MONSTER HYENA

For the Monster/Cute assignment, I created two collages, one of which was two-sided.

The Monster Hyena collage originally depicted one giant hyena mouth with two hyena mouths on either side of it.  The background consisted of cut-up photocopies of hyena fur, and pictures of hyena-eaten animal ribs.  The back, which I somehow decided I must also decorate with photocopied fur and ribs, was meant to represent the abstract, killers-in- fur aspect of the hyena Monster.

The feedback on the original collage was that there were too many mouths–yes, I knew it–something hastily put together, however well thought-out , received the truth.  Also, the animal ribs and xeroxed fur on the Monster “back” were not recognizable , and as such, any point about the hyena as killing machine was lost.

Hyena – Monster (revised)

Hyena – Monster Back (orig ver)

I revised this collage because I knew what my original idea had been, and I wanted to see it through.  I removed the extra mouths, cut out black and white photocopied pieces of the same color hyena mouth and jaws, and re-assembled the collage as a single scary maw.  I also added a few ribs on top, hoping that their color versions and the fleshy backgrounds, while still abstract, might make the black and white ribs slightly more recognizable.

In its revised form, I’d say that while this is no art piece,  I do think it is a reasonable picture of Monster Hyena.

I did not change the back of the Hyena Monster because I felt that the revision of the front made the back irrelevant.

CUTE HYENA
My original “cute” take on the Hyena was truly awful–so much so that I also revised it before posting.  The criticism, again, “too much.” Yes!  I found many, many images of cute hyena babies and, since getting to know and appreciate the hyena, had an irresistable urge to overwhelm people with cute hyenas.

In revising, I wanted to depict the animal that some people believe is as intelligent as a primate (Jane Goodall). I also wanted to allude to status within hyena society, as well as to the playfulness of young hyenas. I took my original large color photocopied image of an earnest-looking baby spotted hyena and removed all the extra disjointed images and reconstituted its bottom half with a black and white copy (I had only one color copy of the photo).  Then I fashioned a kind of frame in cut-out pieces of hyena fur from other hyena photocopies I had.  To put forth the scampishness of the young hyenas, (usually only imagined in their vicious mode), I included, on the right side of the page, five copies of the same small image of a baby brown hyena, wearing what appears to be a little smile.

Hyena – Cute (revised)

I created the fur frame around the large picture in an attempt to give the feeling of a framed child’s portrait, with its associations of value and status (hyenas are born into a rigid class hierarchy dependent on their mothers’ status). Hyena mothers suckle their young for 12 to 18 months; and the nursing may be hard on the mothers, since the babies, as mentioned earlier, are born with teeth.  Birth is also difficult for hyena mothers, and an estimated 10% die giving birth to their young.

The small baby hyenas on the side, sprite-like in this moment, could become the retinue of the large hyena cub when they mature.

I am interested in these creatures because they are familiar, but they are not easy for me to romanticize or idealize. The three aspects of chicken I am covering are (1) Roosters/Chickens as Sacred Beings – Japan; (2) Roosters/Chickens as Comic Figures (3) Roosters/Chickens Used in Political Commentary.

Chickens as Sacred Beings – Ancient Japan
In Japan, in the Yayoi period (300BCE–300CE), what scholars have identified as roosters appear in chambers of burial mounds, depicted as sitting at the helm of boats bound for the land of the dead. It is clear that they are a very old animal.  Chicken fossils have been found in Northern China dating to 5400 BCE, (possibly originating from southeast Asia/India, and Polynesia–though there may have been more than one strain of bird), and chickens proliferated throughout northern and central Asia, including Japan.  Possibly they were rare or perhaps their crowing at dawn, marked them as mediators between night and day, and as such, appropriate guides on the journey to the underworld. Maybe the action of adrenaline in a chicken’s body after its head is cut off (which mimics continued life) made the ancient Japanese imagine that this creature defied death. Some folklorists associate the cock with the folk deity Jizo, who, in pre-Buddhist times, was associated with the rooster and was considered a protector against demons, analogous to the rooster, who disperses the demons of the night at daybreak.

Yayoi Period Burial Mound drawing (l)   Kofun Period Burial graphic (r)

Contemporary American Comic Chickens/Roosters

Chickens, in particular, roosters have been used frequently as comic characters. In the two examples I am presenting here, both are associated with the American South, both are verbal persuaders and both allude to human characters earlier in media history: Foghorn E. Leghorn and Hyper-Chicken.

Foghorn J. Leghorn
Foghorn J. Leghorn is a comic chicken created by Warner Brothers, and is a large, white, male rooster. He sports a southern accent and  bullies for fun, both verbally and physically, but always ends up paying the price. His verbal style was taken from Senator Beauregard Claghorn, a comic southern politician character (“”I won’t go into a room unless it’s got Southern Exposure!”) on Fred Allen’s radio show in the mid-1940s. Claghorn originated phrases that were used in Foghorn’s dialogue, such as, “That’s a joke, I said, that’s a joke son…” Leghorn is such a bold persuader that in his first cartoon appearance, in “Walky Talky Hawky,” he initially convinces Henery Hawk, a young and hungry hawk, that he is actually a horse, and the the farmyard dog, Leghorn’s nemesis, is in fact, a chicken. What is interesting about this use of the chicken for comic effect during the 50s and 60s perio is that it points to a desire to move past the Civil War and the rural by making fun of the chicken embodying a regional stereotype. (I have not seen more recent Foghorn Leghorn cartoons.) At the same time, the fast-talking southern trickster is treated fondly, even as he carries a large plank through the barnyard and hums Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races,”"Gwine to Run All Night, or De Camptown Races,” the minstrel song’s formal title. Foghorn Leghorn takes the southern politician character on which it is based and pushes satire into the realm of slapstick, though it sometimes seemed to be used in the 1950s to make subtle political satire.

