Category Archives: Discussion of the Week–Leave Comments

Black Hole

6 Replies

We have already read two  graphic novels/comic books, Locke & Key, and the Girls comic book series, but Black Hole is distinctly different. Black Hole, set in a mid-1970s Seattle, tells the story of a group of teenagers coming to age in the midst of a breakout of an untreatable sexually transmitted disease (STD). Unlike currently diagnosable STDs,  this virus causes mutations to the infected person’s body, ranging from boils and scar tissue to a completely functioning second mouth, as seen on Chris’s boyfriend Rob.  Some of the mutations are concealable and the teenagers can continue to lead their normal lives (and continue to transmit the disease), but others feel ashamed or stigmatized because of their physical appearance to the point that they run away and live in the woods.

Before Infection                                    After Infection

In the novel, the infection could represent either the stigma of an infection such as AIDS or the social taboo of sex before marriage. While there was a a strong taboo against pre-martial sex in the 1970s,  there are sexual partners in the book who are not infected, which means the act of sex alone does not cause a person to become infected with the mysterious disease. Instead, the disease of unknown origin can only from infected people to uninfected people. Although the book is set before the first cases of AIDS were diagnosed in the US, the infection epidemic in Black Hole seems to be a metaphor for the 1980s AIDS epidemic which is currently a world-wide issue.

Like AIDS, the disease in the novel seemed to appear one day without a known cause. Both diseases can be passed through sexual activity, and both are incurable. AIDS does not cause mutations, but the mutations in the novel can be representative of other symptoms that come with AIDS. Another important shared trait between the two diseases is the social isolation that comes with being infected. In the 1980s, AIDS was something that no one understood and would cause extreme stigmatization and isolation for the infected person because other people did not understand how the disease was transmitted. Similarly, in Black Hole the infected teens are ostracized by their peers because of their physical deformities and mutations. Teens that were once popular become outcasts, which in combination with losing her boyfriends, almost leads Chris to commit suicide. The violence against infected teens is similar to the violence enacted on teens with HIV and AIDS, such as the Matthew Shepard case from 1998.

Do you agree that the infection in Black Hole might represent AIDS or do you think differently? What other themes are present throughout the novel?

DotW: Baudrillard on Simulation

1 Reply

I apologize for the late post, hopefully this will at least catalyze some discussion to be started in class today.

On to Baudrillard – what I surmise from some quick biography scanning is that he was a philosopher who was interested in how we assign value to words and ideas and how meaning is transferred and represented through symbols.  Simulation, as defined in the excerpt we read, appears to be any symbol or representation that in principle derives its meaning from the ‘real’ object or idea it is meant to represent.  Baudrillard’s argument or thesis is that these simulations are rapidly replacing the real objects so that we interface directly with and communicate with simulations and representations with little regard from the true form.  In this way, representations have come to be synonymous with the things they were originally created to represent.  A somewhat base example of this could be our money system.  The concept of value and exchange has been abstracted to such an extent that we interface with these pieces of paper and exchange them as if there was value implicit in the materials being exchanged.  This is a simulacrum, by my interpretation, of exchange through barter where two objects of implicit value are exchanged based on the equity of their worth.

In a similar fashion we have heavily abstracted communication and transportation to such an extent that interfacing with the ‘real’ versions of either is considered somewhat strange.  Walking is nice, but rarely considered a real option for getting anywhere and while interpersonal communication is certainly sustained, idea exchange has taken on a whole new meaning in the age of instant communication that can be branched and distributed through a variety of electronic media.  Another classic example of this is reproductions of the human form where the ideal visage and body are defined by artist representations of some ideal form.  We don’t disregard the statue (or, presently, models) as unrealistic, we instead treat them as being the true idea that we in reality try to approach.

In an attempt to introduce some pretty heady ideas, I’ve given two base and simple examples that don’t really do justice to the abstract and general nature of Baudrillard’s work.  Many other forms of representation have been addressed, one notable example being the denial of the Gulf War as being a war.  In arguing this point, Baudrillard considers many components of the war experience (militarily, politically, socially) as an elaborate dance that each served purposes distinct from any sort of ideology-driven war.

