Drink Wilkins Coffee... or else!

So here's a strange historical artifact: the Wilkins Coffee commercials produced by Jim Henson between 1957 and 1961 and they are a work of art.

The ads feature two characters: Wilkins (who, I kid you not, is the Kermit prototype puppet), whose job is to shill Wilkins Coffee, and Wontkins, who doesn't want it. Over the course of at least a couple of dozens commercials Wilkins tries to “persuade” Wontkins to try some. In pursuit of this goal Wontkins is repeatedly humiliated, threatened, stabbed, shot, run over, blown up, thrown out of aircraft and in various one-off indignities he is executed by electric chair, eaten by a whale and crushed by the Washington Monument.

Any number of these near or actually fatal humiliations are accompanied by Wilkins declaring “Things just happen to people who don't drink Wilkins Coffee.”. Hell, in one or two of them, after dispatching Wontkins, Wilkins even threatens the audience.

Its like the secret origin of The Muppet Show and you can watch it here. 

Goodbye, Black Panther & The Crew

Patience, they said as they made Captain America a Nazi. Patience, they said as the situation got worse and worse, as they told us Magneto was joining Hydra, too. Patience, they said as more and more context piled moral offense upon moral offense on the road to Secret Empire. Patience, they said for more than a year as they geared up to fill my pull list with unavoidable Nazis.

Then they cancelled Black Panther & The Crew after two issues due to poor sales. The most promising team book I've seen Marvel put out in years, that I did not see one ad for in any of their comics aside from Black Panther, will now run for a single six issue arc.

All this has happened before and all this will happen again, as the saying goes.

This was genuinely the most promising team book I've seen from Marvel since Keiron Gillen's Young Avengers. Its Harlem setting was fascinating and well-researched, Ta-Nehisi Coates' angles on Storm and Misty Knight were interesting even beyond the sheer novelty of having those two very different women working together. It was all tied in with the history, both real and fictional, of Harlem which is just something you don't have reason to learn much about when you're a white bloke from the south of England. All that was great and at the end of the second issue Coates finally introduced Black Panther to his own team book and we were off to the races.

Well, not so much now.

This is a microcosm of something I've been banging on about for a while. You see, as I write this I have Coates' Wikipedia page open and I am wondering how a series written by someone like this, with past work like his, isn't one of the biggest deals in Marvel's publishing portfolio. His second book Between the World and Me won the (US) National Book Award For Nonfiction and was a Pulitzer finalist. He has a television deal developing a series for HBO about Martin Luther King being produced by Oprah Winfrey. Not being American, I don't know exactly how famous these distinctions make him but I think that there would be some potential in getting his name out there to attract new readers...

… if Marvel, or any comics company, actually advertised anywhere other than inside their own publications.

So here we are again, with the insular nature of comicbooks coming back to bite the industry on its arse. Now, I'm as big a supporter of promoting internally and recognising when someone has paid their dues as you'll get but right now a title about a team of African and African-American characters set in Harlem written by a Pulitzer finalist who has written extensively about African-American history and philosophy has died on the vine. Meanwhile, a huge crossover event about Captain America being a Nazi at the worst possible moment in modern history is being handled by a man whose only claim to fame outside comics is a failed political career in Cincinnati and whose Wikipedia page refers to a 2011 one-shot in the future tense gets the lions' share of the company's meagre advertising budget, questions have to be asked.

Questions like: what the hell are you guys doing? Do you want new readers or not? Why did you bring Ta-Nehisi Coates into the comicbook industry if not to use his existing reputation to sell product?

Do you, in short, have any plans to actually grow your business or are you content to allow Disney to act as your life support system until they decide that just having the IP rights means they don't need your niche, barely profitable product cluttering up their portfolio?

Because that's what's going to happen at this rate. 

Found Objects: Truth in advertising

As a renter for the last ten years I, of course, despise the real estate industry and everyone in it but even I have to admit this is one of the best posters I have ever seen. The tag line might be completely irrelevant but you'll never forget it. 

A personal, subjective view on the Batgirl Joker variant

The title of this post is meant to convey that this is what I feel about the whole business of DC soliciting and then pulling the Batgirl Joker variant cover. I'm not trying to make a definitive statement here, least of all because the artist, Rafael Albuquerque, wrote an open letter on the subject which I think deserves pre-eminence. Its a bit of non-apology but it does seem to represent genuine contrition, which is good because DC's own statement pretty much throws Albuquerque under a bus in lieu of admitting any fault on their part.

(That said, I can't say whether the theme of the piece was Albuquerque's or DC editorial's idea. After all, you say “Batgirl Joker variant” and the natural pitch is “Killing Joke tribute”, so who knows whose idea it was).

As to the cover itself? I think its a really good piece of art if divorced from context. Hell, even given its context I think its well-drawn. Its technically proficient and genuinely disturbing. I'm a strong believer that art is meant to provoke an emotional reaction and that reaction doesn't need to be positive to have worth. The problem, and I feel there really is a problem, comes from the context this image would have been published in.

