Mondello, Salvatore. “Spider-man: Superhero in the Liberal Tradition.” JofPC (10.1). 1976
This is a curious paper, to say the least. The basic argument is that Spider-man’s politics separate neatly into two eras. In the first, he’s basically selfish. Even though he fights crime, he does so for his own reasons (I.e., helping Aunt May), or to protect his country, but not truly selflessly. In the second era, he acts as a mediator between extreme left- or right-wing political practises, not taking part in protests but sympathising with their goals, seeking peaceful resolution instead of violent revolution (just to get a bit poetic about it).
There are some problems with this analysis, of course. The first issue of Spider-man starts with the superhero mantra, ‘with great power comes great responsibility,’ and in subsequent issues is frequently echoed in flashbacks to Spider-man’s Uncle Ben. Selfishness, then, is not the stated stance of Spider-man’s character. Whether his actions reflect it, however, is a matter of debate. That aside, there is also a problem or relative political position, here. Mondello characterises Spider-man’s position as neither left nor right, but simultaneously calls him a “Superhero in the Liberal Tradition” in the title of the paper, while never defining what the ‘liberal tradition’ actually is. Insisting that social problems, like poverty and racism, are best solved by working within the prevailing political system does, in fact, qualify as a conservative political stance. Though Spider-man is willing to question the morality of a particular circumstance, like appropriating housing for the poor or going to war in Vietnam, Mondello’s characterisation of him makes clear that he basically trusts the system that allows these things to happen in the first place. As such, I can’t help but read Spider-man as, not a bridge between extremes of the right and left, but as an apologist for the right. This reading says a lot about Mondello’s paper in general.
Though he does not state them in negative terms, Mondello’s paper reveals a lot of assumptions made by the never-defined ‘liberal tradition,’ which he doesn’t name but strongly implies is the American liberal tradition. In the above example, Mondello’s ‘middle-ground’ amounts to a justification of the systems that underlie a great deal of American (and generally Western) political injustices (if I may use such a strong word). Mondello is, I suspect, being unwittingly honest about what the actual political spectrum is in the United States. To be politically moderate means saying, “something is wrong with this situation and appealing to the legal system’s built-in avenues of complaint will undoubtedly solve the problem.” At the very least, Mondello’s article indicates that such an attitude is often seen as politically neutral, whereas it is, in fact, a subtle justification of the system itself, which of course is ultimately responsible for whatever social injustices that happen within it.
Mondello commits the same unwitting honesty when he contrasts Spider-man’s ‘human’ powers with his enemy’s ‘technological’ powers. To be fair, he does call attention to the fact that most of Spider-man’s villains are freaks of science and technology, such as Doctor Octopus (atomically fused to a set of mechanical tentacles) and the Lizard/Doc Conners (tried to grow back a missing arm the same way lizards do, accidentally turned himself into a powerful lizard monster).* in reference to a fight between Spider-man and ‘Doc Ock’ in which Spider-man knocks him unconscious with a punch to the head, Mondello claims that “human, not super-human powers, triumphed over the mechanical tentacles of his opponent” (234), and insists that Spider-man’s powers are “not artificial but an integral part of his very being” (235). Finally, Mondello asserts that “Spider-Man’s[sic] greatness [is] his ability to control his emotions, his ability to dominate himself. Since Spider-Man[sic] has mastered himself, he can master the technology around him” (235). These statements contain a very odd chain of signifiers.
First, to debunk Mondello’s assertions, Spider-man’s abilities are just as technological and freakish in origin as his enemies’ are. He gained them through an accident with an irradiated spider. They may be physiological in nature, but that doesn’t make them inherently different than a set of mechanical tentacles fused to his back. Furthermore, his web-shooters are devices he invented, and are not integrated into his body at all (though they are biological in the Sam Raimi films, and have become biological in current comics). The punch that knocks out Doctor Octopus is aided by his ‘spider strength,’ and therefore precisely is ‘super,’ and possibly not human at all, but arachnoid. Mondello seems to have something invested in casting Spider-man as ‘human and his opponents as ‘technological.’ Given how slippery the definition of ‘technology’ is, however, that distinction seems illusory at best.
