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.”

Although I’m grousing, I had a great trip. Both conferences I attended were extremely interesting in themselves, and it was particularly delightful to dip my toe into another scholarly community.

***

As previously mentioned, I started off at the Joint International Conference of Graphic Novels, Bandes dessinées and Comics, which was jointly sponsored by the journals, Studies in Comics, European Comic Art, and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. There were two major themes for the conference, space & time and audiences & readership. I spent most of time in the latter stream of panels, and given the formalist and humanistic tenor of most comics studies, it was a breath of fresh air.

It was particularly nice to see some empirical research on comics readers, such as Liam Burke’s survey of Thor and Green Lantern movie audiences, which found that half of those who identified as comic fans don’t actually read comics while 10% of people who identify as non-fans do, and Shari Sabeti’s work with an extracurricular graphic novel–reading club in a Scottish secondary school. Very interesting secondary analyses of data—for example, of press and citizen reviews of Joe Sacco’s Palestine (Martin Barker), of letters to the editor of Superman (Ian Gordon), or of previous interview studies of comics fans (Simon Locke)—were also presented. I think social-scientific approaches to comics and concern with the real people involved at either end of the industry still has a long way to go, but it’s clear that there is some very interesting work being done in this area that will challenge a lot of the assumptions that we have extracted from isolated readings of texts or ported over from the lore of fandom.

Excepting a lack of delegate wi-fi access, a kooky kabbalistic keynote, and a terrible beeping noise outside my dorm room, I think the conference (or, rather, its first half: I couldn’t stay for the meeting of the International Bande dessinée Society in the second half) came off rather well.

An expanded version of my paper, “The Android’s Dungeon,” will be published this December in a special issue of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics on the theme of audiences and readership.

***

From Manchester, I took a short train ride to Leeds to the Moral Economies of Creative Labour conference, organized by members of the Leeds University Institute of Communication Studies and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change.

The conference brought together the kind of social/cultural theory I’m used to seeing in communication studies with perspectives from political and moral philosophy, which is much less common, to talk about creative work and the cultural industries. There was also a strong empirical core to many of the papers I saw.

One interesting theme to emerge was the role of universities in shaping the place of creative labour in our societies.

On the one hand, unpaid work placements and internships were an important issue for several presenters. Sabina Siebert, for example, noted that it was becoming common for aspiring journalists to devote as much as 18 months of unpaid labour to media companies, and fewer then half of them get a job out of it at the end. David Hesmondhalgh drew attention to universities’ complicity in organizing the market for unpaid work through co-op schemes.

On the other hand, academic labour was frequently referenced during question and discussion periods as presenters sought illustrations of their arguments about knowledge work in general. I wonder if this hard-nosed look at creative and cultural labour is only possible now that our own positions as academics have been suitably professionalized, “precariatized,” and demystified.

I was on a panel more closely focussed on Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of practices and its application to cultural work. Mark Banks opened, discussing the relative merits of MacIntyrean and Bourdieusian interpretations of jazz musicians’ descriptions of their practice. I talked about audience practices as a normative foundation for cultural policy. Finally, Luke Jaaniste reflected on the competing demands of “practice” and “institution” on cultural practitioners.

I was particularly thrilled to see the keynote by Russell Keat, who is an emeritus professor at Edinburgh and whose book, Cultural Goods and the Limits of the Market, has been really important to me in the last couple years. Andrew Sayer’s closing keynote, which discussed at the idea of “contributive justice” and the division of good and bad work amongst workers and jobs, was also a highlight.

My talk is up at Scribd, and the slides can be viewed at SlideShare.

“Winter is coming,” and so is HBO’s adaptation of the first novel in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, A Game of Thrones. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, A Song of Ice and Fire is about the Realpolitik of a fantasy kingdom called Westeros. Its inspiration is supposedly the Wars of the Roses, vaguely reflected in the names of the main contending houses, Stark (York) and Lannister (Lancaster). The replacement of flowers with a direwolf and a lion, respectively, should signal something of the series’s tone. And, as you can see in the preview HBO recently released (above), the supernatural elements in the books tend in the direction of horror more than your stereotypical fantasy novel. (Indeed, the scene with the Others seems a little fast-zombies to me.)

