Re(MoC)CAp epilogue
Craig Thompson (in shirt that does not read “This is not a BEER BELLY–It’s a gas tank for a SEX MACHINE”) and Sean T. Collins, 12:43am, June 28, 2004, North Bellmore, NY.
Milo-age
John Jakala writes in:
Is Milo being serious in his latest entries? I have a hard time telling how much of his writing is sincere vs. sarcastic [I’ve found many people have this problem with deciphering Milo–ed.], but I generally enjoy his writing most when I assume he’s being ironic. But “clueless Merkin douchebags”? I guess part of the problem is not knowing who he’s referring to (other than Parrish Baker, whose comments I grant were pretty lame, but I hardly think everyone’s arguments should be tarred with the same brush just because one blogger makes some crass, tasteless statement).
If he’s serious, I have several problems with his arguments/rhetoric. One, all the clueless douchebags were responding to Tim O’Neil’s terribly reductive arguments, not to your out-of-context TCJ excerpt. Two, the fact that Neilalien quoted something doesn’t mean that he approves of it. Three, yeah I can understand why those who have had more direct experiences with fascism would be troubled by things that remind them of those regimes, but that still doesn’t make superheroes essentially fascistic. Four, supercomics gave us Ray Tate and Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Milo-age
For the record (now UPDATED)
I thought that the way I placed emphasis on that Comics-Journal-fascism exchange made it clear enough, but since what I was getting at still managed to elude at least one former editor of the Comics Journal, let me state for the record that the “problem” I was pointing to was Gary Groth’s opinion of the concept of heroism, not Jean-Claude Mezieres’s. Meziere was the interview subject–why on Earth would I, and how on Earth could I, hold one of his opinions against the magazine the interview appeared in?
Obviously, it was Journal editor & publisher Gary Groth’s “yes” that I was pointing to. To him, the idea that “the concept of a hero is fascism” (not “smacks of,” but is; A=A, if you will) is so clear-cut that it doesn’t merit any more exploration or explanation than a one-word confirmation, or at least that’s how it comes across.
I mean, duh, of course I wasn’t talking about Mezieres. How would his opinion signal a problem with the Journal? Everyone did notice that the “emphasis mine” was placed on Gary’s “yes,” right? Okay, everyone except Milo, then?
I’ll say again that this exchange took place 18 years ago, and I’ve had it pointed out to me by people who should know that heroic fiction was viewed with even more suspicion than usual back then, seeing as how it was Morning In America and all that. But the point was that, despite what Milo says, it wasn’t me who “project[ed] the whole tired ‘heroes=fascists’ stance onto … a word”–it was Gary. (And Gil Kane, oddly enough.)
(UPDATE: I think Milo might be saying that I’m making too much out of what might have just been a monosyllabic silence-filler, but in my experience as an interviewer I’ve never said “yes” in that context. Yeah, mm-hmm, uh-huh, okay, sure–those I’ve said, but I can’t imagine saying “yes” unless I was agreeing with someone or confirming something. Certainly Gil Kane chiming in with an identical statement lends credence to the notion that Gary wasn’t just making noise, but was in fact saying something intentional.)
(BTW, Milo then proceeds to launch into a couple of tangentially related diatribes about the infamous blogospheric ideological echo-chamber, Ugly American Nerds, and a defense of the French, all of which he seems to think are spot-on responses to my “straw man” argument. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t’cha think?)
Anyway, NeilAlien has a linkfilled round-up of this whole hero/fascist debate, with some thoughts of his own (I was interested to see that, like me, he too pointed out the fact that since the early ’60s superheroes themselves have, in the main, been anti-authoritarian individualists); meanwhile, David Oakes writes in to Tim O’Neil with an exploration of the relationship between simple (mere?) power and full-blown fascism.
PS: For a solid, comprehensive, difficult-to-abuse definition of fascism, I recommend the following:
Fascism is a set of ideologies and practices that seeks to place the nation, defined in exclusive biological, cultural, and/or historical terms, above all other sources of loyalty, and to create a mobilized national community. Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism, for they are seen as prioritizing class or gender rather than nation. This is why fascism is a movement of the extreme right. It is also a movement of the radical right because the defeat of socialism and feminism and the creation of the mobilized nation are held to depend upon the advent to power of a new elite acting in the name of the people, headed by a charismatic leader, and embodied in a mass, militarized party. Fascists are pushed towards conservatism by common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests–family, property, religion, the universities, the civil service–where the interests of the nation are considered to require it. Fascist radicalism also derives from a desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women’s movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority. Fascists seek to ensure the harmonization of workers’ and women’s interests with those of the nation by mobilizing them within special sections of the party and/or within a corporate system. Access to these organizations and to the benefits they confer upon members depends on the individual’s national, political, and/or racial characteristics. All aspects of fascist policy are suffused with ultranationalism.
