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The End of Comic Comfort: Manipulating the Superhero in Laylah Ali's Greenheads
Laylah Ali's Greenheads series presents a discomforting view of an imaginary society.
Figures with green bowling ball-like heads commit terrible acts of violence against one another including hangings by belt or crushing skulls with disembodied heads. There has been much discussion over the violence in Greenheads but little discussion on the Greenheads' identity. In this series of over eighty small gouache on paper paintings, it becomes apparent that this imaginary society is composed of limited types of figures: citizens with normal clothing; rulers with exotic head dresses; religious figures dressed in black robes and eye masks; and heroes with leotards, capes, and face masks. My interest is in these heroic figures, wearing the hero's costume that is at odds with the deeds they do.
The heroes-by-appearance in Greenheads have a close relationship to visual heroic narratives, and by extension, cartoons. The crisp, clean, and simple graphic style of the
Greenheads' world is often classified as cartoony—the series has been included in the cartoon anthologies Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation and Cult Fiction: Art and
Comics. Ali’s heroes are very different than Superman and Batman, mainstream superhero figures who populate an entire genre of cartoons. Her heroes have the same capes and masks, but they are not presented in heroic ways. Many have been thwarted and bound up to prevent the saving of the innocent; many are the perpetrators of the horrific crimes they should prevent.
These heroes by dress are confusing figures that don't appear to bring order to their confusing world. I argue the Greenhead heroes are a catalyst to a conversation about the way narrative influences perception of identity; a viewer's assumptions about the heroic narrative construct the identity of these heroes. Ali's work is a significant contribution to the discourse about the construction of heroic identity because Greenheads examines what it means to be a hero outside Hein 2 the traditional heroic narrative, creating characters who lack their assumed identities. To focus this argument—because works within Greenheads come together to form a basic internal language for interpreting each work separately and collectively, making the discussion of one piece nearly inseparable from another—I will use untitled (1997) and untitled (1997) from the
Greenheads series (see attachments). Because both works are untitled and made in the same year, I will refer to the first work as untitled (tied and flying hero) and the second work as untitled (tortured hero).
To argue untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) show characteristics outside the traditional heroic narrative, I must first detail the discourse surrounding the current comic narrative and the hero's place within it. Emma Mahony's introduction to Cult Fiction: Art and Comics describes the comic as "pictorial storytelling" that combines "linguistic and visual signs to drive their narratives" (Mahony "Introduction" 11). This pictorial story, created through both image and word, is often constructed in sequenced form with a "dramatically simplified style" that allows comics to create "a common and accessible language" (Clark 26). The primary character of this narrative language is the superhero, a character of American origins designed to uphold American values. In her article "The Power of Suggestion...... The Suggestion of Power"
Clark explains superheroes embody the values of the society in which they were created; the superheroes of early to mid-20th century America, especially Superman, were "zealous protector[s] of law and order, [men] who used [their] superhuman powers to restore order and maintain the status quo" (Clark 29). They were heroes designed to "uphold American values in the time of world wars and the Great Depression" (Clark 29). Through the years authors have made the comic superhero reject its masculine, American values and embrace politically trampled identities like non-heterosexual sexuality and non-normative race. The ideals the comic Hein 3 superhero embodies have become more vast and varied: "Where there once were universal heroes and ideas, there are now personalized and complicated voices" (Clark 32). The superheroes of untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero), with their flying away from helpless victims, belong to the voices of modern comics.
Much discourse about the modern superhero is centered on the roles superheroes have in new comics. Like Clark, Rebecca Wanzo argues many superheroes have abandoned their roles of embodying white American values. Her article "Wearing Hero-Face: Black Citizens and
Melancholic Patriotism in Truth: Red, White, and Black" labels many current superheroes as
"anti-heroes, struggling with a morally ambiguous state of affairs" (Wanzo 344). The superhero is a type of patriot, one that must love his country and show nationalism for "one's own community or group, and cosmopolitanism" (Wanzo 346). Acting on this patriotism becomes difficult when the superhero himself is of a minority; she argues the current superhero— especially if African American—cannot perform their duty of upholding the laws of the state because those laws actually harm his own minority identity. The superheroes of untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero), though of the normative race in their own world, are a minority through their non-existence in the viewer's world, making pertinent an examination of their possible status of anti-hero.
