How Removing Gender from the Analysis of James Sturm's The Sponsor Makes You a Mark

November 7, 2014

How Removing Gender from the Analysis of James Sturm’s The Sponsor Makes You a Mark

I thought I could ride out the week without actually devoting anything like real time to James Sturm’s latest entry into the whiny artistic jealousy comics genre, but the sheer preponderance of stupid wafting around the comic is basically forcing me to puke something more substantive than a few tweets on the matter.

Today Heidi Mcdonald weighed in with a paragraph that, I mean you have to read it for yourself:
"To be honest, the gender question here is, for once, a red herring. I think Sturm’s satire—and it is a satire, not an autobiographical comic—was based on the image of two white guys fretting over the success of a younger female cartoonist. That was kinda the POINT.”

I think that’s what’s driving me craziest about this comic. That so many voices in comics are so oblivious to the text of the comic, and the way that they are embracing it is to toss out the central point about gender, and instead rally around the comic as both satirical AND somehow explaining something they’ve all felt. I mean look at Heidi’s paragraph here: she calls the gender question a red herring, and then says that the POINT of the comic is two white guys fretting over the success of a younger female cartoonist. And she says it’s not an autobiographical comic, but instead satire—but if you read the whole of what she’s written in that piece, she has no grasp of what is actually being satirized.

If we take Sturm’s comic as a satire, then what it is satirizing is softbatch white males crying over the success of women in comics. It is a satirization of their entitlement as men. And yet Heidi wants it both ways:

"Of course we all know that judging your own success by someone else’s is a short cut to despair. By the same token, we’ve all done what Casey does, looked at other people’s book deals, Facebook likes, retweets or dinner companions and found ourselves feeling shitty about someone else’s perceived success. It’s human nature. You do it, I do it, we all do it. And then, if we want to actually be a success in some measure, we move on."

So not only is it a “satire” it is also the explication of some kind of real thing that we should relate to as a reader—even though that thing is also what is being skewered by it being a satire.

And this view isn’t only Heidi’s, when the comic dropped Sean T. Collins tweeted out(EDIT: Sean T. Collins later the next day, did agree with someone who was talking about gender in the comic):
"It’s very cool and good to watch altcomix embrace financial success and mock people who are insecure and less successful imo. Great job gang."

Zack Soto also said initially in reaction to the comic(he later changed his mind(edit: he didn’t change his mind):
"Filed under "Only cartoonists will get this" but man, do I "get" this James Sturm comic."

So you see, not everyone who is defending the comic saw it as a satire. In fact the initial defense was basically about how overly sensitive people were being to include gender in the criticism of the comic—and that they were somehow obfuscating some real true point that all artists feel and Sturm should be somehow lauded for being the first person ever to express artistic jealousy.

Meanwhile, let’s get to the actual text of the comic. I don’t really care about the idea of Sturm’s intent as a creator. I just care what the text actually is. The text of the comic is that these two male comic creators have a relationship to each other whenever they are in some kind of crisis, the younger one calls on his “sponsor” to talk him through the problem. And then the older sponsor himself has another male sponsor. The crisis which has brought them together tonight is this cartoonist “Tessa” who through her burgeoning success at a younger age than youngest homedude, has completely destabilized both of these white dudes to the point that they are in hysterics, and can barely cope. We see all of this play out in the highly dramatic body language that Sturm has put into these characters.

Older sponsor dude drops a “what would Crumb do?” into the proceedings, and then young dude decides he needs to start thinking about grad school. Old dude then breaks down and has to call his sponsor who is also male.

The central crisis at the core of this story is white males inability to cope with a woman who is more successful than them in their field. That is literally what is in the text. You can’t BRING a gendered reading to the text, because the text IS gendered. What we see people like Soto and Mcdonald doing is actually REMOVING gender from the comic so that it fits their needs as a reader. And the problem there becomes very obvious, because once you remove gender from the comic, you lose out on the absurdity of the idea of this network of men and their worries about successful women. You end up with a comic about artistic jealousy that “only cartoonists get”.

But here’s the thing. YOU are the ones who are marring the text to get your reading.

The best thing about this comic is not that it is somehow relatable to your own petty existence sitting around worrying about the financial success of others as a barometer for the conviction you feel about your own work—it’s that it makes FUN of that. And that so many grabbed this comic and read it as their life story…man, the joke is on you. This comic is making fun of you.

Unless, looping back to intent, we assume that Sturm had no idea about the text he had created, and was oblivious to the gender warfare he depicted. In which case, you’re basically calling the author an idiot with your reading, and the comic a failure in executing your perception of an intent which is not expressed clearly in the comic.

As a last bit of business here. For those of you that get all soft and relatey to these artistic jealousy comics that come out every few weeks—such that you let yourself get played by a piece like this—you need to figure this shit out. If you’re crying in your sleep because someone’s drawing of grumpy cat got 50 million hits on tumblr and you get like 5 likes a month…fuck you. Art isn’t entitlement. If you don’t believe enough about what you are doing to not measure yourself against the most patently absurd ways to measure yourself—then what the fuck are you? Do you have something to say? Or are you just making comics because it’s the only thing you really know how to do, and no one has told you to stop? I mean be a fucking artist. Damn. Think about what you’re doing with your life.

Also stop being scared of women.

Or go get yourself a fucking Sponsor. I don’t know. Maybe you should be thinking about grad school? Maybe this comics game isn’t for you?