Why do so many people go straight to the resume when defending a writer?

Like I just told someone else: Good writers have bad ideas, bad writers have good ideas, and readers differ on what is a good idea and what is a bad idea. Why do people think a generally good history exempts someone from all criticism?

Disagreement is one thing, but your snap judgment based on a single post (the conclusion of a series of posts), your rush to defend Moore with a litany of his unrelated works, and your venomous personal judgments suggest that your comment is little more than the knee-jerk reaction of an overenthusiastic fan.

It seems entirely appropriate to refer to some (a litany of two?) of Moore’s previous works when considering a question of whether he’s likely to have been fully aware of the political implications of this particular character.

It’s certainly more appropriate than critiquing a tale set in 1950s England, based around 19th century British characters because it does not address racial issues from a 21st century American perspective, which is what the link blog appears to do.

Crooked, I am happy to explain to you why the use of the Golliwoogg’s sex bits is not at all consistent with Moore’s use of sexuality so far in the League, and why his failure to set the stage previously by dodging the root of this character, along with his stated agenda, lead up to a spectacular failure with this particular character.

I don’t want to hijack someone else’s site, so I will keep this as brief as possible. There are a couple of minor spoilers, too.

Depending on how closely you’ve been paying attention to the League so far, you have noticed that it is extremely hetero, biased in favor of the female characters. He has chosen to tackle head-on Victorian attitudes toward gender and sexuality, and depending on your affinity for the series, he’s either done pretty amazing, insightful and entertaining things with this exploration, or he became tedious about the whole thing about halfway through vol. 2. What one may think about his success in upending Victorian attitudes toward gender and sexuality is a ‘your mileage may vary’ thing. That he’s made a significant attempt to speak on these topics in the League is undeniable.

However, that respect (lack of a better term) for the humanizing freedom he’s telegraphed as being intrinsically tied to sexuality has not at all been extended to other characters in the League.

Wells’ Nemo had a family whom he loved that was killed by the British during one or another of their imperialist operations. That murder is presented by Wells as one of the prime motivators for all of Nemo’s actions and hatred of the British. Moore has restored Nemo’s family, but he has broken it. He has estranged Nemo and his wife, going so far as to exile the wife and children to compound outside of Lincoln island. He has made it very clear that the wife is rebuffed for failing to produce a male child. He has intimated through the story that Nemo has pursued no other sexual outlet in all this time. So while just about all of the other major and secondary characters in the LoEG are “having relations” (I don’t want to cuss on somebody else’s site) with humans and other creatures, and are exploring emotional relationships mono and poly, the main brown person in the League - nay, the *only* brown person in the League - is denied a range of sexual expression by Moore. He denies him companionship. He denies him love. He denies him a necessary element of humanity (as defined by Moore). But he keeps the hate.

There’s Quartermain, also. I thought I could summarize this, but this is the best I can do. Let’s just say that early on Quartermain was the biggest sign that something was wrong on the racial front in the League. You have to be familiar with Haggard’s work to understand why. The sensitive new age wuss that has been Quartermain throughout the LoEG is absolutely not Haggard’s take, even making allowances for aging. A new approach is fine because Moore is doing that with a lot of the characters, but when Quartermain is stripped of his essence, what you get is a blob of jelly. What’s wild is that Haggard’s Quartermain walked the line between xenophobic colonial imperialist of the Great White God In Africa variety and almost-progressive-for-its-time racial awareness/critique. While Haggard/Quartermain is not quite an example of what scholars call dual masking, a literary approach of white authors often seen in Faulkner, Adams and the like, he comes close. Moore could have, though Quartermain, busted out on poking at the Victorian attitudes toward race as he has done so abundantly with sex and gender. Instead, he avoided the entire topic by emasculating Quartermain and retreating from his source. (Which is why every time Ayesha is mentioned in the League it pisses me off.) In Moi opinion, Quartermain is the *only* character through which Moore could have easily done this. Once I finished the Dossier, I wondered if that could have also dovetailed into race/sex and set up whatever he has in mind for the Golli down the road.

