A Mob! A Lavender Scare! A Witch Hunt even!

The Snagglepuss Chronicles: Exit Stage Left by Mark Russell, illustrated by Mike Feehan and Mark Morales.
Graphic Novel Review by Kerey McKenna.

DC Comics has been doing some interesting things for the last few years with their stewardship of the Hanna-Barbara cartoon characters. Some choices seem fairly straightforward from the point of view of corporate synergy, like launching Future Quest, a massive crossover event linking action-based characters like Johnny Quest to the Herculoids. Or getting superheroes like Birdman and Space Ghost back to their jobs as superheroes instead of self-referential parodies on Cartoon Network. Scooby Doo was re-imagined as post-apocalyptic survival horror. The Jetsons and The Flintstones were both reconstructed into dramedies (See my review of the latter here).

But in The Snagglepuss Chronicles: Exit Stage Left, classic Hanna-Barbara characters Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound, and the titular Snagglepuss are placed in a scenario I never would have expected: a drama about homosexuality and politics in the McCarthy Era. The premise is so out there it hit with all the surprise of an El Kabong attack.

With both sides of the political aisle invoking the shadow of McCarthyism, and the contentious issue of writing previously straight comic characters as gay or bisexual (Alan Scott the Green Lantern, Iceman of the X-Men, and the Rawhide Kid to name a few), I thought this might be an interesting read.

So first things first: who was Snagglepuss originally and why reboot him into a period piece about the 1950’s? I must confess I only have vague memories of this cartoon character and even then only as a supporting member of Hanna-Barbara cartoons that brought their funny animals into one big story, with Yogi Bear getting top billing. I could only remember the pink lion having a laid back attitude and a collection of catch phrases and verbal affectations like “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” “Exit Stage Left!” and his signature conjunction “even.”

In the comics world there is a bit of debate (either a raging storm or a tempest in a teapot depending on who you ask) about writing previously established characters as gay or bisexual. One argument against the trend is that it subverts original authorial intent, creating character traits and interpretations that had never been there. In this case though, I think it’s pretty reasonable to say that the original character of Snagglepuss had a lot of subtext. He’s a pink lion that’s in show biz and sounds like this:

Yeah, that is one dandy lion. In fact a lot of his verbal shtick invokes Bert Lahr’s portrayal of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939) (Lahr actually sued).

Okay, so what does the graphic novel do with this walking collection of gay stereotypes? Well, it tries to turn him into a complex fully rounded character that is living as a closeted gay man in the 1950’s. Well, a gay lion-man anyway.

Seemingly following in the footsteps (or paw prints?) of Netflix cartoon Bojack Horseman, the world of Snagglepuss is a world in which animal people and humans exist side-by-side with no explanation given or really needed. Also like Bojack, Snagglepuss is a celebrity and he mixes and mingles with real celebrities of the era. Parallel to Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, Snagglepuss left his boyhood home in the rural south for the bright lights of New York City to pursue a career in theater and the emerging gay scene.

Establishing himself as a celebrated playwright, Snagglepuss straddles the line of what is acceptable in the 1950’s. To keep up appearances, he has a marriage of convenience to a lioness to serve as his beard, but his reputation is such that Joe DiMaggio is not concerned with Snagglepuss spending time with his knockout of a bride Marilyn Monroe (turns out Jumpin’ Joe should have been watching out for another NYC playwright, Arthur Miller).

However Snagglepuss’s place in society is threatened when the House Un-American Activities Committee wants him to name names and point them towards communist sympathizers from his social circle.

The story explores the intermingling of art and politics and the tension between conformity and freedom, from the individual to the societal level. Even if Snagglepuss can survive the pressure with his characteristic nonchalance, can his near and dear ones survive the ordeal intact? Can he maintain his ideals and still keep his name off the infamous blacklist?

In a daring move, the book takes this premise and plays it completely straight. Well, not completely straight.

The creators use the “funny animals” to act out a mature adult drama, something that has been done since at least the 1970's in the independent comics scene (Fritz the Cat, Maus, and Blacksad, to name a few), but to my knowledge this has never before been done with mainstream established characters. One wonders why the creators chose to do this when a little tweaking here and there could have made them recognizable analogues but more distinct. However, there’s a method to their madness.

