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May 11, 2018

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1171: Casanova #5, July 1991

https://www.comics.org/issue/340173/

Erg.
More of the same. Casanova's so hot that he even seduces a young bride on her wedding night. These stories would be so much more enjoyable if the women were every bit as conniving and horny as the men. Then there'd be some intrigue.

That said, Ricard's a very talented artist. His men are of a realistic bent, but the women verge on a slightly more iconic style, almost as if we're seeing not a woman, but something more symbolic, interacting with Casanova. More pessimistically, we could also attribute this slight abstraction of the women to the ever-present male gaze, and its reduction of women to objects.

I try to err on the optimistic these days, but there's good arguments for both sides, I think. Is this possibly a way we can recuperate the products of the male gaze, such as this comic, in that we can choose the way we interpret the stylization of the women in the comic? Rather than reading them as reduction to object, can we instead elevate them, in a sense, to that status of the mythic hero Frye talks about, superior to others and environment? There's so much less detail on the women that they almost look as if they've been pasted on top of the drawing of the background underneath. This stylization almost seems to give them a dimensionality. It doesn't remove from the story the problems of Casanova and his apparent ability to bed any woman, iconic or not, but from a purely visual, or pictorial, point of view, we could see these as portraits of a flawed man interacting with more perfect beings.

Again, I try to err on the optimistic. But there is something to be said for the frame of mind with which we approach a text. I encourage my students to bring their own experiences to the interpretation of a text, that we really have no way of understanding a text except through the lens of our experience. So surely that means that we can, to a certain extent, decide which of our experiences we will bring to a text. Is this perhaps the idea of a resistant reading of a misogynistic erotic comic?

That's a lot more thought that I imagined this comic would engender.

More to come...

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