Second, Mondello rehearses a model of humanity that doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny, but is ideologically specific. Spider-man is ‘human,’ in this reading, which seems to mean that he “has mastered himself,” and therefore can “master […] technology.” Spider-man, as well as most of his villains, is a combination of animal imagery, (spiders, octopi, vultures, rhinoceri, flies, lizards, hammerhead sharks, cats, etc.) and technology (radiation, cyber technology, anti-gravity, mechanical exo-skeletons, genetic mutations, etc.). We might even be justified in reading technology itself as a form of domination of nature, of raw materials shaped into useful devices. By that logic, then, technology that is used to replicate the attributes of animals is the ultimate domination of nature itself, which Spider-man and his villains all do.
The only difference between the protagonists and antagonists in Spider-man comics, according to Mondello’s argument, is that the hero control’s his mind and body, which is another form of domination of ‘nature’ (the body and its irrational desires) by the rational mind, here implicitly read as ‘human.’ Therefore, the paper argues that Spider-man earns his right to dominate animals and technology (I.e., use his technology and animal-powers to beat up technologically-based, animal-themed criminals) by virtue of his very existence as an independent Liberal Humanist subject. Mondello rehearses a kind of personal manifest destiny that demonstrates just how American Spider-man really is. What this paper claims is moderate, balanced, and implicitly just is, in fact, part of an ideology of individualism and domination that has been part of the American tradition since the beginning of that nation. American culture relies on these ideological underpinnings, rugged individualism, manifest destiny, to justify the theft of almost half a continent, for example, and to destroy wilderness to achieve economic and military power. This is not to say that no other country is guilty of the same crimes, of course (to make that claim would require that I ignore Canada’s history), but to merely point out that America remains blind to its own crimes through ideologies just like these, ideologies that, according to Mondello, are propagated through Spider-man comics
*Why doesn’t anyone ever just die of experiments gone wrong or exposure to radiation? I think that’s far more frightening than turning into a theatrically-exciting monster, which might answer my question, actually. They embody our fears about technology, radiation, and so forth, but assuage them by making them dramatic and entertaining, not to mention conveniently defeating them at the end of every story, instead of allowing us to acknowledge our real fears.
Palumbo, Donald. “The Marvel Comics Group’s Spider-Man [sic] is an Existentialist Super-Hero[sic].” JofPC (17.2) 1983.
I’m always a little impressed by an essay that has its thesis right there in the title, but as a corallary, the paper itself tends to be somewhat flat. Palumbo does a fine job of arguing that Spider-man has strong existentialist elements in his origin and common themes, in so far as he defines for us what constitutes an existentialist hero and then makes sure that Spider-man and that definition match. There are problems, though. Palumbo seems to take Spider-man comics as a closed narrative. Though he doesn’t say so explicitly, he does fail to opening aknowledge that the comics are on-going, and therefore his analysis tends to take for granted that the Story Thus Far is complete. The biggest hole this creates in his argument is his discussion of the famous death of Gwen Stacey, which Palumbo posits as an object lesson in the absurdity of life as demonstrated by the meaninglessness of death. “Peter’s most serious romantic interest, Gwen Stacey, is ultimately slain by one of his arch-foes, the Green Goblin” (69). Writing in 1983, Palumbo should have been aware of Mary-Jane Watson waiting in the wings to be ‘the’ great love of Peter’s life, despite constantly living under the shadow of Gwen’s death. At the very least, he should have acknowledged that it’s unlikely Peter wouldn’t ever have a love interest again.
Inversely, he also doesn’t quite make the on-going publication of Spider-man comics work for him, either. The central action of Spider-man stories is, of course, the title character’s battles against criminals and monsters of various kinds. The nature of comicbook storytelling is such that that battle is required to be ‘never-ending,’ “the absurdity [Spider-man’s] encounters in his world must be both accepted and combatted, […] meaning is to be found only through contined struggle and […] defeat lies only in capitulation” (69). Coincidentally, that format allows for the continual publication of comics staring Spider-man. I don’t point this out as a way to defeat Palumbo’s argument, that the character is existentialis, but to show that publication practises might have something to do with that existentialist impact, and to show that Palumbo didn’t recognise a pertinant fact of comics publishing.
