Buck up, genocidal dictators of the world! The heirarchy of the Roman Catholic Church will always have your back!

What the hell is going on here? Amid the (well-deserved) attention being paid to the political future of Iraq, Afghanistan has busied itself with creating a thoroughly theocratic constitution. While nominally democratic, what good does that do anyone when religious (and given that the religion in question is Islam, sexual) discrimination is built right into the country’s founding document? My hope is that U.S. involvement in the country, even if it’s just in Kabul and wherever else the troops happen to be at the time, will prevent the kind of egregious abuse this has the potential for fomenting, but clearly it would be best to head this off at the (Khyber) pass. Actually, that’s putting it mildly: It would be an affront to the Afghans and Americans who’ve sacrificed so much blood and treasure to topple the Taliban and oust their murdering cohorts in al Qaeda to do anything but prevent the return of theocratic intolerance.

It seems as though we’ve learned, at long last, that it’s pointless to replace one autocrat with another. When will we learn that it’s equally pointless to replace dictatorship with theocracy, particularly when, as is the case throughout the Muslim world, the relationship between the two is symbiotic?

Listen, all I want in this world is someone who’s left of Bush on social issues and right of Bush on the war.

(Link courtesy of Josh Cohen.)

Move over, Nigeria: There’s a new center for scam spam in town! (Say, maybe this was what Saddam was importing from Africa all along!)

Date: 12/15/2003 15:53:38 GMT

From: abuahmedd@netscape.net

To: [me]

Subject: THANK YOU

Dear Friend

My name is ABU AHMED, a merchant and arm dealer in Baghdad Iraq.

I have urgent and very confidential business proposition for you. I got your contact from my private search for a reliable and trusted foreign partner.

That any action you take is geared towards rendering humanitarian assistance to a man who is in distress with his family

Before the war between the United States coalitions forces and our former stupid President (Stupid Captured President Saddam Hussein) who dose not have consciences for his country and any member of his family. Captured stupid president Hussein gave me $55,000.000.00 (fifty five million United States dollars) to import Ammunitions from other countries to fight war.

I realized that my entire life is in danger, even if I fulfill the promise or not; I decided to navigate the funds and forget my investment behind in Iraq to run with my family to seek asylum in Dubai (U.E.A).

I deposited the money contained in 2 trunk boxes in a security/finance company as artifacts to avoid prying eyes and I traveled back to Iraq to lie to Bastard Saddam Hussein that the Ammunitions will be delivered within 21 days. Then I move to Dubai with my family to start with our asylum process.

I am contacting you to assist me in getting this fund and also helping me investing this fund in your country. So that you will help my family and I in getting back our normal life’s of standard of living and join you in your country. Due to my family and I do not have any travel documents, because of our asylum status in Dubai. And I can not go back to my country, because the stupid Saddam has a lot of loyalties that is looking for me.

All you need do is to fly down to claim the 2 Boxes from the Security Company and open a bank account through which the money will be lodged before transfer into your nominated Bank account.

I am willing to compensate you with 20% of the total sum for your assistance and

want to let you understand that the future of me and family depends solely on

this money. In this transaction confidentiality is very essential for us to achieve our goal. It is important that you maintain utmost good faith and trust. You must also not circumvent the transaction in any way. In conclusion, all the necessary documentation as regards to the deposit will be given to you to secure the deposit, and be rest assured that this transaction is 100% risk free.

Thanks while I await your urgent response.

Best Regards.

MR. ABU AHMED

* Between this and a certain scene in the upcoming Return of the King, by the end of the week the term “spider-hole” will have entered into the parlance of our times with a vengeance, no?

* It’s fascinating to see how while in hiding Saddam abadoned the Mustachioed Dictator’s Club for the Beared Dictator’s Club. Once in the company of Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe, Petain, Musharraf, and Franco, he’s now hanging around (metaphorically) with the likes of Khoemeini, Lenin, Omar, Arafat, and Castro. And now that I look at it again, doesn’t it seem like the hair on the top of his head is thinning a bit? Maybe he’ll join the combover club with Mao and Mussolini soon!

* I’m certainly glad not to find myself in the position where I have to explain why I opposed the course of action that allowed this to happen.

(UPDATE: Laura Gjovaag’s reporting on Corner Comics may now be found at this page.)

