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I'm not sure I'll be posting more for a while -- I still have this huge stack of comics, but it may just be too huge to get through in time -- so here's some straggler reviews. (Sadly, I've been stalled on the porn, too, but perhaps I could take one last pass at it.)
Paul Auster, City of Glass, graphic novel adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli: Quinn, who writes mystery novels under another name, gets a phone call in the middle of the night asking to speak to Paul Auster. Isolated by the death of his wife and young son, Quinn eventually gets sucked in to Auster's looking-glass world of intrigue, which translates well into graphic novel form. The visual interest of the multiple styles and nested narratives kept me from having my usual negative reaction to non-genre writing, but not very much happened; if you read for mood and style, you might enjoy this.
Alice Sebold, Lucky: I read this book in one painful sitting; it is an intense account of Sebold's rape, at the end of her freshman year in college, and what happened after – it's not right to call it "recovery," though things do change for her, and change again. Beyond the rawness of the writing, what stands out is how there is never any final interpretation, final resting place, for how it affected her. She writes about her reactions at different stages of her life with clarity and precision, just as she testified with clarity and precision. What's also amazing is how difficult it was for a "good" rape victim in 1981 – brutally beaten up by a stranger of a different race, all things I learned were prerequisistes for credibility for most rape victims, and still the police officer doesn't believe her story and her father wonders how she could have let this happen. (Sebold, by the way, has a lot more sympathy for the police officer and her father than this quick summary implies, and she has her reasons.) I hope things are different now, but I can't say that they are, much; my one grand jury experience with a rape victim doesn't give me much hope.
Geoff Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why: Interesting, fun book, with very little connection to the title, in my opinion. It's basically a story of three recent periods in comic book history, all of which struggle with "the anxiety of influence" in a very different way than Bloom imagined for poetry, since while poems are made up of other poems Batman is Batman, not just made up out of other Batmen. So Klock looks at Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as revisionary superhero narratives challenging the basic ideas behind the Gold and Silver Ages, then shifts to Marvels, Astro City, and Kingdom Come as responses to that first revisioning. Then there's a sort of detour to America's Best Comics, including League of Extraodrinary Gentlemen and Promethea and how they play with the superhero form (as an aside, I find it bizarre that Klock thinks Powers isn't "really" a superhero title, but a crime title). He comes around to Warren Ellis, arguing that Planetary and The Authority represent yet another revisioning of what a superhero is and means.
I found his interpretation of The Authority unpersuasive, because I felt he accepted without questioning the characters' statements in the book – essentially, "we have the power and therefore we're going to tell you normals what to do from now on for your own good, rather than just fighting other people with superpowers" – rather than looking at the actual plots, which – at least in the books I read – inevitably involved something superpowered showing up that only the Authority could fight. Somehow they never got around to fixing fuel economy standards or deforestation or employment discrimination or anything like that. It was shocking to see the good guys declare their enjoyment of absolute power and I was intrigued, but it was all empty promises when the Bleed kept emitting superthreats and the rest of the world got to continue with ordinary politics. Klock's reading seemed to me like the interpretations of the romance readers described by Janice Radway: they were willing to take the author's statements about the characteristics of the protagonists at face value; if we're told the heroine is "spunky," that's what she is, even if her observed behavior is passive. But then, if enough readers really do see the heroine as spunky and the Authority as a bold challenge to conventional superhero narratives, that's an interpretation I have to acknowledge. More to the point, my disagreement with Klock concerns whether the Authority succeeds as a revisionary narrative or just collapses back into the same old same old; his overall argument about superheroes responding both to earlier versions of themselves, as with Batman, and to other versions of superheroes, as with Watchmen, makes a lot of sense. I really enjoy Supreme Power as an implicit dialogue with the DCU versions of Superman and Batman, so I can just substitute that into his argument.
Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing: A fascinating look into the world of guards in an upstate New York prison. One of the best points Conover makes is simply that the world of the guards and the world of the inmates intersect only in certain ways; he doesn't pretend to know what's really going on with the inmates, although he does explore how the power dynamics – which are also often racial dynamics – affect their interactions. There are no shocking stories of abuse or rape here, but there is plenty of day-to-day humiliation (on both sides), and many details about the bureaucratization and normalization of warehousing prisoners, just trying to keep them from causing too much trouble for the outside world and for the guards. Conover is a sharp observer and a compelling writer, so if you have any interest in prisons or in narratives of working life this would be a good read.
