Abstract
This essay studies Edie Fake’s award-winning graphic novel Gaylord Phoenix from the perspective of Queer Theory and Transgender Studies. Nikki Sullivan’s use of the term transmogrification from her work on somatechnics provides a critical lens through which to examine Fake’s exploration of the transgender body in his narrative. Fake includes multiple images of bodies undergoing radical transformations through a combination of magic and surgery, blurring the distinction between modern science and the occult. The essay also explores Fake’s status as an innovator in the world of comic books and graphic novels as he creates an idiosyncratic verbal and visual vocabulary largely unprecedented in the world of sequential art.
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Notes
The interest in comics as a medium worthy of study has produced several notable recent works of scholarship, two of the most prominent being Hillary L. Chute’s Graphic Women: Life Narrative & Contemporary Comics and Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Within comic book fan circles, however, critical discourse has a long history, dating back to the zines of the 1960s and 1970s and to publications including The Comics Buyer’s Guide and The Comics Journal in the 1970s and 1980s. Those interested in a history of comics scholarship might begin with Hatfield’s book, as its first chapter provides a good overview not only of the “emerging literature” of his title but also of the critical discussions which have matured with that literature.
In his 2011 review of the collected edition of Gaylord Phoenix, Jake Austen describes the book as “a narrative-esque, 2-colored, dream-like (nightmare/wet dream mashup division) art-gasm of a minicomic that takes Fort Thunder aesthetics to a new visual-symphonic plane…” In a 2012 review of Gaylord Phoenix’s sixth and final installment, he again refers to the book as a work of art which “[m]akes the Fort Thunder guys seem like they are on Garfield level…no, make that Heathcliff level.” For more information on the artists in the Fort Thunder collective, as well as some examples of their work, see Tom Spurgeon’s article “Fort Thunder Forever” (The Comics Reporter. December 31, 2003. Accessed 15 September 2012. URL: http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/briefings/commentary/1863/).
As I discuss later in this essay, most of my analyses of Gaylord Phoenix are based on its original format, the series of six zines or minicomics which Fake completed in early 2012. Small press publisher Secret Acres collected and published these individual, self-printed comics in 2010 (with the exception of Issue #6, which Fake printed and released in 2012). While the content of the minicomics and the collection is largely the same, there are some significant differences in terms of the colors used, notably in the final issues. Also, the covers for the individual issues have not been included in the Secret Acres edition. For more on the culture of zines and minicomics, see Fredric Wertham, The World of Fanzines: A Special Form of Communication (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993); Amy Spencer, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture (New York: Marion Boyars, 2008); and Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (Bloomington: Microcosm Publishing, 2008).
Other than Gaylord Phoenix himself, most of the characters in the narrative do not have specific names. I have taken to naming some of these characters in order to refer to them in a consistent and, I hope, accurate or evocative fashion. I refer to Gaylord Phoenix’s love interest as the lover and to the Gaylord who appears in Issue #5 as the Diva, whom I discuss in more detail later in this essay.
The parallels between Smith’s films and Fake’s works are worth examining in more detail. With its pale yellows, bright oranges, and almost pink color palette, Issue #5 recalls the gauzy, ornamental imagery of Smith’s work, which inspired Andy Warhol, experimental theater directors Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson, and essayist Susan Sontag, whose writings on camp were influenced partly by her response to Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1962). Sontag’s assessment of Smith’s film might be applied to Gaylord Phoenix: “Flaming Creatures is that rare modern work of art: it is about joy and innocence. To be sure, this joyousness, this innocence is composed out of themes which are—by ordinary standards—perverse, decadent, at the least highly theatrical and artificial. But this, I think, is precisely how the film comes by its beauty and modernity” (Sontag 1966, 229). Michael Moon’s critique of Sontag’s essay underscores, however, the limitations of her argument. As he correctly points out, “For every person who actually saw Smith’s film, perhaps a hundred know it only from Sontag’s description of it.” According to Moon, Sontag’s description of the joyous “innocence” of the film ignores the revolutionary or, as he describes it, “incendiary” nature of Smith’s art. Moon critiques “the extreme degree to which” Sontag’s essays “Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures” and “Notes on Camp” “depoliticize the sexual and artistic practices that are their subjects….Flaming Creatures not only exemplifies a remarkable range of experiences and sophistication about the ways people inhabit gender and sexuality, [but] it also manifests an acutely intelligent political awareness and engagement” (Moon 1989, 35—36).
For more discussions of superhero bodies, see Aaron Taylor, “Investigating the Engendered Superhero Body” (Journal of Popular Culture 40.2) and Craig Fischer, “Fantastic Fascism? Jack Kirby, Nazi Aesthetics, and Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies” (International Journal of Comic Art 5.1 [Spring 2003]).
Gaylord Phoenix, in both its minicomic and collected formats, does not have page numbers. Also, fonts within the text change frequently. I have tried to indicate which texts are in lower case and which ones are written entirely in caps. In quoting from the text itself, I have used slashes to indicate line breaks. My use of slashes to indicate the layout of the text might suggest a certain poetic quality to Fake’s prose; while the text embedded within Fake’s images does have a fragmented, lyrical sensibility, it also is a key compositional element of the pages themselves.
Sullivan is interested not only in reflecting on transgender issues but also in theorizing various body modification practices. Sullivan argues that Stryker’s essay is “potentially useful for any attempt to rethink body modification practices more generally” but remains “concerned that some practices and forms of perverse embodiment may be more open to reinscription than others…” (Sullivan 2006, 558). Throughout much of her essay, Sullivan maps the intersections of a number of somatic transformations, exploring the links between “transgenderism, cosmetic surgery, and ‘non-mainstream’ forms of body modification,” all of which, as she argues, might be studied by “[bringing] Stryker’s insights to bear on the debate regarding the status of such practices, and in particular their relation to the question of agency” (Sullivan 2006, 558).
Gaylord Phoenix can, for example, be found in the zine or minicomics section of comic book and zine specialty shops such as Quimby’s and Chicago Comics. The zines share space with all sorts of handmade ephemera, books stitched together with needle and thread or bound with long-armed staplers, covers colored with crayons or magic markers or duplicated on color Xerox machines. The bound version of Gaylord Phoenix, published and distributed by Secret Acres, sits with other graphic novels, not far from works by Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel, and the Hernandez Brothers.
As Stuart Kaplan explains in an overview of the divinatory and archetypal meanings of the cards—in this case an analysis and explanation based on the writings of Arthur Edward Waite and the now iconic illustrations of Pamela Colman Smith—The Chariot represents “Adversity, possibly already overcome. Conflicting influences. Turmoil. Vengeance. Success. Possibly, a voyage or journey. Escape. Rushing to a decision. Need to pay attention to details. Urgency to gain control of one’s emotions” (Kaplan 1991, 8).
As George Aichele and Richard Walsh argue in their analysis of the transfiguration stories in the Gospels, “The metamorphosis of Jesus is a change of both physicality and identity, his transformation into another, the revelation of a monster…that terrifies his disciples….Monsters are always something that reveals, whether there is a voice from the sky or not, but in these texts the disciples’ responses suggest that the revelations may not be so positive, and not something that augments faith…” (Aichele and Walsh 2011, 263).
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Cremins, B. Bodies, Transfigurations, and Bloodlust in Edie Fake’s Graphic Novel Gaylord Phoenix . J Med Humanit 34, 301–313 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9214-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9214-z