Steampunk, Man-Thing, and why Shackleton rules
james_nicoll asks about steampunk. Some of the answers are hilarious, such as realinterrobang: "I liked what another writer on the subject said: "It's something for goths to do when they realise they're too old for PVC clothing and dyeing their hair all the time will just make it fall out." Which, in my mind, totally misses the point and purpose.
One thing that I find very interesting about steampunk is the emphasis on a DIY mindset that is holistic in self-presentation, meaning from the clothing you wear to the technology that you wield to the degree to which you meld the two. In this it reminds me a lot of the first phase of punk rock from late 1975 to late 1977; there's a sense of taking back and reappropriating the means of production of what you want (in punk's case it was the production of music and visual representation of your subculture, in steampunk's case it's technology itself) to use and what is meaningful for you. Steam and the first wave of punk are also similar in that both extend/extended representation of their culture from the self to the surrounding aesthetic of the environment, and both plumb the past for visual self-representation (for punk, for example, it was elements of Dada and Futurism). Another similarity: both subcultures relentlessly document themselves visually.
However, they diverge significantly when it comes to how one accesses and is accepted into a subculture. On online steam communities on LJ, half the posts seem to be people saying "look, this is my first attempt at a steampunk outfit, what do you think?" Whereas with punk, it was a much more scathing process of total transformation before one was accepted; the first wave of punk had to do more with mindset, behavior, and life choices rather than just music and how you dressed. Being a punk was dangerous; you could be beaten up or killed for the way you dressed and represented in public verbally and visually. Punk rock was also one of the first musical subcultures to aggressively self-document on film. Actually, I'll argue that it was the first music-based subculture to do so. British punk was barely four months old before it was filming itself. Don Letts' The Punk Rock Movie comes to mind, of course. There was also a strongly anti-racist and political element to early punk rock, whereas steam seems more agnostically fantasy oriented towards a fictional repurposing of history and focuses on how you interact with technology and the environment.
Maybe I'll have to extend this comparison further and write a not-so-learned essay.
Speaking of music and subculture, I've been into dubstep for years and years (which will come as no surprise to most of you, I'm sure, when you pay attention to my music posts), and I'm endlessly fascinated when I watch how dubstep evolves and how other micro-tribes absorb aspects of dubstep in a form of synthetic musical syncretism (also, of course, all aspects of bass culture have similarities of approach and execution).
This leads me to showing you a clip from Shackleton's set at Sonar 08 from Mary Anne Hobb's YouTube channel. The audio is superb.
Shackleton, Sonar 08, get off your ass and get cerebral:
A lot of people have observed that dubstep seems to have an introspective aspect to it; it's more about on concentrating on the complex and ever shifting structure of the beats and dancing with yourself rather than dancing with other people. Interestingly, you can see evidence of that in this clip. Since I'm a horrible dancer, perhaps you can see why dubstep appeals to me on more than a musical level.
Okay, now a brief Rantus Maximus™:
Over on Joe Quesada's weekly My Cup o' Joe column, which you find on both Marvel's official website and on MySpace, on May 1st Joe had this to say about all the "hate" being heaped on Marvel Divas in the blogsphere:
Question from Ashley: About the "hating" on Marvel Divas, let's call it what it really is-criticizing how sexist this book appears to be. If Marvel produces comics that are offensive to female readers, why shouldn't people "hate" on it? Why would I want to support a company that produces offensive, sexist material? Why shouldn’t everyone speak out against it? While the book hasn't come out yet, what has been released so far is blatantly sexist. But what troubles me the most is that Marvel thinks people want to read this, and this constitutes strong female characterization. Does Marvel actually want to attract female readers or is the whole point that Marvel Comics are only for guys?
Answer from Joe Quesada: Ashley, while I completely respect your opinion as I do every Marvel fan, your calling Marvel Comics and this particular mini series sexist is a bit extreme from where I’m standing.