From Kevin Passmore’s excellent Fascism: A Very Short Introduction. I myself probably wouldn’t have privileged fascism’s relationship to feminism quite so much, nor perhaps even its relationship to socialism–it seems to me that the nationalistic exclusionary/exterminationist facet of fascism is thereby undersold; not to mention the fascists’ use of violence to further their goals, even within a nominally democratic framework such as those possessed by both Germany and Italy during the inter-War years–but I think that’s the best working definition I’ve yet come across. You can see how it encompassess not just Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists, but to one extent or another Imperial Japan (which used a fall-guy Emperor in lieu of the charismatic leader), Falangist Spain (which used fascist tactics, but eventually was more accurately an extreme-right conservative dictatorship, in a more traditional sense, than a fascist one), the various Islamist movements (which define the nation in religious terms–the Ummah), and the American extreme right (which has not truly adopted fascist tactics, but has to one degree or another a fascist conception of the ideal America), and the European extreme right (ditto). You can also see that it does not encompass Spider-Man.
Prediction
Feline literacy will become the hot-button issue of the comics blogosphere. Why, the Missus and Scott at Polite Dissent are already on the beat!
Another thought
In one of his big anti-superhero posts, Tim O’Neil asked why we (the blogosphere, I’m assuming) spend so much time and energy discussing superhero books. I’m sure this question is meant to be rhetorical, seeing as how Tim thinks they’re not worth discussing (and yet–and yet!–his last two Comics Journal review pieces were both of superhero books), but it made me think: Why do we spend so much time discussing superhero books? Obviously most of us have fairly heterodox taste in comics. If I myself were to list my top twenty/twenty-five favorite comics of all time, maybe only three or four would be superhero books. So what gives?
Well, obviously,
I mean, duh.
But let’s pretend, for a second, that that’s just a dopey ad-hominem dismissal of an opinion that the speaker disagrees with. (I know, that’s tough to believe, but bear with me.) The answer that comes to mind for the question “Why does the blogosphere spend so much time talking about superhero comics?” is “Well, where else are we gonna go to do it?”
Time and time again bloggers have pointed out that there’s not really a forum for intelligent, textual & aesthetic criticism and analysis of supercomics. The Comics Journal is far and away the best magazine about comics around, but their serious engagement with supercomics is limited at best; most of it is characterized by the type of statement reprinted above. Superhero-centric publications like Wizard aren’t interested in criticism and analysis at all, and superhero-centric publications like Comic Book Artist are predominantly venues for those-were-the-days reminisces more than anything else. Meanwhile, other online discussion fora (message boards, Usenet, listservs, etc.) too easily degenerate into flame wars and in jokes. Blogging, as a publication tool, seems to lend itself well to lengthy discussion between self-policing participants. Meanwhile, in a sort of chicken-and-egg situation, at this point comics bloggers tend to be people who want to talk intelligently about superhero comics and turned to blogging to do so.
As comicsblogging continues to evolve, I wouldn’t be surprised to see blogs develop along other lines; we’ve already seen some blogs that appear to follow the Wizard or CBA pattern, and with Tim and Milo both in business we’re starting to see some that resemble the Journal. The more the merrier, I think.
Attention Cartoonists
Hot on the heels of her still-ongoing “correctly identify my tattoo and win a prize” contest, the Missus and our daughter Lucy the cat have come up with what may well be the offer of the century for comics writers and artists. Go take a look!
Heute Gotham City–Morgens die Welte!
Alright. Yes, the potential for reinforcing fascist ideas is inherent in superhero comics. Ubermenschen in impressive costumes using their might to make right, yes yes, we understand.
But here’s the thing: When was the last time you read a superhero comic that (as Tim “Here’s a twenty-graf essay on how upset I am that we spend so much time writing about superhero comics” O’Neil puts it, God love him) “uncritical acceptance of powerful authority figures”? (Excepting Marvels, of course. And The Authority, no matter what Warren “Comics’ Closet Conservative” Ellis says.)
