#based on an artwork by a different creator so all creds to them for the og piece

[ameliathetadclover]

“U can’t die in hazelnut hotel”

- my friend

[believermag]

Who Will Think of the Children?

Jim Knipfel on Satire and Children’s Books

This past September, the Abrams’ imprint Image, which specializes in illustrated and reference works, published a novelty book entitled Bad Little Children’s Books by the pseudonymous Arthur Gackley. The small hardcover, which itself quite deliberately resembled a little golden book, featured carefully-rendered and patently offensive parodies of classic children's book covers. Instead of happy, apple-cheeked tykes doing pleasant wholesome things, Gackley’s covers featured kids farting, puking, and using drugs. Others included children with dildoes and racially inflammatory portrayals of Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American youngsters. The book was clearly labeled a work of satire aimed at adults, and adults with a certain tolerance for bad taste and crass jokes.

Upon its initial release it received positive reviews and sold fairly well. Then in early December, a former librarian named Kelly Jensen posted an entry on Bookriot entitled “It’s Not Funny. It’s Racist.”  

“This kind of 'humor' is never acceptable,” Ms. Jensen wrote. “It’s deadly.”

Jensen’s rant circulated quickly across social media, and Abrams suddenly found itself besieged by attacks from the outraged and offended, who assailed Gackley for creating the book in the first place, and the Abrams editorial board for agreeing to publish it.

“There is a difference between ‘hate speech’ and free speech,” one outraged member of the kidlit comunity wrote on Facebook. “In the same way, you cannot yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater just because you feel like it. This book was in very bad, insulting, racist taste, and designed to look like a children's book. How is that a good idea? Children are too young to understand this as parody. If it's for adults, why is that even funny? Oh, I guess if you are a racist you would think it's funny.”

Another tweeted, “Sounds like something that should've been completely ignored and removed before it hit the shelves. Just because we have the freedom of speech, it can be taken way too far.”

Still another confused and enervated soul wrote, “Argue all that you want, but this particular book was for children yes? Or no? If it was, does that mean we should allow and subject young children to gratuitous violence, gore and pornography? And what age is it acceptable? Does this mean we have to start putting PG-14 on printed material and make it mandatory because certain writers can't conduct themselves with a moral scale?”

Another angry reader summed it up quite simply by posting, “Freedom is bullshit, literally.”

[Note: As much as possible, the spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors which peppered the above posts have been corrected here for the sake of simple comprehensibility.]

Although Abrams initially stood by Gackley and the First Amendment right to offend, and had received the public support of several anti-censorship organizations, by December tenth the noise had simply grown too shrill. Mr. Gackley, maintaining to the end his intentions had been grossly misinterpreted, admitted there was no way to salvage things, and asked that Abrams not reprint the book. In a statement, Abrams announced they would be complying with his wishes. Although Bad Little Children’s Books was not banned in any official capacity, it had all but completely vanished from online booksellers within a few days after the announcement. Used copies, while available, are now selling for outrageous prices.

At the same time that this was happening, there were also calls to ban the (real) children’s books When We Was Fierce and A Birthday Cake for George Washington. The invented slang used in the former was interpreted as racist by some parent groups, and the latter was attacked for its historically inaccurate portrayal of the daily lives of slaves on Washington’s estate. Meanwhile, a mother in Tennessee led the call to pull Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks from the local school system. The New York Times bestselling biography, which concerned a Baltimore woman whose massive cervical tumor had become the invaluable source of several generations worth of cell lines used by cancer researchers, was being taught in local high schools as a means of educating students both about cancer and about racial issues within the medical community. The Tennessee mother calling for its removal, however, found the book pornographic.

Point being, I guess, that certain sectors of the population harbor an insatiable, even desperate desire to be shocked and offended by something they’ve read, seen, or even heard about, and the drive to ban these things (made much easier with the advent of social media) will likely always be with us. But back to the Gackley for a moment. Reading through the enraged postings aimed at Abrams, a number of the offended make the point that they are not attempting to censor, but are merely exercising their own First Amendment right to criticize. That’s fine and understandable. But the crux of the matter is that these people would be much happier if the book never existed in the first place, and considered Abrams’ decision a glorious victory for their cause.

Let’s try to put it in some sort of semi-comprehensible historical context. Dark and occasionally tasteless adult-oriented satires of children’s books, television and toys have been with us about as long as media aimed specifically at the innocent set. We just can’t help ourselves. Present us with the doe-eyed lukewarm treacle of the Smurfs or Care Bears, and some of us will instinctively reach for a baseball bat. In the case of Bad Little Children’s Books, the outrage in many instances seems to be sparked less by the content than form, and the fear that the book might actually be mistaken for legitimate kidlit. So here are a handful of similar cases from the last half-century. While reactions and results differ wildly, a certain historical pattern does seem to emerge.

Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 animated feature Fritz the Cat, based on the R. Crumb character, became notorious overnight for being the first theatrically-released cartoon to receive an X rating from the MPAA. What people tend to forget is that the film received the distinction not on account of its sexual content, nor because it included characters who were overtly racist, misogynistic drug addicts who cursed a lot. The real problem was the film featured cute and fuzzy animals who were racist, misogynistic drug addicts who cursed a lot, and had sex. The MPAA board was afraid people would see the cartoon poster and stroll into the theater, family in tow, expecting the latest Disney opus. By modern standards the film should have received nothing more than an R rating, but the damning “adults only” designation was an effort to avoid any confusion. It didn’t matter. People saw the X rating and immediately concluded Bakshi had made a hardcore cartoon in a diabolical effort to corrupt the nation’s youth. Although the publicity attracted large audiences and earned the film an undeniable bit of underground cred, that same publicity did irreparable damage to Bakshi’s career. For decades afterward, even while trying to redeem himself with the family-friendly Mighty Mouse cartoon series for TV, he found himself labeled a racist, sexist pornographer determined to get America’s young people hooked on heroin—charges leveled at him mostly by people who had never seen Fritz the Cat.

Long before he won a Pulitzer for Maus and became a regular contributor to The New Yorker, cartoonist Art Spiegelman spent twenty years working for the Topps trading card company. Among other things, he was one of the primary creative forces behind Topps' wildly popular and wickedly subversive Wacky Packages series, which satirized American consumer products. In 1985, Topps attempted to arrange a licensing deal to release a series of trading cards based on Cabbage Patch Dolls, which were all the rage at the time. Finding licensing fees had already gone through the roof, they decided instead to release a Wacky Packages-style parody. As it happened, an unreleased Wacky Packages design called Garbage Pail Kids was already on the boards, so they ran with it.

Spiegelman and the involved artists took the basic design of the cuddly and adorable plush dolls beloved by all the world and twisted them into deranged monstrosities covered in snot, vomit, oozing sores and bugs. From the moment they hit convenience store checkout counters, the GPK stickers were outrageously popular. Although some school systems banned them as an unwelcome distraction and more than a few parents were mortified and disgusted that any sick individual would do such a horrible thing to something so innocent and cuddly, there was no organized grassroots effort to censor the stickers on moral grounds. Topps' only real trouble came in the form of a copyright infringement suit filed by the Cabbage Patch Dolls’ creators, Original Appalachian Artworks, Inc.

Topps’ argument that what they were doing was clear and obvious parody (and therefore protected under the First Amendment) didn’t quite cut it. The suit was settled out of court, with Topps agreeing to alter the Garbage Pail Kids logo and basic character design so as to avoid any possible confusion with the original dolls. The stickers continued to come out, and went on to inspire an animated television series, a feature film, a book and an unholy array of merchandise ranging from trash cans to sunglasses. In the end, it could easily be argued that over time the Garbage Pail Kids had more of a lasting impact on the culture than their inspiration.

Struwwelpeter was first published in Germany in 1845. The cautionary and terrifying collection of nursery rhymes (with graphic accompanying illustrations to drive the point home) warned children that if they sucked their thumnbs, didn’t eat their dinner, didn’t clean themselves up properly, mistreated their pets or threw tantrums, a horrible fate awaited them. The book became a standard instructional volume in most German households with young children. In 1898, a similar but decidedly British version was released in England under the title Shockheaded Peter, and was nearly as popular. Nobody it seemed thought much about presenting naughty children with images of potential disfigurement or death. The book helped keep the little buggers in line.

In 1999, American indie publisher Feral House released a gorgeous new edition of Struwwelpeter, complete with new illustrations, interpretive and historical essays, and assorted bowdlerized and satirical versions of the nursery rhymes which had appeared over the years. Feral House, which had always prided itself on publishing dangerous and controversial works, soon found this simple history and analysis of a once popular if disturbing children’s book could be just as troublesome as their books by notorious British serial killer Ian Brady or the Church of Satan’s Anton LaVey.

“Yes, we had minor trouble with Struwwelpeter,” says Feral House founder and publisher Adam Parfrey.  “But most of that was put to rest when bookstores simply refused to carry the book. I guess 21st century Americans are more touchy than the Germans of yore. For a while, a couple chains and many independent bookstores stopped carrying the Anton LaVey books we published after Geraldo Rivera put on those sensationalist programs about Satanism... I credit Marilyn Manson for putting an end to that crap. After he spoke out about it, so many people went into bookstores to order them that the stores saw best to get them back into their shops. Time passed, and the crazy ideas receded.”

