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When I named this the (Infrequent) Newsletter, I didn't realize how infrequent it would really be, but it has been nearly a year since the last time I sent one out. . . and what a year it's been!
 

As I mentioned last spring, I moved from my home planet of Brooklyn to Pittsburgh, PA in June of 2019, and a lot of life before and after that time has been about that homeowner's dream of making the place your own, which meant a lot painting, building a game room in the basement for the ultimate RPG experience, and re-shelving what we jokingly call "the wine cellar," which is just a root cellar cold storage space where we keep household supplies and dry goods (something that has come in quite handy with the quarantines in place and our desire to stay home as much as possible). My wife and I also got a new dog, Winnie the ChiWeenie (Chihuahua/Dachshund mix). I had also been trawling some of the local comic shops and taking advantage of a very different back issue market in a much smaller city. I have probably gotten about 200 or more back issues since I've moved. Though obviously, like so many other of our common activities, comic-hunting (at least in person) is on pause.

As for The Middle Spaces, things are chugging along. While 2019 turned out to be a slow year in terms of traffic and total number of posts, there are plenty of good things on the horizon, which you can see in the announcements below and in the "Coming Soon" section (assuming La 'Rona doesn't put the kibosh on even more plans). However, I am trying to take advantage of my bursts of productivity amid my recurring general despair, including doing stuff like making unboxing videos when my pull-list books arrive (something that may not happen again for a while since Diamond announced its halt on distributing any comics and Marvel - as of this writing - is cutting back on a third of its titles in response to Corona-related disruptions). Nevertheless, if fewer new comics are coming in I will have more time to spend with my old comics and making more stuff to share on the site, Patreon, and here.

In the meantime, we also want to hear from you! This seems like the right time to reach out, reinforce our social networks, be patient with our professional networks, and be kind to everyone we meet. So if there's anything we can do, if you have questions, suggestions, complaints, just checkin' in, whatever, reach out by email or on Twitter! 

Announcements
 

Welcome Nicholas Miller! Our New Regular Writer!

In the 2019 Year-End Meta Post, I mentioned my desire to continue to expand The Middle Spaces by bringing on two to three regular writers and maybe an associate editor or two. Nick joining the team is the beginning of that process and his brilliant analysis of comics and other popular culture through the lens of transmedia studies, queer studies, Latinx studies, and more, will be a great addition to the site. As many of you probably know, Nick has been contributing to the site semi-regularly already, including participating in both of our roundtables, and writing two guest posts (one of which went up since the last newsletter went out). His first post in his role as staff writer was published near the end of March and he hopes to be contributing a new post four times a year (so we have three more in 2020 to look forward to). Nick is one of those rare examples of a person you meet in a professional context that becomes a real friend so I was so happy when he suggested coming on before I even got to ask him (like I was planning to).

Nicholas E. Miller (@uncannydazzler) is Assistant Professor of English at Valdosta State University, where he teaches American literature, gender and sexuality studies, and comics studies. His work has appeared in many journals and other venues, including his essay, “Asexuality and Its Discontents: Making the ‘Invisible Orientation’ Visible in Comics,” in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society (2017) and “‘Now That It’s Just Us Girls’: Transmedial Feminisms from Archie to Riverdale,” in Feminist Media Histories (2018).

What's New on Patreon?

We started a Patreon for The Middle Spaces in September of 2018 and the support of readers has been an immense help in keeping the site ad free and paying guest writers. We also recently hit the goal that allowed us to provide our copy editor (who proofreads and gives feedback on every post) with some modest payment for his work (even though he originally volunteered, not compensating someone at all for their work doesn't feel right to me).

We appreciate any and all support (even if it doesn't take monetary form through patronage or donating through ko-fi), but have also recently tweaked some of the reward levels and created more patron-only content to help thank the people who have been kicking us bucks.

The "World's Finest" reward level ($5/month) wasn't rewarding folks enough. So, we extended the special offer we ran in September to be a permanent thing. Now, in addition to the No-Prize and sticker rewards, those giving at the World's Finest level will also be getting a comic chosen from my collection once a year, accompanied by some brief writing on it by me.

