NEAR-MYTHS: KICK ASS 2 (2012)

 In my review of Mark Millar's first KICK ASS collection, I commented that I didn't think it registered very strongly as either null-myth or near-myth. However, the sequel, while it has a lot of the same schematic feel as the first series (and the movie adapted from it), Millar and his artistic collaborator John Romita Jr do a better job of developing their basic idea.

After the end of KICK ASS, the titular hero briefly retires and leaves the job of superheroing to other vigilantes following his example (the exception being Hit-Girl, a grade-school kid trained to be the ultimate costumed crusader by her obsessed father). But he quickly gets bored and drifts back to vigilante activity. Initially Hit-Girl gives Kick-Ass some training, but her guardian finds out and grounds her. Kick-Ass then contacts other amateur superheroes, and though initially they perform a lot of community service, inevitably they get on the bad side of the underworld once more. Even without their more adventurous activities, Chris, the son of the mob-boss that Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl originally took down, vows to eradicate all superheroes, and assembles a group of ruthless killers to become his "Legion of Doom."

Most of the ultraviolence in KICK ASS 2 is as predictable as what appeared in the first series. But there's a much better development of the two central characters' mundane identities of Dave and Mindy, and Millar devotes more time to understanding the motives as to why numerous amateurs risk their lives to dress up as superheroes. This sociological myth is the only thing that gives the sequel a little more gravitas than the first entry. 

COUPLE MORE QUICKIE REVIEWS

Like this group of quickie reviews I did in May, there's nothing about these items that firmly aligns them, in terms of symbolic discourse, as either near-myths or null-myths, which distinction of course matters only to me.

The Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. KICK ASS is, to my surprise, a decent read, compared to the awfulness of works like WANTED and OLD MAN LOGAN. It had a few decent jokes and it presented its ultraviolence competently, even though the choreography pales next to the collaboration of Romita Jr and that other guy named Miller on DAREDEVIL THE MAN WITHOUT FEAR.

I suspect that even though a lot of Millar's concepts are paper-thin BS like WANTED, he took a little more care when he sought to represent the supposed fantasy of all superhero geeks. The geeks will accept some parody, but how much? Yet how can Millar do parody and still keep using the tropes that make his story work? How can the author put across the notion that amateur superhero Kick Ass, rescued from a burning building by firemen, doesn't just get his mask pulled off by the first fireman to lay hands on him? And will the geeks accept the parody of an ordinary guy who almost gets massacred playing superhero, as long as he's counterpointed by a "real-life" superhero who's a total badass, i.e. Hit-Girl?

Again, I'm not recounting the pretty simple story here. But the biggest laugh I got was the ad slug on the back of the THB for KICK ASS: "the greatest superhero comic of all time." Maybe somewhere in the low nine-hundreds out of a thousand.

Finally, while it's true that there are a lot of superhero stories that are as basic, simple and unadorned as KICK ASS-- which I think Millar truly believes to be representative of the real genre in comics if not in all media-- it's the more complex versions of the genre that have kept me invested for more than fifty years.

I've even less to say about the 2004 TPB JSA: THE LIBERTY FILES. It's another "realistic" Elseworlds effort, and the gimmick by writer Dan Jolley and writer-artist Tony Harris is that back in WWII the various heroes of the Justice Society-- including a non-canonical Batman-- operate primarily as covert government agents in mufti, unveiling their superheroic long underwear only when fighting super-powered Axis agents. Because FILES is two separate stories jammed together, they don't play off one another very well. Harris does pretty but static photorealistic art and Jolley produces wordy Alan Moore naturalistic dialogue, but with less eccentricity. No better or worse than most Elseworlds stories.

NEAR-MYTHS: SUPERMAN RED SON (2003)

 

I finally read the TPB of SUPERMAN RED SON on a friend's recommendation. I didn't like it nearly as much as he did, but I must admit that it showed me a side of writer Mark Millar that I hadn't hitherto seen: a degree of simple competence.

This ELSEWORLDS project, originally appearing in three installments and penciled by four separate artists, follows the premise, "What if Superman had been raised in the culture of Soviet Russia?" Unlike the canonical Superman, whose historical era varies according to his audience, this alternate version specifically grows to manhood during the Cold War, so that he's poised to take the place of the atom bomb as the objective correlative of the struggle between the capitalistic U.S. and Communist Russia. Prior to this period, the Soviet Superman apparently foregoes any Superboy-like career, and it's only as an adult that he dons a costume and offers his services to Joseph Stalin. 

Nevertheless, Soviet-Man doesn't go around grinding the free world into mulch, as one suspects would have happened had someone given Stalin a weapon of ultimate power. That's because Millar, playing to DC Comics' "Bible of Superman," makes certain that even though he's not farm-bred Clark Kent this time out, Superman is still the same inveterate do-gooder as always. Thus even the Soviet leader can't tell this other "man of steel" what to do, but has to mask his lust for power in seeming benevolence. 

To be sure, the narrative is largely free from explicit period politics. The gist of Millar's myth-idea is that Superman acts as a talisman to the fortunes of his adopted country. Without a Kryptonian hero to represent "truth, justice and the American way," the United States falls into disarray, while most of the civilized world falls into step with Russia's designs. The role of the U.S. in Soviet-Man's story is that of military escalation, for they seek to manufacture superhumans as a means of negating Russia's ace in the hole. Lex Luthor, portrayed as a polymath genius in the service of the CIA, is the primary source of super-powered opponents, mostly alternate versions of established Superman-foes, though Millar works in an alternate version of Green Lantern as well. An alternate version of Wonder Woman becomes Superman's ally when he assumes the role of Russia's leader following Stalin's death, while a Russia-born version of Batman becomes one of the hero's most formidable enemies.

Lois Lane is also worked into the mix. She and Superman only meet some time after the intrepid reporter has become the wife of Luthor, and consequently, even though Lois and Luthor eventually divorce, no romance between Lois and Soviet-Man ever transpires. Millar seems to have settled on making his version of DC's iconic hero such a goody-goody that, with Lois out of the picture, he never hooks up with anyone else-- not Wonder Woman, whom he treats like "one of the boys" despite her obvious feelings for him, nor "Lana Lazarenko," Russia's version of Lana Lang. Eventually Millar finds a way to divorce Soviet-Man from his ties to the Communist regime, but he does so in such a way as to make it all about the hero's devotion to doing right in the long view, rather than any particular disenchantment with said regime.

Romance is relegated to a secondary consideration here because Millar's playing to the "Elseworlds" fan who basically wants to see old wine in new bottles, including, besides those already mentioned, revisions of Brainiac, Jimmy Olsen, "Superman robots," and the Phantom Zone. Yet I never got the feeling that Millar or his collaborative artists had any particular feeling for any of the Superman mythology. When Millar's sometime collaborator Grant Morrison did ALL-STAR SUPERMAN, he clearly shared similar motivations in re-fashioning the established myths to please experienced fan-readers. Yet Morrison conveyed a genuine fascination with the power of those myths. With Millar, I don't get any sense that he's doing anything but completing a job.

