The Return of Blackhawk Wingsdays: Live!

First off, my apologies for the summer long gap in this blog. Right around the time I was planning on devoting more time to the blog, a bunch of stuff happened to take the wind out of my sails, and then some other projects took over my time. I did manage to put out a fairly regular movie column over at the Bureau Chiefs site, and now I'm ready to get back to some regular blogging a few times a week, if there is still anyone out there who is interested. I'm also on sabbatical this semester to work on a comics research project, so some of my posts coming up will be related to that work.

One of my accomplishments over the summer was to read a huge chunk of Blackhawk comics. I would venture to say that I've read most of the Blackhawk stories ever printed, though my research is a bit spotty from about issue 130 to 180. So, with that under my belt,and my batteries recharged, I'm going to make an exciting return to one of my favorite features: Blackhawk Wingsdays!

But if I'm going to make a comeback to this feature, I want to do it in a big way. Therefore, I'm going to be presenting Blackhawk Wingsday live this weekend!

Actually, this weekend I'm presenting a paper at the Purdue University Comparative Literature Conference, Graphic Engagements: The Politics of Comics and Animation. My paper, titled "Retcon and Race: The Many Faces of Chop-Chop from 1941-Present" (though the program gives the subtitle as "The Changing History of Chop-Chop, 1940-Present," it has since changed, partially to get the starting date right), will be like a more academic version of a long Blackhawk Wingsdays post, complete with tons of images but a bit more literary theory than I tend to use on the blog. So, if you are attending the conference, or are in the West Lafayette, IN, area on Saturday morning, come check it out!

I just want to say that I love the fact that I have a job where I can go to a conference and present a paper on Chop-Chop and the Blackhawks. My teenage self would hi-5 me so hard right now.

But because I know that most readers of this blog won't get to see this presentation, I want to share some of the stuff I will be discussing, especially since some of it is really nuts.

One of the things I became aware of while doing my Blackhawk research is that I really, genuinely enjoy the post-war Blackhawk stories, especially those drawn by Reed Crandall. Most of these stories are straight-up anti-Communist propaganda, with the team fighting off Communist rebellions in both real and fictional nations. And with 3 stories per issue at the time, the Blackhawks would often quell three revolutions in three separate fictional countries.

But the series also became a pretty solid adventure strip in a Milton Caniff mode, aided largely by Reed Crandall's dynamic, realistic art. It's a shame that DC hasn't reprinted any of this material: the early stories in the single Archives volume only catch the very beginning of Crandall's work on the strip, and the Showcase volume reprints the early DC issues, where the team had become a group of bland and generic crime-fighters.

One Cold War story that stands out is "Red Ransom," from Blackhawk 55 (Aug. 1952):



First of all, that is one dynamic cover!

In this story, we get a rare glimpse into Chop-Chop's private life. The Blackhawks travel to the U.S. in order to eat at the restaurant owned by Chop-Chop's cousin, Wah Jung. While there, they learn that Wah Jung has a problem: the Red Chinese government has sent him an unpaid tax bill charged to his father, Wah Po, who remains in China, where he runs a kite factory. The Reds threaten to imprison Wah Po if the "tax bill" is not paid.

The Blackhawks agree to help Wah Jung, letting Chop-Chop know, "You're one of us, Chop-Chop! We Blackhawks have to lend each other a hand!" So, the team heads to China, and Chop-Chop goes undercover to help break his uncle out of prison.

Not only is this the rare plot that takes the Blackhawks to a real, rather than fictional, country, the story also has something interesting going on visually. Here's an early page from the story:



I find it curious how Crandall depicts Wah Jung in his normal, realistic style, while Chop-Chop remains a heavily caricatured figure. If anything, the contrast makes the caricature even more grotesque, as this cartoonish figure clearly doesn't belong with the rest of the strip, despite Blackhawk's assertion that Chop-Chop is "one of us."

