Everybody (Alien Deppey Doane Harris) is blogging about various recent Marvel comics, the Marvel Comics rating policy, and the trouble both are causing with squeamish retailers.
There are a lot of factors at play here. One is that it seems cheap to imply (as Alan David Doane and Dirk Deppey appear to) that the creators are somehow behaving sleazily by putting adult content into their books. Marvel’s T&A covers are one thing–in many cases they have little or nothing to do with the book behind them, and that is sleazy, particularly when the covers aren’t even sexy except to the stereotypical lonely fanboy–but a book like Bruce Jones’s Incredible Hulk is an intelligently written thriller for mature audiences, which features realistically disturbing violence and (in the Abomination story arc, and I swear I’m not kidding) realistically arousing sensuality. It’s not Jones’s decision to give an issue with an attempted rape scen a PG rating and a 25-cent pricetag in what seems to be an effort to get kids to read the thing. (As a side note, the very grown-up nature of Jones’s Hulk tales might actually make a second Hulk title make sense, if it were substantially differentiated from Jones’s by being geared toward a more all-ages audience.)
As for Chuck Austen’s The Eternal, well, the content is indeed strong stuff. Sex slaves, sadism, rape-murder, interspecies mating–“yuck” about sums it up. Of course, all this makes Austen’s depiction of the Eternals as racist marauding scum perfectly convincing, and in future issues I’d imagine we’ll see the main character set apart from this depravity. In addition, sleaziness is Austen’s strong suit: compare his riveting pulp mini-epic U.S. War Machine or this disturbing Eternal issue to the ponderous Captain America or preachy Uncanny X-Men (which, it should come as a surprise to no one, boasts a naked jump-rope scene as its most original and entertaining moment). Moreover, The Eternal is part of Marvel’s mature-audience MAX line, which the company has always made clear is not to be sold to children. And at any rate the sex scenes are in the book are filled with nudity and shocking in their way, but they’re certainly not explicit (a point Franklin Harris, in a post that correctly defends Jones and Austen, makes quite clearly). If this is explicit, Dave Cooper’s Weasel is a criminal offense. And look at the retailers’ reasons for objecting to the book: erroneous claims that it contains “graphic sex scenes”; complaints that, essentially, Marvel is breaking this guy’s favorite toys (coupled with the usual “Why should someone’s sexuality, which after all is merely a biological imperative inherent to every human being, enter into a story?” stupidity, as well an inability to come up with anything other than the CSI comic as an example of a good mature-readers title); taking offense at what is perceived as blasphemy (now that’s a good reason for taking something off your store shelves–provided you sell comics in Tehran, or Eric Rudolph’s backyard); pining for the halcyon days of the “consistent” Comics Code (folks, believe me, that antiquated piece-of-shit rubber-stamp quasi-ratings-system has died a death it richly deserved). Are these the people you want deciding what comics should be labelled “good,” let alone “mature”?
If there’s a problem, it’s not the talent, or with a clearly adults-only line like MAX–it’s inconsistency with which Marvel applies its ratings. High-profile books seem to get a free pass when it comes to highly violent or sexual content. Whether they use adult content intelligetly (Jones’s Hulk, Grant Morrison’s sexually charged and challenging New X-Men, Pete Milligan’s satire of Reality TV immorality X-Statix) or like an episode of The Man Show is beside the point–if you’re going to have a self-regulated ratings system, use it the way it’s meant to be used. It’s ridiculous to give J. Michael Straczynski’s adventure-romp Amazing Spider-Man the same rating as a seedy study of criminality like Jones’s Kingpin. And it won’t be surprising if retailers, in an effort to crack down on “dirty books” getting to minors, start throwing out the baby with the bathwater (if by “bathwater” you mean books with big-titted women punching each other).