Do Not Siege Walled Cities - 240
Tis the Season To Shut Up and Make Comics
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
It’s 93º today. 96º is the forecast for Christmas. A very different thing than I’m used to. I hope your holiday or day off or however you care to frame it is spent with people you love.
Thought I’d ‘gift’ you with some pondering. You can pretend you’re back in the dorm room listening to some asshole go long on unremarkable thoughts he’s very proud of. My gift to you.
REMINDER, GO SPEND MONEY
If you haven’t ordered ANTIOCH yet, I strongly urge you to do so. We got PDF copies out to some media and the response was very kind. I’ll post some interviews here next week. Call your local comic shop. Or Amazon. Or one of the mailorder retailers like Midtown Comics. You’ll be glad you did.
COMPLEXITIES, THANK YOU
Sometimes I catch the news and I realize I’m not doing my job. I promise this will tie back to comics.
Many of you saw the congressional hearings about anti-semitism on college campuses. For any who don’t fill their days watching boring people talk in unimpressive spaces, here’s the short version:
The presidents of three top American universities were asked if calls for the genocide of jews violated those institutions’ policies on bullying and harassment.
The presidents all answered with some variation of “no, that would require further action and simply expressing that viewpoint does not meet our standard for harassment.”
This, as you could guess, was a problem.
The problem for some was the content of the statement. It’s ok to call for the extermination of an ethnicity or religious affiliation? Many didn’t care for that part. Jews, as you might imagine, were particularly unhappy.
The problem for others was the hypocrisy. I almost typed “perceived hypocrisy” but let’s cut the bullshit. Had the question been about people of color or transpeople, the presidents would not have insulated themselves with the 1st Amendment.
And so began a couple weeks of drama. Jews (and some conservative allies already critical of these universities) called for alumni to pull donations. Free-speech advocates preached to anyone who would listen that the presidents answered correctly. And, most interesting from a narrative perspective, Harvard’s president Claudine Gay’s mounting problems.
She did not resign when called to, unlike the UPenn president. Gay said she was getting back to work.
So, the angle of attack changed. Her opponents went looking. Lemme tell you, if you search for means to discredit someone, you will find it. And as it turned out, Gay was a bit of a fraud.
She’s currently being murdered online for plagiarism, examples of which are found throughout her rather limited academic bibliography. This is, I guess, scandalous. And the media is running with it. She’s being charged with ‘duplicative language’ which is the recycling of passages but not the theft of ideas or research. Now, as a writer of fiction, this style of plagiarism is a more egregious offense to me than the traditional version. But Harvard doesn’t see it that way and has opted to defend its president.
All this is interesting in the way it exposes certain hypocrisies (students, it seems, are held to a higher standard than the president of the school). But it’s not the MEAT, in terms of story.
The part worth paying attention to is only being talked about in the margins of the story, at least at the moment. And that’s the fact that Claudine Gay is, by any standard including Harvard’s, unqualified for her job. That’s not my assessment. That’s her written output + citation level, as compared to other academics. Apparently there’s an actual metric for this type of thing. Really, of course there is.
As it turns out, when you make people really mad at you, anyone with an outstanding grievance joins the pile-on. And academics who have been passed over for jobs like president, despite far more impressive resumes, are lining up to come off the top rope.
Race is, as we could predict, part of the conversation. Gay is black. This has led to some defending her under the premise that any criticism of a black woman is racism. And on the other side, black academics who see Gay as an academic featherweight and empty suit also have the knives out. The accusation from those corners (including from a woman Gay plagiarized) is that the president is the “right kind of black woman.” That is, in their definition, someone of privilege who holds the approved beliefs.
Now, here’s the part that’s germane to comics.
Gay was elevated for her identity rather than her credentials. And that’s a boring story. But what’s fascinating and bracing and human is how she FEELS about that fact. That’s the story.
I raved about the film Tar a few months ago in this newsletter because it explored the motivations and private life of someone who had done a bad thing. The only heroism on display was her unwillingness to be crushed. BUT, that’s a matter of opinion in itself. Because maybe you saw the film and thought, “but she deserves to be crushed.” You see what I’m getting at? Stories with real pathos don’t require the judgement of the reader/viewer but they will always solicit it, even accidentally.
Gay is being exposed as a fraud but that does not necessarily mean she’s not a good president. Or absolutely the right person for the job. Maybe she believes with her full self that she’s the only one to lead Harvard. Maybe she is!
Or maybe she’s a useful idiot who has been endlessly promoted by cynical managerial types who use race as a sales tool and armor against criticism. Dark, right? But even if that’s the case, if Gay was the protagonist of the story she would still have a ton of interesting thoughts and feelings about it! Is she self-aware? Is she self-hating? Is she self-aggrandizing? Does she feel that she was wronged by unmerited promotions she believes she could have achieved without that leg up? Does she feel pressure to be an exemplar of blackness or womanhood or both?