Hyde. Okay I realize Hyde is not a brown person. But I’m bringing him up because it ties into the disingenuous messaging that’s been in this series all along. For all of the ! ooo look at the wild, transgressive, totally free and liberating ! sex in the League, it’s not, really. How often are Orlando’s gay male relationships/encounters explored as compared to her lesbian encounters? Do you remember the references to Quartermain not so much being into the gay thing with Orlando, even after all these years? Fanny and Mina have lots of flirty, sex-positive, even joyous lesbian encounters. But when gay male sexuality is presented center stage, it’s through Hyde, and it is violent, mean-spirited, and not at all fun. It is, in fact, Victorian. (On the other hand, at least Hyde didn’t go out like a punk.)

Why is that? Is he playing to the audience, you know, the legions of comic book boys who find lesbian stuff titillating? (For those who haven’t read the series, the lesbian stuff in the LoEG series is overwhelming in comparison to the gay male stuff.) With would Oscar think of that, I wonder? Crooked, since you think it’s important to use the success of work-X when discussing the failures of work-Y, perhaps you have a hypothesis explaining how the man who put his own money behind AARGH to fight government-sactioned gay bias so badly messed up with the gay messaging in the League? How could the man who created Dhalua and Telsa have blundered so with the glaring racial omissions in the League?

Perhaps what he pulled off well elsewhere has little to do with how he didn’t do so well this time out.

I focused only on the Golli because that’s my thing. But for all that’s nifty about the League, the other big missteps outside of racial issues has been the void around homosexuality and class issues. Arguably, the class issue should be a hefty presence considering the works and creators being used as springboard.

Back to the race stuff, the source materials and creators that Moore has heavily relied upon to pull off the League - to the point where this series *would not be possible* without the benefit of public domain - bleed with racist, xenophobic common-for-those-times attitudes. Attitudes as common as the gender and sex stuff he has chosen to engage, and without subtlety I might add. Moore has not been satirizing racial attitudes in the LEoG. He’s been playing them for straight or for the most part ignoring them. He has been doing this since the series started, and all of the benefit of the doubt/wait and see how it plays out/surely he will get to it won’t he that has been part of my experience reading this series from Day One collapsed when the Golli showed up late in the game and out of context. If he has been *trying* to satirize racial attitudes in the series, he has failed. Monumentally.

When combined with his agenda to “rescue” a racist construct that endures to this day, a construct loaded with cultural baggage Moore has chosen to avoid, adding the sex part is not going to work because it wasn’t set up. The sexual threat posed by black men (or the sexual ease of black women) is a foundation element of blackface and minstrelsy, of which the Golliwogg has been an enduring manifestation. Moore’s decision to ignore the coals while playing with the resulting fire is not something I need to witness. Just the bit he’s already done with the Golli’s intro is enough to alert me that no good will come of this.

Since we (okay *I*) have been told that one of the things he and O’Neill want to do with this character is to “save” and rehabilitate it, that speaks to a disappointing and rather shocking agenda when you look at the big picture landscape of Moore’s work on other issues in the series so far.

Thematically in the League so far, all indications are Moore cares and has thought a lot about sex and gender. His *approach* to the story so far lends evidence to an argument that he cares and has thought a lot about the sexual liberation of heterosexual white people, particularly white women of a certain level of economic comfort.

Nick, Moore has been toying with attitudes of gender and sexuality, from a 21st century perspective, throughout the entire series. His informed-by-modern-attitudes approach toward the 19th-century characters of Mina, Orlando, Fanny, Quartermain, everybody he’s decided to attach to Bond and the overall political critiques (particularly in the Dossier) makes that crystal clear. One must choose to be willfully blind to this truth in order to not see it. On the other hand, with this series one can be so caught up in trying to spot the references to other pop culture works that it’s easy to let the rest of it go right past you.

