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Well, okay then. As no-one else is replying to this thread, and as it doesn’t actually have an abstract, rather than go down the ‘which footballer do you think Batman should look like?’ route (correct answer: Cantona, duh), I’ll just hijack this thread for this post rather than starting a new one... apart from anything else, because Pope *has* just claimed that his 'Batman 100' comic will be reflecting his political views, and I think they could do with a little public discussion. Or, at any rate, I’m interested in how one might respond to them...
Okay, pls excuse the length of the post, but some context. Because here’s the thing with right-wing politics and superheroes: I really enjoy Steve Ditko comics. I can’t even say it’s *just* because of his artwork; yer 60s mainstream Marvelsuperhero Ditko is fucking brilliant, obviously, but I really enjoy settling down with a cup of coffee and one of his nutty later comics. For reference, I mean the stuff that reads like this:
...using superheroes as medium for his, er, ‘social comment.’ I think it’s heady stuff, stories being driven along by all the things he seems to be angry about/fixated on. His art often has this buttoned down, metronome, obsessive quality - always the 50s style hats and suits, always the cool guy and the, uh, strident woman, always the strict 9-panel grid. And it all comes from somewhere inside him: the page from ‘Killjoy’ I posted above was drawn in 1988, for example, yet the way he draws street scenes makes it look as though he hasn’t stepped outside in the last 30 years; the way he cross-hatches has little connection to any patterns or textures I’ve ever seen in the real world. And this very rigid technique in his later work makes for a particularly startling effect on the pages when his loony creativity breaks loose and flows all over the place. It’s the sheer intensity of this stuff that makes me love Ditko. Unlike some other objectionable fucknut like, say, John Byrne, who’s just too dull to bear.
But these tracts of Ditko’s aren’t going to convince anyone. I’m feel quite sure there’s no way in hell that his screechy rants are going to make the world a significantly more unpleasant or dangerous place, or convert anyone to the joys of Objectivism. He's harmless.
So, Paul Pope. I dunno, I think maybe I’ve been taking Pope’s political stuff to just be a self-conscious steal from Ditko. Like a boy dressing up as Travis Bickle because he looks cool and intense, or something. But it’s not, is it? His libertarian thing *isn’t* a pose, he's perfectly sincere, and I’m starting to read ThB as being All About his politics.
I realise this may not be much of a revelation to the rest of you, in which case skip right along to the point where I ask you what you think. But, for those who don’t know, ThB is Pope’s long-running sci-fi series set on Mars. It’s damn pretty:
The Buranchists are the representatives of an oppressive government - pretty much a right-winger’s caricature of socialism, in which all officials are portrayed as being less than human. That’s less than human because they’ve surrendered their individuality to authority - they’re still people somewhere inside their, er, insect suits. It’s not particularly subtle. Not that it needs to be, of course. He's just prepping the canvas.
So, the actual plot, once you look beyond the girl/giant robot/hipster kids being chased around a weird future city stuff, and look to see what’s driving this narrative, it’s about a dispute between HR Watson’s father, who is a businessman, and this crazystrange caricature of a socialist government. The cause of this dispute has only just been revealed in the latest issue - it’s because he wants to mine the asteroid belt, free from government interference. Yet the precise nature of this 'interference' and how it affects the details of Watson’s plan is all a bit sketchy and doesn’t make too much sense to me - if anyone wants to explain, I’d be obliged. It seems to be pitched merely as government vs entrepreneur, in those very essential terms. As though that's a fundamental struggle in Pope's view.
But, y’know, it seems to me there’s a real world parallel to that story going on right now, is there not? It’s not as if he decided to write Mr Watson as a businessman who’s only trying to evade ‘crippling taxes,’ or looking for a better profit margin on his robots, or something like that. No, this entire narrative is being propelled along by a businessman’s efforts to assert his inalienable right to explore and exploit pristine wilderness for personal enrichment, in defiance of any non-specified government regulation. I mean, that’s a struggle that’s happening now. In the real world.
...er, is what I think. The point I’m trying to make here, is that Pope’s *fundamental* politics are there throughout the comics he writes, and that the right of free enterprise to exploit natural resources kinda underpins a current right-wing agenda to roll back environmental regulations in the real world, and I think that Pope is writing science fiction in such a way as to position himself in relation to contemporary debates.
Not that right-wing allegories are a particularly unusual thing in science-fiction, but Pope can sometimes be inclined to write in a way that isn’t really any less prescriptive than Ditko - compare this spiel about property rights and freedom
with this sequence from ThB, where Lottie finds and reads a banned book, helpfully repeating the key points, just so we don’t miss them:
 
...and so on. An entire chapter, inserted so as to explain precisely what you should think of this society. And that voice, the Voice Of Pope, seems pretty crooked in the way it presents a definition of 'forcible intervention' and in the way the criticism of democracy is set up, as vaguely opposing the freedom that Lottie is reading about.
Well, anyway, so what? Hardly anyone reads ThB. But what about his mainstream work? As we are now being promised a 200 page sci-fi Batman which he says will reflect his libertarian views, let’s not imagine Paul Pope could *ever* mean ‘libertarian’ in the Chomskyish, Michael Moorcockish, ‘libertarian socialist’-ish sense of the word. Pope’s short ‘Berlin Batman’ story might be one of my favourite Batman comics ever, because I think it *looks* absolutely stunning. But...
The plot - Kommissar Gordon reveals to Baruch Wane that his men have just impounded Von Mises’ library, and are about to transport it out of the city by train:
The Bat-Man swoops off to save it. Stuff Happens. He blows up the train tracks instead. Here’s the final page, the voice of Pope, speaking through ‘Robin’s secret journal.’
...that’s where his Batman story ends up. The action is over, and there’s another whole page tacked on the end, just so we get his point. And, Batman fighting Nazis - no-one’s going to argue with that. Batman preventing the destruction of someone’s library - cool, triffic. Book-burning is Evil, after all. But, Batman as eternal defender of Von Mises’ work and champion of his philosophy? *strokes chin* Hmmmm.
So, O Barb, my question. Well, first, should this even matter anyway? My gut response to this thread was that most explicitly right-wing comics are Bad because they usually look like shit and read like shit, but that I find that it's very easy to avoid such things, and that most people do. But then - there’s Ditko, and I thought I was rationalising my love of Ditko by taking him as a completely harmless crank. But then - well, people read Paul Pope. Lots of people. He’s cool and influential and stuff. He's hip. He’s pretty much the *opposite* of harmless crank, in fact.
And he can draw like dynamite. I'm not *necessarily* averse to reading comics that I can disagree with, as long as they're weird enough to be harmless. But my Ditko standard can't be applied to mainstream Pope, because he's such a pin-up for hipsters. And I'd hate to think that Pope might just be getting a free pass for his writing because he looks so damned sexy and cool.
So: thoughts, anyone? |
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