Hello, it’s another theme month. This month I’ve decided to hook my claws into a different author each week, beginning as I ought with dear Edgar.
A million years ago now when I was in middle school I did a project on Edgar Allan Poe and every time I went to write about him the power went out, computers broke, lightning struck; it all felt very clandestine. I was amused and spooked enough I considered telling my teacher that he didn’t approve.
I recently saw some artwork of Ligeia and decided to reread it, which took me elsewhere with Poe since I’ve always had a thing for him. I wrote a short story ten years ago now which got some movement and consideration where I put a fictional Poe on the day of his death, stumbling about. He had a sad death. I think from time to time I ought to rewrite it.
Speaking of Ligeia, a short story of two dead wives and will power over death, Ligeia is given credit for composing ‘The Conquering Worm’ which has long been one of my favorite poems.
Poe’s famous for his morbidity, but his greatest contribution to fiction is the detective story. Poe wrote C Auguste Dupin, the first layman applying considerable intellect and imagination to solving crime as a private individual, first appearing in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. Dupin was a huge inspiration toward later private detectives, namely Sherlock Holmes.
But I called this ‘Edgar Allan Poe was a feminist’ for a reason. Poe wrote repeatedly morbid stories about death, will power over death, and the romanticism of women dying of tuberculosis not because he was someone who fetishized tuberculosis—as was very common at the time—but because he had experienced so much loss of the women in his life.
Poe was raised by his adoptive family, the Allan’s, after his mother’s death from tuberculosis when he was three years old.
When Mrs. Allan also contracted tuberculosis and Mr. Allan began overt efforts to remarry before his wife had died, Edgar Poe viciously fought with him for the respect and rights of his foster mother to the point of being disowned and consequential financial ruin.
Poe continued to lose. Often financially in dire conditions, he struggled, joined the military, took various names and aliases. His first sweetheart married another; his wife (and cousin) Virginia Clemm died aged twenty-four after eleven years of marriage (yikes) of …yes , more tuberculosis. Worse yet, Virginia took five years to succumb to the illness, leaving Poe to watch her struggle and wax and wane in health. His optimism and pessimism hinging on Virginia’s well being, much of his writing and fixation on death in fiction mirror descriptions he wrote of Virginia’s illness in letters to friends and family.
Virginia also was said to resemble many of his female heroines, particularly Ligeia—the much loved wife of the unnamed narrator who possesses the body of the next, less loved wife. Indeed, implying that remarrying would have just been a poor attempt at rekindling feelings that had died with Virginia.
In life, Poe never remarried.
He was known in his lifetime primarily as a critic rather than as a writer, his writing becoming more popular after his death, and he was also known as responsible for several hoaxes. (The Facts in the Case of M Valdemar, a short story about, yep, resisting natural death through mesmerism and willpower, was so convincingly written that many people at the time mistook it for a medical paper, requiring Poe to publicly declare it as a hoax). While known for the horror it’s encased in, a prevailing theme of his work, outside of death itself, was the reverence he had had for the women he’d lost.
These reviews are posted somewhat out of order. From time to time I delve into a specific writer, and I have done so with Vonnegut a few times throughout my life.
I read Slaughter House Five a few times in coursework; in both highschool and a college course on Wartime literature. When Vonnegut died I was in college. I turned, in a panic, to a roommate who reported that she didn’t know who Kurt Vonnegut was. The conversation haunted me then and now. I am not afraid to say he’s my favorite author though I hate that kind of commitment.
Here are the books I’ve reread by Vonnegut this year:
Cat’s Cradle
Man Without a Country
Books kitty-corner to Vonnegut I’ve read this year:
If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?
Love, Kurt
Pity the Reader
I also wrote a story story called “Book on Tape” where I have a conversation presumably with Vonnegut. The character has Vonnegut’s history and some features but it’s not actually about Vonnegut at all. And the character that uses Vonnegut like a mask isn’t based on Vonnegut at all. Vonnegut isn’t in the story for a single moment but it’s sculpted in a way to make the general population think it’s Vonnegut. I did it because it’s a story, much as Vonnegut suggests you write, written to one person and one person only. Only one person can read that short story and know that the conversation I’m having is with them. I’ve been thinking of it as a love letter and am vaguely ashamed I used Vonnegut in that way.
I’m going to be very presumptuous and familiar and upsetting in that this isn’t really about Kurt Vonnegut at all. I think Vonnegut is my favorite writer because he’s saved my life more than once. I have a very blunted view of him as a man, a perhaps inflated view of him as a writer, but I think he provides a familiarity. He writes a bit how my father talks, he reminds me of a friend I miss, I have another friend I miss who had tattoos of Vonnegut’s doodles and who has since passed. Vonnegut, like Edward Gorey, has an indelible mark throughout my life through various touchstones.
And lately I’ve needed him. I’ve needed that amalgam old friend to lean on.
“Love, Kurt” —a collection of love letters collected by his eldest daughter Edith sent to her mother, (prior to her parent’s divorce, of course,) describing a side of the man that isn’t satirical, competing with himself to prove his intelligence, or the presented pose he contrived. It’s full of doodles, his name in bubble letters checkerboarded, hearts, constant self doubts, frustrations, and attempts again and again to put feelings into words that he actively avoided putting into novels. Vonnegut felt any manner of romance ruined a novel because love is so much more important to humans than any plot. Once there was romance in a story the story became the romance, and the story ends when they kiss.