The interesting difference that Palumbo ultimately highlights is that, unlike most superheroes, Spider-man actually realises how absurd his world is, in both its ridiculousness and its lack of closed meaning. One of the character’s signature traits is his witt, which he uses, often as not, to point out how strange the people around him actually are. He will make fun of a villain’s costume or name, for example, or just inject a life-or-death situation with mundane levity in the style of Jerry Seinfeld. Other heroes do not do this. They live in their worlds and accept them, absurdity and all, much as their readers accept the absurdity as reasonable within the context of supehero comics. Spider-man, however, points out the absurdity, possibly making the audience aware of the power of verisimilitude. We, the readers, share a laugh with Spider-man as we realise how incredibly dumb a character like Electro really looks, with his yellow lightning-bolt costume motif. The conflict, however, rears its head when we realise that Spider-man himself looks just as silly, especially considering that red and blue are not normally colours associated with spiders. So, though, according to Palumbo, he accepts the absurdity of the Marvel Universe, he also embraces that absurdity but does so with the knowledge that it’s absurd.
In the end, though, I’m not sure what the point of this paper actually is. Okay, says I, I’m convinced, but so what? Does that existentialism in comics point to something in the production of comics, as both art and consumer goods, that’s of note? Does it signal an attitude amongst the readers or creators of Spider-man comics? This paper is, in the end, ‘flat’ because it doesn’t seem to do anything interesting with its argument.
Schmitt, Ronald. “Deconconstructive Comics.” Journal of Popular Culture. (25.4) 1992.
Schmitt’s article is, to be fair, full of serious factual errors and interpretive blunders, but there are a few intriguing ideas buried in it. The errors mostly come in the form of sweeping generalisations about instances he’s probably not researched all that well, and is going with his gut. He refers, for example, to Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers as part of the superhero genre, calling them ‘superhuman,’ but fails to note that neither of them actually are. The one is a detective, part of a long line of crime drama in pulp and comics, and the other is a sci-fi hero, closely-related to and sometimes not-easily-distinguishable from a superhero, but a different entity, nonetheless. Surrounding this generic mistake is an interesting if flawed rehearsal of a model of three ‘ages’ of American comics, as created by a critic called Arthur Berger in The Comic Stripped American.
Berger divides ages based on how much they conform to a predominant social norm. First Generation comics are naïve and optimistic, the Second Generation are (super)power fantasies, and the Third are subversive and radical. Unfortunately, this timeline is somewhat (to use the vernacular) wonky. The naïve comics are supposedly the funnies, comic strips, but to read them as naïve requires ignoring a lot of the carnivalesque elements of, for example, The Yellow Kid or The Katzenjammer Kids. He (either Schmitt or Berger, it’s hard to tell) identifies power fantasies only vaguely (locating them in the wrong characters), jumps into superheroes a bit early, and, again, doesn’t note the remarkably dark and violent crime, horror, and war comics that surrounded superheroes in 30s and 40s. His subversive age comes with Marvel’s 60s heroes and underground comics, which seems a reasonable marker, the timeline then ceases, failing to note the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series “Hard Travelling Heroes,” (’70/’71) which tossed a bucket of cold water onto the superhero genre (the famous “What have you done for the black skins?” encounter). Berger’s book was written in ’73, so it seems that Schmitt simply ran out of history to relate to us, but the paper was published in ’92. A more ‘on the ball’ critic would have followed the same logic into the late 70s and 80s. The subversiveness increased as time went on; 80s superhero comics started tackling even more complex political and social subjects. To not mention Watchmen (or any of Alan Moore’s work), or even The Dark Knight Returns, is a serious oversight for a paper about subversive comics.
The central thrust of Schmitt’s argument is actually not historical but formal (though he roots that argument in fallacious history, which is why I just spent two paragraphs objecting to it). He argues that the form of comics is what makes it deconstructive, and he’s somewhat convincing on this point. To read comics is to learn a whole new form of literacy, but a form of literacy that is constantly weighed against textual literacy, and found lacking by people like Fredric Wertham. Schmitt enters into a close reading of Seduction of the Innocent to show how part of Wertham’s anti-comics sentiment was based—over and above the violence, sexual/gay content, and racial content—on a privileging of text. “The notion of the page of written text as the most effective and ‘preferred’ conduit to ideas, information and ultimately ‘intelligence’ and literacy is still a firmly entrenched hierarchy in all levels of education” (153). Schmitt makes some attempts to connect comics literacy with e-media literacy, the web and so forth, but he blurs the two in his final remarks, “the comic book occupies a curious and unique position in the 20th century electronic media revolution” (160), and then names a whole other medium, television, as the “ultimate intertextual media form” (160). Which is to say that he seems a bit confused, here.