The question is: Can A Game of Thrones do for the fantasy genre what Battlestar Galactica did for science-fiction?

***

I first started formulating my research project on nerd culture in the post-War (of the Ring) period, and I was interviewing people while Avatar was going like gangbusters in the box office, and so how genres often associated with nerdy audiences—genres like fantasy, superheroes, and sci-fi—fare in the mainstream has been an important index of the whole “revenge of the nerds”/“geek chic” issue.

I had a memorable discussion of this phenomenon with one of my interviewees, the manager of a game and comics shop. As part of a series of questions about his own engagements with nerd culture before taking up gainful employment within the scene, I asked about his taste in movies and TV shows:

What about movies? Certain sort of fan favourites? I don’t know if you’re into, like, sci-fi or fantasy…

I’m really big into sci-fi. Fantasy a little bit. I just recently watched How to Train Your Dragon. That was awesome. Just totally gripping, really amazing, super cute, and they improved the 3-d, so the 3-d experience didn’t suck like it was before. Obviously, I really liked Avatar. I’m a bit of a … nnnature-loving hippie kind of sympathizer. Not actually hippie, hippie-sympathizer. So all of the anti-corporate tentacles in my brain danced in glee as those mercenaries were ripped to shreds by nature’s wrath and all that stuff.

Yeah, so, um, I find it’s very strange why sci-fi doesn’t really succeed. It’s actually a thing in the movie industry that sci-fi is a long-shot all the time. […] So, yeah, sci-fi has been a long-shot in movies, in television shows for a long time. I don’t know if you know about Firefly?

Yeah.

Uh, Battlestar Galactica? The best sci-fi movie—er, television show, of all time was almost cancelled twice.

The new one or the old one?

The new one. ((laughs)) It was almost cancelled twice. It almost died in its … like … And people were like, “huuuuh,” drooling over this show, and it was almost cancelled because it didn’t have enough viewership. People are just … like, everyday people are like, “Oh, laser guns and aliens? Fuck that.” You know? Even though there was no laser guns or aliens in it. There was robots and … humans …

Bullet guns.

Bullet guns. Like, real bullet guns and stuff like that.

But when sci-fi does succeed, it seems to succeed really big. Fantasy as well, I guess. The Lord of the Rings, Avatar—

No, no. Fantasy is never a long-shot. Fantasy is very successful. People just dig fantasy. They can relate to it, you know? They’ve read fantasy books when they were a kid, you know? They, they … dragons and this and that and the other. It’s part of our inherent culture. Sci-fi is sort of this, you know—began in the 1920s, and it was this like weird idea of thinking about the future in a way that was … through the lens of technology, you know? So, there’s all sorts of religious people and people who don’t like change who are, like, totally not down with it. You know? Most people, I think, like looking backwards and romanticizing the past instead of looking forwards and being hopeful about the future.

While both genres are unquestionably related to nerd culture—indeed, there is an argument that SF&F fandom is the most recent common ancestor of the whole range of contemporary geek cultures—this interviewee makes distinctions between them in terms of mainstream appeal, integration into other, more established cultural forms, and political ideology. Part of this is simply a question of frame of reference: Which examples of each genre are being referenced?

In recent years, “realistic” and “gritty” have become the bywords for film adaptations that seek simultaneously to exploit the name recognition of existing franchises with a general audience and to court the grown-up fanboy audience.* The “dark” remake/reboot/reimagining allows producers to draw on childhood nostalgia while targeting a more profitable, adult audience. I’m thinking, for example, of Bryan Singer’s X-Men, Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, Star Trek: Nemesis, and Pokémon: Apokélypse.† At the same time, ensemble casts in which every character is a horrible human being has become the lazy television writer’s shortcut to Drama—something I first noticed while following BSG and Mad Men at the same time.