In a commencement speech documented in “If this Isn’t Nice, What Is?” Vonnegut suggests, if you find yourself in marital trouble, the trouble isn’t likely sex or money or how to raise a kid, but that the problem in every marriage is that each partner too often looks at the other and is hurt/disappointed/angered that they are only one person. You want your partner to be the world and you lose sight of the singular person that they are. I read it suggested in an article that the reason his marriage to Jane ultimately failed was because he looked at her as a character he had come up with, and that he had become her character just the same. She had been the one to continuously push him as he repeatedly gave up and pursued a wide variety of day jobs, always thinking that writing would just be a hobby. His success ultimately created the rift between them because they were confronted with the truth that they weren’t the characters they’d been playing for each other.
Admittedly, this is what made me go looking through folders to find old notes and love letters from my partner. If you have any things like that laying around, go find them.
My favorite thing Vonnegut wrote, two things I should say, were highlighted in “Pity the Reader”. The first was a letter written home, the first letter written home after he had been liberated in Dresden. The first letter he had sent home to let everyone know that he was alive. There is something so glib and his voice is already so clear then as he reports what has happened and why he’s been missing and how he’s doing at the moment. It’s so clear and evocative a letter that I have no problem seeing him sitting on the cot writing it.
The second, also in “Pity the Reader” is a long form contract he has written to his wife Jane as she is pregnant, detailing all of the things he is willing to do for her, clean for her, arrange for her, and the amount of swearing he’s going to attempt to refrain from while he does it.
I think in those two pieces you get most of what you need to know about Vonnegut the person, outside of Vonnegut the author. You get bluntness, unapologetic honesty, humor, adoration, and resilience.
In middle school I did a book report on Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers.
I remember only a few things about the book because that was a while ago now. I remember that people were batteries, that it had an unhappy ending, and that there was a female character who preferred dildos to men.
I believe she was meant to be an unlikeable character but that didn’t hit with me, that seems like a Stephen King problem. I read the line about her preferring her vibrator and nodded and said ‘girlboss’.
What’s important about this is that my English teacher pulled me aside to tell me that I needed to diversify my reading. This is a nice way of putting it. That’s generously assuming what he meant. What he told me was to stop reading horror and go read something ‘nice’.
He didn’t think horror or sci-fi were worth discussing academically.
What kind of teacher tells a child punching way above the rest of the class’s weight to stop reading? Well. A lot of them did. I went from not being able to read to reading 600 page books in short order and I assure you: no one gave a shit.
I feel like many people promote these gushy stories about really inspiring teachers and influential figures in their childhood that helped to push them through —-it just has never been my experience.
This is an extremely mild example of that.
I think those gushy stories have appeal because in reality there’s so few of them.
I didn’t like school. I didn’t apply myself. I didn’t see a point. I was always being discouraged for being too different, or weirdly for being too introverted. Nothing kills connection with someone like demanding it. So I stopped trying. School was just something I did for a portion of the day.
What I did, what I thought taught me anything worthwhile, was reading and looking things up for myself.
I envy, in a way, those people who had a mentor or just a helping adult, but I appreciate that I never learned to rely on that, too.
I probably have more horror stories than most when it comes to bad experiences as a child with adults. I didn’t have a good experience with teachers, really, beyond the superficial, until they were called professors.
Maybe it was that I was old enough or mature enough to put aside my absolute distrust. But I had a professor who convinced me to double major, who convinced me to take more literature classes, who came up behind me while I sat in the student center with a cup of coffee, looked over my shoulder, and said “Red heads, huh?”
I’m still embarrassed about that but won’t elaborate because it’s funnier this way.
Because I took that second major, I had a thesis advisor who used to yell at me —you always need a theoretical framework! You can’t just present evidence for itself! Don’t let anyone draw their own conclusions! Treat your reader like you’re the goddamn expert!
It flew in the face of my counseling training.
She made me read dozens of philosophers trying to figure out where I fit into things. I fought her every step of the way, and she fought with me, and I called her ‘The German’. She asked me why I bothered double majoring, she was always on my ass that I should work in the arts and stop with the psych major. She resented psychology as a field and I was treating her field like a hobby. She said I needed to get serious.
Then when I had finished and I stood in front of that room of professors and students and took questions, and did that whole bit, I told her, “I think I finally get Foucault,” and she hugged me.
I think there’s a deeper lesson in what she was getting at than just telling me to root myself in a school. You need your people, you need to define your opinions. A lot of writers don’t know what they’re talking about until they’re done talking. Opinions solidify in the editing process. There’s a great James Baldwin quote about it, one of my favorite quotations about writing at all,
“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.”
It’s why people are drawn to writing. It’s about communicating. The whole process of writing a novel is finding a topic, screaming about it, and then looking around and saying, “You too?”
I’d never really had any opportunity to figure out who else agreed with me, or who else had had my opinions before, because I never had any adult sit with me before and say ‘you don’t know shit’ in a patient way instead of a condescending one. So much of how we talk to children comes from a culture of shame while knowing that harshness accomplishes nothing. There is nothing in life that benefits from being harsh about it.
