Review: Dead by 30 #2 - 'Road to Ruin' by Andrei Buters.

Picked up this self-published Australian comic at the same time as Nemesis as is my want for periodically sampling Oz Comic fare.

As I hadn't read the first issue, the sock puppet re-enactment of "the story so far" was welcome if not completely enlightening.

The story follows Phoebe Kestler, who is the target of the same killer who murdered Hess, the best musician in Dylan, and turned into one of the zombie hordes that roam the surrounding countryside. Jenseit 'death-priest' Reuben Carver has been given the job of escorting Phoebe to the safer spaces of, The Capital, which also houses the musical 'Inspiration Project' which Phoebe has been invited to join. But along the way Hess makes an appearance and it seems he's not as completely zombie-fied as first thought.

Not sure what I was expecting with Dead by 30, but certainly not something in the fantasy genre. I found myself being drawn into the story seeded as it is with a number of little intrigues of which I'm keen to find our more. Reuben and Phoebe's conflicting ideals and it seems, sexual tension, pushes the story along nicely.These characters are well-developed with distinct personalities.

There's a lot of work gone into the production of the comic itself but it's also readily apparent that Buters has created a whole world for his characters; a place where they really exist.

If there's any down side it's some of the dialogue slides into exposition at times but it's not particularly distracting.

This is a really well-produced comic with a semi-gloss full colour cover and sharply printed black and white interiors. At 56 pages it's a goddamn bargain providing a much longer reading experience than Nemesis! The artwork isn't generally what I'd go for but it's accomplished and well executed leaning towards the cartoonish with a manga influence.

I'm going to be looking for the first issue and keeping an eye out for further installments.

For a little more about Andrei Buters you can go to his Comics Lifestyle Page.

This: Recommended. Forthcoming: Hopefully soon.

Review: Nemesis #1 and 2, by Mark Millar (writer) and Steve McNiven (art), Icon (Marvel) Comics.

Managed to pick up the first two two issues of uber comic writer Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's creator owned Nemesis at the incredibly excellent Minotaur pop culture shop in Melbourne.

Nemesis is a very nasty man. He has a vendetta against police of all nations having had his very privileged upbringing torn from him when his parents were arrested for running a hunting club. With the father committing suicide and the mother sent to the chair, the young man who'll become Nemesis inherits a massive fortune and travels the world acquiring the skills that will make him a criminal genius. All to eventually to take revenge on Blake Morrow, the cop who "stole his life away".

Nemesis asks the question, basically, what if Batman were a criminal? It reverses the "good guys wear black" to "bad guys wear white" (and it doesn't even add any weight to Nemesis at all).

I have to say I was pretty impressed with these two issues. This sort of storytelling reminds me of the early Image comics, only much better.

Millar hits all the cool points and sets up the Nemesis' motivation cleverly and succinctly. He doesn't waste any time on needless exposition - the mark of an accomplished writer - and heads straight for the action. These action sequences filled with train wrecks, exploding buildings and the required high body count are spectacular and plain over the top, which unfortunately for meant for a fairly quick read, with few pages sporting more than four panels.

Even so there's a lot to get into with McNiven's art (previously combining with Millar for Civil War) verging on stunning. McNiven seems to have pared back his line work since Civil War but the art loses nothing for it. It's detailed and highly individual. I've been going over the panels just taking in the intricacies. There's not one flaw or unnecessary line.

Millar writes in an Afterword that since the Wanted and Kick-Ass movie adaptations there's been many a person sniffing around Nemesis. Whoever gets the gig won't have much work to do in adapting it because whether deliberate or not  Nemesis could easily be translated to the big screen with little trouble. It verily screams "summer blockbuster".

The challenge for Millar will be in making the "everyman" hero cop Blake Morrow more interesting than the supervillain-genius, Nemesis in the too cool all-white costume. Otherwise you won't want him defeated. I mean, this guy is bad - murdering cops and indiscriminately slaughtering civilians by the truckload. But, you know, carnage can be appealing. At this point I think Millar's got it about right with it looking like it's going to a battle of intellect and wits even though there's sure to be more high-stakes action.