Still, he certainly does that job, limited as it is, much better than his more uninhibited, but less coherent, works, such as OLD MAN LOGAN and WANTED. Thus I must admit he's not a total incompetent.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE HUMAN RACE" (THE FLASH #138-140, 1998)

One of the most memorable "proverbs of hell" in William Blake's MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL states that, "Eternity is in love with the productions of time." While I am not a Blake expert, I tend to believe that Blake used this epigram to explain why the denizens of any eternal realm-- be they gods, devils, or angels-- should be mindful of mortal human beings.

Of course, no one can prove what Eternity feels, and I've often thought that it's easier to prove the converse: that human beings, possibly the only self-aware "productions of time," are undoubtedly in love with Whatever They Consider Eternal. Grant Morrison's 1998 FLASH continuity-- which puns upon the idea of "race" as a unity of humans and "race" as a running-contest-- meditates on a similar set of questions: what happens when humans love the universe that isn't part of their everyday world, and whether or not that universe can in any way love them back.

(Note: according to credits, Mark Millar shares co-scripting credit with Morrison. But given that in 1998 Morrison was the more celebrated of the two writers, and that Morrison is better known for stories about wild flights of imagination, I think it probable that Morrison supplied the principal plot and Millar mostly filled in some blanks.)

HUMAN RACE is, to borrow again from Blake, all about the conflict between the "innocence" of childhood, with its tender-minded desire to feel empathy with the world around him, and the world of adult "experience," which teaches one to be "tough minded" and wary of the cold, cruel world. Wally West-- the Flash of Nineties DC-- inherited the mantle of his Silver Age mentor after a long apprenticeship as "Kid Flash" in various TITANS titles. RACE, however, begins by telling the reader that in Wally's middle school years, he was a ham-radio buff. Long before becoming a superhero capable of running faster than light, Wally reached out to the cosmos, seeking confirmation of "life out there." He makes contact with Krakkl, a creature from a world inhabited by living radio-waves. But as Wally gets older, he loses contact with Krakkl and comes to believe that he merely made up an imaginary friend.

Fast forward to Wally's adulthood in the 1990s. As the Flash, he had "experience" with more than his fair share of alien life. This time, Earth is treated to a particularly unpleasant visitation.by aliens so powerful than none of the planet's many superheroes can withstand them. Much in the vein of Lee and Kirby's Galactus, who came to Earth only to devour the planet, the two extraterrestrials known as "the Cosmic Gamblers" care nothing about human beings, except for holding them as ransom to make Flash to do their bidding. And what the Gamblers want is for Flash to race another super-speedster across the universe, just so one or the other of them can win a bet. As a further irony, Wally's opponent is none other than his "imaginary friend," Krakkl, another super-speedster fighting for his own world.

This SF-trope of the "cosmic ransom" was not new even in the Silver Age, but Morrison conceives a new take on it. Usually, when super-powerful aliens force Earthmen to fight other, less powerful aliens for purposes of instruction or amusement, it's a one-shot deal, and the big bad aliens let the Earthmen go afterward. In this story, any time the Gamblers choose racers for their games, they keep said racers under their thumbs, essentially running them to death. While Wally speeds across the universe, his former friend Krakkl says that he's already defeated numerous opponents who perished, along with their worlds. More, Kraakl expects that sooner or later he will be run to death, and that the same fate will befall Wally, even if he wins this race.

I won't discuss in detail the ingenious means used by the hero to circumvent the Gamblers' no-win scenario, though it naturally involves a different contest of speed. What's interesting is that on one hand Morrison gives the reader a vivid picture of the infinite cosmos, with Flash racing through black holes and witnessing the prehistoric incarnations of the Guardians of Oa. while on the other, the author continually grounds the hero's resolve in his affection for his home world, which is in turn mirrored by the protective instincts of his friendly opponent Krakkl. In addition, for once the hero fights for the survival of his friend's world as well as his own, and Morrison even manages a new take on the old chestnut of "all people on Earth send their energy to help the hero," perhaps best known from franchises like DRAGONBALL and X-MEN.

The art of this three-issue arc--by Paul Ryan in #138, and Rob Wagner in #139/140-- is agreeable but not outstanding.

NULL-MYTHS: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (2012)

Hmm, it's been almost a full year since I did a "null-myth" entry. I can't believe that I've been reading only good comics since then, so it must just be that I' haven't found any that were worth writing about.

I had to debate whether or not KINGSMAN (originally called just SECRET SERVICE) had enough mythic content to fall into the "near myth" group. It was an okay read, compared to earlier Mark Millar works like WANTED and OLD MAN LOGAN, two brain-dead exercises in superhero ultraviolence. Millar has written a lot of superhero works I have not read, so it's quite possible he's written something better than these two bore-fests. Yet I get the impression that, whereas many British writers sought to expand what superhero comics could do by bringing in aspects of the real world, Millar merely used realism as a method of degrading iconic characters, whether he used the actual characters (Wolverine in LOGAN) or approximations (various DC Comics villains in WANTED). KINGSMAN is no exception, since the project began as a pitch to Marvel Comics, in which eternal superspy Nick Fury took a young spy under his wing.

KINGSMAN is definitely improved by not taking place in the Marvel Universe, and by being centered in Millar's own country, which also happens to be the birthplace of Ian Flemijng's quintessential superspy. Millar, working alongside artist (and fellow Brit) Dave Gibbons, certainly brings a vraisemblance to this James Bond pastiche. The "older man" figure, Jack London, is a former working-class Brit who's been a covert superspy for decades. His sister still lives on welfare with her grown son and a succession of bad bed-mates, so one day London decides that he'll become a tutelary figure to young wastrel-in-training Gary "Eggsy" Unwin. The dramatic exchanges between the knowing elder and the impulsive youth are at least competent, and occasionally Millar and Gibbons touch on sociological themes about British society, though none of these get as much development as Fleming put into his least interesting Fleming novels.

To be sure, KINGSMAN isn't trying to emulate the Bond books, only the Bond movies. Fleming gave his villains assorted exotic gimmicks, but only in the films did Bond have access to similar doodads. In the TPB collection I read, an interview with Gibbons includes a passage wherein the artist scoffs at the "invisible car" seen in one of the Pierce Brosnan flicks. But KINGSMAN is lousy with crazy devices, such as the "laser penknife" with which Gary wins his climactic battle with a villain-henchman named Gazelle because-- well, he has two metal legs that look like those of a gazelle.

But if there's one thing that renders any potential meaning in KINGSMAN inert and inconsummate, it's Millar's handling of his villain. Even many of the Bond-villains invented for the movies prove fit to stand alongside the classic Fleming-fiends. But what does Millar come up with? Well, it's none other than-- James Arnold, Super-Fanboy. Arnold-- who's given one of the blandest villain-names of all time-- is a nerdy genius who decides to play God (or maybe Thanos) by eliminating most of the world's populace. However, because he's a nerd, he gives away his plans in part by trying to kidnap a lot of the celebrities from SF-films, such as Mark Hamill and Ridley Scott. Perhaps Millar and Gibbons thought they were putting across some devastating satire of fan-culture. Frankly, it seems more like a desperate attempt to keep away from the political content found in many of the Bond films, simplified though this content was in comparison to the Fleming books.

There are two sequels I've not read, but I'm not getting my hopes up, based on the mild pleasures of SECRET SERVICE.