And that confuses people, people who can’t delineate between aggressive and assertive. That professor never went easy on me, and she called me an idiot more than once, but being gentle and being patient does not mean being easy. And too often people see someone ‘going easy’ on someone else and they feel that they have to step in, to bring the harshness, because that’s all they know. They don’t acknowledge that it just doesn’t work.
Every person I’ve ever talked to who’s been depressed is harsh on themselves and every other person that they come across, even if it’s in the quietest voice. Being kind isn’t about how you say it, it’s about what you’re really saying. People want things wrapped up in these too cushy, too gentle, constant streams of validation or they want punishment and to punish—because they aren’t thinking of the reality of a situation, they’re thinking of shame.
The world is a much better place when you’re actually aware of it.
I wasn’t taught how to read until I was about eight or nine years old.
I went to a private Catholic school and it was in second grade, when she realized that none of us knew what she was talking about, a teacher finally caught on to the fact that we hadn’t been taught anything. She’d have us come in an hour early every morning and a group of us got extra lessons so we could catch up. I don’t know if having no real idea of what I’m doing is a boon or not, ultimately. A lot of people who write or read extensively have these mystical stories about having done it at a very young age, I don’t have that sort of luck. I can’t go backwards and make it happen. People thought I could read because of how I talk, I talk how I do because I spent most of my time with old, old men. Most of them immigrants and traditionally uneducated themselves. I talked how they did. Which tends to be decisively.
My mother played radio for me, trying to keep things on classical stations because she thought it would make me smart. She wasn’t aware that at midnight this radio station that she had constantly going switched over to stock projections. My little brain got blasted with numbers most of the time. Everyone thought I knew how to read because there wasn’t a reason not to.
My oldest kid was showing me their homework and I had no idea what I was being shown. I was never taught grammar. That, I think, is obvious to anyone. It’s not clear if it’s because I was never properly taught it the way most people are or if I’m just vaguely dyslexic, but I can’t spell for a damn. I had a teacher in highschool, I had to explain to her, it just doesn’t make sense to me. Sometimes a word I’ve used a thousand times comes out like some phonetic, new creature. I don’t know any tricks of how to make a sentence. I don’t know how to tell whether a vowel is going to be long or short or whatever the hell. I just write how I talk and rely on meticulously editing it down to make sense after the fact. I ask other people to look at it and tell me what I’m doing.
In fifth grade I used to carry around a copy of Twelfth Night. People thought that it was very smart of me. Shakespeare never bothered me, with weird spellings and grammatical differences or whatever, because I already didn’t know how anything was spelled or metered. It just sounded all right out loud. That’s all I need. And what no one realized was I wasn’t carrying around the book to read it. I carried it around because it was the oldest book we had in our house. It had the date it was bought, sometime in 1897, and I thought that was reason enough to like it. I didn’t know anything or anyone that old.
One of my great grandfathers left behind everything in Italy except a suitcase of some clothes and a copy of Dante’s Inferno. He taught himself English by translating it back and forth. Maybe it’s some generational ingrained memory that that was what I was supposed to do to figure out English. I’m always carrying a book.
I have a confession to make about recent comics. I don’t read them nearly as much as I used to. I tend to get attached to a title, buy a trade, but I’m not showing up on restocking day the way I did. I recently finished all four volumes of I Hate Fairyland by Skottie Young published under Image Comics; before that I finished all the volumes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin by Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, and Tom Waltz written under IDW Publishing. The last time I got hooked into a major title under the big two was Heroes in Crisis by Tom King back in 2018-2019. I think it appealed to the psychologist in me. I had a lot of ups and downs with that title (as did we all, it seems).
I’ve honestly hit a wall with comics because there are so many options, the market is saturated and it can be hard to find the weird independent gems without going completely local. Like my father before me unfortunately, seeing certain properties turned on their head by writers who don’t seem to understand them has me….acting like a sixty-something year old man.
The thing is, I’d like to as obnoxious about comic books as I once was. I want to be in the comic shops. I’ve finally moved past my post-quarantine mindset even as I hesitate and find it inadvisable to be outside like nothing is wrong.
Comics tend to have life cycles as different writers and artists gain and lose the capital, the endorsement of the throne. Ultimately, each character is the property of their editors and the editors decide the course of their life. You have an editor that wants everything turned around, has a vision that doesn’t jive with you, the reader, and you end up with comics burn out.
So something that has….set me off my dinner.
I am a character driven sort of lad. I have a lot of opinions about the course of stories following the actions that make the most sense given a character’s backstory, the cultural atmosphere represented, how that character’s behavior is formed. I also care a lot about character creators, how their own stories and politics and styles fold in.
It is lazy criticism to say that something is out of character. I’ll make the argument, and I’ll also say it’s lazy. It’s privileged nonsense. Those characters are malleable to their writers and their writers are trying something. If it works you call it brilliant, if it doesn’t work you sit and say ‘bah, why fuck this up?’
And it’s therefore not bad writing, it just doesn’t work for me.