I guess an appropriate approach to discussion on the topic would be how you all interact with and treat symbols and representations.  Do you see false meaning and symbolism replacing reality to the point that we have synthesized our reality as something distinct from our actual experience?

*note* this simulation leading to a synthetic universe idea is what connects the Matrix to Baudrillard, which Baudrillard himself is said to have admonished as a misinterpretation of his work.  So…grain of salt.

(Much of this information was gleaned in part from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudrillard and the reading we were given)

Girls: Volumes 3 and 4

12 Replies

When I first began reading the Girls comics I was very surprised at how much I enjoyed them. Typically, I am the type of person that would never open a comic book, unless it was a requirement for a class. However, I’m glad that the Girls comic series was one of our required texts for this course because I really enjoyed reading them. When I purchased the comics my initial reaction was “oh no, what am I getting myself into”. The cover alone scared me and I was convinced that there was no possible way that I would finish the series and enjoy them. The naked woman on the covers really threw me off and I knew it was going to be a painful read. The illustration was very beautiful and I appreciated it but still strange, nonetheless. But then, I opened up the comic and I was surprised by the images. The characters weren’t all like the woman on the cover, instead, they were “normal” humans. I think this was a big surprise to me because I always had the stereotypical perspective on comics. The view that consisted of anime, heroes and villains with super-powers, otherworldly themes and illustrations and fantasy, such as those seen in the images below. So, when I began reading Girls I was surprised that I didn’t find a great deal of these stereotypical comic elements.

Although there were some strange things in the comic such as the giant killing sperm and the dangerous and evil girls that hatch out of eggs, these made the comic interesting and allowed me to engage my imagination. What really intrigued me about the comic series was the visuals and the imagery. The Luna Brothers are very talented and they way in which they told their story through vivid images was really amazing. By depicting the girls as beautiful and seductive women, and then showing them in a completely different perspective when they become zombie-like and dangerous towards the citizens of Pennystown, the reader is able to see both sides rather than just one. By giving the enemy a beautiful face, the Luna brothers created a villain that was different than the ones that are typically seen in comics. The story line in Girls is smart and the art is very detailed and cinematic. Throughout the comics, the story stays in focus as the Luna Brothers zoom in to characters and events, leaving the background blurred. After I read the Girls series, I went back and re-read them and I noticed something that was very interesting. As I was reading the comic, I noticed that I wasn’t actually reading it, but rather, looking at the images. I was able to read the story over just by looking at the images. This is something that I think is very important in a comic.

There has been a great deal of speculation on whether or not the Luna Brothers are willing to bring Girls to the big screen. Although it would make a great film, there are several things that would have to be adjusted in order to turn it into a film. Just like any other text that has been adapted into a movie, they would have to shorten the list of characters and their descriptions to  fit in the run time and try to tell the story in a way that strange things such as the giant sperm wont sound completely ridiculous. Another main issue is nudity, there are naked women everywhere! The Luna Brothers responded to this issue in an interview with MTV news: “We realize and accept that some changes might need to be made for a film adaptation. Mass nudity would be a big hurdle. There’s also a lot of extreme violence, but a lot of people seem to handle that better than nudity.” The Luna Brothers also mentioned how someone like Megan Fox would make a good character for the girls. Having someone like Megan Fox on the cast, the movie would definitely sell. However, do you think she would be willing to play such a part? Then again, she did do the film Jennifer’s Body which surprisingly brought in 6.8 million dollars its opening weekend and was also transformed into a graphic novel.

So, is it worth bringing Girls to the big screen? Do you think this adaptation will ruin the comic series? Would you watch the film? And lastly, do you think it will even be successful or is it to ridiculous for people who haven’t read the comics to watch?

-Stephanie

Oh, the Colors!

13 Replies

I don’t read comics. Not anymore, at least. And even in my heyday, I was never really drawn to Western/American comics. Except for The Sandman, and everyone makes exceptions for The Sandman.