These: Highly recommended. Forthcoming: Highly anticipated.

Part 3 - Notice the Difference? Eliminating the Feminine in Superhero Comics

Part 3 of 'Notice the Difference? Eliminating the Feminine in Superhero Comics' covers how armouring the male superhero body is an attempt to elicit self-control and thereby control the feminine that is embodied in chaotic, uncontrollable and changing ‘outside forces’. I further establish how armouring the body is unworkable due to its passive mode of resistance. I describe the next step in the process to control outside forces as becoming the weapon/machine and the consequences that this can have for culture at large.

Read Part 1

Read Part 2

Armouring the Body

Why have ‘ideal’ male superhero bodies increased in size so dramatically? Superman had ‘the constitution, organs and abilities equal to the rigors of the Machine Age’ (Bukatman 99), but he was never so damned big and rippling with obscene amounts of muscles as these heroes. What the increasing size of the male superhero body indicates is a process of armouring.

A defining characteristic of postmodernism is the decentring of identity, of meaning being found outside of the self. Bukatman states that the bodybuilder/superhero-fantasy represents an attempt to ‘re-centre the self in the body’ (110). Stripped of signs, naked, idealised, this re-centring, armouring of the male body is an attempt to weather the postmodern storm; to re-load the body with meaning.

Simply, the times-are-a-changing and 1990s superheroes didn’t know much else to do other than to be bigger, badder, and just punch on, incarnating problematic and painfully reductive definitions of masculine power and presence’ (Bukatman 96). Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, distinctly postmodern in their own rights, had heralded the direction superhero comics would take. Image comics eschewed any type of self-reflexivity, and instead ran with the surface aspects of the dark, gritty, and violent figuring that extreme sex and violence was the natural extension from Miller and Moore. And for a time they were right. Without realising it they also produced a thoroughly postmodern response, that being that these comics were all surface and little substance. They had no meaning other than armouring the body to hypermasculine extremes against the postmodern condition.

Apart from the decentring of identity, the postmodern condition also signifies the instability of western culture due to its questioning of stereotypes, sex roles, and role models. James Maertens writes that controlling nature is ultimately ‘rooted in the desire for absolute self-control’ (191); for ‘self-control, mastery of nature and of our nature, is a defining marker of the masculine state’ (Frosh 104). Nature necessarily is equated with the female or femininity as Theweleit states – ‘male rationalist thinking repeatedly renews its demand for the oppression of women each time it calls for the subjugation of “nature”’(1987 432). Using the fascist male as an example, Theweleit describes perfectly how the state of controlling the self through armouring the body equates to control of outside forces –

Men themselves were now split into a (female) interior and a (male) exterior – the body armor. …the interior and the exterior were mortal enemies. What we see being portrayed… are the armor’s separation from, and superiority over the interior: the interior was allowed to flow, but only within the masculine boundaries… What fascism promised men was the reintegration of their hostile components under tolerable conditions, dominance of the “hostile” female elements within themselves.

A line from Superman #123 relates how Superman’s inability to control his newly acquired energy powers threatens his existence – ‘that lack of control made him more vulnerable than ever’ (Jurgens, Frenz, and Rubenstein 1997 2). Therefore control of the self and the ‘female’ interior through armouring the body conflates with controlling the feminine as nature, and other ‘uncontrollable’ outside forces such as the postmodern condition. More succinctly, it is the wish to control chaos. However this control and re-centring of the self is ultimately relegated to the realm of desire; it is unobtainable. While being armoured protects one from outside industrial shocks, it imprisons the ego which is then ‘unable to escape the barriers it has raised against a universe that can only be conceived as an enemy’ (Maertens 190). An imprisoned ego is unacceptable to the masculine ideal because armouring the body is a passive mode of resistance, a protective rather than aggressive strategy. In the midst of postmodernism, the characters with reductive definitions of masculine power, unable to ‘re-centre the self’ turn out to just be, bulging, empty, armoured, shells.


