all such images from Eisner’s works are coupled with “narrative moments of sexual frustration and failure,” suggesting that “sexual desire—adulterous,

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Jewish Women’s Multicultural Images 225 violent, or based on deception—leads to [the partners’] disappointment and disaster rather than satisfaction,” and thereby indicating Eisner’s conservative view on illicit or improper sexual desire.48 Corman complicates the binary moral compass of Eisner’s work by presenting Mrs. Feinberg’s secret adulterous affairs not as a case of disappointment and failure but as a pragmatic method of avoiding verdicts of illegitimacy imposed by a still largely traditional community, an instance of immigrant Jewish women’s limited context of life in the early-twentieth-century United States. In the case of the daughters, Corman suggests that the younger generation’s nonsecret loveoriented life placed them at the mercy of many prejudicial and prejudiced views, coming either from the Jewish or the mainstream WASP American communities. The only way out seemed to be the path of Esther in favor of only temporary bonds of cognizant, well-reflected personal affect amid a muddy life scene for women in the early twentieth century. These strained bonds went beyond ethnic lines and built themselves on the multicultural images of women in the early twentieth century that coupled mainstream American and Jewish views. NOTES 1. See Hasia R. Diner, Lower East Side Memories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Hasia R. Diner, Jeffrey Shandler, and Beth S. Wenger, eds. Remembering the Lower East Side (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Deborah Dash Moore, gen. ed., City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, 3 volumes (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 2. Jeremy Dauber, “Comic Books, Tragic Stories: Will Eisner’s American Jewish History,” in The Jewish Graphic Novel, eds. Samantha Baskind and Rainen Omer-Sherman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 27. 3. Hillary Chute, “Comics Form and Narrating Lives,” Profession (2011): 107–117. 4. Dauber, “Comic Books, Tragic Stories,” 30. 5. Eli Rosenblatt, “Introducing a New Graphic Novel: Leela Corman’s ‘Unterzakhn.’ Interview with the Author,” Jewish Daily Forward, February 28, 2008, accessed July 13, 2012, http://forward.com/articles/12793/introducing-anew-graphic-novel-/. 6. See Michael Kaminer, “Graphic Confessions of Jewish Women. Exposing Themselves Through Pictures and Raw Personal Stories,” The Jewish Daily Forward, December 4, 2008, accessed February 3, 2014, http://forward.com/ articles/14657/graphic-confessions-of-jewish-women/, and Sarah Lightman and Michael Kaminer, co-curators, Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, accessed February 13, 2014, http://graphicdetailstheshow. wordpress.com/about-graphic-details/. 7. Kaminer, “Graphic Confessions of Jewish Women.” 8. Rosenblatt, “Introducing a New Graphic Novel: Leela Corman’s ‘Unterzakhn.’ Interview with the Author.” 9. Michael Kaminer, “Graphic Details: Q & A,” Interview by Leah Berkenwald, Sisterhood Blog, Jewish Daily Forward, January 25, 2011, accessed February 4, 2014, http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/134917/graphic-details-qand-a-michael-kaminer/#ixzz2souXhblQ.

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226 Dana Mihăilescu 10. See, for instance, Hasia R. Diner’s presentation of late-nineteenth-century Eastern Europe as a locus of pogroms from which Jews had no other choice but emigration in order to escape oppression in Lower East Side Memories. 11. Barbara Schreier, “Becoming American: Jewish Women Immigrants 1880– 1920,” History Today (March 1994): 28. 12. See Leela Corman, Unterzakhn (New York: Schocken Books, 2012), 85 and panels 2, 3 on page 11 or panel 3 on page 18. 13. Schreier, “Becoming American,” 27–28. 14. David Von Drehle, Triangle. The Fire That Changed America (New York: Grove Press, 2003), 44–45. 15. See image and discussion in Barbara Schreier, Becoming American Women. Clothing and the Jewish Immigrant Experience, 1880–1920 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1994), 22. 16. Corman, Unterzakhn, 27. 17. Schreier, “Becoming American,” 29. 18. Carolyn Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover. The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 20. 19. Corman, Unterzakhn, 25. 20. Ibid., 27. 21. Ibid. 22. Schreier, “Becoming American,” 30. 23. Corman, Unterzakhn, 165–166. 24. Ibid., 163. 25. Kitch, The Girl on the Magazine Cover, 122, 133. 26. Corman, Unterzakhn, 59–60. 27. Ibid., 133. 28. Ibid., 134. 29. Ibid., 141. 30. Ibid., 166. 31. When Margaret Sanger was nineteen, her fifty-year-old mother died from tuberculosis brought about by the strain of eleven childbirths and seven miscarriages. This triggered Sanger’s lifelong fight for women’s rights to use contraceptives. She was the one who coined the term “birth control” in 1914 and who started to provide women with information and contraceptives, whatever the risks, including her being arrested and indicted several times. For more information about Margaret Sanger’s agency as a women’s rights activist and her work on the Lower East Side, see Melissa R. Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace. American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890–1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 68–102. 32. Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace, 88. 33. Ibid., 68–69. 34. Corman, Unterzakhn, 178. For Corman’s acknowledgment of Margaret Sanger as source of inspiration, see Jessa Crispin, Interview with Leela Corman, Kirkus Reviews Blog, May 8, 2012, accessed July 27, 2012, www.kirkus reviews.com/blog/fiction/immigrant-life-unterzakhn/. 35. Corman, Unterzakhn, 186. 36. Ibid., 187. 37. Ibid., 193. 38. Frederik Strömberg, Jewish Images in the Comics. A Visual History (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012), 103. 39. Corman, Unterzakhn, 65. 40. For an excellent study of early-twentieth-century charity institutions in the United States and the case of Jews, see Amy Koritz, Culture Makers. Urban

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

Performance and Literature in the 1920s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), especially the chapter entitled “‘Make Yourself for an American’: Anzia Yezierska’s Public Sphere,” 111–134. Corman, Unterzakhn, 78. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 145–146. Ibid., 164. For further details, see Steven J. Belluscio, To Be Suddenly White. Literary Realism and Racial Passing (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 30–31, 90 and Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America. Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Berkley: University of California Press, 2009), especially the chapter entitled, “Ellis Island as an Observation Station: Spectacle and Inspection, 1892–1924,” 104–122. Corman, Unterzakhn, 164. Klapper, Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace, 3–15. Josh Lambert, “‘Wanna watch the grown-ups doin’ dirty things?’: Jewish Sexuality and the Early Graphic Novel,” in The Jewish Graphic Novel, eds. Samantha Baskind and Rainen Omer-Sherman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 54, 51.

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14 They All Look Alike? Representations of East Asian Americans in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings and Scenes from an Impending Marriage Emma Oki CONTEMPORARY EAST ASIAN AMERICAN AND CANADIAN COMICS “We need more Asian faces written by Asians,” contends Sam, the main character of Secret Asian Man, claiming that race issues are very much alive in American society and “there’s still a lot more work to be done.”1 At the time Tak Toyoshima’s “S.A.M. Meets Larry Hama” was published, there were already quite a few successful cartoonists of East Asian descent—for example, Derek Kirk Kim, Adrian Tomine, Jason Shiga, and Gene Luen Yang.2 The first author, Kim, won three of the most prestigious awards in the comics industry for his 2004 graphic collection Same Difference and Other Stories. The title story, which was republished as an independent graphic novella in 2011, continues to be his most significant work. It features two Korean Americans who embark on a journey of maturation and self-discovery. Throughout the novella, they make subtle references to their East Asian roots and experiences as East Asian Americans. The same cannot be said about Tomine’s Shortcomings (2007), in which the author deliberately over-Asianizes his characters and boldly deals with issues of race, identity, and stereotyping. The next comics creator, Shiga, is perhaps, as Viet Thanh Nguyen would put it, the least “masticated” of the four, as he has not received as much attention from literary scholars as Kim or Tomine.3 His 2000 graphic novel entitled Double Happiness features the character of Tom, who feels an outsider both to the Chinese and American communities, a prevalent theme in Asian American literature. In his attempt to belong, he starts learning Hokkien and behaving like his distant cousin, the consequences of which are not quite what either of the characters expected. The final author, Gene Luen Yang, is best known for his graphic novel American Born Chinese (2006), in which he reassures his reader-viewers that happiness comes with self-acceptance: “You know, Jin, I would have saved myself from five hundred years’ imprisonment beneath a mountain of rock had I only realized how good it is to be a monkey.”4 What makes Yang’s narrative stand out is his use of Chinese mythology and nonlinear narration, which add to the appeal of this work.

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They All Look Alike? 229 Since 2009, the number of North American cartoonists of East Asian descent has increased considerably. Thien Pham, Gia Bao Tran, and David H. T. Wong are just a few names that come to mind.5 Their contributions to Asian American and Canadian literature are comparable to those of their earlier counterparts in that they also address issues of race, history, and identity in their output. Pham earned wider recognition among comics readers as the illustrator of Yang’s Level Up (2011). In this story, Dennis Ouyang and his friends have to choose a career path for themselves and decide whether to follow their hearts or their parents’ expectations, a decision both artists had to make at a certain point in their lives. In his first solo work entitled, Sumo (2012), the author relates to his experiences of transition—just as the main character, Pham, had to adapt to his new environment when his family emigrated in the 1980s. In Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2011), GB Tran looks to his ancestors’ history and presents the lives of his family during the Vietnam War and after their arrival in the United States. As for Wong’s Escape to Gold Mountain (2012), it provides a detailed history of Chinese Canadians and their struggle for acceptance and recognition in Canadian history and society. What is also worth pointing out is that there is a growing group of women creators, among whom are Hellen Jo and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. Their work completes the representations of women of East Asian descent, previously portrayed by their male counterparts. In “Supergrrrls,” Jo criticizes the works of cartoonists whose female characters are presented as “weak, helpless, and in need of a hero.”6 She also comments on Jaime Hernandez’s Daffy, an East Asian American teenager that gives up her punk identity to pursue a degree and career in optometry: “She sheds her punk ways, goes off to UCLA, and becomes an optometrist. That’s an eerie[ly] accurate representation of many suburban Asian American girls I grew up with—even myself, to some degree. In high school, we tried to look like punks and goths, to seem tougher to our families, our friends, and ourselves. But having lived sheltered lives, we realize it’s just a costume, and grow out of it.”7 In Jo’s Jin & Jam No. 1, the title female characters are strong and rebellious teenagers. They smoke cigarettes, wear scruffy clothes, use obscene language, and get involved in physical fights. Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim (2008) is also a coming-of-age story, but it is less crude and violent than Jo’s work. Its visual style is reminiscent of Japanese art of the nineteenth-century, which Jillian Tamaki discusses in an interview: “It seems the ukiyo-e influence is deeper in my subconscious than I gave it credit for.”8 Although Kimberly Keiko Cameron, the main character of Skim, is a Japanese Canadian, she does not, as Suzette Chan put it, “stake her identity on her ancestry.”9 Only twice does she make references to her Asian (that is Japanese) roots; the first time is when she recalls the last birthday party she attended: The last birthday party I went to was Julie Peters’ thirteenth birthday in grade seven. It was a costume party. I went as the Cowardly Lion from

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The Wizard of Oz. Everyone at the party was a ballerina or a figure skater. The only other non-figure skater was Hien Warshowski, who came dressed as a soldier. . . . Hien and I watched The Secret of NIMH in the living room. Until about half way into the night when suddenly we heard . . . AIR RAID! AIR RAID! And then this herd of ballerinas swooped into the room and chased Hien and me out of the house. We waited for them to let us back in. After a while Hien left. . . . Maybe she thought that’s how people left parties in Canada: Asians first.10 This experience challenges the view that Canadians are more tolerant toward the Other than, for example, Americans.11 Kim also alludes to her heritage when writing about the ways people are “marked” by others: “If you are ugly, like Natasha Cake[,] who has no eyebrows and doesn’t wash her hair, then you are marked to be treated like crap for life. I have eyebrows and wash[,] but I think I am also marked to some degree (biologically) as a weirdo for life. (Mom says that there is nothing about my appearance that I don’t contribute to with my habits.)”12 Upon reading the graphic novel, it becomes clear that the main theme is not of race and racial identity but of the challenges of adolescence and discovering one’s sexual identity. “PROBABLY NOT YOUR CUP OF TEA”: READING ADRIAN TOMINE13 “Don’t think of me as an Asian cartoonist. Just think of me as a cartoonist”— this has been the wish of many authors whose output has been viewed primarily through the prism of their ethnicity as opposed to being read and appreciated for its artistic and literary merit.14 To escape the Asian label, Adrian Tomine avoided addressing issues of race and identity in his early work and drew many of his characters in a way that did not expose their ethnic and racial backgrounds: “I think there was a point in the past when I felt that my options as an artist were either to make race a nonissue and deny its impact on life . . . [o]r . . . to be like some politically active guy carrying big placards, making giant pronouncements about political issues and injustice. In my ignorance, I chose the former because I didn’t want to do the latter.”15 Realizing it was not a “binary set of options” and that there was “a lot of area in between to be mined,” Tomine created Shortcomings (2007), in which he examines how Americans of East Asian descent negotiate their Asian and American identities, and Scenes from an Impending Marriage (2011), which is a more humorous exploration of how racial and cultural belonging can influence an individual’s everyday life.16 Both books fall under the category of parallel culture literature, which is, as Mingshui Cai and Rudine Sims Bishop argue, “literature written by authors from parallel cultural groups to represent the experience, consciousness, and self-image developed as a result of being acculturated and socialized within