ADDENDUM: I did read KINGSMAN THE RED DIAMOND and found it no better than the previous GN, though it's not written by creator Millar and so isn't nearly as bloodthirsty. This one's sole virtue is pitting Eggsy against Kwaito, a tough intelligence-agent from Africa, who is fairly charming despite the great improbability that any current country in Africa could come up with a world-class intelligence organization.

NULL-MYTHS: OLD MAN LOGAN (2008)

It was only after watching the 2017 film LOGAN that I learned that it had been based on a graphic novel-- actually a compilation of stories from Marvel's ongoing WOLVERINE title-- and that the writer was none other than one of the worst scripters currently in the business, Mark Millar. This is not entirely a fair opinion, since I've read few of Millar's works since my bad experience with the atrocious WANTED.

However, once I read the Millar GN, I was happily disabused of the idea that anything by Millar could have had quality in its original form. Like the 2008 movie WANTED, the 2017 LOGAN-- directed by James Mangold, who also helmed the respectable 2013 WOLVERINE-- just borrows dribs and drabs from the Millar continuity. In fact, the only things Mangold really takes away from Millar's GN are the ideas that (1) in some future setting, Wolverine has gotten very old and beat-down by coping with everyday life, which is a consequence of the fact that (2) most mutants and superheroes are out of the picture. 

Though LOGAN is far from being a game-changing movie, I can appreciate that Mangold uses some subtlety, refusing to dilute his story by telling the viewer what happened to the heroes. In contrast, Millar's OLD MAN is just Millar regurgitating the same brain-dead concept that informed the WANTED graphic novel: that all the super-villains get together and wipe out most of the heroes, sparing only a few like Hawkeye the Archer and (inevitably) Wolverine. 

As with WANTED, Millar's work is made visually bearable by his collaboration with a good if somewhat slick artist. Conceptually, though, it's just channeling the same old vibe that had begun to get tedious in Alan Moore's work in his "grim and gritty" period: What If the Superheroes, the Ones Who Always Win, Went Down to Dusky Death (and Degradation)? Incidentally, though I've scoffed at Alan Moore's claims that every writer in the business is guilty of ripping off his wonderfully ironic and deeply intellectual concepts, in the case of Millar Moore's ire would be fully justified.

 In OLD MAN Millar trades on the cumulative histories of the standard Marvel heroes for cheap shock-with-no-awe, showing no appreciation for said histories. For instance, Millar knows that Wolverine started out life as an opponent for the Incredible Hulk, so by the rules of fannish consistency, Logan as an old man must once again face the Hulk. But this is a Hulk who, for no stated reason, has become as much of a villain as the Red Skull. He's also become a gross hillbilly who rules his territory in the villain-conquered U.S, alongside a passel of green, gamma-mutated offspring. There had been other attempts to show the Hulk becoming a darker figure-- Peter David's "Maestro" iteration of the character, not to mention a few intimations of Hyde-like nastiness in the character's first appearances. But as far as I can tell, the only reason that Bruce Banner becomes a cannibalistic redneck is because he couldn't find any regular humans to have sex with. So he had sex with his first cousin, the She-Hulk, and-- presto, Instant Hillbilly!

About the only nice thing I can say about this worthless work is that I smiled a little when Hawkeye and Wolverine start tooling around in a rebuilt Spider-Mobile. But it was definitely a smile of short duration.

PRACTICALLY INCONSUMMATE IN EVERY WAY

I said at the end of PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS that I'd seek to find examples of the four potentialities that might be more accessible than the novels I cited (GONE WITH THE WIND being the only one of the four that is widely read these days). But it's occurred to me that since I revived the concept of the potentialities alongside the Langerian concept of consummation, adapted here with application to literary merit.

I chose "potentialities" as the term for these four types of relationship between literary elements because such elements are not "given," like physical elements. The author is, as Tolkien rightly says, a "sub-creator," and for a work to succeed with respect to any of the potentialities, a significant number of readers must feel that all or at least most of the proper elements are well enough assembled that the work feels "finished," which is the definition of the adjective "consummate," But when the audience feels that the work is "unfinished" in some way-- i.e., "inconsummate"-- the result is audience dissatisfaction. Of course, "consummate" and "inconsummate" will never replace common terms like "good" and "bad," or even "cool" and " sucky." But I believe that they are not only more accurate with respect to the vagaries of taste, the dichotomy allows one to explore the potentialities with a somewhat more objective eye.

I've stated in a general way that most works are dominated by a particular potentiality, but here I want to state that my principle of centricity applies to the potentialities as much as to mythos. In JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY I stated:

 One of the key features of my ongoing theory is the notion that every coherent narrative, even if it contains elements of all four of Northrop Frye's mythoi, only one of the mythoi dominates the narrative.... I find it interesting that even though Frye does not invoke Jung's four psychological functions (sensation, intuition, thinking, feeling), Frye's "logic of dominance" (my term) mirrors the logic Jung uses to assert that only one of the psychological functions can be dominant when it is in a "conscious" state. 

The same logic pertains to the potentialities. In FOUR BY FOUR I used Dave Sim's CEREBUS as an example of a work dominated by the potentiality of "the didactic." (And though I've never stated it outright, its overall structure conforms to the mythos of the Fryean irony.) The same "logic of dominance" pertains to both. CEREBUS contains elements characteristic of the drama, the comedy, and the adventure, but overall the elements of the irony dominate. And like all works that are primarily about "thinking," its potentiality is dominated by the didactic. Elements of the kinetic, the dramatic and the mythopoeic are all present, but they don't inform what Frye would call the "total vision" of the work.

Now, since Sim was a superlative (if problematic) artist, even the "inferior potentialities" are generally well executed, even if they are "side dishes" to the main entree. So in none of my four categories do I consider Sim's work "inconsummate."  In contrast, if a work seeks to craft even a side dish, and does so in an unsatisfactory manner, then the work is inconsummate with respect to that potentiality. For instance, in this essay I judged that Mark Millar's WANTED fails in the domain of the dramatic. Dramatic relations are certainly not the focus of WANTED, but since Millar fails in this department as much as he does in the centric area of WANTED-- that is, the sensation-oriented "kinetic"-- then in these two areas the work is inconsummate.

Similarly, Millar botches any mythopoeic elements that might have been inherent in his proposition that "this is what happens when the villains win." So WANTED is inconsummate with respect to those three potentialities.

But is it fair to view WANTED as having failed in the domain of the didactic? Millar isn't really dealing with abstract ideas at all; he doesn't even bother to lend any intellectual rationalizations to the characters' actions. I would probably judge the potentiality of the didactic to be inconsummate as well, but in a different way than the others. It's not so much "tried to run the marathon and failed to complete it" as "didn't even show up at the starting-post."

ADDENDA: I should add that it's certainly possible for an author to use one of his non-centric potentialities in a minimal fashion, yet still prove satisfying and thus "consummate" with respect to that potentiality. Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, like Millar's WANTED, is primarily intended to evoke the audience's thrill in pure kineticism, and so like WANTED, the other three potentialities are all used to a lesser extent. Yet whereas WANTED fails to support its extravagance with any hint of abstract concepts, RAIDERS evokes didactic concepts-- like modern man's indebtedness to ancient history-- to a degree which is satisfying even though it remains even more minimal than the film's dramatic and mythopoeic components.