The blackface stereotype affects us across the diaspora, with no regard for country, or, as evidence shows, time. If you are unaware that Robertson didn’t officially stop using the Golli as its logo until 2001, or that “Black Pete” celebrations are rife throughout Europe in this modern era, or that minstrel- and blackface-inspired attacks are unleashed against prominent black American persons in the current time, or that the BBC didn’t end the Black & White Minstrel Show until the late 1970s, or that the very popular Papa Lazarou still shows up on the BBC to this day, you should probably work to educate yourself.

I still have no idea what’s up with the James Bond obsession, save an inkling that maybe it ties into the gender thing. I’ve only read a few of the Fleming novels, but the Bond of the books is not so nice toward women. The movie Bond is nicer in comparison. I admit to being curious if the Bond stuff will play out more in the future editions, if only because the punch line presented in the Dossier was not worth the two volumes building up to it.

For the record, just because I’m tired of answering this question… Deciding to walk away from the League does not mean banning all future Moore work from my reading list. I’m kicking just this one to the curb. If he comes up with something else down the road that sounds interesting, I’ll check it out. In general, I like his work a lot. Just so happens that I don’t have a high tolerance level for obscenity, which is what Moore & O’Neill’s intent with the Golli is to me.

Pam Noles

Crooked, yes in the one spotlight piece that was largely a surface summary, that’s true. When compared to the scope of sexuality on display and repeated over and again in the full run of the League so far, it doesn’t hold up. The series has been a weird meld of heteronormative and hot lesbian action for the benefit of the male gaze. Kind of like the superhero books now that I think about it.

You’re off base about this bit… As relates to the Golli, I was hunting for elements in the Dossier that would vindicate my Hope And Faith that Moore would eventually he would get around to engaging with race as he had with gender roles and sexuality. I went hunting for my happy ending. It wasn’t there.

Agreed, it’s very obvious Moore was primarily interested in exploring Victorian white female sexuality, opting to leave gay male relationships and class issues and race issues to the side. For 2.5 volumes. Which it too, too bad considering his source materials.

It appears I have predicated my approval of the use of the Golliwogg on Moore’s immediate appropriation as a tool for discussing race issues?

Well, you know. D’uh.

When you chose to read only the final entry in series, you missed a lot.

It comes down to Moore didn’t even try to deal with the era’s well-documented racial attitudes, yet he thought it all right to take a vile racial construct from that period and play games with it in this one. Bad writer. No cookie.

I see Pam’s argument, but I must respectfully disagree with it. I’ve read the entire article as well as Pam’s posts here, and I’m quite familiar with the pervasiveness of blackface shows and the controversy surrounding the Golliwog. But I don’t think that Moore has ignored racial issues in the League books, nor that he mishandled them in relation to the Golliwog in Black Dossier.

Admittedly, race hasn’t been a primary focus of the series to date. But it’s there, as a part of the overall critique Moore is making of the British imperial mindset. We’ve seen racist and patrician attitudes put forth, and they always come off as negative. Hyde’s use of the “wog” slur is a good example of this. Hyde is one of the more odious figures in the series to date, so when you’ve got him using a racial slur, you’re automatically casting aspersions on the word’s use.

But more specific to Black Dossier itself is the example of Bulldog Drummond. Drummond is presented here as a patriotic racist extremist. He spouts vile and ignorant attitudes, going so far as to refer to Golliwog as a “coon.” That puts Britain’s racism on the table as a topic of discussion in this book as far as I’m concerned, especially in relation to Golliwog.

As for the use of Golliwog himself, I thought it was pretty smart. As with all the other pop culture figures Moore is drawing on here, he’s assuming his audience has some basic familiarity with Golliwog as a racial lightning rod. So he takes off from that cultural base, and makes it part of the story. Golliwog (appropriately, I think) is almost completely symbolic. He’s presented as a being of tremendous weight, as befits his real-world cultural weight. He’s also very alien, as far removed from human beings as the Golliwog caricature itself is. In addition, he’s immensely powerful, and an important figure in the Blazing World, a king if I’m not mistaken. The crew of his ship are the “Dutch Dollies” of the original Golliwog book, who are themselves hyper-sexualized caricatures playing off the stereotype of lusty northern Europeans (more about them in a minute).

