I’ve recently reviewed three comics the subject of war. The three are very different from each other in terms of approach, and they contain very different anti-war messages.

The first, “Timeless Cartoons” reviews Craig Yoe’s collection The Great Anti-War Cartoons. The book includes images from the sixteenth century on. The review ran in The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2010.

The second, “It was the War of the Trenches,” reviews Jacques Tardi’s novel-like treatment of a few minor events from World War I. It’s on The Comics Journal site.

And the third looks at reporter David Axe’s memoir, War is Boring. It, too, is on The Comics Journal website.

Superheroes

Also at The Comics Journal, I reviewed four recent superhero comics, all issue #1’s from Marvel: Avengers, Secret Avengers, Astonishing X-Men, and Dazzler.

Would you believe Dazzler is the best of the bunch?

There’s a reason I titled the series “False Starts.”

I’ll be speaking at the Anti-Racist Action conference in Portland, on July 25 at 4pm (PSU Smith Center, room 236). I will discuss the history of the Portland Police Bureau, focusing on its role in maintaining racial inequality. I will outline both the historical linkages between the Portland Police and avowedly racist organizations like the Klan, and will also describe the racism inherent in policing a stratified society.

Interviews

The first of a two-part interview, “Police Violence and Class Conflict: An Interview with Kristian Williams,” is in the Summer 2010 issue of The Portland Alliance. It originally ran on KBOO back in December. But the Alliance version also includes a graphic I created, titled “Fire the Cops.”

Submedia also just ran another segment of their interview with me, relating my statements about police violence to the recent events surrounding the G20.

Re-Prints

Since the Supreme Court just tossed out Chicago’s handgun ban, Bring the Ruckus decided to re-run an article Peter Little and I wrote concerning the racial history of gun control. The essay originally appeared in In These Times back in 2008, but the Ruckus version, titled “Gun Rights Are Civil Rights,” is quite a bit longer.

Reading Group

North Star Infoshop (833 SE Main St. #108 in Portland) will be hosting a reading group of Our Enemies in Blue, starting July 21.

Update:

Part two of the Alliance interview is out now as well: “Police Violence and Class Conflict, Part Two: An Interview with Kristian Williams.” Bill Resnick. The Portland Alliance. July 2010. It also started out as a radio interview, on KBOO back in January.

We really shouldn’t trust corporate censors any more than government censors.

For example, Apple’s efforts to regulate the content available on its iPad recently led to the redaction of Tom Bouden’s graphic novel adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Luckily, in this case, good sense and public embarrassment prevailed, and Apple decided to un-censor the comic.

(For more on the Apple controversy, see the coverage in The Big Money and Gawker.)

Drawing Dorian

As it happens, I have recently written a long, multi-part essay for The Comics Journal about cartoon portrayals of Wilde and graphic adaptations of his works.

In the last installment, I discussed long-standing efforts to obscure Wilde’s homosexuality and pointed to Bouden’s comic as a kind of rebellion against that. I wrote:

“One method of resisting invisibility has been to emphasize or even exaggerate the homoerotic elements of Wilde’s life and work. Neil McKenna surely does so, here and there, in his thoroughly gay-centric biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. And Richard Ellmann also did so, inadvertently, by mislabeling a photograph of Alice Guszalewicz, ‘Wilde in costume as Salome.’ Tom Bouden’s all-male comics adaptation of Earnest is, likewise, more gay than the original.”

The entirety of my essay, “Pictures of Dorian Gray, Images of Oscar Wilde” — in nine parts — is archived at The Comics Journal.

Here’s a quick guide, in case you don’t want to read the whole thing:

Part One, “The Power of Image” is a short introduction to the series.

Part Two, “The Cartoons of Dorian Gray,” reviews four recent comics adaptation of Wilde’s novel.

Part Three, “Beardsley, Russell, and Salome,” compares classic and contemporary illustrations to Wilde’s play, Salome.

Part Four, “The Double Image,” consider the difficulties with illustrating Dorian Gray and looks at some of the strategies for cover design.

Part Five, “Revealing Corruption,” continues that discussion with a look at internal illustrations.

Part Six, “Actor and Image,” applies the analysis to theater and film adaptations.

Part Seven, “Victorian Cameos,” discusses other comics alluding to Dorian Gray, or to Oscar Wilde himself, and more broadly considers Wilde’s influence on the medium.

Part Eight, “The Tribute Mediocrity Pays to Genius,” examines historic caricatures of Wilde.

And Part Nine, “Oscar Wilde: Martyr, Saint, and Superhero,” recounts the re-emergence of Wilde as a figure following the period during which his name was unmentionable.

Writing Wilde

I had written about The PIcture of Dorian Gray previously for The Common Review: “Dorian Gray and the Moral Imagination” (Winter 2010). That essay explicates the moral philosophy suggested by the novel.

And I wrote a long review of Thomas Wright’s Oscar’s Books, which appeared in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed issue 68/69.

Neither of those are available online.

Resistance is a charming comic about kids in occupied France. I reviewed it for The Comics Journal.

I wrote a profile of Yoram Bauman, the “stand-up economist” and writer of The Cartoon Introduction to Economics for the Reed College alumni magazine.

And I reviewed two books on counterinsurgency and anthropology for Z Magazine — American Counterinsurgency and The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual.

I had a review of Joe Sacco’s latest, Footnotes in Gaza, in the March issue of In These Times.