CREATIVE DIFFERENTIATIONS

“I interviewed Stan Lee three or four years ago for a magazine, and Stan’s like my hero. I was interviewing him, and he just brought up in the middle of it, he said, “What is wrong with you guys?” And I was like, “What do you mean?” He said, “Why do you want to do my characters instead of creating your own?” I was like, “That’s quite an interesting point, and I hadn’t really thought about it. I didn’t get into comics to create characters; I got into comics to write Superman or Spider-Man and all that kind of stuff.” And he says, “I grew up reading Tarzan and Superman and Batman, but I went off and created Spider-Man and the Hulk. Why do you want to play with the old toys?” It was a real moment for me. I just thought, “Shit. In pop-culture terms, how weird would it be if I was to reject all the characters?” That’s a gap in the market, essentially. ”--Mark Millar quoting Stan Lee in this interview.

I discovered this quote through a secondary source, this BEAT post, It's certainly conceivable that Stan said something like this, as he's not exactly known for his overall consistency.  I remember seeing him speak at a local convention from either the late 1970s or early 1980s, when the Claremont X-Men had just started to get popular with fans. When Lee was asked some question about the New X-Men, I recall him saying something like, "I don't know what was wrong with the original characters, but I guess these new ones are OK."  It was one of the few times I ever saw him express some feeling that he might have been in some way disappointed to see the new creators not follow the original setups of the Marvel Universe. Usually when fans asked Stan about current developments at Marvel, or about film/TV translations, he would plead ignorance of what was going on. This was probably true for the most part, though this posture also allowed him to avoid antagonizing the Marvel establishment with possibly unflattering remarks.

The quote from the Millar interview takes the opposite tack, expressing incredulity that anyone would want to "play with the old toys." On two levels, this statement strikes me as somewhat disingenuous, going by the definition, "pretending that one knows less about something than one really does."

First, I doubt that Stan wasn't flattered, back in the day, by meeting young fans who liked his characters enough to want to continue their adventures. From a pure business standpoint, it certainly worked out for him that Roy Thomas got even more deeply into Marvel continuity than Lee himself was, since Thomas indubitably had a knack for what Lee was doing and could produce material that furthered the sense of an ongoing "universe" of loosely connected events. But I'd imagine that it was stimulating on a personal level as well, in contrast to his encounters with professionals who could learn the Marvel style and reproduce it, but had no outstanding passion for the continuity-- as I would judge to be the case with other 1960s Marvel-scripters like O'Neil, Skeates and Goodwin.

Second, Stan is certainly enough of a businessman to know that one of the principal reasons for creators to continue other peoples' characters is because they have been proven to sell, at least under certain circumstances. Lee certainly made the editorial decision to revive the 1940s Captain America in the 1960s, even though an earlier revival in the early 1950s had failed to be lucrative.  Still, Lee may have remembered that failure, for although the Captain made his first Marvel appearances as a member of the Avengers, his first Marvel feature didn't regularly take place in the 1960s milieu, but frequently sported "flashback" adventures taking place during WWII. True, this could have come about simply because Jack Kirby wanted to do more WWII stories, but IMO it's more likely that Lee wasn't entirely confident about the power of a WWII hero to enthrall 1960s audiences.

The 1960s version of the Human Torch was not a direct revival as Captain America was. Still, though the Silver Age Human Torch appears as part of the Fantastic Four ensemble, there's not much question that his creators hoped to tap into the current audience by invoking the same fiery thrills that had sold to audiences of the Golden Age. No one ever saw Stan Lee reviving flop characters like the Red Raven; that would become the raison d'etre of Roy Thomas, who never met a Golden Age character he didn't want to revive. Further, it's certainly no coincidence that the Silver Age Torch was the first Fantastic Four character to be spun off into his own feature, suggesting that Lee was hoping that the character could grab a supportive audience on his own, even though the Golden Age Torch had also failed in his early 1950s revival.

So "playing with old toys" has distinct advantages in a financial sense, and in some cases, it can even be rewarding in an aesthetic sense for the fans. Much as I enjoy the classic Captain America tales of the war years, most of them are just fair entertainment, and though there have been many bad Cap tales following the Silver Age revival, on the whole "revived Cap" has yielded a fair share of above-average stories.

On a tangential note, in the BEAT post cited above Heidi McDonald gets a little static from Tony Isabella for her light remarks on Stan's possible lack of creative influence. I've critiqued a buttload of Heidi comments here, but I found her remarks pretty harmless, compared to the know-nothing fans who would ambush Stan at conventions asking him if he'd tell the "truth," as these fans conceived it, about Jack Kirby's contributions.  Not unlike the guy in the BEAT comments-section who claims that "Jack created it all!"

FEELINGS, NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS

In my last essay I cited a recent article on Comic-con 2014 to substantiate the claim that bad real-life behavior does still occur at conventions. That, however, doesn't mean that I agree with every point writer Rebecca Keegan made in support of this thesis. Here's one I reject:

At a “Game of Thrones” panel at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con, a mix of cheers and groans rose up in the audience when actor Jason Momoa said his favorite part of his role on the HBO show is that he gets to “rape beautiful women and have them fall in love with me.” 

Now, I would sympathize with the outrage here only in one respect: since Comic-con is not an "adults only" function, it was at the very least indecorous of the actor to make an adults-only statement in that venue.  But Keegan didn't object on the basis of grossing out juveniles. The thrust of the article is on the "harassment" of women at the convention.

Harassment, however, does not include "anything that annoys many or even all women," and within a context of speaking to adults about adult entertainment-- which GAME OF THRONES certainly is-- Momoa's remarks do not constitute harassment.

The kerfluffle resembles the one that arose in 2013 when Mark Millar had the audacity to assert that in a story-context the act of rape could be used for the narrative purpose of showing graphically that a villain was a Bad Guy. In my essay CONJUNCTION JUNCTION, MEET VIOLATION STATION, I observed that though I had no use for Millar's work, the writer was just stating a fact.  Much of the criticism directed against his remarks was based not on the nature of storytelling, but on an ideological desire to make sure that the activity of rape should never be used for any purpose but the condemnation of so-called "rape culture."

I haven't bothered to look up earlier responses to Momoa's remarks; though it's the first time I came across this particular issue.  I'm sure the original debate had largely run its course before Ms. Keegan brought it up.  I would imagine, though, that a lot of vitriol came about because of the linkage of rape and "falling in love."

But of course, as I mentioned in this essay, the linkage is not something Momoa made up out of whole cloth: it's a trope that has circulated throughout the genre of the "women's romance" since it erupted from the skull of Samuel Richardson.  I hazarded a few guesses at the reasons why the assocation of rape and love in these genre-works should prove so durable, especially in works aimed predominantly at a female readership. But though I freely admit that there could be many subtleties about the subject to which I, a male writer, am not privy, I don't believe that the trope is syndromic of "rape culture."  On one hand, I regard the trope, as phrased by Momoa, is absurd on the face of it: barring the rare occurrences of real-life Stockholm Syndrome, I don't think the average person believes this to be anything more than a fantasy.  On a second hand, I believe that the same trope pertains no less to the fantasy of female-on-male rape-- even if this is usually accomplished through roundabout means; i.e., drugs, etc.

While I don't agree with the moral opprobrium attached, TV Tropes helpfully provides a list of examples on this topic as it pertains to comics, ranging from Black Canary to Asterix,  

So tosum up::

Real threats of rape to someone, even if intended as stupid "humor"-- no good.

