Geoff Grogan, Fandancer. Self-Published, August 2010, $19.95
In the documentary Crumb (1994, and re-packaged last month in a fancy Criterion DVD edition), the eponymous bad-boy underground cartoonist reveals that he felt his first twinges of lust at the age of five, while looking at a picture of Bugs Bunny. Crumb carried this picture in his pocket for a long time, and when it wrinkled, he persuaded his mother to iron the creases out. Was it an image of Bugs in drag? (As film critic Hank Sartin argues, the Warner Brothers cartoons are shot through with a strongly transgressive queer sensibility.) Another question:
How do the comics we read, and the comics characters we love, shape our sexuality?
Click to enlarge images--though be aware that the images from Fandancer are cropped because they're too big for my scanner.
When I was a child, my favorite toy was my Captain Action doll, a 12-inch action figure manufactured by the Ideal Toy Company between 1966 and 1968. The best thing about Captain Action was his mutable identity; you could buy tiny costumes and masks and dress him up as other adventure characters, like Superman, Steve Canyon, Captain America and the Phantom. (Above is a faded picture of me, age five, opening my gifts on Christmas morning in 1968, the CA Aquaman costume on the table in front of me.) No doubt riding the wave of the Batman TV fad of the same period, the Captain Action toy became popular enough to spawn a few spinoffs, including a well-regarded but short-lived DC comic drawn by Wally Wood and Gil Kane. And more dolls: a villain named, appropriately enough, Dr. Evil, and a sidekick named Action Boy. I convinced my parents to buy these toys for me too.
I played with the Captain Action crew around the same time I began reading. I would spend hours using the dolls to act out variations on the tales I read in Superman and Spider-Man comic books. I didn't have a girl doll, however, and this was a problem. Most superhero comics included at least one female--a relatively powerless character like the Invisible Girl, or a damsel-in-distress saved by the hero--and the stories I invented in my private puppet theater felt unfinished without a girl puppet. So I asked my dad if he'd buy me a Barbie, and his response was an uneasy mix of a vehement "No!" and quieter, more disturbing concern. This was a few years before "William's Doll" and Free to Be...You and Me (1972), after all, and my dad was never interested in getting me to question the gender stereotypes of his generation. He thought the male-breadwinner/female-housewife paradigm worked fine.
But I was going to have to improvise without Barbie. I went into our bathroom, pulled a couple of sheets of Kleenex out of a box, and walked over to my shelf of dolls. I opened the snap at the back of Action Boy's neck, pulled his collar wide, and stuffed the Kleenex down the front of his shirt, shaping the paper to create two fake breasts. AB looked passable, in a pixie-haircut, Jean Seberg kind of way. I was now able to dream up more complete stories, where the hero defeated the villain and got the girl; invariably, these stories would end with Captain Action and Action Boy expressing their love with a kiss. One day, my dad walked by as one such clinch was in progress, and noticed Action Boy's new figure. A day later, my doll collection was moved out to the garage, stored in big cardboard suitcases previously used to carry the household sundries (potholders, lemon squeezers, etc.) my older brother sold door-to-door to raise money as a Cub Scout. I snuck out to the garage a few times to play with the Action Family, but a few weeks later the suitcases were gone.
How do the comics we read, and the comics characters we love, shape our sexuality?
Geoff Grogan's remarkable new Fandancer is (in the words of Grogan's website) "36 pages in full color, tabloid size 11" x 13.5", limited edition--500 copies, signed by the artist." And it is a virtuosic display of Grogan's chameleon-like mastery of color and collage. The book begins with two Kirbyesque superheroines battling as they fall from an exploding airplane lifted directly from Roy Lichtenstein's 1962 painting "Blam." The superheroines are reverse images of each other: one is blonde, the other brunette, and their costumes are red-and-blue inversions of each other. Grogan uses crayons to color his pictures, and the result is a gorgeous riot of cross-hatched texture poured into Kirby's thick outlines:
Is it my imagination, or are those breasts as (un)natural as Action Boy's? Anyway, before the women hit the ground, Grogan transitions to a prehistorical tableau of a cavewoman (the superheroine?) living off the land. This section is again colored in crayon, and the drawings--a perfect balance between representation and simplification of the human form--are the best cartooning Grogan's ever done. Grogan then changes his visual approach again, crafting collages out of pictures and word balloons cut from old comics, and concludes Fandancer by returning to the blonde superheroine, rendered in a style that mimics the tropes of superhero comics (right down to layouts winkingly borrowed from Fantastic Four 89 [August 1969]):
I have a theory about the narrative that links these disparate approaches to image-making--see below--but in some ways, story doesn't matter here: Fandancer is an oversized, mad, audacious visual spectacle, and you should get this book and stare at it until the reds scald your eyes.
