Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky

Ed McMahon vs. The Man

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A while back, editor Ryan Standfest asked me to contribute to his black humor comics anthology Black Eye. I wrote a piece for him, but it turned out not to be what he was looking for, and he decided not to print it. The rejection did spark an interesting back and forth about black humor, faith, and other issues.

Black Eye has since been released, and Ryan kindly sent me a copy. The below is less a review than a way of continuing our conversation.
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“It is our duty to give our readership whatever they wish to choke down, hoping it gets lodged in their throats….Sometimes you just have to go for broke,” Ryan Standfest writes in his preface to his anthology Black Eye. In doing so, he neatly encapsulates the dilemma facing the dangerous avant-garde. That difficulty being that the dangerous avant garde has been around, now, for more than a century. Artaud, arguably, was scary. Crumb, maybe was shocking. But if you’re preparing the same recipe Artaud did, are you really creating something your readers can’t digest? If you’re walking in Crumb’s footsteps, are you really going for broke? Or to put it another way, how can you shock the bourgeoisie when shocking the bourgeoisie is by now so thoroughly bourgeoise?

Black Eye has a lot of lovely work, and managed to freak out Canadian customs officials. But it never really manages to figure out how to get around the central dilemma of the unoutrageousness of third-hand outrageousness. The more it rages against the machine, the more overdetermined and reverent it seems.

For example, Michael Kupperman’s advertisement for All-Purpose Animal Groinologues, which will allow you to correctly reference various vertebrates’ reproductive organs for important business presentations, is up to his usual standards of hysterically goofy humor — but it fits comfortably into a genre of comics advertising satire that long since passed through pointed and on into nostalgia. Similarly, Danny Hellman’s two-page spread showcases his usual strikingly clear and accomplished graphic style…but the image of a nude woman dead in a graveyard, tits visible and nether bits carefully covered, seems less like a brutal fist in the face of hypocritical contentment, and more like the sort of casual misogynyist imagery underground-influenced comics artists draw because that’s the sort of casual misogynist imagery comics artists draw. Similarly, Onsmith’s one-panel gags are little more than reiterations of frat-boy gross-outs without the inventiveness of Harold Ramis or the Farrelly Brothers, much less Crumb. Shooting dogs is funny, peeing on homeless people is funny, chopping up women is funny, necrophilia is funny all just in and of themselves because, damn it, being a black humorist means rotely following the tropes of your forbearers without ever having to add an iota of your own imagination. More successful is Gnot Gueddin’s surreal tale of butt-faced fisherman, demonstrating that you can water down Kafka a lot and still get something fairly entertaining. And then there’s Roland Topor’s “100 Good Reasons to Kill Myself Right Now” which is mainly amusing because it reminds you that, oh yeah, those goofy French! They are so cute with their berets and their wine and their nihilism! Oh, by the nose of Gerard Depardieu, that is dark!

Detail from Danny Hellman’s Black Eye centerfold

But Black Eye’s difficulties are perhaps most clearly summarized by its essays. All written by prominent comics scholars, the pieces are careful, well-written and, inevitably, devoid of the bite that they claim to champion. Ken Parille defends Ditko from the moral animadversions attendant upon his objectivist philosophy by summoning up Crumb and Lenny Bruce and declaring that like them “Ditko attacks the status quo, ridicules government and religion, exposes hypocrisy, and, most importantly, sees irony and humor wherever he looks.” Jeet Heer, in similar vein, insists that S. Clay Wilson is not a misogynist or a narrow moralist but that his comics, which occasionally depict homosexual sex, are, therefore, “A Visual Stonewall,” which, like the gay rights movement “speaks to…the new spirit of freedom.” Whether or not you agree with the aesthetic assessments, the intention is clearly hagiographic; you’re supposed to reverence Wilson and Ditko for their brave irreverence. All the idols have already been toppled, and there’s nothing for the nascent black humorist to do but idolize those who did the toppling.