Metaphorically, film and television compress flesh and blood actors into cartoon versions of their public personas. Breathy blond bombshell Marilyn Monroe has been immortalized in film, but the public doesn’t really remember Norma Jean, the stuttering, insecure factory worker, the real person who couldn’t bear the weight of constantly being Marilyn. Similarly, in this novel, the “funny animals” we know and love from our childhoods, always taking pratfalls and getting in and out of trouble, lived complex lives before being preserved forever as cartoons.

The art and dialogue are superb, but I did have a few bones to pick about the book’s politics and reading of the pertinent history. My issues aren’t that it is a political book, or even most of the politics involved, but rather a matter of historical accuracy: I was disappointed that the creators ignored or omitted aspects of the history that would have made the tale a bit more nuanced and projected less of a modern mindset onto the past.

My first point of contention is whether Snagglepuss really needed a beard. Although most gay men in the 1950s did live in the closet—the conformism of the era, sadly, made that necessary—there were exceptions, including some members of professions considered to be “eccentric”—like writers. As I mentioned, Snagglepuss here is clearly based off real life writers Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, both of whom at the time this novel was set were living openly as homosexuals, or at least as openly as a man could in that time and place.

There is also some modern projection in that the politics of the gay community as portrayed in the book are drawn along modern battle lines. The story features two gay members of the supporting cast on opposite sides of the political spectrum: Snagglepuss’s Latin lover Pablo the Cuban revolutionary, and Gigi Alan an anti-communist government operative (and barely closeted lesbian). Gigi is the Inspector Javert of the story, diligently working to root out Communist sympathizers even if she has to out closeted homosexual men. She appears to be a gender-swapped version of McCarthy operative Roy Cohn. Pablo fled the oppression of the Batista Regime but runs off to Cuba to join the Communist Revolution; by the end of the story we find him having adopted a bushy beard and military fatigues, and working diligently as an official within the Castro Regime. In real life Pablo is going to be in for a real shock when he finds that the violent government crackdowns on homosexuality won’t just continue under the Castro regime but perhaps even increase. He himself might very well be purged from the regime and imprisoned in a labor camp. The graphic novel is so focused on the Lavender Scare in the US it makes the mistake of assuming that the grass was greener on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Again I feel like a dramatic opportunity may have been missed here. With a few lines of dialogue the actions of Gigi Allen (who I don’t think the authors wanted us to see as a complete villain) would make a bit more sense. Yes, she is defending a system that does not make life easy for people like her, but looking at the persecution of homosexuals in the USSR and Soviet Bloc States she could rationalize that communist rule would be much worse.

There is also the issue of Snagglepuss’s trademark idiom. In a book about a character whose most memorable aspect is his verbal mannerisms, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to imagine this version of Snagglepuss speaking with his classic inflection. I feel like a visual flourish or two could have indicated times when Snagglepuss was speaking with his characteristic affectations vs when he is speaking more naturally (perhaps even indications that he reverts to a southern accent when in private or under stress). It seems like a missed opportunity. A mistake. A misstep. A faux paw, even.

But in general I liked this book’s daring in trying to take so many risks with characters that had previously always existed as lighthearted cartoons. As I said, subversions of “funny animal” stories have been a fixture of the independent comic scene for decades. But even a more mainstream success like Bojack Horseman feels the need to zigzag between maudlin existential dread and madcap slapstick and puns. In consistently using these characters for a serious period piece, The Snagglepuss Chronicles show that “gritty reboot” doesn’t need to mean “add more muscles, guns, and swearing.”

Should classic cartoon and comic book characters be rewritten as gay or bisexual? And does it make a difference if the original character already "had a lot of subtext?" Please leave a comment and let us know your thoughts.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Longyear vs. Jemisin

A Nerds who Read Smackdown.
Dual Reviews by Michael Isenberg.

Enemy Mine by Barry Longyear and the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K.Jemisin are similar in many ways. Both are tales of survival on a hostile planet. Both won Hugo awards—and in both cases the awards were controversial. And both deal with the same theme—racism. But what they say about racism differs substantially.