I love JLI. I love JLI very, very much. Do I think they threw away some possibly amazing Guy Gardner stories in order to make him more fun, sure. Do I think they hinted at what Guy Gardner was capable of—better than anyone else. A qualm like this isn’t a make-it-or-break-it scenario. You can let characters have fun and still have dynamic, troubled stories, and come out on top. I think sometimes we—the proverbial we—forget that comics are fun.
You wanna fight me on Booster Gold? Fuck. Please. Do.
Enough apologizing.
And enough DC.
Here’s something that truly doesn’t work for me. And it’s something that could have been brilliant.
A brief history on J Jonah Jameson.
There’s a lot, there’s a lot that’s been tweaked and changed over time and no summary, no character’s backstory is ever going to be complete. This is the J Jonah I know. And it’s defined by the line, “No one’s a hero every day of the week.”
This was an invention of the 2003 Behind The Mustache, a story in Spider-Man’s Tangled Web issue 20. I think this is one of the nicer attempts at explaining the ups and downs of J Jonah’s pursuit of Spider-man character assassination since his introduction in March 1963 along with the rest of the Spider-Man title.
I think one of the things which we release too quickly from our reader’s perspective, we suspend the disbelief too completely, is that objectively J Jonah is right. It’s only through dramatic irony that we see him as buffoonish. J Jonah is a person suspicious of costumed vigilantes, with a wealth and breadth of life experience dealing with bad guys and high stakes. I think by inserting the line “No one’s a hero every day of the week” we give him a sympathetic reason for his hard-line stance against people with no accountability.
It used to be that being a war correspondent had been enough, but the times and readership changed. The further we move away from Vietnam and Korea and World War II, the harder it was to understand a character deeply suspicious of a ‘nice guy’ with unchecked power.
A huge problem which Marvel writers often address is the issue of accountability and I think it’s one of the chief selling points of Marvel vs. DC plotlines. The Civil War storyline in 2006-2007 addressed it head on—and caused a lot of friction among the fans. It essentially took a polarized society and reflected a mirror back on itself of how these tensions play out within the Marvel microcosm. Now, of course, not everyone was on board with Marvel society in chaos and it was all retconned and conscripted into turning out fine (it uh….was not to improve neatly for actual society).
The Behind the Mustache story is essentially this: J Jonah’s biological father is MIA, his foster father/uncle David Jameson is a decorated war hero—and deeply abusive of his wife and son. “No one’s a hero every day of the week,” and “Even the real heroes can’t keep it up all of the time,” are J Jonah’s core beliefs–ones which a younger generation could connect with more easily than wartime perspectives.
This story, adding to the mythos in this way, was brilliant. It was brilliant for a reason Stan Lee always held dear–Spider-Man, in particular, is a kid. He was written and designed to appeal to youth. Not just as a sidekick, but as the star, someone on a constant journey up.
J Jonah, in contrast, isn’t that kid anymore.
J Jonah has several issues in Spider-Man titles in which he is handed the baton and Spider-Man is barely present; namely, Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man # 80 (1983), Web of Spider-Man #52 (1989), and Spider-Man’s Tangled Web #20 (2003). J Jonah is considered, or was considered such an important character that writers consulted Stan Lee and asked him to come out of retirement to script the marriage of J Jonah Jameson to Marla Madison.
It’s because of something Marvel does that other publishing houses do on a smaller, less visible scale.
For instance, I was really pleased with the Loki show that Marvel Studios produced for making Owen Wilson have a mustache. Without the mustache, he couldn’t have been Mobius M. Mobius, because without the mustache it wouldn’t be Mark Gruenwald. September 1987, Mark Gruenwald became Marvel’s Executive Editor. It only made sense when the Time Variance Agency was created—first in a four shot series in Fantastic Four—that all of the TVA agents be clones of Gru. He was in charge of continuity for the whole Marvel Universe, inside and out.
Writers particularly in the 80s were very protective of J Jonah storylines, a tradition that waxes and wanes.
J Jonah was bullied as a child and beat up his bullies. He married Joan, father of John Jonah III. He was a correspondent to the Howling Commandos, a correspondent in Korea. He became a widower, used grief to focus on publication, and eventually became the owner of the Daily Bugle—making good on his boastful, loud decrees that someday it would be his name on everything.
He was greedy, belligerent, stubborn, demanding of his employees, but with a reputation for integrity. I think Sam Raimi struck on it nicely, it’s one of my favorite parts of Spider-Man (2002). Even being strangled by the Green Goblin, which, I’d listen to Willem Dafoe– JK Simmon’s J Jonah says he doesn’t know where the pictures of Spider-Man come from.
J Jonah is a long time crusader for civil rights, campaigns for labor and mutant rights, is repeatedly shown to be disgusted by racism. There are multiple times in which J Jonah protects Spider-man, no matter the personal cost.
Without fleshing out every character development and gut punch of more than fifty-nine years of comics, the long and the short of it is this:
J Jonah doesn’t feel protected to me the way that he was. In people’s need to reinvent and do something fresh with the character he’s gotten increasingly away from who he is.
J Jonah Jameson is Stan Lee. Stan Lee said, “Grumpier” though his artists might have had vague shrugs about that.