Becoming the Weapon

However all is not lost! If re-centring the self through armouring the body is passive, there’s a further step that the male can take to fight this unstable, uncontrollable enemy that is indicative of the postmodern condition: a change from armouring the body to arming it with weaponry. The body is now becoming the weapon/machine, blurring the boundary between the weapon/machine and the body. This is exemplified in Wetworks where the team is enclosed by the symbiote described as a ‘bio-metalloid compound saturated and controlled by nanotech wetware’ (Portacio & Choi Jun.1994 9). The symbiote augments the Wetworks team’s metabolic systems, and adapts and integrates weapons systems so that they function as extensions of their body (Portacio & Choi, Aug.1994 3). The idea of the body as weapon is demonstrated more explicitly from this excerpt – ‘Look at them, Colonel. Don’t you see that you and your soldiers are the perfect weapons I need to bring the vampire nation to its knees’ (Portacio & Choi Aug.1994 4). The idea is not limited to the superhero comic however as the literature of the Freikorps explicates – ‘these men were living guns’ (Schauwecker in Theweleit 1989 179); ‘was I now perhaps one with the weapon? Was I not machine– cold metal?’ (Salomon in Theweleit 1989 179); and ‘What purpose would be served by all these weapons leveled against the universe,  were they not intertwined with our nerves, were it not our blood that hissed on every axis’ (my italics)(Junger in Theweleit 1989 179). Becoming the weapon is a reaction to outside forces, and again we find the recurring motif of the universe as enemy.

As Connell argues, modern day "heroes" such as professional sportsmen are obliged ‘to treat their bodies as instruments, even as weapons’ (58) which ‘ultimately results in violence against one’s own body’ (Messner in Connell 58). But becoming the weapon gives one ‘the ability to recreate oneself into a predictable machine, one which, if it does break down, can be fixed’ (Maertens 191). The predictable body/weapon/machine aligns itself with the re-centring of the self, for predictability necessarily ensures control. This predictability and control of the self therefore translates into a control of outside forces. 

Where armouring the body failed due to the imprisonment of the ego, becoming the weapon/machine is an active mode of resistance against the postmodern universal enemy. This resistance enables the individual to act rather than react. 

The consequences for the feminine and other outside forces when the male becomes the weapon/machine is very disturbing. Becoming the weapon involves a mode of production that Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call machinic. Ideally an individual is a ‘human multiplicity-machine’. Theweleit describes the functioning of the individual as machinic thus:

by manufacturing an infinity of new associations… it is always in search of accessible connections, open pathways, unforeseen spaces, powerful flows. It couples, it uncouples; each component is functionally independent; it may function here, or… elsewhere’ (Theweleit 1989 198).

This human multiplicity-machine has the ability to produce infinite pleasures. Becoming the weapon explicitly negates the desire of the human multiplicity machine, the individual becoming a human totality machine– ‘hierarchized, functionalized, individual; the machine connections are standardized and unified, it flows liberated only if individual components overwhelm and explode’ (Theweleit 1989 198).

As weapon/machine, the human being, a ‘producer of desire’, is transformed into a muscle machine (the armoured body incorporated) that prohibits and persecutes the production of desire (Theweleit 1989 199). In turn the machine also becomes anthropomorphised. The human-

becomes an imperfect machine and the machine an imperfect human being, neither any longer capable of producing, only of expressing and propagating the horrors they have suffered. Perversely distorted, both now become destroyers; and real human beings… are the victims’ (Theweleit 1989 199).