To use a much bandied-about statistic, 99.999% of superheroes themselves are unable to accept their own status as powerful authority figures. And this isn’t new, either. This has been this way since the Marvel Age dawned in the early 1960s. And this is to say nothing of the fact that for the past two years nearly every supercomic writer who’s felt the need to Say Something has made his or her spandex-clad steroid cases stand-ins for Resident Bush’s Ill-Advised Mesopotamian Intervention, explicitly rejecting the notion that one should offer up uncritical acceptance of powerful authority figures. And to be honest, I wouldn’t have my superhero comics any other way. They’re interesting because of their powers, but they’re compelling because of their weaknesses, and the extent to which they do or do not overcome them.
So who would uncritically accept superheroes? Genuine idiots, I suppose, but then the real question becomes: Why the hell are we wasting so much time and energy getting upset that a genuine idiot might read Action Comics and think to himself, “If there really were a Superman, I would uncritically accept his powerful authority”?
I’d really love to opt out of these F-word debates from here on out, because quite frankly the idea that superheroes promote fascism is just as much a product of years-long immersion in comics culture as is the near-worship of superheroes. But if you’d like to learn more about fascism, I recommend Fascism: A Very Short Introduction by Kevin Passmore. (Hint: Fascism is not German for “art that I don’t like that has some muscular people in it.”)
(Thanks to J.W. Hastings–he’s got a great post on the topic, and links to all the pertinent, thoughtful posts on other blogs, especially Tim’s. And a big “welcome back” to Tim, by the way–I really did miss his bloggin’ presence!)
Hey kids! Contest!
First of all, our computer is back again, and no, we didn’t lose all our data. So hooray!
Second of all, the Missus and I got new tattoos yesterday. Mine is the emblem of the kings of Gondor–the White Tree, the Seven Stars, and the Crown of Elendil. It’s nice.
But what is the Missus’s new tattoo? That is the question. Go on over to her site, check it out, and let her know what you think it is. The first person to get it right wins an actual prize! How about that!
Computer World
The bright lights at Apple Central must have had their iPod earbuds blasting that annoying Jet song a little too loud when they fixed my computer less than a month ago, because it turns out they didn’t fix the goddamn thing at all. Today it melted down in the exact same way it did in mid-May, with the added fun factoid that the tech at the Apple Store thinks it’s somewhat likely that the whole hard drive was wiped out. Such fun!
So, I’d say “expect blogging to be light for a while,” but it’s been light for such a long time that this probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise to any of you anymore. Still, hope springs eternal, even when every week seems to bring the Collins household a fresh kick in the teeth.
The problem with the Comics Journal, in a word
[GARY] GROTH: What do you find politically offensive about the concept of a hero?
[JEAN-CLAUDE] M
Managed care
You may remember a long time ago, back when Journalista roamed the Earth, a report that the major American bookstore chain Borders was switching to category management for its graphic novel sections. In a nutshell, category management is an industry term for a procedure by which advice is solicited from the publishers themselves as to how their books should be shelved and marketed within the store.
Now that I work at a certain major American bookstore chain that shall remain nameless, I’ve seen what’s in store for the cat-manned graphic novel section, and frankly, I’m pleased. The unofficial split between “manga” and “everything else” will now be made official, with a third category of “superheroes” emerging, leaving “everything else” to include artcomix, altcomix, indies, non-superhero genre books, and so forth. Each category will be alphabetized according to what makes the most sense–superheroes will be in order by character, “other graphic novels” by author, and (I’m assuming) manga by title. (Right now everything’s by author, and despite the wishes of the “we deserve legitimacy!” crowd, that makes it much harder to navigate. You might have to look in four separate places to track down a significant run of, say, Daredevil books; and how many kids can keep track of those foreign-to-Western-eyes Japanese surnames? (Hell, oftentimes the chain will accidentally file a manga book by the author’s first name.))
One final aspect of category management? The graphic novel section will be expanding by 40%-60%. So far, so good.
