Sausage fest

Comix, Feminism
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These are the top ten comics in the Hooded Utilitarian International Best Comics Poll:

1. Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz
2. Krazy Kat, George Herriman
3. Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson
4. Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
5. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
6. Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay
7. The Locas Stories, Jaime Hernandez
8. Pogo, Walt Kelly
9. MAD #1-28, Harvey Kurtzman & Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, et al.
10.The Fantastic Four, Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, with Joe Sinnott, et al.

Notice anything? Yep, for an international poll it is very much dominated by American comics; even Watchmen, though created by two Brits, is very much in the American comics tradition. Worse, there’s no woman to be seen either, not until number 24, Fun Home, Alison Bechdel. In total there are just eight women on the list for a total of nine entries (Alison Bechdel being the sole woman to be mentioned twice), most of which are clustered in the lower regions of the list, having gotten on with just a handful of votes:

Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
The Dirty Plotte Stories, including My New York Diary, Julie Doucet
Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel
Furûtsu Basaketto [Fruits Basket], Natsuki Takaya
Maison Ikkoku, Rumiko Takahash

Ernie Pook’s Comeek and the RAW Stories, Lynda Barry
A Drunken Dream and Other Stories, Moto Hagio
Moomin, Tove Jansson

I’m not going to blame the poll contributors for their appalling oversights, my own collection not being very gender balanced either and at least the Hooded Utilitarian editorial team are aware of this shortcoming, having asked Shaenon Garrity to redress the balance somewhat in a separate article. The gender skewedness of this list is just a symptom of a much greater problem, that comics as a medium is much too male dominated.

Part of that is mindset, a certain ignorance of readers and critics of female cartoonists, in which only a handful of currently active creators are well known, but the context and history in which they work is lost, each a singleton, the same problem we’ve discussedhere before regarding science fiction. Nobody is consciously suppressing women cartoonists, but there is still a systemic bias working against them, which polls like this bring to light. It’s so much easier to think of ten, hundred, thousand great male cartoonists who could arguably be part of the list than it is to find even half a dozen female cartoonists who could also be. It’s natural to think of sequences of influence like Noel Sickles -> Milton Caniff -> Al Severin -> John Buscema, but where does somebody like Marie Severin fit in?

But as Shaenon touches upon in her article, there are other barriers as well. The past ten years have seen an explosion of classic comics series, both newspaper strip and comic book being rediscovered and republished in nice, prestige editions, but how many of them have been created by women? Where are the classic female underground cartoonists to take their place amongst the Crumb archives? Where is the Daredevil Visionaires: Ann Nocenti? If the best work by women is not available, how can readers ever discover them?

Finally, and this is something that’s especially true for American comics, it might just be that the kind of work that really gets you noticed in comics is the kind of work that — certainly historical — has been the last available to female cartoonists. That’s the long form comic, the multiple decades old newspaper strip, the fifty issue plus comic book run, the one that needs time and dedication and self sacrifice. In Tom Spurgeon’s unrelated, intensly personal rant from earlier this week (which I found both moving and hard to respond to, if response is needed), he mentions at one point the “children of strip artists whose primary memory of their fathers and mothers is that person at a drawing board, desperate to get away for a few moments but deciding with an almost whole-body resignation to continue working while life-moment X, Y and Z unfolds nearby.” Which of course has always been easier for men than women to do, traditional gender roles being what they were and often, in disguise, still are. As Virginia Woolf once argued, before you could have great women writers, they need a room of their own, which goes double for cartoonists.

So, umm, yeah. It is understandable if bad that a list of the best comics a group of dedicated, clever critics can think of is such a sausage fest, but it’s just one symptom of a deeper imbalance, one not easily solvable, so what can you do? Well, perhaps comics needs to take the Russ pledge too:

The single most important thing we (readers, writers, journalists, critics, publishers, editors, etc.) can do is talk about women writers whenever we talk about men. And if we honestly can’t think of women ‘good enough’ to match those men, then we should wonder aloud (or in print) why that is so. If it’s appropriate (it might not be, always) we should point to the historical bias that consistently reduces the stature of women’s literature; we should point to Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which is still the best book I’ve ever read on the subject. We should take the pledge to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed. Call it the Russ Pledge. I like to think she would have approved.

Battle Hymn

'Eavy Metal, video
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Just heard S. won’t be out of hospital tomorrow, as they want to keep her a few days longer to make sure she’s allright, which is … a bit annoying … It put me in the mood for a bit of schlock metal to get rid of some of my frustration — what better than Manowar’s Battle Hymn? The video shows all past and present members of the band rehearsing for their German tour back in 2007 iirc. Naff as fuck, but I’ve always liked this song, first hearing it at the same time as I discovered David Gemmel’s equally shock fantasy novels, especially Legend and Waylander, which it fit perfectly with.

2018: updated with a different live video because some fucker had to get the original video removed from Youtube.