Parfrey also sees a potential connection between the backlash Abrams suffered over Bad Little Children’s Books and the present brouhaha over what has been termed “fake news.”

“Right now there’s a good bit of madness going on with Trump-loving crazies, including Alex Jones and Infowars building up this idea that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are torturing and killing children…and they’re pointing at Marina Abramović, too. That’s a big deal on Facebook at this instant. And anyone who poo-poos this story is being accused of covering up kiddie killing. I can see how this sort of madness can amplify into the book trade, a situation where parodies are mistaken for outright kiddie torture. Sad, isn’t it?”

As a final example, in 2010 Simon and Schuster published my book These Children Who Come at You With Knives, a collection of darkly comic fairy tales aimed at adults. Across roughly a dozen stories written in traditional fairy tale formats (though with more cursing, gratuitous gore, and uncontrolled bodily functions), assorted anthropomorphized animals, magical creatures, human children, the elderly and the dull-witted come to various terrible ends. The book received decent reviews and publicity, but there was no outcry, no controversy, and no one insisted the book be banned in order to protect the innocent. Meaning, of course, that I didn’t sell millions as a result of the hoo-hah.  Christ, I’ve even heard from people who use them as bedtime stories for their own kids. Dammit! What the hell did I do wrong?

I think I made two deadly mistakes. First, despite my best efforts to the contrary, my publisher decided to release the book without illustrations, meaning it could never possibly be confused with an actual children’s book. More devastating still, I was cursed with bad timing. These Children Who Come at You With Knives was released halfway through President Obama’s first term, and while there was certainly a good deal of rancor in the air, satire was still a viable form and accepted as such, at least among the literate. 

In different eras and in different ways, all the above examples were damned by a public inflicting its own preconceived notions upon works of obvious satire, insisting they be what the public believed them to be instead of what they actually were. 

By the time Bad little Children’s Books was released, the world had become too ridiculous, too absurd, and as a result we lost our sense of humor. There was simply no longer any way to lampoon our chosen leaders or our own insecurities, with the world itself poised and ready to top us at every turn. In short, the book’s publication coincided with the precise moment satire breathed its last, meaning readers had no choice but to take Gackley’s work, as Parfrey points out, at face value. Lucky bastard.

Jim Knipfel is the author of Slackjaw, These Children Who Come at You with Knives, The Blow-Off, and several other books, most recently Residue (Red Hen Press, 2015). his work has appeared in New York Press, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and dozens of other publications.

[aion-rsa]

How The Ren & Stimpy Reboot Reignited the Debate Around Animation Gatekeepers

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On Aug. 5, Comedy Central announced a reboot to the classic 1991 cartoon The Ren & Stimpy Show. The show’s initial airing, as one of the three original Nicktoons (alongside Doug and Rugrats), was a milestone in cartoon television history, with its purposely crude yet dynamic visuals and heavily exaggerated animation and aesthetics. It also had a deeply complicated run. Ren & Stimpy was controversial both in public and behind the scenes and its sordid history includes creator John Kricfalusi’s inability to complete episodes on time, episodes Nick edited down or refused to air, and the criticisms of the show’s most disturbing aspects. Nevertheless the show was able to cement itself with a passionate, dedicated cult following.

That sordid history, however, reached an impassable point in 2018 when Buzzfeed reported a grotesque expose on Kricfalusi, and his grooming and dating of a 16-year-old girl during the show’s production. Before this point, Ren & Stimpy and John Kricfalusi had been provided a certain degree of street cred from beleaguered artists, who saw the show and creator as  brilliantly and bravely fighting the corporate whims of sanitized Americans (also often omitting the more grounded stories of Kricfalusi being notoriously bad at his job). But this overt act of sexual predation, rightly, was too far. John Kricfalusi was “canceled.” 

So upon hearing the news of the reboot, much of animation Twitter revolted. Even though Kricfalusi will reportedly not be receiving any credit, residuals, or other financial benefits of this reboot, it still felt insulting, particularly to the victims of Kricfalusi’s actions. Nothing can really untie the connection between Ren & Stimpy and John Kricfalusi; the two are deeply intertwined in the way some television programs are synced so distinctively to their showrunner. The revival, to some, feels like a celebration of the counterculture hero worship Kricfalusi once profited from but no longer deserves. 

But this revolt is also driven by more than an ethical awakening. This Ren & Stimpy reboot controversy also epitomizes a broad response to the so-called “gatekeepers” of animation – a field that has been notoriously insular, controlling, toxic, and demeaning–and that’s across the board.