I’m going to go on a limb here and assume you’re a Marvel reader. It’s an assumption I’m making based upon the fact that you’re responding to this column. If you’re Marvel reader and truly feel we’re sexist, then why are you reading our books? Now, perhaps you’re not a Marvel reader, then if that’s the case, I’m not quite sure what you’re criticizing if you don’t read our books?
Okay, all that aside, I’m going to go with the former assumption. With that in mind, I’m going to be as straight up honest with you as I can possibly be. That’s what this column is all about.
You haven’t read a lick of this story yet!
Please, I can buy you saying that you’re cautiously pessimistic based upon what you’ve heard so far, but to throw around allegations like that is completely unfair, not just to Marvel or myself, but to the creators and editors who are working on this book. Have you ever read any of Sacasa’s work? Have you ever found him to be a sexist writer? Is the cover image provocative, perhaps, but it’s no more or less than any other book we do.
Summation: If you think we're sexist, don't read our books. Our comics aren't for you pesky feminists critical of how we do business, and the exploitative cover is just business as usual.
Niiiice, Joe, nice. I mean, it's impossible that we care about the medium enough to try to get it to improve when it concerns treatment of female characters, right, and how they're presented within the Marvel universe? It's an impossibility that we want to engage the male creators and editors in the industry to try to share our perspective and reaction BECAUSE WE LOVE COMICS, right?
God, he really is that myopic, isn't he? He really, really doesn't get it. I occasionally see Paul Cornell, who is a writer whose skill I greatly respect and who I think of as a consummate gentleman, take people to task for criticizing Quesada because Quesada is his friend and supposedly a good person. While I respect Mr. Cornell's loyalty to his friends, I just can't see how anyone could read the statement "If you’re Marvel reader and truly feel we’re sexist, then why are you reading our books?" as anything but disgustingly dismissive and insulting to female comic readers. I am incapable of thinking of Joe Quesada as composed of "100% good person!" when he so blatantly derails the conversation into "don't like it, don't read it."
Male readers have the privilege of looking at a statement like this and walking away unharmed. Male readers have the privilege of not experiencing firsthand the hurt that an attitude like Quesada's causes to women who are concerned about the fact that we can't see ourselves reflected in what Marvel's output.
Furthermore, based on comments I've seen in the comics blogsphere, any comments or questions that were submitted to MySpace as a comment to that entry that took Joe to task for what he said above or pressed him further on the issue? They were either not allowed to be posted or were deleted.
Yeah, Marvel. Way to go!
*HEADDESK HEADDESK*
Ouch. That's the second time this week I've had to commit concussion-by-self to help ease the pain.
However, to end on a positive note, I want to showcase something that Marvel has done within the last couple of years that was oh so very right. I've only been promising to post about this since, oh, 2007, and I'm finally getting around to it.
In 2007 Marvel put out a one-shot issue called The Marvel Tarot -- an issue that barely got any notice and that promptly sank without a trace -- which was part of the larger Mystic Arcana project that emphasized the history of magic and mysticism within the Marvel universe. As the name implies, it took characters from the Marvel universe and represented them as cards from the tarot. The premise of the issue was that it Structurally, it reminded me of House of Leaves in that the format was bits and pieces of notes, arcana, found objects, and excerpts from mystical and magical texts all put together in a marvelously inventive collage. In fact, each page literally was a collage.
The issue is visualized as a narrative by Ian McNee. Some of you will know that he's a skilled sorcerer from the MU who once challenged Dr. Strange for the title of Sorcerer Supreme.
I'll be posting more tomorrow about The Marvel Tarot, because it truly was a tour de force of visual design and execution, but today I want to show you one page that illustrates why this issue was so brilliant.
This is who Ian McNee visualizes as The World:
Necessary standard disclaimer: although I believe that showing one page from this issue falls under fair use, this image will immediately be removed at the request of the copyright holder. Marvel, I am trying to pimp this book for you, blah blah blah blah.