To summarize, the superhero comic is characterized by its ability to convey messages of normative identity to the viewer in a pictorial way. untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled
(tortured hero) are definitely comics. They are composed in the common comic pictorial style of having multiple frames that combine to form a sequenced narrative. Most obvious, both pieces contain characters dressed in the identity markers of superheroes—disguises, masks, capes, and leotards—placing the two pieces in the more specific superhero comic narrative. I argue Ali’s Hein 4 figures better fit the markers of the more modern superhero comic, characterized by its ability to show more complex non-normative identities and value systems. The figures of Ali’s comics, figures whom I will call characters as I am discussing them in relationship to narrative structure, have a complex non-normative identity. The characters in untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) are complex with the "[c]onventional codes that help map race and gender are here scrambled, as these schematized bodies traffic in the logic of resemblance"
(Byran-Wilson 23).
Yet for the ease of categorizing untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) in the superhero comic narrative, there is much about the two pieces that do not rest easily with that classification. A key component of comics is their ability to create nostalgia, that they deal with contemporary issues through their use of historical symbols and language to "construct romantic narratives about a golden age" (Wanzo 351). If this premise is accepted, then untitled
(tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) do not fit the narrative markers of comics. The pieces do not evoke a sense of nostalgia like most comics but of horror. The past is where belts were used as devices of punishment, where the body was stretched and torn in torture, not the present. As Michelle Wright states in her article "The Spectacle of Violence in Laylah Ali's
Greenheads" the pieces show "primitive violence with an aesthetic," something that does not fit with nostalgia's forms of beauty (118). With an aestheticized violence occurring across vast light blue almost pretty skies, Ali rejects the comforting connotation of nostalgia in numerous ways.
She even states the works are not a "sort of fantasy world which is my secret little world like a dollhouse" (Ali qtd. in Art21: Power). Here the comic is not fun.
The list of Ali's manipulations to the superhero comic narrative and nostalgia is quite long, even with analysis of only untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero). Hein 5
Firstly, untitled (tied and flying hero) does not depict the values of the American hero. With three heroes tied and hung by the feet, it is obvious this hero can be thwarted; he—or even she as there are no gendered features—is not the last hope against evil. In the next frame of the three- frame piece, an unbound hero—did he escape? not get caught?—is flying away from the helpless heroes, looking down at the characters bound by belts and string in the frame below. Though it is not clear, it looks as if the free superhero is fleeing both from his community group and from the citizens; he is abandoning the powered and the powerless, and in this case the powered has become equivalent to the powerless. The bound heroes have no more hope of being rescued by the escaping hero than do the citizens below. The heroes' power—both the bound and the fleeing—has been equalized to that of the citizen. The superhero has nothing super about him.
If the hero-like character in untitled (tied and flying hero) does not uphold heroic traits, is this character an anti-hero? Key to Wanzo's discussion of the anti-hero is knowing who has authority within society, a very unclear variable in Greenheads as a whole; my assumption that the characters with head dresses in untitled (tied and flying hero) are citizens is challenged by untitled (tortured hero) in which a head dressed character has an un-caped hero tied in such a way that he can brutally control the movement of the hero-like character's limbs. The characters that looked merely like citizens in untitled (tied and flying hero) because they needed help now appear as characters of authority. Clothing, the most obvious markers of identity in Ali's work is an unreliable source of information; rather, "it is only the expressions on their oversized heads, a contortion of their denture-like teeth, or a look in their eyes that gives us any indication of who holds authority in the clan" (Mahony "Laylah Ali" 26). The expressions on characters' faces are vast, varied, and frequently change; the hero in untitled (tortured hero) screams in pain in one frame and then looks confused and awed in the next. Reading authority from character Hein 6 expressions is as dubious as reading authority from clothing in Greenheads. There is no way to know who holds power. Suggesting the superheroes in untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled
(tortured hero) are anti-heroes is fruitless if the viewer does not know who in the paintings to trust because the anti-hero is defined by his opposition to power.
