***~~ (3/5)

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1910 is another more or less standalone entry into the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic series by writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill. I say “comic” because as this instalment is fairly short it would be a bit cheeky to call it a graphic novel, but any comedy you’ll encounter will be predictably dark.

In 1910, Mina Murray*1 and Allan Quatermain*2 appear surprisingly in their prime (a fact explained only in the epilogue), working with A.J. Raffles*3, Thomas Carnacki*4 and the immortal Orlando*5 to try and prevent a predicted apocalypse presumably engineered by the magician Haddo*6, and miss out on a very commonplace drama going on in a dockside drinking hole, slowly leading up to a catastrophe.

The story offers the same kind of name-dropping 19th/early 20th century pulp fiction fanfic as all the other instalments, this time wrapped in Penny Orchestra lyrics and the theme of violence, poverty and, you guessed it, rape.

Much has been written about Alan Moore and rape before, but it’s prevalence here and the specific philosophy in which it is wrapped is still worthy of notice. Loosely following the events of song Pirate Jenny, Captain Nemo’s*7 daughter Janni accepts work as a waitress, gets brutally raped, and retaliates spectacularly. That is the core of the story, with the League’s Gentlemen mostly mucking about, relieving internal tensions and making literary allusions in the background. Alan Moore’s paraphrased translation of Pirate Jenny and Janni’s initial rejection of her father’s legacy appear to place the blame of her rape partially on her, though her rage in its wake is treated sympathetically – as ultra-violence so often is. In the final stages of the story the Whitechapel Murderer sings a song at the gallows accusing government and poverty of being the true sinners, rather than prostitutes and their johns – which is fair enough – or “priests with wandering hands” (a jolly way of saying “people abusing authority to sexually assault others”). In the midst of death and destruction, the whores and the killers sing, “mankind is kept alive by monstrous deeds”. Powerful stuff, if borrowed, and it adds up to a eulogy for personal might as opposed to governmental regulation.

Moore’s own sexual attitudes seem to be shining through elsewhere in the text. Plenty of time is spent dwelling on the sailors’ groping of Janni even before they rape her, and Raffles comments with disfavour on the apparent sexual triad of Mina, Allan and Orlando, exhibiting discomfort at the existence of the “He-She” which, aside from being transphobic, is somewhat at odds with the suggestion of Raffles’ own bisexuality in the novels*8. Moore further makes a point to say that Orlando annoys Mina while he is male, thus confining Orlando’s lived bisexuality either to titillating cis female bisexuality or to the image of the effeminate gay man. (Orlando is assumed gender-fluent as well as able to change his/her physical sex, which is compatible with Woolf’s novel.) Indeed, throughout the story he appears as a foppish, silly, self-centered and prattling stereotype of a gay man. His position in relation to Mina and Allan, too, seems to be that of a kinky addition to their true love couplehood.

It’s also noteworthy that in the written-word epilogue Orlando has a re-imagined primordial youth in which she talks about being a rapist – saying how, had he met a woman as beautiful as the one he later became, he would have raped her. Is this an attempt at normalizing rape, downgrading Orlando further, or just a scintillating throw-off line to keep the presumably rape-happy reader excited?

While there’s nothing as overtly pro-rape or rape-apologist in the text as in Moore’s Watchmen and Promethea, it’s hard to miss the suggestion that violence against women is not only horrible and humiliating to the victim, but also natural and instinctive to a man, and necessary for the propagation of the human race; female homosexuality is bisexual titillation for a primary male lover, and male homosexuality distinctly normative with bottoms and tops, and also slightly off-putting.

None of this balances very well with the fact that the League is led by Mina, a resourceful, intelligent, powerful, honourable, charismatic woman, that Janni takes power for herself in spite of her father’s misogyny and her own mistreatment, or that Moore himself has spoken out against sexism in comics. There’s an overlaying feminist message strongly undermined by an anarchic, violent, rapey and heteronormative one. Moore seems entirely aware of the instincts he’s catering to – but does it anyway, without apology, explanation or much criticism.

There is no doubt that Alan Moore is an exceptional author and carries the distinction of gracing the medium with intelligence, vision, complexity, erudition, a sense of history and a general assumption that your readers are not idiots. Even this rather mediocre and unoriginal instalment has a certain dark power that is definitely attractive, as well as voicing an unconventional call for criminal anarchy against an unfair state. Do its issues with gender roles make it worse than the bubblegum sexism and righteous violence that we get in mainstream comics? The dreadful answer is, probably not.

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*1 Dracula, Bram Stoker, 1897
*2 King Solomon’s Mines, H. Rider Haggard, 1885
*3 The Amateur Cracksman, E.W. Hornung, 1899
*4 Carnacki the Ghost Finder, William Hope Hodgson, 1913
*5 Orlando: A Biography, Virginia Woolf, 1928
*6 The Magician, W. Somerset Maugham, 1908
*7 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne, 1869
*8 Open to debate, I suppose, but you need pretty thick hetero-goggles to ignore it.