Just about.

So, I was out of the comic-reading groove when picking up Girls. Then I got thrown further out of that groove when I saw the covers of what we were supposed to read. There was a brief moment of bafflement, immediately followed by a ‘Professor is making us read WHAT.’ That was then followed by a period of time in which I decided knowing how it all turned out took priority over work and food time. Not for the art, though. I’ve got one thing I’d like to say before going any further, and it’s

And it's FREE~

I mean, it’s nice. But [see above again], and I stayed for the plot. (There might be a trend in my media priorities.) However, enough has been said about the plot and/or underlying theme of Girls that I feel comfortable letting well enough alone – save to be amused at how the Luna Brothers turned ‘guy meets magical girl’ on its ear, wonder why no one can ever converse with their mental lady friends while keeping an eye on the world around them (a la Doctor Gaius Baltar of Battlestar Galactica), and freak out a little in the good way about the ending – and moving on to the superficial aspect: the pretty, pretty pictures.

The thing about the artwork in Girls is that it is smooth. It is sleek, it is streamlined, and the key word here is ‘airbrush,’ followed closely by ‘dodge’ and ‘burn.’ That’s the kind of stuff that, reportedly, makes things look good. Too ‘good,’ I suppose, to be real, like the nominal Girls. It’s very easy to not get caught up in the art, or at least that’s what I found. At times, I wasn’t certain if I was reading anything. It was more like watching an animated series with a nice budget. (Movies seem to prefer that newfangled 3-D type thing.) I’m watching; I’m a spectator; I’m detached from whatever (man-raping, lady-killing, people-punching, sperm-exploding WAP FAP WAP) is going on. Add in the arche/stereotypes that people have been pointing out, and it’s exactly like, as Joss Whedon puts it, “watching a movie.” (See the comment on the back of volume 4.)

Myself, I’ve always made a distinction between the acts of ‘reading a comic’ and ‘watching a movie,’ although that could, in part, be due to the fact that the people in the movies tended to have rather normal proportions and not exceptionally abnormal hair, and a lot of the comics I read, uh… didn’t.

Yeesh.

Maybe I’m just more accustomed to wacky-looking frames, border-breaking and abstract ‘emotional’ (weird) backgrounds than to soft-shading, storyboards, and clearly defined settings. I’m getting the sneaking suspicion that comics are going to become more like storyboards in the future, geared towards hitting the big screen, and that this trend, like most others, is one that’s been building for a long time. As previously noted, there’s now discussion of a Girls movie. Easy, right? It’s practically there already. But why make a comic that looks and reads like a movie? Was it intentional? Was it necessity?

Does it even matter?

I’m probably being paranoid, but… I think it does.

-Sam

Girls Vol. 1 and 2

12 Replies

As I first began reading Girls, my first impression was: wow, this is incredibly weird.  I am an avid comic and graphic novel reader, yet even for me I found giant man-killing sperm to be a little odd.  Nevertheless, as I continued to read, I kept thinking that all the sexism and hatred towards women that I was seeing must have a purpose, that the Luna Brothers must have some sort of point they are getting to that they’ll eventually explain.  Yet when I finished the comics, I was stumped.  No reasons, no explanation.  Nothing.  I saw that Girls had a clear,  main theme of misogyny, but I kept thinking to myself, this can’t be right.  The Luna Brothers aren’t condoning sexism here.  So what is it?  And then I realized; Girls presents us with the stereotypes of women in society.  We see how men think of and treat women, and even how women treat each other in ways that only deepen the gender gap.

In our society, we tend to think of women as belonging to a specific type, and Girls brings out all of these.

