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The Patron Saint of Superheroes

“Chris Gavaler Explores the Multiverse of Comics, Pop Culture, and Politics”

Monthly Archives: September 2023

25/09/23 A Brief Cartoon History of the Biden Impeachment Inquiry

On September 12, Speaker Kevin McCarthy directed a GOP House committee to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. National political cartoonists responded immediately.

The most repeated word was “evidence”:

Especially its lack:

The empty container/room repetition is almost as fun as two identically posed McCarthys reaching into the same visual metaphor:

Or wielding the same detective trope:

The location of the search is key too:

McCarthy is by far the most repeated figure, with a range of visual jokes, including posed as a “dummy.”

Which is part of a larger McCarthy theme:

McCarthy’s gavel is a popular prop too:

But whatever angle, McCarthy is by far the most repeated figure in Biden impeachment cartoons:

Who’s the second most-named figure in Biden Impeachment cartoons? It’s not Biden:

Including a pair of “cover-ups”:

Though generic GOP elephants are popular too:

To be fair, unflattering donkeys show up sometimes too:

And sometimes even Biden:

Though even then, Biden tends to look pretty good:

Though political cartoonists are not a major voting block, if they were, Biden is polling ahead by an average of 6 to 1. That’s based on just the first two weeks of impeach cartoons — though really almost entirely on the first week, because cartoonists’ interest in the House GOP impeachment inquiry suddenly dropped off. You’ll never guess what they’re focused on now:

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18/09/23 What Is a Woman?

Nathaniel Goldberg’s and my next book, Revising Reality, takes the concepts of sequels, retcons, and remakes from fictional narratives and applies them to the real world. One subsection looks at gender identity as raised by J. K. Rowling. Since a visitor to our college campus this week raises a similar question, I’m sharing an excerpt:

In 2020, J. K. Rowling tweeted in response to the phrase “people who menstruate”: “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Rowling was objecting that “women” was no longer being used to refer to people assigned female at birth but to people with a female gender identity. Her phrase “there used to be” implies that the current definition is a sequel: a new definition follows an old definition. No retroactive reinterpretation.

We disagree and understand the current meaning of “women” to be a retcon. Whether or not anyone realized it, the term always referred to people with a female gender identity—and not just currently but in the past too. Similarly, Harry Potter had always been a wizard, even though it took until his eleventh birthday for Rubeus Hagrid to reveal that—and therefore retcon Harry’s self-understanding—by inviting the boy to enroll in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Rowling’s most detailed public statement of her views is to be found in a 3,670-word essay posted on her website in 2020, where she explains that she is “worried about the new trans activism” and how it seeks to “erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.” Rowling explains that she tweeted support for a tax specialist who lost her job for making “what were deemed transphobic tweets” and then lost her case before an employment tribunal that ruled that the “belief that sex is determined by biology” was not legally protected. (The tax specialist since won her appeal in 2022.) Rowling also describes following the Twitter account of a “young feminist and lesbian” who “was a great believer in the importance of biological sex.”

Rowling also refers to herself as “a biological woman,” and, among her reasons for deciding “to speak up,” she names “young women … who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.” That suggests that while she sometimes treats gender identities as sequels, other times she rejects retconned gender identities by privileging sex over them.

In 2019, Rowling opposed reforming the U.K.’s Gender Recognition Act of 2004 to make it easier for trans people to receive a Gender Recognition Certificate legally establishing their gender, and in 2022, she advocated against passage of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in Scotland. Rowling argued that those favoring the Scottish bill and wanting to reform the more general U.K. act were privileging gender at the expense of erasing sex. “If sex isn’t real,” she tweeted, “there’s no same-sex attraction [and] the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

She explains that her interest in the topic began in 2017 in part because she was writing a crime series with a fictional female detective “interested in, and affected by, these issues.” She also said it was “intensely personal,” acknowledging that her fear of bathroom predators is grounded in her own history of sexual assault and domestic violence. She shares the “safeguarding” worries of an “older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing room.”

Rowling rejects what she calls “one of the central tenets of trans activism … that a person’s gender identity is innate,” which she seems to understand as therefore also unchanging. That would ground the idea of gender identification as retconning: revealing what one’s gender had always (innately) been. And it explains why we understand Rowling as understanding gender identification at least when someone identifies as trans, as sequeling: changing from one gender identity to another. Rowling cites herself as an example of someone whose gender identity could have sequeled to escape misogyny:

“if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge.… I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.… I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth…. As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.”

Rowling’s use of “man” seems to refer to both cis and trans men, since she mentions her own “possibility of becoming a man.” Either way, it seems her hypothetical change would have been a sequel, not a retcon, and so not revealing of what her gender identity would always have been.