Spider-Man writers Jerry Conway and Tom DeFalco agreed that J Jonah was the closest Stan Lee came to a self-insert character, a surprisingly honest one, with Conway stating “Stan is a very complex and interesting guy who both has a tremendously charismatic part of himself and is an honestly decent guy who cares about people, he also has this incredible ability to go immediately to shallow. Just, BOOM, right to shallow. And that’s Jameson.” He went on to say that he read and wrote J Jonah in Stan Lee’s voice, at least one time directly quoting a speech Stan Lee gave the art department into a Spider-man comic.
It puts a different spin to imagine the boastful, demanding, ‘get me pictures of spider-man’ when you know it was literal.
Spider-man was one of Stan Lee’s favorite properties. He was quoted in 2018 as saying that Spider-Man was the most like him because “nothing ever turns out 100 OK”, though two years later in 2010 when asked about J Jonah he would say “You caught me… I thought, if I were a grumpy, irritable man, which I am sometimes, how would I act? And that was it. So, you got me.”
Spider-man was aspirational. It was something Stan Lee referenced back to constantly. It was something he talked about in interviews as changing the course of comic writing. But mostly, Stan Lee liked Spider-man. Spider-man was someone relatable, someone he cared about.
After 2002 I remember him giving an anecdote in an interview. For the 1989 Batman movie premiere, Bob Kane had picked him up in a limousine and outside the theater, Bob Kane had told him something to the effect of, ‘You don’t see Spider-Man up there, do you?’
Stan Lee was grinning, so happy to tell you that Bob Kane was an asshole to him, and that Batman (1989) had made 411.6 million.
The Joker is a domestic terrorist and pragmatist. He engages in practices that require a great deal of planning, cunning, and technical knowledge which he does not personally possess. And so– he relies on armies of henchmen whom he controls using fear, greed, and the concept of being unpredictable; disrupting social order. The Joker is here to appeal to your hatred of status quo. He weasels himself in to different social spheres, in comics and wherever you see a meme floating around, because he appeals to people by pointing out what makes them unhappy.
If you share a Joker meme, you’re helping him out. He’s become his own sort of virus.
Or, at least, this modern Joker has. The original Jerry Robinson/ Bob Kane Joker was buffoonish and lacked depth. He was a mobster with a gimmick. But we’ve built on that lack of depth to show how emptiness can become madness.
But the Joker is not unemotional. The Joker can’t be a by-the-book sociopath because the Joker does care. He doesn’t care about the topics that he panders to; the Joker doesn’t care about society or entropy or status quo. The Joker cares about curating his image. Without his image the Joker doesn’t exist. He doesn’t have a consistent backstory, name– his mystery lends to his terror, he is completely malleable to what he thinks will garner him the most validation for the persons that he has created.
And that makes him a narcissist.
Pop psychology is really up the ass of narcissism right now. I can’t go a few minutes without seeing someone accuse another person online of being a narcissist or some jilted lover tagging their ex in an article about narcissism or hearing some kid explain that he’s like this because his dad is such a narcissist. So I want to talk about what a narcissist really is.
First of all, it’s very easy to accuse and argue with someone that they are a narcissist because narcissism is ego syntonic—meaning that by the nature of narcissism, a narcissist cannot recognize if they are a narcissist or not. So it is easy to accuse someone of narcissism and then walk away, because no matter what they argue back it reinforces the accuser. It’s a fun little logic loop.
That’s one of the reasons that understanding true narcissism gets muddled by buzzfeed articles about your shitty ex.
The Joker relies on an image of ‘expect the unexpected’ but is extremely predictable. In fact, the greatest downfall of the Joker, the reason that he can be thwarted, is that he assumes his public image to be true. If he convinces enough people of who he is and what he stands for, he can convince himself. When he fails in something, he drags himself into intense depressions—Batman the Animated Series showed this well; Mark Hamill’s Joker, morose, sitting in his lair and taking his narcissistic injury out on Harley Quinn when a plan doesn’t meet his high standards.
A narcissistic injury is any event which a narcissist interprets as being disruptive to their sense of self. Their sense of self being wholly externalized, anything which upsets the image they contrive can cause harm. And it may be valid—by definition it does cause them significant pain and strife; but that does not mean that the injury is factual. More often than not it’s imagined. This does not stop the narcissist from retaliation, to the narcissist the perceived event is extremely real.
When a narcissist acts out against someone, they are convinced that they are acting in the right. Every action which they take is justified because it is in service of staving off the hurt of a narcissistic injury or in the support of the narcissist’s self image.
By the nature of existing, Batman represents a narcissistic injury to the Joker. There is no consistent backstory, there is no reason; but the Joker feels that there is. It is always the Joker who is insisting that he has been done wrong by society and that bringing harm to Batman will quell that injury. This can be because of what he perceives Batman to represent, it could be because Batman refuses to get the joke—whatever the injury is, it is worth killing Batman and anyone else over.
And confronted on that, the Joker is evasive. He doesn’t have a single tragic backstory to whip out and justify his actions. Heath Ledger’s Joker’s multiple stories about his scars was accurate. It’s possible that not even the Joker knows why he’s doing what he’s doing.
A character yelling ‘Actually, this was what I wanted all along!’ does not a Xanatos gambit make.