And when Chop-Chop works undercover to infiltrate the prison, the Chinese soldiers seem to think he's some kind of imbecile:



This sort of contrast between realism and caricature in the depiction of Asian characters within the same story occurs frequently in Blackhawk stories of this era, especially as the team engages in East Asian conflicts. It would still be a few years, though, before Chop-Chop's appearance would change in order to reduce, but not eliminate, the caricatured elements.

"Red Ransom," however, is particularly sensitive despite it's overt anti-Communist propaganda. Once the Blackhawks free Wah Po, they learn about the existence of a nearby weapons factory. Wah Po can signal the team from the ground so the Blackhawks can launch an airstrike, but Chop-Chop's uncle must sacrifice himself in the process. The team flies away from the mission with tears in their eyes.

Unfortunately, that sensitivity is undermined by the awkward placement of the Chop-Chop solo story in this issue, where Chop-Chop inherits a worthless fortune from a dead relative, and hijinx ensue.

I've got plenty of material for future installments of Blackhawk Wingsdays, and my research has yielded some other stuff that I'll work into the blog as well. Before I go, though, I want to give a much belated thanks to Tom Katers for plugging this blog on his fabulous podcast, Tom vs. The Flash. Unfortunately, there wasn't much of a blog to plug at the time, but I appreciate the shout-out, anyway.

Cite This! New MLA Rules for Citing Graphic Narratives

The Modern Language Association recently came out with a new MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (7th ed.), and at long last, there are rules for citing comics, or "graphic narratives" as they are referred to in the handbook, and as they are increasingly referred to in academic circles, foregoing the awkward, often inaccurate, but entrenched term, "graphic novels."

In grad school, I worked as an editorial assistant at a scholarly journal, where my job required knowing the ins and outs of MLA citation format. Ever since, whenever a new edition of the MLA Handbook comes out, I'm anxious to see what changes have been made. And lots of stuff has changed this time around, including an addition that requires the medium (such as Print or Web) to be included in a works cited entry.

It has irked me that MLA has never had specific rules for citing graphic novels or comics, and this is reflected in a lot of the scholarship on graphic narratives, where it often seems like each essay or book has come up with idiosyncratic rules without any standards or collective agreement. Most of these rules are drawn from a variety of other types of sources, like periodicals, film, cartoons, and illustrated books, while some rules seem to be made up from whole cloth. Now, I'm glad to see that at least some rules are codified.

Here are some examples of graphic narratives given in the MLA Handbook (Note that the indentations are not correct):

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. 2 vols. New York: Pantheon-Random, 1986-91. Print.

Pekar, Harvey, writer. The Quitter. Art by Dean Haspiel. Gray tones by Lee Loughridge. Letters by Pat Brosseau. New York: Vertigo-DC Comics, 2005. Print.

Yabuki, Kentaro, writer and artist. Showdown at the Old Castle. Eng. adapt. by Kelly Sue DeConnick. Trans. JN Productions. Touch-up art and lettering by Gia Cam Luc. San Francisco: Viz, 2007. Print. Vol. 9 of Black Cat.

The first one is pretty straightforward: if you have a graphic narrative created by a single cartoonist, then that gets cited like a regular book with a single author. For more collaborative graphic narratives, the rules here are pretty similar to citing films: cite by the collaborator(s) who is the most relevant to your research, then include other collaborators after the title.

Unfortunately, a some types of comics publications are still not addressed in the MLA rules. For example, periodical comics still don't have special rules, which they need, as they don't fall easily into the normal rules for periodicals, and nothing really compares very easily to this type of publication. Based on the rules that do exist, here's how I would guess one would cite an individual issue of a comic:

Hickman, Jonathan, writer. "The Bridge: Chapter One." Pencils by Sean Chen. Inks by Lorenzo Ruggiero. Colors by John Rauch. Letters by VC's Rus Wooten. Dark Reign: Fantastic Four 1 (May 2009). Print.