Enemy Mine began life in the September 1979 issue of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. The publication was relatively new at the time and Asimov lobbied heavily for Enemy Mine to win the 1980 Hugo for Best Novella, prompting a rant by David Langford in Ansible:

The success of Barry B Longyear (“The man's a f--king illiterate!” – J. Nicholas. “I'm not a Jackie Lichtenberg fan any more. I'm a Barry B. Bongyear fan now” – C. Priest) with his “Enemy Mine” in Hugo and Nebula is an indication of the new Isaac Astral award-grubbing technique: millions of copies of the story were sent to SFWA members with glowing recommendations from the Doctor.

Despite the controversy, the award launched Enemy Mine on its way to a 1985 movie starring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett, Jr. Later Longyear expanded the story to novel-length in the 1998 “author’s cut.”

It is the tale of two enemy fighter pilots, the human Willis Davidge and the Drac Jeriba Shigan (or as Davidge calls him, Jerry). Humans and Dracs have been at war for some time over competing claims to alien planets and many on both sides have lost friends and loved ones. Davidge has literally been trained to hate the three-fingered, yellow-skinned Dracs—there was a briefing on the “Draggers” at flight school where Davidge learned that “the smell is terrible,” and if he sees one, kill it. In a dogfight over Fyrine IV, both Davidge and Jerry end up crash landing on the planet. Although they initially fight, they soon figure out that on a barren world of monstrous tsunamis and long, bitter winters, they are going to need to cooperate in order to survive. Over time they learn each other’s languages and cultures. Davidge even learns to read the Drac bible, the Talman, and to recite the names and accomplishments of two hundred generations of Jerry’s ancestors, the all-important lineage that means everything to a Drac.

The story of enemy spacemen marooned on a planet had been done before—Captain Kirk and the Gorn come to mind. I thought that in Longyear’s version, the enemies come together a little too readily, very early in the story, without either Davidge or Jerry having to do much soul-searching. But Enemy Mine has a unique twist that really makes it work [SPOILER ALERT]. About halfway through, the hermaphrodite Jerry dies in childbirth. Davidge must deliver the baby from the corpse of his friend and raise it as his own.

The racial metaphor is driven home later on after Davidge and the child are rescued. In a segment left out of the movie, Davidge returns to Earth, where he’s shunned as a “dragger-lover.” Note the similarity between “dragger” and a real-life racial epithet that we’re not supposed to say. Davidge later travels to Jerry’s home world. The Dracs talk openly in front of him about how ugly he is and how badly he smells and they make him sit in the less comfortable front of the bus with other “outcasts.”

Nevertheless, Davidge seeks out Jerry’s family. He doesn’t know whether they will welcome him, but he is inspired by the words of the Talman: “Passion is a creature of rules. This does not mean do not love, do not hate. It means that where your passion limits talma [problem solving], you must step outside of the rules of your love and your hate to allow talma to serve you.”

 

*                     *                       *

 

Jemisin’s Broken Earth series also revolves around two races who face each other with daggers drawn—both literally and metaphorically. Broken Earth was published in three installments: The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017). All three won Hugos for Best Novel, an unprecedented occurrence. The awards were controversial because women swept nearly all the literary and professional categories all three years, and some have suggested that the contests were rigged, decided more on the basis of identity politics than on merit, a suggestion which Ms. Jamisin denounced in her 2018 acceptance speech.

In the world of Broken Earth, the minority Orogenes have the power to control what lies beneath the ground, to move rocks and quell earthquakes. But careless—or malevolent—use of the powers can kill. This makes the Orogenes feared and hated by the majority Stills.

Jemisin is a skilled writer; the reader shares the Orogenes' pain, which covers the whole range of racial injustice, from the historical evil of slavery, which we all agree was monstrous, to more nebulous and disputed injustices like micro-inequities, and everything in between. The analogy to African-Americans is intentional. The Stills call the Orogenes “ruggas;” those who sympathize with them are “rugga-lovers.” Some Orogenes, especially the younger ones, have adopted “rugga” as “their" word. Note the similarity between “rugga” and a real-life racial epithet that we’re not supposed to say. Orogene children, if they’re not killed by their non-Orogene parents, are turned over to the Guardians, who use magic of their own to keep the Orogenes under control. It’s slavery with comfortable living arrangements and a measure of self-government, but slavery nonetheless.