Panel from S. Clay Wilson’s “Star Eyed Stella from Zap Comix No.4, 1969, reprinted from the original art in Black Eye in conjunction with Jeet Heer’s essay

It’s instructive to turn to perhaps the most aesthetically successful contemporary comics black humorist, Johnny Ryan. Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix #12, reprinted in his latest anthology Take a Joke is devoted to “Boob Pooter’s Jokepocalypse.” Pooter, for those unfamiliar with Ryan’s work, is a world-famous comedian dressed in a cheap suit who specializes in hyperbolic offensiveness. In the Jokepocalypse, for example, he sprays people with Holocaust juice, turning them into lampshades; cuts off a soldier’s hand and sticks it in the soldier’s ass; launches a fleet of horribly destructive pity-fuck missiles; frees the breast cancer odd couple from the “cancer bags” of the President’s wife; goes back in time to kill Abraham Lincoln before he can sign the Emancipation Proclamation, resulting in slavery never being abolished; and kills a KKK member in order to cut him open and fly around in his corpse.

Pooter is, in other words, an anarchic black humorist, spitting in the eye of the proper and ejaculating blood upon the PC. Moreover, Pooter is not merely treated to hagiography, but is in fact deified. Pooter isn’t just some comedian; he’s a comedian with godlike powers. For one of his jokes in AYC #13, Pooter shoots himself in the head, comes back as a ghost, enters a woman’s body and masturbates until ghost sperm comes out of her mouth. In AYC #14 a (now-living) Boots elaborately ruins a man’s life, and when the man enacts revenge by killing him, Boots survives through a dizzyingly improbable series of disguises and substitutions, in which it starts to seem like Pooter is everyone and everyone is Pooter. He becomes a kind of immortal, unkillable demon, murdering and torturing in the name of cheap laffs and shallow boredom.

In some ways, Ryan’s use of Pooter is similar to Chris Ware’s use of God in some of his early Acme Novelty Library Work. For Ware, God (in tried and true black humor fashon) is revealed to be a megalomaniacal pissed-off superhero spreading brutality indiscriminately throughout the world. The difference, though, is that God for Ware acts out of sadism and cruelty — not out of a desire to make people laugh. Pooter’s a comedian, which means that he is, fairly directly, a stand-in for Ryan himself. Ware’s “God” satirically reveals the cruelty of the world; it’s a bleak joke on the ogre father. Ryan’s Boobs Pooter satirically reveals the cruelty of Ryan, who doesn’t so much want to upend the ogre-father as he wants to become him. Thus, while cruelty may be fun, it’s not exactly liberating. Pooter, isn’t a revolutionary; he’s a fusty stand-up man, beloved by even the President of the United States — sort of a mean-spirited Ed McMahon. Black humor, for Ryan, isn’t sticking it to the man in the interest of freedom. It’s sticking it to the man in the interest of taking his place — with the understanding that the man is all the more the ogre-father because he’s really just a bored dick.

If you gave Boobs Pooter Black Eye — with its lushly printed Onsmith/Paul Nudd cover, its witty Momma /Medea mash-up by R. Sikoryak, its lyrical surreal comic by Lilli Carré, and, yes, its thoughtful and enlightening essays by Heer and Parille and Bob Levin—if you gave Pooter this anthology, he would vomit Holocaust juice on it. That’s not Black Eye’s fault; Pooter’s a soulless cretin. As such, he defecates, not just on the staid squares, but on the anarchic rebels, until they’re both so slick with feces that you can’t tell the difference between them. Contemplating the mess, it’s hard to see black humor as a romance with daring heroes who courageously upend all values. Instead, it starts to smell a lot like just another stupid laff.

Country Race

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This piece first appeared on Splice Today.
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Much of the best American music is the offspring of miscegenation. Whether it’s African-Americans in New Orleans repurposing white band instruments; or Elvis combining country and R&B just as his hillbilly forbearers did for generations; or mash-up artists deliriously merging together white and black; segregation has traditionally, and gloriously ended at the borders of the recording studio.

SoulJazz’s two-disc compilation Delta Swamp Rock: Sounds of the South, At the Crossroads of Rock, Country and Soul provides another satisfying instance of musical cross-breeding. Expected country rockers are represented—Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers show up on several tracks. But the comp spreads its net wider, too, focusing especially on the scene around the famous session players at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but also reaching out to Memphis and Nashville, with some surprising results. Cher, of all people, delivers a soul-soaked, down and dirty vocal for “Walk on Gilded Splinters,” recorded in Muscle Shoals. Area Code 615, a group of Nashville session musicians, provides “Stone Fox Chase,” a bluegrass-meets-blues-funk rave-up that was later sampled by Kool G. Rap and others. Dan Penn, known for writing hits for James Carr and Aretha Franklin, here sings his own Stax-ready, Memphis-recorded “If Love Was Money.” Linda Ronstadt on “I Won’t Be Hangin’ Round” is encouraged by a chorus that seems to have strolled out of a black church; Waylon Jennings’ “Big D” sidles up to funk, and the whole album is soaked in blue-eyed soul.