All of which makes me think Moore is very much aware of the controversy and ill feeling surrounding the Golliwog. He’s made the character weighty and important, and as threatening as he could possibly be to the controlling white male power structure who are the ultimate villains of the League series. These empire builders are out to seize, exploit, and despoil the Blazing World and all its wonders the same way they’re exploiting the space aliens. And it’s all in the name of furthering the glory of Britain, which in their minds is a nation of white people.

We’ve seen that attitude from the first book on in their treatment of Nemo, who deserves a few words himself. As a non-white victim of British imperialism, he’s the best example I can give of the League series’ anti-racist content. Allan and Mina (our heroes) respect the hell out of him, but the authorities (the bad guys) repeatedly treat him less well than their white operatives. After the Martian war, they even give Hyde more honorifics. Hyde gets a statue, while Nemo (as we see in Black Dossier’s “Prospectus of London”) gets a cheap plywood replica of the Nautilus and an actor portraying him in blackface(!). The bastards!

Moore treats the good captain with far more respect. I made a different assumption than Pam about Nemo’s family as seen in Black Dossier, for instance. I assumed that the woman and child that Mina sees on Nemo’s island were replacements for the dead family that drove him to become a pirate. The wife is described as being thirtyish, which would be too young for Nemo’s original bride (30 years having passed since the death of his family). Nemo’s estrangement from them might be because of the child, or it might be that he’s been so filled with hate by the wrongdoings of the British Empire that he can’t love anyone anymore. I don’t know that we have enough information to say just yet.

I also assumed that it was an immortal Nemo who was in command of the Nautilus. Sure, they say he’s dead, but they said the same thing about Quatermain when they revitalized him. It could be that Nemo’s daughter took command of the ship, but I remember the hand of the Nautilus’ commander looking decidedly male in the one illustration we got. I’m just guessing here, of course, but I think Nemo got a dip in the magic water. In spite of appearances, it’s not a “whites only” pool.

So while I’ll agree that race has been a secondary theme of the League books, I do think it’s in there. And I think it’s a topic that Moore will return to in a later volume. There’s a lot of seed-planting going on in Black Dossier. Lots of character introductions are made as teasers for future volumes. The adventure with the two foreign Leagues is supposed to be the next book, for instance, and there are further mysteries to be explored with Nemo as well.

Golliwog falls into the same category, I think. Rumor is that one of the remaining League books will be set in the present day, which I’d imagine is where Golliwog will return. Not that race isn’t a viable issue in the other time periods the series covers, but it’s in the modern era of racial diversity and anti-discrimination law that the bad guys might come to see other races as a big enough threat to the hegemony of white Britain that they’d take action.

Okay. Moving on to the issue of Moore’s emphasis on Golliwog’s sexuality, I’ve got to say that I found it in keeping with Black Dossier’s overall highly sexual tone. Every other character’s sex life is at least touched on in Black Dossier, and excluding Golliwog from that would seem far more controversial to me than what Moore did.

And what I think he did was to make a political statement out of it. Yes, Golliwog has a very large penis. And yes, he commands a crew of sex-crazed white women. And yes, that’s the official black male stereotype, as feared and hated by the white male power structure to the point of irrationality. I thought Drummond’s line was particularly telling here: “That bloody coon’s done something to my god-daughter.” Way to sum it up for us, Bulldog!

But Moore’s showing us that Golliwog’s penis is nothing to fear. He’s kind of a fun guy, in fact, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with his inter-racial relationship with the Dutch Dollies. So the ultimate point of Golliwog’s appearance in Black Dossier is that racism is silly and stupid and destructive. Which is a sentiment I can get behind.