A thought
Of course the work is not just the work. If it were, the whole critical enterprise would be a titanic waste of time, and I don’t believe that it is. There are many cases when critics attempt to armchair-create rather than critique–I think we see this when people go after, say, the Comics Journal not because they’re not reviewing superhero comics, but because they’re not coming to the right conclusions about those superhero comics; or when people go after The Sopranos for a lack of whackings during a particular episode or season; or when people went after Eyes Wide Shut for not giving them enough boners; etc. Sometimes what you want a given work of art to be is not what that work is supposed to be. I’ve fallen victim to this trap myself, or so Tom Spurgeon has told me at least once.
But sometimes what you want a given work of art to be is what it probably should have been. Sometimes authors make the wrong choices in terms of what to show or how to show it. The window they place over the events of the fictional life of a given character is too narrow, too broad, too opaque, too transparent, too open, too shut, or facing the wrong direction entirely. The author can say “No, no, it’s exactly the way I wanted it–it’s your problem if you don’t like the view,” but that doesn’t make it so.
Here in the trenches of blogville, we each of us get raked across the coals on a semiregular basis, being told by a couple-three dozen other smartypantses why our line of thinking does or doesn’t make sense. It would never occur to me to respond “Yeah it does–you just don’t get it.” Well, okay, it would from time to time, but that would very much depend on the person in question and the strength of his or her argument. The folks involved in picking at Demo are some of the brightest in the bunch, and the arguments are all pretty sound, whether or not you agree with them. Which, of course, you are free to do or not do. The work is the work, if you must; but if you must, you must also know that it can be good or less so, and critics can help analyze why.
At any rate, if I were the Demo team, I’d think it’s pretty neat that my work generated as much heartfelt and informed discussion as it in fact has. We don’t get this kind of mileage out of The Art of Greg Horn, you know.
As it turns out Demo #7 is my favorite of the series so far–we seem to be trending upward, which excites me.
(More fascinating Demo talk at Jason Kimble, Dave Fiore, Peiratikos, and their respective comment threads.)
Comix and match
Ah, fuck it.
The blogosphere is getting all Filthy in response to Jim Henley’s theory that Morrison’s latest graphic novel is “a guy thing.” I think it’s an interesting theory, and I probably think it’s more interesting than usual because a) I just got back from a weekend visit to the residential treatment facility my wife checked into for anorexia over the summer, immersing me for a few hours in the world of women with profoundly catastrophic relationships with the needs of their own bodies; b) It occurs to me that at least 50% of the horror images in the book stem from men either being penetrated or being immersed in something vaguely vaginal. Something to think about, certainly.
Everybody hates Bendis. Everybody is wrong, of course. (Take heart, Johnny!) Personally, I feel that objections to Bendis’s dialogue stem from its relatively unique position in comics–its mimickry of the staccato rhythm of actual human speech is familiar enough in motion-picture media (and even then people like Mamet and Bendis’s idol Aaron Sorkin can morph it into an overstylized schtick) but can be quite jarring when it appears in a comic. As for the Daredevil stories themselves, he occasionally has trouble with endings (they just sort of happen, regardless of what has come before), but I’ve found them to be among the most compelling to come along in the four or so years since I began reading comics again. Certainly Matt Murdock’s trajectory has been the most unpredictable of any genre character around. Finally, I think certain critics bring aboard some baggage regarding the “appropriate” depiction of race or gender issues, or even relatively trivial stuff like Bendis’s position as Marvel’s bald golden boy, that affect their perception of his work. (As for people who hate on Alex Maleev–sorry, I got nothin’.) Meanwhile, and unsurprisingly, Dave Fiore takes the opportunity to go off on a gorgeous little tangent on the need for realism, or the lack of such a need.
“Hello. My name is Christopher Butcher, and I am a Big-Two-bash-aholic.” Hi, Christopher.
Jimmy Palmiotti has had one experience of graphic novels at major bookstores, and I’ve had another. Both are on display at this Fanboy Rampage post and comment thread.
Dirk is gone. Never forgotten, though, believe me. (And he’s named Kevin Melrose as the inheritor to the throne, by the way. And rightly so.)
John Jakala comments on my Battle Royale/fanservice post. What can I say? It didn’t look like she was wearing pants. (Man, if I had a nickel.)
Considering the illuminating conversations I’ve had with both men, I’m excited to see the Eisner/Miller interview book they mentioned to me way back in the summer of 2001 is finally on its way. (Courtesy of Ken Lowery.)