  • The McCallister’s daughter: the cocktease – She so clearly appears to offer sexual promises, but in the end, she doesn’t do anything at all, and is furious you thought so.
  • Alexis: the easy girl – she’ll sleep with anyone for no reason, but she’ll still slap you for identifying her as overly promiscuous
  • Taylor: the emotional ex-girlfriend – her reasoning makes no sense, she deals with everything in life through her emotions and not reason, she assumes you know the inner workings of her mind and becomes furious when you don’t.
  • Nancy: the emasculator – nothing gives her greater pleasure than emasculating men, particularly in public.   She is also a control freak and extremely outspoken on all matters
  • Ying-Ma: the gold-digger – similar to Nancy, she is a control freak, constantly nags her husband (to the extreme, in this case), and constantly uses the money her husband worked for to shop for things for herself
  • Ruby: the nuclear housewife – she stays at home, cleans, cooks, and cares for you and the children without a word of complaint.  Considered to be “the perfect woman.”  However, on occasion she will eventually disobey, and leave you.
  • The “Girls” – the Girls are a little more all-encompassing and fall under the extremely old stereotype that women are innately lustful creatures that seek only to drag men down into sin with them.

With all of these stereotypes, we see one clear theme connecting them all – that men are the victims.  In Girls, for the most part, very little happens that can be directly blamed on men.  Even the creation of the eggs, can be blamed not on the men who had sex with the Girls, but on the aliens themselves, who tempted the men with the forbidden fruit of their flesh.  The alien Girls are not the only bad guys, the women of Pennystown as well.   Through their comics, the Luna Brothers expose the way men view women in society through the character Ethan.  In the first few pages of the comic, he declares his hatred for all women and identifies the Pennystown women as the stereotypes I listed above – a clear indicator of how the rest of story will play out.

In their comics, the Luna Brothers identify sex as a central theme surrounding the treatment of women in society.  For example, consider how the Girls remain naked throughout the entire comic and how they are not able to truly speak.  The Girls represent not only sex as a sinful temptation, but as an act required of all women.  Both Ethan and Lester have sex with the Girls because they have been denied it by the women in their lives (man as woman’s victim), and they see no problem with having sex with the Girls because it is something women should automatically give to men.  This is often the reasoning behind the pettier forms of sexual harassment (groping, pinching, catcalls, etc.) to full-on rape.  The nudity of the Girls represents the sexuality required from them, while their lack of speech is their inability to protest – the silence of so many victims of sexual assault.

The Luna Brothers also touch upon how women treat other women in society.  Even though the norm of modern society is that sex is much more acceptable, women often resort to insults of promiscuity when directing their anger towards other women.  For a women to be seen as a “whore” is for her to lose all respect and standing in society.  Notice how although Nancy sees the creation of eggs as solely the fault of men who think with what’s between their legs and not their brains, the first insults she comes up with when speaking of the Girls are “whore” and “slut.”  Through this, she seeks to decrease their standing and thus the ability of the townspeople to allot them any rights.  A woman labeled a “whore” can be treated horribly, and no one will protest it, because they believe she deserves it for her supposedly sinful behavior.

Overall, I found Girls to be an incredibly brilliant piece.  While I wasn’t a fan of the ending, its structure, plot, and graphics cleverly identified and analyzed sexism in society.  The Luna Brothers used both text and art to examine sex as a key factor the manner in which women are viewed and treated, and also exposed how women are not always the victims, but culprits themselves, of sexism.

So, what do you think?  Is Girls a misogynist piece?  Or a commentary on sexism?

~Samantha Faso

Playboy and The Totally Rad Show

19 Replies

After watching the ~3 hours of The Totally Rad Show and reading the 15 page article, I will do my best to keep this post short and condensed.  Having said that, I also apologize in advance since I have a lot of thoughts on my mind and this will probably be a pretty lengthy post.

Since I watched The Totally Rad Show first, I will discuss the 3 episodes before the Playboy article.  I will preface this by saying that I haven’t read, watched, or played most of the media that the show discusses, but I would like to point out the poignant things that stood out to me while watching.

The thing I did notice (which was probably done on purpose by Professor Russworm) was that in each episode a connection to Avatar (directly or indirectly) could be made.  In the episode “Bubo” the cast talks about the upcoming movie Clash of the Titans.  This stars Sam Worthington, the actor who played Jake Sully.  In the second episode, “H8TR AID,” there is a picture in the background from the TV series Avatar

In the third episode, “Tautness,” they obviously talk about Avatar the video game.  Sorry for that tangent, it was just something I had noticed.