If anything, the Joker is compelling because he is pretty bad at it.
The only reason that the Joker succeeds in terrorizing Gotham is because it is extremely easy to terrorize Gotham. He is able to pull the attention of Harley Quinn, the reason he can convince the police in Gotham is that he appeals to their own unhappiness and their wish—the belief that exists in all society, that there is a reason behind everything. Joker falsely claims to be deeper than he is, that there is a secret plot, a master plan; there isn’t.
There’s a poignant part in The Killing Joke, as we try to piece together The Joker’s psyche as an audience, where Batman stagnates on the idea that he really knows nothing about The Joker.
Throughout the Batman Beyond story lines, particularly the Return of the Joker arc; as well as Jason’s Red Hood origin arc (and a few million other instances; almost especially the Killing Joke), these are stories not about The Joker but about Bruce Wayne. The Joker is only a mirror, a vessel, for talking about Bruce Wayne.
The Joker, or Captain Plot Armor, is a puddy character. He is meant to be molded to the needs and whims of whatever writer picks him up. This is how he sometimes becomes spliced with The Red Hood arc, Joe Chill, Carmine Falcone, various hitmen like the dude who killed Carl Beaumont for Valestra… He has the ultimate plot armor because he has true anonymity—something Bruce Wayne has never had.
And when you explore that, when you as a comic book writer try to give him a reason, you run into the same wall as all of the other Gothamites: there isn’t one.
Look, everyone wants Captain America to be happy and laid. Ever since Chris Evans called Cap a virgin, a lot of people have scoffingly offered their chosen ship and character dynamics are proof positive that the Sentinel of Liberty gets his boyshorts ripped off. This of course applying strictly to the MCU. So I wanted to spend some time talking about one of the few canonically homosexual characters, one of the first homosexual characters openly acknowledged by Marvel starting in 1985, generated within the Captain America title. That would of course be Steve Rogers’ best friend since childhood, his one time sidekick who he seemed to be constantly saving, the man who calls him Stevie, saved him from bullies as a child, and who he jumps to the aid of no matter what hiatus has taken place in their friendship.
Obviously, it’s Arnie Roth.
When MCU revised the history of Bucky Barnes, in a lot of ways they injected Bucky into Arnie’s role, lending to why it’s so easy to assume more of Buck and Cap’s relationship within the film franchise. Arnie is canonically gay but also merging the two characters makes for a much longer and more intense narrative between Buck and Cap as it fuses two vital relationships in Steve’s life.
Bucky and Steve have always had a long standing history of coming under scrutiny as a couple. When Ed Brubaker revised Bucky’s origin story, it cast Bucky into the protector role for Steve Rogers. It also aged Buck up significantly so as to avoid what the Comics Code had once deemed inappropriate bonding between a man and young boy. By fusing his loyal sidekick with his gay best friend, the MCU kinda set themselves up for #givecaptainamericaaboyfriend
Arnie is important. He is an often forgotten character worth noting because he was representation for LGBTQ+ characters, shown struggling with internalized homophobia, in a long term committed relationship. And his character was introduced in 1985. In the days where AIDS was still occasionally referred to as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) (both terms coined in 1982). HIV was not a term used until 1986. Not only that, but Arnie is anti-stereotype to the time. He is neither sexually promiscuous, a drug user, nor over sexualized. He’s just some dude.
Arnie may be bumbling, old, but he’s an everyman. In many ways he’s starkly un-Bucky. Most importantly Arnie provides a concrete example of a homosexual character who is subtle. The fact that he is gay is never the point. And Steve doesn’t berate the point, either.
These storylines set a monumental precedent for LGBTQ+ characters in comic books. Arnie is treated very delicately given the time in which his character was developed.
When his sexuality is forced to the forefront, it’s often a heartbreaking narrative on homophobia.
But most importantly, Cap reacts to homophobia, canonically, like this:
I know a lot about comic books. I recently decided that for the month of July, since I enjoyed doing the Friday reviews themed, I was going to dip my toe into something I have tried very hard not to. Which is taking about comic books on the internet.
These aren’t going to be proper reviews so much as a couple essays about comic book material.
Which I am–as always–so looking forward to being told I’m wrong about.
All media are the result of their writers, their publishing companies, their political climate, their contractual obligations–none so obviously in recent years as those tied to film production companies.
I’m coming down from my mythology month by talking instead about what Denny O’Neil referred to as the American Mythology.
I can’t recall the source of the interview, it was ages ago that I saw it, but Denny O’Neil upon becoming the head editor of all Batman titles referred to himself as the custodian of an American mythology.
So, on the heels of talking about Antigone, it only makes sense I would talk about a different princess.
I’ve threatened to do this for ages when people chuckle nervously after asking me what I thought of WW84 and my eyes apparently turn white and start glowing.
In the past I’ve been deeply apologetic on behalf of the DCCU.
I will have to sing the sweet cries of Doom Patrol or Peacemaker some other night.
WW84 is a movie so deeply disappointing I had to write about it.
