Why's the Bible so gory? To please the kids?

Why do kids, especially boys, like gross and disgusting things? As kids get into their teen years, they develop a fascination with gross and gory things. In my case, it was the gory images from "Tales from the Crypt".

Movie makers out of Hollywood long ago discovered box office gold in splatter flicks, such as "Scanners" or "Aliens", or even "Jaws", just to name a few. The Bible is filled with splattering, flaming, and exploding imagery. How interesting that right when kids develop their fascination with gore, it's time to get a bar mitzvah!

Perhaps the redactors to the Bible wanted to make sure that the gore was firmly rooted in a moral context (that is, part of God's plan, or a result of the Wrath of God), rather then being gratuitous and gross, and with the intention of scaring kids. Maybe the Biblical scribes of olde felt that it was important to scare kids with stories of God's wrath, all in the name of making sure that they lived a life that adhered to the commandments recorded by Moses. Because gore without God is a world that is lost. Even even gore WITH God is hard to stomach.

As I said earlier, perhaps our sages of yesteryear recognized that right as kids start getting interested in gory things, perhaps that's the best time for a child to assume the moral principles of adult. I wonder if that's a hidden reason why Jewish kids get their bar mitzvahs at thirteen years old!

What's the tone of God's voice? It matters!

In the torah, God often speaks to Moses. What does His voice sound like? I've already pointed out, in the last post, that God's words really don't tell us His MEANING, for the tone of His voice carry more content than the words He actually uttered. Let us suppose that God is passive-aggressive, or says things to test us mortals (I mean, God IS always testing our mettle, is He not?).

When reading the words of God in His exchanges with Moses, God could mean a variety of things depending on the tone of his voice. From anger to sarcasm to impishness...you just don't know. Only Moses knows the tone of God's voice when God spoke to his. But since we don't know it, we can't tell from the text whether Moses acted in good faith (sorry about the pun on "faith"), bad faith, out of a desire to please, or out of spite. Remember, Moses' relationship with God was very chummy and familiar; Moses did, after all, feel nothing about destroying the most sacred objects at the time, the stone tablets upon which God had carved the ten commandments. It makes you think twice about Moses' actual respect for God: how could Moses destroy the law, which he had just received from God? And why was God willing to make a second set, thus giving Moses a second chance? Think about it: God creates the ten commandments, etched in stone...and Moses, in a fit of rage, breaks them apart. Why is he taking his anger (at the people worshipping the Golden Calf) out on the stone tablets? Perhaps because the tablets were intended, by God and Moses, as a gift. But Moses, realizing that the People weren't worthy of the gift, destroyed it. Apparantly Moses wasn't into recycled gifts. No exchanging them at Bookman's for trade credit (that's a local joke. Bookman's is a "recycled entertainment" store in Arizona. But Bob Bookman is Jewish, so I'm sure he'd appreciate the joke) What's incredible, though, is that Moses gets himself a replacement copy! He goes back up Mount Sinai and God zaps off another set. I can only imagine what God might have said to Moses, on his return trip back up Mount Sinai: "Dude, you break this set, and your ass it toast!"
Without info about the tone of God's voice, or the sound of God's voice, it's up to us to imagine what God really meant when He spoke. Sarcastic? Coy? Humorous? Humorless? Angry? Professional? It's really hard to tell.

God may have created the World out of words when He spoke...but we have to decide what was God's mood at the time of creation, and at other key moments in the torah. There's a case to be made that the tone of God's voice more accurately reveals His intentions than do the literal meaning of His words.

Representing the Tone of God's Voice

God spoke to Moses. In my mind, I usually imagine a deep commanding voice...you know, the stereotype. But what clues to we really have about the TONE of God's voice? Not many... but if you think about it, it's vitally important for understanding the text of the torah. Is God calm? Angry? Sarcastic? Whispering? Gritting his teeth? Cool? You really don't know. It's up to the reader to imagine the "mood" of God when he's speaking.