While watching the episodes, I found that if I didn’t have a willingness or interest in what they were talking about, it was pretty boring and I lost interest.  The clips such as “Dan Becomes a Man” where Dan learns to drive stick were hilarious, and I wished they had more of those.  Another part of the show I enjoyed was simply the vulgarity; I like watching and listening to things where people say what they feel, be it sexual or otherwise.  Also in the first episode, all that I could think of when they were picking names was the episode “The Seven” from Seinfeld (one of my favorites).

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/NRUdaWZ4FN0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

In the second and third episode I felt there was less interesting things.  Some of the stuff they were talking about seemed awesome (like Watchmen—I have to read that!), but for the stuff I had no interest in the episodes dragged on.  On the topic of the first R rated movie I’ve seen, I couldn’t remember but the first thing that came to mind was The Matrix, which I can’ t wait to discuss later in the semester.  In the third episode I liked the new intro, which tells the viewer in a list what will be on the show.  At least then I knew what to expect, and could concentrate on the parts that I wanted to know about.

I found it interesting they brought up the skin color on the African American people in The Princess and the Frog.  It reminded me of the racist discussion we had about Avatar (the video game sounded horrible), except in this case they made their skin color very light (perhaps to make it connectible for little kids?).  Probably the best part of the 3rd episode (for me) was the talk about Locke & Key.  I liked this because I knew it was relevant to the class and, more importantly, it sounded AWESOME.  I just got the comic and can’t wait to read it.

When I started reading the article “The Bachelor Pad as Cultural Icon” I had pretty much one conception of Playboy magazine (as I’m sure many people have):  that it is a magazine solely focused on nude pictorials of women.  I’ve never actually read through one of these magazines, and pretty much the only thing I have seen were the pictures. Osgerby says that “Undoubtedly, Playboy’s sexual content was fundamental to its success, but the magazine was always more than slickly packaged pornography.”  I found this statement very intriguing and wanted to explore more into the world of Playboy magazine.

Before reading this article, I had no idea Esquire magazine had been around for so long and that it sort of set the standard for men’s magazines.  While reading the article I tried to picture myself to be in that timeframe (the 1930’s), and with that in mind I’m sure I would have been blown away by a magazine like Esquire. Not only did it have the visuals and information that I wanted, but it was also organized in one coherent place.  The idea of streamlining that Sakhnoffsky talks about presented an interesting perspective for people from that era.  Whether it was the inside of a plane or a office desk, his “contemporary styling” set the standard for everything that Esquire was.

Once they actually started talking about Playboy (somewhere around page 6 or 7), I immediately loved one of the descriptions about the penthouse, that it was for “a man who enjoys good living, a sophisticated connoisseur of the lively arts, of food and drink, and congenial companions of both sexes.”  I find it very interesting how the empire of Playboy exploded onto the scene.  In a time where magazines like this were not the norm, the sheer magnitude of Hefner’s creation is quite remarkable.  It not only launched a ton of copycat magazines, but also ignored the feminists view of what is moral.  The conception of some people on what a bachelor pad could look like (like this picture) was funny, but Hefner’s Playboy mansion pretty much defined what a bachelor pad should be.

From the bed to the mini-bar, Hefner’s bachelor bad was the hands down best, and really set off a wave of people trying to imitate his perfect lifestyle.  “Playboy Modernism” was really the defining goal for all men trying to set up their ideal bachelor pad, and also gave men something to wish for; something that was perfect but was always out of reach.  The décor, style, and overall chic of Hefner’s creation is something that should inspire awe in everyone (even people who don’t agree with his lifestyle…), and Hefner certainly revolutionized the masculine lifestyle.  The one question I do have is mainly for the women.  Do you agree with the empire that Hefner has created? And, in regards to the bachelor pad itself, how do you see it as a “cultural icon?”