Comix and match

Our top story today: At long last, Eve Tushnet reviews New X-Men. My response can be found right here.

Lots of interesting things at Tim O’Neil’s blog. First, his wife Anne explains her thoughts on Phoebe Gloeckner’s photo-based cover for the Comics Journal (read all about it, or at least a debate about it, here. I think a lot of this debate revolves around three misunderstandings: One, Anne’s misunderstanding of how Phoebe has been working lately, i.e. doing autobio with photographs rather than cartooning. If we were to use Occam’s Razor would explain the presence of a photo on a Journal cover she herself designed a lot more readily than the assertion that she’s suddenly gone all wobbly and is no longer the astute examiner of gender and sexuality that we’ve long known her to be. Anne herself says she’s only read probably ten pages worth of Phoebe’s work, so that probably helps explain why she’d conclude that, in Tim’s words, “Gloeckner is OK with defining her public persona and critical importance in direct proportion to her physical appearance in a notoriously male-dominated field.” (It doesn’t really explain why Tim, who has read a great deal of her work I think, would think that, but hey.) As Anne alternately puts it, “dude, if a guy did a picture on the cover and I called him vain, would you feel the need to defend him to everyone on the web?” Well, of course I would, if I felt that this analysis arose from a misapprehension about the guy’s work which if corrected would explain the picture on the cover pretty handily.

Second, Tim’s misunderstanding of what I was getting at with my first post on the subject–which of coures was not a post on the subject at all, but a link round-up that mentioned the subject in passing. All I meant by my two-sentence response to his wife’s concerns about the cover is that, since Phoebe is an autobio cartoonist, we can expect to see her physical self on the cover of any publication in which her work is the lead story due to the nature of her work, not due to the publication’s or her own exploitation of her gender or attractiveness. The confusion arose here because I didn’t add the bit about how she’s now using photography, so it sounded like my point was to patronizingly say “you do know she does autobiography, don’t you, dear?”, whereas what I was actually saying was “there’s a perfectly harmless explanation for all of this, honest–don’t lose faith in Phoebe!”

The third misunderstanding was Tim and Anne’s shared belief that my posts were “an insult to [Anne].” Heck no! The more debate around here, the merrier; I really do think the whole thing sprung from my incomplete description of Phoebe’s recent working methods in that little two-sentence link, anyway, so it’s much ado about nothing. Nor did anything “touch a nerve” with me, nor does my being “a guy” have anything to do with it, nor do I think a familiarity with or ignorance of feminist thought enters into it at all either (my wife and I are feminists ourselves, and we have the subscriptions to Bitch and Bust, the dogeared copies of The Beauty Myth, Reviving Ophelia, and Against Our Will, and the years of dealing with body dysmorphia and eating disorders to prove it, but in the end I think Phoebe’s credentials speak for themselves in terms of how we should interpret intentionally problematic or open-ended aspects of her work). Long story short, the reason I got all feisty was Tim’s Br’er Rabbit impression: “Please, Br’er Sean, whatever you do, don’t start a flame war with me!” There are better ways to avoid making things unnecessarily hostile and personal than calling a fellow out by name, invoking the flame war concept, and telling him what a patronizing ass he’s being, all without linking to the original piece so that readers can view what’s going on for themselves. (Particulary when there