For the issue number and date of publication, I used the format for a scholarly periodical, but that may not be correct. One could leave the issue number out entirely and just reference the issue by date. But because this is a miniseries, would I need to indicate that this is part one of five? Also, I would want to include the name of the publisher in this citation, but that isn't standard for periodicals. Perhaps the line "Published by Marvel Comics." could go in after the lettering credit. And what if the issue contained an individually titled part of a larger story? I would guess that information could go after the individual issue's title.

MLA also doesn't offer guidance on how to cite a collected edition of previously published comics, which is, after all, one of the more popular ways in which comics are published. MLA does have rules for citing reprinted works; however, Maus would be considered at least a partially reprinted work, having been originally published in RAW, yet the example above does not indicate that. So, I'm not sure if one would need to include that original publication information or not. Here, then, is how I would cite a trade paperback collection:

Abnett, Dan, and Andy Lanning, writers. Guardians of the Galaxy: Legacy. Pencils by Paul Pelletier. Inks by Rick Magyar. Colors by Nathan Fairbairn and Guru eFX. Letters by Virtual Calligraphy's Joe Caramagna. New York: Marvel Comics, 2009. Print. Vol. 1 of Guardians of the Galaxy.

That last item might seem redundant, but I think it's necessary. At the very least, it would help to clarify confusing collections like the recent New Avengers and Mighty Avengers hardcovers, which are listed as both volumes of the Secret Invasion storyline in each series and volumes of each title. And if one wanted to include original publication information, I guess that it would now go at the very end of the entry, based on the new MLA rules.

In trying to think through these rules, I find myself sympathizing with my students, who see MLA citation format as frustratingly nebulous and impenetrable. While it may not be as bad as all that, as the scholarly study of graphic narratives continues to grow, these rules will have to be worked out in greater detail and consistency.

The Day Job: Comics in the Classroom

I will be posting more about David Hajdu's great book, The Ten-Cent Plague, later this week. I had planned on running posts about it all week, but a computer problem at the Dr. K Head Office resulted in a harddrive crash. From the looks of things, most essential stuff was backed up, and the worst things that I lost were some images for the blog. But until the replacement harddrive comes, I can't use the scanner, so some stuff I was planning to do with the Hajdu book and other things will need to wait.

But, meanwhile, I'm still working on the reading list for the graphic novel class I mentioned in an earlier post. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions.

On a similar topic, I recently received a review copy of a new literature textbook--Legacies, edited by Jan Zlotnick Schmidt, Lynne Crockett, and Carley Rees Bogarad--and I was surprised to see that the anthology contains a work of graphic literature in each chapter along with the usual poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction.

The graphic literature selections come from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Lynda Barry's One! Hundred! Demons!, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese.

Individually, these are all fine selections, and I'm glad to see a lit anthology making this move to include graphic literature, but they also all tend toward autobiography, with the exception of the American Born Chinese exerpt on "The Myth of the Monkey King" (this section also suffers from not being reprinted in color). While autobiographical comics tend to be the dominant genre of "indy" or literary graphic novels, I would like to see more variety in an anthology like this (though I don't know what decisions went into the selections and how much cost and availability played as factors). I know this is a criticism that was lodged at the recent Best American Comics volume edited by Chris Ware, which seemed top-heavy with autobiography, and has been an issue of some controversy. Nonetheless, I think the editors of Legacies should be commended for this effort, and I hope this indicates a trend in lit textbooks.

I know Legacies isn't alone in this progress: I recently saw a manuscript of a new composition reader that included a short story by Will Eisner, and a lot of comp readers have moved toward including sections on visual rhetoric, which can include graphic literature as well as advertising, political cartoons, etc.

