Tlönista

I’ve been sitting on this one a while, as you can tell. Broken up into parts for your convenience.

1 “Angoulême is old, old, old”
2 General overview of demographics, genres, comix culture and industry in France
3 A very short glossary
4 Playing the bass
5 Gatecrashing
6 Notes on the panels
7 Schtroumpfs noirs
8 Party in the alt comix tent
9 Readers on the lawn of the Hôtel de Ville
10 “Je tombe amoureuse”

Continue reading ‘Angoulême’

Alan Moore, arguably one of the greatest comic-book authors of all time, brings new depth and subtlety to every genre he works in, whether it’s historical fiction, horror, dystopia, superhero stories, or plain old porn. His bibliography reads like a list of Graphic Novels You Must Read Before You Die. He makes Xine use big words like “intertextuality” and “Baudrillardian” gratuitiously. So when I heard that he introduced a Golliwog character in the newest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I knew the odds that he’d pull it off with sensitivity and insightfulness were, oh…

…approximately HONKY TO ONE. Because there is no way for a white dude to appropriate such powerful racist imagery and *not* fuck it up somehow. Has ebogjonson’s blackface flowchart taught us nothing?

Pam Noles has written a very good series at And We Shall March in which she discusses the historical context of the Golliwog, and the treatment of race in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in great detail before describing the comic itself:

It’s an alien.

Its spaceship isn’t a cue ball, it’s more like a Golli eyeball. It’s powered by roses and its exhaust is moonbeam and starshine. Perhaps there’s a unicorn somewhere in mechanism, gently pissing rainbows to keep the gears oiled.

Peg and Sarah, the two Dutch dolls, speak Dutch throughout. From translations cobbled together via various free services on the internet(s), they refer to him as their brave hero, their proud champion of love and an admiral of pleasure. Once they get to the blazing world, other dolls from their world greet him as the fiery pirate of the heart, and say something about either dying of luck or dying of happiness.

Peg also says she volunteered for the Golliwogg’s crew because of his big dick.

So as of this outing, The Black Dossier removes the Golliwogg from its roots in racist ideology while still clinging to the ever so wearying fascination with black sexuality. To evade the difficult fact-based truth of where the Golliwogg comes from while simultaneously affirming the black male stereotype it represented (complete with lustful white women) is quite a trick. Talk about Olympian-level Denial Acrobatics.

And that’s where comics broke my heart.

I remember how I felt when I discovered Jose Saramago was an anti-Semite. You know the kind – the kind who say they’re merely anti-Zionist, but who somehow can’t manage to express their perfectly sensible and well-thought-out opposition to Zionism without sounding suspiciously like raging Jew-haters. I was in a daze.

And I remember when I was just a wee thing reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time. It’s in The Two Towers, I think, when we first encounter the armies from the east and south of Middle-Earth who are allied with Sauron. They are “swarthy” and “slant-eyed”. Generally, in LotR, anyone swarthier than an inbred Anglo-Saxon is morally suspect; I recall a “sallow” Southerner rousing our heroes’ suspicion in Bree, later being likened to a goblin. Now, because I take after the European side of the family, I generally identify as White; but reading that, I was keenly aware of my Asianness.

If it ain’t literature it’ll be sci-fi or fantasy or comics; they’ll get you every time.

I’m going to go pet the cat. There is nothing happier than a cat getting a good scratch under the chin.