The good:
Pedro Pascal’s entire character arc. I would not cut a single scene. It was such an interesting and dynamic way to introduce magic into the unnecessarily gritty DC live action franchises and it’s true to WW writing. It had such potential for wonderment. From the instant his character wished to become the wishing well himself, I was immediately hooked into ‘oh shit, they’re doing DC-weird.’ I expected the character to be a Trump-esque joke and he was legitimately the most endearing, human character.
Kristen Wiig as Barbara/Cheetah was excellent, though I was a little bummed that she wasn’t utilized more in the final act. But the characterization, the scenes that she was in, all felt real. When they were playing villain music over her beating up the mugger, it was big ‘why are you booing, she’s right’ energy. I could have done with less establishment scenes of her being super strong. Like. I got it in one. She has super powers now. Time could have been shaved here. But Kristen Wiig was good and I didn’t mind seeing the cgi cats.
Barbara taking the moral high ground over Diana, repeatedly. Good. It was good. Barbara saying ‘I’m not going to let you hurt this man’ etc, and Diana being like ‘well, we could just kill him’ or Barbara saying ‘You want me to renounce my magic amulet wish, but you won’t do it?’ Good. GOOD.
Steve Trevor falls into multiple categories. Steve Trevor was….good? Chris pine was good. The concept that he was what she accidentally wished for from the stone, and getting to have fun acclimating him to the 80s as a newly rematerialized dude was fun. Way too long. I can only look at Chris Pine being slack jawwed so much. We get it, he’s from the past.
Gal Gadot is literally a better actress if Chris Pine is there. Her line deliveries are more smooth, their chemistry is great.
The meh:
The Amazon’s representing truth/valuing truth over success. This is the more enduring theme of Wonder Woman. It’s why she has the lasso of truth. It’s Lex Luthor saying, ‘Superman seeks to pull out the best in us. Batman seeks to curb the worst. You…seek the truth.’
It was handled clumsily. A lot of the Diana a-plot felt badly edited while the villains b-plot was amazing, and that’s the ultimate summary of where everything in this movie went wrong.
Asteria’s armor. This is a grey zone between the good and the bad, because they clearly cut this entire story line for time and just….she just…..she just fucking had it in her closet. She just..she just fucking…’hey what’s that?’ ‘oh, it’s the armor of the most powerful amazon ever, don’t worry about it’. They didn’t even call it the golden eagle armor. Like
It’s an established thiiiing. I feel like there was an entire goddamn storyline here that just got cut for time because they didn’t want to spend too long on mythology elements, and that’s why this movie fails. Hard. They’re afraid to talk about mythology….in a Wonder Woman movie….If they had played up the importance of Asteria and the armor, the pay off would have been good. Instead, ‘oh, this old thing. M’not gonna wear it now when it’s plot relevant. Gonna wait till later for no discernible reason’. I want the Asteria plot.
The bad:
Why did…uhhhhh…why did we do that very long sequence in Thymiscyra to teach us about the importance of truth and not cheating and like…not mention ASTERIA and her sacrifice? Instead they were like ‘let’s have a long ass sequence, point at a statue of ASTERIA, and not tell you what she did.’ Why…uhhhh….why beat us over the head with a clumsily written theme and leave out the super important sacrifice altogether? When they talked about ASTERIA later it wasn’t like ‘oh yeah, that lady’ because we knew nothing about her, but we do know that Diana ran real fast at 10 years old.
Oh, and hey, while we’re here, WHERE DID SHE GET THE ARMOR? HAS SHE BEEN LOOKING FOR ARTIFACTS? IS THAT WHY SHE BEFRIENDS BARBARA, TO CONTINUE HUNTING? IS THAT WHY SHE’S WORKING AT THE MUSEUM? IT SURE WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO KNOW.
The random ‘hey look, we’re in the 80s. Haha, everyone is inconsiderate and bad, cause 80s!’, whoops, mini montage of WW saving people. Yeah. Cut it. Cut it? Cut it the fuck out. Everything about it felt heavy handed, top long, and stupid.
We also followed this mcguffin too closely? Like instead of following a consistent character in the beginning to establish a frame of reference, we talked almost exclusively about the rock.
The first ‘oh no’ I had was Barbara/Diana at dinner. That was so very clearly a date. I chocked up Gal Gadot being awkward to it being a date, though I was to later decide it was because that is how she acts. Maybe that’s how she thinks people talk? How did Kristen Wiig have good chemistry with Gal Gadot but not the reverse? Even when they introduce Steve to Barbara, Steve says he’s Diana’s ‘old friend’ and Barbara immediately, defensively, says ‘well I’m her new friend.’ Where the FUCK was my sapphic arc? Why did it die there? It’s never acknowledged again? And hey! Barbara’s smart! Steve said he’s a pilot and she goes ‘pilot’ and looks aside CAUSE SHE KNOWS HE’S A WISH. Because SHE IS A SMART AND GOOD CHARACTER. Barbara’s entire arc was wanting to be more like Diana and admiring Diana and wanting to be with Diana and it just….stops? Not even a ‘you rejected me?’
That poor man that the ghost of Steve Trevor possesses. Why couldn’t they just rematerialize Steve? Why did they disrupt this man’s life?