Dirk Deppey blogs the bloody bejesus out of the Corner Comics incident. Boldly going where few comics journalists have the patience to go, Dirk sorts through years of tax law to determine whether or not the shop’s owner, Paige Gifford, was in fact doing something wrong by not having paid taxes on her backstock. The answer? No, probably not. It’s a question of two different types of accounting, one of which the IRS, though it doesn’t have any strict rules against it, is no fan of. This confusing, dispiriting dispute between a small business owner and the government is the result.

Dirk chronicles an even more troubling aspect of the situation, though: The reactions of some of Gifford’s fellow retailers, which ranged from amused indifference to outright rooting for the IRS. Apparently some of this sentiment stems from the retailers’ erroneous belief that Gifford was, in fact, breaking the law; but still, that members of a group purporting to represent the interests of Direct Market retailers as a whole were so ready to jump all over a colleague who was in a position to lose thousands and thousands of dollars in cash or in merchandise, if not her whole store, is deeply troubling. I couldn’t help but feel that the retailers in question are happy with the little corner of the world they’ve carved out for themselves, and anything outside of it is greeted with suspicion if not contempt. Provides some context for the abject failure of the Direct Market (or at least the segment of it making these kinds of statements) to properly market and sell anything but supercomics, doesn’t it?

Fortunately, the Comics Journal is around to be a tireless investigator and advocate when it comes to the big stories and issues facing comics today. Well, I mean, the Comics Journal’s website is, that’s for certain. But I’m sure the magazine itself covers the important news in its News Watch section with the same dilligence and brio that Dirk does it on Journalista. Let’s see… bad-girl artists plagiarizing each other… Jim Warren’s legal troubles… Stan Lee getting sued by a stripper… some stuff about the Spider-Man movie…

Hmmm, I don’t see anything about the manga explosion in bookstores, the failure of the DM to cash in on same, the New Marvel Renaissance, the subsequent ouster of Bill Jemas, the coincident disintegration of the company’s (presumably) final attempt at creator ownership with Epic Comics, the moves made by new Marvel Publisher Dan Buckley, the degree to which those moves are a response to negative consequences of the high public profile previously maintained by Jemas & Joe Quesada (eg. the removal of Princess Diana from Milligan & Allred’s X-Statix), editorial cartoonists regularly being prosecuted/persecuted in Muslim countries, the Michigan adult-publication censorship decision, the increasing presence of anti-Semitic imagery in Western editorial cartoons (or increasing amount of accusations of same, if you prefer), CrossGen’s restructuring and layoffs, the rise of Dan DiDio at DC, altcomix graphic novels (like Blankets) being pushed out of the DM, superhero graphic novels being pushed out of the bookstores…

But I’m sure they’re in there. Somewhere.

It’s been brought to my attention by multiple sources that even if “virtual kiddie porn” as “defined” by recent attempts at anti-porn legislation is no longer a concern due to the intervention of the Supreme Court, the less extreme but still serious charge of obscenity can be levelled. Tokyopop doesn’t necessarily have to worry about ending up like Gary Glitter, but if an ambitious district attorney in a Southern state gets ahold of Battle Royale #3, they’re still likely to be in trouble. And the penalties can be astoundingly severe: Let’s all pause to remember Mike Diana, convicted of obscenity and ordered to be subject to random searches of his property to ensure that he’s no longer drawing anything.

It’s situations like this that make you wonder about the wisdom of allowing for “community standards” to decide important civil-liberties questions. The argument has been made, somewhat convincingly, that the ability for states and other, smaller jurisdictions to decide for themselves on issues such as gay marriage is ultimately good, because it permits for advancements in localized areas even if the country at large isn’t ready for it. This way, we can avoid forcing the issue down unwilling communities’ throats, which might only cause them to pass stringent measures against that advancement. On the other hand, look at the civil rights movement of the 1960s: The federal government took matters into its own hands because the “community standard” in Southern states was simply unacceptable, states’ rights be damned. The unwilligness of SCOTUS to rule substantively on what constitutes obscene speech or art is probably a good thing if you live in New York or San Francisco, but not so great if you live in Smalltown U.S.A.; their decision would likely but a damper on some products available in liberal communities, but open up a great deal more freedom for conservative ones. It’s a genuine quandary, and one which comics, already an interstitial, neither-here-nor-there medium in terms of publicly viewed artistic merit, will be tangled up with for some time to come.

