This essay provides a case study of the extended conflict between an animal welfare organization, the American Animal Defense League, and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) that took place between 1923 and 1925. The essay distinguishes among actual cruelty inflicted on animals during production; “suggestive” cruelty, which appeared on screen but could have been achieved through filmmaking techniques without actual harm to animals; and general negligence of animals living under the care of studios. Drawing extensively on MPPDA archival records and historical newspapers, the essay foregrounds the importance of animal cruelty as a concern of the American film industry and provides an early demonstration of MPPDA president Will Hays’s strategies for negotiating with pressure groups as well as the press.

Representation and Diversity in Comics Studies Ellen Kirkpatrick (bio) and Suzanne Scott (bio) In spring 2011, Bart Beaty broke new ground by editing the first In Focus section of Cinema Journal devoted to comics studies.1 Beaty curated a thematically important issue, concluding with a roundtable on the state of comics studies—a section befitting a rapidly evolving and expanding field. However, there was a noticeable absence of matters of representation and diversity in the section's vision of "comics studies" and an equal dismissal of studies of representation in that roundtable. To some extent, this absence is understandable, especially as the primary function of the section was to rationalize and celebrate the study of comics as a distinct media form. Though issues of representation were certainly of concern within comics scholarship and culture at that time, Scott Bukatman identified "representation of" studies as one of the problems "endemic to a young field."2 In their understandable effort to privilege the "how" of comics, the panelists, however, not only marginalized "scholarly work that tends [End Page 120] to dwell on the 'what' of comics"; they also failed to engage "critical intersections between the 'how' and the 'what' of comics, and likewise the 'who' (audience) and the 'why' (economics/industry demographics)."3 This current section is another foray into the world of comics scholarship, but it is a very different entity. It is freer, perhaps, than its predecessor or successors—in that we are not tasked with validating or grounding the field, or revisiting a canonical text.4 Using the superhero as a critical axis, the essays collected here aim to capture both the transmediated nature of contemporary superheroes and the issues surrounding their bodily (trans)formations and identity. The discussions that follow reveal not only the merits—critical and ontological—of working at such intersections but (much like the malleable superhero body) also the elasticity of contemporary comics studies, with its embrace of inter- and multidisciplinarity, collaboration, and border crossings (such as fan-scholar). Indicating some of the ways in which superheroes can, if given the space, speak beyond themselves and their originating medium, this section discusses aspects of representation through several media forms wherein the superhero has particular cultural force, including movies, games, and transformative fan art, in addition to comics.5 As a field of inquiry comics studies is perhaps best considered as a series of interlocking debates rather than as progressing toward a cohering formalist theory. We believe that a valorization of the formal is deleterious, resulting in the construction of (literally "man-made") boundaries and oppositions (e.g., form/content) and not only the privileging of one field of research over another but also an idea of mutual exclusivity: the notion that fields cannot speak to or inform each other. Greg Smith observed during the 2011 roundtable that, though the participants might have "moved on from those early ideas" concerning representation, it was clear that other scholars had not.6 Four years on, this section demonstrates why we and many others working within comics studies and its allied spheres—scholars, fans, and commentators—have not yet moved on. There is good reason—we simply cannot afford to. What is for some, in terms of representation and diversity, a "predictable parade of scholarly concerns," is for others a similarly predictable parade of elisions, evasions, and errors.7 Ever mindful of the value of formal analysis, this In Focus seeks to promote the merit of engaging with matters of representation and diversity and to establish, at the very least, their equal status with other topics in comics scholarship. [End Page 121] Ellen Kirkpatrick's essay, "TransFormers: 'Identity' Compromised" works in just such a way. Drawing on contemporary identity theories, the essay demonstrates, through close readings, how the transforming superhero is readable as speaking not only to various trans realities but also to the variety of broader, ongoing gender-identity debate(s). Carlen Lavigne also tackles gender identity, but from a representational perspective. In "'I'm Batman' (and You Can Be Too): Gender and Constrictive Play in the Arkham Game Series," Lavigne interrogates gender representation within a game environment to reveal how it not only fails to step beyond...