Comic book artists don't have this problem; that's what word balloons are for. If God's angry, use an "electric" word balloon, filled with spikey points. If He's whispering, use a dotted line word balloon. These are the graphic symbols for representing speach. But think about how much fun you could have putting the text in different word balloon shapes. The shape of the word balloon completely changes the tone and mood of the voiced embodied therein. If we got into the habit of drawing speech balloons of our own design around the words of God (that is, the uttered "speech" of God), then we would be contributing in the listening of God, and ultimately the understanding of God. For the tone of someone's voice communicates just as much, if not more, than the words actually uttered. In fact, the tone and tenor of someones's voice, the "pre-verbal" noises that make communicate so much. But if all we're hearing are God's "words", God still needs our help in assigning a "voice" or a tone to those words. Comic book artists, based on their reading of God's tone, can design a thought balloon or a speech balloon which best represents that tone.

"Between thought and expression lies a lifetime" -- Lou Reed

...and a word balloon. Indeed.

Does God Speak in a Word Balloon?

As a comic book artist, and as the author of a Jewish graphic novel, I'm fascinated by the visual conventions we in the comics biz use to represent speech, thought, and feelings. The word balloon is an awesome creation. It floats above the heads of those speak, so that we can "read their minds", as it were. A pointer to the speaker quickly identifies for us who is doing the speaking. I wonder, when God spoke to Moses (pick your favorite scene), WHERE would the word balloon be? Of course, we could just point the word balloon skyward, and I'm sure everyone would get the idea, but is God really in a cloud? Or is He everywhere? If God is everywhere, then the word balloon would point nowhere. Maybe it would just be a disembodied sound effect floating in the air. But when Moses talks to God, I'm sure that Moses would have a word balloon point to his mouth. Representing God as a word balloon is a tricky idea, because it immediatly makes some assumptions: that God has a mouth, that God has a voice, and that God's voice is coming from somewhere that can be pointed at (with a word balloon). Throughout the Bible, God has spoken to Man by the use of various agents of vessels, such as the burning bush, the firey cloud that followed the Israelistes during their wanderings in the desert, and the talking ass (the equestrian type) in the story of Balak and Balaam. How is a comic artist to represent talking to God, but to do it in a respectful way? The easy thing to do would to just point a word balloon skyward and forget about it. But that simple act creates the assumption that (as already noted) that God has a mouth, a voice, and a physical place in the world. But it also introduces the feelings that we get from comic books; a kind of sassiness. Can that attitude exist in the Hebrew school or the prayer service, and still contribute to an aura of holiness and respect. That's an issue with which I often struggle. You want to be readable, and accessible, but you don't want to be a joke. You've got to straddle the line between the sublime and the ridiculous. That ridge is where the heart of the Comic Book Siddur resides. If I did my job correctly, you'll feel the frission.

The Torah as Literary Seqential Art

In their efforts to make the case that comics are like fine art, comic book artists with fine art pretentions have renamed what they do as "sequential art". When comics are recast as sequential art, then the whole panorama of art history suddenly looks like comics.

Any art that is broken down into bite sized pieces suddenly becomes fair game for being included in the sequential art pantheon. In fact, the whole "salon style" of hanging paintings on a wall in grid formation feeds into this idea nicely. If we view an art gallery or a museum as another version of a comic book page layout, then we can see that the most popular curator strategies are "salon style" (already mentioned), and "comic strip style", that is, hanging the pieces in a horizontal line.

To paraphrase Scott McCloud in in book "Understanding Comics", comics work the the areas between the pictures. Your mind make the sense by trying to see a series of disparate images unified in some way. Next time you look at a series of pictures on a wall, pretend that they are all hung in a certain order for a certain reason, and see if you can have fun trying to see a story in their order. You'll watch how your mind works when it tries to see the work as "comics"!

This idea got me thinking about the torah, and its presention into book form. The torah is a scroll. It's a big run-on document, that goes on and on and on...until the end of the scroll. But if you look at the torah in book form, you can see that it's been divided into various portions, or parshas. This was done by later editors. This act of editing a big long scroll into "chapters" is a milestone in sequential art: breaking the stories down into bite-sized pieces. The same goes for the book fomat as well: each turn of the page is an interruption, a break in the sequence; a "panel" for all intents and purposes.

From the conversion of a scroll, into a book with pages, Biblical editors are made the Bible into a work of sequential art, although it wasn't called that at the time. The Torah is in fact a form of literary sequential art, page by page, line by line... Just as Scott McCloud made the point that comics happens by what goes on BETWEEN the panels, the torah is akin to comics in that there's a lot that goes on between the lines.