In preparing my graphic novel class, I've lamented the absence of a good, teachable graphic novel anthology that would serve my purposes, and this Legacies anthology has made me think about this issue more. Ivan Brunetti's Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories is the closest thing, but lacks any kind of apparatus or sense of historical scope to make it truly useful in the classroom. I can imagine, though, an anthology with a historical view, perhaps like the books the Smithsonian put out on newspaper comics and comic books, would be a nightmare of permissions and expenses that would make such a publishing venture cost-prohibitive, especially with its limited use in a specialized course. I wonder, though, as classes in graphic literature become more common, such an anthology will more than likely be forthcoming.

In addition, scholarly research in graphic literature is booming right now, and I'll have more to say about that trend in a later post.

Help Out Dr. K: Graphic Novel Class Syllabus

I'm interrupting Apes Week to ask my readers for some help putting together a syllabus for a summer class I'm teaching on graphic narratives. The class goes for five weeks (2 hours per day, 4 days a week), and I plan to include 10 books on the reading list. So far, I have the following 7 picked:

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud
V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
The Best of the Spirit by Will Eisner
Nightly News by Jonathan Hickman
Persepolis by Marjane Sartrapi
Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

So, I'm looking for 3 more books to include in the class. Here are my criteria for the books already on the syllabus:

V for Vendetta and Jimmy Corrigan are on this list because I've used them in past classes, and they work well. American Born Chinese is there because of current research that I'm doing, and that book fits with Persepolis in a unit on autobiographical comics. I don't feel like I need to add any more of those to the list, but I'm thinking of using Fun Home.

Nightly News is there because I want to end the class with a new work that pushes the rules of page design and narrative form, and I also think this work fits well with a sub-theme of revolution that will tie it in with V for Vendetta. In most of my literature classes, I try to teach at least one first novel so that students can start following the writer's career from the beginning and possibly make a life-long commitment to follow that writer's work. That's another reason why Nightly News is on the list.

The first assignment for the class is going to involve reading Understanding Comics and applying some of McCloud's narrative concepts to another work. One of those works is going to be the Spirit collection, but I'd also like to include something else that's more conventional, and perhaps superhero-y. I'm toying with the idea of using The House of Mystery Showcase Vol. 1, because it will give students a greater variety of short stories to choose from for this short assignment. I would welcome other suggestions, especially collections that don't need to be read in their entirety.

I also want to use something by Gilbert Hernandez, but I'm debating between Heartbreak Soup and Human Diastrophism. I'm certain I will use one of them, but I am on the fence as to which.

I'm also considering Matt Kindt's SuperSpy, to pair with Nightly News to talk about formal experiments, but I worry that the book's narrative experimentation might require too much time to unpack in this short class.

For a wide variety of reasons, I do not want to use Watchmen, From Hell, Maus, and A Contract with God. The first two would take up too much time for this course; Maus is too expensive for the class (I want to keep the cost down, and volume one is unavailable as a separate book; and other than its historical importance, I don't find Contract to be anything more than a mediocre short story collection. All of these will be referenced in the class, however.

I also plan to reference a lot of stuff that I won't be teaching in its entirety, like Jar of Fools and Black Hole. For similar reasons, I don't want to be teaching parts of longer, multivolume narratives, like Y: The Last Man, Fables, Planetary, Transmetropolitan, etc.

I'm also less interested in discussions of canonicity and "essential" works than I am of finding works that are relevent to each other and making connections between works that I can pair up "in conversation."

So, to summarize:
--I need three more books for the class.
--One should be a superhero book or another popular genre, like horror.
--One should be by Gilbert Hernandez.
--One is totally up for grabs, but I'm less inclined to pick something autobiographical, since that is already well-covered. It should also stand on its own as an independent narrative.
--The choices should be less than $20, and preferably around $10-15 in order to keep the cost down for this class.

All suggestions are greatly appreciated.

The Chop-Chop Hits Keep Coming

I know I'm running the risk of turning the 100-Page Super Spectacular into the Chop-Chop blog (and that would be wrong for a variety of obvious reasons), but the Chop-Chop posts have generated thousands of hits, and several other prominent blogs have linked to these pages.