Reviewed by: Superheroes and Identities ed. by Mel Gibson, David Huxley, and Joan Ormrod Christine Atchison (bio) Superheroes and Identities edited by Mel Gibson, David Huxley, and Joan Ormrod. Routledge. 2015. $155 hardcover. 284 pages. Mel Gibson, David Huxley, and Joan Ormrod’s Superheroes and Identities promises to explore “what superhero narratives can reveal about our attitudes towards femininity, race, maternity, masculinity, and queer culture.”1 Although it doesn’t fully exhaust each of these aspects (that would be a rather lofty goal), it certainly does introduce the topics as areas ripe for further study. Gibson, Huxley, and Ormrod introduce their anthology as a collection of articles that were, for the most part, previously submitted to the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and, unfortunately, the book reads that way. Although the editorial organization of the articles is effective—the anthology is divided into six main categories (“Race,” “Narrative and the Development of Superhero Identities,” “Boys and Girls,” “Supermoms,” “Queer,” and “Audiences, Reception, Fandom”)—the included articles do not interact with one another or form a coherent whole. This is, perhaps, an inevitable pitfall of which the editors demonstrate their awareness when they share their hope that [End Page 192] the collection will serve to “draw together work from a range of disciplines to indicate both the extent and the potential coherence of this area of study.”2 The key word here is “potential.” The articles in this anthology do not yet make up a complete, systematic body of work and, given how new the interdisciplinary study of comics is, one would not expect them to do so. That said, the editors do identify common trends in the field that may evolve into a more coherent form. The introduction mitigates some of the inherent problems of pulling together a collection of existing articles by providing some much-needed background information on the rich connection between superheroes and identities. Gibson, Huxley, and Ormrod pay particular attention to the cultural significance of the superhero, the fluidity of both cultural and superhero identities, and the interdisciplinary nature of studying the relationship between these factors.3 Although the introduction gives a breadth of background information that will prove indispensable to scholars new to the study of superheroes, a more direct road map to the divisions of the articles (and the rationale behind these divisions) would have been helpful. Each of the sections in Superheroes and Identities could easily expand into an anthology of its own, so it would be ridiculous to expect the three essays included in the section “Race” to fully flesh out issues related to race and identity as they are connected to the superhero. That said, this section does successfully draw attention to some salient points, including the role of racist ideologies in the genesis of what has become the modern superhero and the effect of racial inclusion and exclusion in superhero narratives. Chris Gavaler’s piece on the connection between the Ku Klux Klan and the origins of the superhero, for instance, brings up unexpected parallels. Gavaler suggests that “Thomas Dixon Jr.’s Ben Cameron, aka the Grand Dragon, represents the earliest twentieth-century incarnation of an American vigilante hero who assumes a costume and alias to hide his identity while waging his war for good.”4 Gavaler does not claim that Dixon invented the superhero; he simply posits that the character type—“as traced from The Clansman through The Birth of a Nation and the second Klan to pulp fiction and early comic books”—finds its genesis in the Grand Dragon character.5 Gavaler’s claim is contentious for a variety of reasons, including, of course, the problems inherent in locating the birth of the superhero, but it is certainly worth serious consideration. The potential weakness of this argument lies in the suggestion that Dixon’s Grand Dragon and Siegel and Shuster’s Superman (and other superheroes) share a causal link when, at this point, a correlational connection might be more easily proved. That said, future study on this topic may lead to more evidence of a direct influence.6 [End Page 193] Regardless of whether the links between KKK vigilantism and the modern superhero are causal, correlational, or...

Two Articles by Ritwik Ghatak Moinak Biswas Ritwik Ghatak (1925–1976) was born in Dhaka, now in Bangladesh (referred to as East Bengal in the essays here), and moved to West Bengal around the time of India’s independence and the Partition (1947). He started off as a writer of short stories and became seriously involved in the new theater spawned by the leftist cultural movement, which around 1944 had taken the form of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA). The IPTA mobilized an unprecedented range of artists and writers from various fields, leaving its impact on almost every aspect of cultural practice around the middle of the twentieth century, including the Bombay cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Ghatak’s involvement in film began in 1949 as an assistant director and screenwriter. He would soon adopt filmmaking as his profession, [End Page 11] even though he continued to write, direct, and act in plays. His first film, Nagarik (The Citizen, 1953) never saw the light of day in his lifetime. After a stint in Bombay as a screenwriter for Filmistan Studios, he returned to Bengal to make his second feature, Ajantrik (The Unmechanical, 1958), which firmly established him as a foremost director, alongside Satyajit Ray. The period between 1958 and 1962 was his most productive, when he made Bari Theke Paliye (Running away from Home, 1959), and the three Bengal Partition films—Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), Komal Gandhar (The Gandhar Sublime, 1961), and Subarnarekha (The Golden Line, 1962). Meghe Dhaka Tara was the only popular success that Ghatak ever saw in his life. The other films not only were commercial failures but also met with critical censure, often from his comrades in the leftist circle, for obscurity, lack of coherence, and—more damaging—sentimentalism. A long period of stillborn projects, unfinished films, and delayed releases followed, which contributed to the alcoholism and nervous disorders that dogged Ghatak for the rest of his life. During 1964 and 1965 Ghatak taught in the new state film school in Pune, earned a reputation as a legendary teacher, and inspired a group of young filmmakers who would become