Also last month, I wrote a small article for San Francisco on Sanjay Patel’s illustrated version of the ancient Hindu tale, Ramayana. (It’s not on the web. Sorry.)

Cops:

A small excerpt from Our Enemies in Blue, “Explaining Away the Abuse,” appears on the website of West Denver Copwatch.

It’s at Left Bank Books, 92 Pike Street, Seattle, on Thursday April 15, at 7:30 pm.

For more information, see: http://www.leftbankbooks.com/store/Events

If you’ll be in Seattle, please come by — and tell your friends!

The Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair runs Saturday and Sunday, March 13-14, at the San Francisco County Fair Building, Golden Gate Park.

My talk will be Sunday, March 14th, at 1pm in the Auditorium.

The comment section, following the essay, is crowded with attacks focusing on my employment-status, gender, reading habits, and my alma mater — which is, you know, pretty much what one expects.

The irony here is that disarming the police is actually my attempt at a moderate compromise position. As I’ve made clear elsewhere (for example, in Our Enemies in Blue), I’d rather just not have cops at all.

Update: The moderator seems to be removing most of the ad hominem attacks. The conversation has shifted, instead, toward naked racism. (I must say, I hardly consider it an improvement.)

One commenter, “Gargleblaster,” is working hard to prove (as he puts it) “More black people equals more murders.” Adding to the absurdity, he seems to believe that this generalization, on its own, justifies Officer Ron Frashour’s shooting of Aaron Campbell. But not only was Campbell unarmed, and trying to surrender — he wasn’t even a suspect. The police were there to check on him because his family worried he might be suicidal.

It’s revealing to see who the Police Bureau’s defenders are and the kind of arguments they make: When logic fails, they appeal to simple prejudice.

Last year, shortly after Ariel Schrag released the fourth volume of her comics memoir, Likewise, I wrote a review covering the entire series. The piece was intended for The Comics Journal, but it got put off repeatedly and eventually the editors decided it had just been too long since the book had come out.

Lucky for me, the folks at Verbicide were less concerned with up-to-the-minute newness. They ran the review, titled “The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag” on January 29.

Ironically, not quite a month later, one of The Comics Journal’s affiliated blogs, The Hooded Utilitarian, is hosting a roundtable discussion on the last volume of the set, Likewise.

To start things off right, Noah Berlatsky wrote a survey essay covering the reviews of Likewise. And in it he pretty much accuses me of being a condescending sexist jerk.

Ng Suat Tong comes to my defense, and Berlatsky calls him a condescending sexist jerk, too — but now at least I have company.

I’m not in the habit of responding to reviews (especially not reviews of reviews). But I do want to state my position clearly in case it has been misunderstood.

Noah wrote: “In short, Williams recognizes that Schrag is working in a modernist idiom, where form follows function. He finds this alienating. He recognizes that the alienation is a deliberate artistic decision. And he responds by…sneering at Schrag for successfully alienating him when she should be writing entertaining, unambitious anecdotes, since that is what high-school girls do best.”

Now, it’s not that I object to highbrow modernism when it succeeds. But I do object to it when it fails. (Pointing out that Schrag intended her book to feel sloppy and dull — or, as Berlatsky puts it, “alienating” — is hardly a defense.) Given how badly I think Likewise failed, I wished aloud that Schrag had stuck with the approach that worked well in her previous books. That’s not because it’s “what high-school girls do best” — but because it’s what Ariel Schrag does best.

I don’t think I suggested that teenaged girls are incapable of producing substantive work. And if someone can convince me that I did, I promise to go back and re-read both Frankenstein and The Outsiders to remind myself that they can.

MEANWHILE:

I wrote a two-part essay, “Border Horror,” in which I parse the economic and political subtext of a zombie comic, Infestacion: The Mythology, and a vampire comic, 30 Days of Night: Juarez. Both happen to be set at the US/Mexican border.

And I’ve offered my gloss of Alan Moore’s anarcho-porno manifesto, 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom.

You can read these, and the rest of my work for the new online Comics Journal at:
http://www.tcj.com/author/kristian-williams

Of course it’s flattering that someone admires the piece enough to run it again. But more importantly, reprints present a good chance for the piece to find a new audience, completely apart from the readers of the first release. And it’s nice that an article that took me dozens of hours of concentrated effort gets to live on beyond the magazine’s brief moment on the news stand.

Lately, I’ve had several pieces resurrected in this way:

The Portland Alliance ran my polemic against police unions, “No Solidarity with Police Union,” which originally appeared in the Portland Observer. It’s in the current Alliance, but you can also see it here: http://portlandobserver.com/?p=491

The current issue of the American Gun Culture Report includes the essay Peter Little and I wrote about gun control and race for In These Times:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3857/talking_about_guns_fighting_about_race/

In its November/December issue, the Earth First Journal reprinted my essay, “The Green Scare, the State’s Priorities, and Day-to-Day Repression.” I originally delivered it as a lecture in May of last year. I then converted the lecture into an essay for the Eat the State website:
http://eatthestate.org/13-22/GreenScareStates.htm

And I recently came across a pirated pamphlet edition of my Monthly Review essay, “The Demand for Order and the Birth of Modern Policing.”
(http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/willmodpol.html)

The pamphlet was free, so I can’t complain too vociferously. I do wish people would ask me first, though. It’s just polite.