A Cosplayers Christmas

By Dash Shaw.

Published by Fantagraphics, 2016.

In 2014 and 2015 Dash Shaw released three issues of his comic book series Cosplayers (two regular issues and one free comic book day special). These comics presented an ongoing series of vignettes centered on the exploits of their dual female protagonists, Annie and Verti, two friends who are also the comic series’ titular cosplayers. Under Shaw’s pen, the act of cosplay took on the guise of an imperfect replication of the fictional, a drawing of the imaginary into the real world that hovers somewhere disconcertingly between these two aspect of being. A prime example of this blurring of fiction and reality is given by Shaw’s rendition of “Batman”, a man who is given away as a cosplayer by his moustache and uncharacteristic (for the fictional Batman) fattened bulk. The individual Cosplayers comics likewise took up this role of acting as something while simultaneously betraying their difference from it; they did this by sitting on the shelves of many comic book stores alongside the genre comics that provide a source of inspiration for some of the strains of cosplay that Cosplayers depicts. However, despite this object-design gesture at simulacra, the content of Shaw’s comics was too idiosyncratic to be considered akin to much of the material surrounding it, particularly the superhero fare. The Cosplayers comics were thus, much like human cosplayers, an imperfect replication of pre-existing fictions, a meshing of the real and the previously un-real to create something new.

In 2016 the individual Cosplayers comics were collected into a single edition which was titled Cosplayers: Perfect Collection. Like the individual comics, the Perfect Collection incorporated physical design into the book’s thematic concerns. Released as a hardcover book with a wraparound dust jacket, the Perfect Collection’s external cover featured an image of a female cosplaying as Green Arrow at a comic book convention; action lines, originating at the image’s borders, hurtle towards its centre, creating visual excitement for a scene that would otherwise be lacking dynamism i.e. these lines apply a layer over the image to enhance the quotidian reality of a person posing at a comic book convention. The dust jacket wraps around the book’s inner cover, which is staid in its design - the title text is printed in blue over a plain black background. Cosplayers: Perfect Collection thus continued the theme of dressing up plain reality and embellishing it with the trappings of fiction by presenting itself as a plain object that wears a more exciting mask, the “true” identity of the object existing in the space between these two images.

The “Perfect Collection” designation is not meant to be taken as a rigid epithet, rather, the label refers to the phraseology sometimes adopted in the collection of anime series when they are localised for release in English-speaking countries. In today’s market of endless rereleases, recuts, remasterings, and rebundlings there is almost no hope for any collection labelled as such to be “perfect” in the sense that it represents a final state of being for the media it contains. After all, not only are we encouraged as consumers to subscribe to the ongoing release of franchised or tangentially related materials, but we are also inspired, by a postmodern ethos, to recontextualise and reinterpret pre-existing works, adjusting their meaning to match their current location within the cultural milieu, a process which inevitably allows for numerous returns to, and reformats of, their previous presentations. Acknowledging this state of play, where material is constantly updated and reinvigorated, it should have been no surprise, then, when Shaw released a further issue of the Cosplayers comic series just a handful of months after the Perfect Collection appeared on shelves, scheduled just in time for the holiday season and bearing the title A Cosplayers Christmas.

The release of A Cosplayers Christmas as a standalone comic immediately draws attention to itself as an item of commercial production due to its ties to a season that has become increasingly associated with rampant consumerism and due to the way it invalidates the “perfectness” of the existing collection by implying that what has been produced to date is incomplete, thus requiring the production of a more “perfect” collection at a future date. This commercial aspect of the comic is countered on the comic’s cover by Shaw’s dedication of the item as a gift from him to you, the reader. To further emphasise the conflation of commercial and gift-giving principles, Shaw includes, on the comic’s cover, a depiction of the icon of the festive season, Santa, on the side of a Coca Cola bottle (Coke being the infamous creators of the popular image of Santa via the advertising campaigns they first began in the 1920s). This blurring of the lines between gift and product (you have to exchange money to receive the “gift” and are thus made fully aware of its ascribed monetary value) also alludes to the inseparability of art and commerce, with Shaw purposefully attaching his work to a consumer-centric holiday in order to comment from within its systemic order. In the same way as the designs of previous iterations of Cosplayers reflected the themes that were to be explored within their pages, the market positioning and cover construction of A Cosplayers Christmas summarises the dominant theme of the comic itself.