Paul Auster, City of Glass, graphic novel adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli: Quinn, who writes mystery novels under another name, gets a phone call in the middle of the night asking to speak to Paul Auster. Isolated by the death of his wife and young son, Quinn eventually gets sucked in to Auster's looking-glass world of intrigue, which translates well into graphic novel form. The visual interest of the multiple styles and nested narratives kept me from having my usual negative reaction to non-genre writing, but not very much happened; if you read for mood and style, you might enjoy this.
Alice Sebold, Lucky: I read this book in one painful sitting; it is an intense account of Sebold's rape, at the end of her freshman year in college, and what happened after – it's not right to call it "recovery," though things do change for her, and change again. Beyond the rawness of the writing, what stands out is how there is never any final interpretation, final resting place, for how it affected her. She writes about her reactions at different stages of her life with clarity and precision, just as she testified with clarity and precision. What's also amazing is how difficult it was for a "good" rape victim in 1981 – brutally beaten up by a stranger of a different race, all things I learned were prerequisistes for credibility for most rape victims, and still the police officer doesn't believe her story and her father wonders how she could have let this happen. (Sebold, by the way, has a lot more sympathy for the police officer and her father than this quick summary implies, and she has her reasons.) I hope things are different now, but I can't say that they are, much; my one grand jury experience with a rape victim doesn't give me much hope.
Geoff Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why: Interesting, fun book, with very little connection to the title, in my opinion. It's basically a story of three recent periods in comic book history, all of which struggle with "the anxiety of influence" in a very different way than Bloom imagined for poetry, since while poems are made up of other poems Batman is Batman, not just made up out of other Batmen. So Klock looks at Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as revisionary superhero narratives challenging the basic ideas behind the Gold and Silver Ages, then shifts to Marvels, Astro City, and Kingdom Come as responses to that first revisioning. Then there's a sort of detour to America's Best Comics, including League of Extraodrinary Gentlemen and Promethea and how they play with the superhero form (as an aside, I find it bizarre that Klock thinks Powers isn't "really" a superhero title, but a crime title). He comes around to Warren Ellis, arguing that Planetary and The Authority represent yet another revisioning of what a superhero is and means.
I found his interpretation of The Authority unpersuasive, because I felt he accepted without questioning the characters' statements in the book – essentially, "we have the power and therefore we're going to tell you normals what to do from now on for your own good, rather than just fighting other people with superpowers" – rather than looking at the actual plots, which – at least in the books I read – inevitably involved something superpowered showing up that only the Authority could fight. Somehow they never got around to fixing fuel economy standards or deforestation or employment discrimination or anything like that. It was shocking to see the good guys declare their enjoyment of absolute power and I was intrigued, but it was all empty promises when the Bleed kept emitting superthreats and the rest of the world got to continue with ordinary politics. Klock's reading seemed to me like the interpretations of the romance readers described by Janice Radway: they were willing to take the author's statements about the characteristics of the protagonists at face value; if we're told the heroine is "spunky," that's what she is, even if her observed behavior is passive. But then, if enough readers really do see the heroine as spunky and the Authority as a bold challenge to conventional superhero narratives, that's an interpretation I have to acknowledge. More to the point, my disagreement with Klock concerns whether the Authority succeeds as a revisionary narrative or just collapses back into the same old same old; his overall argument about superheroes responding both to earlier versions of themselves, as with Batman, and to other versions of superheroes, as with Watchmen, makes a lot of sense. I really enjoy Supreme Power as an implicit dialogue with the DCU versions of Superman and Batman, so I can just substitute that into his argument.
Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing: A fascinating look into the world of guards in an upstate New York prison. One of the best points Conover makes is simply that the world of the guards and the world of the inmates intersect only in certain ways; he doesn't pretend to know what's really going on with the inmates, although he does explore how the power dynamics – which are also often racial dynamics – affect their interactions. There are no shocking stories of abuse or rape here, but there is plenty of day-to-day humiliation (on both sides), and many details about the bureaucratization and normalization of warehousing prisoners, just trying to keep them from causing too much trouble for the outside world and for the guards. Conover is a sharp observer and a compelling writer, so if you have any interest in prisons or in narratives of working life this would be a good read.
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From:
klock
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/college_literature/v032/32.1burt.html
or, if you don't subscribe to project MUSE, here:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_200501/ai_n9520895
Batman IS made up of other Batmen, though: that's his point. He wasn't when invented, but he is now.
Call us, please?
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Re: klock