In addition, now all patreon supporters will be acknowledged on the "Our Supporters" page after 12 months of giving.

Furthermore, I have been working towards monthly patron-only video content. I am still learning the ropes of recording and editing, but The Middle Spaces has a You Tube channel (that includes a playlist of select songs that have been written about or referenced over the years), some of which is public content, but some of which is only accessible through our Patreon page.  Originally, the video content was only going to be available to Two-in-One supporters or higher, but since the content is not yet coming out as consistently as I'd like, I am leaving it accessible to all supporters for now.

So far I have made videos digging into short boxes from my collection like the ones labeled "Kirby & Kids" and "Odd Ducks" (the latter of which specifically looks at my collection of Assistant Editor's Month comics from 1983), and my next video is going to take look at my "F.F. & Beyond" box.

If you want a sense of what these videos are like and you are are not a Patreon supporter, you can check out the teaser version on the YouTube channel or check out the video I made for the 2019 Year-End Meta post below, which takes a peek at my custom comics closet.

On my very last visit to a used bookstore to trawl for back issues before La Rona arrived to lock us down and make even the most dedicated collector of comics hesitant to handle countless dusty comics in boxes or else risk a life-threatening illness, I grabbed a handful of random issues that looked interesting and that cost no more than two bucks each. Among that last stack was Marvel Fanfare #38, and when I got it home I realized that not only were both stories in it written by Jo Duffy (a Marvel mainstay writer of the 70s and 80s, who is probably best known for her wild run on Power Man & Iron First and co-creating the delightful and underrated Fallen Angels), but they were penciled by women as well (Judith Hunt drew the Moon Knight main story, and Colleen Doran drew the Dazzler/Rogue back-up).
 

I was fascinated by this 34-year old comic and the rarity of it having women together in those roles in a Big Two comic of that time. The stories within were also fascinating and in some ways reflected something about the dominant perspectives about women and girls and what they like. However, when I noticed the editorial comic strip by Al Milgrom on the inside cover, and its misguided TERF-y joke, I knew I had to write about the issue. So I did.

 

One of the concerns I have when writing something like this about women comic book writers and artists, is avoiding the suggestion that there is something inherently different about this writing or art because it is done by women. I don't want to be reductive. While our lived experiences and identities certainly shape how we see and act in the world and how we represent it, there is no one to one correlation. While some women writers and theorists like Virginia Woolf and Hélène Cixous have tried to identify and encourage what the latter termed écriture féminine, a kind of writing that adheres to the goal of how a "woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies" (1975), I must admit a too strict correlation between embodiment and gender as expressed through cultural production makes me nervous. While I agree that writing should work to transgress against the phallogocentric default of literature (something that Cixous thought men were also capable of), this perspective strikes me as too easily reduced to a biological essentialism that excludes rather than includes. As such, I think the kind of analysis I try to apply in this essay, walks the line between considering how the female identities of these creators contextualizes the work through the position of women in the field of comics production but not through some essential "woman-ness" that comes out in their work. In fact, I ended up cutting a paragraph from the essay specifically bringing in the work of Cixous and other French Feminist post-structuralists like Luce Irigaray because the essay was already overlong and to do this work justice I would have to have elaborated quite a bit more than I had room for. Nevertheless, I hope that this question of women's writing and art—one that has shaped feminist thought for a century—continues to find its way into discussions of comics.



Something else I cut from the essay for length was in the section where I mention that it is not my intention to "cancel" Al Milgrom for a 32-year old problematic joke strip. In an early draft, I discussed how I probably would not have done much better in terms of implicit attitudes towards women and ignorance about gender and trans* issues in 1988 or 1998, and how even in 2008 I was still pretty early in my efforts to inform myself and to be sensitive to those issues. Ultimately, this seemed irrelevant to my analysis, but I think it is important to give people room to learn and do better, including ourselves.

Anyway, the art included in the two stories is amazing and there was more of it than I felt I could reasonably include given both fair-use guidelines and just not making the post into a hard to follow mess of text wrapped around countless examples of panels. As such I decided to include some more examples here (including the panel above which is from "Whatever Happened to Podunk Slam?"