Given more space, I think his ultimate point is that text occupies the top position in a socially agreed-upon hierarchy of ‘load-baring’ media, the ‘load’ in this case understood as information. In this system, text has the best signal/noise ratio. It carries data in the most comprehensible form. Therefore, any visual content other than text (which is to say, pictures) is merely distraction, or ‘noise.’ (There may be a noteworthy blind spot, here, in that in such a system, there is an ideological, though not a verifiable, difference between ‘pictures’ and ‘diagrams,’ but Schmitt doesn’t raise that point.) With that in mind, new media that contain a lot of pictures—film, television, the web, comics—are seen as full of distraction, noisy, which we can read literally as ‘lacking text.’
However, once we remove the axiom, “text > pictures,” we see that extracting information from these new media is simply another kind of literacy, which means that comics could conceivably displace text at the top of the hierarchy, and even deconstruct the hierarchy itself; once we realise that the axiom is arbitrary, there’s no need for a hierarchy. Therefore, people like Wertham are actually absolutely right to fear comics. Schmitt reads Wertham not as he is normally read, the hysterical Chicken Little of comics history, but as someone who accurately perceived that comics, as one of the new media, pose a genuine threat to the status quo of education. That fear, if accurate, would mean that the established cannon of textual literature, which Schmitt implicitly reads as a conduit for normative values, will not be able to deliver its information load to readers/viewers who are literate not in text, but in the new pictorial media. Schmitt claims that fantasy and humour are also inherently deconstructive/subversive, but there is, much like most of Schmitt’s claims, simply too much counter-evidence for the claim to be convincing, not to mention that it’s too broad to be in any way useful.
Despite its insights, which are few and far between, Schmitt’s paper is just too simple. It makes sweeping generalisations about history and reading practises, and it constructs binary oppositions out of complex interactions. His description of reading comics, for example, insists that the eye must rapidly move back and forth between text and images, which is true in the case of word balloons and panels, but then he utterly fails to recognise that stylised text, which he specifically cites—things like sound effects, non-standard lettering, or titling—often contain both textual and pictorial elements. The design of the text carries as much information as the words, and we perceive both simultaneously. When we see “Superman” written in rounded, three-dimensional letters with red on the front and yellow on the sides, we don’t perceive the letters then the design, or vice-versa. We perceive both at once, much as we do with any other font, and the age of word processors has dramatically demonstrated to all of us that fonts make a difference to the ‘feel’ of what’s written.
This, I think, is Schmitt’s central mistake. He constructs the written word as a ‘pure’ medium, containing only text, and comics (and the rest of the new media), as predominantly pictorial, containing mostly pictures. The truth is that text has a pictorial impact, as I’ve already said, and comics aren’t just a juxtaposition of pictures and words, but a blending of them. In the end, text and comics represent different positions on a spectrum, not entirely different media. Text is near one hypothetical end, where visual impact is zero, but not quite right at that end, and comics float somewhere in the middle third, probably favouring the pictorial but still with a healthy does of the textual, depending on the artists involved. For all that Schmitt’s central point is a good one (I.e., comics deconstruct established notions of the superiority of text), his paper doesn’t seem to rehearse a true deconstruction, in which the system collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, but a mere binary opposition, in which text is inherently different than comics, though not necessarily better.
Author's note: I'm into the reading phase of my research, so this blog is about to be all about essays on comics, and books on cultural theory. Don't say I didn't warn ya!
Williams, J.P. “All's Fair In Love And Journalism: Female Rivalry In Superman.” JofPC. 24:2 (Fall 1990).