That is GENIUS. Period, end of story, no denying it. The Man-Thing as the World? GENIUS, I say. I dare you to tell me that that choice is not brilliant and inspired in every possible way.
(Also, did I not say that the design of the issue was pretty? Look at that page!)
One thing that I find very interesting about steampunk is the emphasis on a DIY mindset that is holistic in self-presentation, meaning from the clothing you wear to the technology that you wield to the degree to which you meld the two. In this it reminds me a lot of the first phase of punk rock from late 1975 to late 1977; there's a sense of taking back and reappropriating the means of production of what you want (in punk's case it was the production of music and visual representation of your subculture, in steampunk's case it's technology itself) to use and what is meaningful for you. Steam and the first wave of punk are also similar in that both extend/extended representation of their culture from the self to the surrounding aesthetic of the environment, and both plumb the past for visual self-representation (for punk, for example, it was elements of Dada and Futurism). Another similarity: both subcultures relentlessly document themselves visually.
However, they diverge significantly when it comes to how one accesses and is accepted into a subculture. On online steam communities on LJ, half the posts seem to be people saying "look, this is my first attempt at a steampunk outfit, what do you think?" Whereas with punk, it was a much more scathing process of total transformation before one was accepted; the first wave of punk had to do more with mindset, behavior, and life choices rather than just music and how you dressed. Being a punk was dangerous; you could be beaten up or killed for the way you dressed and represented in public verbally and visually. Punk rock was also one of the first musical subcultures to aggressively self-document on film. Actually, I'll argue that it was the first music-based subculture to do so. British punk was barely four months old before it was filming itself. Don Letts' The Punk Rock Movie comes to mind, of course. There was also a strongly anti-racist and political element to early punk rock, whereas steam seems more agnostically fantasy oriented towards a fictional repurposing of history and focuses on how you interact with technology and the environment.
Maybe I'll have to extend this comparison further and write a not-so-learned essay.
Speaking of music and subculture, I've been into dubstep for years and years (which will come as no surprise to most of you, I'm sure, when you pay attention to my music posts), and I'm endlessly fascinated when I watch how dubstep evolves and how other micro-tribes absorb aspects of dubstep in a form of synthetic musical syncretism (also, of course, all aspects of bass culture have similarities of approach and execution).
This leads me to showing you a clip from Shackleton's set at Sonar 08 from Mary Anne Hobb's YouTube channel. The audio is superb.
Shackleton, Sonar 08, get off your ass and get cerebral:
Click to viewA lot of people have observed that dubstep seems to have an introspective aspect to it; it's more about on concentrating on the complex and ever shifting structure of the beats and dancing with yourself rather than dancing with other people. Interestingly, you can see evidence of that in this clip. Since I'm a horrible dancer, perhaps you can see why dubstep appeals to me on more than a musical level.
Okay, now a brief Rantus Maximus™:
Over on Joe Quesada's weekly My Cup o' Joe column, which you find on both Marvel's official website and on MySpace, on May 1st Joe had this to say about all the "hate" being heaped on Marvel Divas in the blogsphere:
Question from Ashley: About the "hating" on Marvel Divas, let's call it what it really is-criticizing how sexist this book appears to be. If Marvel produces comics that are offensive to female readers, why shouldn't people "hate" on it? Why would I want to support a company that produces offensive, sexist material? Why shouldn’t everyone speak out against it? While the book hasn't come out yet, what has been released so far is blatantly sexist. But what troubles me the most is that Marvel thinks people want to read this, and this constitutes strong female characterization. Does Marvel actually want to attract female readers or is the whole point that Marvel Comics are only for guys?
Answer from Joe Quesada: Ashley, while I completely respect your opinion as I do every Marvel fan, your calling Marvel Comics and this particular mini series sexist is a bit extreme from where I’m standing.
I’m going to go on a limb here and assume you’re a Marvel reader. It’s an assumption I’m making based upon the fact that you’re responding to this column. If you’re Marvel reader and truly feel we’re sexist, then why are you reading our books? Now, perhaps you’re not a Marvel reader, then if that’s the case, I’m not quite sure what you’re criticizing if you don’t read our books?