Dumb jokes about rape in a fictional context-- okay.

BITER BIT: FILM AT ELEVEN

Though this essay still concerns Alan Moore's most recent-- but probably not final-- rant-fest, I'm separating it from the "Elitist Neopuritan" series because I want to make a broader point about the ironies of scapegoating.

Back in 2009 I wrote of one of Moore's rants:

...scapegoating has an indispensable function in both literature and religion. The notion that one can dispense with evil (be it moral evil or mere physical calamity) by dispensing with a representative of evil is well-suited to both of these forms (to use the Cassirer term).

Scapegoating isn't quite as suited to politics. It's true that every political system advances itself by excoriating (whether directly or by implication) an opponent who represents a contrary belief. It's also true that this excoriation can sometimes lend to a process of scapegoating. But political systems inherently require compromise between rival factions. Even Machiavelli, who as Cassirer noted was the first to speak openly of the *realpolitik* that took place in Renaissance versions of the smoke-filled back room, admitted the necessity for compromise between rival powers.

A scapegoat, then, is not the same as an opponent. You may compromise or come to terms with the latter, but the former exists to be sacrificed.

In this essay my problem was with Moore's simplistic-- and badly substantiated-- reading of American culture.  In this 2012 essay, I found his view of Ian Fleming's James Bond no less problematic.  While I allowed that Moore might have valid reasons for his ire toward the injustices of masculinist culture in real life, I found that his satire of Bond was almost purely Moore's own projection, and as such, another example of scapegoating rather than a genuinely thought-out criticism.

Now, neither of these developments is ironic.  What is ironic is that over the past few years Moore himself has become the target of another form of scapegoating.  And golly gee, guess who doesn't like having his work cherry-picked for anti-liberal meanings!


I'm not sure what started the trope "Alan Moore Writes Rapey Comics," though I did find one blog-post from 2009 on the topic.  In the rant-fest Moore blames Grant Morrison for continuing the trope, but I for one have been seeing it for at least the past three years on various forums.  Moore's response to this accusation is muddled and verbose, suggesting that readers have overlooked the number of "far greater prevalence of consensual and relatively joyous sexual relationships" in his work.  Further, what scenes of rape or other violent sexual encounters Moore did pen should be seen in a spectrum of truth-telling about real life: "my thinking was that sexual violence, including rape and domestic abuse, should also feature in my work where necessary or appropriate to a given narrative, the alternative being to imply that these things did not exist, or weren’t happening."

Though I would debate many of the specific political observations Moore makes in the rant-fest, I'm completely on his side in stating that an author seeking to address adult themes should be free to do so without fear of, well, scapegoating.  Yet Moore, offended though he is by being misrepresented as a rape-happy sadist, fails to see that he's been so victimized because the topic of rape itself has become an ultraliberal hot-button issue. In this essay I traced how Mark Millar was pilloried last August for making a simple-- if somewhat obtuse-- statement about the potential use of rape as a story-element. Various ultraliberals-- I define the term here-- jumped on Millar for not having defined rape the way they wanted it defined.  And at heart they are no different than the ultraliberals who have decided that Moore's use of violent sexuality goes over some ill-defined line.  It's a line that suggests the hectoring tone of Susan Brownmiller, co-founder of the feminist organization WAP:

We are unalterably opposed to the presentation of the female body being stripped, bound, raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered in the name of commercial entertainment and free speech.

If Alan Moore were exposed to this quote, would he perceive that the censorious voices of the comic book world have evolved along the same lines as pundits like Brownmiller?  That, even though Moore is far more esteemed in the comics-world and the "outside world" than Mark Millar is, he has been stigmatized precisely because he has invoked the trope of the raped female at times.  To this mental and political outlook it does not matter how many times Moore has written of "consensual and relatively joyous sexual relationships." I don't imagine Moore would agree that he has used rape purely for mere "commercial entertainment," but he does believe that it was within his rights of "free speech" to write seriously on these and other adult topics as he pleased.

Nor can I see any compelling or worthy reason why I, or any other writer, should restrain themselves from addressing whatsoever issues they feel are worthy of address, if they have the courage to engage with those subjects in the face of the possible approbation and loss of livelihood which may be entailed.

I have always maintained that art-- not just fine art, but also popular art-- must be free to explore all such aspects, whether they represent "real life" or not.  I don't credence Moore's attempt to portray himself as nothing more than the noble teller of uncomfortable truths, especially when one sentence before the one quoted, he tries the old dodge of attacking the commercialization of non-sexual violence:

I genuinely cannot see any reason why lethal non-sexual violence should be privileged over sexual violence, other than a residual middle class discomfort or squeamishness over all matters pertaining to sex, which in this instance has taken on the protective colouration of a fairly spurious appeal to contemporary sexual politics.

But of course the "appeal" is not spurious.  The scapegoating of the hideous anti-liberal icon is intrinsic to both ultraliberal and ultraconservative ends of the political spectrum.   Alan Moore himself is just fine with scapegoating, as shown in the essays referenced. 

He just doesn't like being the one with the teeth in his rump.

 

THE READING RHEUM #4: WANTED (2003)

I first read WANTED as a graphic novel compilation after seeing and enjoying the 2008 film derivation.  I say "derivation" because the film could not be called an adaptation in the true sense: it merely borrows the loose outlines of the graphic novel.  WANTED the GN concerns a pathetic wage-slave who learns that due to his heritage he can become a member of a globe-spanning network of costumed super-criminals, while WANTED the movie concerns a pathetic wage-slave who learns that due to his heritage he can become a member of a globe-spanning network of non-costumed super-assassins. 

Though the filmmakers may have any number of justifications for changing the content of their scenario, I speculate that the biggest reason was one of narrative clarity. When dealing with matters metaphenomenal, live-action audiovisual media, which must use actors to some extent, it's difficult to present huge hordes of metaphenomenal characters, as comic books frequently do.  The cinematic medium-- like its cousin, television in its serial manifestation--  is dominantly allied to what science fiction readers have called the "one gimme rule," in which for the length of the narrative the story may ask the reader to believe one impossible thing-- time-travel, an alien invasion-- but not two impossible things. 

Prose, however, has long been able to weave together many impossible things together into a single strand, ranging from archaic epics like THE ARGONAUTICA to THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, the novel that advocated believing in six impossible things before breakfast.  Ironically, the "one gimme rule" was first articulated with prose fiction in mind, but prose-- and all media dependent on the printed word, such as comics-- have always had a greater ability to entertain many impossible things, with or without detailed explanation.

The WANTED movie chose to use super-assassins-- a bunch of ordinary men transformed into a cult of killers by a secret organization's rituals and weapons--because that was the easiest narrative concept to put across in a two-hour film.  The WANTED graphic novel, however, began as a proposal to DC Comics, which would have taken the old 1970s SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS concept and cranked it up for the ultraviolence audience, imagining an alternate dimension-- evocative of, but not identical with, DC's normative universe-- in which the more numerous supervillains banded together to kill off or render helpless all the superheroes.  Further, the villains managed to erase the memories of everyone on that earth as to the former existence of superheroes.  Thus, given that ordinary law-enforcement was incapable of fighting hordes of fiends with super-weapons and super-powers, nothing restricted the supervillains but their own kind.  They formed guilds in order to rein one another in, not out of any sense of probity but simply to avoid (1) killing the "goose" of common humanity and depriving themselves of its golden eggs, and (2) drawing the attention of whatever superheroes existed in alternate dimensions.