Williams’ paper is somewhat predictable but quite convincing. Though she (?) employs Burke’s non-intuitive ‘dramatistic’ analytical system, her reading of Lois Lane and Lana Lang’s status as symbols of femininity in Superman comics is quite logical. Lois is a star reporter, but she constantly gets into trouble and must be rescued by a big, strong (Super)man; Lana is a conniving meddler who wants to ensnare a (Super)man through trickery. It’s a fairly standard feminist reading of Lois and Lana’s presence in Superman as, in fact, actively anti-feminist. By presenting strong women who, nevertheless, are constantly distracted by attempting to ‘keep’ Superman, Superman stories represent women as essentially interested in domestic affairs, like marriage, instead of professional ones, like journalism. This reading is perfectly logical.
The more interesting aspect of the paper, though, is Williams’ background assumptions about how popular literature functions. Between Burke and a few feminist sources, de Beauvoir mostly, she constructs a few ideas about popular narrative. First, dispensing with concerns about cause and effect, she states, unequivocally, that popular narratives coincide with the values of the time in which they are produced, regardless of whether they reflect or affect popular culture. This reasoning means that on-going narratives, such as Superman’s, must change with the times in order to continue to coincide with contemporary values. Her conclusion coincides with my own thoughts on the subject, at least in broad strokes. However, because she dispenses with cause and effect, she side-steps issues of power (such as hegemonic negotiation) within the exchange of ideas between art and audience. As a result, she ends up treating popular narrative as little more than a sociological diagnostic tool.
Second, although it’s logically required by the terms of her discussion, she doesn’t explicitly say that to perform this diagnosis, we need stories that have been told over a great deal of time, at least two generations. Superman stories are only useful diagnostics for a general cultural attitude towards women because they’ve been around since the 1940s and have survived through at least three different forms of feminism (First-Wave, Second-Wave, and Post-Feminism). It’s very important to emphasise that only certain instances of popular narrative can be used in this diagnostic way. They have to be either extremely popular, appealing to a wide cross-section of society, or told over a great deal of time, appealing to multiple generations, and in the latter case, it’s preferable that they’ve been told by a multitude of artists. Basically, the more people in society are involved, the more we can trust the narrative in question to be an accurate form of diagnosis. Lord of the Rings and Sandman might be useful because the audience is so large and/or varied, despite the fact that they are limited stories told by a singular author or small group of creators. X-Men and Fantastic Four might count because they’ve been around since the 1960s, despite the fact that the reading audience has traditionally been limited to young men and boys. With these guidelines in mind, Williams’ choice to use the Burkean ‘representative anecdote’ is a bit perplexing.
The representative anecdote is, from her description and my own reading of Burke, an attempt to find a representative example from within a narrative that can stand for the whole thing. For Burke, this is an exercise in pattern recognition. The critic is re-telling the story but only as an illustration of a pattern. That critic will choose a story amongst the many and interrogate it individually, but that interrogation can be taken for the whole group, in this case, all Superman stories, pre-1990. My critical objection to that is that, although there isn’t time within a short paper like Williams’, by using this method, we learn only about one particular issue of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane (“The Girl Atlas,” #12, ’59 October) in any depth. As critics, we must either take pains to perform surveys that cover a great deal of ground or perform close readings of individual stories. To mix the two is to run the great risk of exploding a single example out of proportion. To make that mistake would be doubly ironic given that one of the defining features of comics as popular narratives is that there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of narratives associated with a particular character. Perhaps Burkean analysis simply isn’t appropriate for a folkloric or mythic story cycle.
The central conclusion of Williams’ paper is quite reasonable, with a few exceptions, but the tools she uses when analysing comics as an on-going narrative form are perhaps inappropriate, but also hold some interesting possibilities. This paper might be useful as part of my background discussion on pre-revisionist superhero comics.
Bender’s book is typical of a non-scholarly work of criticism. This is not to insult it, but to identify some of its primary characteristics, which are, ironically, indicative of a ‘pre-theory’ perspective on literature itself. That’s a roundabout way of saying that Bender’s book focuses itself on the singular genius that is Neil Gaiman. There is certainly more than a little discussion of Gaiman’s collaborations with his various artists and even his editors, but information about them comes from Bender either Gaiman himself, or in the form of text boxes that are tinted and separated from the rest of the text. Criticism directly on P. Craig Russel’s art for “Ramadan” or McKean’s covers are, then, visually different (it’d be going to far to say ‘Other,’ but one gets that sense reading through the book).
