Everyone’s talking about Before Watchmen, the seven Watchmen prequel miniseries announced by DC this week. As with pretty much everything in the world of comics, opinions are divided and being fiercely argued where anyone will listen—and even places where they won’t. (The Beat and ComicsAlliance round up the serious and snide reactions.)

I guess because Alan Moore is widely enough respected, has been public enough about his falling out over the Watchmen rights, and is enough of a crank that DC knew they had a public relations problem on this one from word go. I can’t think why else they would devote so much of their PR to justifying Before Watchmen’s right to exist. That’s just a bad foot to put forward.

Susana Polo of The Mary Sue argues that Before Watchmen represents everything that’s wrong with the comics industry today. That’s maybe an overstatement, as there’s lots more things wrong with comics, but I take her point. In particular, she notes that this is an inevitable result of the fact that DC (and Marvel) are not really in the business of making comic books; they’re the custodians of intellectual property for Warner Bros. (and Disney).

Notice how Before Watchmen’s defenders talk about the project:

Comic books are perhaps the largest and longest running form of collaborative fiction. Collaborative storytelling is what keeps these fictional universes current and relevant. –DiDio and Lee in the original release

The whole point of having great characters is the opportunity to explore them more deeply with time, re-interpreting them for each new age. DC allowed these characters sit on a shelf for over two decades as a show of respect, and that is salutary, but there comes a time when good characters have to re-enter the world to teach us something about ourselves in the present.–Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl writer J. Michael Straczynski at Newsarama

The challenge is to make the stories modern and relevant to 2012 […] by adding to the mythos and not to detract from it. –“Crimson Corsair” illustrator John Higgins at HuffPo

In an age when the comic book industry is not at its finest, every comic book company should do all they can to exploit (I mean that in the literal definition, not the negative context it often bares) their properties[. …] It’s good to see new creators taking on these characters. It’s good to have fresh voices reaching into these characters. If a character is compelling, there should always be more stories to tell. –Newsarama editor Lucas Siegel

In each of these cases, the argument is based on an idea that Watchmen is a set of characters–i.e., intellectual properties–that simply can’t be allowed to lie fallow, whether for economic (Siegel) or artistic (everybody else) reasons. Compare this with Marc Hirsh writing at NPR’s Monkey See blog:

In other words, not only was Watchmen never intended to be an ongoing series, that’s precisely why the story was done as Watchmen and not just the Charlton heroes in the first place. It was produced as a single-shot, twelve-issue story using characters that had never existed prior to its publication and were never supposed to be used after. It was a self-contained novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, written with exactly that structure in mind.

I think this is the major divide between the two camps on Before Watchmen. There are a lot of important issues about creator’s rights–and especially moral rights–involved, too. But how you go about evaluating those arguments and applying them to specific cases is a result of your basic assumptions of what a contemporary American comic is: Is it an “artistic” work or a vehicle for a character-cum-brand?

I don’t know that I’d say Watchmen is the best comic / graphic novel ever. It’s not one of my favourites. But I certainly think it’s more than a collection of “characters.”

Hand of Fire is not a biography of Kirby, nor is it exactly a critical appreciation (for those, see the books appendix), as Hatfield focuses on a narrow slice of Kirby’s oeuvre (of the six “periods” of his career (21–33), only two are discussed in significant detail). Instead, Hatfield asks us to consider a smaller sampling of examples in light of a couple of main points.

The book’s major argument and contribution is Hatfield’s concept of comics art as “narrative drawing.” Writers have arguably driven the recent transformation and consecration of the “American” comic book cum graphic novel as art form. Hatfield develops a more complex idea of authorship, one which recognizes the contribution of visual artist to the finished work:

Cartooning, as I define it, is emphatically not the same as illustrating a prior text; Kirby generated stories through drawing. His stories and characters were affordances to his graphic sense; vice versa, his graphics were inspired by imagined narratives.

Comic-book artists are not merely “illustrators”; they decisively shape the “text” and, consequently, the reader’s experience.