prominent practitioners of the Indian new wave in the 1970s (Mani Kaul, Kumar Shahani, and John Abraham, among them). He managed to make two more feature films (Titas Ekti Nadir Nam [A River Called Titas, 1973] and Jukti Takko ar Gappo [Arguments and a Story, 1974]) before his death at the age of fifty. Ghatak’s work remained largely unrecognized until a critical revival started in the 1980s. The new critics undertook a reappraisal, among other things, of the complex role of melodrama and narrative experimentation in his films as well as the role of historical imagination and Indian aesthetic traditions in his method. In the absence of a hospitable critical environment, Ghatak wrote some extraordinary commentaries on his own cinema. A definitive anthology of his English writings was belatedly published in 2000 and a complete Bengali collection (from which I have chosen the two pieces here) in 2005.1 The essays and interviews, crucial for an understanding of his work, mainly appeared in film society magazines, the present texts being no exception. Both of the essays were written in 1963. The third Partition film, Subarnarekha, had been recently completed. After the abject rejection of Komal Gandhar by both audiences and critics, Ghatak was facing a challenge to even find a release for what is often considered his most mature work. Written in days of deep despondency, Ghatak, the self-professed Marxist, tried to explain his method in these essays to whoever was ready to consider the question of artistic practice outside the narrow confines of official leftist principles. In the first essay, he draws on Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God, published three years earlier, to explain his principle of using archetypal forms.2 As such, he joins a line of twentieth-century artists and critics who came under the influence of C. G. Jung. The interest in the collective unconscious was to stay with Ghatak, a source of puzzlement to his colleagues. But more than a belief in a system, it was a useful tool for him to formulate...

Reviewed by: The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story by Ian Condry Lori Hitchcock Morimoto (bio) The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story by Ian Condry. Duke University Press. 2013. $76.45 hardcover; $19.25 paper. 256 pages. Ian Condry’s The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story is a unique and much-needed non-Western exploration of the complex relationships of media creators, fans, and—as Condry contends—the objects they collectively produce in a non-Western context.1 There are several excellent books that explore both Japanese and Western fans of anime (otaku), notably Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World; but what makes Condry’s book noteworthy among these is the way it puts a variety of historically and socially contextualized Japanese case studies into conversation with the scholarly concerns of media ethnography and institutional history, media production, and work on fandom.2 Together, they make the case for Condry’s theory of the “soul” of anime as social energy engendered through a variety of interpersonal contexts that collectively create anime. In advancing this idea, Condry offers an alternative to research on anime history, texts, and aesthetics that begins with the question “What is anime[?] … [to] [End Page 156] suggest a different entry point: Who makes anime?”3 Condry locates his collaborative creators among not only animators, directors, and studios but also Japanese and overseas fans, whose anime-centered affective energies effectively constitute them all as producers. In posing this question, Condry situates not only his study but also the Japanese anime industry and its fandoms themselves within present-day work on fan-producer relations and fan labor. In recent years, there has been a drive to globalize the fan studies classroom in response to the intensified transnational and transcultural networks within which contemporary media are produced. Yet to judge from the number of requests I receive from colleagues asking for suggestions of work on non-Western fandom to include in course syllabi, this is an imperative that is presently more aspirational than accomplished. The divide between “mainstream” and non-Western fan studies is perpetuated on both sides, driven by unfamiliarity and, sometimes, the perceived inapplicability of culturally contextualized research, on the one hand, and a failure on the part of area specialists to effectively articulate their research with the broader concerns of the discipline, on the other hand. It is in this sense that Condry’s study offers an invaluable means of bridging a significant gap. Specifically, Condry argues that anime is created out of the enthusiasm born of social engagement between artists and studios, fans and producers, fans and fellow fans—a complex feedback loop that constitutes a critical caveat to scholarly preoccupation with the influence of top-down corporate and even government strategizing in anime production and distribution. Which is to say, he is interested in the question of how “people who care” about anime affect its material production and circulation, in how a shared affective investment in anime engenders new studios, new productions and characters, and new audiences.4 He examines this process in part through ethnographic observation of such social interactions as intracompany meetings concerning the creation of new characters and stories, as well as industrywide brainstorming about what “cutting-edge” anime might look like. Condry’s descriptions and analyses of these contingent communities foreground the collective excitement they generate over both nostalgic anime favorites and possibilities for future projects, revealing the extent to which those most intimately involved in the material production of anime are often its biggest fans. Condry’s exploration of the intricate ethos of online communities centered on the production of unofficial subtitled versions of Japanese anime, called “fansubs,” similarly blurs the dividing line between producer and fan, particularly in fansubbers’ dedication to authenticity and cultural transparency in their own work. Many digitally fansubbed versions of Japanese anime include detailed, if parenthetical, explanations of even the most fleeting or esoteric textual references to Japanese culture and language. As Condry observes, these sometimes exceed the intentions or expectations of producers, thus “amplify[ing] the meaningfulness of anime...