I’m agnostic here. I think Gay and her fellow presidents opened their institutions up to legal liabilities when they in essence said “you can say what you want here except, you know, not the stuff we don’t like and will quietly kick you out for. But the Jew stuff is fine.” But I don’t care. If people wanna go to these places, that’s on them. I don’t have much respect for colleges to begin with.
But what I am totally gripped by the human drama. If Gay is a villain, that’s interesting. If she’s a hero, that’s interesting. And if she’s a dupe, that’s interesting. And I’m sitting here reflecting on how I haven’t read a comic in the calendar year that explored complex emotions or tricky interpersonal conflict with any real depth.
Last week I said I was happy to work in exploitation that skirts conversations about ‘art.’ But today I’m lamenting the lack of heft in our medium. Think about the stories we’re not telling. Damn.
AND I MEAN IT!
I do a little Youtube roundup at the end of the newsletter now, but I thought I’d just lay this here and expand on it slightly. Or at least affirm my commitment.
With all the bullshit that gets kicked around weekly in comics, I think we should lay some ground rules to help parse what’s worth listening to.
If you don’t do creator-owned work. Or you do it in a perfunctory fashion that betrays no passion for stories… then you don’t get to talk. That last bit is perhaps more to the point, as most Big Two creators have *some* type of indie book on shelves.
If you’re a career Big Two guy, you are not a complete creator. Full stop. And you don’t get to jump into conversations on the course of the comics industry. Your viewpoint isn’t worthless, but it’s not far off. The Big Two are fine. Happy you’re employed. But it’s not a direction. And if you don’t have the same skin in the game as people coming up with ideas and trying to sell them, then vamoose.
THE HARD REALITY THAT RIGHTS ARE UNIVERSAL
There’s a petition or letter or other worthless item going around about Substack’s “Nazi problem.” I don’t care about platforms in any real way, so I’ll keep this short. My view of my time here on Earth is informed by a single afternoon in, I dunno, the year 2000? I was living in Brooklyn and came into the city to be entertained by simply walking around. There was a comic book store and record store circuit of five or so spots all within a short walk. So it was a great time to be young and working for tips. I went into See Hear, a zine shop. This represents the last moment in NYC history that something as low-margin as zines could have retail outlet in Manhattan. The shop carried a wide variety of what any reasonable person would call ‘nutball shit.’ Or, being charitable, fringe material. From religious extremist literature, to white power quarterlies, to the NAMBLA newsletter.
What made this viable was twofold. First, it was before the internet existed solely for the mob destruction of places like this. Second, the owner Ted Gottfried, wasn’t taking any shit.
I had wandered in hoping to find Chick Tracts I couldn’t find by interacting with street preachers. He had a couple small plastic bins worth and I would go through them like I was searching out back issues at the comic shop.
While I was there, a man picked up the NAMBLA newsletter, put it down in disgust, and turned to Gottfried in anger. “What are you doing letting this shit in here, man? It’s for pedophiles!”
There was approximately one second pause before the 6-out-of-10 intensity inquiry was rejoined by an aggressive 10-out-of-10. “Because we live in a free fucking country! Get the fuck out! Go! Get the fuck out!”
There was no discussion about the nuances of the 1st Amendment or why a marketplace of ideas is essential for a healthy democracy. It was just “you don’t get it, you dumb bastard, leave.”
It’s seared into my memory. And as odd as it may sound, it’s been my philosophical north star.
If you don’t understand why the ugliest thoughts are entitled to the same protections as the most anodyne or even the most virtuous, then you don’t understand anything.
And instead of equivocating with some practical argument for freedom (such as “we cannot trust a third-party to tell us what is bad without forfeiting our minds. We must have access to the bad thing so we can know it and fight it effectively”), why not just live the principle?
“Because rights, idiot.”
I bring this up because the Substack nazi thing is an easy fix for me. If Substack’s mandate is an adherence to the 1st Amendment, then frail bloggers taking the bold stance of “nazis are bad” isn’t a relevant argument.
Get the fuck out. Go. Get the fuck out.
YOUTUBE ROUNDUP
In the video below I mention AX-WIELDER JON, a book that just arrived by Nick Pitarra. A quick print review before we get there:
I think the snobbery that elevates single hyphen creators or full cartoonists over teams of writers and artists is stupid. Ultimately it’s the work that matters, and plenty of teams deliver better work than individual artist-writers.
However, there is something undeniably fulfilling about a singular vision delivered without even a smidge of compromise. That’s AX-WIELDER JON. Panels were drawn page-sized and then reduced and assembled. And it paid off. Pitarra is doing detailed and expressive work here.
The story is direct. And despite my earlier call for comics to be emotionally complex and nuanced, I think my work speaks to the fact I value A→B told well. The story is violent and unrelenting. And it just looks cool. I think that’s the real victory here. You want to look at it. Like a proper comic book.
Very happy for Pitarra and excited that he got the response that he did.
And here’s the video where I speak about it a bit before going into all the ways it coulda gone wrong.
AND THAT’S IT UNTIL NEW YEARS
Enjoy the holidays. Call someone if you’re depressed. Do for self.