Yesterday John Jakala and I had an exchange over the degree to which Battle Royale #3 does or does not constitute child pornography. Today John writes with information I’d been looking for–the pertinent law. It can be found here, and it’s exactly as troubling as I remember it. To wit:

“child pornography” means any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means, of sexually explicit conduct, where –

(A)

the production of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct

(B)

such visual depiction is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct

Emphases mine.

What’s wrong with this picture? First of all, totally fictional depictions of the acts in question–i.e. drawings, paintings, computer-generated images, and so forth–are legally identical to actual recordings of the actual acts–i.e. photographs, film, and video. Now, I think we can all understand why it’s illegal not just to make child pornography, but to possess it: Unlike with visual documentation of other crimes (the Zapruder film, for instance), the audience is part and parcel of why the crime is committed in the first place. But when the visual documentation in question shows no actual crime being committed, how can that visual documentation itself constitute a crime? I’m just as grossed out by the notion of people whacking off to computer-generated pictures of little girls as the next guy, but being grossed out, or even outraged, cannot of itself be the basis for legal action. And as Battle Royale, the book in question, shows, this definition doesn’t just apply to fake porno–it applies to works with genuine artistic intent and, dare we say it, redeeming social value. And hey, don’t like Battle Royale? Fine! How about A Child’s Life or Diary of a Teenage Girl or The Playboy or even A Contract with God or Blankets? All feature visual depictions of underage people engaged in sexual conduct. And under this law, you can go to prison for owning them.

Problem number two: All that’s required for a given work of art to be considered “child pornography” is for there to appear to be underage people engaging in sexual conduct therein. Once again, no actual crime need be committed for the work in question to be illegal itself. The effect on visual arts here is so chilling it need hardly be enumerated, but just remember the next time you rent Kids or Amarcord or Fast Times at Ridgemont High or American Pie or Lolita that you are now a convictable kiddie-porn user.

If there’s any good news about this, it’s that I remember hearing about these regulations quite some time ago, and have yet to hear of anyone being prosecuted based on its fuzzier aspects. Though I’m not much of a court-watcher, it seems to me that laws in which definitions are this broad are routinely struck down when challenged. But until that happens, I guarantee you that someone will have to spend thousands of dollars and several years defending themselves against spurious accusations that do little to protect actual children and much to undermine First Amendment rights.

Troubling. Troubling indeed.

UPDATE: This is what I get for not following SCOTUS as closely as I should. Turns out that the Supreme Court struck down the ban on “virtual kiddie porn” in April of 2002, despite the best efforts of leading would-be theocrats John Ashcroft and Antonin Scalia. However, the House continues its attempts to reinstate the regulations. Remember this the next time you crack open Blankets.

You all checked out my posts on John Jakala’s manga reviews, the chilling effects of overly broad child pornography laws, and Corner Comics vs. the IRS, right? Right.

Sometimes I forget that Eve Tushnet just started reading comics regularly this year, because she writes about them so passionately and so well. Then again, I myself gave up on reading comics regularly for my entire college career, and only started reading them again when New X-Men debuted, so I guess it’s easy to lose yourself in the medium when what you’re reading rewards your interest. As a fangirl of relatively recent coinage, Eve’s thoughts on how she “got into comics” and good comics for new- or non-readers are must-reads. (My own recommendations for newbies may be found here. Great holiday gifts one and all.)

Look out–Shawn Fumo is back! The comicsphere’s resident manga expert has returned to blogging with a vengeance, announcing that Radio Shack has begun selling manga, pointing out predicitons of a manga-driven comics Renaissance… from six years ago, and much more. Start here and scroll up.

Take it from me, Rich Johnston: Getting things banned is never a good idea. I’m not going to go in-depth on this, but please, trust me on this one. I know what I’m talking about.

NeilAlien responds to Dirk Deppey‘s comics-fan j’accuse by saying, basically, “nuh-uh!” (This tends to be how these things between Dirk and Neil go.) I think Neil might be right to say that it’s too much to lay all the blame for the sorry state of the Direct Market at the feet of the customers. The DM’s spectacular failure to capitalize on the manga explosion shows that the retailers and publishers should shoulder much of the blame. after all, this audience is out there, and the DM has completely neglected to attract them into the shops; the people buying JSA every month have nothing to do with it. On the other hand, most retailers who do attempt to stock non-superhero comics of any kind will tell you that such titles die a death on the racks. The DM as it stands has an audience that not only does not reward diversity, but seems intent on actively policing against it. You can see hints of this even in intelligent fans like Neil, whose occasional disses of altcomix are as sloppy as they are undeserved (Bill Sherman sums this angle up quite well).