In the “Marvel method” of production, developed in Stan Lee’s collaborations with Kirby and Steve Ditko, artists worked from a story outline but made all of the decisions about breaking down, pacing, and laying out that story themselves, and the writer later returned to add captions and dialogue. Over time, Kirby was given ever freer reign by Stan Lee, who was increasingly disinterested in day-to-day editorial oversight, and became more and more responsible for what actually ended up on the page. According to Hatfield, Lee was a unifying presence without whom Marvel Comics as we know it would not exist, but Kirby should be seen as the primary author of the Marvel universe.

Kirby serves as an extreme case for this line of argument. Despite being celebrated as the “King of Comics” and his unmistakeable style, Kirby was–as Hatfield takes pains to remind us–the quintessential work-for-hire cartoonist. Over his forty-year career in comics, he produced an estimated 21,000 pages of comic art (7), and while on contract to DC in the 1970s was required to draw 15 pages a week (176). Yet, in the midst of this prodigious workload, Kirby improvised characters, concepts, and stories that are still inspiring readers and creators today–and still generating revenue for DC and Marvel (and their respective corporate owners, Warner Bros. and Disney). Borrowing from Bourdieu, Hatfield argues that Kirby managed to carve out a sphere of “relative autonomy” within a very heteronomous form of mass-media production.

The first four chapters develop this argument about authorship through Kirby’s working methods and career. Afterwards, the book loses some of its structural coherence. A chapter on the “technological sublime” in Kirby’s work, two on the Fourth World saga, and one on Kirby’s return to a very different Marvel Comics in the ‘70s follow. They’re interesting and important contributions in their own right, but also could conceivably have worked as standalone essays. The book’s real strength is the first part and the way Hatfield uses Jack Kirby and his wonderful, crazy art to redefine what it means to be a “Great Comics Artist.”

However, I was starting to teach classes at the university and had to think more about how I was presenting myself to a lecture theatre full of students who were less than a decade younger than myself. So, I started wearing ties and jackets and making no excuses for it.* I don’t pretend to be an expert on men’s style or to be the best dressed dude on the block, but, y’know, I try.

***

More recently, I’ve gotten back into reading popular comic books after some absence from the genre(s). In practice, this means a lot of DCU superhero books.† One thing that I’ve noticed since coming back to them is how badly a lot of the men in comics are dressed. I’m not talking about superhero costumes; I’m talking about guys like Bruce Wayne and Jimmy Olsen.

Now, I try not to be (too) judgmental about these things. But there are some instances where their poor fashion choices break character and start to undermine my willing suspension of disbelief. It’s like Alex Toth says in his famous critique of some Steve Rude Jonny Quest pages, “The fakery’s so obvious […] that it detracts from what follows—you cripple credibility at the start (yours! and the story’s!)[….]”

For instance, let’s look at a recent issue of writer Grant Morrison’s Batman, Inc. with art by Yanick Paquette [p], Pere Perez [p; pp. 16–17], and Michel Lacombe [i]. For those of you just joining us, Batman is “franchising,” recruiting heroes around the world to join a new initiative (publicly bankrolled by Wayne Enterprises) to build capacity for some shadowing danger looming on the horizon. In this issue, #4, he travels to Argentina to meet with El Gaucho, an original member of the Batmen of All Nations. Following a scene where they together escape exploding scorpions in a hot air balloon, we join Batman incognito at the villa of Don Santiago Vargas (the Gaucho’s alter ego)…

Your lips say, “tango of death,” but your collar says, “Saturday night fever.”

Paquette’s drawn Bruce Wayne, international billionaire playboy and the man whose picture is next to “suave” in the dictionary, in a gigantic, baggy suit that can’t seem to decide if it has three buttons or two. However many buttons there are, he is resolute about buttoning all of them.