They All Look Alike? 231 those groups.” In short, it is “the literature of [and not about] a cultural group.”18 Hailed as “a master of the small gesture” and “a master portraitist of the awkward and alienated,” Tomine is one of those author-artists whom readers either love or hate.19 When asked how he would describe a typical Adrian Tomine story, the author replied: “I’d probably say something self-defeating like: ‘It’s probably not your cup of tea. It’s kind of boring.’ But probably I should say that it’s kind of like contemporary fiction in comics form.”20 His artistic style, which has been characterized as clean and simple, is heavily influenced by the work of Daniel Clowes, the Hernandez brothers, and Charles Schulz, among others.21 His narratives tend to end unexpectedly, leaving the main issues unresolved and open to interpretation.22 Although the author is aware that some reader-viewers would prefer strong and clearly defined endings, he remains true to his style: “some people hate the way I end my stories. I offer no defense, other than that they’re the way I intended them to be, for better or for worse.”23 The characters that appear in his graphic stories are, at least at first reading, unlikeable and thus challenging for reader-viewers. Daniel Raeburn refers to them as weirdos that “are all, at heart, suspiciously similar—but isolated stabs at love define the human condition in America today.”24 Greice Schneider describes them as representatives of “the so-called Generation X” that are “distinguished by a loss of perspective and the decay of the traditional idea of a nuclear family.”25 She identifies five basic types of characters: broken couples, relationships in conflict, lonely individuals, shattered families, and damaged friendships.26 The most common themes the author touches upon center around the everyday and quotidian, which is why the label “slice-of-life” is often applied to his work. As an illustrator, Tomine is able to express a great deal in very little space, and a single panel is all the author needs to tell a whole story. The way he structures his panels and breaks down his narratives also adds to the appeal of his work. As for his dialogues, they have been characterized as realistic and having a Woody Allen quality to them: “his dialogue and stories skew more Woody Allen, if Woody Allen were a young Asian guy from the West Coast.”27

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17

“BE THANKFUL YOU’RE NOT MR. YELLOW”: REPRESENTATIONS OF EAST ASIAN AMERICANS IN SHORTCOMINGS28 Shortcomings, which was previously serialized in Tomine’s Optic Nerve, is arguably one of the most important Asian American graphic novels. The impetus behind its creation came from the author’s desire to try his hand at longer narratives: “I’ve always been really impressed with some of the longer graphic novels and thought it would be really amazing if one day I could try something like that.”29 He describes Shortcomings as one of his usual

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stories “that’s been slowed way down.”30 In this work, Tomine approaches issues of race and identity as directly and as compellingly as possible: I wanted to avoid doing what I thought people wanted me to do. There were certainly some people who wanted me to do a feel-good story that affirmed a lot of very commonly held beliefs. Especially for younger readers, maybe that’s a good angle to take. In general, it didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to not shy away from some of the more racy topics that might go along with that. I wanted to try to create characters that happen to be Asian but who are pretty different from those we generally see in our culture, in our commercial culture.31 All of the most important characters of Shortcomings are of East Asian descent, which is made explicit by their names, facial features, culinary practices, and, to a lesser extent, by the language(s) they use. Ben Tanaka is the thirty-year-old manager of a struggling movie theater and fits well into one of the many stereotypical views of Asian American males—for example, the neutered Asian American friend or the white-girl obsessed, nerdy Asian.32 His girlfriend, Miko Hayashi, works as an assistant organizer for Asian American Digi-Fest, an annual Asian American film festival held in Oakland. She is what might be called an active or politically minded Japanese American who is comfortable with and even proud of her Japanese heritage. She is seen using Japanese on a number of occasions; by comparison, Ben never speaks any language other than English. Their relationship is not an easy one, as it lacks understanding and communication. Ben’s only friend, Alice Kim, a naturalized American born in South Korea, is a twenty-nineyear-old lesbian, who is still in college—not to pursue knowledge but to pursue the incoming “freshwomyn”: “My goal is to at least make out with a hundred girls by the time I get my Ph.D.”33 Her family is unaware of her sexual orientation and to keep them in the dark about her attraction to women, Alice asks Ben to accompany her to a family get-together as her boyfriend: “I’m sure my family would rather see me with a Japanese boy than a Korean girl. . . . Everything is preferable to homos.”34 There is also a half-Asian character, Meredith Lee, a professor at New York University. According to Ben, as a hapa, that is a person of mixed-race descent, Meredith is unable to fully understand him and other full-blooded East Asian Americans. Her halfness is made visible by her hair—whereas Ben, Miko, and Alice’s hair is fully black, hers is much lighter (to create this effect, the author used diagonal lines). Throughout the narrative, Tomine draws on many of the stereotypes about East Asians and East Asian Americans that permeate US society and popular culture, thereby both reinforcing and deconstructing them. His characters encompass many of what are considered to be typical Asian traits—for example, nerdiness, passiveness, and submissiveness; but they also demonstrate some values, attitudes, and behaviors that are not usually

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They All Look Alike? 233 attributed to their racial group, such as queerness, laziness, and lack of ambition.35 Like many of his protagonists, most of the characters in Shortcomings are difficult to like due to their frailties. However, as Schneider argues, by exposing their weak sides, Tomine “establishes an impression of authenticity,” and also, as Hye Su Park writes, makes it possible for readerviewers to relate to his characters more easily: “Tomine strategically creates a not-so lovable protagonist. Ben is sullen, bitterly critical, and filled to the brim with a double-think that entraps him psychologically. . . . At the same time, however, Tomine asks that readers relate to Ben. . . . To do so, Tomine chooses certain visual devices to place readers in a direct emotional contact with Ben.”36 Typically, when characters are presented in an unfavorable light, such as possessing poor social skills or bad looks, they are highly motivated to compensate their shortcomings by, for example, doing exceptionally well in other areas of life, such as their studies or work (hence the stereotype of the nerdy top-of-the-class East Asian American or the submissive hardworking Asian American employee). In this case, however, Ben excels in nothing apart from making sarcastic and self-deprecatory remarks. Nevertheless, thanks to Tomine’s narrative technique and crafting of images, readers develop a sense of connection with Ben, whose unresolved Asian American identity makes them sympathize with him despite his flaws.37 In the opening panels of Shortcomings, reader-viewers witness what soon turns out to be the final scene of an independent Asian American film in which a young Asian American woman and her grandfather finally bond. They have never been able to be close due to their language barrier. The main character’s internal monologue reads as follows: “As I stood beside him in his aging fortune cookie factory, my perception of him began to change. I realized that he was very much like the thing he’d spent his whole life making: a hard, protective shell containing haiku-like wisdom.”38 It is supposed to be an emotional scene, and for many it is, but not for Ben. Whereas everyone around him is smiling and clapping, he is the only person in the audience who is not applauding and is looking away disapprovingly. Outraged that no one else is willing to openly criticize Ling’s film, Ben tells Miko: “Everyone knows it’s garbage, but they clap for it anyway because it was made by some Chinese girl from Oakland! I mean, why does everything have to be some big ‘statement’ about race?”39 As the story progresses, reader-viewers realize that the main character is much more concerned about race than he believes he is, and everything he does is, in fact, determined by race. Ben is full of contradictions and reminds reader-viewers of the stereotype of the socially awkward East Asian American. He finds white women superior to and more attractive than their East Asian counterparts. Miko is more than aware of his “type” and even confronts him about it on several occasions: “It’s like you’re obsessed with the typical western media beauty ideal, but you’re settling for me.”40 Instead of trying to comfort Miko and reassure her of her beauty, Ben responds in a mocking tone by saying: “Okay! So I’m brainwashed by some insidious media conspiracy into thinking that

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234 Emma Oki blonde-haired, blue-eyed women are attractive! What am I supposed to do about it?”41 Meredith addresses Ben’s fixation on white women by asking him questions that allow him to reveal himself: “Is your attraction to white women a sublimated form of assimilation? Are you trying to elevate yourself in society’s eyes by [dating white women]?”42 The answer to both questions is, undoubtedly, “yes” and not, as Ben claims, “maybe.”43 Earlier in the novel, when Sasha, a white bisexual character, asks Ben to describe Miko, who by that time is no longer his girlfriend, he says: “Her name’s Miko and, uh, she’s Japanese, so . . . you know . . .”44 Surprised by his answer, Sasha asks: “What does that mean? That they all look alike?” Ben responds hesitantly, “No, I just mean . . . you know: black hair, brown eyes, etc., etc.”45 The question is why does Ben avoid describing Miko? Is it simply because he does not want to talk about her or perhaps he really thinks all Asians look alike? The second answer seems more accurate, especially when juxtaposed with another scene in the novel. On the way to Alice’s family reunion, Ben and Alice briefly discuss the Second World War and why Koreans resent the Japanese. In order to satisfy Alice’s parents, Ben suggests telling them he is Korean, to which Alice responds: “All Asians might look the same to you, but my family would spot your Japanese ass a mile away.”46 This conversation exposes Ben’s reductionist views on East Asians and East Asian Americans. It also makes visible the main character’s disconnection with his roots and lack of interest in Japanese history. “Didn’t you tell me something about your people hating my people?” he asks Alice.47 “Hello? Does the phrase ‘World War II’ ring a bell with you? Your people raped and pillaged my people! . . . My grandma still refuses to even eat in a Japanese restaurant.”48 Suffering from an inferiority complex, Ben seeks approval from white Americans. He idealizes them and goes to great lengths to fit in, which ultimately works against him. He fails to acknowledge any signs of discrimination or hidden bias. On the day following the screening of Ling’s film, Ben meets Alice for lunch at Crêpe Expectations—the name of the restaurant seems to be more than just a random one, especially in the context of Ben’s unfulfilled expectations of Asian American Digi-Fest. The two end up having a conversation about Miko’s newly found interest in the Asian community and how, according to Alice, he refuses to recognize discrimination when it occurs. Ben admits that he did experience mistreatment as a student but blames it on his personality and poor social skills rather than his Asian roots and appearance. “Remember that guy from the dorms . . . Elvin . . . something [who attributed all his problems to racism]? . . . You’re like the total opposite of him,” says Alice.49 It is evident that Ben is in constant conflict with himself and the entire Asian American community. He finds it impossible to relate to East Asian Americans despite having similar experiences. By not being willing to accept who he is and to be categorized on the basis of race, he fosters negative feelings toward himself and other members of his ethnic group, which leaves him bitter and frustrated. He also does something far worse: he rejects his Asian identity, which has many negative

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They All Look Alike? 235 consequences, among which is his inability to maintain a relationship with Miko.50 In Shortcomings, Tomine also delves into the issue of Asian American masculinity. Under the dust jacket of the hardback edition, there is a ruler printed across the bottom of the cover, which alludes to the main character’s insecurities. Whether or not they are unfounded, reader-viewers cannot be certain. What they do know is that Ben suffers from manhood issues, as he clearly feels insecure about his “size.” It has a negative impact on his selfesteem and relationships with white women. “What’s the difference between Asian and Caucasian men? The Cauc,” is a joke he tells Alice as the two have a late dinner.51 It appears that Tomine does not attempt to redefine Asian American manhood; he simply shows what issues some Asian American men deal with. His lesbian friend, Alice, is his direct opposite. She is successful with women (of all races) most probably owing to the fact that she has no identity issues: she accepts both her queer and Asian identities. However, reader-viewers may get the impression that her need to womanize is a form of compensation for issues of a different nature—for example, her parents’ lack of support and acceptance of her homosexual identity. Asian American femininity is another theme explored in Shortcomings. The reason Miko ends her relationship with Ben does not have as much to do with his personality as it does with his rejection of her as a romantic partner. Although Miko tries to arouse Ben’s interest, her efforts are to no avail. Realizing that their relationship is not what it used to be, Miko decides to move to New York on the pretext of having been accepted for an internship at the Asian American Independent Film Institute. She lives with Leon Christopher, a half Jewish, half Native American designer, whom she met while still in Berkeley. Miko finds understanding in Leon, who demonstrates a strong liking for Asian culture and even speaks Japanese. He allows her to embrace her roots and provides the support she needs. He also makes her feel attractive, which is probably why she agrees to take part in a photo shoot in revealing clothing and sensual poses. Needless to say, Ben does not approve of her choice of partner: he calls him a “Rice King” and implies that he may have pedophilic tendencies. Among the many other stereotypes that Tomine challenges is the supersmart East Asian American student. The character of Alice serves as a stereotype buster and proves that not all East Asian Americans are brainy and introverted. In fact, Alice is anything but a perfect student and has a slim chance of completing her Ph.D. studies due to her inability to focus on anything but pursuing her fellow female students. As for Ben, his experience as a college student was short lived—he did not complete his studies, which he regrets. Meredith, the New York University professor, is only half-Asian. It is evident that Tomine objects to the prevalent stereotypical concept of the exceptionally smart Asian student, as the majority of characters in the novel that are successful in the area of education are either white or half-Asian.

