Book review: J. Andrew Deman – The Claremont Run: Subverting Gender in the X-Men - a review by Christopher Roman

 
reviewed by Christopher Roman, Kent State University

J. Andew Deman, The Claremont Run: Subverting Gender in the X-Men. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781477325452. https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477325452/

For those of us who followed J. Andrew Deman’s “@ClaremontRun” account on Twitter/X, this academic work treads familiar ground. On his Twitter/X account, Deman would practice public facing scholarship in order to discuss the importance of Chris Claremont’s writing run on the X-Men, often discussing gender, race, and disability issues, using a multiple post thread to lay out an argument in a short amount of space. In my estimation, it was an excellent use of tweets to reach a wider audience. The book under review here can be said to be a translation of the use of that social media platform into an academic book. The Claremont Run looks at key characters in the X-Men and the ways they subvert gender. Each chapter deals with two or three characters (as I will discuss below). Deman’s book is successful on many levels, but what I find admirable is the way Deman uses the intersection of the digital humanities and traditional close-reading to examine gender roles in Claremont’s run. By basing his readings on statistical analysis which may show, for example, that Wolverine has more interior thought bubbles than other male X-Men, Deman is able to then show how that statistic is important in understanding how Claremont is subverting gender roles during a period of time in comic book history that rests on gender stereotypes for male and female characters.

            The introduction lays out the framework for the book explaining the critical family that Deman draws from including works by Carolyn Cocca, Joseph Darowski, and Ramzi Fawaz. As well Deman explains the support of his university which allowed him and his team to create data sets of Claremont’s run for the purpose of present and future analysis. Deman explains that for the book, he is focusing on gender as it provides a foundation for other intersectional concerns. Gender is a through-line to thinking about its subversion as, according to Deman, 82% of Claremont’s run on the X-Men passes the Bechdel test. While Deman explains that this is not the only rubric he uses to understand gender in the X-Men comics, this statistic also suggests how important gender subversion is to Claremont’s characterization of the X-men,

            The first half of Deman’s book focuses on female characters, and he begins, in Chapter One, with a discussion of Jean Grey and Moira McTaggart. For Deman, Moira MacTaggart, who originally poses as Charles Xavier’s housekeeper but soon reveals she co-created the team (and the housekeeping role was a ruse), is a powerful scientist who embodies both a scientific mind and a nurturer. By opening his analysis with Moira, Deman can show how Claremont undermines gendered stereotypes of the cold female scientist or the mother-figure as they are knit together in one character. Jean Grey inhabits the rest of this first chapter, and while Jean has a body of analysis behind her, Deman is able to show how Jean undermines Cyclops’ alpha male dominance through Claremont’s representation of Jean as enacting her own sexual agency.

            Chapter Two focuses on Storm who Deman argues “achieves greater significance and complexity by entangling gender performance with social categories of religion, race, and sexuality” (35). In this chapter, Deman utilizes data sets to show how important Storm is to Claremont’s run. She has the most (nearly double) thought bubbles and interior monologues; she appears in the most panels of the Claremont run; she appears on the most covers; and she achieves a number of milestones including being the first female and first black lead of a Marvel superhero team. However, as Deman shows in the rest of the chapter, it is not merely numbers and firsts that make Storm such an important female X-Men character; rather her representation is complex as Claremont’s characterization of her touches on issues of religion, her African heritage, her leadership style, and her sexuality.

            Chapter Three examines two other woman X-Men characters Psylocke and Dazzler. Psyclocke is a mutant with psionic powers, while Dazzler can create light from sound. Each of these characters subvert female gender stereotypes. For Psylocke, her feminine appearance belies her fighting prowess and, as Deman, writes, “reflect[s] on the artificiality of female gender roles” (63). Placing Psylocke with Dazzler in this chapter allows Deman to show the range of female representation, as much as Psyclocke becomes a warrior, Dazzler tends to be discussed in terms of hyper-femininity—she was an aerobics instructor, movie star, model, and disco star. However, Deman shows how Claremont uses Dazzler to plumb a deep interior life, as well as use her character to comment on toxic masculinity. Rather than a damsel-in-distress role, Claremont characterizes Dazzler as commenting on the performance of femininity. By placing Dazzler in this role, it shows how powerful she actually is and further reveals the value of the feminine in the male-dominated comics world.

            The second half of the book turns to the men. Chapter Four focuses on Cyclops and his struggles with masculinity. As Deman argues, the characterization of the men relies on their interaction with their female teammates. Cyclops’ masculinity is critiqued both through Jean’s sexual agency, as well as Storm’s powerful leadership. As someone who was hand-picked to lead the X-Men, Cyclops’ ouster of his role as leader by Storm shows how toxic masculinity has no place in the X-Men. With the conclusion of the Dark Phoenix Saga, for example, Scott leaves the X-Men realizing how toxic his relationship is with the team, and turning to the domestic sphere to find true happiness.

            Chapter Five focuses on Wolverine. Much like the Storm chapter, this chapter is strong in its analysis of the importance of Wolverine for his subversive potential. Despite characterizations of Wolverine as a killer and as a berserker, Deman shows how Claremont approaches Wolverine with much more nuance in terms of masculine stereotypes. Wolverine is a nurturer expressing a reluctance to fight more than any other member of the X-Men. His characterization is complex in that it portrays the harm of hegemonic masculinity as he most desires to be loved.