Some simple rules for writing about the UK riots

Manufacturing Consent, UK politics
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Combining the subjects of my last two posts, here’s Guy Halsall commenting on David Starkey’s odious little stunt on Newsnight the other day. In the process he puts together a few simple rules good historians should adhere to when trying to analyse something like the London riots:

As I see it, the skills of an historian, when confronted by a complex phenomenon like this, ought (and this is neither original nor controversial) to include at least the following:

  • The evasion of a simple catch-all explanation, of whichever ‘political’ narrative, particularly a doctrinaire explanation
  • The avoidance of reliance on untestable notions like ‘innate human nature’
  • The avoidance of sweeping generalisation
  • The ability to disentangle different elements within the phenomenon; to tease out geographical and other variables
  • An aversion to reducing a complex phenomenon to simple cause and effect

If only the various talking heads on the BBC radio and television pontificating on the riots this past week had been using those rules. For example, the fools who I heard on Broadcasting House yesterday morning, who dismissed the idea that the riots could’ve been political in nature because some of the rioters didn’t even know which party was in government — as if politics end outside of the Westminster bubble. There seems to be a deliberate refusal to engage the questions of how and why the riots started, why they persisted so long and why they spread on a more than superficial level, at least in the mainstream media and especially at the BBC. If reporting is the first draft of history, this particular one will be unreadable.

Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West — Guy Halsall

books and books review, history
Published on 2 Comments on Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West — Guy Halsall

Cover of Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West


Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568
Guy Halsall
591 pages including index
published in 2007

I spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve with my parents in Middelburg and took advantage of this visit to check out the town’s library, which used to supply most of my reading back before I moved to Amsterdam. It turned out to be an wise decision as less than an hour browsing found half a dozen excellent history books to read, including this one. Guy Halsall is an author I had just seen slagged off by Peter Heather in his book Empires and Barbarians for being Completely Wrong about the impact of barbarian migrations on the late Roman Empire. This piqued my interest to see how exactly Halsall’s interpretation of the end of the Roman Empire differed from Heather’s views and if Halsall’s explanations make any sense on their own.

To my not inconsiderable surprise, it turned out that the story Halsall puts forward in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568 does not differ quite so much as Heather made it seem. They don’t so much disagree on what happened as on why it happened and on where the emphasis should be placed. To keep it simple, Heather believes barbarian invasions are the cause the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, while Halsall argues they are an effect of the collapse. It was the weakness of the western empire that made possible the barbarian takeover of various provinces. Another major point of disagreement is on the composition of the “barbarian hordes”: Heather has argued that the more classical image of entire population groups invading the empire is largely correct, with caveats, while Halsall sees them more as proper armies rather than tribes. Ultimately these differences in intepretation however for me were less important than the sheer quality of Halsall’s history.

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What the fuck was the BBC thinking inviting Starkey?

Manufacturing Consent, UK politics, video
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Good news for everybody who was hoping for a nice, easy, racist explenation for the riots in Britain, “historian” David Starkey has come to your aid. Yes, the rioters were multiracial, Black, white and Muslim, while the victims and defenders of various communities in turn were also multiracial, Black, white, Sikh, Turkish and so on and it seemed that all the simplistic ideas about how those minorities just cannot help their criminal natures were clearly wrong, but Starkey knew the truth. It was the white man that had gone Black, had abandoned its superior nature, that it had been infected by the “gangster culture”, probably through that newfangled hippity-hop music. This is not racist of course, it’s just common sense. And hence Starkey is listened to politely, not interrupted and taken seriously as a commentator even if the other guests disagree with him.



Compare and contrast the treatment of Darcus Howe, who is clearly a dangerous loony who has to be chided and can’t be trusted to be sensible. Howe needs to be handled aggressively, he’s almost a rioter himself and his waffle about root causes to explain the riots need to be attacked immediately as excuse mongering.

As with every unexpected, natural crisis when the news media are caught unawares, the raw edges of approved reality become a bit more visible. On the one hand, the manipulation of news and acceptable opinion becomes more blatant — one very obvious example being the whitewashing of the spontaneous cleanup operations in the days after the first riots, as noted and ripped apart by W. Kasper. On the other hand, even more blatant is how unacceptable opinions like Howe’s are handled, attacked, shouted down. This by and large is not a conscious process, but something journalists and the news media pick up by osmosis. It’s no surprise that it’s the BBC, supposedly independent but in practise always hypersensitive to how the political winds are blowing, that is the most hardline in this. We saw the same thing with the War on Iraq, where it was the commercial news channels that were more skeptical than the BBC, other than you’d expect at first.

Starkey might just well be trying to move the acceptable discourse to the right, to make his racist ideas respectable as Lenny argues, but the BBC is more culpable by giving him a platform and treating him with respect, making his ideas more respectable by that. Howe’s views on the other hand, the idea that some of the responsibility for the riots may just have to lie with the police for their treatment of (young) Black people in general and the murder of Mark Duggan in particular, are still beyond the pale, as shown by how he is treated. In short, the BBC is actively shifting the borders of acceptable, mainstream opinion rightwards.