Let’s look at it this way: Imagine that the record-store industry had only 250,000 or so regular customers. Now imagine that around 90% of them only bought records by the artists formerly known as teeny-poppers: Britney, Justin, Christina, Beyonce. This pop genre totally dominates the industry, and the bulk of what it yields is, well, crap. When challenged, the consumers of these works will say, “Hey, it’s not all crap: Somtimes they work with the Neptunes, or Timbaland, or the DFA, or Fischerspooner. That’s an intelligent alternative to the usual pop fare.” Of course, they’d be right–but only to a degree. There is indeed some variety to be found amongst these popsters: In my opinion, “Crazy in Love” and the original version of “Boys” are pretty great. But it’s still the pop genre at heart. If that’s as far afield as these hypothetical 250,000 consumers were willing to go, and they consistently shunned anything and everything else, what possible incentive would there be for the record-store Direct Market to diversify, aside from taking a longview that will almost surely soak them in the short term?

That’s essentially what we’re facing in the comics Direct Market. It’s a very small set of consumers, and the vast majority of what they buy is superhero stuff. Occasionally they’ll opt for superhero crime, or superhero sci-fi, or superhero noir, or superhero fantasy, or superhero satire, or superhero slapstick, or superhero teen drama; and occasionally (hell, even semi-often) the stuff’ll be terrific; but it’s still superhero stuff in the end, and it seems that nothing else will do. Now that it’s apparent that the DM must diversify or die out, is it any wonder that the loyal audience can be seen not as a boon, but as an obstacle?

Finally, thanks to (cough) certain real-world events vaguely referenced above, it looks as though I’ll be switching to buying only trade paperbacks whether I like it or not. I can’t see this as being anything but difficult for me: Even though I’d weaned myself off of several titles I wasn’t really enjoying in their monthly installments, there were still a ton of books I jonsed for on a week-to-week basis, and I’ll miss them. But my bottom line will be a lot healthier, and as I truly do feel that collected editions are superior to floppies not just logistically but aesthetically and literarily, I’ll be reading comics in their ideal format–the better to judge whether or not they deserve reading in the first place, perhaps?

(UPDATE: Laura Gjovaag’s reporting on Corner Comics may now be found at this page.)

When she and Alan David Doane aren’t busy bringing out the absolute worst in each other, Laura “Tegan” Gjovaag is a fine comicsblogger, and she’s broken what may turn out to be the story of the year. The IRS has issued an ultimatum to Washington state comics retailer Corner Comics: pay $14,000 on your backstock, or physically destroy it by December 31st. According to the shop’s owner, this bizarre and vindictive order is based neither on applicable tax law (the law they’re citing specifically does not apply to a business this size) nor on an even remotely accurate appraisal of the value of the store’s backstock. As things stand now, the best-case scenario is that Corner Comics is put out of business by IRS agents who are either woefully uninformed or maliciously indifferent. The worst-case scenario, of course, is that this policy is applied to retailers nationwide, thus destroying the Direct Market in the proverbial one fell swoop.

Dirk Deppey has issued a call to arms on this story, asking everyone with a cyber-soapbox to get up on it and spread the word. Please, follow his advice and do so–on blogs, on messboards, on listservs, on news sites. And if you live in Washington, contact your local government representatives. This is some scary stuff going on here, and woe to the comics industry and medium if we can’t put a stop to it.

I don’t think Jim Henley and I could be further apart on foreign policy if the two of us sat down and thought up ways to be so, but I’ve found his recent coverage of some fog-of-war issues indispensible. Whether it’s the mysterious firefight in Samarra or the seemingly less-than-reliable Iraqi military official who insists to this day on the veracity of the “45 minute WMD deployment” claim, Jim’s been there to point out when the Emperor is finely shod and when he is, in fact, bare-ass naked. War supporters need good information same as war detractors; Jim’s done a fine job of separating the wheat from the chaff.

