Reappropriating Symbols

I took an arcitecture course in college, and had to do a report on a local building. I opted for a local church, primarily because it was literally across the street from the apartment I was in at the time. The pastor there was friendly, and provided a tour. I quickly noticed, though, a number of swastikas embedded in the tile floor near the alter. Probably seeing my gaze, he proactively responded that, historically, the swastika was an icon with very positive connotations and can be found in religious texts and artifacts dating back thousands of years. “Being with higher self” is sometimes given as the literal translation of the word “swastika.” It was perfectly normal and appropriate to use swastikas in churches built before the 1900s.

Adolf Hitler developed a specific version of the swastika for use with the Nazi party. It’s black and on a 45° angle, set in a white circle which is then set on a red field. Despite the specific usage, though, swastikas of any sort have come to symbolize Nazism and white supremacy. In part, this is due to the attrocities committed under the Nazi regime, but it’s also partly because Hitler was an expert propagandist and used his swastika EVERYWHERE. Not only were the banners and flags all about at the rallies, but it was clearly on the bicep of evey, single Nazi soldier. Sure, many countries incorporate their flag as part of their uniform, but Hitler’s swastika was exceptionally easy to read and very distinctive. It didn’t take long for Nazi ideals to seep over into other forms of the swastika as well.

This is the notion of symbol reappropriation. That an individual or group is able to take an existing symbol and bring enough identity to it, that the symbol’s original meaning is subsumed. It’s of course not limited to visual icons like the swastika; it can happen with textual icons (i.e. words*) and broader icons like Superman and Batman. The question becomes: when does it make sense to do that with regards to characters?

Batman’s a good example. The character, as he was known in the 1950s and early ’60s was very banal. A generic superhero who was pretty interchangeable with any other DC superhero. The only real difference was the costume; they all saved the planet from kooky aliens and used strained logic to solve crimes. And they did so for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. Batman essentially represented everything bad that happened to the comic industry in the wake of Seduction of the Innocent. Despite the “New Look” Batman introduced in 1964, the 1966 television’s popularity took hold of the character’s image. It was then in 1969 when Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams deliberately tried to re-image the character into more of a dark detective.

Not that sales shot up (they didn’t) but what I’m talking about isn’t necessarily related to sales. What I’m saying is simply that they weren’t happy with what the icon of Batman represented, and deliberately went about trying to change that. The problem O’Neil/Adams ran into relative to that was that Detective Comics got the barest fraction of an audience that the TV show did, so their work wasn’t seen by everyone who “needed” to see it. Which is why we got “Bif! Pow! Wham!” headlines in newspaper articles about comics for YEARS afterwards.

Of course, that’s OFFICIAL reappropriation. It’s entirely possible to do the same thing more surreptiously for older characters that are more in the realm of public domain. How many times has Dracula been reappropriated over the years? Or, for a more complex version, how has Mr. Sulu’s image changed since George Takai took up a more flamboyant public image for himself?

Just because an symbol — whether it’s a chracter like Batman, an icon like the skull and crossbones, or a word like “otaku” — means something to you right now, that doesn’t mean that it has to continue to mean that same thing.

* The notion of “Big Brother” is one of the more innocuous ideas to come out of George Orwell’s 1984. Read the book, if you haven’t — he spends a good amount of time talking about how words get deliberately redefined to mean the opposite of what they used to me. See also: Fox News and Republicans.

Peter Linklage

• Marc Tyler Nobleman walks readers through the cover design process for Bill the Boy Wonder.
• Kirk Taylor talks a bit about helping to work on Bazooka Joe and His Gang.
• Jim Shelly wonders why do people quit reading comics?
  

Runnin’ Down A Dream

“Runnin’ Down a Dream” is the title of a Tom Petty song released in July 1989. The video for the song was almost entirely animated and was a clear homage to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland.

The video features Petty and characters that bear more than a passing resemblence to Flip and Dr. Pill. Several of the animation sequences harken back to specific events in the strip, and the giant mosquitos seem to be a nod to McCay’s own animation efforts. (Which I talked about a bit back here.)