Even an analysis of the anti-hero in regards to race doesn't apply to the Greenheads.
Wanzo argues the power the anti-hero is fighting against is often opposite his race. Yet unless the head dresses in untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) are used to represent racial and ethnic differences—an idea many critics equate with Ali's Typology series but not Greenheads—racial inequality in the Greenhead world does not exist. The society is entirely filled with characters having green heads and black bodies. Still, the society is filled with chaos as characters commit acts of violence, these acts often having racial histories; belts, used in untitled (tied and flying hero) to bind the heroes and citizen-like characters, are associated with whipping and slavery. Characters of the same race commit acts of violence against one another as the hero flies by, ignoring the callings of shared identity.
The hero-like characters of untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) do not do any of the things a hero is supposed to do, nor is there any way to determine if that hero is fighting for or against a power. The pictorial language of untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) is no longer easily assessable like it should be in most comics. When these hero-like characters are interpreted through the stereotyped system of the heroic narrative, the cartoon no longer serves the function of the cartoon. untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) do not promote American values or promote an identity. The hero-like characters may have the appearance of a hero, but their actions have been modified so "hero" no longer functions as the symbol of a man fighting for the rights of a normative or even non- Hein 7 normative group of people. Mark Singer's "'Black Skins' and White Masks: Comic Books and the
Secret of Race" documents the attempts of comics to represent any identity other than white
American. He argues comic books containing superheroes have "proven fertile ground for stereotyped depictions of race" because "[c]omics rely upon visually codified representations in which characters are continually reduced to their appearances, [especially superheroes] whose characters are wholly externalized into their heroic costumes and aliases" (Singer 107). The cultural language surrounding the viewer creates the label of hero, the label that rids the hero-like characters of untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) of their unique identity: looking like heroes who aren't heroes.
The imposition of the superhero comic narrative on the hero-like characters in untitled
(tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) block discussion of what these caped and leotard wearing characters actually are. Julia Bryan-Wilson's article "Color Schemes: Laylah
Ali's Greenheads" gives an apt comparison of Kara Walker's life size black silhouette cutouts to
Ali's Greenheads series: "In their imagery, both Walker and Ali depict aggression, power, abuse—sometimes punishingly so—while also unraveling that violence using formal maneuvers, including absurd inventions, numbing repetition, compelling surfaces, and narrative incongruity"
(25). I see Walker's Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a Grand and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery! (see attachment) (from hereon referred to as Slavery!
Slavery!) as having an interesting dialogue with untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled
(tortured hero). Both show a grotesque image of a society composed of one race. Similar to the lack of order in untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero), Slavery! Slavery! shows a society in a state of chaos. The slightly larger than life-size characters crowd against each other as if there isn't enough space; they dance around with rapid motions that make their Hein 8 clothing flail in the air, a woman with breasts prominently showing careens to the ground from a roof. The scene is a massive wall of grotesque characters committing crimes against characters of the same race. The same race committing acts of violence against one another is repulsive and grotesque in all three works.
Slavery! Slavery! and untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) have similar amounts of horror and grotesque, but viewer interpretation is easier for Walker's work than Ali's works. Firstly, Slavery! Slavery! is titled, giving the viewer a starting place for interpretation whereas Ali's is not. In an interview with Allan Isaac, Ali says she does not title her work because she is "am more interested in hooking into and playing off narratives outside of the picture. So [she] provide[s] cues and one can move from the image and off into one's own reference system, and back onto the image again" (155). The obvious starting place for interpretation with Slavery! Slavery! is slavery, and the vast horror of this subject corresponds to the many life sized characters that dominate the gallery wall at the Whitney; the scale of the work and the scale of the grotesque correspond. Walker's Slavery! Slavery! will stop a viewer because it presents the grotesque in a large non-ignorable way, and Ali's cartoons would stop a viewer reading the weekend paper. The obvious starting place for interpretation with Ali's work is the cartoon, and the size, crisp and colored style, and obvious cartoon aesthetic make the piece very identifiable to the viewer. But the weekend cartoons are fun, not depressing or jaw dropping because of their glorified bloodshed. Ali's untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) go against the viewer's expectation, placing racial violence in a location it does not usually enter, and by doing so, creates a work in which racial violence is shocking and provocative, more provocative than a piece specifically about slavery. Ali's hero-like characters have abandoned Hein 9 their own peoples; the viewer's ally of the superhero has turned against his/her value system, destroying the nostalgia of the comforting comic.