The Stills take their name from the Stillness, the continent they share grudgingly with the Orogenes. The name is ironic: the Stillness, subject to chronic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, is anything but still. From time to the time, natural disaster spikes, plunging the land into a “Season,” a volcanic winter that lasts for years. Ash falls from the sky like snow. Crops don’t grow. Death comes to the unprepared, those who haven’t stored up food or shored up their defenses against wandering bands of looters. But food stores don’t last forever. In the longer Seasons, death eventually comes to the prepared as well.

The series begins with a mother mourning over the “broken little body” of her dead child. The mother is Essun, an Orogene, who had spent the last decade living in hiding in a remote village, married to a man who didn’t know what she and their two children were. When he finds out, he kills their son Uche and flees with their daughter Nassun, his favorite, to a place where she can be “fixed.” Driven from her home by her neighbors, who now know she is Orogene, Essun takes to the road to find her husband and daughter, just as a new Season descends upon the earth.

Essun has suffered a great deal at the hands of the Stills (and I’ve only told you a fraction of it). And yet she’s a surprisingly unsympathetic character. But don’t take my word for it. Here is how Ms. Jemisin, writing in her blog, describes her own creation:

I expected people to hate Essun. She’s so many things that readers dislike sight-unseen and story unread: a middle-aged mother, a collaborator, a revolutionary, a mass murderer, a woman who refuses to be sexy or nice. She’s traumatized for much of The Fifth Season, and she displays this in ways that don’t tug the heartstrings, because trauma doesn’t usually look sympathetic. It’s angry. It’s distant. It’s violent, and sometimes harmful. I wanted readers to feel this intensely, but I also wanted them to feel the disassociation of her, the not-all-here of her.

Jemisin struggled with how to “bridge the empathy gap” and in the end, “decided to trick readers into caring about her.”

The trick is quite clever, and doubles as a neat plot twist. But ultimately it doesn’t work. At least not for me. I still didn’t like Essun. I just couldn’t get past the mass murderer part, which Jemisin sandwiched so casually between “revolutionary” and “woman who refuses to be sexy.” Over the course of the trilogy, Essun uses her powers to kill hundreds of thousands of people, both Stills and Orogenes, most of them innocent, and even when the victims are fair-game combatants, the murders are unnecessarily cruel. Even Jemisin admits this. “Heroes don’t summon swarms of nightmare bugs to eat their enemies,” we're told.

I don’t want to be overly moralistic here. I don’t want to be that stuffed shirt in the 80’s movie who’s determined not to let his little town be overrun by dancing. But I don’t think that drawing the line at mass murder makes me excessively judgmental.

In any case, Essun proceeds on her quest. It’s a thrilling tale. As I read the climax of each novel, my inner monologue was breathless. Eventually Essun comes to the village of Castrima, which is run by another Orogene Ykka. Castrima is located underground, inside a giant geode. The various apartments are carved out of crystal, all of which glow with the technology of some long-dead civilization. Give Jemisin credit for imaginative and beautiful world building.

Ykka works day and night to build a community where Orogenes and Stills live in harmony, cooperating to survive the Season, like Davidge and Jerry on Fyrine IV. But Essun is skeptical. “You’re from so many places. In every one of them you learned that roggas and Stills can never live together.” Essun is certain it’s only a matter of time before the other shoe drops.

That never happens. And yet, Essun, and later her daughter Nassun, remain unmoved. In the final pages, Nassun laments that the Stills are “not going to choose anything different” than persecution.

“They will if you make them,” the ancient and wise narrator tells her.

Ms. Jemisin never tells us what “make them” means. I suppose you can “make” someone accept you by means of a charm offensive. But that doesn’t fit the brutal world of the Stillness. In that universe, the only sense of “make” that makes sense is the use of force. A race war. And given that the Stillness is such a thinly disguised metaphor for America, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Jemisin is calling for a race war in real life. When everything’s said and done, the Broken Earth trilogy is 1,200 pages of hate. In my humble opinion, the antidote to hate is not more hate.

Anyway, that's my two cents. So what do you think? Is Longyear right or is Jemisen? Is conflict between the races inevitable, only stopping when one side “makes” the other stop? Or is it possible to live together in harmony and “step outside of the rules of your love and your hate.” Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com