I’m curious, though, if anyone’s gone back and tried to annotate the video, finding the original strips that are referenced. I’ve read all the Nemo strips at one point, and many sequences here look very familiar but others only vaguely so. I don’t have nearly the time/energy to try a research project like this at the moment, but I certainly would not mind seeing someone give it a shot. Any McCay enthusiasts out there with a bit of free time?

Two Quick Newspaper Anecdotes

We were visiting a friend’s place near downtown Chicago yesterday. She’s in a townhouse in an upscale, fairly hip, urban area. As we were walking to her place, I spotted a copy of the day’s Chicago Tribune on the sidewalk. Not litter, but a copy that was delivered to someone’s doorstep. Still in a clear, plastic bag along a busy sidewalk. This was pretty late in the afternoon, mind you; late enough in fact that the paper had already begun yellowing in what little sunlight there was there. The paper was still there when we left an hour or so later.

What struck me was that the paper had clearly been sitting there all day with hundreds, possibly thousands, of people walking by. And no one — zero people at all — thought it was worth swiping.

When I was in college, very few people (well, my peers at any rate) had extra cash for newspapers and magazines. But we still had enough interest and respect for those media that when we happened across a free paper — one that was left behind in a toilet stall or one that sat on somebody’s front porch too long* — we scooped it up and it got passed around to a few friends. Today, everyone just ignores the paper as if it was just more litter. A crumpled McDonald’s bag or an emptied can of Red Bull.

This evening, I happened across a copy of today’s Chicago Sun-Times. Not unlike how I came across them in college, this paper was left behind at a booth in a fast food restaurant. So I flipped through it while eating my burrito. Now, granted, the Sun-Times is not as reputable a paper as the Tribune but there was absolutely zero in that paper that I felt was worth my time, even considering that I was also using that same time to eat! The process of turning the pages, only to find page after page of worthless tripe was mind-numbing. I tried reading, I think, two actual articles, but couldn’t finish them because they were so vapid as to insult anyone with enough intelligence to pass the mirror test.** Even the comics, which surprisingly did NOT include any of those old legacy strips that stopped being funny 50 years ago, were crap. It was a free newspaper and I still felt I overpaid for it!

We all know that newspapers have had problems trying to keep up with the internet. The web provides a much faster, easier, more efficient way to get news and comics. I don’t need to go into the details about all that. But I find it stunning that newspaper publishers still seem oblivious to this. I mean, they must still be making SOME money; they’d all have gone bankrupt by now otherwise. But to continue doing exactly the same thing that they’ve been doing, when that’s clearly not working, seems willfully ignorant to the point of stupidity.

Look, I know I’m not a newspaper man and I haven’t studied the newspaper business enough to provide anything I would even claim as a possible solution. But just killing time by doing the sam-ol’-same-ol’ while you earn less and less each passing year seems like a sure-fire way to write your own obituary.

* I think the general rule of thumb we followed was that if you were too busy or lazy to pick your paper up by noon, you either weren’t home or weren’t interested. Yes, this was totally rationalizing on our part.

** No, not the psychological study to see if animals/children have enough self-awareness to recognize themselves in a mirror. The physical test of holding up a mirror to your face and seeing if your breath fogs it up.

Mother’s Day Comics

Running a bit later than I’d like today, but apparently Mother’s Day is a popular holiday for cartoonists. Here are the related cartoons I found on the subject today…

Seuling On Mike Douglas

Richard Pini posted this a while back and I’m really surprised it hasn’t made the rounds yet. It’s a ten minute clip of the Mike Douglas Show from 1977 featuring Phil Seuling. He posted it because Wendy Pini makes an appearance towards the end as Red Sonja, but there’s a lot of other fascinating stuff there.

There are several things I’d like to point out here, some more obvious than others. First is the somewhat obligatory “Holy cow! He’s just riffling through landmark collector issues like they were right off the shelf!” and semi-related “ONLY $1500?!?” With that out of the way, though, I’d like to point out that the stack of comics Seuling has on his lap is not insignifcant. Looks like maybe 50 books or so. But he’s able to pull out issues relevant to the immediate discussion exceptionally quickly, even though they’re all over the map chronologically. Which suggests to me that he’s actually put some serious thought into what he wanted to say, and the order in which he wanted to say it. Or at the very least, he’s got the books arranged alphabetically, knows exactly what he has with him and is able to jump through the stack so smoothly that the camera never really picks up his digging through them. Either way, he was clearly well prepared for this.