The manipulation of the hero-like characters' identities in untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) is a demonstration that society doesn’t always know what it thinks it knows. With caped characters and damsel-in-distress type characters, the heroic cartoon narrative appears to be the appropriate reference system for her work, but it's not; the easiest and most often applied reference system is not always the best. Ali's untitled (tied and flying hero) and untitled (tortured hero) challenge how identity is read through outward aesthetics.
Appearances do not solely compose an identity because actions also matter. In this way the two pieces—and by extension Greenheads—is a precursor to Ali's later Typology series which she describes as "see[ing] how much could be indicated without explicit actions. How much could be read through the faces, clothes, and postures of the characters?" (Ali qtd. in Onli). In Greenheads nothing can be read through outward visual aesthetics. The intriguing cartoon style sucks the viewer into a world of violence; the innocent superhero costume hides the hero's role of merely being a label that essentially means nothing. Visual appearance, thus visual identity, is defeated by a character’s action or even inaction. The works value judgment of character through relationships to others, not through appearances. The hero-like characters are labeled hero because it is supposedly obvious, the most convenient, and ironically, the most wrong. Hein 10
Attachment 1
Laylah Ali, untitled, 1997. Gouache and pencil on paper, 11 x 21 inches. (Ali, Laylah The Greenheads Series) *referred to as untitled (tortured hero)
Attachment 2
Laylah Ali, untitled, 1997. Gouache and pencil on paper, 10 x 10 inches. (Ali, Laylah The Greenheads Series) *referred to as untitled (tied and flying hero) Hein 11
Attachment 3
Walker, Kara. Slavery! Slavery! Presenting a Grand and LIFELIKE Panoramic Journey into Picturesque Southern Slavery, 1997. Cut paper, 132" x 1020." (Walker) Hein 12
Works Cited Ali, Laylah. The Greenheads Series. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2012. Print. Art21: Power. PBS. 2005. 8 February 2013. < http://www.pbs.org/art21/watch-now/episode- power>. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. "Color Schemes: Laylah Ali's Greenheads." The Greenheads Series by Laylah Ali. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2012. Print. 22-31. Clark, Vicky A. "The Power of Suggestion...... The Suggestion of Power." Comic Release: Negotiating Identity of a New Generation by Vicky A. Clark and Barbara Bloemink. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2002. Print. Clark, Vicky A. and Barbara Bloemink. Comic Release: Negotiating Identity of a New Generation. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2002. Print. Isaac, Allan. "Here Comes The Kiss: A Conversation Between Laylah Ali And Allan Isaac." Massachusetts Review 49.5 (2008): 153-160. Academic Search Complete. University of Maine. Web. 9 Feb. 2013. Mahony, Emma. "Introduction." Cult Fiction: Art and Comics ed. by Kim L. Pace. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2007. 11-13. Print. Mahony, Emma. "Laylah Ali." Cult Fiction: Art and Comics ed. by Kim L. Pace. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2007. 26. Print. Onli, Meg. "Interview: Laylah Ali." Black Visual Archive. 2011. Creative Capital and Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. 12 February 2013
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Bibliography Ali, Laylah. The Greenheads Series. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2012. Print. Ali, Laylah. Note Drawings. Massachusetts: DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, 2008. Print. Ali, Laylah. Resume. 2012. Web. "Laylah Ali." Ellen Miller Gallery. nd. 12 February 2013
"Laylah Ali: Drawings from the Typology series." The University of Arizona Museum of Art. January 2008. The University of Arizona. 12 February 2013