***** (5/5)

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I freely admit that I am biased against French and Belgian adult comics. This is because at some point no amount of high concept sci-fi or fantastic art can make up for the way the female characters are too often written as fantasy dolls propping up a pair of perfect tits. No, this is not all of them, and there are French and Belgian comics I love, sometimes despite the issues, but at some point I just gave them up.

Miss Don’t Touch Me is a French adult comic about prostitutes being murdered by a sadistic killer, features half-naked women on most pages, and I loved it to pieces.

Here’s the set-up: Paris in the 1930s. The virginal Blanche works as a maid together with her free-wheeling sister Agatha. She begs Agatha not to go to the dances where a murderer has been known to be picking up victims. When Agatha is (inevitably) killed, Blanche swears revenge and tracks the killer down to a high-class brothel. She gets hired as the brothel’s “English governess”, a girl who whips but must not be touched, “Miss Don’t-Touch-Me”. It’s a job she performs with vigour, putting all her anger and revulsion – towards her sister’s killer, or men and sex in general – into the act, while continuing in her off hours to search for clues. She intends to take the life of her sister’s killer.

The two artists behind the name Kerascoët have managed to create an art style that draws the eye and holds it by packing a big wallop of charm. Yes, charm is the word, despite the subject matter. The art is sketchy, but expressive and detailed. The characters are instantly recognizable, as they come equipped with varied body-types and their own unique features features. A cartoony, exaggerated style applied to the characters is combined with rich, almost expressionistic backgrounds. The layouts are simple with little variation between the panel shapes. Dramatic moments are underlined with larger panels and close-ups.

The plot sounds like a woman-against-man parable, almost as much as it sounds like slasher porn, but doesn’t in the end come off as entirely either. The story takes place very much in the female sphere, with men – even the ones who have all the power – barely making an appearance. Blanche’s main encounters are with women. She clashes with the other prostitutes as well as forms attachments with them, becoming particularly friendly with the other two “special girls”, the angelical masochist Annette and the “madame-monsieur” Josephine. Perhaps it’s partly because of this focus that the novel doesn’t come off as as offensive as you might think, though mostly I still put that down to decent writing, that is to say, that female characters are full-fledged and their motivations, however extreme, make sense within the story.

Blanche is not a likeable heroine, a wish-fulfilment character or even someone you might want to hang out with. She’s driven, murderous and has trouble controlling her impulses. Even so I found it easy to sympathize with her. I find this kind of character is particularly satisfying to read about, as, when successful, she provokes and evokes the reader’s darker impulses, and makes her question the moral structure of the story itself.

Many of the characters easily fall into categories – neurotic Blanche, Agatha who loves fun and gets punished it, martyred Annette, the money-grubbing madame, the cruel bully, and so on – but they’re also characters you can understand and recognize. There’s no forced feminist message obscuring plot and characters; what you get instead is a depiction of subjection, commercialism and dehumanization as the default state of these women’s lives and the (even more) gruesome consequences thereof. They are tied to the brothel in more ways than one, no longer fitting into the world outside after living by different rules within its four walls, and the description of their predicament and their world is gritty and evocative.

I have to add, despite it being a non sequitur – how awesome it is to have a black transsexual prostitute as a wise mentor character, someone kind, beautiful and adored? Josephine is strong, intelligent, in control, and not the least bit ridiculous. More of this, please.

Does it pander to sexual sadists and exploit its premise? Certainly. Does it uncritically portray the virgin/whore dichotomy? Yes – in a sense. Whatever the reason or plot behind it, the image of a naked woman strung up and cut is always a titillating image, harking back to the old days of pulp art and true crime scandal rags as well as ongoing, franker publications. The setting is all about sex and violence and Hubert & Kerascoët exploit the reader’s potential interest in them shamelessly. There is, however, a difference between presenting sadomasochistic scenarios and condoning actual violence against women, as there is between exploiting a kink and espousing an ideology. In my mind Miss Don’t Touch Me is on the good side.

As for the virgin/whore dichotomy, the dichotomy of perception exists in the world of the novel, where whores and loose women are considered by male outsiders, by the killer, the brothel owner and at first Blanche herself as less worthy, as people who can’t expect to be treated humanely unless they enforce this through violence. Blanche herself becomes a star attraction of the brothel because of her hallowed virginity. I am however willing to argue that this, rather than blaming sexual women for their predicament within the context of the story, is instead a depiction of attitudes towards virginity and of women’s own mobility – and lack thereof – within the trap those attitudes have made.

I might not be over my bias yet – it is reaffirmed every time I walk past a comics stand in my home town – but I will certainly be keeping an eye out for these three authors.