Four-Colour Commentary

Black Summer

It's been a while, again, but here's the bits on Ellis/Ryp's Black Summer that I added to the previous sections on Miracleman and Watchmen. In Black Summer, a lone superhuman executes George H. W. Bush for his supposedly criminal behaviour, but the narrative reveals that in so doing, he is squandering the technological tools at his disposal because he cannot think outside of his generic role.

A Theory of Absent Ducks

The other kind of theory application, probably even worse than Duck Theory, is the theory of Absent Ducks. In this method, a critics selects a theoretical structure and then checks to see if a text conforms to it. The flaw in this methodology ought to be obvious, and yet it's maddeningly common for critics to simply check if this movie correctly reflects Lacan or if that comic book accurately depicts Nietzsche, as Zizeck does in Enjoy Your Symptom! and Matthew Wolf-Meyer does in "The World Ozymandias Made," respectively. I call this the theory of Absent Ducks because often, such critiques merely report that they are shocked, shocked!, to discover that the particular text in question "fails" to construct a narrative that reflects the critic's interpretation of how theory indicates that the world works. Which is to say that these pieces of art don't happen to conform to the theory in question.

There are a couple of truly baffling assumptions behind this method. The first assumption is that art has any responsibility whatsoever to reflect a given critic's little pet theory. Unless a piece of art indicates that it allies itself with a politics, a philosophy, an ideology, or a theory, there's just no point in reporting that it doesn't ally itself to one that you like. Even if it references one of those theories, it still has no responsibility to conform (and by the by: critics who happen to use a wee piece of a theory aren't on the hook for using the whole theory either!). The second is that the theory just is an accurate portrayal of the world, and therefore we can blame a text for portraying the world "wrong." Some of the less sophisticated Marxist critiques are guilty of Absent Duck theory, for example. They simply report that yet another piece of art fails to point out that capitalism is "bad." This second assumption is by no means limited to Marxism, of course. It happens in Feminist critiques as well, and it's all too easy to use psychoanalytic criticism to point out Absent Ducks.

Now, to be clear, the theory that a critic might happen to use when applying Absent Duck might be brilliant or it might be dim, but that's beside the point. Using a theory to apply Absent Duck does not imply that there's anything at all wrong with the theory. It's just an empty statement. It's the equivalent of seeing a fire hydrant and yelling "Not a duck!" Which, if you think about it, is an utterly useless thing to say. It gives me only slightly more information than I started with and it's probably not information of any value.

Miracleman and Watchmen: benevolent dictators pt 2

The dictatorship entry on Miracleman got kinda long, so I'm doing Watchmen in a separate post. (Fear not, though. I will be cutting down that post when I put it into my diss.) Although not a would-be dictator as such, Ozymandias in Watchmen takes it upon himself to make a horrifying moral choice on behalf of humanity: kill half the residents of New York City at a stroke in order to unite the world against a (fictitious) extra-terrestrial threat. Like Miracleman's choice to rule the world, Watchmen presents Ozymandias' choice to manipulate the global, political landscape in very ambiguous terms and refuses to resolve the ambiguity.

This may seem like a half-measure. If the goal is to fully dismantle the superhero, then presenting them as unequivocally morally corrupt would seem to be the most expedient route. However, ambiguity is the opposite of the moral certainty that most superhero comics were required to portray by the Comics Code. Instead of merely inverting the moral hierarchy, and condemning superheroes, Revisionist comics tend to deconstruct the hierarchy itself, but allow the superhero to remain at the centre of the story.