The book consists of, in equal part, Bender’s own fairly transparent summaries of each story arc or story collection in Sandman, and his interviews with Gaiman in which he asks the writer to expand on various reasons why he wrote this or that. There is also, comprising something like a tenth of the book, the aforementioned interviews and/or commentaries on other artists, including Alan Moore’s musings about a young Neil Gaiman asking for advice on how to write comics. These short sections are, however, like structural parenthesise; what’s inside them is clearly optional, not the main attraction at all.
The most interesting thing about Gaiman, as opposed to his writing, is that he is the perfect, humble, faux-bashful, rock-star for comics. He dresses in black. He’s young and bookishly cute (a fact not lost on the unprecedented 50% female readership of Sandman). He has that charming English accent that always gives the impression of intelligence and sophistication to Americans and Canadians. He loves collaborating and is quite humble about how talented all his collaborators are, but he’s also encyclopaedically knowledgeable about Sandman, quoting lines from memory (which he identifies by issue, page, and even panel position), and pointing out exactly what books he got what ideas from and why he chose them. He’s the perfect artist, in Wordworth’s sense from “The Preface to The Lyrical Ballads,” someone with a singular vision of universal humanity who then presents that vision to the world.
It’s media hogwash, of course, but it works. I don’t say that to imply a slight against Gaiman. His work is wonderful and sophisticated, and he’s quite aware of the tools and tropes he uses to screw with his readers’ heads. He’s a writer’s writer. He does his research and he has struck upon a beautiful, unique narrative voice. What’s fascinating is how he’s constructed as an author, as opposed to a writer. Larry Niven, in the forward to a book of short stories that I’ve long since lost, once said that he knew a lot of people who didn’t want to be ‘writers.’ They wanted to be ‘authors,’ they wanted to ‘have written.’ They wanted the prestige without the work.
Gaiman is a writer; there’s no question of that, but he’s been built up as the media-friendly spokesman for comics, like the all-new Stan Lee for the 21st century. Unlike Moore’s threatening spiritualism and his crazy attack hair or Ellis’ constant barrage of sarcastically-worded diatribes, Gaiman is someone you feel like you could introduce to your mum (and he would call her your ‘mum’), despite the fact that he’s also the lord-high author-god for a generation of Goths. He seems to hold the same kind of position as John Lennon. He has some things to say that are very threatening to the social order you’re familiar with, but he says it in such a charming way that it’s hard to be afraid of him for it.
And Bender’s book does everything it can to contribute to the construction of Gaiman as the Friendly-Neighbourhood Radical Comics Author. Bender doesn’t really consult any sources for his discussions other than Sandman and its author. Ironically, Gaiman cites dozens of texts he used as source material, for various kinds of mythology, for French Revolutionary history, etc. For me, there are two possible uses for this book. First, as a reference book, since it conveniently summarises each story arc/collection, and contains some quick, rather pithy remarks by Gaiman about his creation.
Second, and possibly more interestingly, as an example of how Gaiman is constructed not as an artist, but as a media personality, as a face with which many comics readers, and people who don’t read comics but did read Sandman, have a relationship. Given that Moore has no relationship with fans to speak of (he doesn’t stay in touch), and Ellis has a daily email he sends out to his, not to mention a web forum specifically set up so that we can ask him questions, the three of them might represent an interesting array of reader-artist relationships within a cultural studies framework. Do fans consider themselves consumers of a product? Does the persona of the artist have anything to do with it? Ellis constantly talks about the industry, his deliberate pricing of Fell at US$1.99 so that anyone could afford it, for example. Gaiman is perfectly willing to talk about the industry itself, but is mostly asked about the creative process, “Where do you get your ideas?” Ironically, Gaiman has only one comics creation to his name, Sandman, whereas Ellis and Moore have both written literally dozens (plural) of comics series since the 80s. The fact that Gaiman is so strongly associated with Sandmanmight have something to do with his recognisability.