FUCK YOUR INVISIBLE JET. I’d like the invisible jet sequence more if you didn’t spent so much time showing us Chris Pine’s tonsils. This movie actually suffers from way too much Chris Pine. Is that a thing? Was that a thing before? Nothing …happened? It was him trying on outfits, then him going to museums, then him stealing a goddamn jet to go to CAIRO so they could be weirdly racist for a long fight sequence that had little payoff both in plot and action.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT ENTIRE SCENE IN CAIRO? I looked away for one (1) second and they were all in tanks??? And then there were children playing soccer in the road IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT? So we had to stop the weird tank thing and shoot a bullet from the TANK so she could ride it to catch the children from being run over by tanks?? And then? Like? None of this was good, well choreographed, or necessary. It was all literally so Diana could have somewhere to go in the invisible jet, be weird about middle easterners, and then get vaguely injured so they could say ‘oh noooo having your wish is diminishing your powers’. This whole thing could have been done LITERALLY ANY OTHER WAY. THIS WAS THE POINT AT WHICH I STARTED HATING THIS MOVIE.
Diana has to give up her wish-Steve to get her powers back, good. A good concept. Sacrifice. Would have tied nicely into that ASTERIA PLOTLINE that we didn’t get for some reason. She might have put on the super powerful armor THEN when her powers were diminished, but didn’t, for some reason. Wish-Steve saying ‘you don’t have to say goodbye, I’m already gone’ nice. Nice. Would have been a nice end to act 2. Sad. Except that it was undercut by web slinging the lasso into the sky and finding out that she knows how to fly now, a thing which receives a lot of visual but no verbal mention?
WONDER WOMAN CAN FLY, I DON’T DISPUTE THAT, I’VE READ A LOT OF COMICS, BUT WHY DID SHE NEED TO SOOOO MUCH? IT ADDED NOTHING EXCEPT AS A CALL BACK TO HOW SHE FEELS ABOUT STEVE. SHE COULD HAVE DONE IT ANY OTHER WAY AT ANY OTHER TIME. THE PAY OFF FELL COMPLETELY FLAT. And it lasted 27 YEARS.
Overall, this movie was so many interesting ideas cut together HORRENDOUSLY.
The best parts,
My compassion for Chris pine when he says ‘well shit, Diana’ as she fails to prepare him or the audience for what’s happening.
So why is this dumpster fire something I feel the need to talk about?
The last book that I reviewed was Antigone Rising. In it, Helen Morales does discuss the Amazonian princess in question made a UN ambassador after the success of Wonder Woman (2017). But also, she discusses something which our culture and which Greek and Romans loved to do before us: Killing Amazons. The most popular subject for Ancient Greek pottery, after Heracles, is dead Amazons. Amazons were used as cautionary tales in many respects: here is what we do to women who disobey our gender norms.
Wonder Woman is a reimagined Amazonian princess which flies in the face of violence against women. She avenges the injustices that her sisters have faced for all of Amazonian literature. And what she represents is truth.
What I really want to talk about, what I wish we could see in a Wonder Woman film or franchise, is content like the August 1998 one-shot Wonder Woman: The Once and Future Story.
The plot revolves around two archeologists in Ireland uncovering Grecian tablets and asking Wonder Woman to translate the inscribed story. Her translation follows the forgotten history of the Ephesians and their princess, Artemis, as she leads a revolt against Theseus in retaliation for numerous acts of violence including the abduction, rape and enslavement of her mother. The heart of the story, while describing abuses against women in the ancient world, is that one of the archeologists is being abused by her husband.
Wonder Woman is forced to confront her own privilege; domestic violence is alien and repulsive to her, she has difficulty understanding–while other characters are so inoculated that they are able to dismiss it. Wonder Woman comes in to rescue, obviously, but is ultimately shaken at how systemic the problem is and doesn’t know how to proceed or why she was fortunate enough to be spared.
That is the correct way to write a Wonder Woman story. It does not need to be so heavy or dark as depicting women being slaughtered or staging an uprising, it doesn’t even need to address a strictly feminist issue. But it must be about using Wonder Woman to uncover a truth.
This is where Wonder Woman 2017 succeeded, why it succeeded. The young Diana is convinced that the Godkiller is a physical weapon, she has to discover that it is herself. Diana believes Ares’ deceptions and ultimately uncovers him as the primary villain.
Very importantly–one of the minor villians, Dr. Isabel Maru, is wearing a mask. I can wax poetic about this quite a lot. The female counterpoint among the villains is visually obscured because her appearance doesn’t please the men in power around her. It was flagged as abelist, it’s shitty, and that’s kind of the point. In interviews, discussing Dr. Poison, director Patty Jenkins referred to the injuries to the character’s face as self inflicted. Each element of what Dr. Poison represents, from her sadism to her callous indifference for herself, places her among the Nazi forces as ‘one of the good ones’–the only female in Nazi command. She is ultimately subservient, provided she isn’t interrupted from engaging in the experimentation she cares about. She does not care about the broader consequences of her actions, she celebrates them.
She is meant to be the counterweight to Diana. Diana is ‘one of the good ones’ not because she follows along with what the men tell her but because she is defiant in pursuing truth, not self interest.
I made mention above referencing a panel between in Dark Knights Death Metal (Nov 2020 issue) by Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo,
Aliactast 
You must be logged in to post a comment.