            Chapter Six examines another range of masculinity examining the characters of Nightcrawler and Havok. Each of these characters critique masculinity in unique ways. Nightcrawler expresses sexual agency and acceptance of his mutant state despite not being able to pass as human like the rest of the X-Men. His blue fur and pointy tale labels him quite explicitly as different. Yet, it is often Nightcrawler who expresses an alternate masculinity through his difference. Havok’s representation undermines traditional toxic masculinity in that each time he attempts to mimic his brother’s leadership style or Wolverine’s violence, it conflicts with who he is. By reveling in the performance of masculinity, Claremont is able to show how toxic masculine traits hurt the community of mutants.

            Deman’s book offers us extended meditations on gender in the X-Men. It is a masterful work on the ways Claremont’s run is not only iconic, but achieves a level of gender subversion at a time when comics stood by traditional masculine and feminine roles. If I had a critique, I wish that some of the chapters were longer. For example, the Moira MacTaggart discussion was a great way to start the book, but it felt too short as it gave way to analysis of Jean Grey. As well, Deman uses the data sets in some chapters (for example Storm, Wolverine), but mentions them only lightly in others. All in all, however, this is an excellent work of scholarship showing the ways public and academic scholarship can meet to open up new perspectives on works of popular culture. 

 Editor's note: We'll be running two reviews of this book on the blog, as one of the editors (ok it was me) assigned it twice. However, I think there is enough room in the field for multiple reviews of the growing literature. 

Book Review - Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing

Reviewed by Adrienne Resha

Esra Mirze Santesso. Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing. Ohio State University Press, 2023. 220 pp, $149.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback. https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215418.html

     Words in the Arabic language often have three-consonant roots that convey meaning, such as sh-h-d (ش-ه-د): to witness. If you do not read or speak Arabic, then this may still look or sound familiar because shahada, the sincere declaration that one believes God is singular and accepts Muhammad as His prophet, is one of the five pillars of Islam. The root also appears in the noun shaheed (شهيد), which can be translated as witness or martyr. Whether translated, transliterated, or loaned to other languages, the word takes on different meanings in different contexts. Martyr, meaning one who sacrifices themself as a testament to their faith, overlaps with martyr, one who witnesses violence when murdered by a settler-colonial state. Esra Mirze Santesso’s Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing attends to different versions of witnessing and visions of witnesses in what she calls “Muslim Comics.”

Santesso’s Muslim Comics is a category that includes “any graphic narrative that features three-dimensional Muslim characters and foregrounds Muslim experiences in relation to various power structures inside and outside the Muslim homeland” (4-5). This definition is inclusive of comics produced by Muslim and non-Muslim creators, privileging character identity over those of cartoonists, writers, and artists. She employs warscape, “a civilian space in which different [political and military] factions are participating in asymmetrical struggles,” as a category that “underscores the prolonged effects of violence as opposed to the finality denoted by ‘war’” and includes the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, Iran, Kashmir, and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon (5). Through visualization and narration, witnessing in comics, Santesso argues, “offers a way to change vulnerability into resistance” and “reflects a desire to restore stability and certainty by creating permanent records of those who are erased from history and those whose voices are muted” (16). Following a history of Muslim characters in US American comics, she examines four kinds of warscape witnesses who appear in Muslim Comics: the reluctant witness, the false witness, the border witness, and the surrogate witness.

While the rest of the book focuses on “protagonists [who] are neither heroes nor villains… individuals with moral complexities who find themselves having to cope with warscape realities” (11), Chapter 1, “The Politics and Aesthetics of Muslim Comics,” is largely about Muslims in superhero comics. According to Santesso, Muslims in American comics in and outside of the superhero genre have historically fallen into three categories: the “Orientalized Other,” the “barbaric jihadi,” or the “hybrid token” like, she argues, Simon Baz (Green Lantern) and Kamala Khan (Ms. Marvel) (30). Santesso acknowledges Muslim Comics in the American tradition, namely graphic memoirs, and those coming out of Europe before turning her gaze to Muslim Comics set in warscapes in North America and Asia.

Chapter 2, “Reluctant Witnesses in Prison Camp Narratives,” contrasts the “barbaric jihadi” of American comics with the “abject Muslim prisoner” of Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani, Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison, and Aaron & Ahmed. Santesso asserts that the “abject Muslim prisoner” is not derivative of the “barbaric jihadi” but rather of the Muselmann, a German term for Muslim used by Jewish prisoners “to describe the ‘living-dead’ inhabitants of the concentration camp” (68). This chapter’s Muslim Comics illustrate how torture turned Guantanamo Bay prisoners into the living dead. The living dead are also reluctant witnesses who bear witness “by refusing to bear witness” (86-87), closing their eyes or looking away as they tell their stories to/for creators who will interpret them in comics form. The reluctant witness does not testify to recover their own humanity but to protect that of readers.

