Circle of Blood

This originally ran on Comixology.
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“Super-hero” backwards is “noir.” The opposite of the upright avatar of justice with entirely sublimated sexual urges is the morally ambiguous anti-hero driven by money-lust and just plain old lust. The super-hero wears his underwear on the outside and saves the universe; the noir hero curses the universe and is pulled around by what’s inside his underwear. Noir is about shadows and helplessness and the best-laid illicit plans ending up in ruins; super-heroes are about light and empowerment and the best-laid illicit plans ending up in ruins.

Which is to say that, while super-heroes and noir appear at first to be irreconcilable, on closer look they do have a fair bit in common. They’re both male genre literature. They both have a strong moral code enforced by corporal punishment. And they both have, shall we say, ambivalent feelings about women. It makes sense, then, that there’s a long tradition of combining the two, starting at least with the first Batman stories, reaching its high point, I firmly believe, with Bob Haney’s goofily brilliant Batman/Deadman team up in Brave and Bold #101, and continuing on to this day with anything Frank Miller has ever touched (including, of course, Batman.)

One of the most interesting super-hero/noir mashups I’ve seen is the 1986 Punisher mini-series Circle of Blood by Steven Grant and Mike Zeck. The Punisher has always been only sort-of/kind-of a super-hero. He wears tights, but merely, you sense, because that’s the best way to stay inconspicuous in the hero-ridden Marvel multiverse. He fights for truth and justice, but he does it by shooting people.

Steven Grant is well known for his writing about comics as well as for his comics themselves (he did some guest-writing on my blog not too long ago), and you can see his critical acumen in his script. Basically, where Frank Miller tends to use noir to make his heroes seem even more bad-ass, Grant uses it to question and ultimately undermine the moral certainties on which the super-hero genre is based.

Zeck draws the Punisher as a pumped-up manly-man whose bobble-head is dwarfed by acres of steroidal flesh, and this is a good metaphor for the way Grant writes the character. From the neck down, the Punisher is a super-hero juggernaut, hyper-competently disposing of roomfuls of thugs in classic Bat-mode, or bashing his way through a prison in a fashion reminiscent of the contemporaneous Rorschach.

From the neck up, though, the Punisher isn’t hyper-competent at all. Instead, he’s more like the classic noir dupe. Though he has a certain tactical animal cunning, his inner monologue is obsessively repetitive in a way that suggests borderline idiocy — where Batman’s traumatic backstory has, supposedly, made him smarter, the Punisher’s has left him, in Grant’s writing, a monomaniacal mental and emotional basket-case. The Punisher is, like most noir men, childishly easy to fool. He stumbles into traps, is bamboozled by a shady conglomerate called the Trust, and, inevitably, betrayed by a woman. His solve-it-by-shooting-it approach to every problem results in heaps of dead bodies, including that of one child. Said child’s death sends our hero into a self-pitying funk, complete with flashbacks and profound utterances (“It’s got to stop. The poor children.”) which, at least from my perspective, makes him appear more damaged, dangerous, unsympathetic, and unheroic than ever.

The Punisher’s final act in the comic is to allow the woman who betrayed him (Angela) to fall off a cliff. His motivation seems less abstract justice than simple spite, and one has to wonder, as he limps off into the sunset, whether the world wouldn’t maybe be a safer place if the bad guys had won and offed this dangerously imbecilic killing machine. The use of noir here actually, and I think intentionally, calls the whole concept of super-heroics into question. The hired thugs in the series are dressed in the Punisher outfit and actually believe themselves to be the Punisher — and the parallel is quite clear. The Punisher himself, after all, seems like a brainwashed sleepwalker, not to mention a criminal. In the not-light of noir, the super-heroic law-and-order certainties become naïve, dangerous idiocy, while righteous vengeance turns into a flimsy excuse for self-aggrandizing fascistic violence.

Of course, you can turn this around and argue that the super-hero genre actually validates noir’s amorality. Just because Grant portrays the Punisher as a dangerous numbskull doesn’t mean that readers will stop identifying with him. He’s the hero, after all, and when, in his quasi-sentient way, he lets Angela fall to her death, you can certainly hear a chorus of “yeah, kill the bitch!” echoing from the peanut gallery. Does breaking a man’s little finger make Rorschach a monster, or does it make snapping people’s fingers seem kind of cool?

Probably both. Super-heroes and noir are polar opposites — but on a magnet, the poles are, of course, closely attached. Like Westerns, spy thrillers, and most male genre literature, both super-hero and noir are built around an exciting frisson of justified violence — a circle of blood. If you want to break out of that circle, you probably need to reach for a less closely-allied genre, or else try to dispense with genre altogether. Once you do that, of course, you’re talking to a much smaller audience, and not writing for a mainstream comics publisher. The irony is that by creating a thoughtful, popular comic questioning the Punisher’s war on crime, Grant probably helped to make that kind of war — with its more explicit blood, sex, and amorality — a mainstream staple.