I’m sorry, but that’s not Bruce Wayne. These are Bruce Wayne:‡

Or, how about this week’s Jimmy Olsen one-shot? Written by Nick Spencer and pencilled by R.B. Silva (with some fill-ins towards the end by Amilcar Pinna), these stories were originally scheduled as back-up features in Action Comics, but their space was sacrificed by the Powers That Be at DC in order that they might “draw the line at $2.99,” and so they were collected together and issued as an 80-page giant. The stories are smart and funny and have pretty much everything that I like about the genre (see Chris Sims’s review on ComicsAlliance). One clever thing that Spencer does is expand the world of the modern-age Jimmy, giving Superman’s pal a kind of parallel supporting cast. Where Superman/Clark has Lois Lane, Girl Reporter as romantic interest and professional rival, Spencer’s brought in a character that originally debuted on the Smallville TV series, Chloe Sullivan (mirroring Jimmy’s own origins on the Superman radio show). And where Superman/Clark has Lex Luthor as his nemesis, Jimmy has Sebastien Mallory, who he describes as “the Biff to my Marty, the Leno to my Conan, the parents to my just don’t understand.” Here’s Sebastien out for a night on the town…

“Chloe, why are you on a date with an army-surplus tent?”

Again, fit is a tremendous problem. This isn’t a suit: It’s a tent. And where Paquette’s Bruce Wayne had a button vanish on him, Silva’s Mallory apparently has no need for such contrivances. “Buttons? What are these ‘buttons’ you speak of?” The plunging neckline on his sweater is a little out of control, and I’m not sure Silva understands how either lapels or neckties look. I mean, look again at that knot.

I just can’t believe that “Lexcorp’s Bright Young Star” would dress like this. I mean, Lexcorp is all about arrogance and vanity and using slickness to keep the public from realizing that its executives are villainous scumbags.

(Jimmy himself generally looks pretty good. Though, I can’t help questioning the wisdom of including jokes about his bowtie when bowties haven’t been cooler in, well, ever?)

***

Anyway. Why am I harping on the fact that a couple of comic artists have “faked” the clothes they’ve dressed their characters in? To be fair, one hard thing about this medium is that the artist(s) have to do the (narrative) work of an entire film crew: they choose the angles and direct the “actors,” of course, but they also design the locations and props and, yes, the costumes. That’s a lot to do for a monthly comic, and so sometimes mistakes will be made. No real harm, no real foul.

But I think this goes a little deeper. I don’t know anything about these artists as individual people, but I think these lapses point to something a little deeper.

In a paper on the geeky t-shirt industry that has colonized the web in the last ten years, Jason Tocci writes, “Several of my interviewees indicated that geeks do not have a reputation for being stylish, and that they tend to dress pretty casually” (7). This probably comes as no surprise to anyone. The geek “uniform” is a t-shirt, preferably black, screenprinted with a graphic or slogan than makes a reference to a beloved media text or an in-joke related to nerd culture. Thus, the content of the clothing, its message, is more important than its appearance as such: Even when it comes to their wardrobe, nerds favour substance over style.

Moreover, in our culture more generally, fashion, style, and dress are not things that occupy most men, and especially not middle or working class men. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but there is some normative force behind it. (Think of all the sitcom episodes that rely on it.) No, caring about clothes is for wealthy dilettantes or gay men or wealthy dilettantes who are suspected of being gay.

When you combine the lack of concern for clothing that most men are socialized to have with nerds’ general dismissal of appearance and style and the fact that most comic artists initially learn to draw copying the superhero comics they themselves grow up on (a genre where most “clothing” behaves more like bodypaint), then you have a recipe for consistently faked costuming decisions.

I don’t think everyone has to dress the way I like to and the way I think looks good. The point isn’t that Bruce Wayne or Sebastien Mallory dress poorly. Its that these particular characters ought to be sharp-dressed men, and it’s only that their artists have dressed them poorly. Contrast the Jimmy Olsen interior art with Amanda Conner’s cover illustration:

This comic also introduced Supergirl-is-a-knitter to DCU canon.

Not only has Conner clearly looked at a bowtie once or twice in her life, but she’s put Mallory in a dark business suit (note the peaked lapels) that tells me he dresses to be taken seriously, an act of impression management that she’s undercut using facial expression and body language.