Among the animators who opposed the Ren & Stimpy reboot was Lauren Faust. (She expressed her support with one of the victim’s of Kricfalusi’s actions, and passed along a petition against the reboot of the show.) Her agreement with the opposition is particularly interesting, given her own history with the full spectrum of the problems of the shifting, dynamic roles of gatekeepers. Faust was the creative mind behind the 2010 reboot of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, itself a show brimming with controversy and awash with toxic gatekeepers. There’s a lot to explain here to fully understand the context of this, but I’ll keep it as brief as possible. My Little Pony at the time was one of a handful of shows to debut on the now-defunct The Hub, a Hasbro-run network where toy-based cartoons were always going to be part of the overall strategy. Nothing about that is surprising. 

Upon the announcement of that reboot, however, Amid Amidi, the author and editor of Cartoon Brew, wrote a lengthy criticism of the news and how it represented the death of creator-driven animation. At the time, Cartoon Brew was the premier and most well-known location for animation news and stories; many industry vets and fans mingled in the comments sections for years. It also had a deeply negative reputation, particularly Amidi himself, who was known to be fairly hostile towards most modern corporate-driven cartoons (he did champion indie animation a lot, but it was strangely pick-and-choose, and he was also notoriously a huge John Kricfalusi fan). In Amidi’s perspective, My Little Pony was the antithesis of an era that propelled original, creator-driven (and, it should be noted, all-male) cartoons to the forefront. Arguably starting with Kricfalusi, it includes shows like Rocko’s Modern Life by Joe Murray, Dexter’s Laboratory by Genndy Tartakovsky, The Powerpuff Girls by Craig McCraken, and even Family Guy by Seth MacFarlane. (Ironically, Amidi also criticized that particular era’s burgeoning reliance on rebooting animated properties and television shows based on film properties.)

Amidi’s article created a lot of pushback, as evident in the comment section of that same article, but also from burgeoning corners of the Internet that mainstream news outlets had not yet caught up to. Primarily, there was the one underground online spot that skirted rules and protocols to discuss cartoons of all degrees with a certain equality: 4chan, specifically, its /co/ section, dedicated to cartoons and comics. /co/ discovered Amidi’s article and also revolted for perhaps an unexpected reason. My Little Pony’s sudden surge in popularity and appeal arguably came from the denizens of /co/ watching and promoting the show to spite Amidi. It was the first all-out “attack” against Amidi as gatekeeper himself, rebelling against his thesis and propping up a “corporate-driven” show. Gatekeepers aren’t just the people who have corporate power; they’re anyone who wields access and influence primarily on personal needs, desires, and whims, and not on the talent, value, and input of others.

Over the years though, the parameters of gatekeeping in animation shifted, courting in its own ways figures that vied for the mantle. Faust left the show after the first season, and while stories abound over why, it’s often attributed to Faust and The Hub execs having “creative differences” – the most loaded term in entertainment history. The show would continue on for eight more seasons, many of which were coupled with pockets of controversy, from wonky storylines, awkward characterizations, “ships,” and one particular moment in which a background character spoke for the first time with a… questionable voice.

All of this, though, were just moments that exemplified a deep concern over the show’s social-media fanbase and its relationship to the show, its cast, and its crew. It probably was the first time all these sides were so intertwined, in which the shows crew, the fans, and the Hub itself vied for a sort of control, a “gatekeeping,” of the show’s reputation and direction. My Little Pony, despite Faust’s vision to appeal to a broad swath of the audience, was a show built to appeal to the demographic of young girls, but that fanbase’s most vocal and active members were mostly reactionary men. 

It seems so obvious in hindsight now, and I don’t doubt that a huge number of them did genuinely enjoy the show and its fan-driven projects, but certain type of angry, reactionary men “gatekept��� the show, controlling the reactions, fan works, and forums, well into 2020. Such a sentiment may be more common and understood now, as any analysis of Comicsgate or Gamergate would tell you, but it’s arguable that these types of fans have tested and dabbled with this kind of controlling, dominating, non-inclusive attitude in various fan spaces, such as Tumblr, Youtube, message boards, websites, and artwork/stories, even back in 2010. Lest you think this take is exaggerated, well, take a look at Buzzfeed’s report that the My Little Pony’s fanbase seems to have a “Nazi” problem.

