Chris Reilly Spotlight On: Michael Kupperman
How to describe Michael Kupperman? Let’s start this off with the most overused word in reviews: Sublime. (I’m using the “to change or cause to change directly from a solid to a vapour or gas without first melting to sublime iodine many mercury salts sublime when heated” definition.) Kupperman weeds out all the NARCs at the party…
Rob reviews STITCHING TOGETHER and DECORUM, both new minicomics from Ed Choy Moorman.
I didn’t get into comic books until my teens. When I say that I grew up reading comics, this week’s entry is the kind of comic I’m talking about. I was nerdy, painfully earnest, and born in the 1970s, and …
Slow news day today, but there are still plenty of links today, as well as your weekly comics podcast round-up.
I feel like I said my piece in my initial essay, but I just want to agree with Kinukitty on one crucial point: Weiss Kreuz really does suck. I’d like to see an academic paper on the phenomenon of crappy properties that inspire insanely devoted and creative fandoms; there are a ton of webcomics like that, too, and you can argue that Twilight falls into that category for a significant portion of its fans. It’s like the poor quality of the original work, rather than turning fans off, inspires them to even greater heights of devotion as they try to repair its flaws while retaining whatever tiny, buried seed of interest drew them to it in the first place. It’s kind of inspiring.
Opening shots by Shaenon Garrity, Noah Berlatsky and Kinukitty; Sidebar by Dirk Deppey; and conclusions by Berlatsky, Kinukitty and Deppey.
The following is neither a joke nor as blindingly obvious as one might initially think: Yaoi fans love gay men. For what it’s worth. And what is it worth? I have wondered. On the one hand – love. Good! On the other hand, love because of sexual preference. Creepy. It isn’t possible to objectify someone respectfully.
We try, though.
Opening shots by Shaenon Garrity, Noah Berlatsky and Kinukitty; Sidebar by Dirk Deppey; and conclusions by Berlatsky, Garrity and Deppey.
For me, then, the problem with Boys’ Love Manga’s forays into analysis isn’t that one shouldn’t analyze sexual fantasies — it’s that the analysis in question was fucking stupid.
Opening shots by Shaenon Garrity, Noah Berlatsky and Kinukitty; Sidebar by Dirk Deppey; and conclusions by Garrity, Kinukitty and Deppey.
Perhaps the best criticism applied to Boys’ Love Manga came courtesy of Noah Berlatsky, who wrote:
So to all these gender-theory steeped writers trying so hard to show that they’ve overturned patriarchy, heteronormativity, and even the c-word of capitalism itself, I say to you: the next time you read a BL manga or slash fiction story? If you really want to be subversive, instead of trying to figure out what that story says about yaoi readers and the yaoi community, and gender and homosexuality and what have you — could you start by figuring out whether you like it? Not whether you like yaoi in general, but whether you like that particular story.
I note this at the outset because the above critique could be applied just as easily to my own essay. Truth to tell, there isn’t a great deal of BL that I enjoy.
Opening shots by Shaenon Garrity, Noah Berlatsky and Kinukitty; Sidebar by Dirk Deppey; and conclusions by Berlatsky, Garrity and Kinukitty.
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