These horrors are the bombardment of the decentring process, and the extraction and distortion of meaning from the human self. The ‘horror’ of these perceived attacks, this destabilisation that the masculine psyche has experienced, can only mean that the attacks will be violently returned against those who are seen as responsible, namely women, the feminine as nature (the environment), and other ‘outside forces’ like postmodernism. It could be argued that these attacks are demonstrated by violence against women such as domestic violence and rape, the continued devastation of the environment when it is seen an economic resource, and to a lesser degree, the call for a return to "traditional" gender roles and "family values". The male, ‘perversely distorted’ as expression-weapon/machine can only express his anger through becoming nothing more than a ‘destroyer’.

The message from the Freikorps through to the superhero comic, indicates that masculinity is unsuccessfully trying to come to terms with the chaotic, fluid and uncontrollable nature of the feminine and a postmodern world. The masculine subject resists rather than accepts these new circumstances. 

Superhero comics seem to come up with ever more elaborate ways of expressing masculine resistance. The energy being superhero is an example of this resistance. Fuji from the comic Stormwatch is an energy being who needs a containment suit otherwise he'll disperse limitlessly into the environment. The same scenario has been played out with other characters such as another Stormwatch character Hellstrike, and for a short time Superman (when he was Electric Blue Superman, May 1997- May 1998). Often it involves a race against time to ‘save’ the hero. Merging with the environment would mean accepting rather than resisting the outside forces of the feminine and the postmodern condition. 

The message that superhero comics communicate to their predominantly male audience is one of fight, resist, and eliminate the female ‘outside forces’, while delighting in homoerotic/narcissistic desire and the worship of impossible ideals of masculinity and femininity.



Conclusion

The female superhero body in superhero comics (especially the Image comics of the 1990s) is endowed with characteristics of a "standard" male body–shoulders wider than hips, a shorter torso and long legs.

For Baudrillard the body is a representation that has been phallicised thus creating erectile parts. This representation of the female is unattainable, derived as it is from the phallus as general equivalent. The phallicised female body is eliminated when it is used as a mirror that reflects male dominance and desire. The female is further not allowed to become a body due to her potential threat of castration (the vagina dentata and the phallic woman) which is eliminated when she is eliminated as female.

In order to control "outside forces" the male superhero tries recentre the self by armouring the body which also is an attempt to control the feminine. This mode of resistance is doomed to failure due to its passive mode of resistance against the postmodern condition. 

The next step in controlling outside forces is to become the weapon/machine. This offers a more active mode of resistance. However becoming the weapon/machine has a disturbing potential dehumanising the individual, becoming an expression-machine/weapon that has the capacity to retaliate violently against uncontrollable outside forces such the feminine and a constantly changing postmodern world, perceived as propagating horrors on the male, such as extracting meaning from the self.

The elimination of the feminine "other", nature or other uncontrollable "outside forces" is effectuated by a masculinity that thrives on homoerotic/narcissistic desire, and the control of the self, which is equated with the control of all else.

Reference

Bukatman, Scott. “X-Bodies (the torment of the mutant superhero)” in  Sappington, Rodney and Tyler Stallings (eds) Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture.  Seattle: Bay Press, 1994.

Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Allen & Unwin, 1995.

Frosh, Stephen. Sexual Difference: Masculinity and Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Jurgens, Dan, (w). Ron Frenz & Joe Rubinstein (a). Superman v1 #123 (May 1997), New York: DC Comics, 1997.

Maertens, James. W. 'The Dragon and the Man-Machine: Reflecting on Jurassic Park and Frankenstein', in Mary Lynn Kittelson, (ed.) The Soul of Popular Culture: Looking at Contemporary Heroes, Myths and Monsters. Chicago & La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1998.

Portacio, Whilce, (w,a). Brandon Choi (w). Wetworks. v1 #1 (Jun. 1994), Image Comics Inc, 1994.

----. Wetworks. v1 #2 (Aug. 1994), Image Comics Inc, 1994.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Volume 1.: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Polity Press, 1987.