It’s possible that Rowling recognizes two kinds of trans revisions. For trans men, there are those who sequeled from being women because being a woman in a misogynist (and homophobic) culture is terrible, and those who revealed that they had always been men through retconning. If so, Rowling’s worries concern the first at the expense of the second. The same would presumably apply to trans women revision — though Rowling’s worries instead focus only on a third: when the revision is a kind of hoax or fictional remake. Someone assigned male at birth and who also has a male gender identity will claim to have a female gender identity in order to commit sexual assault.

Perhaps when Rowling writes, “I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people,” she recognizes it as a solution because it marks a retcon rather than a sequel. If so, she believes retcons are a minority: “studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria.” Rowling apparently did, and anyone who does is experiencing gender identity sequels and so not a single “innate” identity that can be revealed and retroactively understood. That Rowling experienced herself as “both sexual and non-sexual” while feeling “ambivalence about being a woman” and confusion “of what” she is might suggest that she is non-binary or gender fluid, which Dr. Sabra L. Katz-Wise at the Harvard Medical School website defines as “change over time in a person’s gender expression or gender identity, or both.” Such changes in identity would be sequels, not retcons.

Rowling seems to understand her experience of gender identity as the norm. Regardless, we think that she is wrong to advocate against legislation promising to make the lives of trans individuals better.

If you’re interested, here’s more on that campus visitor:

Entertaining BS

Entertaining BS (part 2 of hopefully only 2)

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11/09/23 Analyzing Joe Shuster’s Action Comics #1 Cover

During the first day of my first-year writing seminar “Superhero Comics,” I project the cover of Action Comics #1 on screen and ask students to observe it closely, note details that interest them, and interpret those details. After writing for a few minutes, they exchange notebooks (or typically laptops) and add to someone else’s comments. After exchanging again, they read and underline what the previous two students wrote that interests them. Then each person reads aloud, while we everyone take notes on what topics arise. Then we talk. The goal is as much about establishing norms of analysis and discussion as analyzing Shuster specifically, but classes tend to make smart moves right from day one.

Here are some highlights from my current seminar:

1. The first person I called on noted the two sweat beads flying off the foregrounded figure’s face. I’ve taught this image many many times before, and no one (including me) ever noticed those before. Cartoonist Mort Walker dubbs the cartoon norm “plewds,” but what matters is that they communicate the character’s fear. He’s terrified of that guy smashing the car behind him. The original viewers of the 1938 image wouldn’t have known he’s Superman or even that he’s supposed to be a good guy. When we read around initial comments, the word “terrorist” came up once and “chaos” multiple times.

2. Sequing from the foregrounded face, the next student noted Superman’s facial expression, calling it “angry” and so not an emotion typically associated with heroism. I asked what specifically created that emotional impression, and we discussed the angle of the eyebrow line and the line of the closed lips, which I extracted and drew (badly) on the board. Everything is made of lines and every line can be analyzed and interpreted.

3. Another student wanted to talk about the explosion-like lines circling the car with red and yellow. Mort Walker dubs that “emanata,” a term I did have them write down, since, unlike plewds, emanata lines tend to appear a lot in superhero comics. We debated why Shuster drew them, agreeing that it gives Superman’s actions emphasis (if extended, the lines would converge on his upper body), and then I asked whether a character present in the scene would see the emanata (this could have been a moment to introduce “diegetic,” but I’ll refer back to the cover next time the distinction seems helpful). The student answered, “I don’t think?” Which is the perfect answer, because it conveys the weirdness of the effect. Someone else offered evidence: the background figure couldn’t literally be running into complete yellowness. I then went back and asked if the sweat beads were literal — do people experiencing fear project drops off sweat from the tops of their foreheads? Not so much. And that’s another example of the weirdness of comics art: it seems to be a drawing of something meant to be “real” (albeit fictional) and yet its details can be non-literal.

4. That unusually dressed man with a cape and in two of the three colors of the U.S. flag occupies the center of the page, establishing him as the literally central character.

5. Unless, someone else argued, you focus on the figure with the sweat beads again. Since he is closest to the viewer, we might as easily assume he is the main character. And that demonstrates two ways of visually privileging subjects: by centering them and by foregrounding them. You would need additional evidence to tie-break that visual disagreement.

We ran out of time, but this more than established the sort of analysis and interpretation they will tackle for each day’s homework. Next class we’re looking at the Superman episodes from Action Comics #1-9.