Like the rest of the Lexcorp bunch, he’s little more than a skeezeball covered by a thin veneer of public relations.

He’s the kind of guy who would try to destroy net neutrality as part of a sinister plot to take over the world.

He’s the kind of guy who will take every opportunity to insult our hero while putting the moves on his (ex-)girlfriend.

He’s a character who’s ready to be shown to a reader.

***

*It didn’t hurt that this was around the same time that the hipsterati were getting into Mad Men and jumping onto the mid-century bandwagon.

†I’ve also  been enjoying IDW’s Doctor Who and Dungeons & Dragons series, Image’s Chew, and the Roberson/Allred Vertigo book, iZombie. But it’s by and large the DC superheroes that I cared about when I was 14 that are making it into my weekly haul.

‡I guess I’m showing my prejudice for the interpretation of the character where Bruce is not a bumbling decoy to avert suspicion a la a certain mild-mannered reporter we all know and love. There is a decidedly Brooks Brothers version of Bruce in the original seasons of Batman: The Animated Series, and that can work, too, but I really feel like Morrison is trying to give us a more Hugo-Boss Bruce Wayne.

(cc) Flickr user Bryan Gosline.

In my research on nerd culture, I have been trying to distinguish between, on the one hand, an understanding of subculture as a kind of identity position or “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) and, on the other hand, a “subcultural scene.” The distinction here is between an abstract and trans-local field (the subculture) and a concrete, localized milieu within which individual participants pursue their cultural practices. In this post, I want to say a bit more about (sub)cultural scenes.

Scenes and Communities in Popular-music Studies

Although the the term is one that is widely used in ordinary language, I’ve borrowed it more directly from popular music studies, where its currency can be traced to a handful of essays written over the last twenty years by McGill’s Will Straw (1991, 2002, 2004). Since Straw introduced it to the discipline, “scene” has become one of its distinctive theoretical concepts (Anahid Kassabian quoted in Hesmondhalgh 2005, 27).

For Straw, the notion of “scene” is a departure point from an older conception of “musical communities.” Although it is only vaguely defined in popular use, denoting a objects ranging from “highly local clusters of activity” to globally dispersed taste cultures, yet the term “persists within cultural analysis for a number of reasons”:

One of these is the term’s efficiency as a default label for cultural unities whose precise boundaries are invisible and elastic. “Scene” is usefully flexible and anti-essentializing, requiring of those who use it no more than that they observe a hazy coherence between sets of practices or affinities. For those who study popular music, “scene” has the capacity to disengage phenomena from the more fixed and theoretically troubled unities of class or subculture (even when it holds out the promise of their eventual rearticulation). At the same time, “scene” seems able to evoke both the cozy intimacy of community and the fluid cosmopolitanism of urban life. To the former, it adds a sense of dynamism; to the latter, a recognition of the inner circles and weighty histories which give each seemingly fluid surface a secret order. (2002, 248)

The idea of community “presumes a population group whose composition is relatively stable—according to a wide range of sociological variables—and whose involvement in music takes the form of an ongoing exploration of one or more musical idioms said to be rooted within a geographically specific historical heritage” (1991, 373), and such a conception is no longer tenable (if, indeed, it ever was) given the globalization of musical forms. A scene, by contrast, is a more fluid and changeable cultural space characterized by “the building of musical alliances and the drawing of musical boundaries” (1991, 373). More recently, Straw has expanded his definition of scenes beyond musical practices to embrace “particular clusters of social and cultural activity without specifying the nature of the boundaries which circumscribe them” but which may be distinguished by location, genre, or “the loosely defined social activity around which they take shape” (2004, 412).

This understanding of a cultural scene is an important corrective to some of the “fetishizing” tendencies in subculture theory that I have discussed elsewhere. Subcultures researchers have too often mistaken their own Platonic idea of a subculture (mod or goth or punk or whatever) for an actually existing reality. Rather, such ideal “subcultures” are accepted, rejected, appropriated, negotiated, and adapted by participants in an on-going practice (or set of practices). However, these practices are socially situated: They take place in a local context where some resources are available and others are scarce, where some opportunities for participation are abundant and others rare. This more or less geographically bounded context is what I am calling, borrowing from Straw, a subcultural scene.