I said above that I enjoyed the movie, and then read the GN, which I mentioned briefly in this 2008 post.  To the best of my recollection I had not read any other Mark Millar work; at most I might've known his name as one of many British (specifically Scottish) authors who became noteworthy in the 1990s.  I briefly followed up my short post with ID-IOT'S DEMISE, in which I compared the constant battles of heroes and villains in adventure-fiction to the adversarial interactions of "the ego" and "the id" in the Freudian schema.  To repeat the obvious pun once more, I found WANTED wanting in this regard:

One might think that in a world where the supervillains have successfully killed off all of the superheroes (and even wiped out humanity's memory of the event), one might see the supervillain in All His Glory: might see all sorts of weird, perverted, diabolical id-impulses on display. But I see more "id-iosyncracies" in an average issue of BATMAN than in this facile antiheroic tripe.

In addition to critiquing WANTED on the basic of its paucity of imagination, though, I want to add that its take on the human capacity for evil is far more meretricious than almost every superhero comic book ever made.  The only tool in Miller's kit is that of the Punk Who Shouted Hate at the Heart of the World, and he screws that up almost as badly as he fails to create strong villainous presences. 

It's certainly possible to imagine a world where villainy is the ruling principle.  The Marquis deSade did so, and even though Sade's vision is rife with philosophical weaknesses, he never for a moment compromises his belief that persons possessed of the will to torture and destroy others should be able to do so. 

In contrast, Millar shows just as much compromise as the wage-slave "assholes" he professes to despise.  At one point in the story, protagonist Wesley Gibson-- the fellow who is saved from life as a corporate drone, so that he can enjoy endless adventures of rape and murder-- confesses that after he made a one-man assault on a police station, killed almost everyone in the station, and then suddenly had a crying-jag.  He reflects to his bed-partner Fox that now he thinks about how he ruined the families of all the cops he killed, and observes that "maybe this 'being evil all the time' crap's just starting to feel a little forced." His bed-partner Fox, also a spree-killer, has these words of wisdom:

You really think we just go around fucking shit up all the time?  This is a global business, man,  We got our fingers in a little piece of everything and that means you gotta be disciplined.

Where a Sade character would dispel moral objections against sadistic acts with a breezy lecture about the necessity of imposing force on others in order to live, Millar dodges the issue of moral recriminations entirely.  Fox does not comment directly on Wesley's crying-jag at all; she merely says that Wesley has "hit the same wall we all hit after the first few months [of rape and murder]."  Fox counsels the same deferral of passions that motivates the original Wesley not to rebel against the people who sign his paychecks: "business"-- except that now Wesley is one of the bosses instead of one of the underlings.  It's interesting that discipline for the sake of efficiency and "time" are her watchwords:

You don't have time to rape, kill and mutilate people all the time, baby... [your father] just wanted you do what you really wanted to do with your life and sometimes that means watching TV in bed all day long and other times it's murdering some fucker.

The characters of Sade view their libertine excesses as a sort of self-actualization as well, but Sade himself is a positive zealot about tearing down the old hypocrisies of religion and morality.  In WANTED Millar, the prophet of an "idiot id," can't summon up the least interest in moral issues, even to dispel them. Fox doesn't even bother to tell Wesley that he's probably less concerned with the cops' families than with his own family traumas, which would be a logical enough conclusion given the psychobabble limitations of Millar's universe.  Implicitly the crying-jag is not actual remorse, just a physical reaction to stress.  Once Wesley has the discipline of a true killer like his father-- whose biggest guilt is that he allowed Wesley to be raised by his pacifist mother-- he will be able to sublimate any guilty reactions to the acts of rape and murder and will be able to chill out watching TV in bed all day when he so pleases.


To be sure, I only reread this graphic novel to test the accuracy of my original reaction and because I was obliged recently to agree with one of Millar's statements in this essay. I wanted to give at least one reason why I considered Millar's use of "ultraviolence" to be stupid and meretricious. Perhaps in a future review I'll cite an example that proves a little more in tune with the "expenditure" ethic of the Grand Marquis, and less with Millar's "consumption" ethic of simply consuming more consipicuously than the ordinary asshole wage-slave.

CONJUNCTION JUNCTION, MEET VIOLATION STATION PART II

I read USES [OF ENCHANTMENT] many years ago and thought it was a fair premise, albeit marked by a certain utilitarianism. While I would never deny that readers may internalize the subject matter of fiction so as to give the subject some personally-proactive theme, it's certainly not the principal quality of fiction, nor do I think most readers, children or adults, are thinking to themselves, even unconsciously, "How can I 'use' this?" Much of the charm of fiction, be it 'fantastic' or 'realistic,' resides in the way those elements most similar to everyday experience can be inverted, transvalued, or reinterpreted in assorted ways.-- me, BETTLEHEIM, BETTELHEIM, BETTELHEIM!

Mark Millar's remarks about rape, superficial though they were, stirred up what amounted to a pretty small hornet's nest, given that the swarm already seems to be settling down, to judge from the one or two comics news-sites I visit. 

Regarding Millar's original remarks, the only thing I had to add is that while he was correct to say that the act of rape could be used in fiction simply to denote "badness," he was incorrect to say that the act had no difference from (to use his example) a bad guy's decapitating a victim.  Various online critics, such as the one I cited in Part One, attacked Millar for not privileging the use of rape to connote the need for social and cultural reform.  This misses the point as to the universal-- i.e., non-political-- ways in which sex and violence overlap and yet remain distinct.  My own view, not reducible to pure utilitarian terms yet not irrelevant to those concerns, was expressed in the essays entitled VIOLENCE *AIN'T* NUTHIN' BUT SEX MISSPELLED:

While there are ways in which sexual partners can attempt to "assault" one another-- ways which include, but are not confined to, rape-- sex is dominantly isothymic, in that sex usually requires some modicum of cooperation. Violence, then, dominantly conforms to Fukuyma's megalothymic mode insofar as it usually involves a struggle of at least two opponents in which one will prove superior to the other, though in rare cases fighters may simply spar with no intent of proving thymotic superiority.

I want to make clear, too, that my objections to a utilitarian reading of violence are not confined to the arguments of those who don't like violence in certain contexts.  My quotation re: Bettleheim  shows that I'm equally opposed to the views of an author who saw violence in a positive light, because he too professed a narrow utilitarianism that overlooked the broader context of fiction: 

Much of the charm of fiction, be it 'fantastic' or 'realistic,' resides in the way those elements most similar to everyday experience can be inverted, transvalued, or reinterpreted in assorted ways.

The battle of these two equally utilitarian viewpoints is highlighted in THE BEAT's new cause celebre, two posts-- one closed to comments, one designed to exclude them from the first-- on the subject of Avatar Comics' use of torture-porn comic book covers.

Here's the first, in which author Heidi McDonald vents her spleen against Avatar for marketing "torture porn."  From her opening remarks she's apparently not the first to do so, but her politicized views are made clear at the conclusion of what is a pretty civil thread overall, replete with many thoughtful remarks about the nature of the horror genre:

...I’ll leave you with this: why does so much “horror” involve sadistic misogyny against women? And are you okay with that?