In Chapter 3, “Vulnerability, Resistance, and False Witnesses,” Santesso introduces what she calls the “vulnerability-resistance dialectic,” a cycle between resistance against vulnerability and vulnerability as a consequence of resistance, which produces false witnesses. False witnesses, such as those in Zahra’s Paradise and An Iranian Metamorphosis, dishonestly testify in service to the state, in these Muslim Comics, Iran. Santesso argues that the introduction of false witnesses, who escape the cycle by lying, illustrates how witnessing is not always liberatory, that it “can sustain and perpetuate oppressive power structures rather than unsettle them” (110). These comics, which differentiate between the witness who speaks on behalf of the powerful and the witness who speaks on behalf of the vulnerable, complicate the resistance-vulnerability dialectic.

Chapter 4, “Shaheed and Border Witnesses,” directly addresses the figure of the martyr in the specific context of Kashmir. Muslim Comics set in that liminal border zone – Kashmir Pending and Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir – challenge “the idea of border subjectivity as an inherently intuitive and productive negotiation between two or more cultures” through border witnessing (117). Border witnesses reject the necropolitical conditions of the warscape that may encourage martyrdom and, instead, affirm the value of other kinds of resistance. In these comics, Santesso continues, “the border witness… by reaffirming the vision of Kashmiri unity known as Kashmiriyat, uses the act of witnessing as an antidote to radicalization rather than an accelerant for it” (118-119).

Focusing on Palestinian refugee camps, Chapter 5, “Surrogate Witnesses and Memory,” diverges from previous chapters by pairing a Muslim Comic, Baddawi, with a non-Muslim comic, Waltz with Bashir. These comics both feature surrogate witnesses, their creators, who rely on eyewitness testimony as they use various focalization techniques to “record, document, and recontextualize the past” (147). Surrogate witnesses have “the license to substitute, embellish, and reenact the past” and can, in doing so, create “counter-histories that attend to the absence, silence, and erasure of victims” (168-169). The surrogate witness can double as a storyteller and an activist, inserting themself as an interlocutor via the medium of comics to illustrate the past and inspire different futures.

            In Santesso’s conclusion “The Future of Muslim Comics,” she looks away from the witness and back at the superhero. Santesso writes, “Muslim Comics, like Black Comics, have perhaps reached a place where they can push back against the universalization and fetishization of American whiteness and redefine what heroism is or what heroes look like” (174-175). They may even, she argues, “have the potential to pave the wave for Muslim futurism,” specifically “a more positive and less limiting model” that is more like Afrofuturism (176). However, each of these categories – Muslim Comics, Black Comics, Muslim futurism, and Afrofuturism – are already overlapping. Twenty years ago, writer Christopher Priest and artist Joe Bennett introduced the Black and Muslim American superhero Josiah al-hajj Saddiq (aka Josiah X) in The Crew (Marvel, 2003). Although Josiah X’s post-9/11 origin story (The Crew #5) is by no means perfect, it is still arguably a Muslim Comic because it is a graphic narrative about a complex Muslim character that foregrounds his experience in relation to structural racism in the US. Santesso’s Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on comics about and by Muslim people, but there is still more work – and work more reflective of the diversity of Muslim peoples across the globe – to be done.

Book Review - Ilan Manouach in Review – Critical Approaches To His Conceptual Comics

Reviewed by Gareth Brookes, AHRC Techne funded PhD Candidate at UAL, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7167-8255

 
Pedro Moura (ed.) Ilan Manouach in Review – Critical Approaches To His Conceptual Comics. London: Routledge, 2023. $170. https://www.routledge.com/Ilan-Manouach-in-Review-Critical-Approaches-to-his-Conceptual-Comics/Moura/p/book/9781032399713

The artist Ilan Manouach has come to occupy a unique place in European comics. To some Manouach is a controversialist, provocateur and plagiarist, to others he is an artist working in the traditions of conceptualism and situationism to reveal concealed power structures ingrained in systems of publishing, distribution and in the reading practices of comics.

It is highly unusual for any artist to be the subject of a book such as this, particularly for an artist at the mid-point in their career (Manouach was born in 1980) with a relatively small, and, for the most part, relatively recent body of work. There are 21 books listed on Manouach’s website and there are 14 essays here, which, including introduction and afterword, amounts to eighteen contributors.

Any reader approaching Ilan Manouach in Review with only a passing acquaintance with his art will leave suitably enlightened. With so many chapters surveying a limited body of work, there are necessary repetitions. For example, the details of the publication and reception of Manouach’s controversial work Katz (2012) - a reworking of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991) in which both Nazis and their Jewish victims are depicted as cats - are repeated a number of times. This is also the case with Riki Fermier (2015), a work in which all characters in the children’s comic Rasmus Klump are carefully erased save the periphery character of Riki the Pelican, who wanders around a depopulated farm, occasionally responding to disembodied voices. Noirs (2014) is also dealt with several times, in this work colour difference in the racially problematic 1963 comic Les Schtroumpfs Noirs/The Purple Smurfs is eradicated by replacing all print toners in the printing of Manouach’s version with cyan. In many cases these repetitions complement one another, and the reader is able to trace analytical resonances not only between scholars, but between fields. At other times reading repeated descriptions of a single work can feel like a chore and make this a volume best enjoyed chapter-by-chapter over a number of weeks.

