Academia
FAKE POLITICS FOR THE REAL AMERICA
Frost/Nixon, W., Milk and the 2008 US Election in Metro Magazine #160, 2009. This essay won the 2009 Australian Film Critics Association Award for ‘Writing on Non-Australian Film’.
“It was an election night like none other,” crowed CNN. “In addition to the obvious – the selection of the nation’s first black president – Tuesday night’s coverage on CNN showcased groundbreaking technology.” Host Wolf Blitzer conducted interviews via hologram, ringed with a blue, sci-fi aura – an aura intentionally added to “avoid confusion” with the real hosts. Days later, it was revealed that these weren’t actual holograms, just effects visible to those watching at home.
It’s a perfect summation of the ways in which reality was framed and reframed throughout the 2008 American election, used as both boasts and attacks. It saw artist Shepard Fairey boil Barack Obama down to a single image and a single word to create a “cultural phenomenon”; John McCain repeatedly demanding to know “who is the real Barack Obama?”; and Obama appearing on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s satirical, self-confessed “fake news” program, giving them their highest ever ratings. The US election was therefore perfect breeding ground for what Jean Baudrillard calls hyperreality: “a substitution of the signs of the real for the real itself”.
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Read the full essay at the AFCA. Or read more about Metro Magazine.
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THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE
Stasis and Speed in Contemporary Superhero Comics for Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2009.
Whether Barry Allen or his successor, Wally West, the Flash is defined by his motion. As Barry’s girlfriend once pointed out: ‘The Flash doesn’t sit around – he does things!’ (Flash #113, 1959). Yet superheroes are born into a medium that appears to consist of static images. Without the ability to show literal movement, superheroes like the Flash are instead animated by the powerful techniques employed by comic book artists to create time and motion across the page. A favourite conceptual trick is to show two panels, a millisecond apart, but between which the Flash is implied to have invisibly performed lengthy tasks; sometimes, even within a single panel, as when he says ‘Be right back’ and ‘Okay, I took a quick look’ almost at once (JLA #20, 2008). The Flash tries to put it into words: ‘Catch lightning in your hands sometime. Spend a month between the ticks of a second and tell me what noise you hear when you crack the sound barrier’ (Flash #80, 1993).
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More on the ‘Comics and Animation’ issue.
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MORRISON’S MUSCLE MYSTERY…
…Versus Everyday Reality… and Other Parallel Worlds! in The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero anthology, 2009.
Despite my childhood wishes to the contrary, I live in the real world. It’s no Metropolis. The skyline is free of flying men or flashes of inexplicable light. I wonder: do all comic fans, deep down, believe that superheroes are real? As a child – and yeah, probably as a teenager too – I rationalized their absence. They were missing from the real world, but there must have been another world in which they’re as real as you or me. A parallel world. A possible future. An ‘Earth-2′.
These are the same ideas that populate the superhero comics of writer Grant Morrison. In his work on Animal Man (1988-90), the Doom Patrol (1989-93), Flex Mentallo (1996), and even the Justice League of America (1997-2000), the heroes face the difficulties of these other realities that encroach upon their own, with surreal, ludicrous, and terrifying results. They are threats that cannot be solved with heat-vision, repulsor rays, or a swift right hook. Worst of all – what happens when the alternative reality is actually our reality, out here in the so-called real world? Can any hero remain intact when faced with our mundane bodies, physics, and colour schemes?
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More information at Routledge.
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THE TEARS OF DOCTOR DOOM
Looking at comic book superheroes battling the mainstream for Overland magazine, 2008.
It’s May 2007 in New York City. There are rare comic books on display in the New York Public Library. Central Park Zoo holds special Spider-Man location tours. Urban poets compose superhero-themed raps at the Apollo Theatre. The mayor appears on breakfast television to officially declare ‘Spider-Man Week’. The celebration centres on the premiere of Sam Raimi’s blockbuster Spider-Man 3 in Peter Parker’s home town of Queens, filling the borough with celebrities like the movie’s star, Tobey Maguire, alongside public displays of superhero iconography and posters reading “A Hero Comes Home”. It’s a major shift from the subcultural niche that comic fans once inhabited. In their song ‘Can U Dig It?’, Pop Will Eat Itself – a 1990s group with a name that already sounded Baudrillardian – used lines like “We dig Marvel and DC” and “Alan Moore knows the score” as subcultural slang, gaining credibility with those familiar with comics culture. How could the band have guessed that comics auteur Alan Moore would become sufficiently famous to guest-star on The Simpsons?
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STRAW MAN AND OTHER SUPERHEROES
A response to Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics for The Valve’s online symposium, 2008.
Right now, respectable graphic novels are winning enough awards that it’s no longer shocking, and superheroes loom larger than ever in the popular imagination. Douglas Wolk’s book Reading Comics straddles both extremes of comic-bound stories. One of the pleasures of the book is his wide analytical sweep – from Tomb of Dracula to David B. to Grant Morrison to Cerebus the Aardvark. It’s wide enough that Wolk interrogates himself about exactly what he will and won’t include, creating a handily-labelled ‘Straw Man’ who asks questions like: “Have you noticed that that’s mostly a description of what you’re not writing about?” I don’t doubt the need to clarify this point, as defining what the hell ‘comics’ actually are is a herculean task. I do find it interesting that the first section of Reading Comics shares so much in common with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and that the authors of both books build themselves straw men with which to argue.
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SUFFERING AND SERIALITY
A paper on ‘Memory, Continuity, and Trauma in Monthly Superhero Adventures’, presented at the Media In Transition 5 international conference at M.I.T., April 27-29, 2007.
A respectable bookshop stocking nicely-bound superhero stories on their shelves is a recent occurrence. Comic fandom used to be a very different beast: collections composed of individual issues, mostly 20 or so pages a piece, sometimes glossy, sometimes not, fastened with a pair of ordinary staples. It’s hard to imagine any book held together so haphazardly. And this kind of collection is heavy. Do the math. A long-running daily soap opera might show the equivalent of around 1300 feature films in a ten year run. For superheroes like Batman and Superman, who have been fighting crime monthly for over half a century each, the equations are more complicated. At times they had one monthly comic; at other times, over five monthly titles, a generous handful of miniseries, guest cameos in others’ adventures, and ensemble roles in the Justice League of America, all at once. Thousands and thousands and thousands of pages. Imagine the weight of it. Imagine all the punches thrown, battles won, and worlds saved. Imagine all the lives lost along the way.
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