A Cosplayers Christmas is a story told in two mirrored parts. In the first part we observe Annie as she decides that constructing a “Holy Grail” (the plot Macguffin from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) would make a great Christmas present for her friend Verti. Annie initially makes the same mistakes as some of the characters in the film do by erroneously assuming that the Grail, as an object of dramatic importance, should similarly convey importance through the value of the materials used in its construction (in the movie, a gold cup is incorrectly chosen over the true Grail, an unadorned wooden cup; in the comic, Annie assumes that a trophy would make a good Grail replica on account of its superficial likeness to gold). After realising that she doesn’t have the tools, at home, to make an accurate Grail, Annie ventures out to a thrift shop where she is confronted by a raft of licensed merchandise for various entertainment properties (Batman, The X-men, and Seinfeld each get referenced), the incredulity she displays at their pricing revealing just how distanced her measure of value is from what has been determined by market consensus. Annie leaves the store and eventually encounters a pottery teacher who guides her through the making of a Grail for her friend. Annie passes this gift to Verti and then we get a transition to the second part of the story, which is told from Verti’s perspective.

Verti, surprised by Annie’s gift and appreciative of the thought behind it, is panicked by the realisation that she doesn’t have anything to give in return. Her solution is to build Annie a wizard’s staff out of a tree branch and a smooth stone, both eventually found in the yard of her home. Annie is just as appreciative to receive the makeshift staff as a gift as Verti was to receive the Grail. In either case, both presents have been produced completely outside the bounds of commercial enterprise, each garnering a near-totemic significance from the fact that they represent a physical manifestation of a fictional item of power and fascination. Shaw helps convey this in his art by illuminating the objects with flashes of colour and allusions to comic book visual artefacts (such as the benday dots used in old printing processes) that stand out against the comic’s predominant colour palette of naturalistic autumnal hues.

The postmodern condition, whereby everything is seen in the context of some interpretive framework rather than as a transcendent self-defining object, is liberating for the subject in that the individual is freed to make their own meaning as previously self-contained “works” are opened up to interpretations as read “texts”. In this view, a movie such as The Last Crusade is no longer seen as a transcendent work that exists somewhere in the interface between its authorial production and intended reception, instead, it is unmoored from such structures and open to all manner of aesthetic and non-aesthetic interpretations (you could look at it as a work of entertainment; as a reflection of prevailing cultural norms; as an influencer of cultural norms; as humorously camp exaggeration of a masculine ideal; as a resolute reinforcement of a macho ideology; as a living fictional reality to imagine oneself inside of - the possibilities are endless). The flipside to this liberated subjectivity is the loosening of reality from its previously rigid foundations. What were once taken as hard facts now only constitute soft evidence since all it takes is a recontextualisation, a change in the terms of reference, or a shift in the interpretive ideology, for the same information to be taken to support disparate realities. In a postmodern world where reality is slippery and impossible to lock down it’s been the capitalist enterprises that have been best able to adapt to a reality in flux, exploiting the vicissitudes of subjective belief for financial profit. You need look no further than the alternate marketing strategies used to sell multivitamins (health in a pill - the triumph of technology over nature) and whole foods (health in the unprocessed - the triumph of nature over technology) to see how adequately commercial enterprises have been able to mold themselves to accommodate multiple conflicting viewpoints held by the markets they deal to.

Shaw’s conception of cosplay shows how the exploitation of individuals that has been opened up by the postmodern ethos can be circumvented by those with the confidence to make their own meaning (even naïveté within certain bounds is enough) against the will of the myriad influences directed at them (e.g. marketing, social norms, political processes etc.). In A Cosplayers Christmas, the obliviousness of Annie and Verti to considerations of the monetary value of the gifts they exchange is endearing and humorous but it also points to the way that cosplay, by allowing its participants to claim partial ownership of the fictions they enmesh themselves in, serves to subvert the traditional paradigm of the separation between cultural producer and cultural consumer that has allowed space for capitalist interests to take hold. Annie and Verti have no interest in purchasing merchandise based on the properties that hold their interest, instead they would prefer to create their own related objects that they can attach personal meaning to.

The ascription of a measure such as “price” to an object as a determinant of value rather than a derivative of some kind of intrinsic worth to the potential purchaser is a form of control in that consumers are inclined to take higher prices as a signal for higher quality, influencing their personal perspectives of relative worth. Annie and Verti are freed from this type of control by their alternative value system (to Annie the value of a dress is not located in what it is but what she can turn it into) and so we see them behave as a different type of consumer, one who acts within the bounds of the capitalist system but who isn’t beholden to its rules. This freedom is associated with an ability for the pair to express themselves honestly, something that other characters in the comic aren’t always able to do. When Annie visits her first thrift store, she is approached by a clerk who accidentally insults her.