Moses & the "Vault of Horror"

In my last post, I looked at Frederic Wertham as a sympathetic character, who worried about the influence that comics had on children. In that story, comic literature (specifically the Horror comics of the 1950's, created by EC Comics) were the villain. But Horror comics didn't spring out a vacuum in 1950's America. They sprang from the soul of a country that had been conditioned by decades of "Red Baiting" and fear mongering, and fear of "aliens". Horror comics, as well as sci-fi movies about space aliens, and Hitchcock films about, say someone watching you through a "Rear Window", all provided a nessessary emotional release; it was cathartic.

Against this backdrop appears Frederic Wertham, with his book "Seduction of the Innocent", where he claims that comic books, especially horror comics, are a cause of juvenile delinquency. Had he been a little more intellectually curious, he might have asked, "why are horror comics so popular?" If he had focused his attention on the consumers of horror comics, instead of those who create them, he'd have to look at why kids have a fascination with gross and gory things. The discussion might then broaden to include parenting, the whole "nature vs. nurture" argument, and other topics.

While researching Wertham a little further, however, I found him to he a fascinating character. Although he comes across as a shrill critic, and a real threat to the freedom of the press, he's motivated by a desire to protect young people from the corrupting influences of mass consumer culture, mass culture being a contemporary equivalent of the "Golden Calf" in the Bible. I don't know if Wertham viewed himself as a kind of "Moses" character, sent from God to show the people the law, but his behavior (his "prophet"-like style, warning the people of dangers), but I see him as that type of person. From my research online about him, I've learned that he was trained as a psychiatrist, corresponded with Sigmund Freud (and later in life with comics fans through their fanzines), and was very liberal in his sympathies. I was surprised that worked for racial equality and against censorship. However, there is something very sad and tragic about Wertham, for his pseudoscientific book "Seduction of the Innocent" caused a lot of trouble, but was short on "proof". Wertham noticed that many juvenile delinquents read a lot of comic book literature. Therefore, he concluded, comics were the CAUSE of their juvenile delinquency. You can't make scientific claims without scientfic testing

Wertham's book really did cast a long period of darkness over the comics landscape; a Plague of Darkness. So, at once, Wertham is a sort of Moses character, as well as his own Pharaoh; contained within his own moral crusade are the seeds of the Plague of Darkness. I'm sure he meant well, and that his heart was in the right place, but look at all of the trouble he caused.

And he failed; comics today are darker and more sinister (and more well written!) than ever before. Although he helped destroy EC Comics (a real "CrimeSuspense" Story), fans of those comics went to college, went to art school, and now create very mature works, inspired by EC Comics. Libraries across America include comic books and graphic novels in their collections. Clearly, librarians value the literary qualities of comic book literature.

But I'm bothered how Wertham's crime fighting crusading spirit was the source of so much grief. Clearly he was motivated by a sense of moral indignation and fear. I don't look at him as a cynical person, rather as someone who made emotional decisions rather than scientific ones. Wertham was a psychiatrist, so I'm interested in his project to psychoanalyze superheroes (actually, as a psychiatrist, he should be prescribing medicine for the various superheroes. Psychoanalysis is more in the domain of psychology)

This musing about Frederic Wertham has me thinking about the Jewish idea of "tikkun olam", or "Repairing the World". Clearly, Wertham saw the world as filled with corrupting influences, and that the job of the censor is one of "repair". But can censorship be a valid instrument of repairing the world? Should all ideas be vented, so that the best ones float to the top? (Maybe the best ideas have the most hot air? ;) An ideal for Judaism is to "repair the world", but that suggests that there is an idea of what that "world to come" will be like. If everyone has a different idea of what a "World Repaired" looks like, then you've got the problem of competing agendas; you've got seeds of conflict, even before you can agree to disagree.

The irony of Wertham is that his moral crusade against horror comics created his own "Vault of Horror". When you read about Wertham's background, and his liberal sympathies, he comes across as "Moses", saving the people from paganism. But when you see the real effects of what did, he comes across as Pharaoh, bring a Plague of Darkness across the land of artistic freedom. I'm not quite sure what to make of all this. Although I am left with questions about heroes & villains, and the criteria we use to tell the difference. As it is in life, so it is in today's comic books.