The book is organised into three parts: Part 1 – Textuality and Surfaces, Part 2 – Reading Practices, Part 3 – Rethinking the Past and Futures of Comics. The strongest chapters are those in which scholars bring their specific research interests to bear on a focused area of Manouach’s practice and analytically respond to the erasures and reversals he performs. Reading Childly by Maaheen Ahmed considers ‘childness’ and the construction of the implied child reader as a tool to critically approach Manouach’s interventions of erasure in Riki Fermier and Cascao (2019). Ian Hague’s critique of the tactile project Shapereader (2015 - Present) designed for comics readers with visual impairment, is disrupted by Covid-19 in a way that proves enlightening. Simon Grennan tests his formulations of ‘graphiotactic saliency’ and the notion of point of view as definitive component of storyworld through a consideration of Abrégé de bande dessinée franco-belge (2019). Barbara Postema discusses history and nostalgia with regard to the Bande Dessinée format and traces relationship of this to Manouach’s work. Benoît Crucifix considers ‘rogue archives’ in the context of Manouach’s online Conceptual Comics Archive.

In most cases the chapters I connected with were by scholars with whose work I was already familiar, and I found my interest most engaged by observing the different ways these scholars approached Manouach’s comics. Through their accumulated responses I found myself considering Manouach’s work in terms of a practice-based body of research, intended to provoke theoretical response, and perhaps completing itself through analysis of this kind.

Of all the contributions I found the chapter Can Comics Think by Daniel Worden to be the most interesting and original, adopting what one might call a practice-based approach to the analysis of the huge volume Crucible Island: Pirates, Microworkers, Spammists, and the Venatic Lore of Clickfarm Humor (2019). In this comic Manouach outsources the captioning of 1,494 desert island cartoons to micropayment contract workers through the Amazon owned microworker platform Mechanical Turk. In the final section of his chapter Worden outsources the analysis of Crucible Island to microworkers who are paid $5 to produce a 100-word response. In both Manouach’s outsourced comic and Worden’s outsourced analysis, the disconnectedness of this digital industrial approach is mixed with moments of humour and humanity often reflecting the desires of the precariously employed microworkers. Worden’s approach does a great deal to illuminate the tensions and intentions active in Manouach’s engagement with these exploitative industries.

Given the oblique nature of the subject matter, it is inevitable that this book says as much about comics studies as a practice as it does about the practice of the artist under consideration. There is a sense of comics studies trying to come to terms with a creator who is really a conceptual artist making self-reflexive work about comics. Manouach’s interventions undoubtedly represent an important contribution to comics, critiquing the hidden power structures embedded in the form, but the strategies he employs are drawn from a post-post-modernist, post-internet stance which holds that the only sensible response to the monstrous number of comics available in the world is through recycling, reappropriation and reframing. Comics studies has barely begun to consider these ideas. Benoît Crucifix’s recent study Drawing From the Archives, Comics Memory and the Contemporary Graphic Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2023) is a notable exception, and Crucifix’s contribution to the volume under consideration extends the scope of his work.

Another interesting question raised is how comics studies goes about accommodating a practice in which so much is based on erasure. Drawing theory usually considers trace, or the index of the body making marks on paper. The authorial presence based on removal represented in the negative trace of Manouach’s diverse dismantling practice presents an analytical vacuum to be filled. The book could very well have been titled ‘Where is Ilan Manouach?’ and the great pleasure of these essays lies in the various ways comics scholars go about finding him.

One can’t help but wonder what Manouach makes of all this. The impulse to respond to work that approaches fine art practice with what some may consider a disproportionate amount of analysis, in order to either accommodate Manouach’s practice in comics scholarship, or rise to the challenge of his conceptualist gestures, perhaps betrays a shift in comics studies toward contemporary art theory. The reification that comes with this is something that Manouach both critiques and invites through his work, and I suspect that the reifying power relationship between comics practice and academia may be too tempting a subject for Manouach to ignore. Will this volume at some point become the subject of one of Manouach’s conceptualist reversals? If so, I look forward to it.

Book Review - Forgotten Disney: Essays on the Lesser-Known Productions.

 Reviewed by Cord A. Scott, UMGC-Okinawa

Kathy Merlock Jackson, Carl H. Sederholm, and Mark I. West (eds.). Forgotten Disney: Essays on the Lesser-Known Productions.  McFarland Publishing, 2023. $49.95. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/forgotten-disney/

By the early 21^st century, Disney became a dominant media force in many regards, controlling the rights to Star Wars, the Marvel Comics, Pixar, and the traditional Disney IP, as well as various amusement parks and broadcast stations that span the globe.  While Disney has always had controversial aspects, it has usually been considered a successful and well-run company. But there have also been some lesser-known aspects of collaborations and projects that have not fared as well.  The essays in this book offer an insight into the “House of Mouse” and how it has not always had the “Midas touch.”  As noted in the introduction to the book, the editors pointed out that some of the projects were never meant to last, while others morphed from their original form into something else.  In all, the twenty-two essays offer glimpses into the Disney realm, and are at times, surprising.

The essays cover specific, chronological projects and times in the career of both Walt Disney, as well as the corporation after his passing in 1966.  The first essay focuses on Walt’s last directorial attempt, with The Golden Touch, a 1935 short animated adaptation of the King Midas story.  As with so many fairy tales, this adaptation had promise, but did not have the lasting effect that other original works such as Steamboat Willie had.  The story is a morality tale, much like the reality of wealthy Americans at a time in the 1930s, when most average were suffering from deleterious effects of the Great Depression.  While Disney tried to rail against the elites of America, the overall story simply did not hold the attention of the general public.  The author argues the failure of The Golden Touch served as a lesson learned for Snow White when it was produced later that year.

Other essays discuss not only the attempted adaptations of Alice in Wonderland, but also the works of Frank Baum and the Wizard of Oz series of books.  While the first book was made into short cartoons before the major release of the Disney adaptation in 1951, the idea of the “plausible impossible” was introduced in the 1939 cartoon Thru the Mirror, and the concept became a feature of the Disney films.  For Baum’s Oz, the opportunity came in the late 1950s when Disney was able to purchase the rights to all of the books.  The project never really came to fruition however, but the legacy of how Disney wanted many popular books or fairy tales adapted into his realm was written into the company’s DNA.

Many of the authors write on a now lesser-known aspect of Disney: the live movies, as opposed to the staple animated features which have been associated with the company since the successes of the 1980s.  From the live adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea to the movie Tonka (a Sal Mineo film centered on a horse that was a witness to the battle of the Little Big Horn), the authors look at how these films often carried a far more expansive view of Walt Disney and his approach to storytelling.  Even when the movies are (rightly) criticized for casting Anglo actors in minority roles, the overall theme Disney was trying to attain was that of tolerance. 

With the book arranged in a chronological timeline of the “forgotten” films, and the first half is about the time Walt Disney directly oversaw the creative process in some form or another.  For the last hundred pages, the essays center on the move forward after Walt’s death in 1966.  The book also goes associated spinoff ideas such as Disneyland, Disney World, EPCOT, and overseas ventures. 

Some of the information gleaned from the book was interesting, as seemingly odd for Disney as we know it in the 2020s: collaboration with Salvador Dali on Destino, a movie that was started in the 1940s but not released until 2003; the war films which had a shelf life of World War II, yest still offer insight into propaganda films made by the major studios in an era before television or the internet; association with seemingly ill-fitting Hollywood stars as Bette Davis and Bette Midler; and the adult-themed live-action films produced by a Disney owned and controlled company, Miramax films. 

The book allows the non-Disney expert a look at some of the lesser-known projects and how they served as a “here’s what NOT to do for next time”, such as the case of The Golden Touch or the lesser-known Oz works.  It also links together aspects of Walt Disney’s mindset about a return to values prized in more rural communities, and a connection to farming and nature that was being pushed aside, even by Disney, in areas where theme parks were situated. Disney’s natural and successful progression into comic book publishing was also noted, despite the company’s current disinterest.  The final aspects of the book discuss the preservation of defunct Disney attractions and their appeal to fans. 

One area that is ripe for future discussion is the corporation’s acquisition of Marvel and Star Wars characters and stories, and how that has already altered the entertainment industry, as well as stories Mickey Mouse entering the public domain.  In total, the book offers a revealing look into Disney’s output, and does give a reader a starting point to delve into aspects of their lesser-known projects, which puts their successes into a wider context. 

“The look of a ghost with ashes in her shoes.” Review of Leela Corman’s Victory Parade by Hélène Tison

Review by Hélène Tison

Leela Corman. Victory Parade. New York:  Pantheon Graphic Library, 2024. $29.00. ISBN 9780805243444. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/552601/victory-parade-by-leela-corman/

“The look of a ghost with ashes in her shoes.”

Leela Corman is a warm, lively, funny and very serious person – much like her work as a cartoonist, from Unterzakhn (Schocken/Pantheon, 2012), her Eisner-nominated graphic novel about life in New York City’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, to her collections of short fiction and nonfiction You Are Not A Guest (Field Mouse Press, 2023) and We All Wish For Deadly Force (Retrofit/Big Planet, 2016), to her new graphic novel Victory Parade (to be published by Schocken/Pantheon in April 2024) which is described on her website as “a story about WWII, women's wrestling, and the astral plane over Buchenwald.” To which one could add such prominent themes as migration and diaspora, racism and antisemitism, brutal social hierarchies, authoritarianism, predatory patriarchy and sexual exploitation, and the many grey areas of life, including in the country that some consider to be “the world’s greatest democracy.”

Corman’s art is striking. She has been working with watercolor for about a decade now, a technical and aesthetic choice that underscores the sensory or haptic quality of this entirely hand-made graphic novel (apart from the lettering – cf. my upcoming interview). It creates a sense of intimacy with the characters, enables the reader to feel the tenderness of the author not only for her protagonists, but also for the survivors and the dead that haunt the concentration camp – and the Jewish American soldier who has returned to civilian life. Her work is beautiful, but not beautifying: as discussed in the interview, Corman presents us with a cast of de-idealized and highly expressive figures.

Corman does a lot of research for her graphic stories, and Victory Parade, which could be described as part fantasy and part historical novel, is no exception: it is full of references, both visual and narrative, not only to the events, but also to the culture and arts of the time, such as Germany’s Bauhaus and New Objectivity, the musicals of Busby Berkeley, propaganda posters or period beer cans. It is also informed by Corman’s family history.

 

Fig. 2 - Victory Parade, page 95. © Leela Corman 2023

As in Unterzakhn, the female characters in Victory Parade are resourceful and impressively powerful – indeed Ruth, the wrestler, is something of a superhero – but as a social group, they are rather low in the hierarchy. This is reflected in the very structure of the book, which first focuses on women (Rose the welder and her colleagues; her daughter Eleanor; Ruth/Rifche, a young Jewish refugee from Germany who lives with Rose), who are central to the story as they are to the war industry for a while – until the soldiers come home, the women are sent back to the kitchen, and Sam (the husband Rose doesn’t love) comes home after having participated in the liberation of Buchenwald, and takes center stage in the narrative. With the exception of the several scenes where Rose and her lover George share intimate and tender moments, sexuality is generally conflictual or predatory in Victory Parade: the book opens on a scene of sexual harassment, and it is ubiquitous, violent and ultimately deadly for Roses’s friend Pearl – as it is, indirectly, for Ruth who was sexually exploited as a child in Germany.

It is fascinating to read Victory Parade in light of Corman’s autobiographical and nonfiction work, which brings to light the more specific and personal meaning of a number of details, images, and symbols. In her graphic narratives, trauma is embodied in the figure of falling, drowning or immersed women who are alternately crushed, distraught, sinister, or empowering – just as nature, the forest in particular, is an ambivalent space, “a place of trauma as much as refuge” (You Are Not A Guest, p. 3). Traumatic loss and multigenerational trauma run through Corman’s autobiographical stories, as in “Yahrzeit” (in We All Wish For Deadly Force, unpaginated), in “Blood Road,” where the figure of the artist braces herself for “an epigenetic storm” as she plans to visit Buchenwald (You Are Not A Guest, p. 22) and in the story that gives the 2023 collection its name, when she visits the Polish town where many of her ancestors were murdered in 1942. In those stories – as is the case for Victory Parade’s Ruth who is described by another character as having “the look of a ghost with ashes in her shoes” (36) – trauma is often impossible to articulate, but it doesn’t go away, it persists as hallucination, after-image, as specters or the undead, limbs and bodies hiding in the woods, coming out of the ground or the sky who accompany, soothe, or bully, Leela Corman’s characters. And so, in the last section of Victory Parade, she addresses, in painful and tender detail, the central trauma running through the generations in her maternal family, and in many others – the Holocaust.

The manner in which she chooses to address it, in a thirty-page episode focusing on the so-called “liberation” of a camp by young, unprepared American soldiers, points to a central trope in the book, indeed, in its very cover: the coexistence of two unimaginably opposed experiences, two continents, one ravaged by brutal, genocidal war and another whose people were far from unconcerned or uninformed, but where ordinary life did not change drastically. The superimposition is symbolized in the uncanny figure of the skull-faced pin-up in a pink bathing suit, legs dangling above a pile of corpses; smoking and blowing toxic, deadly-looking fumes that form the background to the word “Victory,” she puts its antiphrastic quality into relief.

The “victory” announced by Harry Truman on May 8, 1945 (we see Rose listening to his speech on the radio, p. 119) is bitter in the narrative as well: not only does it signal the end of Rose’s relative freedom, but it also heralds the end of innocence or ignorance, the revelations of the extent of Nazi horrors, the confirmation of the fates of relatives left behind in Europe… The antiphrasis is also a comment on political hypocrisy and cynicism, exemplified by that very same speech, in which Truman promises to “build an abiding peace, a peace rooted in justice and in law,” mere weeks before giving the order to launch atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although that episode is left out, its “off-frame” presence is hard to miss, and is confirmed (again, elliptically) in the concluding quote by Japanese photographer Shōmei Tōmatsu.

After the preceding paragraphs, it may come as a surprise to read that Victory Parade is not devoid of humor – humor which is neither gratuitous nor mere comic relief, as when Corman offers her readers moments of unexpected, highly political and very dark comedy. She not only dares to tackle Nazi concentration and extermination camps, a topic which is notoriously hard to do right, without trivializing or sensationalizing one of the worst episodes in human history. But, in the mode of Roberto Benigni’s controversial 1997 film Life Is Beautiful, she dares to do so in a passage that she calls the “Busby Berkeley death scene,” (p. 172) superimposing the camp and the type of light, extremely popular entertainment that came out of Hollywood throughout the war years.

Leela Corman’s graphic novels are both historical and topical – in Unterzakhn, before Roe was overturned, she reminded her readers of the reasons why access to abortion is a matter of life and death; today, with Victory Parade, she wants us to remember what tyrannical supremacy and the murderous maligning of the racial Other actually mean – and warns us against going on with our lives as though nothing were amiss while the humanity of others is being denied.