That said, I do think Grogan both tells a story and addresses important issues in Fandancer. (This is the point in the review where I begin to sling spoilers.) The narrative spine is one you've seen before: Hero versus Villain! And although the hero is more powerful, the villain finds some insidious way to worm into and manipulate the hero's mind. With his illusions, Mastermind convinces Jean Grey that she's a dominatrix at the Hellfire Club; Marcus, "with a subtle boost from Immortus' machines," turns Ms. Marvel into a willing rape victim. (Did someone say something about sexuality?) Maybe the quintessential example of such a comic-book psychic assault is Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' "For the Man Who Has Everything" (Superman Annual #11, 1985), where the alien conqueror Mongul uses a plant to immobilize Superman with false images of a restored Krypton where Kal-El marries and has a loving family. How can the hero(ine) free himself/herself from these dreams? (How ironic is it that comic-book fans love these stories about the dangers of escapism?)
I see a similar mind-manipulation arc in Fandancer, albeit with a twist. In the beginning, we're not sure which battling superheroine is the "good guy" and which is the "bad guy," although the fact that they're doppelgangers hints at the kind of twisted relationship that the Flash shares with Professor Zoom. Zoom steals the Flash's power and appearance, but Grogan goes one step further than Zoom: Lichtenstein borrows the art for his "Blam" painting from art by Russ Heath in All-American Men of War #89 (January-February 1962), but Grogan steals the art back and inserts it into his comic book. It's all about image duplication, and it's all about making the women fight each other, with men out of sight.
The transition between sections one and two is odd: Grogan draws a spiral fade-out around the falling heroines, and then we see a full-page image of a fetus curled tightly in a womb, followed by three pages of a naked cavewoman staring at a reflection of her face in a pool of water, catching a fish, and cooking over a fire. She is autonomous, self-reliant, maybe a little narcissistic. She is joined, however, by a man who brings his own fish to eat, and who rapes her. I read these scenes as taking place in one of those illusory worlds that a villain manufactures to trick a hero: I consider the cavewoman and the blonde superheroine to be the same person, although Grogan's narrative is ambiguous and loose-limbed enough to accommodate multiple interpretations. Nevertheless, the rape-by-fireside takes a supernatural turn, as the man becomes a horned, goat-like exemplar of rapacious masculinity, a monster that sinks his claws into her stomach:
He extracts from her a shining force that represents many things: the cavewoman's pregnancy (connecting to the earlier image of a fetus), her autonomous strength, and even Adam's reclamation of his rib from Eve. And the next time she sees her face reflected in water, all she can see is the face of the goat god:
Abruptly, Grogan then revisits and revises, in the next twelve pages, some of the collage techniques that dominated his earlier Look Out Monsters. He layers his pages with diverse images of women (photos of Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich and Bette Davis, woodcuts by Max Ernst, drawings of love-struck girls from Marvel and DC romance comics) and gives most of these images word and thought balloons from comic books, many from superhero stories featuring Dr. Fate (I recognize that pseudo-Egyptian Howard Sherman lettering) and Dr. Strange ("I am Eternity! Heed my message and remain silent!"). I'm still figuring out this whirling juxtaposition of female bodies and superhero rhetoric, but I think the point here is that much of the surface noise of our culture (including popular culture) constitutes a superstructure that conceals a harrowing misogyny at the core of western civilization. Since prehistory, men have held the rib and controlled the reflections. On a narrative level, the collages represent our heroine struggling to see sexist truth behind illusion, the dancer behind the fan. (The largest word on the back cover of Fandancer is "Mystique," as in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), as in the X-Men shapeshifter who specializes in masquerade, and whose blue face adorns Fandancer's front cover.) Further, Grogan asks his readers to probe beneath surfaces and consider:
How do the comics we read, and the comics characters we love, shape our sexuality?
The final act is a happy ending: Grogan combines chunky Kirby with collage aesthetic to chronicle the superheroine as she wakes up from the illusion and defeats the goat-villain. While they battle, his mask flies off, and he turns out to be just another dumpy guy in horns. On the final page, she reclaims a glowing ring that is her life force, her vagina, the round wound in her side inflicted by the goat-rapist:
In his emphasis on collage, in his exploration of the conscious and unconscious connections between gender and genre, and in his willingness to self-publish (self-publish!) expensive, colorful, resolutely experimental art books, Grogan is unique. Nobody else is making comics like these, and very few artists play with the puppets of our popular culture in order to explore vital, important ideas. (The only other creator that treats superheroes as philosophical avatars and ideological symptoms as smartly is Grant Morrison.) I hope Grogan continues to make his idiosyncratic, magnificent comics.
[A complimentary review copy of this book was provided by Grogan.]
You're right, Craig. FANDANCER is a mind-rattling tour de force, a terrific comic, a terrific art book, a delicious puzzler. And you've written a terrific, revelatory post! Thanks for this.
Would that I had gotten around to writing about it too. Wow.
Posted by: Charles Hatfield | September 30, 2010 at 07:38 AM