Finally, I just want to note the ironic titles of a couple of non-scholarly critical texts on Sandman. Bender’s is The Sandman Companion, and it locates itself, specifically, as a book about the series. It is physically arranged to aid in your reading of the series, and it sticks to that topic. It even has a bit of Dave McKean’s artwork on the cover. This book’s innards, however, are mainly focused on Gaiman’s interpretations of his own work. Joseph McCabe’s Hanging Out with the Dream King, however, is a collection of interviews with all of Gaiman’s collaborators and has very little of Gaiman in it at all (nine pages out of 297). The content of the book, if we can extrapolate a meaning from its structure, implies that ‘the Dream King’ is the product of a collaboration between all of these artists, pencillers, inkers, letters, visual artists, other writers, etc. However, McCabe’s book has Gaiman on the cover, thus implying that he is in fact ‘the Dream King.’
There are a lot of really interesting things going on in Mirrormask. It has the elements we've come to expect from these artists, Gaiman's easy-going modern faerytale, complete with a cheaky bit of bibliophilia, and McKean's dark, disturbing, but vibrant art, always a little out of focus but with an incredible kind three-dimensionality.
In fact, that visual depth is one of the most remarkable things about the film. McKean has taken, as a base, a two-dimensional art style for the protagonist, Helena, but he has rendered (or has had rendered, to be fair) that style into 3D graphics. The result is an object that looks flat, even as the camera rotates around it.
I could now launch into a description of how the appearance of superficiality hides the reality of depth and complexity, but I suspect that the sequence I'm describing was designed to remind a viewer of pencil drawings on paper, which it does quite successfully. I'm a little learry of reading it as heavily ideological. I'll have to give that more thought.
The visuals of the movie feel like a comic book, with set shots and angles that look planned, sculpted. Every shot is like a lavishly illustrated panel, a delicate mis-en-scene. Every object and person is where it should be, and nowhere else. It's not a surprise that McKean is primarily a static visual artist and that this is his first time as a filmmaker.
I sense an interesting negotation going on with the credits of the film, by the way, something akin to Wordsworth and Coleridge good-naturedly arguing about whose name goes on which poem in The Lyrical Ballads. The actual credits at the opening of the film read "Story by Neil Gaimain and Dave McKean... Written by Neil Gaiman... Directed and Designed by Dave McKean," but they might as well say "Wordy bits by Neil, and Picturey bits by Dave." The sense of collaboration is palpable.
That's not to say it's seemless. Far from it, actually. The collaboration is one born out of years of working together on comic books, which means that the two, text and pictures, work like a duet, each distinctly itself, but in combination, creating something more than the sum of their parts (horribly hackneyed phrase, I know). You can feel Neil's propensity for what I can only call conceptual punning when unwanted books silently float back to the library of their own accord. You can feel Dave's desire to make his viewer slightly uncomfortable in scenes in which the contrast is tuned far too dark, and the screen just won't go into focus.
The whole movie looks just like McKean's covers for Sandman, in fact, and the whole plot takes place in a dream. Mirrormask could easily be a one-shot or mini-arc within Sandman. We'd merely need Dream to show up briefly and say some cryptic words about how Helena's quest is real and unreal, both and neither.
One of the really fascinating moments, very subtly slipped into the film without much fuss, is when Helena quickly realises she's dreaming, and plays the situation accordingly. Gaiman likes to tell stories all about storytelling, about symbol and metaphor and narrative, and this movie is no different. Because she knows it's a dream, she can take control, and does, she can take risks, and does, she can start to not just watch the story unfold, but actively shape it herself. She is neither passive viewer, nor all-powerful storyteller, but something in between instead. Given that she is, indeed, dreaming, it seems only logical to say that is both audience and artist, that she is negotiating the story with no one other than herself.
But then, there is a problem. The film hints that Helena and her mother are both dreaming the same dream, that they both think the other is a figment in their seperate dreams, and the events that unfold would seem to match that. Helena dreams of being an idealised version of herself, capable, strong, her own hero, but she also dreams of her rebelious self, smoking cigarettes and snogging a greasy punk. Her mother dreams of herself as a dark queen who wants nothing more than to control her daughter's every move, but she's also a sleeping white queen who is,m by definition, utterly passive, in possession of no agency whatsoever.
What we have then is another "Game of You." A full-colour, full-motion, exploration of two minds, Helena's and her mother's. There's far less of a sense that the dream is 'real,' but after a few years of reading Sandman, we should realise that it's a real dream. No objective test of reality is necessary.