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AN IRISH JAPANESE WEDDING: ON STRIVING TO FIND A BALANCE BETWEEN TWO CULTURES Scenes from an Impending Marriage, which resembles the visual style of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, is, literally and metaphorically speaking, much lighter than Shortcomings. Although it started as a sixteen-page wedding favor not intended for publication, the author decided to expand and publish it for two reasons: first, he found a copy of his work on an online auction site; second, he wanted to focus on something that would be different both artistically and thematically from Shortcomings: “I think the worst thing I could’ve done to follow up Shortcomings would be to do another book with a similar tone and drawing style.”52 Putting aside its obvious humorous appeal, Tomine’s graphic memoir points at a few issues worth discussing, especially in the context of multiculturalism. The first is the question of cultural heritage, which the author addresses in the fourth chapter. Naturally, the union of two people—be they from the same background or not—involves many compromises and sacrifices, but there are a lot more issues that have to be dealt with in the case of couples that are racially and/or culturally diverse. While planning their big day, Tomine’s literary alter ego and his future spouse, Sarah Brennan, decide on what regular soon-to-be-weds do, that is the favors, music, outfits, venue, etc.; however, they also have to consider many more delicate matters—for example, what to do with their families’ cultural heritages: should they acknowledge them evenhandedly or not? And is it at all possible to balance cultural differences? As they are brainstorming on how to incorporate some Irish and Japanese wedding traditions into the ceremony, Tomine realizes it cannot be done. He loses control and exclaims: “Yeah, that’s exactly what I want at my wedding: a bunch of guys in diapers banging on drums and a bunch of guys in skirts blowing into bagpipes, all at the same time!!!”53 When he regains his calm, he says: “I just wish there was some way to make everyone happy, including us!”54 His fiancée rightly notes that they cannot have one and not the other. Just as Brennan thinks he will present a solution that will somehow reconcile both families’ traditions, Tomine suggests the opposite: “In the name of cultural sensitivity and harmony . . . we’ll have neither!”55 In an interview, the author mentions it was a compromise that, on the one hand, disappointed everybody but, on the other, proved to be a good solution, as it did not favor either side of the family.56 The next issue is also related to cultural differences. Once the future spouses have completed the guest list, they begin working on the seating arrangement for the wedding reception. Bearing in mind some of the differences between their East Coast Irish and West Coast Japanese friends and family, Tomine suggests creating “a ‘buffer zone’” between their prospective wedding guests, calling the former loud and drunken and the latter quiet and sober.57 His fiancée’s facial expression indicates that she is not enthusiastic about the idea and does not see a need to group the guests according to

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They All Look Alike? 237 their ethnicity. Nearing the end of the narrative, reader-viewers learn that Tomine’s concerns were unfounded, and the wedding was a success, which only shows that whereas it is a good idea to anticipate problems that may arise due to cultural and behavioral differences, they are no longer that big an issue in culturally diverse societies. Finally, the author shows people’s tendency to surround themselves with individuals with similar personal and/or group characteristics. Readerviewers learn that Tomine’s dentist, optometrist, and tax accountant are all Japanese Americans, which is by no means a coincidence. “You always assume that the Japanese person is the best,” his fiancée complains as she tries to convince him to consider a non-Asian florist for their wedding.58 Although she would like Tomine to decide objectively who the best florist is, he is unable to fulfill her request, and the couple end up choosing Miki, an expensive but, most importantly, Japanese florist. CONCLUSION Adrian Tomine belongs to a growing group of East Asian American authors whose work not only features many nonwhite characters—who have long been marginal at best but are now more visible in the comics medium— but also explores such issues as race, identity, and stereotyping. In both Shortcomings and Scenes from an Impending Marriage, Tomine depicts the lives of ordinary Americans of East Asian descent and tackles themes of belonging and (self-)acceptance, among others. He also offers an honest portrayal of multiculturalism in the United States but from the perspective of a Japanese American. His narratives show that East Asian Americans continue to be perceived through the prism of their ethnicity and, unlike other ethnic groups, they are treated as perpetual outsiders. It is clear that ethnic and racial stereotypes are still present in US society and continue to have an impact on the (self-)perception and (self-)representation of East Asian Americans. NOTES 1. Tak Toyoshima, “S.A.M. Meets Larry Hama,” in Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, eds. Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow, and Jerry Ma (New York and London: The New Press, 2009), 23. 2. See Jared Gardner, “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim,” in Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama (Austin, TX: University of Texas, 2010). 3. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Masticating Adrian Tomine,” American Book Review 31, no. 1 (2009): 12. http://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed December 5, 2013). 4. Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (New York: Square Fish, 2010), 223.

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238 Emma Oki 5. For more Asian American comics authors, see Jeff Yang et al.’s Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (2009) and Shattered: The Asian American Comics Anthology (2012). 6. Hellen Jo, “Supergrrrls,” in Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, eds. Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow, and Jerry Ma (New York and London: The New Press, 2009), 126. 7. Ibid. 8. Paul Gravett, “The Making of Manga Mania,” Royal Academy of Arts Magazine 102 (2009): n.d., accessed December 3, 2013, http://royalacademy.org. uk/ra-magazine/spring-2009/the-making-of-manga-mania,216,RAMA.html. 9. Suzette Chan, “This Is the Story of Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. So Read On,” Sequential Tart, n.d., accessed December 3, 2013, www.sequen tialtart.com/archive/oct05/art_1005_3.shtml. 10. Mariko Tamaki, and Jillian Tamaki, Skim (Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2010), 83–86. 11. For a more detailed study of Chinese Canadians, see Brenna Clarke Gray and Peter Wilkins’s An Innocent at Home: Scott Pilgrim and His Canadian Multicultural Contexts in this volume. 12. Ibid., 124. 13. Mark Sinclair, “Q&A: Adrian Tomine,” Creative Review Blog, March 13, 2009, accessed November 30, 2013 www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/ march/qa-adrian-tomine. 14. Nicole Rudick, “Adrian Tomine,” The Believer, September 2010, accessed November 10, 2013, www.believermag.com/issues/200710/?read=interview_ tomine. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Mingshui Cai and Rudine Sims Bishop, “Multicultural Literature for Children: Towards a Clarification of the Concept,” in The Need for Story: Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community, eds. Anne Haas and Dyson Celia Genishi (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1994), 66. 18. Ibid. 19. David L. Ulin, “David L. Ulin on Adrian Tomine,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 2011, accessed November 30, 2013, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/ jacketcopy/2011/01/david-l-ulin-on-adrian-tomine.html; Jeff Yang, “Adrian Tomine and Derek Kirk Kim graphic novels an accurate mirror,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 6, 2007, accessed November 30, 2013, www. sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Adrian-Tomine-and-Derek-Kirk-Kimgraphic-novels-3235404.php. 20. Sinclair, “Q&A.” 21. Sommer Mathis, “DCist Interview: Adrian Tomine,” DCist Daily, March 5, 2008, accessed on December 5, 2013, http://dcist.com/2008/03/dcist_interview_ 19.php. 22. For an extensive study of Tomine’s narrative techniques, see Hye Su Park, “Lost in the Gutters: Ethnic Imaginings in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings,” Image & Narrative no. 2 (2010); and Greice Schneider, “Lost Gazes, Detached Minds: Strategies of Disengagement in the Work of Adrian Tomine,” Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art (SJoCA) 1.2 (2012). 23. Sinclair, “Q&A.” 24. Adrian Tomine, Summer Blonde (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2003), front cover flap. 25. Greice Schneider, “Lost Gazes, Detached Minds: Strategies of Disengagement in the Work of Adrian Tomine,” Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art 1, no. 2 (2012), 62.

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They All Look Alike? 239 26. Ibid., 63. 27. Emily Flake, “Adrian Tomine Gets Happy,” The Economist, February 15, 2011, accessed November 30, 2013, http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ arts/emily-flake/adrian-tomine-gets-happy. 28. Reservoir Dogs, directed by Quentin Tarantino (1992; Warsaw, Poland: Monolith Video, 2004), DVD. 29. Rudick, “Adrian Tomine.” 30. Mike Atherton, “An Interview with Adrian Tomine,” Bookslut, November 2003, accessed December 1, 2013, www.bookslut.com/features/2003_11_000972. php. 31. Ibid. 32. For more on stereotypes about Americans of East Asian ancestry, see Mary Yu Danico and Franklin Ng, Asian American Issues (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004); and Rosalind S. Chou, Asian American Sexual Politics: The Construction of Race, Gender, and Sexuality (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing, Inc., 2012). 33. Adrian Tomine, Shortcomings (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2007), 17. 34. Ibid., 25. 35. Andrea Bittle, “I Am Asian American,” Education Digest 79, no. 4 (December 2013): 58; Chiou-ling Yeh, Making an American Festival: Chinese New Year in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkley and Los Angeles, CA, 2008), 185. 36. Schneider, “Lost Gazes,” 65; Hye Su Park, “Lost in the Gutters: Ethnic Imaginings in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings,” Image & Narrative 11, no. 2 (2010), 108, accessed November 30, 2013, www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/ imagenarrative/article/view/79/55. 37. Ibid., 106. 38. Tomine, Shortcomings, 9. 39. Ibid., 13. 40. Ibid., 29. 41. Ibid., 30. 42. Ibid., 92. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 59. 45. Ibid., 59–60. 46. Ibid., 25. 47. Ibid., 25. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 16. 50. Park, “Lost,” 106. 51. Ibid., 57. 52. Flake, “Adrian.” 53. Tomine, Scenes, 20; it should be noted that Irish Americans incorporate kilts and bagpipes into their wedding celebrations although they are stereotypically associated with Scottish culture. 54. Ibid., 21. 55. Ibid. 56. Michel Martin, “Wedding Planner Tips for the Commoner,” NPR.org, April 28, 2011, accessed November 30, 2013, www.npr.org/2011/04/28/135803886/ wedding-planner-tips-for-the-commoner. 57. Tomine, Scenes, 22. 58. Ibid., 38.

15 Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden

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Speaking Local Identities in Persepolis and Tekkon Kinkreet Alex Link While they might seem like dramatically different narratives, Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, and Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkon Kinkreet are both intensely interested in the individual’s ability to participate in the articulation of cultural identity when overwhelming external pressures seek to deprive them of this power.1 In both, myth, folklore, and popular history, often with their own global familiarity, become powerful tools in the construction of popular, local narratives that try to make themselves heard in an arena largely dominated by and negotiated through strictly material political and economic discourses. This use of globally available narratives undermines the secure divide of a specific culture, “here,” that has nothing to do with “elsewhere,” allowing these graphic novels to depict the articulation of collective identity without fixing that identity coercively. Both Persepolis and Tekkon Kinkreet show how one might express a difference between cultures while at the same time safeguarding the right to difference within them, in a manner that opposes other, global narratives that radically simplify and foreclose upon national and local identities. The global cultures expressed in the expansion of capital and in bombastic dialogues between a West and a Middle East or, more narrowly, America and Iran, are met with the alternative global narrative of commonly shared stories and themes that, paradoxically, can ground local identity. Furthermore, both Persepolis and Tekkon Kinkreet mobilize the very form of the comic to address these questions. What is curious about these narratives is that both Persepolis and Tekkon Kinkreet demonstrate the mechanisms of the expression of local identity, rather than expressing such an identity directly. Cultural expression takes place at one remove, in them. It is tempting to read Persepolis as a peek under the veil of a repressive regime to reveal the “true” Persia. However, an attentive reading of Persepolis renders this sort of vicarious cultural tourism, by, say, laying out definitive cultural features and characteristics, impossible. It is more about the struggle over the right to speak that identity than it is about concretizing such a thing on behalf of millions of people. It does not insist upon Persian identity so much as it does upon the sense that that identity must always remain in play. Tekkon Kinkreet literalizes the defense of the local, but of a fictitious space within Japan that emphasizes the value of