Okay, all that aside, I’m going to go with the former assumption. With that in mind, I’m going to be as straight up honest with you as I can possibly be. That’s what this column is all about.
You haven’t read a lick of this story yet!
Please, I can buy you saying that you’re cautiously pessimistic based upon what you’ve heard so far, but to throw around allegations like that is completely unfair, not just to Marvel or myself, but to the creators and editors who are working on this book. Have you ever read any of Sacasa’s work? Have you ever found him to be a sexist writer? Is the cover image provocative, perhaps, but it’s no more or less than any other book we do.
Summation: If you think we're sexist, don't read our books. Our comics aren't for you pesky feminists critical of how we do business, and the exploitative cover is just business as usual.
Niiiice, Joe, nice. I mean, it's impossible that we care about the medium enough to try to get it to improve when it concerns treatment of female characters, right, and how they're presented within the Marvel universe? It's an impossibility that we want to engage the male creators and editors in the industry to try to share our perspective and reaction BECAUSE WE LOVE COMICS, right?
God, he really is that myopic, isn't he? He really, really doesn't get it. I occasionally see Paul Cornell, who is a writer whose skill I greatly respect and who I think of as a consummate gentleman, take people to task for criticizing Quesada because Quesada is his friend and supposedly a good person. While I respect Mr. Cornell's loyalty to his friends, I just can't see how anyone could read the statement "If you’re Marvel reader and truly feel we’re sexist, then why are you reading our books?" as anything but disgustingly dismissive and insulting to female comic readers. I am incapable of thinking of Joe Quesada as composed of "100% good person!" when he so blatantly derails the conversation into "don't like it, don't read it."
Male readers have the privilege of looking at a statement like this and walking away unharmed. Male readers have the privilege of not experiencing firsthand the hurt that an attitude like Quesada's causes to women who are concerned about the fact that we can't see ourselves reflected in what Marvel's output.
Furthermore, based on comments I've seen in the comics blogsphere, any comments or questions that were submitted to MySpace as a comment to that entry that took Joe to task for what he said above or pressed him further on the issue? They were either not allowed to be posted or were deleted.
Yeah, Marvel. Way to go!
*HEADDESK HEADDESK*
Ouch. That's the second time this week I've had to commit concussion-by-self to help ease the pain.
However, to end on a positive note, I want to showcase something that Marvel has done within the last couple of years that was oh so very right. I've only been promising to post about this since, oh, 2007, and I'm finally getting around to it.
In 2007 Marvel put out a one-shot issue called The Marvel Tarot -- an issue that barely got any notice and that promptly sank without a trace -- which was part of the larger Mystic Arcana project that emphasized the history of magic and mysticism within the Marvel universe. As the name implies, it took characters from the Marvel universe and represented them as cards from the tarot. The premise of the issue was that it Structurally, it reminded me of House of Leaves in that the format was bits and pieces of notes, arcana, found objects, and excerpts from mystical and magical texts all put together in a marvelously inventive collage. In fact, each page literally was a collage.
The issue is visualized as a narrative by Ian McNee. Some of you will know that he's a skilled sorcerer from the MU who once challenged Dr. Strange for the title of Sorcerer Supreme.
I'll be posting more tomorrow about The Marvel Tarot, because it truly was a tour de force of visual design and execution, but today I want to show you one page that illustrates why this issue was so brilliant.
This is who Ian McNee visualizes as The World:
Necessary standard disclaimer: although I believe that showing one page from this issue falls under fair use, this image will immediately be removed at the request of the copyright holder. Marvel, I am trying to pimp this book for you, blah blah blah blah.
That is GENIUS. Period, end of story, no denying it. The Man-Thing as the World? GENIUS, I say. I dare you to tell me that that choice is not brilliant and inspired in every possible way.
(Also, did I not say that the design of the issue was pretty? Look at that page!)