Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Lazy Homages Lazy Comics Use Lazily
by Travis Hedge Coke
Ms Marvel, Kamala Khan, does not need to be killed off (even for three months), with a Pieta homage cover. The Punisher does not need to be a Vietnam War veteran. We do not especially need a Vietnam War or a proxy fictive version in current Marvel comics, hovering only just a few years ago. We never need to see another Saigon Execution reproduction in a Punisher or any other Marvel comic ever again.
The rise in World War 2 iconography during Desert Storm and post 9/11 papered comics with proxy racism and naked jingoism. It was not good then, and it aged so poor it was sourer within a year. It is okeh to let it go. To let it recede the way we ought to let aspects of all wars go.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe may find it easier to use Russia as the enemy of the Allied Nations in World War Two, for commercial purposes, but it is damaging. Comics make so little headway in sales, readership, or market-presence, that it does not even make crass capitalist sense.
Pieta
La Pietà is a sculpture by Renaissance Michelangelo, representing Mary and her son, Jesus, at Golgotha; the Sixth Sorrow of the Blessed Virgin in Catholic dogma. Currently held in St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, it is an explicitly religious work, homed in an explicitly religious place, owned by very precisely religious people. It is Catholic.
Comics have been using variations on the Pieta arrangement, the physical arrangement of the bodies of Christ and his mother, for decades. Sometimes the person in the Mary position is kneeling, sometimes they stand. Superman and Cyclops, for example, definitely stand, when they hold up Supergirl and Phoenix, respectively. Batman stands, holding Robin and Sgt Rock. Superman stands holding Power Girl.
Starman kneels. Batman kneels holding a different Robin. A third Robin kneels to hold Batman. Captain Atom sits and on another cover is held by a sitting figure. Death sits to hold Marvel’s space Nazi turned superhero, Mar-Vell. Home Simpson struggling to stand while holding Jesus Barney Christ is funny.
Most of these are either Christian characters or are raised culturally Christian, except for Mar-Vell. But, what of when it stretches to Muslim characters? To DC Universe Amazonians? To Earth peoples who have religions that are, or very closely mirror, very real and true Earth religions that are not Christian, and very not Catholic?
Like the trope of all the heroes making their last stand in a Christian church. Always a Christian church, this is embarrassing. It is hurtful, diminishing – it is not ignorant – it is callous.
Flag at Iwo Jima
February 23, 1945, a United States flag is planted, a symbol of victory in battle, on the island, Iwo Jima. A short period later, it is done again, to get good photographs. It would be thirty-one more days before the US military succeeded in taking the island.
Comics love their World War 2 iconography. We have not seen the last of someone running to punch Hitler. We have not seen the final attempt to make the Dominators – those big-teeth yellow conquering aliens with their orientalism and big red dots – work.
The flag-planting image is, and always was, a commercial venture.
When 2000 AD parodies it, Britannia, The War, or Futurama, the commerciality is highlighted. It adds something, rather than simply trading on unconsidered, unthinking patriotism and nationalism.
When it is the Justice League of America, the Teen Titans, Countdown, JSA, it is a signal of American Exceptionalism and little, if anything more. All it really communicates, with reflection, is that the original composition and effort are more important and better than anything in the comic at hand.
Saigon Execution
There are some good Marvel comics about the Vietnam War, not set in or during the active war, and some interesting. The Night Thrasher miniseries, Four Control, by Dave Hooper and Fabian Nicieza. The Marvels, by Kurt Busiek and Yildiray Cinar. A number of comics featuring Vietnam veterans like the Punisher and Forge of the X-Men.
We do not know what the Resistance War Against America is, anymore, in America, and barely what it is for in America. The war waged in the bounds of Vietnam is not the war staged for the American psyche.
American comics, like American entertainment, loves the photographs and footage known as the Saigon Execution; the murder of Captain Nguy?n V?n Lém of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. We will never know if Lém committed the crime which supposedly pushed Brigadier General Nguy?n Ng?c Loan to shoot him in the head. He was supposedly found near a large number of civilian dead, and was accused of murdering an entire family.
Some of those present, insisted they believed that the General was only going to threaten Lém with his sidearm. Frighten an enemy officer.
Amongst those who utilize the image, which range from Marvel Boy to The ‘Nam, there is very rarely a sense that the entire creative team are versed in the actual event. At worst, it becomes visual code for any street execution, any tired hard man who pops someone with a pistol while everyone else stands around. Like the raising of the flag, the execution is only shorthand for “realpolitik” to be shoved into an Ultimate Thor moment.
In our history, the white photographer who took some of the photographs regretted that he did so, regretted the entire situation. He referred to his photographs as his own execution of the General, who would go on to face accusations of war crimes and attempts to deport him for trial from a protective United States government.
Thi Bui, working the execution into comics form, her memoir, The Best We Could Do, tries to bring something in, as an educator, as well as something personal, something political, and something aesthetic.
American Gothic
Describe the painting, American Gothic. Who is in the picture?
Many of us will say, there is a “farmer and his wife.” The wives of farmers are, by and large, farmers, but we will let that sexism slide for now, to address that it is a woman and her father. The models were sister of the painter, Grant Wood, and their family dentist.
American Gothic is a pre-Depression work. A political painting, it was lauded as a “comic valentine,” criticized as a harsh parody, considered by some to be an attack on Wood’s home state of Iowa, and as a statement of survival and sturdiness. The Great Depression, of course, changed our understanding of it, entirely, and it is now emblematic of that period. By 1942, parodies and homages were picking up, and it has been referenced in over a dozen television programs, in multiple photographs, in untold comics covers and panels.
But, other than being a funny image to homage, because of it’s seeming seriousness, the straight-faced pair dead center… what do homages mean? What do they do? Alf, The American, She-Hulk, Marvel 2 in One, Mosaic… what does it mean? The Human Torch and the Thing as the father and daughter does what? Archie Andrews and Betty Cooper on a cover for Betty and Me?
Elektra Assassin, Crossed, and an issue of Cracked featuring Donnie and Marie Osmond do something new with the image, utilize the politics into something distinct. Most do not.