Okay, to sum up: I see a stronger thread of anti-racist content in the League books than Pam, and Golliwog seems a very smart treatment of a very controversial figure to me. All that said, I’m a middle-class white boy. If I were black, I might not feel so sanguine about it. But I do think that Moore did his homework, and made a strong satirical statement to boot.

Pam, I have to commend you for your research and for putting your two cents into this issue. (Although in your response to Crooked, which you reposted on your blog, you said Nemo was created by Wells. He’s a Verne creation. I’m sure you knew that, but you may want to fix it up on your blog.)

I can’t really say much more on the Golliwog. I didn’t really know what to think when I saw him and wasn’t sure Moore and O’Neill really “earned” the right to use him. I read a bit about him (although not the original story yet) — here, particularly being struck by this quote:

The Golliwog was a mixture of bravery, adventurousness, and love — for White children.

Because while reading the article I had a feeling that this all wasn’t okay, but others could make it feel like it was okay.

Mark, I think you brought up a lot of good points, many I’m going to agree with in a minute. But I think the basic “He’s not a bad guy, so it’s okay” really isn’t enough. Recently, I watched a cartoon clip of “The Go-Go Gophers” on YouTube. I used to watch that cartoon when I was a kid, and it has the Gophers as stereotypical Native Americans. One talks in “Me want ums” while the other spouts indecipherable jibberish. They both fight American army members in the west (represented by coyotes — an aggressor animal), and they’re considered the heroes while the coyotes (or at least the short general; the tall sergeant was kind of like a prototype of Kif from Futurama) were bullies and buffoons. Now, the Indians here are clearly the good guys, but the stereotypes … not so good. And it does play into what Pam is talking about with using a “safe” medium for whites, even if the message is good. (Worsening and confounding the issue is that the gophers are pale-furred and the coyotes have dark fur.)

Overall, I remain interested in what happens next with the Golliwog, if anything, however. O’Neill’s answer about “saving” the Golly is worrisome, and rather indecipherable to me — I don’t know why we need him. I hope it is something interesting they do and not just the sentimentalities of two old British white guys.

However, Pam I do think you are overstating the sexuality and the heteronormative/lesbian bias in the League. The lesbianism in particular only came into play in the latest volume. In fact, lesbianism got a rather bad rap when it first appeared in volume one. At a school with highly sexually charged and lesbian overtones, Victorian porn icon Rosa Coote cheerfully takes advantages of her charges. She allows a subordinate to beat one; passes off the girls’ rapes (”Perfectly fine, even though she was a little hysterical at the time.”) and then uses them to get publicity for her school. The woman practically runs a “refrigerator factory.”

I also agree with Mark; I don’t think what Hyde does or says should be taken as good because … well, he’s Hyde. And when he rapes Griffin, it’s portrayed clearly as rape, not as homosexual sex. When Hyde makes his speech about how the split doomed them both, he states that all Jekyll did wrong (and I think “sins” are in parentheses) was he masturbated to thoughts of men. In other words, if Jekyll had been OK with who he was, he wouldn’t have created Hyde and “probably doomed [them] both”, as Hyde says.

Mark also forgets the Scarlet Pimpernel prefers male Orlando (despite being married to a woman), and Natty Bumpo is also the odd man out in the 1700s League, basically because Fanny doesn’t like him. It’s also safe to say that Jimmy and Emma aren’t going to have a happy relationship. Yes, these characters aren’t center stage — but it’s clear they’re the good characters, while characters who make racial and homophobic slurs (Hyde, Griffin, Moriarty, Drummond, etc.) are the bad ones. So I don’t think a reduction to “Male gaze good! Gay men bad!” is really fair.

Fox, would you rather that white male artists just stopped dealing with non-white characters? Maybe we could get male superhero writers to stop including powerful female superheroes in their stories, and relegate the queer characters to the handful of gay writers working in mainstream comics. Personally, I’d rather encourage het anglo xian males to weigh in on the issues of other groups, because they might learn something in the process… and maybe even contribute something as well.