While the writers have considerable enthusiasm for their subjects, they don't let it numb their critical faculties. Tossing away the shield of journalistic objectivity and refusing the shovel of fannish boosterism, they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms. Contact us here.

Disconnected Viewing

I don't have cable right now so I'm rewatching old shows and movies. A lot of them are animated. Such is my way. I'd like to have a nobler reason for rewatching them--something like when James revisited his favorite childhood books. And it's true—he did inspire me. But it's also true that I don't have cable.

Hammering Away at the Here and Now

Let's say you're the newly-sentient internet. How would you decipher the meaning of all the bits and bytes whizzing past you? And what about the real world outside your electronic realm?

Pilgrim's Progress

There’s a girl sitting on the subway. She’s 16 or so, in a brown corduroy jacket and a pair of faded sneakers, her feet propped on the seat across from her. She’s absently brushing on lipstick, absorbed by Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life: Volume 1.

Lovely piece, Carol, very thought-provoking.

My feeling about Ebony, for what little that's worth, is that he's a character best left alone. I enjoyed Mr Cooke's take, for example, but the truth was that he wasn't Ebony at all. Any attempt to give weight to Ebony only seems to accentuate how horribly racist the original character was. Ebony as originally portrayed is so thin a person, so pathetic a comic relief, so ignorant a stereotype, that trying to turn him into even a two-dimensional character seems to me quite futile. The only endearing qualities he had were his friendliness, loyalty and determination, all of which only worked as "positives" if we view his friendliness and loyalty as "positive" components of his subservience to the Spirit. He's lovable because he's the type of Black boy that racists like to believe in: the black servant boy who's fulfilled by service to his master.

There's so much of The Spirit which I adore. I have the whole run of the Archives on my shelf. But Ebony isn't recastable as a character because there was never anything but a racist fantasy there to begin with. There's a great fondness for Ebony - though even that name is hard is type! - because The Spirit was so fine, and the tone of the surface of the stories so affable in their apparent humaneness. But Ebony's biography is already written, I think, in the very regret and shame which Mr Eisner to his credit expressed in later life. He knew there had been - and was - no excuse for perpetrating on Black Americans the prejudice which was so appallingly disastrous to his own ethnic grouping. Mr Eisner apologised and moved on. And I think the Spirit franchise should move on to; just having an Ebony draws the attention to what was, and rather than try to redemn such a character, why not create new ones? I certainly see no point in changing the characters gender. Move on. It's shameful, it's gone, move on.

But then, what do I know? If Mr Cooke believed that reworking Mr E was a good idea, then perhaps it was. And given how you obviously believe that such a project is worthwhile, then I'll be happy to engage with it when and if it comes. But still, if there was nothing more than racism there, why add anymore? What was there to save in the first place?

3 comments below.
Pitch in yours.