Before the cover analysis, I asked them to brainstorm traits and tropes they associate with superheroes and superhero stories. Then I stood at the board and wrote what they called out, underlining and circling and literally drawing connections as they explained. They anticipated so much of what I expect to discuss during the semester. It will be fun to show them their original comments on the last day of class:

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04/09/23 Recreating Creative Writing (part 5 of way too many)

What happens to Creative Writing in a ChatGPT world?

The meaning of both “writing” and “creative” may have just changed.

The word “writing” used to mean something like: “selecting and assembling words into sentences.”

Daniel Dennett (a philosopher and cognitive scientist) was interviewed in the New York Times last week. He described writing this way:

“When you are choosing the words that come out of your mouth, slight subliminal differences in the emotional tone of one word over another, that’s what’s going to decide which word you use.”

The day before I came across an essay by Alan Knowles about LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT:

“they use a statistical model to predict the probability of tokens (output) occurring after a given sequence of tokens (input). In other words, after an LLM sees some words, it predicts which words will come next based on patterns learned in its initial training.”

In our suddenly LLM-world, “writing” no longer (necessarily) involves “selecting and arranging words.” Software can do that now. The human part of writing is now focused on crafting questions (to ask the software), revising (the output), and endorsing (the words become your words when you accept them as your words).

Asking a sequence of guiding questions and choosing the best results — that used to be called “editing,” specifically “developmental editing,” what a psychotically hands-on editor might do with a psychotically malleable author’s most impossibly primordial work-in-progress. Though in this case, the author is ego-free, literally brainless, and the editor is a tyrant. It’s as if Shakespeare had an army of monkeys battering away at typewriters, and he just had to read over all of their shoulders, waiting for Hamlet to rattle out. Only this monkey army has been trained (the “P” in GPT stands for “pre-trained”) and so doesn’t require an infinite number of attempts.

Or, better, think of a director working with actors improvising lines and scenes that eventually get finalized into a script. The actors are coming up with the lines, but only as shaped and nudged and assembled by the director. The actors just keep trying different things, until the director sees something that clicks.

That’s how I felt when I coaxed a short story out of ChatGPT earlier this summer that story is here, and my earlier attempts are here, here, and here). It was fun. It was also not devoid of creativity, but I’m really not sure the process (or the results) should be called “creative writing.”

Either way, the revising stage has become significantly more central. Keep this key difference in mind: ChatGPT does not experience subliminal differences in emotional tones, and you don’t run statistical models that predict the probability of words occurring.

The word for “probable words” is “cliché.” Writers, especially of fiction and poetry, eliminate them. ChatGPT is designed to produce them.

The word for “subliminal differences in emotional tones” is “connotations.” Writers, especially of fiction and poetry, weigh them carefully. ChatGPT doesn’t know they exist.

To be fair, ChatGPT doesn’t know that anything exists. But its probable word arrangements can seem uncanny at times, producing meanings (when read by actual readers) that are improbably accurate.

That particular kind of accuracy doesn’t matter as much in fiction writing. While Chat is notorious for “hallucinating” textual evidence when producing literary analysis, fiction writing is entirely hallucination. You’re required to make things up.

You’re also required to produce connotatively rich, cliché-free prose.

Or rather, that’s a new requirement for creative writing courses in a LLM-world. You now have to write better than ChatGPT. Rather than providing an undetectable method for cheating, the software just raised the bar above its own level of mediocre prose.

I see lots of “process sentences” and “placeholders” in first drafts (my students’, my own, other professional writers’). They’re a kind of “note to self” about facts you need to keep straight and intended effects that you can’t achieve on a first round.

ChatGPT produces mostly placeholders, most of them dull generalizations. The “writer’s” job is to make those sentences better, and so in that process make them their own.

I call that “endorsing,” which may seem like a new final step for writing, but anyone who has collaborated with a (presumably human) co-author has probably experienced it.

When I “write” with Nathaniel Goldberg (we just turned in our third book together last month), we each draft text and share it with the other. Often we make multiple changes, bouncing material back and forth until we both have trouble remembering who initiated the original version of a given sentence or paragraph or subsection. Sometimes we make no changes, accepting something that the other drafted as now also our own. That’s the moment when we become an author of those words. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t draft them.

ChatGPT is similar, with one key difference: it’s not a co-author. It can’t be. It can’t read. It’s sorting word objects not word meanings.

Still, ChatGPT is fulfilling the function of a co-author, which disrupts the traditional meaning of “writing.”

It might also mean the death of writer’s block. The blank page may be gone forever. First drafts are now effortless, and so the effort of writing leaps to revision.

Which creative writing classes were always about anyway.

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