Marvel Comics: Making Zombies Happy Again Since 2004. Sigh. (Courtesy of Marc-Oliver Frisch.)
I haven’t joined the blogosphere’s Losers lovefest, and judging from Steven Berg‘s review of the spy series, which pretty much confirms my first-glance impressions, I’m unlikely to do so.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Milo George, who, in pointing to yet another embarrasing creator freakout on the Comics Journal messboard (I’m not gonna bother to link to it–you’re allowed to kill yourself, but I’m not allowed to help you) and offering pro bono, er, analysis of the Larry Young Phenomenon, proves why he’s the boil on the ass of the Comics Internet Era of Good Feelings. God bless him.
Jason Kimble is one blogyear old! And Rick Geerling is back!
I’ve probably missed the continuing iterations of the Demo #6 debate, but I put in my two Scorsese-influenced cents at the fascinating Johnny B comment thread. Steven Berg keeps on digging, too, even though author Brian Wood wants him to dig in a different direction. The best thing to come out of this whole discussion (aside from offering us bloggers the chance to directly discuss a work with that work’s author, not to mention thereby putting our feelings on authorial intent to the test) is J.W. Hastings‘s masterful post on parsing the difference between meandering, messy, and ambiguous fiction. If you follow one link in this whole monstrous post, follow that one.
(Also, Dave Fiore asked via email for me to comment on the narrative and thematic similarities between Grosse Pointe Blank, a film I hated, and Demo #6, a comic I liked. Yes, it’s true that both works center on a youthful suburbanite mass murderer who, in the eyes of the audience, is presumably supposed to have achieved some (almost completely unearned) redemption by the story’s end, at which point he is permitted to ride off into the sunset with his lady love. But Demo has any number of intervening factors in its favor: the fact that its central character actually has a reason to become a killer, however tenuous (and a one-two punch of institutional racism and animal abuse would piss me off, too; at any rate, though the specifics are different, I remember what getting bullied felt like, and if I could have dneo what he did, I just might have if I got mad enough); the supernatural angle serves as its own impetus for action (that is, Ken doesn’t deliberately choose, as Lloyd Dobbler or whatever he was called in that movie does, to hone his killin’ skills–they are some sort of gift/curse the presence of which likely compels their own use on a psychological or even physical level); it has a compelling fable-esque feel that eschews the “realism” that GPB, as a hipster post-Tarantino action film, is burdened with and subsequently fails to pull off (to me, Demo #6 feels like an “Appointment in Samarra”-type story told from Death’s point of view); in the end, there’s a certain sense of ambiguity about how “redeemed” Ken really is, since we never see anything from his parents’ or his wife’s point of view, whereas in GPB the special lady sees Cusack in full killing mode and decides “you know what? he’s so charming and his taste in music is so good that I’m gonna go out with him again, no matter how many people he’s murdered in cold blood and despite the fact that he stood me up at the prom,” to which Frasier’s dad (he’s in this movie, right?) says “Amen.”)
Finally, What is horror, you ask? That’s a very interesting question…
Everybody else is (not) doing it, so why can’t we?
Despite the outrageous abundance of riveting blogging topics currently making their way through the ‘sphere (horror! The Filth and gender issues! Demo, ambiguity, and authorial intent!) I’m going on a work-related blogging hiatus, probably for the remainder of the week. (Don’t quote me on that if I’m back before then, though.)
I would like to say that this blog is a priority of mine, and it’s a kick in the ass not to be able to write for it as often or as thoroughly as I’d like. My hope is that within the next two weeks or so, things will happen that’ll make that possible again.
TV Ay yi yi
In response to one of the issues raised in my post about Battle Royale, bloggers Shawn Fumo and Bill Sherman both wrote in to tell me that the mysterious, camera-less, plot-hole-gouging “reality TV show” angle was not present in the original Japanese comic, and was invented wholesale by English-language adapter Keith Giffen. Which makes the question “why the fuck would you do that?” even more pressing–I mean, half the story revolves around kids secretly trying to overthrow the Program’s authorities and escape. Didn’t Giffen think the readers might wonder how the kids hoped this would happen if it was all being filmed? And didn’t he think we also might wonder where the bloody cameras are? Oh well: Just like Magneto’s resurrection in Uncanny X-Men, the mentioning of a television show is something you can pretend never happened.
PS: Volume Seven is the best one so far. Comics can play games with the passage of time that are exhilarating to behold.