That being said, every once in a while he says something that makes me thank God I’m about 180 degrees away from him on a lot of this stuff. Case in point: his post today about Kosovo. “Patently illegal” and a “cruel farce,” Jim calls it, saying that “the Republican opponents [of the war] of 1999 were right.” Right to oppose a noxious, racist fascist’s grab for lebensraum–one in a seemingly endless series of such moves, one virtually guaranteed to end in the same sort of humanitarian disaster as his earlier ones? Jeez, Jim. Say what you will about Clinton’s half-assed war plan, Wes Clark’s woeful generalship, the intrasigence of the European community, and the unwillingness of the UN to actually solve any of the problems it’s nominally in charge of–hell, I’ll be right there bitching about them with you. That’s because that’s what’s to blame for Kosovo’s degeneration into its current criminal free-for-all, not our having fought there to begin with. The Kosovo War put an end to the territorial ambitions of the biggest murderer on European soil since the Stalinist puppet regimes, and eventually put an end to his reign, too–all too indirectly, but still.

Here, I suppose, is where I could do the whole “making the perfect the enemy of the good” routine, which is applicable, I think. But when you’re talking to someone who’s sufficiently… ambivalent, I suppose, about the government of Slobodan Milosevic to feel that the “illegality” of a war against it even merits mention, doesn’t it go without saying? I deplore the way the war and its aftermath have been botched, but you’ll never find me saying to myself that refusing to fight and defeat fascism was the right idea.

John Jakala, who may well be the best non-Deppey comicsblogger on the block, offers up a masterful five-part collection of negative reviews of various manga he’s been reading. Substantive and thought-provoking, they ought to settle the question of whether good comics criticism can be found on the Internet. But his review of Battle Royale #3 raised more questions than it answered, for me at least.

Part of John’s disappointment with the volume is the out-of-nowhere intrusion of some pretty heavy hentai scenes, which he worries could open up both Tokyopop and himself to child-pornography or obscenity charges. Now, I’m reasonably sure that a drawing of underage people engaged in sex acts does not constitute child pornography, at least not yet, or at least not as obscenity laws are enforced in most of the country. I know that a law was passed to the effect that “depictions” of such activities would be prosecutable, but as this would mean Barnes & Nobles nationwide could be shut down for selling Lolita, I’m not sure if these provisions have even been tested. And since I don’t even remember the name of the law, for all I know it’s already been struck down by the courts. (Tips as to what the hell I’m thinking of here would be appreciated.)

At any rate, the scenes in question are no more actual child pornography than, say, Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life (which WAS seized by Canadian authorities, however). Tastefulness–that’s a different story, and one where we’re getting into some questionable territory, but I think the sex is presented in a light that makes it comparable to, and congruent with, the incredibly graphic violence. For the character in question, sex is as much of a weapon as anything else, so it does make sense from a storytelling point of view.

On another front, I myself didn’t really notice the dropoff in art quality between the volumes that John and others were bothered by. Actually, now that he mentions it I think I saw something different, but figured it was just because such a different kind of story was being told. Perhaps my inexperience with manga played a part here; it’s tough for me to differentiate between art styles, and I’m certainly nowhere near the level of discernment I’ve achieved with American comics. (Recently, someone on the blogosphere made the analogy that we have the same kind of trouble noting differences in manga that might seem obvious to someone who’s been reading it for years as a manga reader might have discerning between the humor found in a Keith Giffen Justice League versus Grant Morrison in one of his sillier moods. Again, tips as to what the hell I’m talking about would be appreciated.)

John and some of the people in his comment thread mention the other two versions of Battle Royale that exist, a prose novel and a film. I didn’t like the BR movie at all; I thought it aped all of the worst aspects of American action movies, which coupled with the subject matter made it extremely tacky, distasteful, and (perhaps worst) cliched and boring. I’m continuing to enjoy the manga because it’s been doing everything so much better. I’ve heard great things about the novel, and am looking forward to checking it out, particularly since I’m told it fills in a lot of plot holes (the true nature of the government, how this can be a TV show despite the fact that we don’t see a single camera, etc.).

I really do suggest you go and read John’s piece, even if you’re not interested in manga generally or the manga he’s talking about in particular; it’s a real object lesson in how this kind of writing can and should be done.

Monday, Dec. 8-Wednesday, Dec. 10th

read: the final portion of