----. Male Fantasies. Volume 2.: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. Polity Press, 1989.

Part 2 - Notice the Difference? Eliminating the Feminine in Superhero Comics

Part 2 of 'Notice the Difference? Eliminating the Feminine in Superhero Comics' uses Baudrillardian theory to analyse the superhero comic Wetworks demonstrating how the phallicised female body is eliminated when it is used as a mirror that reflects male dominance and desire. The female is further not allowed to become a body due to her potential threat of castration (the vagina dentata and the phallic woman) which is eliminated when she is eliminated as female. 

Read Part 1

In the Image comic Wetworks the characters are covered by a gold bio-metalloid compound that’s like ‘having a suit of armour for a second skin… I feel as though it’s reading my mind and working with my body, making me stronger and faster than ever before’ (Portacio & Choi, Jun. 1994, 15). On initial contact the compound covers every orifice, one character having to fight desperately to open his mouth . This ‘symbiote’ makes the body smooth, shiny and enclosed, even the eyes. A goggle wearing character now finds them incorporated into his body. The Wetworks team walks naked and smouldering from their symbolic (re)birth by fire and explosion, their bodies completely covered and protected by the symbiote. Their sex differences erased and the bodies now ‘lacking’ nothing, they literally wear Baudrillard’s second skin becoming ‘more nude than nude’ and a phallic effigy at the same time.

The ‘nudity’ of the energy being superhero is best of all. These energy beings have no corporeal body. As Baudrillard writes, the corporeal body is–

denied in the interests of a second, non-porous skin that neither exudes or excretes, that is neither hot nor cold (it is “cool” and “warm”: optimally air-conditioned), with no proper density…and above all without orifices (it is smooth)…All these qualities (coolness, suppleness, transparency, one-piece) are qualities of closure… (105).

The energy being must have a suit, a second skin (their only one) to contain their ‘design(at)ed nudity’. As Baudrillard argues design(at)ed nudity–

implies that there is nothing behind the lattice of signs that it weaves, especially not a body: neither a body of labour, nor a body of pleasure; neither an erogenous body nor a broken body (106).

The suits could be any shape because these energy beings resemble Brigitte Bardot, who is ‘“beautiful because she fits her dress exactly”’ (Baudrillard 106). They fit into their suits perfectly. Because the energy being’s body is only a body because of their suit, their body is faultless. It has no gaps, no orifices and is completely smooth. These energy beings in their suits are simulacra of ‘real’ bodies but without the lack that comes with a real body. Like the Wetworks characters, the energy being is ‘more nude than nude’, lacking nothing and a phallic effigy.

Both aspects of the fantasised phallic ideal are covered in the depiction of female and male bodies in superhero comics. The first is the exaggeration of the ‘erectile’ legs in the female creating the ‘ideal’ long penis. The extra muscled legs and arms of male characters resemble ‘ideal’ thick and ‘veined’ penis. Although uncommon, some depictions have all three in one– a long, wide and veined leg/phallus.

In superhero comics the female body is incorporated into a system of phallic exchange ‘whereby woman becomes erect and man’s desire will be received in its own image’ (Baudrillard 103). The body of the female superhero is merely a disguised phallus which signals the homoerotic/narcissistic undertones of the superhero comic. This homoerotic desire is also present in mainstream media as Jane Ussher recognises–

The mass media encourages heterosexual women to desire masculine bodies, which are hard, lean and slim – at least in their ideal state. It is this that many women measure themselves against (and are certainly measured against in the media – those cellulite free thighs are very like those of boys; we may wonder whose fantasy is at play here, given it is largely men who create this imagery) (71).

Indeed, as Lynda Nead argues, representations of the female nude created by male artists not only testify to patriarchal understandings of female sexuality, they also endorse certain definitions of male sexuality and masculinity (283). In the case of the representation of female superheroes, the patriarchal understanding of female sexuality is not of woman as ‘other’ as may be expected, but of woman as mirror. The tough, strong, and independent female superhero becomes a mirror reflecting male dominance and desire. It is just as Baudrillard states that when woman is annexed to a phallic order she is condemned to a non-existence (104).