Neil Young was wrong
Comics can break your heart.
(Sorry to be cryptic–it’s a “note to self” kinda deal.)
Let’s Battle
Six volumes in, I think it’s safe for me to declare that Keith Giffen’s English-language adaptation of Takami & Taguchi’s Battle Royale is a frigging mess.
I know Giffen’s presence on the project is at least a part of what made this book such a manga gateway drug for Western comics fans like many of us in the blogosphere, but yikes. Simply put, have you ever met anyone–kids, grown-ups, Japanese people, paranoid schizophrenics–who talk anything like this? Does anyone aside from Penthouse Forum writers and the film critic for Hustler use the phrase “a peek of pink”? What in God’s name is a “bad poking kitty”? Also–bear with me for a minute here–left out the subject in this sentence. Makes it seem casual. Sounds informal. See if it doesn’t. (Wait for it…) It doesn’t! Sounds maddening! Maddening like the bad poking kitty! Want my peek of pink! See if I don’t!
The insane idiomatic translation is certainly not all that’s wrong with this ultraviolent manga series. (To start, there’s the fact that it renders all reviewers incapable of discussing it without using the term “ultraviolent.”) While not as hole-ridden as I found the movie’s to be, the comic’s plot is still kinda wonky: If this is a reality TV show, where are the goddamn cameras? And yes, this matters beyond the “maybe they just goofed” factor–much of the plot revolves around various groups of kids trying to do things undetected by the authorities running the show. But if it is a show, shouldn’t everything that’s happening be, y’know, shown to people, especially the show’s very producers? I just don’t get it.
And as with the movie, the conventional action-thriller contrivances leave me completely cold. The film seemed to have been molded in the Simpson/Bruckheimer/Bay mold, while the manga goes the karate-choppin’ kung-fu-fightin’ leaping-forty-feat-in-the-air Dragonball route, but either way, they took a Lord of the Flies/A Clockwork Orange idea and made a Lethal Weapon/Bad Boys out of it.
And, loathe as I am to admit it, there are some manga conventions that I just can’t wrap my head around. I’ll never understand why everything is translated but the sound effects, for example. Nor can I figure out the reason behind the bizarre kabuki-like faces of the lecherous Program director and the mincing homosexual student slash Yakuza soldier (yeah, it’s that kinda book). And I’m sure John Jakala would just call it “fanservice,” but isn’t the impact of the scene in which young Shuuya shows his terminally ill mother his sand-castle sculpture of the two of them with his late, politically liquidated father a teensy bit diluted by the artist’s depiction of the mother’s bare ass? (I guess this is what John Jakala had in mind when he explained the concept of fanservice to me, but still, that’s just weird.)
So anyway, yeah, it’s a big fat mess.
Why, then, is it so awesome?
Yes, I really enjoy Battle Royale, warts and all. Giffen’s brusque, unnaturally direct dialogue has the perhaps unintended side effect of brightly highlighting the most compelling aspect of the book–the relationships between the student protagonists. The intensity of first love, adolescent lust, inter-social-caste idol worship/caretaking, best-friendship, and platonic opposite-sex friendship are crackingly well-depicted–every conversation and interaction is hard-sold by the outrageously staccato dialogue, and I for one am buying. It works. And even putting aside the words, perhaps it’s only when we throw 14 year olds into a contest in which they’re forced to murder each other that we can truly replicate the near-operatic emotional turmoil of pubescence and adolescence. All I know is that reading this book takes me right back to Garden City Middle School.
Speaking of which, would this not be the most fucking awesomest comic ever if you were a fourteen-year-old? Casting the kids in your grade in the different roles would be at least half the fun, I’d imagine. Hell, I could still tell you which lacrosse player from the GCMS Class of ’92 would be Kazuo, and which cheerleader would be Hardcore Souma, and which girl I crushed on would be Noriko. (I’d be Shuuya, duh. My buddy Kennyb would be Shogo, because he owned nunchucks and throwing stars and stuff back then.)
As for the art–well, to use my extremely limited manga reference pool, it doesn’t even approach either the lovely poetry of Planetes or the utter madness of Uzumaki, but then again it doesn’t need to. And thankfully, it steers clear of the glorified stick figures that inhabit a lot of the manga I’ve seen on the racks. It’s clear, realistically detailed when it needs to be, stylized and clever when it needs to be that, and a solid conveyer of plot-driven action at all times. And the violent interludes, when they come, are pitch-perfect. Speaking as a gorehound, that is some fine, mentally sticky, disturbing gore.