I've already refuted similar McDonald views here, so I'll confine myself to mentioning that she never responds to one poster's claim that Avatar tortures quite a few male characters as well.  Heidi then offers a summation of the controversy on her newsblog and elsewhere, with a pertinent link to an essay by Warren Ellis.

Ellis' defense of violent stories frames its argument in equally utilitarian principles, not unlike Bruno Bettelheim's defense of violent fairy tales. 

The function of fiction is being lost in the conversation on violence. My book editor, Sean McDonald, thinks of it as “radical empathy.” Fiction, like any other form of art, is there to consider aspects of the real world in the ways that simple objective views can’t — from the inside. We cannot Other characters when we are seeing the world from the inside of their skulls. This is the great success of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter, both in print and as so richly embodied by Mads Mikkelsen in the Hannibal television series: For every three scary, strange things we discover about him, there is one thing that we can relate to. The Other is revealed as a damaged or alienated human, and we learn something about the roots of violence and the traps of horror.

I don't disagree that violence in fiction CAN be used for this "conversation on violence."  My objection is that Ellis-- and the book editor he quotes-- are extending this potential use of violence further than it deserves to be extended.  Basically, Ellis simply attempts to turn the "desensitization" view of violence on its head: instead of making readers/viewers less sensitive to violence, violent fiction makes them more empathetic.


The truth is that violence can have either effect, and that the effect on the audience can be totally at odds with respect to the intent of the author.   In the terminology of Hume, the only "is" one can state with certainty is that most if not all human cultures are fascinated with fictional violence.  To impose any "ought" upon it, as Ellis does above, is mere wishful thinking, as is his claim toward the essay's conclusion that "fiction is how we both study and de-fang our monsters."  Camille Paglia is more forthright in this famous quote from SEXUAL PERSONAE, which grounds human behavior as a ongoing struggle between a fantasy principle and a reality principle:

We may have to accept an ethical cleavage between art and reality, tolerating horrors, rapes, and mutilations in art that we would not tolerate in society. For art is our message from the beyond, telling us what nature is up to.

CONJUNCTION JUNCTION, MEET VIOLATION STATION

To believe that literature should mirror a desired form of experience, an "ought" rather than an "is," is Werthamism in its most obtuse manifestation.-- THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4.

I've avoided the work of Mark Millar since my encounter with the fatuity of his graphic novel WANTED, but I can't help but be drawn into the firestorm of argumentation birthed by this remark from a New Republic essay about his influence:

“The ultimate [act] that would be the taboo, to show how bad some villain is, was to have somebody being raped, you know?” he told me. “I don't really think it matters. It's the same as, like, a decapitation. It's just a horrible act to show that somebody's a bad guy.”

Up to now my only response to Millar's remark was on this ROBOT 6 post, wherein writer Corey Blake provides his take on the failure of the Big Two's efforts to expand their demographic:

And all of it, those remarks and the repeated embarrassments and failures at making comics for a different demographic, to me it has the subtext of “protect my superheroes.” As if making some superhero comics that might opt to not casually use rape as a villain’s character trait will take away the superheroes I grew up with.

Blake provides no justification for this "subtext," so I attempted-- without success-- to provide a different attitude toward the use of ultraviolence like Millar's that was not at all predicated on the idea of saving one's superheroes:

I for one don’t defend the presence of ultraviolence (whether in the context of rape or in other contexts) because I’m defending just “my” superheroes. I defend it on the same principle I defend both the Marquis deSade and Mickey Spillane, among others. I won’t defend Millar’s use of ultraviolence, because it sucks. But there are people who do it well, and some of them work outside Marvel and DC.  The undergrounds used to be far more physically transgressive than the mainstream. Maybe the modern inheritors of that tradition have got a little too “artsy” for their own good (if one defines “good” in terms of gaining publicity from transgressing boundaries).

Blake's confused commentary falls into one of two categories of responses to problems regarding the Humean dichotomy of "ought" and "is." This category, "Response #1," is one in which the subject merely ignores the fact of an existing situation-- what Hume calls an "is"-- in order to promote his vision of how things should be, his "ought."

Little as I like to defend Millar, there can be no doubt that rape *can* be used by a fiction-writer as a "horrible act to show that somebody's a bad guy." Blake puts Millar's factual statement-- that rape can be used for a given narrative function-- in an unjustifiable context, as part of his (Blake's) suggeston that all such "rear-guard" (my word) statements by Millar and others somehow prove  that many Big Two creators are seeking to protect the "superheroes [they] grew up with."  And it's not just any superheroes, it seems, but a particular violent-- and violative-- phylum of superheroes that is presumably oriented only upon older readers.  I *think* Blake is saying that such ultraviolent superheroes are the type which creators like Millar and McFarlane experienced in their youth, but the point is unclear. To be fair, Millar in the New Republic article does indeed speak of being attracted to the "outrageous" quality of certain comics from his youth.

The second category, "Response #2," is more practical in that it tends to admit the existence of the "is" but to insist that it should be transformed into an "ought."  This response appears in the comments-section of this Heidi McDonald BEAT post, from commenter Mariah Heuhner, who takes interviewee John Romita Jr to task for having said that a certain scene in KICK ASS 2 was not a "rape scene:"

My issue with the answers here for the scene in Kick Ass is that it’s a quite a bit of a cop out to act like the direct implication of that scene, which is clearly that rape is about to happen, is automatically less or not problematic because the actual rape wasn’t shown explicitly. This is true, but we know it’s going to and it’s still being used, quite obviously, to show the villains are bad and not much else.

So Heuhner essentially agrees with Millar; rape can be used to serve this bare function. However, she evaluates the KICK ASS scene as a "lazy way to make someone evil," which is characteristic of "Response #2," which is to say, "Yes, this is the current status of the 'is' in question, but it 'ought' to be otherwise."  I have not read KICK ASS 2, or the earlier GN, though I did see the film adaptation of the latter.  I suspect I would agree with Heuhner in her evaluation of Millar's use of a rape-scene for "shock value."

I agree somewhat less with the statement she makes when she compares KICK ASS 2's use of rape with that of the Steig Larssen novel THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO:

Further, the example of The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo is interesting because yes, that scene is much more explicit in the book and film. But. It’s also not used merely to shock, it deeply informs Lisbeth’s character, but unlike a lot of rape scenes…does not define her and everything she is. Nor does it function to motivate a male character or just to establish her rapist as evil. Especially in the context of the series, it’s about much more than that, about entrenched misogyny, about a system that is deeply messed up, about rape culture, and about how Lisbeth’s navigates the world and deals with the things that happen to her.