Eliminating Castrating Women

Barbara Creed argues in her book The Monstrous Feminine that the vampire’s fanged mouth is a symbol of the castrating vagina dentata (22). The Wetworks team leader, Jackson Dane, has a dream where he is attacked by a vampire of the “Night Tribes”, (the vagina dentata), and in typically feminised fashion is unable to fight back– ‘All he can do is bleed… and take the pain’. In a scene reminiscent of a rape, the vampire stands behind Dane snarling. Dane screams ‘SSS-stop! No more! PLEASE!’ The vampire replies – ‘Giving up already, my pet?’. Dane hopes his newly acquired symbiote will protect him, but it moves aside revealing his flesh for the ‘fanged monster’ (Portacio & Choi, Aug. 1994 23-4). Fortunately for Dane and reader alike, this is only a dream and could never happen for “real”. Still, this sequence demonstrates how the threat of castration could happen, impregnated as it is with the ideas of passivity, feminisation, rape and violence. In fact it says that castration could only happen through the male being passive and overpowered.

For Baudrillard, as with Freud, the fetishised object/phallic body part is caught up in the denial of castration. The phallic/castrating woman is mirrored in Klaus Theweleit’s description of the proletariat women who appeared in Freikorps literature. These rifle-women (flintenweiber) were depicted as cold-blooded killers, often in the company of several men (which obviously made them whores) and in no way could be trusted. Theweleit describes one image of the rifle-women that was so feared– ‘Hair flying, packing pistols, and riding shaggy horses, the women present an image of terrifying sexual potency. It is a phallic, not a vaginal potency that is fantasized and feared’ (73). This phallic potency also translates to the fear that the rifle-women have a concealed weapon (a gun or a grenade) under her skirt. The phrase that is of interest here is the phallic potency that is ‘fantasized and feared’, which plays right into the depiction of the female superhero – fantasised as phallic effigy, feared as the phallic castrating woman. But we cannot have both. They cannot co-exist.

The pervasive threat of castration embodied by the female superhero is eliminated by eliminating the castrating potential of women. This is done in a number of ways. In Wetworks the threat of woman as vagina dentata is eliminated through the symbiote’s ability to seal all orifices of the body (especially the female body) as well as protect the penis with its armouring properties. The threat of the castrating woman as a phallic woman is eliminated when her body is given male body characteristics. When she is phallusised she is eliminated as female by incorporation into a masculine ideal. Although what I am talking about here is not as extreme as Theweleit’s dissertation on the German Freikorps where the soldier seeks to eliminate the female and the threat of castration by reducing her to a ‘bloody mass’, the parallel is more to do with what he states as a ‘dissolution of the body itself, and of the woman as bodily entity’ (196). If the ‘standard’ female body is dissolved, it has no presence, no corporeality, and no representation. If, as Baudrillard theorises, the body has moved into representation, feminine specificity is thus eliminated, and the only representation that remains is that of the masculine.

To give the female a body of her own is to give her representation, to recognise her difference. Denying female representation denies her an existence, thus eliminating her, leaving only the image of the male.

Read Part 3

Reference

Baudrillard, Jean. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage, 
1993.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London & New York: Routledge, 1993.

Nead, Lynda. 'The Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and Sexuality' In Segal, Lynne. & Mary McIntosh (eds). Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate. Virago Press, 1992.

Portacio, Whilce, (w,a). Brandon Choi (w). Wetworks. v1 #1 (Jun. 1994), Image Comics Inc, 1994.

---- Wetworks. v1 #2 (Aug. 1994), Image Comics Inc, 1994.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Volume 1.: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Polity Press, 1987.

Ussher, Jane. Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex. Penguin Books, 1997.