Such a concept being exposed in 2020 is, unfortunately, not that surprising. There is a top-down reckoning with all matters of vicious, controlling, toxic gatekeepers, many of whom are male, white, cis, and straight. Animation, in particular, has an ugly history of shifting but problematic trends of gatekeeping. The insidious “CalArts” style criticism tossed about on social media (often attributed to John Kricfalusi, who coined the term on his blog back in 2010) currently is absurd, but it’s an idea derived from a particular narrow career pipeline in which a majority of animators had to go through CalArts to increase the chances of getting a job (thankfully, it’s not nearly as problematic as it once was). 

There’s the infamous story of Brenda Chapman and her firing from Brave. The first female director for a Pixar film to be let go is not a good look, and her comments at the time suggested some understated, egregious “boys club” behavior that took place behind the scenes at Pixar. Chapman’s comments would be proven even more credible a few years later when multiple women came forward detailing producer John Lassiter’s non-consensual behavior towards Pixar female employees; for which he resigned in 2018. In that same Vulture piece, Jim Morris, the president of Pixar, all but mentions the “old guard” as gatekeepers who are on their way out, emphasizing more of a diverse workforce in the years to come.

Two years later, the absolute re-thinking and re-imagining of entire industries through more diverse perspectives and people has taken shape in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The full cultural shift is wildly complex and its worth examining on its own, but it can be broadly and generally tracked as thus: protests against police brutality led to a re-examination on how police are portrayed in pop culture, which then led to an overall reckoning on whose perspectives we place front and center, and why. Showrunners, directors, producers, and all matter of gatekeepers, once confident in their vision, had begun to concede the inherent blinders and obstacles their visions created. 

Even prior to this current reckoning, Bojack Horseman Raphael Bob-Waksberg creator admitted regret on casting  the white Alison Brie to play a Vietnamese-American; he directly explores this even more here. Biracial characters in both Big Mouth and Central Park, once voiced by white actors, now will be recast to reflect their race, with Central Park already choosing Emmy Raver-Lampman as a replacement. (It’s interesting to hear, in particular, Loren Bouchard’s comments in regard to the casting of Kristen Bell as the original voice for Molly.)

It’s important to note that in no way are the decisions of people like Bouchard and Bob-Waksberg comparable to the behaviors of Lassiter and Kricfalusi. But they all do speak to a perspective of gatekeepers, even well-meaning ones, who are blinded by the inherent restrictions their visions can be. The overall industry, animation in particular, is so subsumed by a combination of networked, closely-synced friends and a cavalier attitude towards vocal, toxic, sexist and racist environments (the former often utilized to avoid complaints of the latter) that such hostilities and obstacles have become normalized, a part of the systematic flow of “how things are” instead of the unfair, moral, ethical, and sometimes criminal issues that they actually are. These were the big news stories; Twitter itself is awash with stories of smaller, individual stories of industry vets going through awful, toxic points in their careers. (As of this writing, two new stories have cropped up in relation to all this: one concerning a staff mutiny against the showrunner of the show All Rise, and one about the Criterion Collection’s lack of films from Black directors–both stories speaking to the narrow lens that gatekeepers, and those who empower gatekeepers, employ.)

It’s hard, in many ways, to contextualize the specific accounts told on Twitter. Social media is not a monolith, and its specificity and constant churn make it hard to narrow in on anything like a cohesive perspective. Still, the general consensus seems to be that the industry needs changing, although that also is butting up against a new crop of critics, staking their claim to a new “Amidi-like” control of what constitutes the animation worth paying attention too. 

YouTube videos and social media influencers have garnered perhaps more attention than they should, often ranting and proselytizing oft-kilter, often-wrong opinions like the aforementioned CalArts style, criticizing changes in character designs, or otherwise completely misunderstanding how animation today even works. The specific circumstances that My Little Pony faced back in 2010 have essentially diffused across a whole swath of social media venues in 2020, of the push-and-pull between viewers and animated shows, of the fanbase and (hostile) critics, of the industry vets and professional critics, all vying for a voice, a stake, a role in the great gatekeeper narrative, to either open or close the door on new, unique perspectives.

It all comes back to the Ren & Stimpy reboot. John Kricfalusi used to offer animation classes, and he was also notoriously known to detest most modern cartoon sensibilities and aesthetics, even before he was outed as a monster. He was, in his own way, a gatekeeper. Comedy Central, instead of opening up to novel, original, and ideally, BIPOC artists, chose to hone in on a show that has too much baggage and history, a choice that itself feels like an act of gatekeeping on its own. There are new shows and new rebooted shows on the way due to the sheer number of cable, streaming, and online outlets that are available to the public. But Ren & Stimpy shows we have a long way to go to break these classic gatekeeper visions. Some things, whether they’re shows or ideas on whose voices to uplift, are best left in the past.

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