Hyper-Chicken
Hyper-Chicken is a current chicken comic figure, a character in the Matt Groening cartoon, “FutureWorld” who is a lawyer. Hyper-Chicken takes the Jimmy Stewart lawyer character of the 1940s film “Anatomy of a Murder” and turns it inside out. In “Anatomy of a Murder,” Stewart plays Paul Biegler, a small-town lawyer in a rural Michigan town who uses the insanity defense successfully to win acquittal for his client, who has claimed to have killed a man who allegedly raped his wife. At the film’s end it becomes clear that Biegler has been tricked by his client and the client’s wife, and is stiffed for his fee. Hyper-Chicken mimics Stewart’s “just a smalltown lawyer” style and frequently uses the insanity defense for his clients, but additionally, has a southern accent, hearkening back to a television lawyer of the 80s, Matlock. Both the Biegler and Matlock lawyer characters have an air of incompetence, a shambling style, a persistent sincerity of purpose, but both win cases. Hyper-Chicken is portrayed as a flat-out incompetent lawyer, whose sincerity is not to be trusted, and who is, in fact, ridiculous, because he cannot predict his own actions.

In this scene, Hyper-Chicken interviews as a trial witness the surveillance camera at a bank where a robbery has occurred:

Hyper-Chicken: As the surveillance camera for the bank what all the judge was a-jawing about, could y’all tell us what you done seen the day of the crime?
Camera: Well, let’s see. My memory’s a little fuzzy, but it went exactly like this: [It projects a black and white picture of Fry and Bender taking the money from Roberto. The court gasps.]
Hyper-Chicken: Your Honor, I move that I be disbarred for introducing this evidence against my own clients.

Hyper-Chicken provides no quarter for quaint understanding or discounting of smalltown or southern regionalisms. The character also embodies the impatience with sincerity and takes the irony of the trial outcome in “Anatomy of a Murder” (a smalltown lawyer wins, but his client is actually guilty and not insane), and pushes it to the extreme of comic cynicism.

Chickens as Political Symbols

The “Chickenhawk”
One of the most common of recent political references to chickens in American political life has been to the “chickenhawk.” This refers to someone who aggressively supports war and the violence and destruction of war, but who has refused to serve in the military, and, likely, has actively avoided military service. This epithet was used frequently during the Bush II administration to describe Bush and his close White House advisors, Cheyney and Rumsfeld, all of whom promoted the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, even though they had avoided serving in Vietnam, when they were of age to do so. It is interesting that the word, “chickenhawk” here is used ironically, because warmongers called chickenhawks are not the tough, beautiful hawks who hunt chickens. Rather, they are hawks on military action who are chicken or cowardly themselves. The use of the full “chickenhawk” word, however, calls up the definition as “bird of prey,” and indeed, the warmongering chickenhawk is a bird of prey feasting on the remains of others, hoping to preserve their own political lives.

The depictions of chickenhawks are usually crude: Either home-made for personal or small organization blogs or rendered in rough political cartoon-style. Here are two I found, that are purely about the “chickenhawks,” rather than depictions of political figures as chicken hawks.

Elmer the Chicken (and his son Jake)
I found an inspired use of the chicken as political symbol in the Filipino graphic novel, called “Elmer the Chicken.” Jake, an underachieving chicken, emerges after the “awakening,” when chickens have acquired the intelligence and emotions of human beings and have been declared internationally “fellow humans”. They consider themselves equal to humans of whatever skin color, or ethnicity, but they mustfight for their rights. Jake discovers his father, Elmer’s, diary, which chronicles the civil rights struggles of chickens in the 1970s. Jake’s father’s exploits are chronicled in the earlier books, along with Jake’s own struggle with his identity and place in society.

“Elmer the Chicken” addresses human-chicken intermarriage, species betrayal, and assertion of rights granted under law but not easily shared using the contemporary graphic novel as a medium and mixing cinematic-shot style storytelling with older styles, including those that recall mid-1800s silhouettes, in order to shift the visual storytelling to the contexts called up–violent action movie or Victorian calling card, used for ironic or referential effect.

Andok’s Chicken

Beyond Elmer the Chicken, I found that because the chicken is considered by many the national food of the Phillippines, one political commentator, Kristian Cruz, has advocated that the national bird, which is the monkey-eating, near-extinct Phillippine Eagle, be replaced by ‘Andok’s Chicken’. Upon further investigation, I discovered that “Andok’s Chicken” is a national brand of chicken fast-food restaurant, and the restaurants are widespread in the Phillippines (300). The writer refers to Andok’s Chicken logo, invoking the commercialism, trivialisation and coopting of Filipino struggles for a fairer political system, while putting it forth as a symbol of recognition of reality, and of hope. After all, Andok’s is cheap, the majority of Filipinos are on a budget, and it is wholly Filipino-owned and operated. Cruz points out that making “Andok’s Chicken” the national bird of the Phillippines will spur people on to “take matters into their own hands” as the originators of the Andok’s Chicken business did.