The Nerd-culture Scene

This concept is both theoretically and methodologically important to how I’m approaching my study of nerd culture. My research up until this point has been trying to explore the nerd-culture scene in one Canadian city from the point of view of specialty retailers and non-profit fannish organizations. As may be seen from the following figure, the nerd-culture scene is highly interconnected at the level of stores and organizations. Research sites sites were connected with one another and with other local and trans-local actors by relationships of patronage, cross-promotion, and sponsorship.

(This graph was produced using yEd, a multi-purpose graph editing application. Nodes and connections were entered from interviews and fieldnotes, and connections are not weighted. yEd’s organic layout, natural clustering, and automatic grouping algorithms were used to organize the representation of the scene. Icon size represents centrality, measured in terms of number of connections.)

Observed relationships among participants and institutions divide the field into four major clusters or sub-fields:

• The largest cluster (in the upper right) is dominated by nerdy film society ORG1, its president ORG1-p1, and the local SF&F convention, and so this might be considered the field of media fandom, although gamers’ networking portal ORG4, game shop STR2, and nodes associated with video games also appear in this region of the graph.
• The second cluster (bottom right) comprises game shops STR2 and STR4, as well as the many games that both stores support with regular events. ORG4-p1’s inclusion and the numerous games-industry members who sponsor ORG1 events draw this cluster as a whole closer to the first field.
• The third grouping (upper left) was constructed by combining two smaller clusters, denoted by the two different shades of green. They both dealt primarily with comic books but separated ORG3 and its conventions from the retail stores, STR3 and STR5.
• The fourth and final field (bottom left) mainly deals with anime fandom. Although anime fans might logically be considered a sub-field of the broader media-fandom field, the clustering and grouping of observed relations suggests that it constitutes a relatively distinct, parallel fan community. University club ORG2 also embraces gaming activities, but these appear to be largely unconnected with the wider gaming communities within the scene.

One way of understanding a subcultural scene, then, is as a nexus of niches. The relationships mentioned by interviewees and directly observed during fieldwork are presumably only a small fraction of the total ties that bind the scene together (especially with respect to participant mobility between events and stores), and so the figure is incomplete. Nonetheless, it helps substantiate the intuition that consumption within the context of practices can never be entirely private and dispersed. The simple transactions required to access or acquire the objects of their interests implicate consumers in a complex and fluid network of relationships. Some of these are known or potentially knowable; others are hidden but no less influential for their obscurity. The inevitability of these relationships gives force to the sense of nerd culture as a scene.

References

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Hesmondhalgh, David. 2005. “Subcultures, Scenes or Tribes? None of the Above.” Journal of Youth Studies 8 (1): 21–40.

Straw, Will. 1991. “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Communities and Scenes in Popular Music.” Cultural Studies 5 (3): 368–88.

———. 2002. “Scenes and Sensibilities.” Public 22/23: 245–257.

———. 2004. “Cultural Scenes.” Loisir et societe/Society and Leisure 27 ‚(2): 411–422.

Cover, The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature

In a chapter in the recently published The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form (Amazons.com/.ca), I examine how truthfulness is represented in (ostensibly) non-fiction comics, focussing primarily on Sacco’s Palestine. While many scholars have looked at this concept in terms of autobiographical comics, comics journalism–which seems to entail a higher standard of “objective truth”–has been relatively neglected up until this point. I use the twin concepts of “information” and “experience,” drawn from the work of the Frankfurt-aligned critic, Walter Benjamin, as ideal-types to structure my examination of comics journalism’s “regime of verisimilitude.”

This piece has had a long history. I want to thank my friend Bethany Lindsay for providing me with her notes from an unpublished interview she conducted with Sacco and the book’s editors, Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest.