Underwater Spaceships

I wasn’t intimately familiar with the work of Joe Kubert when he was alive, but I did read some of his late work earlier this year while doing research for my sort-of thesis on [unimportant]. Here’s a somewhat modified version of what I wrote then, incorporating this weekend’s viewing of the Miami Vice movie for the umpteenth time.

The Prophecy, Joe Kubert’s late-period return to Sgt. Rock, was released in 2006, the same year as Michael Mann’s film adaptation of Miami Vice, and there are some parallels worth exploring. Both Kubert and Mann had co-created a franchise and wrote/directed (or drew for Kubert) a part of its initial run. As much older men, their returns were stripped of the vibrant flash their younger selves had adorned their respective products with. While still virile in unabashed macho swagger, a world-weary perspective had seeped through, accompanied by a fatalism unconcerned with franchise potential.

I’m not entirely sure what the studio was expecting when Mann came back on board for the film version of Miami Vice, but he took a $150 million dollar budget and replaced the streamlined, digestible coherence of the original with jarringly unwieldy digital grain and grossly microscopic detail and rendered the plot arbitrary background noise to the Kiss Me Deadly-ish descent into soul-crushing, “what does it all even mean” hopelessness. SPOILER (on multiple levels), the heroes kill the middle men but miss the big man, lose the girls, question the point of their routine and end the narrative going into a hospital, nullifying any potential for a sequel. The only things Mann was launching were a torpedo on the undercover cop genre, and a bid for artistic glory (which he won, IMO).

At 80, working within the finite framework of a six-part miniseries, Kubert probably wasn’t interested in reigniting franchise potential either, but the nullifying aspect comes less from the flirtation with abject market failure and more from the overall concern. Mainly, “The Final Solution.”  Not without ambition, The Prophecy is mythic, but in a deconstructive sense. Kubert pulls back the myth to reveal an unprecedented reality too hard to comprehend, with the hindsight of someone who has had over half a decade to process it.

Not that Rock was never plumbing the depths of war’s turmoil. Even if, in its original incarnation, it was never part of the 50’s trend of turning a horror comics lens on the ravages of war, a later statement by co-creator Robert Kanigher gave Rock similarly grave trappings. “As far as I’m concerned ROCK is the only authentic World War II Soldier. For obvious reasons. He and Easy Company live only, and will eventually die, to the last man, in World War II.” Tellingly, his authenticity was measured by his grueling fate at the end of the war. Still, as a serialized action-adventure, it extended the punchy upswing of WWII propaganda.

The Prophecy, on the other hand, is practically a ghost story, given the way Kubert sends Rock through a dead zone like a wandering spirit stuck in the machinations of his living self’s routine. The story deals with an idea about the end of the war that was already actualized years before its completion. Like in earlier incarnations, soldiers and friends die, others make it, the general action template remains. The lens through which the template is viewed, however, is drained of any excitement once attached to the proceedings. The year is 1943, Rock and his platoon are dropped off in an area that is grey on multiple levels. It’s a “No Man’s Land” between the Germans and the Russians and their mission is transport a “valuable object” out of Lithuania into safety.

Ostensibly filled with rubble and devoid of life it’s also devoid of liveliness. There is a drastic distinction between the old Rock and the new one in the color palette, alone. Unlike the bombastic clashes of primary colors in the originals (dark and less dark greens for uniforms and tanks, ketchup red and sun yellow for explosions) everything here seems to be tainted by shade of grey, all the colors are washed out.

Upon arriving they find bearded child rabbi named David with a prophecy to spread to the outside world. The rabbi elders have given him the task of telling Americans, anyone, about the death camps and the final solution. The entire plot, in turn, rests on the importance of his testimony, the irony being that his prophecy is already under way. Kubert’s choice to make it operate under the illusion of a prophecy turns the horrific reality of the concentration camps into something only understood by mythological nightmare.

One set piece on the journey involves stumbling onto an empty camp. While empty, as if contracted but still unused, the air wreaks of death only hinted at by medical files for experiments on absent bodies. An ensuing skirmish with a troupe of classically villainous Nazis informs them the camp has just been liquidated, sent to “the next world.” The success in the skirmish proves pyrrhic when immediately following we get the first glimpse of the prophecy, in giant mounds of dirt with limbs jutting out. The washed out tint becomes poignant here as the air of death that sucks the life out of the color palette is given a corpse-strewn source.

In an instance of meta-textual commentary on witnessing atrocity and attempting to translate it into coherent testimony, one of the soldiers in the platoon attempts to make a comic about the death camps. His sketches are more cartoonish than the comic, but strain with sincerity. His erased and redrawn sketches of crude figures and basic outlines speak to the intransigence of reality in the face of textual, testimonial translation.  

Halfway through the comic Kubert makes another, similar statement on testimony. Running into a family in hiding, the soldiers become audience to a story of a village’s liquidation. The survivors speak in a Yiddish translated by the young rabbi, and the font in the dialogue bubbles changes to the traditional Hebraic mold. The concrete history of the font is contrasted with the fading history it conveys as the artwork that accompanies the story makes a drastic change.

The drawings are now sketches, rendered in charcoal. Not as crude as that of the soldier’s, but still an anatomical blueprint compared to the semi-vivid colors of the present. Speaking to the precarious situation of the narrator’s subjects, and to the ephemeral nature of concrete memory, the visual accompaniment looks as if it is disappearing at the same rate it leaves the narrator’s tongue.

Kubert had actually taken this method to its full conclusion three years earlier in his comic Yossel April 19, 1943 where he simultaneously deals with the genre of alternate history and the attempt of the present to interact with it. Having been 13 around the time of the Warsaw Uprising but living in the states, Kubert didn’t go firsthand. ‘Families would visit us in Brooklyn from back home in Poland, and talk about the terrible things happening in Europe…In the end, my intent wasn’t so much to show the Holocaust as to show how it affected people caught within it.”

Kubert here places his family in the throes of ghettoization and extermination. The charcoal sketches are those of Kubert’s alternate self, actively documenting what was happening as it happened. Kubert did not revise the drawings with ink and handed over his pencil drawings for publishing. The effect is akin to reading a lost diary, one as finely detailed as the village testimony, but as rough-hewn as the soldier’s sketches, conveying wasting talent dying with bracing immediacy.

I just read Night Business issue 2 before i read Night Business issue 1. I haven’t read the latter because it’s sold out so it’s not included in the Traditional Comics Bundle. What is totally not a problem about that is, because Night Business is modeled after b-grade 80’s exploitation films that need to be fed after midnight to become transcendent, it allows one to jump into the fray almost precisely because of how the narrative sequence is jumbled. One of the fun things about watching sequels before watching the originals is that the traces of the original become miniature puzzles that complicate and shade the action of the succeeding chapter’s proceedings. Similar is the case with badly cut films disowned by their directors, something that can equally give off a giddy rush from it’s near-Dada disjointedness.

I don’t say any of the above because Marra either a) doesn’t know what he’s doing, so his work is only incidentally compelling much in the same way some of the inspirations are or b) that Marra doesn’t have director’s cut. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and is allowed to do it that way because his comics are from-the-ground-up, creator owned/distributed works of personal art. The mish-mash of hard-boiled pulp signifiers—a night slasher, the strip club affected by their killings and the lower-depths bodyguard that has to do something about it, plus others—are as much informed by the narrative as they are by the narratives that gave birth to their iconographic stature. Thus, like in a sequel, some of the fun is in the aforementioned shading, here in genre precedents. 

The literal shading in the comic provides some interesting complications informed by iconographic stature as well. Perhaps because I don’t have much precedent for the characters, being ignorant of their backstories, they are given a healthy two-dimensional unmooring, in that there is the intentional one-dimensionality of their characterization, but the second dimension is an unusual interchangeability that takes over them when reading it like this. I don’t want to sully Marra’s art when I say the following, but there’s a statuesque brusqueness to the characters movements that reminds me of re-enacting scenes from Mortal Kombat to that Traci Lords song with the tie-in action figures in my bedroom as a kid. What I mean is, the work of Marra, as an overlord in the seedy underworld of Night Business, is felt in every cheekbone, inner thigh, and ink-blotted tricep.

The characters are born out of and contract back into stone with every panel. While my only frame of reference is the vinyl-groove voids of Charles Burns and the outre bluntness of early Judge Dredd, there are a few cases here, especially with the main character Johnny, that brought to mind another disjointed, unusually cut but compellingly iconographic genre meditation, The Keep. In that film, a renegade group of Nazis accidentally unleash a Golem-like figure while looking for gold in a Romanian mountain. A metaphysical reflection of the evil of Nazism he complicates the moral binaries of Nazi and Jew alike, his own alliances and potential for counterforce shifting with the film’s badly cut and compromised trajectory. As the smoke-shrouded, sprite-like presence of the force grows increasingly hard-bodied and limber, the flesh-and-blood humans descend into a marble-hole where their actions become informed by desires beyond their control.

In issue two of Night Business, characters whose sides of the good/bad line of demarcation are seemingly clear, blur with the speed of their fists. Johnny, the strip club bodygaurd (i think), mulls over/through the escalating action like a hard-boiled egg. Thickening to the point of stone-cold with the proceedings, even putting a stripper into the street as slasher-bait, he is eventually kidnapped in a way that suggests he can be easily smashed. One slashed stripper escapes with her face still bandaged from the hospital, reawoken with a murderous vengeance. The slasher is nearly cut, but his leathery mask is echoed in both the unbandaged, lacerated into portions face of the surviving, bloodlusting stripper and in the moody, violent insularity of Johnny.

Like all narratives of vengeance that want any staying power, doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing intersect in ways that become indistinguishable. In Marra’s stark, almost wood-cut lines, deliberate movements and thud-landing action, the dark shading that dents each character’s body, each alley’s walls and each building’s potentially imprisoning contours blends the blacks and the whites into your grey matter, the only area in which the action’s grey areas can flourish.

I’m at home right now. I’ve found my Magneto: Testament comics and am remembering the disappointment I met their inside pages with back when I bought them. It was fall 2009, around the time I fell into one of my deep Holocaust literature holes, reading Primo Levi and Raul Hilberg, watching Shoah and The Sorrow and the Pity, etc. Finding a series devoted to uncovering Magneto’s childhood encounter with Auschwitz seemed potentially revelatory. Not that Testament should be held up against objective historical analysis, but even when placed in the context of more fragmentary and subjective Holocaust literature, or earlier issues of X-Men that dealt with the subject, the scope of how missed the opportunity was becomes equally, if not more apparent.

As a fictional approximation, in particular a comic, it has the opportunity to bypass the formal rigor of objective historical and socio-political analysis for something more personal. While the former is necessary for understanding how mass extermination was committed using rational structures, bureaucratic mechanization, taxonomical classification and other things generally associated with modernity and civilization, it doesn’t account for the subjective response in which the temporal dislocation of traumatic events put traditional cultural mythologies through the wringer and rendered linear objectivity useless. Fictive works like Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl or Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies: A Love Story give the events resonance in the canon of diasporic literature that deal with this. For instance, Manuel Zapatta Olivella’s Chango: The Biggest Badass, in which slavery is partially interpreted through a clash between African folklore and American monotheism, or Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun in which the Nakba is given circular fragmentation in village stories that loosely recall the tales of Sheherezade. Also Jewish folklore, which reconfigured the pogroms through The Golem. Testament by default registers as magical realism, but its attempt at streamlined narrative and documentary relevance cancels that out.

Meisha Rosenberg, in an article on Ozick and the “midrashic mode,” argues the necessity of not relegating Holocaust literature to the non-fiction realm, or enchaining the narrative with grounded purpose when within the fictional realm. She declines Theo Adorno’s (paraphrased) assertion that “writing poetry after the Holocaust is barbaric” on account of how documentary realism bars “imaginative entry into the event” and also gives credence to the ways in which fiction—in this case post-Holocaust fiction—has access to historical explanations that objective analysis does not.

Fiction about the Holocaust can fill a void in the Jewish literary community left by the millions of stories completely lost to the genocide. Fiction about the Holocaust can go where history cannot, paying tribute to the personal experiences that have been silence by mass murder.

Rosenberg implicitly makes a connection between Ozick’s use of the midrashic mode and the approach towards Talmudic discourse taken by rabbis after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD. Since the midrash—which etymologically means “to search” or “to inquire”—was meant to “guide the diaspora” after the destruction, it has resonance in Ozick’s attempt to both make sense of the Holocaust while upholding its mystifying grip on the shattered psyches of those that went through it. While guiding may have been the goal, the midrashic “project” led to an interpretive dynamic that allowed for non-didactic engagement with the source text. The overly literal and by-the-numbers Magneto: Testament goes the didactic route, approaching the subject with a limited attempt at documentary semi-realism. Its failures, especially as a comic, become all the more confusing when looking at issues 150 and 161 of Uncanny X-Men, whose mytho-poetic abstractions about survivor trauma are far more incisive than the streamlined “official backstory.”

One problem with Testament is reverence, not necessarily towards the Holocaust or its survivors but towards the genre and a notion of its teachability, where the historical event is given a pat narrative trajectory out of which one—possibly a middle school teacher or a hip volunteer at an afterschool program at Temple Beth Sholom—can wring out a lesson in morality. While the moral does engage in a contentious aspect of Holocaust scholarship—the level of resistance Jews displayed in the face of encroaching extermination—it does so in a way ensured to offend (and engage) no one.

For instance, take the comic’s treatment of Kristallnacht. As in history, the pogrom is preceded by a young Jew’s assassination of a Nazi diplomat (adorned with annotations to make sure this goes through the right bureaucratic channels for legitimacy), prominently displaying a Jew whose philosophy was “by any means necessary.” In contrast, the narrative’s trajectory is Max’s slowly dawning realization that not fighting back against Nazis for fear of amplified reproachment—which he is consistently told in skirmish after skirmish—means nothing in the face of inevitable wholesale slaughter. Thus, the passive, accepting and intentionally oblivious Jews of Hilberg’s history and the varied resistors of Yehuda Bauer’s history are both represented. Whether that was intended or not is unclear, since the events taking place, and the aesthetic that conveys them is so facile in its construction that historical debate by Jewish scholars seems a secondary concern to the remove of inoffensive Jewish characterization.

Max’s Jewishness is implied by context instead of by character, as there are zero signifiers of Judaic heritage in his household aside from his artisan father yelling “Ach!” at the comic’s beginning. Since his Jewishness is primarily established by the discrimination he receives for apparently being Jewish, any ethnicity is rendered the province of his persecutors. He is drawn with dark hair, which separates him from the Aryan archetype of the Hitler Youth that springs up around him (a la Swing Kids). He is also given horrifyingly large doe eyes, as is Magda, his gypsy love interest, and also all of the comic’s victims. Pak’s study of Maus in preparation for writing his must have led to art directions suggesting another fable, this time made out of squinting Germans and Disney-fied, wide-eyed Jews.

To make sure any sense of historical importance from the egregious annotations is not lost on the reader, there is an author statement at the back of the first issue about research. The statement speaks of an attempt to synthesize the confusing, contradictory narrative strands surrounding Magneto, in the process creating something so grounded and literal that the rarefied, mystifying shock that led to this comic is lost in the process. Perhaps Pak, not being Jewish, was padding the story with a dutifully respectful approach to the Holocaust to avoid incurring the wrath of the ADL or anyone with like-minded inclinations. My mom, after watching X-Men: First Class with limited knowledge of the franchise, had identified so much with Magneto that she didn’t really register him as a potential villain. Earlier this weekend, when I began explaining Magneto to her, she wondered if it was a new stage in anti-Semitic propaganda, which seems reasonable without proper backstory.

Even though two Jews created Magneto, it was a gentile that invented his status as a survivor. However well meaning he may have been, that kind of information can easily be misconstrued. I bring this up not for validity of the reactionary response but for the murky, historically burdened waters in which this kind of stuff automatically has to float in. But since Magneto is already a Jewish villain of sorts, why even bother creating a palatable narrative when it already exists in the opposite direction? It reminds me of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of Louise Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants, which also had an angelic othering of persecuted Jews posing as social realism:

In keeping with the more enlightened, liberal brand of French anti-Semitism, which depicts Jews as cute, lovable, and exotic rather than venal and sinister, the featured victim is treated as a rare objet d’art rather than an ordinary kid.

Rosenbaum is not suggesting the more overt brand of anti-Semitism is preferable, but that using kid gloves on the subject is itself a form of revisionist history that further dehumanizes the oppressed subjects at its center.

Like the myriad of dutiful media products dedicated to teaching the Shoah before it, its packaging is unusually glossy. Ironically, this yields its one plus (aka what sold me on it), the covers. Much more powerful if taken as one large panel, the sparingly detailed, poetic abstractions adorning the covers are like a night terror that conveys Magneto’s narrative without spelling it out. I suspect that the choice of red as the only color was as much informed by Magneto’s suit as it was by the cloying sequence in Schindler’s List, but I haven’t really seen such a limited palette used with such visceral efficacy outside of Matt Seneca’s Affected.

The first cover is young Max Eisenhardt, seemingly on the eve of his fall, being showered with white leaves while shrouded by darkness, emerging from a closing light of promise, and facing down a bloody puddle with Magneto’s silhouette ominously foreshadowing his inevitable destiny. The white leaves make an interesting conversation with his white armband, whose black Star of David and grey stripes resemble the eventual flag of Israel more than they do the insignia Jews were normally forced to wear in the ghettos. A cursory search of the old testament for water, leaves and Israel reveals Ezekiel 47, where the titular prophet is shown a stream that will flow through the New Temple, bring life into the Dead Sea and surrounding land, and bring fruit to trees whose leaves will not wither. In contrast Max sees a cesspool of blood riddled with vengeful violence, and the leaves rain unattached to anything but a ghostly pallor.

The second cover, the last of the five to feature Magneto, has Max leaning on barbed wire, face now shadowed by a cap that serves no purpose in regards to anonymity. The use of white now renders the child a victim of vampiric bloodlust, black eyes sitting like slits in a removable phantom mask. Strands of red fabric rest on the barbs of wires barely out of reach and taunt any plans Max may have for escape. The face, and the placement of fingers suggest resignation, the cap being a potential nod to the iconic helmet, which hovers like a foggy vision in the background.

The absence of any Magneto iconography in the last three covers implies an internalization of his mythos. The costume is subsumed by the resentment it is used to clothe, becoming fully integrated as an idea into the body of its owner. In the same way that the trauma of war forces some to mature immediately, the necessity of portraying the physical transformation of Max into the elderly antagonist is rendered useless. In the fourth cover, with his head shaved, dressed in the striped uniform of labor, his impishness is both infantile and rapidly aged, representing the polar ends of life’s spectrum millions were forced to simultaneously inhabit.

In the last cover, Max’s age is completely inscrutable. His charcoaled face is a stream of snot, tears and sawdust. His pupils are red, whether they are witnessing Magneto or the crematorium is unclear, but in way that is immersive. The differentiation between his pupil and his face is important. The face, drawn with blunt realism, relates the explainable version of the holocaust, one based on the documentary evidence available via, say, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog. It reflects on our perception of the events, and is reduced to what we see of him. The red speaks to the inexplicable, the shattered psyche that has to contend with the lacerating scars of unspeakable atrocities, that doesn’t conform to our objective and linear understanding of history but struggles in its own fragmented universe.

The pupil’s subject is up to interpretation, and the tearful, snot-filled wordlessness suggests an explanation that is worlds away from pedestrian understanding. It recalls Ka-Tzetnik 135633’s Shivitti: A Vision where the author, a holocaust survivor suffering from night terrors, undergoes LSD therapy in order to confront his traumas. In a way it recalls the alternate realities explored by the broken protagonists of Philip K. Dick, continually haunted by their pasts, rarely benefitting from the technological advancements and interdimensional transcendence of the future (though the author here does, in a way). Ka-Tzetnik, real name Yehiel De-Nur, basically goes back in time and becomes witness to his own memories, but as the procedure progresses the LSD and the subconscious memory bank it’s tampering with render them increasingly distorted and, most importantly, biblical. This image in particular could be the aforementioned red in Max’s pupil:

Auschwitz is a flaming pyre. I know I have been summoned to witness the fire-belching site. Ashmadai, King of Auschwitz. Here he is. I see him with my own eyes emerging from the furnace in his ascent from the chimney, from the hidden holies of his abode. Cloaked by the smoke, he wafts to the heights of heaven, with Shamhazai and Azael unfurling a canopy over his head. Mushroom-like, the specter looms in the sky: Shamhazai and Azael are about to anoint Ashmadai as the new King of Kings, lord of the universe. With blaring trumpets they declare war on the four corners of the earth that the new name of the sovereign of the universe will no longer be Ashmadai but Nucleus! His birthplace: The heart of the furnace in the mystery laboratory, Auschwitz. Manufactured from a new substance, altogether unique, Nucleus is the concentrate of the souls of one and one-half million living, breathing children.

This hallucinogenic interpretation of the trauma of the Holocaust, written in 1989, isn’t actually the first time it was broached in that fashion. Though fictional, Uncanny X-Men #161 from 1982 has a comatose Professor X relive the memory of his split from Magneto, the action starting in a Haifa mental ward for Holocaust survivors. The opening page depicts X under nightmarish reverie, with the X-Men hideously transformed into monsters and insectoid aliens (like the dark forces that would later roam the outer regions of the Invisibles’ consciousness) looming over his skull. He is soon whisked back to 20 years prior, when he first meets doctor Magnus at his friend Daniel Shomron’s survivor clinic. A patient named Gabrielle Haller, beyond the ability of Magnus to heal, sits catatonic.

Professor X broaching the closeted mental space of a catatonic schizophrenic directly engages with a debate raging then and now as to the use of survivor testimony in understanding the Holocaust. Raul Hilberg ruled out any testimony that wasn’t born of the period either prior to or during WWII claiming the inconsistencies between survivor memories (either lockjawed or borrowed from memory of what happened other inmates), where Yehuda Bauer contended that the sometimes sharper memory of elders and those inconsistencies themselves were equally ripe for analysis. Christopher Browning, a historian who at one point followed Hilberg’s maxim, recently wrote a book called Remembering Survival in which the 1972 case against Walter Becker, a german chief of police spotted by survivors of Treblinka as a former officer at the camp. He was acquitted when legal rule of inconsistent testimonies resulted in having over 100 surviving witnesses’ statements thrown out of court.

Xavier, braving the hallucinogenic instability of Gabrielle defies any pretense of rational observation when the effect of the atrocities was irrational in itself. Before Xavier’s superego magically extracts itself and projects into her mind, one of the backgrounds already evokes “The Yellow Wallpaper” and the suggestion that the narrator’s unreliability is as revelatory as it is obfuscating.

The blue and yellow swirls surrounding the floating Xavier register both as wings fluttering in the netherworld of his coma’s cocoon and as panoptic eyes rendered useless by Gabrielle’s barrier, which interestingly looks like a red pyramid. The connection between historical (Nazi) and biblical (Pharaoh) oppression—a connection which I am not making given rich and important culture of ancient Egypt, I mean this mainly in the diasporic sense of a continuum of overseers—gives the trippy atmospherics a touch of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, which similarly flirted with the occult of both ancient Egypt and Nazi Germany. Much like Ka-Tzenik’s later filtering of Auschwitz through the imminent presence of nuclear holocaust, Xavier interprets the blinding light in the same way J. Robert Oppenheimer did the first atomic test, with the quote from Baghavad-Gita: “I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.” Xavier also falters in attempting to interpret the light, vacillating between the feminized menace in the Greek mythology of Gorgon or the overwhelming potential of the monotheistic lord. While it is later revealed that Xavier survived serving in the Korean war, Gabrielle’s Dachau-informed visions are initially beyond his comprehension.

Part of the reason, of course, is that Gabrielle has transformed Dachau into equally horrifying if still removed horrors of predatory insects. I’m not entirely sure how much of this is Xavier combatting against the infestation implanted by the Brood Queen in his mind, but there’s an overlap between the fantastical horrors of space and the earthly terrors of the camps. One of the things De-Nur is combatting in Shivitti is that sense of estrangement from the camps as a tangible, of-this-earth historical reality. In an interview with Tom Segev for the introduction to The Seventh Million he recounts:

I was there for about two years. Time there was different from what it is here on earth. Every split second ran on a different cycle of time. And the inhabitants of that planet had no names. They had neither parents nor children. They did not dress as we dress here. They were not born there nor did anyone give birth. Even their breathing was regulated by the laws of another nature. They did not live, nor did they die, in accordance with the laws of this world. Their names were numbers…

Issue 161’s plot, which alternates between space, Haifa, Dachau and the internal recesses of the mind, creates another form of dislocation.

Though X-Men was always allegoric, this issue is basically a secret entry into the Weird War Tales/Horrors of War canon, and as such becomes more teachable than Testament while its phantasmagoria correlates more to the language of comics as well. Since the art in Testament is uniform, it subscribes to an aesthetic linearity that undermines both psychological turmoil and the ways in which traditional comics art naturally conveyed that. Xavier walks through her horrors much like Ka-Tzetnik wanders through his own, noting common signifiers such as the cattle cars, the death of the elderly, the rapid maturity of the young who were “ancient in spirit, innocent no longer”, the gas chambers and officer cruelty. It is implied that Gaby is used by the guards, who “like her,” corresponding with Ka-Tzetnik’s most controversial work, the Joy Division-inspiring House of Dolls, in which Ka-Tzetnik’s sister is thrown into the camp brothel, or joy division, for Nazi pleasure. This also trumps campy movies like Dead Snow about nazi zombies in that the mutated guards here reflect on the damage they inflicted on Gabrielle instead of “whoa, what if there were Nazi zombies” inanity.

In the various boxes, the spare, unorthodox coloring also provides effective disorientation. The barbed wire, with a gloating skull floating over it, is done in black and red, the inmates barely etched into the other side of the fence. The crematorium spews pink fumes giving the gas an appropriate signifier of a science experiment gone awry. The color scheme also advances the plot, in that the solid gold Gabrielle turns into is the fusion in Xavier’s mind of the memory of the ensuing conflict, which is the emergence of terrorist network HYDRA, made up largely of ex-Nazis, in the pursuit of gold hidden by their former peers. Gaby’s golden transfiguration is symbolic of the Nazi loot’s origins, robbed from new inmates to the camps.

The complex interplay between layered imagery resurfaces when HYDRA’s uniforms resemble both the infestation in Xavier’s mind and Gaby’s trauma-induced nightmares. Now that the recognizable uniform of Nazism has been relegated by law to museums and antique shops, what the insignia represented has floated on as a phantom presence and manifests itself in a garish approximation of the mental scars it left. Prior to the above panel, HYDRA attacks the hospital in order to kidnap Gaby and two Israeli soldiers exchange queries about whether the attackers are “Arab Commandos? Terrorists?” or not. They hear German and realize that’s impossible. While successive Israeli administrations re-oriented the threat faced by Jews to the surrounding Arab nations, the sneak attack also brings an unpleasant reminder of the European origin of Jewish destruction.

Magnus eventually uses his powers to crush HYDRA and once safely securing the gold redirects it towards the funding of his plans for Mutant Supremacy, giving backstory to the rift hinted at in X-Men issue #150, both of which make a far more compelling backstory than the one invented by X-Men: First Class. Issue 150 exposes one of the problems with giving Magneto’s childhood a digestible narrative. Mainly, that the fractured and unstable psychological state the atrocities left him with speak more to the complexity of the horrors endured than a conservatively traditional Shoah story does.

Titled “I, Magneto,” the story gives him a sympathetic monologue that gives the merciless cruelty of the villain sociological heft and greater sympathy. In fact, the inside cover depicts Magneto orating on a small stage next to a globe, his own Globe Theater, if you will. While not a backpedaling attempt by Shakespeare to counteract the overt anti-Semitism he was employing in Shylock’s demand for a pound of flesh, it is tangentially Jewish (his tattoo had not yet been revealed) and a tragedy of a systemic order. It introduces what would overshadow the rest of his menace and become the largest pop cultural take on survivor aftershock.

The plot follows the X-Men as they try to stop Magneto from destroying the globe. Magneto, as a hologram (which uncomfortably recalls the liminality which most survivors who feel they accidentally “made it” toil in) is depicted in front of a variety of nations, from the U.S. to Moscow to Saudia Arabia, delivering the a speech establishing mutants as “homo superior,” transcending the barbarity of “common humanity” that hunts and kills mutants because they are different, while at the same time leading towards “HOLOCAUST” by way of nuclear weapons. The politics are somewhat complicated, in that, the systemic persecution and sometimes violence towards mutants has rendered Magneto’s views of world politics in a false binary that excludes the residents of Kenya, whose leader is among the hologram’s audience.

Magneto is projecting his image from an island where, ironically, he uses a machine to paralyze the powers of any mutant that gets in his way. The action, as a result, subtly simulates the identity crisis of the mutant granted normality at the expense abnormal familiarity. Though established early on when Cyclops is introduced with his powers already lost, the moment where the X-Men arrive later on and realize their stripped status uses the limited palette to great effect. For one picture they are all colored in the same washed out purple, their differences neutralized.

Earlier, after the hologrammed state of the union address, he tells prisoners Cyclops and Arcadia about his plans to divert the war funds and caches towards the “eradication of poverty, hunger and disease.” The ultimatum, though, is between a positive golden age and death, which leads to a minor debate on freedom of choice. Magneto’s rash insistence on a fascist turnover, in turns benign and malignant, poses the dilemma of exhibiting agency through vengeful remediation within the framework of the system that stripped him of it. Perhaps a printing mistake, but after his helmet is removed, his white mane is briefly given a pinkish purple hue, giving it continuity with the gases to be depicted in Issue 161. Cyclops and Arcadia are is dressed in ancient Greek garb, and like the hideaway itself exist somewhere between Jason and the Argonauts and Flash Gordon. Though a bit heavy handed, it hammers home the historical continuum in which these power shifts have and will always exist.

Wile the extremities of his views have a traceable impetus in the oppression of Mutants —itself an extremity that causes an inverse response of overturned taxonomical hierarchy—the final skirmish sets off a post-traumatic trigger the reveals how deep his wounds go. Pointedly, what sets off the trigger directly plays with the structural barriers set up in the camps, electrical fences. When Kitty Pryde attempts to strip Magneto’s mechanism of its power through the infrastructure’s memory bank, he lunges at her. She “disrupts Magneto’s natural electronic field, jolting him painfully.” Magneto, on impulse, sends a “lethal charge of electricity through her.” His pain subsides and the gravity of what he’s done registers in a shock, becoming victim to the same thing he’s been escaping ever since he destroyed the camp fence.

Kitty’s apparent death by Magneto’s power brings back memories of “Magda” who reacted with “terror” when he tried to “[avenge] our murdered daughter” with his powers. Much like Captain America’s grief-stricken comedown from the post-awakened skirmish, Magneto is immediately awash in agony. Kitty survives and Magneto disappears, but the way his mutant oppression is qualified by his Jewish oppression lingers.

Testament in its slavish adherence to respectful literalism, seems to miss the point of franchise it contributes to. X-Men managed to infuse the schematic with the symbolic, incorporating allusive political commentary into the Heroes vs. Villains template. In a world where mutants represented the effects of oppression, there was a fluidity to the way it switched between allegoric—Professor Xavier as MLK vs. Magneto as Malcolm X, or the segregated, mutant-slave state of Genosha as South Africa during Apartheid—and direct—here, the actual Holocaust. In issues 150 and 161, the vestiges of trauma, as exploded into the mytho-poetic abstraction that comics trade in, we learn more about what happened to Magneto and what it can demonstrate about what happened to victims of the Holocaust on a physical, psychological and cultural level than any straightforward explanation could attempt to “teach.”

Following what I wrote here I actually did end up sneaking into the Avengers movie (with the attendant donation), but with only four of the original comics read. While the dialogue was snappy, intermittently funny and occasionally incisive, and the film’s progressive politics were agreeable, they don’t really deepen anything that hadn’t been established either by the Iron Man films or the comics themselves. Some of the jokes may have a higher level of sophistication than Stan Lee’s dopey one-liners but what comes across in the film is the residual Sorkin/Abrams compactness of modern television pacing (the opening sequence seemed to have dropped out of an episode of Fringe). 

It has some moments though. Mark Ruffalo’s choice to play Banner as both mournfully removed and humbly self-deprecating is inspired, and the banter with Downey Jr. in the floating laboratory was like a Big Chill-ish sequel to Real Genius. Scarlett Johanssen, here given a more sizable role with a spectrum of emotions, seems to harness all of her real life’s TMZ drama and no-doubt hurtful criticism of her acting as wooden and nothing much beyond a body. It hangs over the character’s ass-kicking confidence, with the restrained vulnerability given meta-textual depth, her compromised reputation held back like a dam behind her controlled delivery. Every now and then, the characters transcend the aesthetic limitations and locomotive “get to the sequel” plotting of the film, but the moments are informed more by the actors than anything that has to do with the characters.  

My earlier criticism, that filmic translation of comics loses one of the original medium’s largest draws—its vibrant imagery i.e. the work of comics artists—still stands. I sincerely doubt this was lost on Whedon, and there are some aspects of the film that seem like an attempt to counter that discrepancy. Loki’s planet of exile looks like a lost set from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos repurposed by Lord Zedd, and the tesseract glows like Ivan’s ooze, but equating that with comics art limits its reputation as anything beyond simplistic children’s fare. Along with the main conflict, the film inadvertently presents an attendant clash between the avengers’ reverently colorful costumes (plus the glowing orb they’re after) and the grey-hued/washed out, technological modernity of the shooting locations. 

Since the film was hamstrung by the new continuity parameters set up by the intersectional franchise I imagine they had to let some of the stuff go, and given my dilettantism there isn’t much for me to argue with someone like Whedon that can confidently cite an Avengers annual as a milestone in Marvel history. Also, I know, holding up a film to a small, somewhat outdated portion of a voluminous text seems antithetical to the non-linearity i held against the film franchise’s master narrative. And though I kind of disagree with Truffaut’s fairly conservative point against the blasphemous nature of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, his objection that replacing slavish reverence to the original text with something merely in the spirit of it rings false when the spirit of the text is lost in the translation as well seems relevant here.

Looking at the earliest introduction of the Avengers, which the film is attempting to both recapitulate and rewrite, it seems like there were some opportunities missed. Here I’ll focus on three of them, first being the Captain’s integration into the Avengers. The Captain’s return is played as a conflict between the Manichean binaries of the good soldier Rogers and the post-modern nihilism of the reference-heavy Stark. Though rendered clever by Stark’s dialogue, the scenario wouldn’t be out of place in an inspirational sports film. In the recent Jack Kirby roundtable, Glen David Gold discusses the importance of Kirby’s background as a soldier in WWII: 

…Jack Kirby is the only major cartoonist to have killed Nazis.  And he didn’t do it from a distance — he killed Nazis using the same hands that later drew Thor, the Aryan God of Thunder, hammering Mangog (old testament villain name, more or less) in the snout.  Kirby shot and stabbed Nazis for about six months in 1943 and 1944, and I would argue that experience didn’t just change his life but shaped his work from that moment forward, in that an underlying PTSD worldview took him places he wouldn’t have gone otherwise.  For instance: Kirby deepened the emotional realm of the Marvel Universe by the re-introduction of Captain America in Avengers #4.

Avengers #4…now had a hero with a truly nuanced, complex unsolvable problem: Post traumatic stress disorder.  Cap responded from his thaw by freaking out, flashing back, displaying hypervigilence, remorse, guilt, nightmares, delusions…the list goes on. And with that, the Marvel universe was really born.  Every character had to have emotional layers like that from then on. And the world of Marvel was based on a trauma that Kirby suffered through.

The whole discussion is fascinating, including a long quote from Kirby on his liberation of a small concentration camp and what Kirby being one of the first Americans to encounter the Holocaust meant for his subsequent work. I don’t have much to add to this, but its absence in the film is a disservice. There, Captain America’s flashbacks, during a semi-serious punching bag session, serve less as a sign of PTSD than they do a cross-promotional signal to everyone in the audience that didn’t catch the Captain America reboot, saying: a) this is what they need to know about him to enjoy the following product and b) there’s another product to check out, if you haven’t yet, when this one is over! The following panel, on the other hand, is the original coming to: 

A number of things are happening within it. The Captain’s initial amnesia is visually articulated as a clash between the material objects that subsumed his human identity and a white void that signifies nothing recognizable. He stands confused, a hero without anything to defend, much less relate to. The middle image shows the captain finding the return of his memory “lucky” but the way in which he puts on his mask to re-familiarize himself with the trappings of his costume suggests an awkward, alienated discomfort. The third panel stands in stark contrast with the first, with the Captain reassuming obedient military posture to feel out an instinctual connection with the identity he was trained into assuming. The modern, technologically enhanced background is there, though still less vivid and detailed then his outfit. 

The initial comfort soon turns for the worse, since the Captain’s obedience to military dictum brings on another instinct, that of immediately identifying anyone unfamiliar as an enemy that needs to be wiped out. The clash of primary colors between the Avengers’ various costumes stands in contrast to the image of the Captain against the purple-hued machinery. The reds, whites and blues of his uniform are no longer in unfamiliar territory as the action becomes a swirl of primary colors, but the Captain’s hard-wired, war mode programming automatically equates the surrounding bodies with Red Skull and the Nazis that defined his reality the last time he was conscious. 

Captain’s episode is stopped by Ant/Giant-Man’s companion The Wasp, who Warner Bros. hadn’t managed to make a film for and thus wrote out of the storyline. (The Wasp is somewhat controversial and problematic (in the hands of men, at least) in that she is boy-crazy and verbally promiscuous, but she also functions as an emasculating and witty counterpoint to the group’s abundant testosterone.) The following shot reads “Captain America’s fighting mood seems to pass, a veil of sadness comes over his eyes.” Essentially a manic episode is followed by its bi-polar counterpart, depression, and the distance between some of the coloring, the shading, and the lines, is transformed into a sapped vitality of someone whose identity is no longer surrounded by what defined it. 

Another telling sequence comes later, when Captain America falls asleep, in his outfit, at a motel. He is plagued by the loss of his sidekick, Bucky, and his career trajectory is momentarily rendered immobile. In what initially seems like sleep paralysis, he wakes up to a shadowy silhouette in the doorway, bathed in a purple orb but entering from a black abyss, something that wouldn’t be out of place in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath. The captain doesn’t even register how unsettling it is, as his dementia insists that Bucky, and not his haunting specter, is alive. When he finds out that the person is actually Rick Jones, a teenage sometimes-assistant to the Hulk, the cognitive association automatically enchains the boy’s features to the familiar visage of Bucky. 

Aside from the quick-cut flashbacks to other movie, the only reference to WWII in this film is an unfortunate sequence where Loki crashes a museum gala in Germany and forces everyone to kneel, except one man refuses. His Tevyeh-style accent and refutation of Loki’s “fascist subject as free man” theory do not carry the potent punch Whedon and scribe Zak Penn probably intended. Instead it recalls the hokey sequence from Menachem Golan’s Delta Force where one of the Delta passengers signals his survivor status to hijacking terrorists, except it replaces the jaw-droppingly exploitive flashing of the passenger’s tattoo with an allusive, simplistic stump speech. Here, a Shoah reference becomes bite-size shorthand for the war’s legacy, and is reduced to nothing more than a check off the list. It ends up registering more like the reductively fable-bound Art Spiegelman, whose Kirby criticism is pointed out as hilariously ironic by the roundtable.   

The Captain says something like “last time I was in Germany, I was fighting people like you” which, while conforming to the Captain’s one-god, pedestrian interpretation of how the world works, does nothing to deepen our understanding of Asgard and the Norse mythology that the Captain is jibing against, or the war which he’s holding it to. In a sense, he is reducing the unfamiliar to the familiar, but it is less a function psychological characterization than a point the filmmakers intend for us to consume wholesale. 

Another aspect that seemed unfortunate but also hampered by franchise continuity, was the Hulk. Hulk’s “puny God” line in the film was funny, but partly because it was startling to hear him make a rational observation. I’m not really sure why the films removed the Hulk’s ability to communicate, since it creates a false binary between civilized and savage, which his original ability to communicate complicated. I suppose when an actor’s paycheck/visibility is on the line, some things have to be renegotiated. Unfortunately, doing so reduces the Hulk’s ability to be anything more than a vaguely symbolic cipher.

For the ostensibly progressive film version, Whedon has Banner hiding out on a discarded, disease-ridden set from Slumdog Millionaire, rounding out the upscale buffoonery of Ghost Protocol’s India for a Western projection of the country as an incompetent Other struggling to maintain itself after colonialism. On the surface, Avengers #1’s iteration of The Hulk’s hiding is not particularly meaningful and only disposably funny, but it illustrates some of the problems of silencing the Hulk’s voice. After saving a train from crashing, despite Loki’s from-Asgard manipulations, he is blamed by the public for its danger anyways. To hide, he joins the circus in clown make-up and identifies himself as a robot named Mechano, giving his feats of strength the credibility of modern technology.

The outfit’s color scheme, red and yellow, suggests a conflict between rage and cowardice, hatred of others and hatred of the self. Also, by correlating with the ubiquitous image of Ronald McDonald, there is a canny boxing of the self into a universally digestible product. The vertical streaks over the eyes, in the illustration’s long shot, render his eyes similar to those of a deceased cartoon character, and with the haloed frown, give a sense of soullessness to the entertainment. Coupled with the bewildered faces of the juggled animals, forced into fetal helplessness by Kirby’s swirl, Hulk’s facial expression ends up rounding out a circle of existential anxiety, with all parties having no clue what they are doing there.

Instead of the white man’s burden condescension of the film, the comic has the Hulk engaging with the limitations of family-oriented entertainment. His attempt to blend into the human realm as a clown provides ironic commentary on the human standard for acceptance a la Tod Browning’s Freaks. Once the disfigured anomaly accepts its unusual lot, patronage becomes acceptable. The superhuman feats his bastardized incarnation is capable of are rendered palatable as a self-flattering signifier of human ingenuity instead of a human accident produced by the faulty roadblocks in scientific progress. He juggles the animals which he is compared to, signifying his control over the taxonomical classification he is relegated to.

A hilarious juxtaposition in the panel above is the outfits of the ringmasters and patrons with the clowned up Hulk, which are equally ridiculous, deflating the sense of importance humans attach to their appearance, especially when contrasting themselves with their subjects. Similarly, having one of Ant-man’s redirected minions catch the Hulk’s balancing act gives a visual comparison between the obedient, carrying more than its weight role of the ant and the for others feat the Hulk is performing.

In the above panel, Hulk is reacting to Ant-Man and the Wasp’s attempts to wrangle the Hulk on behalf of the Avengers and save him from his self-exile. The humans, thinking it is a part of the show, inadvertently become a stand-in for passerby that view comics as mindless fare, ignoring the alternately mythic and human dilemmas at their center. An interesting conflict in the above scenario develops between anonymously performing tricks under a ringmaster and the manipulative tactics of other superheroes.

In the films, Banner is attempting to restrain the beast. His alter-ego is a burden worthy of suicide attempts, and causes him to develop an inferiority complex that the beast isn’t particularly aware of, being a semi-conscious vessel of rage. His conflict with the Avengers is polite embarrassment and a desire to not become himself. Here, it’s the hidden beast that sees potential for emotional damage on all sides of the conflict, partly articulated by the color scheme of the background. Much like the white void behind Captain America’s amnesia, and the relatively plain purple background his uniform clashes with (here audience instead of technology), the background becomes a reflection of the unstable psychological interior of the character. When the Hulk dons his Hulk-ness, the white void becomes red, bolstered by Hulk’s exclamation mark-inflected, defensive hatred of everything. Unlike, say, Godzilla, the Hulk’s ability to communicate his alienation from humans/everyone gives a significant voice to the cast-off “mistakes” humans would rather bury in half-truth-laden narrative of progress.

One final point, since this is approaching 2,500 words, is about that revised ending to Transformers 3. This, perhaps, is as much about the comic as on the loss of creature effect magic to the work of computers. In the comic, Loki is attempting to lure Thor to his planet of exile. Once Thor arrives, Loki confronts him with large, purple, underground trolls worthy of Jason and the Argonauts and casually tosses out a counter theory to human mythology, in itself containing a gigantic idea on human enchainment of the unnatural into palatable terms.

This might be a huge stretch, but look at the following quote on Kirby’s liberation of a small concentration camp:

I thought I was going to see prisoners of war, you know, some of our guys that got caught in some of the early fighting, but what I saw would pin you to the spot like it did me.  Most of these people were Polish; Polish Jews who were working in some of the nearby factories.  I don’t remember if the place really had a name, it was a smaller camp, not like Auschwitz, but it was horrible just the same.  Just horrible.  There were mostly woman and some men; they looked like they hadn’t eaten for I don’t know how long.  They were scrawny.  Their clothes were all tattered and dirty.  The Germans didn’t give a shit for anything.  They just left the place; just like leaving a dog behind to starve. I was standing there for a long time just watching thinking to myself, “What do I do?”  Just thinking about it makes my stomach turn.  All I could say was, ‘Oh, God.”

This, of course, might entirely be my tainted reaction to their appearances after having read two books on Holocaust survivors this week, but the ill-fitting shorts, the scrawny arms, the bald heads and the sagging faces bring to mind photos of musselmen. There was a Bill Moyers interview with Maurice Sendak (RIP), where they discussed the illustrations of Where the Wild Things Are in the context of Sendak’s upbringing, surrounded by Eastern European relatives that narrowly escaped extermination. Sendak, raised with his parents’ obsessively displaced guilt over being alive while their family burned, used the memory of his childhood perception of the family that did survive to write about the Wild Things. Their grotesqueness (to a child), coupled with their spirited gallow’s humor, were partial inspiration for intentionally frightening if still joyous imagery.

If we take the Kirby discussion to its logical (or perhaps necessarily illogical) conclusion, the “pin you to the spot like it did me” horror of witnessing the ravaged bodies of concentration camp survivors would just as well instinctively filter itself into his art. The earlier conflict between blond and blue eyed Norse god and the old testament is here, too, like a whack-a-mole response to the burned-in memory of those crematorium-evading prisoners. While Sendak’s book reclaims stereotypes and channels the lively spirit of survival, this interpretation of Kirby’s work would suggest a House-style evasion of war veteran trauma.

I’m not  saying Whedon should have used Loki’s trolls to extend the conversation about the Holocaust initiated in the hokey German museum takeover sequence, but the visceral quality these colorful creatures have engage a much stronger response mechanism in the imagination than the anonymous skeletors of the film, a bunch of pixelized goons waiting to be obliterated in array of fast cuts and reductive action (something the old Judge Dredd film’s creature shop toadies avoid as well, but that’s for another time). Given the Where the Wild Things Are film’s success in balancing new school pixelation with old school puppetry, Avengers’ devolving battle seems decidedly un-magical. With the rapid rate of comics production, the gap between a focused, end-in-itself book of pointed illustrations and an endless, cheaply produced series seems immeasurable, but the potential for imagery to be as indelible in both should not be understated.