Hélène Tison is associate professor at the University of Tours (France) and is the author of

Female Cartoonists in the United States: Bad Girls and Invisible Women (Routledge, 2022).

 

Read Dr. Tison's interview with Leela Corman.

Book Review: Matthias Lehmann's Parallel

reviewed by Lizzy Walker, Wichita State University

Matthias Lehmann. Parallel. Oregon: Oni Press, 2023. 452 pages, $29.99 9781637151006. https://oni-press.myshopify.com/products/parallel

 

            Translated from German into English for the first time by Ivanka Hahnenberger, Matthias Lehman's Parallel presents the story of Karl Kling, a gay man living in 1980s Germany. He is struggling to reconnect with his estranged daughter through a letter he wants to send to her. Lehmann presents Karl's story in two timelines. One timeline is in the 1980s before the Berlin Wall coming down and Germany’s reunification, shortly after Karl had retired from his job. The second timeline is during 1950s postwar Germany, after Karl has returned from his time in the German army. The story presents Karl's struggle to conform to familial expectations and social conventions, keeping his sexuality hidden from everyone close to him, and with reason. Homosexuality was illegal until 1994.

            The graphic novel opens with elderly Karl and his friend Adam discussing his retirement, but Karl's demeanor does not reflect any joy at facing his "hard-earned" reward. His mood improves little at the celebration held in the local bar that evening. When Adam talks of the beaches of Italy, and of the gorgeous women he could meet, Karl does not say much. Later, when Adam inquires about Karl's estranged daughter, Hella, Karl reveals he has not heard from her in eight years. In a flashback, the reader sees that last fateful evening with Karl and Hella. She is angry with him, she yells at him, and she leaves. The story snaps back to the present, and Karl starts going through old photographs. His first memory conjured by these windows in time is from when he served as a cook in the German army in World War II. An innocent romantic encounter with his tent-mate gives the reader the first glimpse at Karl hiding his homosexuality.

            Karl's life in the 1950s is fraught with bad decisions and tragedy along the way. After Karl kisses a man whom he mistakes for his old tent mate in the restroom at a local bar, rumors start to circulate. This information makes it to his father-in-law who happens to be a prominent figure in the community. He issues a severe warning to Karl, who does not heed it. Instead, he meets a man at the local swimming hole, which leads to a sexual entanglement that costs him his marriage and his livelihood when his father-in-law intervenes yet again, via a group of men who assault the two lovers. When he leaves his first marriage, Karl finds friends and foes in his struggle to come to terms with his identity while still attempting to maintain a straight façade. Eventually, Karl marries a second time, which becomes a relationship also fraught with tragedy. At one point, a clandestine lover loses his housing, so Karl invites him to live with his family. Much to the surprise of Karl, and the reader, this ends terribly, but not as might be expected.

            Throughout this graphic novel, Lehmann depicts Karl with all of his flaws. Despite how much he says he wants a traditional family, Karl destroys them by hiding his extramarital relationships the best that he can, while denying his identity out of necessity. He could not live openly as he might have wanted because of the illegality and stigma of being homosexual. As infuriating as Karl's actions are, it is a struggle to remain angry with him. While his life story unfolds, the reader sees his second marriage fall apart, more relationships fall apart, and betrayal after betrayal. They are not all of Karl's doing, but come as the result of his actions.

            Lehmann's approach to themes of loneliness, confusion, deception, and how the decisions of one man's lifetime culminate in isolated introspection and coming to terms with his past both work to provide the reader with a whole person. Karl is not perfect. The reader can despise the character's actions in one panel, and have compassion and empathy for Karl in the next. Lehmann's use of nonlinear storytelling helps tell the complicated story of Karl's life, weaving back and forth between his past and present, interspersed with the letter he is writing to his daughter. Karl's story hurts and it is meaningful in that hurt. It is engaging in a way that makes the reader feel like they are witnessing a very human character. Lehmann does not sugarcoat anything here. The reader sees everything primarily from Karl's point of view. At first, I wondered why Lehmann did not spend any time from Hella's point of view, but this could be for various reasons, including that the story is based on an actual relative of Lehmann's.

            It is worth taking time reading through Parallel, both to digest Karl's whole story and to take in the artwork. While there are many secondary characters, it is not hard to remember who they are and what their roles are in Karl's life, both those he harms but also ones with whom he shares genuine friendship. Lehmann's chosen palette for this graphic novel is black and white, and he makes good use of light and shadow. The backgrounds are worth taking extra time to peruse. Lehmann effectively matches the environment with the mood of particular scenes well.

 

Book review: Washington’s Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben.

reviewed by Cord Scott

Trujillo, Josh and Levi Hastings.  Washington’s Gay General: The Legends and Loves of Baron von Steuben. New York: Abram’s Surely Press, 2023. $24.99 ISBN 978-1-4197-4372-6. https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/washingtons-gay-general_9781419743726/

 In today’s politically charged cultural atmosphere, the argument that history is often written to fit social events of the day is one that resonates.  Permeating aspects of current society across the board, many Americans are uneasy with thinking of national heroes having what they perceive as less than desirable traits. This sort of argument could, and most likely will, be made by anyone trying to ban this book from libraries.  However, Steuben’s life is a great example of how complicated the stories of the Founding Fathers truly are.