Next, listen to Jamie Farr. Farr was, of course, well known for playing Max Klinger on MASH, which had been running for about five years when this clip was filmed. That’s an interesting bit of timing, I think, because Klinger’s character was, at that time, still basically a one-note joke — he wore women’s clothing to try to get out of the army. For the purposes of the show, he was a clown; the more dramatic aspects of his character wouldn’t really develop for another few years. But listen to what Farr says during this interview. He is surprisingly well-versed in comic history, not only pulling out the names of relatively obscure characters without even thinking about it, but he also tries to goad Seuling into talking about the legal battle between DC and Fawcett, a battle which had been over and done with for about 25 years by that point. He also makes the comparison between comics and storyboards for films.

Comics in 1977 were generally looked down upon, and I give the folks at the Mike Douglas Show a lot of credit for treating Seuling with such respect. They’re surprised a grown man still reads comic books, but they don’t present him as sideshow freak example of arrested development or anything. Part of that is, I suspect, because Seuling carries himself so well. He’s confident, thoughtful, intelligent, well-spoken, and well-groomed. Farr is an interesting contrast in that he’s almost literally falling out of his chair in excitement; there’s more than a little stereotypical fanboy behavior going on. BUT, I think Farr could get away with it precisely because of his popularity as Klinger. The character, as I said, was a clown at that time and Farr could exude his real fanboyish enthusiasm for comics precisely because that culturally fell into the same category as cross-dressing on television.

I have to wonder how Farr might’ve reacted differently if MASH had been a few years later into the run, after Klinger gave up wearing dresses and became a more serious character. Of what Farr’s agent would’ve said if he behaved as he did here.

More Than I Can Read

I like to take advantage of free comics. Not just the ones from Free Comic Book Day, but somebody’s cast-offs or giveaways or any other promo books. That “#1s Promotion” that Marvel recently did with comiXology? I went ahead and downloaded all 700-some books, even though I’m pretty sure I won’t read most of them. You might be asking yourself why I would do that?

The first possible answer would, I think, stem from a collector-type mentality. “He who dies with the most comics wins” or some such. And, to a degree, that would make sense in strictly a physical world environment. But it doesn’t really click in a digital space. Especially one like comiXology where users are basically just renting the comics, and don’t have the ability to store local copies. If comiXology — a single company that’s trying to make a profit — goes under, the books in that already emphemeral (i.e. digital) collection vanish.

No, the answer in my case is the same as why I’ve never gotten rid of any of my comics. I use them for reference.

The first piece of comics-related writing I got paid for was back in 1997. It was a series of issue reviews of Marvel’s Heroes Reborn comics. The angle that I took in writing them was to first summarize and review the stories on their own merits, but then also go back and put them all in perspective relative to the original characters’ origins. To do that, I made heavy use of my own collection, doubling-checking how characters were introduced and in what capacity. I wasn’t thinking it at the time, but I’m sure there was a heavy subconscious influence from The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

Actually, much of my writing in general has been influenced by guys like Peter Sanderson, as I’ve stated before. It tends to be research-heavy, and often that research goes back to obscure nuggets that nobody else besides me finds memorable in the slightest. And even my memories on those pieces tends to be vague, which is why I then like to go back and confirm that I know what I’m talking about.

In some of the things I’ve written, I can recall a stack of comics three feet tall sitting right next to my computer as I kept everything I might need handy while I was working. A couple times, I had five or six issues I was cross-referencing simultaneously and had to spread them all out on the floor so I could flit from one panel to panel across multiple books.

In most of those cases, I was writing based on what I already had in my collection. I didn’t (generally) go out and buy comics just for the research. So I hang on to what I’ve got, and I take advantage of free books when they’re available. Because I might need to refer to them in something I’m working on. Granted, I might never have a need to write about Arachia’s current Fraggle Rock comics, but if I do, I’ve got some old background material from Marvel’s attempt at the license ready to pull out.