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Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden 241 the local, no matter how familiar or cliché, simply by virtue of its geographical specificity. Local culture, here, has nothing to do with whatever unique features it might have, and everything to do with the fact that it is territory claimed, experienced, and maintained by local subjects. In Tekkon Kinkreet, culture resides in the community of participants itself, purely by virtue of their participation. To enable a sense of identity that is specific without being restrictive, each narrative employs a comics style drawn from global influences; and each tells a story with roots in myth and folklore, which, while often deployed to ground local identity, are familiar enough to allow for cultural similarity without insisting upon cultural sameness. Persepolis, at its simplest, tells the story of Marji, an Iranian child who grows up through the Iranian Islamic Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq war, waiting out much of the latter in Austria, where she spends her teenage years, before returning to Iran to try and live under an oppressive theocratic dictatorship. It has inspired a perhaps surprising volume of criticism in just a few years, mirroring its commercial success. Responses to Persepolis are quite varied, but generally, can be grouped into four categories. First, Persepolis might seem to promote cross-cultural understanding by gesturing to a universalizing liberal humanism as, indeed, Satrapi’s own introduction, pleading that “an entire nation . . . not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists” might be read.2 Second, while Persepolis is a valuable teaching tool, many critics wonder what it might be used to teach, given its potential for “Orientalist formations of emotional tourism, epistemic commodification and pity.”3 Third, some have seen Persepolis as an expression of “indigenous Orientalism.”4 Lastly, several have suggested that Persepolis de-essentializes and sophisticates Persian cultural identity, by opposing attempts to foreclose upon it by both the Iranian regime and the Western media, that might alternately characterize “the Islamic Republic as oppressive and backward” against a Western progressive liberalism, or a Western decadent oppression of the East against the Islamic Republic as a safeguard of moral values.5 They maintain that cultural identity, in Persepolis, is fluid, fractured, or hybrid.6 However, while Persepolis foregrounds the constructedness of cultural identity, its consistent focus on the contested and contingent identity of objects, people, and cultures underscores the many fronts on which the battle for the right to determine identity takes place. Satrapi herself has by turns referred to her own narrative as specifically representing Iran and Iranians, and also as universal, and she understands that her story expresses an attitude easily coopted by Orientalist Western media perspectives. She has remarked that she fears Persepolis being made into a token in some oversimplified debate between “the veil and the thong.”7 This apparent contradiction is the result of a work that gives us, altogether, “Marji’s specific story, the story of all Iranians who lived through the revolution, and, at the same time, a universal story of childhood experience” because of the popular assumption that childhood experience is universal or, in other words, outside of culture.8 As Lily Glasner puts it, a child

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242 Alex Link can readily become “the icon of everychild on the path of becoming enculturated.”9 Of course, such a construction also benefits the Iranian Islamic regime, by maintaining its antagonism with the West. In broad terms, East and West collude in conflating regime with culture, allowing a precise construction of “the Iranian” to function as a political token of exchange for mutual advantage, while many Iranians themselves are silenced, at best excluded from public involvement in the construction of a cultural identity, and, at worst, compelled to watch that identity appropriated by force.10 Indeed, this ambivalence in Persepolis makes the book readily instrumentalizable as part of this reductive discourse of Western imperialists and Eastern dictators, itself. In response to this powerful geopolitical narrative that excludes local, differing, individual voices, Persepolis presents us with a narrative that exposes—and that confronts via this exposition—the mechanisms that conceal and inhibit local authoritative self-articulation. It does so in several ways: by reminding us of the materiality of mystified or fetishized cultural objects and identities; by creating a narrative that balances the individualbut-popular experience of culture with the collective-but-imposed experience; by illustrating the structural similarity of systems of oppression in both the West and the East, undermining to some extent the degree to which they are taken to be radically different; and by chronicling the everyday in popular culture from family oral history to myth, and in the popular medium of comics, as a space where the theocracy’s claim to ownership of Persian culture is contested. The materiality of culturally charged objects, including veils and thongs, renders defining a culture in terms of positive material content difficult. For example, the opening page of Persepolis reminds us that the veil, as Gillian Whitlock puts it, is a mere “piece of cloth,” overdetermined by the discourses that have appropriated and spoken it, underscoring that the veil is less the issue than is the power to construct its place in a semiotics of cultural identity.11 Marji eventually realizes that the veil is a material instrument of political control in Iran that is mystified under the guise of moral stricture, since a woman who is occupied with asking herself, “is my veil in place,” no longer asks, “where is my freedom of thought.”12 At the same time, in the West, this piece of cloth comes to stand as testimony to the existence of women’s oppression as taking place elsewhere. It enables the same selfcongratulation that Wonder Woman once did, long ago, when Athena called for a defender of America, that “last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women.”13 The uneasy layering of the material object with symbolic weight is ubiquitous in Persepolis. It underlies the ambivalence with which we regard the Austrian Shirin’s enthusiasm for cosmetics, which is both frivolous and a forbidden privilege, outlawed in Iran, but that comes to seem compulsory in Austria. At first, Marji thinks of Shirin as occupied with “trivial things,” but the materially neutral quality of makeup, to which multiple significations

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Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden 243 might be attached, makes it difficult to know whether Shirin is being callous in the face of Marji’s culture shock, is taking for granted a freedom denied Marji in Tehran and so is anything but trivial, or is bowing to social pressures more subtle and pervasive than—but just as uncompromising as—the overt legal pressures imposed on women in Iran.14 To be clear, it is the fact that cosmetics are forbidden in the context of the narrative spun by the regime that constructs them as Western.15 Politically, what matters is conformity—conforming to what is beside the point—the object serving as a focalizer, rather like the brick in George Herriman’s Krazy Kat that speaks love, violence, or crime depending on the character’s perspective. Hence the ambivalence of the much-remarked page that juxtaposes boys wearing keys to heaven around their necks, dying in the war, above a similar image of Marji and her friends leaping into the air dressed as punks.16 It is tempting to read this comparison as implying that Marji’s resistance through parties, music, and dress is trite. However, one ought to remember that while suffering, the boys, through no fault of their own, are not resisting at all. In this context, simply preserving and maintaining a culture of the everyday, while not outright defiance, staves off the “Persian . . . philosophy of resignation” Marji invokes at the chapter’s opening.17 It is also worth noting that she adopts punk as an aesthetic here, which like other forms of popular culture is both global and appropriated by the local. Punk is characterized by an oppositional posture that has become fashionable, but that here is re-contextualized as oppositional again, resisting a regime that re-contextualizes irons as instruments of torture; cheap plastic keys as divine guarantors; and tulips, “which have a universal association with springtime” as “potent symbols of martyrdom,” with a style that re-contextualizes objects like safety pins as ornament.18 Like these objects, people, too, find themselves spoken by voices other than their own. For example, in the opening pages of Persepolis, we see Taji, Marji’s mother, transformed by a newspaper photograph of her from just another political demonstrator in a crowd into a symbol of public protest. She becomes conflated with a media image of herself as synecdochial of political unrest, an image that has little to do with her personally other than to put her in physical danger.19 In becoming symbolic of political resistance, a kind of public property in which her ability to speak herself authoritatively is compromised, Taji becomes more than herself, and potentially fetishized as a public image. Likewise, anybody, even someone who dies of natural causes, during the revolution, is declared a martyr, deindividualized, loaded with symbolic weight, and interpellated into the revolution and its language, interrupting the individual’s ability to self-represent.20 In Austria, too, with its “traditions as rigid as those of Iran,” Marji’s ability to self-articulate is compromised.21 Here, she becomes a desirable symbolic acquisition by supposed friends who want to appear radical from their position of safety, and relatively tolerant by acquiring her as a token exotic friend. This treatment is no different from a stranger on the train calling her a sheiss

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244 Alex Link ausländerin, in that it fixes her as a symbolic object in someone else’s conversation to someone else’s advantage.22 It is the adult counterpart to Marji’s interaction with Ramin, a torturer’s son. Dissuaded from attacking the boy, and under threat of punishment by her mother, Marji declares, “Your father is a murderer, but it’s not your fault, so I forgive you,” simultaneously absolving Ramin of guilt and constructing him as being in need of her forgiveness, which she bestows, allowing her the “feeling of being someone really, really good.”23 The co-extension of this discursive violence and the Iranian regime is made plain when Marji herself becomes a willing instrument of it, falsely accusing a stranger of speaking indecently to distract the authorities from her forbidden use of cosmetics.24 In short she discursively constructs this stranger, forcibly, the way in which the Iranian political apparatus speaks womanhood, making her no longer an opponent of the regime but its willing instrument. Marji does not recognize her authenticating role in her Austrian friends’ dilettantism, hence her “disgust and profound contempt” when the anarchist meeting she attends turns out to have nothing to do with political discourse at all.25 Marji is an instrument of their self-construction, as someone who is intriguing for having “known war” and can add substance to their sophistry, who is a liar about having “known war” when her popularity threatens to overshadow them, or who is nominally foreign and therefore proof that her friends are tolerant and “really, really good.”26 What happens here is that Marji is stripped of the authority to speak herself culturally outside of the immediate events and political relations that shape Iranian-ness in the geopolitical context of the Islamic Revolution and, later, the Iran-Iraq war, such that it seems for a while like her only alternative, to find some relief, is the unacceptable strategy of denying her Iranian cultural heritage altogether and claiming to be French.27 While it is a selfbetrayal, it can seem, at least, like a moment of agency. The way in which her Austrian friends see her leaves her no space for her to speak herself in a manner that interrupts their vision of Iran, forcing her into the position of adopting one of two unviable and simplistic, caricatural positions. She must be either wholly Austrian and guilty of “cultural betrayal,” or wholly Iranian according to someone else’s construction of it.28 Popular culture is a venue for self-expression that transcends this intolerable monopolization of public expressions of Iranian identity. It is free but in hiding, as families defiantly throw parties, fall in love, conceal hair and makeup, buy black market American popular culture, and share family oral histories of political resistance and integrity, all of which might seem trivial, but which also maintain and perform alternate narratives of Persian identity. As popular culture, comics, too, interrupt this attempted foreclosure on cultural identity by the theocratic regime. Formally, the very fact that this is an autobiographical comic blends Western and Iranian traditions of representation, complicating any sense in which the two are easily distinguishable. It problematizes the sense of Persepolis as a simple and direct conveyor of Persian identity, partly because it does so in a form that

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Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden 245 is specifically Western, but not without Persian correlates. The narrative’s visual style has been likened to “ancient Persian miniatures, murals, and friezes . . . locat[ing] itself along a continuum of Persian art.”29 However, the narrative is also rich with Western influences, and elements often associated with the West, such as comparisons with the comics style of David B (Pierre-Francois Beauchard), participation in the tradition of the female autobiography, the re-contextualization of Michelangelo’s “La Pietà,” and the influence of Swiss artist Felix Vallotton and German expressionist film.30 In a world in which there is so much anxiety concerning the stability or instability of an object’s or a person’s ability to signify, from veils to irons to tulips to corpses, an object that invites multiple interpretations, suggesting the fluidity of cultural identity itself, is especially dangerous. Comics and myth both perform and enable this fluidity, and for Satrapi it is this openness that distinguishes comics, which are “grounded in a context,” from “illustration.”31 It is no accident, then, that Persepolis concludes with episodes concerning cultural production. The first is the failed attempt to create a kind of “Disneyland in Tehran,” intended to commemorate pre-Islamic Persian myth, which, Marji remarks, is the source of several Western myths such as that of the Holy Grail (Figure 15.1).32 In the process of designing the park, though, these mythic figures—female heroes or, if you prefer, superheroes of legend, such as Gordafarid—become literally unrepresentable within the narrow parameters established by the regime, and at the same time global in their resemblance to other narratives of female avengers and warriors who in their adventures go un- or misrecognized, such as the Chinese Fa Mu-Lan, or even the early Supergirl. The second episode concerns Behzad’s imprisonment and beating for having produced a comic that replaces Rapunzel with a man with a long beard, ostensibly so as to be able to tell the story without having to expose a woman’s hair, contrary to the law.33 This, too, is untellable. Indeed, the strict censorship in Persepolis is correlative to the laws governing dress. Just as there is no way to dress in a manner that renders one wholly inside the law, there is no way to tell a story, whether it be Rapunzel or the tale of Gordafarid, without rendering one vulnerable to censure. The impossibility of following the rules is their point. And yet, in Persepolis, we are told these untellable stories. This availability and easy sharing of narratives across cultures, among which one might count the relative accessibility of the image, in comics, undermines the simplistic division of cultures on which many of Persepolis’s antagonisms depend. Popular stories such as Disney tales, Rapunzel, woman warrior legends, and family histories familiar in theme if not in their specific content, establish points of contact between otherwise discrete cultures, in a manner alternative to the complicity of geopolitical narratives of posturing rivalry, without positing an equally intolerable universality that elides real cultural difference. The use of the Gordafarid legend also locates discursive freedom in pre-Islamic—indeed, even pre-Hellenic-conquest—Persia, where it is wholly