As the cover to a horror comic or even to Gail Simone's run on Batgirl it might even have worked. Simone's Batgirl dwelt a lot on the trauma Barbara suffered as a result of The Killing Joke. Put this cover on one of the early Death Of The Family tie-in issues and it would work perfectly, an expression of Barbara's lingering unresolved issues, especially given the presence of the gun (one of Simone's earliest issues has Barbara freeze when a gun is pointed at her).

The actual context of this piece, however, would have been an issue of the Stewart/Fletcher run which DC has heavily marketed to the female young adult audience. Its pretty much the prototype for the way DC intends to diversify its content and audience coming out of Convergence. This is the comic DC is pushing to young women to show them they have a place within the audience and not just with the traditional trick of having a female creator on it, which is pretty much how they marketed Simone's Batgirl and Birds Of Prey before it. Babs Tarr's art is a big part of this: more akin to Lumberjanes or Girls With Slingshots than the traditional superhero house styles, swapping out the style that has historically alienated women for the styles of comics that have been more welcoming to them.

A comic's cover is not art alone, it is also a piece of advertising and good advertising is meant to send out a coherent, unified message. The purpose of this series from the writing to the art to most every other piece of marketing has been to foster a sense of Batgirl as embodying the traditional superhero power fantasy for young women divorced from many of the usual problems that plague female superheroes in that regard. To then pair this with a prominent image of Batgirl restrained and visibly terrified is a massively dissonant note that contradicts the central message of the series.

The cover image is disturbing in a way that does not suit the series it would have been used in and this, more than anything, is why I think it was a good decision for DC to pull the cover. Hell, of all series for this to happen to its strangely fitting for it to happen with the Cameron/Fletcher Batgirl, whose creators were previously criticised for the use of transphobic tropes in one issue. Their response, in an open letter, was to look at their work and apologise for the feelings it evoked, for not properly considering the issues when they wrote and drew those scenes and to thank their audience for provoking the discussion and expressing hope that they and others would be able to create better stories as a result of those discussions.

Especially given DC's own sidestepping of all responsibility in their corporate response to this issue, its nice to see that the DC title designed to appeal to women is also the comic whose contributors own their actions. 

Talking of missing the point

Now there's a lot to say about how the original X-Men movie set the stage for modern Marvel movies and how it compares to Disney's largely literal translations of characters from panel to screen, both for and against either approach. It was a good film that wasn't afraid to make changes to the source material so that it could be a good film whilst remaining a relatively faithful X-Men story so I'm willing to believe that this poster...

… was the work of a marketing executive who didn't understand what they were writing about. I mean, really:

TRUST A FEW. FEAR THE REST.

That's actually a really, really sinister message to apply to the X-Men, isn't it? And I say this because unlike most forms of racism portrayed in the X-Men franchise this is one I've seen in horrible action. The racism (and other expressions of prejudice) that underpin X-Men comics are, not unnaturally, ones rooted in the civil rights history of the US: the imagery of lynchings, segregation and the epic legal fight over interracial marriage. Its a specific cultural history of horrific organised violence and legislative support for oppressors.

Racism in the UK has a different, and in some ways more insidious, history. We've had racial violence and race-related murders, certainly, but nothing as organised or widespread as the lynchings. As bad as our far right has been and as repugnant as its organised members are there's been nothing as large or as active as the Ku Klux Klan. Segregation existed in parts of the British Empire but was never a legal principal in the UK itself. Interracial marriage has never been illegal here, though it has been subject to considerable social prejudices for centuries.

And that's our racial history in a nutshell: social prejudice. Skin colour, amongst other things like accent and religion, were used in the social construct of an imperial power to divide the world into us (the “rightful” rulers) and them (the ruled). I'm not kidding about accents, by the way, just look at any number of Empire-era films, TV and radio shows. You'll get your heroes speaking in a generic, received pronunciation accent, comedic but sympathetic supporting players speaking in regional British accents with foreign accents reserved for complete idiots and villains (sometimes both at the same time).

The long and the short of it is that British racism is usually a weird extension of class-ism. The thing is that someone's class can change based on their circumstances and so in some cases particular people are allowed out of the “them” category to become part of the “us”.

And here is where my personal experience comes in because I grew up in a time and a place where there was a lot of prejudice for groups (homosexuals and immigrants of East Asian descent in the main) but where huge exceptions were made to those prejudices for the ones your family knew. Your parents might be fine with that one gay man down the street but the rest of them? Perverts, probably paedophiles. The Indian guy who ran the corner shop? Good, honest working class guy but the others? Scroungers living off our taxes.

The sentiment there really was “Trust a few, fear the rest”, which confused me as a child and disgusts me as an adult and to see it reiterated in this poster is really shocking. Especially given that the film itself takes pains to demonstrate how justified Magneto's perspective is through the concentration camp scenes and in Senator Kelly's attempts to enact exactly the sort of identity registration that was the first step towards those camps.

The point I'm trying to make here? I don't know, probably that Bill Hicks was right and people who work in advertising and marketing just don't have souls, I guess.