The graphic novel centers on Trujillo, the writer, finding out about Friedrich von Steuben, a Prussian soldier who was brought to the American colonies to help train George Washington’s forces.  Von Steuben was instrumental in creating a training regime for the colonial army, was the first Inspector General of the US Army, and created the “Blue Book” a training manual that still has relevance to the modern US military. Trujillo was drawn to von Steuben as an openly gay man in a time of history when it was literally a crime.  While his affectations were widely known, there are few firm pieces of direct evidence, as many personal references or thoughts on homosexuality would be destroyed (p. 15). Narratively interesting is that Trujillo readily identified his own shortcomings in terms of scholarship, interest in history, or proximity to the actual areas where von Steuben lived. But this is something that historians often must face: how does one make a story complete, warts and all?  To that end, the result was commendable.

Friedrich von Steuben was born in Prussia in 1730 and had wanted to pursue a military career.  He was a shy child, and not above exaggerating stories or his own feats to get ahead in life.  As Trujillo wrote (p. 24) von Steuben often embellished stories to attain promotion or higher status.  He felt that he deserved such things as he was professionally that good, but this was a lifelong trait.  Von Steuben came to adulthood at a time when the Prussian military was used as the model for training, discipline, and strength in battle.  King Frederick I (Frederick the Great) of Prussia often outfitted his soldiers in smart-looking uniforms and had requirements for height.  Trujillo argues that Frederick was also gay, and so the “Prussian Giants” (p. 73) appearance may have been for his own proclivities as well as that of military prowess.

He had made close connections with Frederick, Frederick’s brother Prince Henry, and Claude-Louis, Comte de Saint-Germaine, a noted mercenary general from that era.  While von Steuben was known for his dalliances with men, it had never been overly dangerous as his military standing shielded him to an extent. Following the Seven Years’ War in Europe (known as the French and Indian War in America), von Steuben was virtually destitute, and living on the kindness of others.  Due to military cutbacks, the costs of war, and his own indebtedness, von Steuben had constant worry about money.  However, his reputation as a rake was becoming more of a liability and that is when he was introduced to Benjamin Franklin.  The reputation of both men for preferring younger lovers was well known, in Trujillo’s narrative.

Hired by Franklin, Von Steuben was part of a foreign contingent of military officers who rallied to the American cause. Trujillo noted that the stories of von Steuben appearing at Valley Forge in a flamboyant uniform were not true, although he did often have uniforms that were made to impress his importance.  His aides who were often very young (in their teens and early twenties while von Steuben at this point was in his fifties). These aides helped with the problems with his lack of English. When training soldiers, he was having to rely on one or two languages as well as interpreters which made immediate training corrections a bit strained, but his men liked him for the care he took of them.

Where Trujillo comes into some minor historical issue is with descriptions.  He notes that von Steuben was considered an outsider as he only spoke German.  This may not have been the issue it appears as German was under consideration for the official language of the colonies.  Second, the commentary on Benedict Arnold was awkward.  Arnold is correctly considered a traitor, but he was never seen as inept, as Trujillo described him.  Arnold was a tested commander who is recognized at both Saratoga and West Point New York for his importance. He, like von Steuben, felt he was deserving of far more than he had received.  In Arnold’s case, it led to his betrayal of the colonial army.

The later part of the book describes von Steuben’s struggle to be recognized, and more importantly paid, for his contributions following the American victory.  As with anyone had kept personal aspects of his life from the public eye (and history), the book ventures into the realm of speculation.  However, Trujillo acknowledges that it is hard to be accurate when facts are unknown.  A strength of the story also lies in the creator’s relating it to modern hardships of those in the LGBTQIA+ community.  The story also doesn’t shy away from von Steuben’s faults, from excessive drinking and vanity, to his ownership of slaves, to the complicity of treatment towards minorities in America.  People often approach historical figures as perfect people, and either have issues with, or outright deny, any wrongdoing.  This is dangerous as it sets a false narrative, and the authors avoided it here.

The issue of homosexuality in the American military is still a confusing one.  On one hand, the modern military often tries to emulate the warrior ethos of the ancient Spartans of Greece, with motivational t-shirts such as “Molon Labe” (Come and Take them – them being weapons).  However, the Spartans also fought with their male lovers, which runs in opposition of mainstream America’s concept of Greek society. It may be worth noting that Abrams did not publish this under their ComicArts imprint.

This book can create an interest in history, biography, or the American Revolution, and be a good starting point for future reading.  As in other Revolutionary War comics (Rebels from Vertigo and U.S. the graphic novel come to mind), it is a bit muted in colors, as though the past was a less vivid place. There may be some issues marketing it towards teens, beyond the obvious one, as there are a couple of swear words.  There is no gratuitous nudity, which does not detract from the story, but some will no doubt still find it offensive, in the way they might object to Maus.  Any historical-based book should have a bibliography for reference, and it would benefit this book as well.  These are minor issues.  In all, it is a good starting point into the lives of the “Founding Fathers,” glaring issues and all.