A Game of Thrones certainly provides ample scope for applying these signifiers of serious artistic purpose to a genre that has previously wallowed in Romantic quests and fuzzy underpants. Against a background of political backstabbing, Martin paints his characters in shades of grey: everyone who starts off with good intentions takes a winding road of compromise to a Very Bad Place, everyone who starts out as a straight-up villain becomes strangely sympathetic over the course of the novels, and everyone is subjected to their share of tragedy and violence. There’s intrigue and incest and beheadings; it all sounds very “mature.” But it remains an open question whether audiences—and especially HBO audiences—will still find this compelling when you add dragons.

***

*The other option for resolving this problem is, of course, camp. E.g., Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which has gained a lot of attention amongst the nerd-blogger set for the references and homages it has wrapped up in a fun, kid-friendly, Silver-Agey package. Another fruitful comparison might be 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead, on the one hand, versus Shaun of the Dead and Fido, on the other hand.

†Okay, that last one is a fan film totally mocking this trend. But, check it out, you can totally see Harbour Centre and the AQ, and I’m pretty sure the newscaster was the external examiner for my MA defence.

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.

To briefly summarize, Hardt & Negri’s book is an attempt to locate a political subject that can resist the logic of Empire—i.e., the exercise of power by nation-states, international institutions, and capital to maintain the global, neoliberal order. This new political subject is the titular multitude, the global masses transformed by their engagement in the newly hegemonic paradigm of immaterial labour. Immaterial labour refers to those types of labour that produce or process ideas, symbols, relationships, and affects. (Hardt & Negri do concede that the distinction between material and immaterial labour is an analytical one; in practice, they are “almost always” mixed together [p. 109].) Because immaterial labour is biopolitical—i.e., it creates forms of life as its product or byproduct—and because the expropriation of the common that it thus produces is the source of a common antagonism, the multitude has within it the means of self-rule.

However, the book’s project fails in at least three ways.

First, the multitude does not fulfull the quest for a post-liberal and post-socialist political subject. Hardt & Negri define the multitude as “an open network of singularities that links together on the basis of the common they share and the common they produce” (p. 129). The multitude is not a collectivity in the old sense (either of the body politic or of the socialist party/state) because participating in the common life of the multitude does not require the subsumption of the singularity:

The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Instead we are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality. (P. 127)

For all its fashionable network-society vocabulary, this strikes me as little more than a recreation of the liberal individual in the state of nature entering into a social contract for the mutual benefit of all. Furthermore, because the multitude is based on one’s dependence on and contribution to the common, it is potentially inclusive of all of humanity; Hardt & Negri do not address the problem that the multitude also includes those people who, as individuals, benefit the most from the expropriation of the collective, biopolitical production that is embodied in the common.

Second, their inscription of democracy (defined as “the rule of all by all”) as the telos of all movements for social change is problematic. I am not sure it is good historiography to read the achievement of this vision of democracy into previous (and therefore “incomplete”) movements. It strikes me that what has been desired is not so much the rule of all by all as the end of (illegitimate) rule by another. Moreover, the emphasis on democracy seems to confuse means with ends. Democracy may well be necessary for a just global social order but it is by no means sufficient for one, as there are no guarantees on what that the multitude will democratically choose to do. (This second problem is, of course, exacerbated by the aforementioned conflict within the multitude that is elided from Hardt & Negri’s account.)

Third, for all of the emphasis on the importance of communication to the creation of the multitude, Hardt & Negri do not articulate a theory of communication. At times, communication seems to be nothing more than the regular interchange of messages as part of the circuits of production. At others, the authors seem to have a “sacramental” conception of communication, for lack of a better term, in mind: “The common does not refer to traditional notions of either the community or the public; it is based on the communication among singularities and emerges through the collaborative social processes of production” (p. 204). Without more clarity on this point, the description of the multitude’s “becoming” through processes of collaboration and communication is unconvincing.

These three problems are mutually re-enforcing and reproductive of one another. My suspicion is that they require a similarly mutual solution: a triune theory that unites a philosophical anthropology to address the nature of the human being, an ethics to evaluate values to correct for the focus on democracy, and a theory of communication. To say that this theory must be “triune” is to seek, for each term, a theory that contains the other two—for example, a conception of the human subject (anthropology) that implies how subjects ought to treat to one another (ethics) and how they can relate to one another (communication).