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Figure 15.1 Disneyland in Tehran. Excerpt from Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi, translation copyright © 2004 by Anjali Singh. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden 247 outside that geopolitical narrative. In other words the regime, taken for Iran itself by the West, and appropriating that name for itself in the East, actually renders Iranian cultural history and identity as Persepolis presents it, unspeakable in official public discourse, and supplants the set of global intercultural relations offered through myth, legend, and popular narrative. Persepolis tells us its history, tells us how that story seemingly cannot be told any other way, and communicates primarily in the fact of the telling, being very much about its own possibility. Persepolis becomes the place for the speaking of histories that are otherwise impermissible, and, as is often the case in comics, the reader becomes one of hundreds of thousands who share Marji’s intimate open secrets. Persian identity as Marji sees it and tells it is the mild-mannered identity shared with us, behind which lies the secret identity of Gordafarid. First published in Japan in 1994, Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkon Kinkreet is significantly different from Persepolis in many ways. However it, too, concerns the deployment of narratives drawn from across the globe and throughout history as a means of opposing a global, homogenizing discursive colonization. It tells the story of Black and White, thieving street urchins endowed with superhuman fighting skills. They are complementary opposites, though the opposition is not so simple. It is true that White is relatively naïve, and hopeful, and Black more sophisticated, and pessimistic— for example, Black’s sense of himself as “evil,” seems driven, in part, by despair.34 The boys are the self-appointed guardian spirits of a city somewhere in Japan called Treasure Town. Tekkon Kinkreet shows us their transition from an antagonism with local organized criminals and police—who are also represented by loosely complementary pairs parallel to Black and White—to grudging cooperation with them in defense of Treasure Town. Their common enemy is a newly arrived global criminal syndicate called the “spirit gang,” which actively homogenizes localities through the establishment of children’s amusement palace franchises called Kiddie Kastle.35 In recent years, the global has typically been represented with images of corporate presences familiar in their ubiquity. In Tekkon Kinkreet, though, against the everyday strangeness of a Treasure Town crowded with mysterious idols, wandering strange animals, and a remarkable cacophony of images and languages on its streets, Kiddie Kastle is the one place that is truly strange, even if it indexes a kind of oppressive global familiarity.36 White even calls Snake and his minions, who speak a language exclusive to themselves, aliens.37 Their untranslated text implies a sense of complete otherness that positions readers in the same way that untranslated Farsi does in Persepolis with the exception that no one speaks the language of the spirit gang but its members.38 This strangeness, accompanied by the Snake’s argument that their domination of Treasure Town is God’s work, suggests that the global city system is itself a kind of alien colonizing culture with missionary elements, but without any specific locale.39 It is the same nation William Gibson describes in his 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, “that country without borders” where “all experience [has] been reduced . . . to price-point variations on the same thing.”40

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248 Alex Link The spirit gang’s ambitions are hostile to local specificity. As Dusk, Black’s counterpart from a neighboring city, warns them, “A building just like this one popped up in our city a year ago. Then . . . [t]he whole city started to feel different.”41 Kiddie Kastle seems to appear out of thin air one day, after which the narrative’s repeated refrain that the city is changing, with elements of its history vanishing and that its days are “numbered,” takes on a renewed urgency.42 Snake’s explicit intention is to “clean up the city” by killing Black and White, a necessary step in changing—and fundamentally representing the manner in which globalization itself threatens to change— “the city’s essential character,” which nevertheless remains unspecified.43 In response, Kimura, Snake’s reluctant henchman, proudly equates Black and White with the city itself. The boys are, in other words, not citizens like the people of Tehran in Persepolis, but a literalized spirit of place. Snake’s sense that to dispose of the boys is to clean the city is an apt echo of the global city’s tendency toward the establishment of a “veneer that covers up the putrefaction of the industrial space.”44 In contrast to the excessive cleanliness of the global urban space, Rat, the old-school crime boss, offers the dirt of the noir city and organized crime, for which Tekkon Kinkreet is shamelessly enthusiastic, wallowing happily in noir clichés such as the refrain that “this city will kill you” and Rat’s jaded declaration that “I’m all outta tears.”45 Rat laments, aptly, how the “city’s turning into a goddamn Disneyland,” in curious counterpoint to Persepolis’s failed Disneyland in Tehran, where it might serve as an assertion of cultural identity contained in a designated theme park space.46 Here, Disneyfication threatens to make Treasure Town oppressive, “the kind of place where you have to stop and think before you spit on the sidewalk,” triggering Rat’s nostalgia for the open criminality of trades in “[l]iquor, smoking, gambling, women.”47 In short, Rat’s Treasure Town gives us a kind of dirtiness that is reprehensible in its criminality, but reassuring in its visibility and familiarity. It is a locally determined dirt, or as Rat argues, “[i]t’s the people who live in this city who should shape it,” ostensibly including its local criminals. One of Snake’s supporters responds by encouraging him to “[t]hink globally, not locally.”48 Organized crime becomes, perhaps strangely, an object of nostalgia and local identity, something also common in the work of London popular historian and novelist Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell, and, when one considers how its principals always resist change that would bring “peace” to Coconino County, even George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. Where Persepolis draws upon a number of Western styles and influences, Tekkon Kinkreet, too, combines Japanese manga paneling with French line art. Matsumoto’s style in Tekkon Kinkreet echoes that of French comics artist Moebius (Jean Giraud), whom he regularly cites as an influence. It also makes reference to specific illustrated narratives from Japanese and French traditions, including a cameo by Osamu Tezuka’s rogue surgeon, Black Jack, along with other markers of a Tezuka narrative style such as Tekkon Kinkreet’s punctuation with absurd and humorous visual non sequiturs.49 Tezuka manga frequently feature the surprise appearance and disappearance of characters

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Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden 249 such as Supaidā or Hyōtantsugi.50 Tekkon Kinkreet surprises us with the unexplained appearance of a vaguely amphibious naked humanoid playing the blues, or it might spontaneously volunteer astrological information about a character.51 This encounter of cultures, in Japanese comics, is certainly not new. After all, it is common knowledge that Disney was a major influence on Tezuka, the founding father of contemporary manga. However, given the narrative’s interest in the culture of globalization, the fresh mixing of different contemporary cultural styles, reflected in the streets of Treasure Town itself, underscores the internal difference it celebrates as, paradoxically, an identifying trait, and its difference from a threateningly homogenizing globalization cast as colonization. As Holger Briel puts it, while manga is certainly a mix of styles, “any particular mix is also the local at any given time.”52 We have seen that myth and legend appear at the end of Persepolis as a paradoxical illustration of the unspeakability of Persian culture in Iran that nevertheless is spoken in comics form for us, and presented as a possible way through the global geopolitical impasse at which we find ourselves in that story, while reaching out cross-culturally through narrative. In Tekkon Kinkreet, myth serves as an alternate model of a relationship between the local and the global, in which the global cultural mix is adapted by local voices to local needs, rather than imposed as a homogenizing force from without. Ultimately, Black and White defend local specificity against a global corporate entity, but are themselves drawn from a global narrative wellspring, primarily of myths of the city, in Black’s case, and of the country, in White’s case, a pairing as old as Gilgamesh. Black and White have no love for the detectives, and none for the gangsters, but the trio of pairs is in equilibrium. The city is Rat’s “playground” and the detectives’ arena, and Kimura equates the boys with the city itself, where the “buildings, the alleyways, the lights” are all “on their side.”53 The Snake throws this old, comfortable set of relations out of balance. The opposition of the spirit gang and Black and White is an expansion, into the global and the mythic, of the more familiar tension of cops and robbers at the street level in Treasure Town. The boys bridge these two scales and defend the stability of this local equilibrium from a globalizing spirit threatening to turn the familiar difference of this local story into a universal sameness. Myth and folklore become the place where cross-cultural encounters can take place in a context that is at once universal and specific to place, in a manner akin to Satrapi’s representation of dictatorships and legendary heroines, both of which are cast as structurally universal but culturally specific in their content. While White briefly mentions the Chinese Monkey King,54 it is Sawada who first draws attention to Tekkon Kinkreet’s reliance upon urban myth in relation to Black, by opening and closing the narrative with references to antiquity. Just before Black, White, Sawada, and Fujimura meet for the first time in the story, Sawada spontaneously volunteers the idea that “cities have been getting colder ever since Hammurabi built Babylon,” which, in his first words to the duo, Black corrects as having been Nebuchadnezzar.55 The last time we see the detectives and the boys together, Sawada

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250 Alex Link remarks, in another non sequitur, “Troy doubted Cassandra, and look what happened . . . the Greeks won!” Fujimura asks the obvious question: “What’s that got to do with this?”56 The simple answer is that we are being presented with a contemporary myth, one that tells of local urban culture threatened by economic globalization and yet participant in global culture. Like Black, Rat is deeply corrupt and attached to the city; when Rat dies, his death is more akin to an abandonment of the city, which has become, like Fujimura has said earlier, “too cold.”57 In a manner of speaking, Snake has successfully exorcised an element of Treasure Town’s local specificity in Rat’s death. Fujimura remarks that, with Rat dead and White now in Sawada’s protection, Black has become truly alone.58 Unsupported by kindred spirits Rat and Sawada, and untempered by White, Black is tempted to become an incarnation of the Minotaur in the labyrinthine city. However, this mythic tradition is not fixed, in that once he descends into a kind of underworld or dream space, where he must choose between faith in White and his own temptation to despairingly ravage the city in some unspecified way, the Minotaur is mixed incongruously with wisdom in the form of the Eyes of the Buddha.59 Arguably, the Buddhist mythic sense of unity suggested by this symbol opposes the homogenizing economic force of the Snake’s gang, which aspires not to unity but to sameness. In contrast to Black, White’s mythic underpinnings center on the Garden of Eden. To this end, Tekkon Kinkreet opens and closes with rural myths invoked by Gramps, an old tramp who tries to help the boys. Gramps recites variations on Genesis 3:6, that the snake beguiled Eve into eating the forbidden fruit.60 This Edenic vision is notable in a city that teems with homeless and stray animals, in which Black and White are routinely shadowed by cats and a crow, and in which our central characters are referred to as Cats, Rat, and Snake, with his minions known only as Dragon, Tiger, and Butterfly. In this context, Gramps’s remark that Noah’s ark is a humble and persistent model of hope is particularly apt, and resonates with the sense of Treasure Town—and manga—as a menagerie. White’s attempt to grow an apple tree in the city against all odds is central. Upon his decision to plant the seed near the abandoned car that serves as the boys’ home, the page becomes suffused with vines and leaves that culminate in a fantastic Edenic vision.61 This idyllic idea returns throughout the story as a house by the sea, notably when White or Black is seriously injured and when Kimura, White’s criminal counterpart, and Rat’s complement, is dying.62 White plants the seed despite Black’s pessimism, and we return to it often, frustrated that it will not sprout, while apples are never far from our thoughts in Tekkon Kinkreet.63 It is immediately after his temptation by the Minotaur that Black sees the tree has finally sprouted, and regains his faith that White’s hopefulness can indeed sometimes bear fruit.64 The sprout is the volume’s final image, beneath an image of Black, happily with White in the promised idyllic space by the sea, holding out an apple to us.65 It returns stability to Treasure Town, with Kimura killing Snake, and with the boys leaving Black’s territory, a city now with a miraculous tree in it, to White’s, a rural house.

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Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden 251 The stories informing Tekkon Kinkreet are insistently similar to one another across cultures. To this end, the Biblical Tree of Knowledge is also blurred with the Japanese folktale “The Monkey and the Crab,” in which a crab patiently grows a persimmon tree.66 White’s own experience has parallels with The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In particular, he is repeatedly presented as an interstellar officer devoted to protecting Japan of “planet earth,” from the spirit gang’s aliens. In fact, his final status report is also his final remark in the narrative.67 White is to the Little Prince what Black is to the Minotaur, depicted for us visually in a pair of panels (Figure 15.2).68 One shows us Black posing atop a fountain where, soon, we will see the Minotaur.69 The other shows us White beneath an oversized moon reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry’s illustrations of the Prince’s home, Asteroid B-612 (Figure 15.3), though Tezuka’s Astro-Boy is also peeking at us from the edge of the frame.70

Figure 15.2 Black and the Minotaur, White and the Little Prince. Excerpt from TEKKONKINKREET © 1994 Taiyo MATSUMOTO/SHOGAKUKAN.

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Figure 15.3 The Little Prince on Asteroid B-612. Illustration from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, translated from the French by Richard Howard. Copyright 1943 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright © renewed 1971 by Consuelo de Saint-Exupery, English translation copyright © 2000 by Richard Howard. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden 253 Perhaps most importantly, White is as devoted to his tree as the Little Prince is to his Rose, a devotion in spite of, or perhaps because of, another deathly snake. In fact, it is his devotion that keeps the Rose alive. This devotion is the same as White’s to his tree, like Black and White, ultimately, to one another and to Treasure Town. As in Persepolis, the fact of devotion and commitment to keeping one’s cultural identity alive by activating it in the expression takes precedence over the positive content of that identity. As the Little Prince explains to some roses, “‘Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together. . . . Since she’s my rose.’”71

NOTES 1. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of A Childhood, trans. Mattias Ripa and Blake Ferris (New York: Pantheon, 2003); Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, trans. Anjali Singh (New York: Pantheon, 2004), hereafter cited parenthetically as P1 and P2 respectively, with page number. Taiyo Matsumoto, Tekkon Kinkreet, trans. Lillian Olsen, (San Francisco: Viz Media, 2006); hereafter cited parenthetically as TK, with page number. 2. P1, n.p. 3. Lisa K. Taylor, “Reading Desire: From Empathy to Estrangement, from Enlightenment to Implication,” Intercultural Education 18, no. 4 (2007): 302. See also Lisa Botshon and Melinda Plastas, “Homeland In/Security: A Discussion and Workshop on Teaching Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” Feminist Teacher 20, no. 1 (2009): 2; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography—A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 2nd. Edition, (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010), 172; and Manuela Costantino, “Marji: Popular Commix Heroine Breathing Life into the Writing of History,” Canadian Review of American Studies 38, no. 3 (2008): 434. 4. Seyed Mohammad Marandi and Hossein Pirnajmuddin, “Constructing an Axis of Evil: Iranian Memoirs in the ‘Land of the Free,’” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 26, no. 2 (2009): 23. 5. Nima Naghibi and Andrew O’Malley, “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Satrapi’s Persepolis,” ESC: English Studies in Canada 31, no. 2–3 (2005): 224. 6. Theresa M. Tensuan, “Comic Visions and Revisions in the Work of Lynda Barry and Marjane Satrapi,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4, (2006): 947–964; Rocío G. Davis, “A Graphic Self,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 27, no. 3 (2005): 264–279; Amy Malek, “Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production: A Case Study of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Series,” Iranian Studies 39, no. 3 (2006): 353–380; Leigh Gilmore, “Witnessing Persepolis,” Graphic Subjects, ed. Michael A. Chaney, (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 157–163; Hillary Chute, Graphic Women, (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2010); Babak Elahi, “Frames and Mirrors in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” symploke 15, no. 1–2, (2007): 312–325; Jennifer Worth, “Unveiling: Persepolis as Embodied Performance,” Theatre Research International 32, no. 2 (2007): 143–160; Kerr Houston, “Narrative and Pictorial Dualism in Persepolis and the Emergence of Complexity,” Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels, eds. David Lewis and Christine Hoff Kraemer, (London: Continuum, 2010), 231; and Botshon and Plastas,

254 Alex Link

7.

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

“Homeland In/Security,” 3. Typhaine Leservot has astutely noted that often such studies nevertheless take “images of the West at face value,” neglecting to consider the extent to which the “Western” is also constructed. Typhaine Leservot, “Occidentalism: Rewriting the West in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” French Forum 36, no. 1, (2011): 115–116. Marjane Satrapi, interview, “Marjane Satrapi: ‘I Will Always Be Iranian,’” Asia Society, last modified May 10, 2005, accessed August 20, 2014, http:// asiasociety.org/arts/literature/marjane-satrapi-i-will-always-be-iranian. Naghibi and O’Malley, “Estranging the Familiar,” 231, 242. See Lily Glasner’s “Embracing Childish Perspective: Rutu Modan’s A Royal Banquet with the Queen” in this volume. Elahi, “Frames and Mirrors,” 313. Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006), 190. P2, 148. William Moulton Marston and Harry G. Peter, “Introducing Wonder Woman,” Wonder Woman Archives vol. 1, (New York: DC Comics, 1998), 15. Originally published in All Star Comics no. 8 (1941–1942). P2, 2. Leservot, “Occidentalism,” 125. P1, 102. Kimberly Wedeven Segall, “Melancholy Ties: Intergenerational Loss and Exile in Persepolis,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28, no. 1 (2008): 42. Naghibi and O’Malley, “Estranging the Familiar,” 239–240. Tensuan, “Comic Visions,” 960. Botshon and Plastas, “Homeland In/Security,” 7. Costantino, “Marji,” 442–443. Leservot, “Occidentalism,” 123. P1, 94. Naghibi and O’Malley, “Estranging the Familiar,” 230. P1, 5. P1, 32. Elahi, “Frames and Mirrors,” 318. P2, 66. P1, 46. P2, 131. P2, 56. P2, 12, 42, 74. P2, 41. Segall, “Melancholy Ties,” 44. Chute, Graphic Women, 144. Whitlock, Soft Weapons, 189. Chute, Graphic Women, 145. Notably, it is a “comic book entitled ‘Dialectic Materialism’” that teaches Marji about Marx. Surely this comic recalls the widely translated and influential Marx for Beginners, by the Mexican comics artist Rius, who wrote it after he was subjected to mock execution by Mexican authorities in response to his earlier political comics. Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith, The Power of Comics (New York: Continuum, 2009), 305–306. Marjane Satrapi, interview, International Journal of Comic Art 8, no. 2 (2006): 13. P2, 175. P2, 180. TK, 110, 408–409. TK, 229. My thanks to Jill Ng for pointing out the varieties of written Japanese, Chinese, and Korean to be found in Matsumoto’s backgrounds.

Tulips and Roses in a Global Garden 255

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

TK, 295–296, 317, and 341. See P2, 21, for example. TK, 305. William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: Putnam’s, 2003), 341. TK, 263. TK, 137, 141, 119. TK, 298, 301. Rosi Braidotti, “Cyberfeminism with a Difference,” New Formations 29 (1996): 9. TK, 325. TK, 284. TK, 324, 322. TK, 276. TK, 388–389. Natsu Onoda Power, God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2009), 78–79. TK, 325, 441. Holger Briel, “The Roving Eye Meets Traveling Pictures: The Field of Vision and the Global Rise of Adult Manga,” Comics as a Nexus of Cultures, eds. Mark Berninger, Jochen Ecke, and Gideon Haberkorn (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2010), 189. TK, 66, 351. TK, 20. TK, 70–71. TK, 602–603. TK, 70, 468. TK, 473. TK, 544–547. TK, 109, 609. TK, 124. TK, 331, 374–375, 395–397, 519–521, 571. TK, 128, 196–197, 258, 384, 121, 134, 155, 161, 482–483. TK, 550, 591. TK, 614. TK, 60. TK, 94, 128, 348–349, 612–613. TK, 452. TK, 509. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 11. Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince, 63.

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Contributors

Carolene Ayaka has a doctorate in social policy from the University of Chichester. She did her MA in gender studies and diversity at the University of Bradford. Her main area of interest is identity; how it is theorised and presented as well as its negotiations and diverseness (thus far having mainly focused on African female identity). Her interest in comics stems from her enjoyment of exploring how they are used to represent and translate people’s everyday lives and imagined lives. She hopes to write a comic strip one day! Jacob Birken (*1978 in Katowice) is a writer and curator based in Karlsruhe, Germany. He co-curated the survey exhibition “The Global Contemporary” at ZKM Center for Arts and Media Karlsruhe in 2011, various exhibitions for the independent art space “Kunstraum: Morgenstraße” (since 2010) and, most recently, the public arts project “Mémoires Perdues” for the city of Karlsruhe. Currently, he works as a researcher for the project “Images of Disasters” at the University of Heidelberg, and is preparing a PhD thesis on the San Francisco 1906 earthquake and fires. Further research interests include the politics of contemporary art and concepts of historicity in (popular) culture. Corey K. Creekmur is an associate professor of English and film studies at the University of Iowa. His research and teaching interests include American film genres, popular Hindi film, and comics. His recent work in comics studies includes an afterword to Gilbert Hernandez’s graphic novel Marble Season (Drawn & Quarterly, 2013); he is also the general editor of the Comics Culture book series for Rutgers University Press. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Bucharest (2000) and a PhD in literature from the University of East Anglia (2007). Her main research and teaching interests are contemporary literatures in English, postcolonial and multi-ethnic literatures, East-European cultures and women’s literature.

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258 Contributors She has published articles in Romanian and international journals (such as Comparative Literature Studies, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Commonwealth Essays and Studies and Perspectives), as well as books such as: Women’s Voices in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (co-edited with Madalina Nicolaescu and Helen Smith, Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2005 and 2006); Identity Performance in Contemporary Non-WASP American Fiction (Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2008); Postcolonialism/Postcommunism: Intersections and Overlaps (co-edited with Monica Bottez and Bogdan Ştefănescu, Bucharest: The University of Bucharest Press, 2011); Between History and Personal Narrative: East European Women’s Stories of Migration in the New Millennium (co-edited with Madalina Nicolaescu and Helen Smith, Vienna and Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2013) and Performance and Performativity in Contemporary Indian Fiction in English (Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming 2014). Mel Gibson is a senior lecturer at Northumbria University, specialising in teaching and research relating to comics, graphic novels, picturebooks and fiction for children. Her doctoral thesis was on British women’s memories of their girlhood comics reading. Mel has also run training and promotional events about comics, manga and graphic novels for libraries, schools and other organizations since 1993 when she contributed to Graphic Account on developing graphic novels collections for sixteen- to twenty-five-year olds, published by the Youth Libraries Group. Mel also runs training events on working with young adults in libraries and working with picture books. Mel’s website is www.dr-mel-comics.co.uk/. Dr Lily Glasner teaches courses in children’s literature and Medieval literature at Bar Ilan University and at the Kibbutzim College of Education (Israel). Amongst her publications are “Revisiting the Concepts of Child and Childhood in Light of the Autobiographic Testimonies of Augustine and Guibert of Nogent” [Hebrew] Olam Katan 5 (2014), and “‘But what does it all mean?’ Religious Reality as a Political Call in the Chronicles of Narnia” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 25.1 (forthcoming). Brenna Clarke Gray holds a PhD in Canadian literature from the University of New Brunswick, where she was a Canada Graduate Scholar. She is a faculty member in the Department of English at Douglas College in New Westminster, British Columbia. You can find her on Twitter @mittenstrings. Dr Simon Grennan is a scholar in the field of visual narratology. He is coeditor, with Laurence Grove, of Transforming Anthony Trollope: “Dispossession”, Victorianism and 19th Century Word and Image (Leuven University Press 2015) and contributor to Representing Multiculturalism

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Contributors 259 in Comics and Graphic Novels (Routledge 2014), Real Lives, Real Stories: Narrative of Ordinary and Extraordinary People across Media (Intellect 2013) and Visualising the Verbal: Graphic Novel Adaptations of Literary Classics, with Professor David Skilton (McFarland 2013). He is the creator of Dispossession, a graphic adaptation of a novel by Anthony Trollope (Jonathan Cape and Impressions Nouvelles 2015) and, since 1990, half of international artists team Grennan & Sperandio, producer of over forty comics and books (www.kartoonkings.com). Dr Grennan is a research fellow in fine art at the University of Chester. Ian Hague is the director of Comics Forum (http://comicsforum.org), an academic organisation that promotes the study of comics and related forms. He is the author of Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels (Routledge 2014) as well as various articles and reviews, and he holds a PhD from the University of Chichester. He can be found online at www.ianhague.com and on Twitter @drianhague. Sarah D. Harris has been a Spanish professor in Bennington College’s Isabelle Kaplan Center for Languages and Cultures since 2009. She is a scholar of narratives of trauma, testimony, remembering and forgetting in contemporary Spanish fiction, with additional research interests including sequential art, twentieth- and twenty-first-century Peninsular film, collective memory, literature of migration, monstrosity, autobiography and memoir, and gender and identity studies. She has published academic articles on the works of Juan Marsé, Miguel Delibes, Carmen Martín Gaite, Miguel de Cervantes and Juan Goytisolo, among others. Dr Harris was the 2008 recipient of the José Monleón post-doctoral fellowship for research and teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds a PhD in Hispanic languages and literatures and an MA in Spanish, both from UCLA, and a BA in Spanish and international studies from Yale University. Ian Horton co-ordinates contextual and theoretical studies across the School of Design at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He has published papers on national identity and architectural aesthetics, oral history and text-based public art and colonialist stereotypes in European comic books. His present research is focused in two related areas: experimental typography and comic books. In 2008 he was co-organiser of the Beyond the Margins International Experimental Typography Symposium held in Cambridge. Recently he has presented papers on experimental typography, information design and comic books and national identity in British comics at international conferences by organisations such as the Comics Forum, Comics Grid, Graphixia and the International Association of Word and Image Studies.

260 Contributors

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Alex Link is an assistant professor in the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary, Canada. His research has appeared in such journals as Contemporary Literature, Gothic Studies and The Journal of Popular Culture, and focuses primarily on American popular genres such as comics and the gothic. He is also the co-author, with artist Riley Rossmo, of the comics Rebel Blood and Drumhellar, available from Image. Andy Mason is a writer, editor and cartoonist attached to the Centre for Comic, Illustrative and Book Arts (CCIBA) at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has an MA in cultural and media studies from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and has co-edited, authored and illustrated a number of books and anthologies, including a historical study of South African comic art, What’s So Funny? Under the Skin of South African Cartooning (Double Storey Books, Cape Town, 2010). Ana Merino directs the MFA program in Spanish creative writing at the University of Iowa. She has published seven books of poems, a youth novel and two plays. She is the author of the academic book El Cómic Hispánico (2003) and a critical monograph entitled Chris Ware: La secuencia circular (2005). She has edited a series of collections, with Julián Acebrón, Del Fanzine al Mango Yaoi: Lesbianes, Gais i Transsexuals al Cómic (2005), and she was the sole editor of two collections of articles: for the International Journal of Comic Art: “Spanish Comics: A Symposium”(2003) and for the Revista Iberoamericana: “Entre el margen y el canon: pensamientos discursivos en torno al cómic Latinoamericano” (2011). Merino has won the Diario de Avisos prize for her short articles on comics for the literary magazine Leer. Merino is a member of the board of directors of the Center for Cartoon Studies and has curated four comic book expositions, writing the bilingual art catalogue “Fantagraphics creadores del canon” (2003). Dana Mihăilescu ([email protected]) is an assistant professor of English/ American studies at the University of Bucharest, where she earned her PhD in 2010 for the thesis Ethical Dilemmas and Reconfigurations of Identity in Early Twentieth Century Eastern European Jewish American Narratives. Her main research interests include Jewish American studies, Holocaust survivor testimonies, trauma and witnessing, ethics and memory. She has published articles on these topics in international journals of specialty such as American Imago, European Review of History and East European Jewish Affairs. Her most recent projects are a co-organised visual exhibition, Family Line-Ups. Trans-Generational Encounters in Family Photography (www.familylineups.com/) and a co-edited volume on Mapping Generations of Traumatic Memory in American Narratives (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014).

Contributors 261

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Emma Oki is a member of the English Department at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities. Her research interests include multicultural education, Asian American graphic novels, and representations of race and ethnicity. She earned her BA (2007) and MA (2009) from SWPS and is currently pursuing her PhD in cultural studies at the same institution. Her thesis explores how artists of mixed roots negotiate their identity in their oeuvre. She teaches practical English courses at SWPS and several Warsaw-based language schools. Mihaela Precup is an assistant professor in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where she teaches American visual and popular culture, film studies, and American literature. Her main research interests include American graphic narratives, trauma and autobiography studies and family photography. Her most recent publications are The Graphic Memoir. An Introduction (The University of Bucharest Press 2013) and Mourning Women. Post-Mortem Dialogues in Contemporary American Autobiography (The University of Bucharest Press 2014). Peter Wilkins holds a PhD in American literature and critical theory from the University of California, Irvine. He is the faculty research liaison for the Training Group at Douglas College in Coquitlam, British Columbia. He is a founding editor of Graphixia, a blog about comics, and a member of the editorial board of the Comics Grid.

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Index

7/7 84, 86, 91 9/11 84, 96, 91 21/7 84 1984 168 2000AD 137–8, 143 Aaron, Jason 71 Abel, Jessica 38 Action 137, 145 adolescence 97, 154–5, 157, 230 Adventures of Tintin see Tintin aetonormativity 180 Afri-Comics see Mighty Man Aiken, Katherine 165 Aldama, Frederick Luis 6–8, 14, 165–6 Alfonso X 113–14 Allen, Woody 231 alterity 113, 128, 155, 167 Althusser, Louis 64, 69, 76–8 American Born Chinese 228 American Splendor 25, 32 ANC 50, 55–9, 62, 64–5 Andersen, Hans Christian 179 Angelfood McSpade 20, 22–6, 31–2 anime 148–9, 155, 158, 207–8 anthropomorphism 83–95, 150, 158 anti-Semitism 54, 167, 175, 214, 223–4 appropriation 5, 11, 29–30, 113, 125, 127, 146–59, 217, 224, 242–3, 247 Arabian Nights 179, 190 Arakawa, Hiromu see Fullmetal Alchemist Argullol, Rafael 116 Arici Pogonici 97, 108 assimilation 6, 22, 27, 35, 79, 84–5, 87, 91, 94, 199–200, 205, 212, 234 audience 4, 23, 38, 42, 48, 78, 96, 98, 103, 105, 107, 114, 116, 138,

155–6, 163–6, 169, 171, 174, 192, 201–2, 204 August de foc 103, 109 Augustine, St 179, 190 authenticity 46, 50, 71, 157, 170, 172, 179–82, 184, 188, 233, 244 autobiography 22, 25, 41–2, 109, 165, 179, 213, 244–5 B, David 245 Babylonian Talmud 179, 190 Baker, Mona 171–2, 174 Balada Eroica 103, 109 bande dessinée 89–90, 94 see also Tintin Barker, Martin 132, 144–5 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns 203 Baudelaire, Charles 116 Beatles, the 105–6, 109–10 Beats, the 28–9 Beaty, Bart 199, 203–4 Beauchard, Pierre-Francois see B, David Bechdel, Allison 42 Beckman, Ludvig 189 Berndt, Jaqueline 158 Berninger, Mark 3, 8, 165–6, 210–11 Bible, the 250 bilingualism 40, 197, 202 birth control 220–2, 226 Bishop, Claire 78 Bishop, Rudine Sims 230–1 Black & White Comics 24 Black Jack see Tezuka, Osamu Black Metropolis 79–80 Black Panther party 27–9 black pedagogy see poisonous pedagogy Black Power 19, 27, 29 Blue Exorcist 153–6 Boia, Lucian 101, 104, 107

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264 Index Bonaventure, St 192 book design 3 Book of Sindibad, The 179, 190 Bosch i Rodoreda, Andreu 173 Bourdieu, Pierre 69, 73–4, 76–7 Bradshaw, Nick 3, 71, 74 Briel, Holger 249 British Empire see imperialism Brubaker, Ed see Complete Lowlife, A Burebista 101–2, 105–6 Buzdugan, Dan (character, a.k.a. Dan the Mace) 102–3

Contract with God, A 212–3; see also Eisner, Will Corman, Leela 6, 12, 212–227 corset 214, 217, 220 cosmetics 220, 242–4 counterculture 9–10, 19–33, 41, 43 Coupland, Douglas 202 Cravata Roşie 99–100, 108 Cruikshank, George 52 Crumb, Robert 3, 10, 19–33, 38–9 Cruse, Howard 42 Cutezătorii 100, 108–9

Cai, Mingshui 230–1 Cantigas 113–4 capitalism 54, 88–9, 99, 147, 152, 156–8 Caprices (Goya) 114–16, 118–21, 127 Captain Canuck 199, 204–5 caricature 2, 20, 31, 52–3, 61–2, 64, 97, 105, 132, 140, 173 Carlos IV 115 Cassidy, Angela 84 Catalonia 164, 170–3 Ceauşecu, Nicolae 4, 10–11, 96–9, 101–2, 104–9 Champion 132–3 Chapman, James 133, 137, 143 children 4, 11–12, 37, 46, 60, 73–4, 80–1, 96–101, 105, 107–10, 117–20, 123, 127, 153, 163–5, 168–9, 172–4, 177–93, 221–2, 226, 241–2; children’s magazines 84, 87, 96–101, 105, 107–10, 130–45 Christianity 5, 114–15, 122–6, 133, 139, 148–53, 156 Chute, Hillary 213, 245, 241 Civil Rights movement 19, 27–8 Clowes, Daniel 231 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 11, 113, 116–17, 120, 122–3, 126, 129 Cold War 89, 133 colonisation 30, 49–53, 60, 84–5, 87, 130, 158, 167–9, 247, 249; see also postcolonialism Comics Code, the 19 Comics Journal, The 35 Complete Lowlife, A 70 communism 46, 50, 53, 65, 96–110, 123, 168 consumption 11, 29–30, 122, 127, 152, 156, 201–2, 217

Dan Dare 133 Dauber, Jeremy 213 Davé, Shilpa 156 Davis, Angela 152 Death of a Spy 79–80 Deletant, Dennis 98, 108–9 Denson, Shane 7–8, 166 Der Struwwelpeter 186, 192 D. Gray-Man 148–55 dictatorship 4–5, 10–11, 96–110, 115, 122–4, 126–7, 168, 173, 241–2, 249 Diner, Hasia R. 212, 226 Disney 27, 43, 249; Disneyland 245–6, 248 Dittmer, Jason 204 double consciousness 98, 104–5, 233 Double Happiness 228 doughfaces 89 Douglas, Emory 29 Douillet, Joseph 168 Dr Lakra 74–6 Drummond-Matthews, Angela 155 Dumbo 27; see also Disney Eagle 130, 133 eating see food Ebony White 27 Ecke, Jochen 165–6 economics 10, 49–50, 83–4, 86, 88–93, 122, 240, 250 Editions Vaillant 100, 109 education 4, 11, 29, 36–7, 40, 46, 54–5, 97–9, 103, 105, 107, 109, 114, 163–5, 174, 178–80, 182, 206, 220–1, 235, 241 Edwardson, Ryan 202, 204 Egg, Augustus 88 Eisner, Will 27, 34, 97, 132, 147, 177, 191, 212–3, 224–5

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Index 265 Elias, Norbert 185–6, 192 Ellefson, Birgit 115 “Emperor’s New Clothes, The” 179 empire see imperialism Engels, Frederick 76 Enwezor, Okwui 49–51, 53, 60–1 epistemology 157 Erasmus 186, 192 Erikson, Erik H. 154–5 Eroii de la Plevna 103, 109 erotic 62, 130, 140, 143 Escadrila nemuritoare 103–4, 109 Escape to Gold Mountain 229 Esopus Magazine 79 essentialism 79, 90, 148, 151, 156, 220, 224, 241 Estren, Mark James 21, 31–2 ethnography 52, 213 evil 54, 99, 103, 122–5, 141, 150, 153, 199, 204–6, 208–9, 247 Ewing, Garen 175 exceptionalism 98, 106–7 expressionism: abstract 89; in German film 245 facture 70–1, 77, 81 Fantagraphics 35, 41, 45, 47 Farr, Michael 166–8 fascism 54, 99–101, 115, 123 Faulkner, William 26 feminism 1, 12, 24, 31, 38, 189 Ferrucci, Piero 181, 188 First World War see World War I flapper 212, 220, 224 Flaubert, Gustave 141 Fleener, Mary 26 Florea, Sandu 101–2 Florea, Theodora 101–2 fobby 199–200, 205, 207–10 food 37, 207, 177–93 Fortier, Anne-Marie 89, 92–3 Foster III, William H. 22–4 Fox, Kate 177, 192 Fraser, Nancy 2, 12 Franco, Francisco 5, 11, 115, 123–7, 172–3 Freeman, Michael 178, 189 Freud, Sigmund 208 Frey, Hugo 175 Fringe 201, 203 Fritz the Cat 27 From Hell 248 Fullmetal Alchemist 149, 153–6

Gardner, Jared 7 Gago, Manuel 3, 115, 122, 124–7, 129 Gem 132–3 gender 1, 20, 40, 61, 93, 155, 165, 171, 189, 199, 213, 216, 219–20; see also feminism Gerard, Jean Ignace Isadore see Grandville, JJ Gheorghiu-Dej, Gheorghe 96, 107 Gibson, William 247 Gibson girl 212, 215, 217, 220, 223 Giddens, Anthony 77, 81 Giraud, Jean see Moebius gNAW 73–7 Gombrich, Ernst 70–1 Gordafarid 245–7 gothic 148–9, 151 Goya, Francisco de 11, 114–22, 127 Gramsci, Antonio 76 Grandville (series) 4, 10, 83–95 Grandville, JJ 83 Grant, Madison 224 Grateful Dead, The 28 Gravett, Paul 133 Green, Richard Eugene “Grass” 21, 32 Groth, Gary 36–7, 40–1 Haberkorn, Gideon 165–6 Hall, Stuart 84–6, 94, 170 Halpern, Rose Heiman 221–2 Han, Byung-Chul 156 Harap-Alb Continuă 110 Harry Potter 154 Hatfield, Charles 30, 38, 47, 138, 145 headscarf 214–15 hegemony 76–9, 81, 85, 91, 147–8, 152, 204 Help! 25 Hendrix, Jimi 28 Hergé 4, 11, 163–76 Herriman, George see Krazy Kat Hernandez brothers, the 6–8, 10, 34–48, 229, 231 Hill Collins, Patricia 167 historical comics 4–5, 10–11, 96–110, 149–50, 165 HIV 55, 60 Hodge, Robert 69, 76–8 Hornet 134 Hoshino, Katsura see D. Gray-Man Hotspur, The 130, 133, 137 Huggan, Graham 167 Hurricane 133–4

266 Index

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hybridity 3, 52, 98, 120, 123, 163–4, 200–1, 207, 210, 241 hyperculture 156 hyphenated identity 197 identity crisis 154–5 ideology 22, 29, 46, 50–1, 69, 76–8, 88–9, 91, 98, 101, 106, 123, 127, 132, 156–7, 163, 167, 170, 197, 199–200 immigration 169, 84–6, 124, 127, 166, 199, 212–15, 217, 219, 221, 224–6, 229, 242 imperialism 9, 11, 12, 54, 61, 79, 83–7, 90–2, 104, 130, 133–4, 137–8, 143, 146, 156, 169, 242 internationalization 166, 202, 209 intersectionality 1 irony 23, 25, 29–30, 39, 43, 108–9, 114, 185, 200, 203–4, 209, 224 Islam 123–5, 127–8, 241–2, 244; Islamophobia 84, 91, 94 Jameson, Fredric 152, 157 Jefferson Airplane 28 Jewish Daily Forward 213 Jin & Jam No.1 229 Jo, Hellen 229 Johnson, Charles 23 Jojo (character) 53 Judaism 6, 8, 12, 13, 54, 129, 177, 179, 212–27 Kali 139, 141, 143 Kaminer, Michael 213–14 Kato, Kazue see Blue Exorcist Kim, Derek Kirk 228 King Jr., Martin Luther 19 Kinney, Jay 23, 33 Kipling, Rudyard 141, 143, 169 Kishimoto, Masashi see Naruto Kitch, Carolyn 217, 220 Krazy Kat 243, 248 Kress, Gunter 69, 76–8 Kurtzman, Harvey 25 Kymlicka, Will 198 Ladies’ Home Journal 217 Lambert, Josh 224–5 Lane, Edward William 140 Langford, Rachael 167 language 3–5, 10, 41, 54, 70, 86–7, 94, 97, 107–8, 113–14, 123–4,

126, 131, 134, 147–8, 164, 167, 171–4, 189, 191 “La Pietà” 245 Larsen, Soren 204 Latour, Bruno 157 League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The 11, 130, 138–43 Le petit vingtième 163 Le XXe siècle 163–4, 168–9 Leping, Zhang see San Mao Past and Present Level Up 229 Licurici 99, 108 Lightman, Sarah 213 Lim, Hilary 178 Lion 133 Little Prince, The 251–3 Lonsdale-Cooper, Leslie 171 Love and Rockets 6–7, 10, 34–48 Luminiţa 97, 108 Mabulu, Ayanda 10, 59–60, 63 McCarthy, Brendan see Rogan Gosh McCloud, Scott 132, 188, 191 McKinney, Mark 9 MAD 23 Magnet 132 Mailer, Norman 28, 33 Manet, Édouard 88 manga; 3, 5, 73–4, 146–159, 201, 207–8, 248–50 Mannheim, Karl 76 Marele drum al incaşilor 104, 109 Mariko 229 Marshall, Kerry James see Black Metropolis Marx, Karl 64, 76, 254 Marxism 147, 157 masculinity 235, 20, 39–43, 60–1, 98 Masked Warrior, The (El guerrero del antifaz) 3, 5, 11, 115, 122–6, 129 Matsumoto, Taiyo see Tekkon Kinkreet Maus 166 Mbembe, Achille 51, 60 mecha 149, 158 Meyer, Christina 7–8, 166 Michael the Brave 102, 109 Michelangelo 245 Mighty Man 80–1 Miller, Alice 180–3, 190–2 Millgan, Peter see Rogan Gosh Minitechnicus 97

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Index 267 minority 4, 21, 50, 83, 90, 98, 108, 131, 172–3, 178, 198, 212 misrecognition 57, 76–8, 245 Modan, Rutu see Royal Banquet with the Queen, A Modood, Tariq 90, 92 Moebius 248 Moore, Alan 25–6 see also: From Hell; League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The; Watchmen Moore, Deborah Dash 212 Moscou sans voiles 168 Moulton Marston, William 242 Mr Wolf’s Pancakes 186, 192 Mu-Lan, Fa 245 Murphy, David 209 Murray, Brett 51, 54–5, 57–63 myth 21–2, 55, 85, 101, 107, 122–3, 130–1, 143, 153, 199, 209, 228, 240–2, 245, 247, 249–50 Naruto 149, 154–5 nation state 5, 84–6, 96, 99, 101–2, 104, 114, 124, 146–8, 152, 156 negrophilia 29, 33 Nerval, Gérard de 141 Neumann, Victor 101 New York 201–2, 212 Nguyen, Viet Thanh 228 Nikolajeva, Maria 180 O’Malley, Bryan Lee 5, 8, 197–211 O’Neill, Kevin 138, 140, 142; see also: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Optic Nerve 231 orientalism 125, 130–1, 134, 136–9, 151–2, 205, 241 Orlando, Joe 80 Orwell, George 132–3, 137, 139, 168 Oştenii lul Mihai Viteazul 102–3 Other, the 11, 46, 50, 60, 83, 85, 89–91, 93, 106, 113–45, 147–8, 152, 155, 164, 167, 170, 185–6, 192, 208–9, 230, 247 Oţoiu, Adrian 98 Palestine 132 Parekh Report, the 85, 93–4 Park, Hye Su 233n, 238 particularity 2–3, 116, 125, 127, 146–7 Pattern Recognition 247 Peanuts 34, 73, 236

Peeters, Benoît 168–70 Pekar, Harvey 25, 32 Persepolis 6, 240–9, 253 Pham, Thien 229 Pif 100, 109 plot 39, 41–2, 46–7, 70–1, 81, 88, 100, 136, 150, 168–9, 171, 173, 199, 205 pluralism 3, 5, 7, 27, 122, 147, 164–5, 174 Podro, Michael 69–71, 73, 76, 78–9, 81 poisonous pedagogy 180–2, 186–7, 190–2 Pollock, Griselda 1 Pollyanna 179–80 polyculturalism 157 popular culture 21, 27–31, 33, 36, 109, 122, 147, 156–7, 199, 201–2, 232, 240, 242–5, 247–8 Porter, Eleanor see Pollyanna postcolonialism 5, 50–1, 146–7, 151–2, 158, 167 postmodernism 5, 11, 51, 62, 146–8, 152, 156–8 power 1, 4, 10, 12, 27, 38, 46, 55, 57, 59, 60–2, 76, 79–81, 84–5, 91, 93–4, 114–17, 122–3, 126, 145, 147, 149, 152–5, 158, 177–82, 184, 191, 199, 202, 205, 208, 213, 224, 240, 242 Prashad, Vijay 157 propaganda 141, 147, 9, 61, 88–9, 101, 109–10, 122, 126 protochronism 98, 109 race 19–33, 49–65, 73, 79, 93, 96, 115, 124, 131–3, 139, 144, 156, 163, 169–71, 197, 207–9, 223–4, 228–30, 232–5, 237 racism 3, 5, 10, 12, 19–33, 38, 56–7, 59–60, 89–90, 105, 133, 157, 163–5, 167, 169–70, 203, 205, 208, 223, 234 Raeburn, Daniel 231 Raigoro, Hidenoyama 3, 71–2 rape 126, 139, 141, 214, 234 Rape of Lady Justice, The 10, 56–7, 60, 62 Rapunzel 245 Rattansi, Ali 84, 86 recognition 2, 19–20, 24–5, 35–41, 43, 69–82, 94, 103, 105, 116, 122,

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268 Index 156–7, 170–2, 178, 180, 188, 201–4, 209, 224, 229, 234, 244 recontextualisation 170 Reich, Rob 178 resemblance 69–82 Rifas, Leonard 7, 20, 22, 29, 31, 113, 163–4, 167, 169–70 Robbins, Trina 48 Roche, Jeremy 178–9 Rodriguez, Manuel “Spain” 21 Rogan Gosh 130, 141, 143 Rosenkranz, Patrick 19 Royal Banquet with the Queen, A 177–93 Rowling, J. K. see Harry Potter Royal, Derek Parker 35–6, 47, 163–6 Rumble in the Bronx 201, 203 Rupert the Bear 87–8 Sabin, Roger 31, 133–4, 137, 145 Sacco, Joe 38, 132 Sadoul, Numa 163, 173 Said, Edward 130–2, 140–1, 151–2 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de see Little Prince, The Same Difference and Other Stories 228 San Francisco 27–9 Sanger, Margaret 221–2, 226 San Mao Past and Present 80–1 Satrapi, Marjane 47; see also Persepolis Scenes from an Impending Marriage 12, 230, 236–7, 239 Schneider, Greice 231, 233, 238 Schreier, Barbara 214–15, 217, 226, 219 Schultz, Charles 73–4 Scott Pilgrim (comics) 5, 8, 197–211 Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (film) 201, 209–10 Second World War see World War II Secret Asian Man 228 sexism 1, 21, 23, 25–6, 31, 213 Shakespeare, William 185 Shandler, Jeffrey 212 Shapiro, Jonathan see Zapiro Shiga, Jason see Double Happiness shirts and waists 214–15, 220 Shortcomings 228, 230–3, 235–7 Sinclair, Carla 38 Sinclair, Iain 248 Singer, Marc 131 Skim 229–30 Skinn, Dez 20–1, 24, 31 Snatch Comics 20–1, 31

Sobel, Marc 35, 37–9, 41 socialist realism 98–9, 105–6 Şoimii Patriei 97, 108 Solldevilla Albertí, Joan Manuel 172–3 Spanish Inquisition 115, 122, 127 Spear, The 10, 57–9, 61–2 Spider-Man: India 156 Spiegelman, Art 47; Maus 166 Spirit, The 27 Stang, Ivan (Douglas St. Clair Smith) 23 Stansbury, Peter 133 Steampunk 83 Stein, Daniel 7–8, 166 stereotypes 2, 20–3, 25, 27, 29–33, 36, 40, 52–4, 60, 62–4, 88, 93–4, 98, 105, 113, 116, 127–9, 130–45, 147, 156, 163, 165, 167, 177–8, 205, 207, 223, 228, 232–3, 235, 237, 239 Strömberg, Fredrik 22–3, 32, 223 Sumo 229 sumo wrestler 71, 74 Supergirl 245 “Supergrrrls” 229 superhero 32, 38, 42–3, 47, 80–1, 104, 110, 123, 131, 138, 144, 198–9, 203–5, 208, 245 Talbot, Bryan see Grandville Tamaki, Jillian 229 Tănase, Valentin 101, 195–6, 109–10 Taylor, Charles 178, 181 tebeos 122 Tekkon Kinkreet 6, 12, 240–1, 247–51 terrorism 83, 86, 90–4, 165 Tezuka, Osamu 248–9, 251 Tiger 133 Tintin 4, 11, 89, 163–76 Tintincat 172 To the Heart of the Storm 213; see also Eisner, Will Todorova, Maria 99, 110 tolerance 20, 30, 83, 90–1, 93, 119–20, 164, 197–8, 230, 243–4 Tomine, Adrian 228–39 Tomonohira-Take-Emon 74–6 Toyoshima, Tak 228 Tran, Gia Bao see Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey translation 5, 8, 40, 87, 113–15, 124, 140, 148, 150, 165, 170–4, 189, 191–2, 247, 254 transnationalism 5, 7–8, 11, 86, 166 Trudeau, Pierre 197, 201

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Turner, Michael 171 Turner, Patricia A. 26–7 Twain, Mark 26 uncanny, the (unheimlich) 208–9 underground comix 3, 7, 9–10, 19–33, 38–9, 41–2, 107, 213 universality 2–3, 6, 40, 77–8, 116–17, 125, 127, 151, 188, 193, 241–3, 245, 249 Umshini Wam see Mabulu, Ayanda Unterzakhn 6, 8, 12, 212–27 Untitled (Hiroshima Tomonohira-TakeEmon) 74–6 Utagawa, Kunisada 71–3 Valiant 133–4 Vallotton, Felix 245 Vanderbeke, Dirk 113 veil 103, 240–2, 245 Ventalló, Joaquim 172–3 Verne, Jules 138, 166 Vertovec, Steven 164, 166 Victor, The 130, 134–7, 143–5 Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey 229 Vision and Difference 1 Wallez, Abbé 164, 169 Walton, Kendon 70 War on Terror 91, 127

WASP (social group) 212, 217, 223, 225 Watchmen 203 Weekly Shōnen Jump 148 Weirdo 25, 32 Wenger, Beth S. 212 Whiteman (character) 20, 32 Whitlock, Gillian 242, 245 Williams, Raymond 143 Wind in the Willows, The 84 Wolfe, Alan 156 Wolverine (Marvel comics character) 202, 204 Wolverine and the X-Men 71 Wonder Woman 242 Wong, David H. T. see Escape to Gold Mountain World War I 134 World War II 96, 100, 103–4, 133–4, 136, 141, 204, 213, 234 Yang, Gene Luen 228–9 Yiddish 214, 217, 221–2 Zap 20, 32 Zapiro (Jonathan Shapiro) 10, 51, 53–7, 60, 62–3, 65 Zimmerman, Nadya 27–9 Žižek, Slavoj 157–8 Zuma, Jacob 49, 53, 56–7, 59–62, 65, 10