And at the heart of it all is a surprisingly effective and affecting story of one kid’s refusal to compromise his morals and his friendships. Actually, as the story expands, we’re now following six or seven kids who’ve made similar deals with their own hearts, and it all makes for propulsive reading. I’ve enjoyed this series a lot (a lot more than I expected to, I think), and as it’s been different enough from the movie thus far to make me wonder if the ending isn’t different as well, I’m truly looking forward to seeing how this one ends up. See if I’m not!
(PS: For past thoughts on Battle Royale, about which I’ve written a surprising amount, go here, here, and especially here, here, and here.)
(PPS: While writing this post I sort of wandered around a bunch of old posts and links and such, and can I just mention how neat it is to visit the Tokyopop website, as it is a comics-company site that doesn’t have the stench of death, desperation, and bilking aging fanboys about it? This just tickled the hell out of me, I tell you. Courtesy of John Jakala. Speaking of whom, how did I miss this? Hilarious!)
(PPPS: Jeebus, did I really used to be this sharp of a writer? Complete sentences, complete thoughts, and hardly an em-dash in sight. Sigh. I guess that’s how one writes when one is gainfully employed as a professional writer, and when one’s ADD isn’t so out of control that one is finally getting a scrip for it, as soon as one can get an appointment out of one’s goddamn general practitioner. Unless, of course, it’s not pro writing but writing on message boards that brings out the best in me… The horror! The horror!)
Digression over. Battle Royale is good. The end.
What does it all mean?
In his recent review of Demo #6, Johnny Bacardi voiced an interesting concern about the series overall:
OK, I understand that there is no overarching theme. nothing which will tie all these individual stories together, that these are just random, one-off looks at different young people with powers and abilities and how they cope (or fail to cope) with them. Nothing wrong with this, but it just causes a bit of a wish, in my mainstream-comics addled brain, that there was a underlying reason (a point, if you will) for all this, and it wasn’t just random instances of “young guy or gal has powers, young guy or gal gets into situation because of powers, young guy or gal deals with powers and faces the future, whatever it may be”.
Interesting, I say, because it literally never occurred to me to complain about this facet of the book. To me, this is not a bug–it’s a feature.
I realized three or four years ago that even the most seemingly anti-authoritarian genre fiction almost inevitably involves a safety valve in the form of a wise old man (or indeed a secret society of wise old men) that explains it all to our at-first befuddled hero. The tormented mutants of the X-verse have Professor X; bullied & abused Harry Potter has Dumbledore and the rest of the Hogwart’s faculty; terminally perplexed Neo has Morpheus and company; bored, sheltered Luke Skywalker has Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda; terrified Frodo has Gandalf; hell, even in the Illuminatus! trilogy the characters have Hagbard Celine and Malaclypse the Elder. No matter how cruel and terrifying the world gets, no matter how bizarre and wondrous your newfound powers are, there’s always someone around to explain the New, Secret, and Real Grand Scheme of Things, and exactly where you fit into it.
In “mainstream,” superhero comics, this can be taken to epic extremes, perhaps paradoxically because of the unruly, hobbled-together nature of the big superhero universes. (DC is famously Frankensteinian, and for all its reputation as a single, cohesive universe, Marvel certainly wasn’t conceived as such, and contains enough disparate concepts to make doing so difficult. I mean, Spider-Man has fought J. Jonah Jameson, the Punisher, the Hulk, Loki, and Galactus, hasn’t he?) The Quintessence, the Earth X saga–these are ways of assuring both character and reader (and writer) that nothing is so weird as to not have a (relatively) rational, well-defined slot to plug right into. Obviously, there’s an appeal to this approach–cohesiveness can be a fascinating thing, if the works cohere in an unexpected, thought-provoking fashion–but I can’t help but feel that some of both the potential for formal inventiveness and the thrill of the truly unknown and unexplained and therefore unbowed and untamed is lost when such devices are employed.