Fan Labor and Feminism:Capitalizing on the Fannish Labor of Love Kristina Busse, editor (bio) In the early 2000s, my three-year-old son wanted a Doctor Who birthday party. He had been watching old 1980s-era PBS recordings on our VHS, and he couldn’t understand why the party stores didn’t have the Fourth Doctor next to Buzz Lightyear and Arthur paraphernalia. Now, ten years later, when I research fannish cakes, I find entire commercial cooking programs dedicated to baking a TARDIS-shaped cake, along with Doctor Who party- and bakeware. One reason for this change is clearly the resurgence of the Doctor Who franchise (BBC, 1963–1989, 1996, 2005–) and its wider popularity than before. Clearly, this amount of fan merchandise for even marginal shows is a recent phenomenon, testifying to both the expansion of media tiein commercialization and the increased popularity of fan and geek cultures. Twenty years ago, our Doctor Who mugs were a special PBS fund-raising gift; today, there is merchandise available not only for the most niche shows but also for specific fans: if you want a T-shirt, tote bag, or iPhone case dedicated to Superwholock (the slashy Doctor Who / Supernatural / Sherlock crossover of “Hunters and Doctors and Boys from Baker Street”), there are dozens of designs and options available on sites that cater directly to this audience. As an aca-fan, I am of two minds about this phenomenon. The acceptance of fans, geeks, and nerds is theoretically and personally satisfying, as is the increased popularity of geeky media, and consequently the more positive media portrayals. The freaks and geeks of my teenage years have given way to more affectionate and certainly more nuanced portrayals: Anthony Michael Hall’s eternally geeky outcast of [End Page 110] the 1985 film The Breakfast Club (John Hughes) has become the entire cast of The Big Bang Theory (CBS, 2007– ). Where the stereotypical geek model used to be drawn from Revenge of the Nerds (Jeff Kanew, 1984), it is now written by Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen and played by Michael Cera. Yet even as we witness an increase in positive male geeks on-screen, female media representations remain few and far between. Mayim Bialik’s Amy Farrah Fowler in The Big Bang Theory and Felicia Day’s Charlie Bradbury in Supernatural (WB/CW, 2005– ) are exceptions rather than the rule and are celebrated as such. Day has advocated, in and out of character, for female fans, and she does so in an otherwise not very female fan-friendly show as the young, queer, geeky, and unashamedly fannish Charlie. Any spread in popularity carries with it a danger of further segregating the remaining outsiders: if the mainstream embraces one form of geek, it risks excluding further or even negating the existence of whoever does not fit that new model. Mel Stanfill describes this as “moving the bar” in terms of queer homonormativity, where “the norm gets to congratulate itself on its tolerance” while those not able and willing to assimilate “get forcefully produced as unassimilable and Other.”1 In particular, the widespread embrace of the white middle-class heterosexual male geek in popular culture redefines but does not erase boundaries of exclusion.2 As fandom has entered the mainstream, and as the bar moves to include more diverse groups of fans and more varied forms of fannish engagement, the study of fans and fandom has become ever more important. That increased interest is most apparent when looking at the number of books, articles, conferences, and panels that focus on fan studies more broadly. Yet even here one can recognize a shift toward industry and production. Whereas early work in fan studies looked toward the fan communities and their countercultural productions, many of the field’s recent monographs focus on industry connections.3 Such a shift often celebrates the new industry-fan model, “an emerging hybrid model of circulation, where a mix of top-down and bottom-up forces determine how material is shared across and among cultures in far more participatory (and messier) ways,” in which supposedly everyone wins.4 Within and without such a commercialization of fan spaces, however, many important questions remain...