Sympathy for Frederic Wertham

I'm holding in my hand a recent comic book, published by a mainstream press, and available in any comic book shop. The content of story is so dark and gross, that it makes the beloved EC Comics of the 1950's look like comedy. For those of you who are familiar with the history of comic books, you're familiar with the book "Seduction of the Innocent" by Fredric Wertham, which made the case that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. Wertham, a psychiatrist, was roundly derided in comic book circles a "square" adult who just didn't "get" comics. So why do I feel that some of his claims are legit? People ARE influenced by the media that they consume. I'm thinking of, say, the cop who thinks he's or "Dirty Harry" or "Travis Bickle" (of "Taxi Driver"), or the investment tycoon who thinks he's "Gordon Gekko", or the bodybuilder who thinks he's "The Hulk"; it seems that we live in a world of media characters, and we model ourselves after those whom we admire-- or at least those who we see in comics and in the movies. In fact, we probably measure our own lives against those lives we see in the media.

Back to comics and human values, where this is all leading. I'm looking at a comic which I enjoy reading, but would wouldn't feel right if I recommended for kids. It's a dark story (both in content, and in the color palatte). The story logo contains the Nazi "SS" lettering. The imagery in the book includes an angry mouse having sex, a trashed out house with clothes and garbage everywhere, seedy looking characters who look like drug dealers, burned out slums, drug deals (depictions of the exchange of drugs for money), a fat kid with a gun being attacked by giant flying cockroaches, his dead body lying on a porch stoop, dank low-rent apartments, a Wall Street businessman in a sports car making a drug distribution deal with his grubby street partner, words like "fuck" and "bitch". The story ends with a swarm of giant cockroaches feasting on the body of the deceased drug dealer.
After having gotten this far in my description of this comic book, I see that I'm having a change of heart. Despite the fact that the setting and characters of this story are "pagan" and vile, the story does have a moral heart: the bad guys lose (not all of them, but this particular character). The heroes in the story, the moral agents, are actually the cockroaches. They're the ones who live amongst the evil and root it out. It looks disgusting, but I'm sure that it's just as foul as watching Aaron's sons get torched for entering the Temple with "unholy fire". The Bible is just as violent and "pagan" (in its punishments) as is my comic book.

I feel for Frederic Wertham. I'm sure that he worried about his kids, and how the artistic advances in culture (he might call them "degenerate") would affect kids. There are many examples of cases where kids do some heinous act because they read about it or saw it on TV. I'm sure that he felt that he as acting as Superman would, to put it ironically: fighting for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. But if you just focus on the gory details, such as the gruesome EC Horror Comics, or the gross cockroach story that I used to start this article, you'd conclude that comics are "pagan" or immoral. However, that's misguided. You've got to look at who the heroes are, and what the implied values in the story are. The cockroaches, as heroes, "save the day" to some extent, yet their work is not done, and may never be done. The thing that we've got to get used to as readers is to realize that "heroes", like God, could be found in the most unlikely of places. A gut test is this: do you feel brought down and depressed by the story? Or oddly uplifted? Today's edgy comics require more of the reader then those of the Golden Age of yesteryear.

The "Hand" of God

In Judaism, its forbidden to represent God as an image. Curiously, however, we do see stand-ins for God throughout the torah, such as a burning bush, or as a cloud with fire in it. One of the more enjoyable images for me is the Hand of God...literally. There is a synagogue for the 3rd century (which is now in modern-day Syria) called the "Synagogue at Dura Europos". It is filled with mural after mural depicting scenes from the Bible, very similar to what we're used to seeing from Giotto in his depiction of the life of Jesus...but created by Jews thousands of years before Christ. In several murals you can see an actual hand reaching out of a cloud down to people below; that is the Hand of God. So interesting, especially at that early history of the Jews, that God is represented by a Hand. Check out this example of
God freeing the people of Israel from Egypt: It looks like Man really IS created in the image of God. It's just that God is literally out of the picture, with the exception of his arms, which gesture from the top of the "picture plane". God's outstretched arms are a necessary storytelling device in this panoramic scene, for with God's arms, you'd just see a bunch of people escaping Egypt. The artist, who I'm sure had a familiarity of the prohibition of representing an image of God, made a representation of God's arms anyway. Perhaps that's an important point: it's really God's FACE that into which we're not supposed to look.