Moreover, I must admit that my own experience of the universe has shown me no wise men, no secret society with all the right answers. Heck, my conception of God doesn’t even gel with such things. As near as I can tell, things happen because they happen, not because of some Plan, not because of the Way Things Really Are as hidden behind some curtain of conspiratorial secrecy which, were I suddenly granted extraordinary powers, my forebears and brothers-in-arms would make themselves known to me in order to reveal. It’s just life. It just is.
I’m certainly not the first person to point out that there’s something extremely and perversely comforting about conspiracy theory. I believe it was Robert Anton Wilson who theorized that the conspiracist mindset is a modern-day replacement for belief in God: “There’s no benevolent All-Father pulling the strings, but there is a top-secret cabal of Freemasons and aliens!” If you don’t believe in the Pope, you can at least believe in the Bildebergers. You see this reflected nearly everywhere, especially in this day and age, where the terrible events of 9/11 and its aftershocks find some people desperate to create an overarching explanation–someone must have known something and used this knowledge to make something else happen–rather than face the idea that, well, we’re all just pretty much on our own. Further, in fiction and in life, some people posit themselves as anti-conspiracy; however, a quick look reveals them to be proponents not of anti-authoritarianism, but of the right kind of authoritarianism. (The comics blogosphere has recently debated whether, say, Warren Ellis is such a person.) Additionally, you see another reflection of this mindset in criticism of “messy” fiction, fiction where not everything is played out in neat little story arcs that tie up all the plotlines in a way that enables the reader or audience to perfectly contextualize all that has gone before–in other words, fiction that’s a lot like life. (My favorite example of this is the vitriol directed at Seasoun Four of The Sopranos. To me, this is maybe the finest work of fiction I’ve ever encountered; to many TV critics, this was a disaster–“Where were the arcs? Why didn’t anything happen?” (Such were the complaints when the critics weren’t busy bemoaning the lack of murders, which I think tells you quite a bit about many TV critics and their real reason for enjoying the first couple of seasons of the show.)) Such outlooks are the metafictional equivalent of comfort food. This is not to say they’re totally horrible, of course–that’s some good food, oftentimes. But it is comforting, a lot more so than the notion that there is no explanation.
In the big fiction project that I’ve been working on for the last few years, this is something I’ve very consciously built the story around. No wise men are forthcoming. No ancient underground group of mind-warriors will swoop out of nowhere to show the protagonists the Men Behind the Curtain. No curtain, no men. Even the de rigeur explanation of “the source of the disturbances”–science? genetics? magic?–is eschewed. I mean, how often do you get one of those in real life?
This, then, is what I find so refreshing about Demo. As near as I can tell there are no connections between its superpowered protagonists. The powers will never be explained, and the characters will never meet each other, nor some old bald guy who’s been running around in the superpower underground since World War II or the Victorian Era or whatever. Whatever meaning the characters glean from their extraordinary situations is just that–gleaned from their own life experiences, not from received truth or prepackaged schematics as to how everything works. It’s all up to them.
How wonderful!
(PS: If there’s a flaw with Demo’s approach, it’s not that no answers are found, but that it doesn’t seem that the characters are searching for them. Personally, I feel that the quest for the wise old man and his bag of explanations is so culturally ingrained in us that were anyone to actually be given super powers, they’d almost automatically being looking for the secret government installation or circle of occult adepts that could help them explain and control their powers, and subsequently enlist them in the battle against whatever it is people with powers are supposed to battle against. The inevitable disappointment is part of the game, you know? But maybe that’s just me.)
(PPS: Demo #6, by the way, is the strongest issue of the series yet. Its horror elements are what grabbed me, as I’m sure you’d expect, and though I’m not sure I was ever “scared” (I didn’t see the Kubrick’s-Shining influence that the artist cited), I certainly remained grabbed. The first appearance of the mysterious skeleton is bracingly surreal, and the shots of the decaying dogs are powerful and grotesque. The added element of genuine oppression, rather than run-of-the-mill suburban ennui, makes the character moments both more believable and more relatable, and gives the horrific events the selling power they need. And Becky Cloonan’s art is at its best, emerging from its influences into its own dynamic, calligraphic territory. And it’s not just the terrifying stuff she nails, either–the protagonist’s bonnie new bride, for example, is refreshingly human and real, a woman you could quite conceivably fall in love with as opposed to the usual Brechtian device connoting “PRETTINESS.” Impressive and unique from top to bottom, if this issue is, as author Brian Wood says, the template for the remainder of the series, we’re in for some very good comics.)