One of those links happens to come from the blog of Gene Luen Yang, creator of the graphic novel American Born Chinese, who writes in the post, "Chop Chop is an ancestor to my character Cousin Chin-kee."

This is particularly cool because the paper I've been working on is about how contemporary cartoonists use racial caricatures from the past, and American Born Chinese is a prominent work in that research.

The Day Job: Keeping up with Chop-Chop

As I mentioned last week, posting has been light on this blog as I've been working on a conference paper on racial caricatures in comics from the Golden Age to the present, focusing particularly on Asian caricatures that inform Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel, American Born Chinese. Part of my work on this project over the last few days has involved reading through my collection of Blackhawk comics and picking out images of the Blackhawks' Chinese mascot, Chop-Chop, to use in the PowerPoint presentation that will be accompanying the paper. This whole process, as you can imagine, is making me feel a little unclean.

Chop-Chop first appeared in Military Comics 3 as comedy relief in the otherwise pretty somber Blackhawk feature that began in Military Comics 1. Here's the first panel in which the character appeared:

From the beginning, Chop-Chop was depicted as a foul-mouthed Chinaman (actually, Dude, the preferred nomenclature is "Asian") who was prone to violence, usually with a sharp object of some kind.

He even had his own tagline, which he used with great frequency whenever Chop-Chop faced adversity or any kind of obstacle: "Chop-Chop been double-clossed!"

There were a lot of such stereotypes used throughout World War II and the Korean War, but I'm using Chop-Chop in this paper because he's representative of a lot of stereotypical images in comics, and he gained a lot of traction as a popular character in the series. Even from his first appearance, he was being used as part of the publicity for the Blackhawk feature:

By the 1950s, Chop-Chop would graduate to his own feature in the regular Blackhawk comic, which kicked up the caricature even further:

The Blackhawk series survived both World War II and the Korean War, and the 1960s run, where the team goes from being high-flying adventurers to a low-rent superhero group, needs a whole series of posts to discuss (these issues, written by Bob Haney, are flat out nuts, and it's one of my strongest desires that DC produces a Showcase edition of them). Blackhawk was also revived a few times as a war book. The series was revived in 1982 by Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle because Steven Spielberg bought the film rights to the comic (which would you rather have: Spielberg's Blackhawk or Schindler's List? I know exactly where I stand on that question.) Evanier and Spiegle's run in the 80s is plain fantastic, but it's proven really difficult for me to get a complete run of it. Some issues feature "Detached Service Diary" backup stories that feature some great art by Howard Chaykin, Alex Toth, and others.

Evanier and Spiegle made some changes to the Chop-Chop character, giving him a less caricatured appearance and avoiding the accented speech patterns, but they did keep the costume and made him a martial arts expert.

A few years later, in an underrated revival by Howard Chaykin (and later Marty Pasko and Rich Burchett), "Chop-Chop" was renamed Weng Chan, and the series frequently commented on the racism of the "Chop-Chop" nickname, including a metatextual scene in the Pasko/Burchett run where Weng complains about his depiction in the Blackhawk comic book (if I remember correctly).

The Chaykin prestige-format miniseries is great, typical Chaykin work from that period following American Flagg! and his Shadow revival. I remember at the time that it got a lot of criticism for its graphic sexuality and the strong liberties he took with the revamp. And like a lot of Chaykin's work, it has a complex narrative that requires the reader's complete attention, as well as considerable historical knowledge of its wartime mileau. However, as a long-time, devoted Howard Chaykin fan, I have a hard time being objective or critical about his work, even when it should challenge some of my stronger feelings about gender issues.

I feel that this post is setting up more posts that I'll probably do down the line on the Bob Haney Blackhawk series and on Howard Chaykin, among other things.

Update: More on Chop-Chop here.