Remember the scene when Moses goes to the top of Mount Sinai to get the ten commandments from God, but he had to turn his face away from God? You can't look God in the face, lest you die. But what about looking at God's arms? Arms are a little less descriptive. We recognize people by their faces. Could you recognize even those people most close to you simply by looking their arms? It'd bet not. Arms are practically generic, so it's safe to safe arms are practically the same; they're not useful for indentifying people (or God), so it's safe to put God's "arms" in a picture. The important thing with is discussion, however, is to make the point that we need to see a picture of God's arms to understand that, as it says in the torah (and I'm paraphrasing) "You shall leave Egypt like an outstretched arm"... It's the words that you find inside of the mezuzzah. If you look carefully, you can see that God is also wearing tefillin (of course, it could also be cracks in the wall)

I really wish that there were other examples of God's Hand in Jewish art, because the hand is so expressive. One of my favorite artists is George de la Tour, mainly for his intricate use of expressive hand poses. My favorite painting by him is the "Cheat with the Ace of Clubs". It as all sorts of interesting hand poses which tell a great story. Wouldn't it be great if God, who is such an expressive character in the Bible, got a few more expressive shots of his hands? Imagine a visual story told exclusively with hand gestures. Could it be done? I wonder if God had no voice, but just the use of his "hands"; how would he command the Israelites? I've always enjoyed silent graphic novels. Could we treat the relationship between God and Moses as a silent graphic novel? The wheels in my head are spinning...

Abstract Art & the curious case of the Amoeba

For Jewish artists to be stylistically kosher, can they paint realistic / representational pictures? The motivation behind this query is the commandment which says that you may not make images of any creature, including those under water, those that creep on the ground, and that those that fly in the air. Presumably, had the ancients known about microscopic life (or more precisely, if God had been a little more specific) there would have been an additional provision for there not to be any depictions of microscopic life either. Therefore, so the socioligical explanation goes, that is why Jews are drawn towards making "abstract" art: because it doesn't look like anything that swims, creeps on the ground, or flies in the air.

Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you: does the amoeba not swim? Or how about the paramecium? Yes, of course they do! And how would you describe their appearance? (Remember, in this case, it's not fair to describe an amoeba as "amoeba-like": that gets you nowhere) Admit it: an amoeba is shape like a blob. That it, it's shape is..."abstract". If you saw a painting of a bunch of blobs, would you regard that as abstract art? Or a realistic respresentation of a family of amoebas? (new concept: amoebas have families!)

The torah (through Moses) forbids the creation of idols, lest we start to idolize them, and idol worship is the thing that Judaism is squarely against. Sometimes, if you're feeling cranky, you can see some blurring around the edges of this value. For argument's sake, let me set up an oversimplification: Judaism is structured around the life of the mind, where everything is abstact, and the only reality exists in the world of concepts. Although we Jews are oriented to make the World a Better Place (i.e. the "real" world of people, places, and things) we want to stay off of the slippery slope to idol worship, so we avoid making sculptures of any person, lest we start treating it like a God. I think that the proviso for Jewish sculptors is that if they do create an image of a person, then it must not look heroic (I'm thinking of the sculptures of Einstein at National Academy of Science Washington, DC, and the sculpture of him sitting in a garden in Israel, which has him lounging on some steps, and sittion on a park bench) And if making realistic sculpture still proves to moral problem, then the Jewish artist can always retreat into abstraction. But if his work looks amoeba-like, then he's being an idol maker after all!
God created, and loves, ALL creatures, even paramecium and amoebas. And can you see someone worshipping a stone blob? How about a massive stone blob? (Say, a massive molten meteorite from outer space?) Although this is veering into the ridiculous, it's all to make the point ALL art is representational, its just that sometimes you've got to change your perspective to see it.
So does this mean that the Ancient Israelites were screwed from the outset, basically commanded to not make any images at all? No. As I see it, the only want to work your way out of this puzzle is midrashic: that God's world can only be perfect if it includes contradictions and inconsistencies! For in every commandment, there are the seeds of inconsistency (I think)