MYTHCOMICS: TYPHOID #1-4 (1995-96)

If Stanley Kubrick's film A CLOCKWORK ORANGE had married a 1990s Freudian treatise on the inter-relation of sex and violence, their baby would probably have looked like the four-issue miniseries TYPHOID by writer Ann Nocenti and artist John Van Fleet.

In an earlier review of another Nocenti story, I mentioned that my reading of the author's run on Marvel's DAREDEVIL comic title had been somewhat inconsistent. That said, even during my incomplete reading, I had some appreciation for Nocenti's original addition to the blind hero's mythos, a schizophrenic character who was essentially three personas in one body. Born Mary Walker, a shy and introverted artist, various circumstances cause her to manifest a second personality, the sexy and assertive Typhoid Mary, and then a third one, an ultraviolent man-hater named Bloody Mary. One character in the mini-series styles the trio as "virgin, whore and killer," thus separating off Mary's propensity for bloody violence from her enthusiasm for sex-play.

I didn't read enough of Nocenti's DAREDEVIL to know what the author last did with Typhoid in that feature, though according to Wiki the vixenish villain continued to make appearances in other Marvel features. In 1995, however, Nocenti had the deranged quasi-dominatrix escape an asylum, after which Mary Walker attempted to live an ordinary life despite her intrusive extra personalities. She even has a boyfriend named John (as in "John and Mary," maybe), but he only has a minor role in TYPHOID. The mini-series is far more concerned with what feminists now call "toxic masculinity," though Nocenti's skilled enough that the narrative isn't a pure paean to wonderful womanhood. Mary's first solo adventure is devoted to portraying her as a "schizophrenic private detective,"  though to my knowledge this was her only series.

Each of the four parts is given a subtitle derived from a famous fairy-tale female, respectively Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Red Riding Hood. In addition, issue one also sports an additional title, "A Fairytale of Violence," though none of the other issues have such this add-on. Nocenti explicitly links all of these famed females together in terms of their suffering at the hands of males, and though the add-on title suggests that there's some disconnect between the linked ideas of "fairy-tales" and "violence," Nocenti almost certainly knows that both original folktales and their literary imitators utilized quite a bit of violence, not always directed purely at women. In any case, the TYPHOID narrative extends the split between innocent Mary and her demonic other selves to society in general, where innocence is continually victimized by violent acts, largely though not exclusively associated with masculinity.

Two plotlines dominate TYPHOID. The more overt plot deals with a serial killer preying on New York prostitutes. The local cops are unable to solve the case, whether they're corrupt male cops like Detective Richards, or dedicated rookies like sincere policewoman Clair Dodge, so Mary decides to track down the murderer. In the second plot, two loopy film-students, Quince and Trent, get the idea to capture the schizophrenic quasi-heroine and make a movie about her psychological aberrations. (This includes fixing her eyelids so that she has to look at a series of assaultive videos, a clear homage to a scene in Kubrick's movie.) Nocenti more or less brings the two plots together in the last issue, but no one should read TYPHOID looking for a well-wrought mystery. Nocenti has followed the pattern of hardboiled detectives, in which the sleuth solves the case not by ratiocination but by being enough of a nuisance to attract violent attraction from guilty parties.

I won't claim that Nocenti's basic idea is any more original than it is well-crafted. However, even if the overall intellectual heft of the story proves somewhat weak, Nocenti brings a rough-hewn poetry to her interactions of sex and violence. The murders are committed by a killer (or killers?) who force hookers to suck on the barrel of a gun before firing, and it's impossible to read this without thinking of Freud's concept of oral fixation. But the opening page gives readers a pun that goes beyond Freud's reductivism, as an unseen person asks Typhoid why she kills, and she responds (in part) that she does so "to lighten the load." The element of humor makes Nocenti's "fairy-tale of violence" a far more evocative realm than most of the Neopuritan screeds that followed in the next twenty years.