The clerk, having realised her mistake, attempts to reconcile with Annie out of a confused sense of duty to her employer that has been instilled in her by the “Yelp” customer rating system. In a desperate attempt to avoid receiving a poor customer satisfaction rating, the clerk attempts to superficially identify with Annie, declaring herself as a furry cosplayer despite having no idea what she’s talking about when she uses these terms. The clerk’s awareness of the existence of the Yelp rating system places her under the control of the invisible force of customer satisfaction, requiring her to contort her personality to match what she thinks any respective customer would wish to encounter. This scene demonstrates how systems that confer value, or imply surveillance, can encourage individuals to conform to imposed norms and present a schizophrenic, false facade to the world. Of course, to be partially detached from such systems, as Annie and Verti are, comes with its own troubles too. Being free to self-regulate your worldview can lead to drastic oscillations in temperament and mood at the hands of the illogical vicissitudes of subjectivity. In A Cosplayers Christmas we once again see Annie plunging into the depths of depression in one moment before almost immediately recovering her previously high spirits.

Shaw’s decision to give the reader access to Annie and Verti’s interiority via the graphic device of the thought balloon draws attention to the fact that both these characters address their subjective worlds with a superficial attention; their thoughts, as disclosed to the reader, frequently turn to prosaic matters as opposed to deliberate introspection. Annie, in particular, purposefully leaves her emotional state unexamined, refusing to get caught up in the existential identity angst that might be felt by someone in her position, someone who deliberately exists on the fringe between reality and assumed fictions. She experiences momentary bouts of depression but she never lingers on these thoughts long enough to become absorbed by them.

As with the previous Cosplayers comics, A Cosplayers Christmas succeeds just as much on its conceptual explorations of the cosplay universe as it does on its humanistic attention to the lives of its two lead characters. Annie and Verti aren’t merely ciphers for an investigation of the cosplay phenomenon, rather, they appear to exist as living characters who happen to be cosplayers and are capable of harbouring all manner of contradictions and subtextual thoughts that allow them to exist beyond the borders of the text and images that disclose their lives on the comics page. This impression is greatly assisted by the art style that Shaw employs on the comic; his thick line, supported by a bold hatching technique, is adept at capturing a reflection of a naturalistic reality but it’s also blunt in its representational force, preventing the comic’s imagery from ever appearing overdetermined. Shaw also employs graphic elements such as zipatone fields, benday dots, and woozy colour blooms as an occasional overlay to his grounded linework and baseline earthy colour palette; these allusions to the collage-like constructedness of reality do a good job of capturing the slippery borders between the objective and subjective realities that Shaw’s cosplayers inhabit. This duality present in the art style - the representation of a concrete reality with inked linework and the co-existing heightened reality suggested by the overt graphic elements - mirrors the way that cosplay imbues real world objects and people with additional meanings so that everything has the potential to sustain a dual existence: a potted cup is both a handcrafted object and an item of mystical power; the story is both a quotidian representation of the experience of gift-giving and an epic adventure embarked on by two people as they quest for items of significance; clothes are both functional wear and a means to adopt an entirely new persona; and a character can accommodate both great excitement and profound depression within themselves. Nothing is locked down to a single meaning or interpretation, including the way the reader is encouraged to engage with Annie and Verti. Shaw’s imagery and writing leaves plenty of space for the reader to perform the act of constructing an interpretation of the characters, to engage with them via a deeper reading guided by surface-level cues (e.g. their dialogue, stated motivations, actions, and immediate thoughts) so that Annie and Verti harbour a literary life that provides an organic motivation for the comic’s exploration of the world of cosplay.

While the cover of A Cosplayers Christmas points out the entanglement of corporate interests and cultural production, the comic’s story shows how this relationship can be partially unravelled by the cosplay experience. Annie and Verti each refuse the demands of socially imbued and commercially supported gift-giving conventions to engage with commercially produced culture on their own terms. Shaw’s cover promises a gift and, if it’s to be located anywhere besides the joys of having a chance to read the further cosplaying adventures of Annie and Verti, it’s in the comic’s liberation of subjectivity from the mechanisms that have developed to control it.