Overthinking Things 7/1/2011

A Open Letter to Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi.

Dear Messrs Tapert and Raimi –

I hear that you’ve gotten the greenlight to create a live-action version of the Noir anime series for Starz. While I admit to trepidation at the idea that an American TV (premium cable, but still,) channel is interested in one of my favorite anime series, nonetheless, as the driving force behind Xena: Warrior Princess, I am willing to trust you both. (Not entirely indirectly, it was because of Xena that I now write here at HU, so I believe I owe you some thanks for the impact you’ve had on my life.)

Before I explain a little bit about Noir and what we, the fans, are and aren’t willing to tolerate, let me start with: 

Elements That Made Xena Great.

1 – “Strong Female” leads that actually were.

2 – Female team-up that acknowledged, but did not collapse because of, romantic entanglements with guys.

3 – Unresolved Sexual Tension between the leads – this is a critical point and I’ll get back to it in a moment.

4 – Xena smiling when she gutted people. Maybe it’s only me, but this was a key selling point for the show.

5 – The comedy. The jokes were always horribly corny and usually pretty stupid, but it meant that viewers never forgot the show was not to be taken seriously. This is a *very* important element when dealing with fans.

6 – Fighting – lots of it.

All of these, except the comedy should also be part of Noir. The anime Noir takes itself very seriously, so cornball humor would seem out of place for those of us who know the series but, again, I’m willing to give you some leeway here. Make it dry humor, rather than corny and I promise to behave.

Element That Did Not Make Xena Great

Joxer

I realize that he’s a relation, but if Ted Raimi shows up in Noir I will hate you, probably irrevocably. The one exception is if he shows up as one of the intended victims, is given a moving monologue, then Kirika shoots him. That is acceptable.

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Having established some of the key concepts that should and shouldn’t be carried over, let’s talk Noir.

Noir is the first of a trilogy of “girls with guns on the run” anime series, all of which have certain elements in common. It would probably be a really terrific idea to translate at least one, hopefully several, of these elements to your new series.

Elements You Should Have in your noveau Noir

I’m going to assume you’ve got the whole older, worldly mature woman / younger, naive woman pairing thing down. You nailed it in Xena and something similar should work just fine for Noir. I won’t beat this one to death. Go with your guts.

Conspiracy

In the Noir anime, the shadow organization that pursues the leads is an occult, Medieval, secret society; in the second series Madlax. it’s a magic-driven gun-running, war-mongering organization and in the third series, El Cazador de la Bruja, it’s a scientific conspiracy to resurrect and co-opt a magical culture. As you can see, the anime director really liked to have his women running from a shadow organization. And so did the fans. I insist you must have a conspiracy. Because the original shadow organization was not only incredibly silly, but random and unevenly developed, fee free to handle it however you like…as long as there is conspiracy of some kind.

Professional Assassins

This is a no-brainer, honestly. Both Mirielle and Kirika are professional assassins. In Madlax. Rimelda was an assassin and in El Cazador de la Bruja, Nadie and Ricardo were assassin/bodyguards. So, please, don’t make them ex-soldiers, or ex-CIA gone rogue. It’s okay to just make them professional killers.

Unresolved Sexual Tension

You did this great in Xena. Just do the same exact thing in Noir. I don’t need them to get together…there just has to be the plausible possibility that they might.

UST, as we called in back in the day in the anime and manga fandom, is a common and popular element in team-up stories. I know it’s cable TV, but don’t give into the temptation of having them fake kissing, or going undercover and having to pretend to be girlfriends or anything else embarrassing and in bad taste. Start with respect that is returned, that maybe becomes something more.

Music

I’m throwing this out, knowing that you probably can’t do anything about this, but if you have actually watched Noir at all, you’ll realize that the music is practically a character in the story. The chances of you actually being able to license Salva Nos or Canta Per Me are slim to none, I realize, but if you can bring *one* thing over whole from the anime, choose the music.

 

Element from Noir Anime You Can Lose and No One Will Cry

The watch. Lose the watch, the watch’s musical theme, the watch’s 800 appearances as repeated footage. The watch isn’t the deal-breaker Ted Raimi is, but honestly, no one will miss the watch.

 

Bonus Fan Points

If you want the already-existing Noir fans to love you, (and we are poised and willing to love you!) please don’t pointlessly Americanize the names into Michelle and Karen or some such idiocy…we’re adults, we *know* there are other countries with names that are not in English!

It’s true that there are people who have never watched the anime, and have no reason to know what the character names are but, there are also people who are already fans of the series, who could specifically subscribe to Starz *just* for the pleasure of watching you not fuck up the series we love. Just sayin’.

Here’s looking forward to the new series.

Yours Truly,