I have absolutely no problem with Heuhner saying that she finds the latter use of rape to be more to her tastes.  However, though I have thus far found Mark Millar's work to be both lazy and clumsy, there are ways to use "shock value" correctly; ways that have nothing to do with examining "entrenched misogyny."  It's true that many creators use male-over-female rape-- which is of course only one possible permutation of that assaultive phenomenon-- as a device to motivate a hero, though there's no intrinsic reason that it can only be a male hero who is so motivated.  But as I've mentioned in other essays, even "shock value" can be used to establish basic moral values.  If Batman rescues a lone woman from a gang about to rape her, and beats the gang into putty, is this scenario ONLY about making Batman look heroic, as many would claim?  I can't speak for anyone else, but for me such scenes validate a moral imperative: that people who violate others should be punished.  I know that there is no Batman able to visit such punishments, but the scene works as a cathartic fantasy.  Structurally it's no different if it's Catwoman who comes to the victim's rescue, as one version of the character does in 1992's BATMAN RETURNS, though I can understand why a female reader *might* prefer the latter scenario as being more empowering.

On a related note, here's a rather famous excerpt from a scenario in which a male character avenges the quasi-sexual abuse-- though not one of actual rape-- of a female character by another male.  Is this scene nothing more than "shock value" alone, as Millar's may be?  Or does the quasi-rape of Mina Murray "define her and everything she is?"  I would say no to both rhetorical questions, but other readers' mileage may vary.

In summation, I remain suspicious of any intellectualized attempts to view a situation purely in politicized terms, no matter how well expressed.

ID-IOT'S DEMISE

Right away let me lay down my prejudices regarding villains.

In the annals of popular literature (which automatically disincludes anything in the realm of the canonical class), there are only Three Great Villains.

Rider Haggard's SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED (1887)

Bram Stoker's DRACULA (1897)

Sax Rohmer's FU MANCHU (1912)

Other prominent villains-- Captain Nemo, the Wicked Witch, Joker, Doc Doom, Darth Vader-- are at best "near greats," and most of the not-so-prominent may be "good," "interesting," and so on down the line. Only the Big Three-- all, not coincidentally, born from the medium of prose-- possess the quality Henry James called "density of specification." James was applying this concept to the density of realistic detail in a work, but though that verisimilitudinous idea does somewhat apply to these prose-villains-- or as much as it can, given the parameters of popular fiction-- I'm really thinking of the density of mythopoetic associations one finds in each of the Big Three; a density that puts all other villains to shame.

Of course, even if these villains were not fictional, few if any of them would be capable of shame. To borrow flagrantly from the psychological model of Big Sigmund Freud, shame belongs to the "ego," experienced thanks to the never-ending battle of the shameless "id" and the shame-inducing "superego." There should be no need to point out which of the latter two most resembles the archetypal comics-villain and which the archetypal hero, but who's the ego? One might suppose that it's the reader of the hero/villain struggle, who both enjoys the villain attempting all sort of transgressive desires (meant here more in the sense of Bataille than of Freud) and the hero's prosocial efforts to batter the villain into submission.

But what happens when the heroes are all gone and the villains, those icons of the id, are on the loose? That's a question suggested by the setup of the Mark Millar/J.G. Jones limited series WANTED-- but do Millar and Jones really let the dogs out? Attend.

Mark Millar is not unique in attempting to break down his readers' tender egos with a villain-centric world. Of the Big Three cited above, Rohmer's Fu Manchu, by promoting his favored fiend within an ongoing series of books, did the most to put readers in the Oriental slippers of an undefeatable evil. Stoker wisely (given his talents) killed his demon off in one book, while Haggard, having killed off his demoness in the first book, had to strain to launch one okay sequel and two mediocre prequels. So Rohmer is certainly one of the first creators who managed to make a villain into the star of the show.


Comic books also experimented off and on with villain-centric features, but few within the superhero idiom enjoyed much success (horror characters did somewhat better). I believe the first feature to be devoted to a large team of supervillains continually striving against their heroic enemies was 1976's SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER VILLAINS, where the villain known as Gorilla Grodd (a "pretty good" malefactor, if you're curious) helped organize a bunch of standard DC evildoers into a force for evil. Though SSOSV was a pretty crappy feature, it had one inspired line, where Grodd tries to give his criminal compeers a reason for forming an alliance, saying that they should do for the same reason they do anything: "enlightened self-interest!" Even given the ritual nature of the hero-villain dance in superhero comics, it's practically mandatory that the villain should have an id-oriented reason for trying to foment chaos, or his whole rationale-- and that of the id/superego dance-- collapses.


However, it's a rationale that I found wanting in, uh, WANTED. One might think that in a world where the supervillains have successfully killed off all of the superheroes (and even wiped out humanity's memory of the event), one might see the supervillain in All His Glory: might see all sorts of weird, perverted, diabolical id-impulses on display. But I see more "id-iosyncracies" in an average issue of BATMAN than in this facile antiheroic tripe.

To borrow Freud's horse-and-rider imagery regarding the id and superego, the hero in mainstream comics is the rider, who guides the narrative to closure, but the villain is the horse that provides the plot's motive force. For the villain to do so, the creator must give the villain's nature center stage for some time, and this often has the effect of making the villain a little more humanly relateable than the superegoic hero, and maybe even more individualistic. The Joker and the Riddler may overlap in terms of narrative functions (both supercrooks leave behind clues that possess a comical tonality), but for Batman to defeat them he must figure out the different ways they think and act, anticipate what they will do, and determine how to use their strengths against them.

There should be no reason that, without the presence of the heroes, the villains should not still be as perverse and transgressive as they are in books with heroes. And yet the Millar/Jones work gives us nothing but pale imitations of the id-icons brought forth by the sublimely-trashy mainstream. Here's a Red Skull ripoff, here's a Clayface copy (appropriate!), and here's a pastiche of the Puppet Master (GREEN LANTERN version). Even in triumph, Millar's villains have all the individuality of ducks in a shooting-gallery.

Which I suppose is the whole point. Millar's antiheroic hero Wesley (supervillain name: The Killer) begins as a tedious office drone who is awakened to his murderous abilities by other villains and who proceeds to use his killing talents on as many of society's sheep as he finds satisfying. Later, it is other villains who become the targets in Wesley's rogue-shooting gallery, but neither their personalities nor their powers are any challenge to him.

Within the overall action-genre (which naturally subsumes the superheroic one), there's always a good deal of kinetic appeal in mass slayings of both the innocent and the guilty, with the villain usually supplying the former while the hero provides the latter. Within the subset of action-works deemed "antiheroic," it probably doesn't matter that the protagonist becomes the Lord High Executioner to just about everyone, as antiheroic works are inherently more id-aggressive, with more of a tendency to expunge other realities in favor of the protagonist's id-centered existence. It does matter a little, though, that the protagonist is just about as dull as a mass murderer as he is as an office drone. I don't *think* this was the author's intent, but IMO even a minor jerkoff antihero like DC's Lobo is more "killah" than the Killer.

From the bland narrative of WANTED it would seem that heroes and villains need each other, if only to challenge one another's weaknesses and provide a sense of conflict. Millar's Killer has no weaknesses, hence no conflict. And don't get me started on the faux daddy issues, which Millar totally bollixes.

In conclusion, I don't imagine that my opinion on Millar's meditations on matters villainous will disturb the author much, especially now that the miniseries spawned a big-budget, certainly-profitable film of the same name. But I will say the one thing no author likes to hear:

"The film was better."

WANTED: A BETTER COMIC THAN WANTED

Having just finished my first reading of the Miller/Jones WANTED in its TPB form, I plan to touch on it more fully later. But for now, my tagline for it would be:

"WANTED reminds you of just how good Frank Miller is at this kind of thing."