SoulJazz’s eclectic, thoughtful choices throughout the two discs emphasize the oft-ignored fact that the South, at least as much as the north, has been a locus of racial integration and racial borrowing. This comp makes sense of the fact that the couple who won the case for racial intermarriage in the Supreme Court, the Lovings, came, not from New York or LA, but from rural Virginia. It’s a reminder that some of the first integrated sessions ever were Jimmie Rodgers recordings.

And yet. While SoulJazz has provided a testament to the South’s proud and little-known history of color-blindness, it’s also highlighted the South’s much better known, and sadder, history of segregation. In its extensive liner notes, SoulJazz mentions several times that the Muscle Shoals scene, steeped as it was in soul music, nevertheless represented a step back in terms of race. The Memphis-based Stax, where so many soul hits were recorded, had as its house band Booker T. and the MGs, an integrated band. Muscle Shoals was inspired by Stax’s example… but its musicians were all white.

The Allman Brothers band did have a black drummer, Jai Johanny Johanson. But the other pillar of the Southern rock movement, Lynyrd Skynrd, was not only all white, but flirted with segregationist rhetoric, unfurling a Confederate flag during their live performances and giving a bump to George Wallace on their hit “Sweet Home Alabama” (not included on the comp.) The fact that African-American Merry Clayton sang back-up on that track intensifies the cognitive dissonance, but doesn’t exactly excuse it. As SoulJazz says, “Walking the line between southern working-class pride and simply reinforcing southern stereotypical bigotry could be a tricky business.”

The sad part about Delta Swamp Rock is that it chronicles a moment when maybe the South could have figured out how to separate bigotry and working-class pride once and for all. There is no doubt that the musicians represented on this comp, and the scene they were part of, loved black music… and indeed, no doubt that they saw it, not as black music, but as Southern music, an integrated tradition that was simply theirs, without the painful fetishization and authenticity-mongering that has so often marred work by non-Southern musicians, from Janis Joplin to the Rolling Stones. Bobbie Gentry’s rough vocals drip, not with black accents, but with Southern accents. She sounds like a black singer, at times, not because she needs black vocal tics to validate her, but because she comes from the same part of the world.

But then there’s the question—if you come from the same part of the world, if this is your tradition, and if that tradition is color-blind, why are the people you surround yourselves with so overwhelmingly pale? The tradition SoulJazz chronicles here was eager to integrate music, but its willingness to integrate musicians was much more nervous. A drummer here, a back-up singer there, but overall blue-eyed soul remained separate from just-plain soul. American R&B attained its current, not insubstantial level of integration through the urban bricolage of hip-hop, rather than through the rural byways of country. White Southern identity remains, to this day, white—defined by a sideways avowal of a rebel segregationist past, rather than by an embrace of its rich and honorable integrated culture. Delta Swamp Rock makes the case that things could have been different, and points to some of the painful reasons why they weren’t.

Utilitarian Review 9/17/11

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On HU

Celebrating Edie Fake’s win for Outstanding Graphic Novel at SPX, our featured archive post this week is Edie’s contribution to our illustrated Wallace Stevens roundtable.

James Romberger talked narrative and visuals in Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates.

Tucker Stone and I finished up our blog crossover with a conversation about Macan/Kordey’s Cable X (and check out Igor Kordey’s response in comments.)

As part of Pussy Goes Grrr’s Juxtaposition blogathon, I reprinted my discussion of I Spit On Your Grave and its remake.

Joy DeLyria on the Bible as fandom.

Meg Worley on Wilfred Santiago’s In My Darkest Hour.

Marguerite Van Cook on the dangerous sublimity of looking at comics.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Chicago Reader I recommend Keith Herzik’s awesome show at the Hyde Park Arts Center, coming in October.

At Splice I review George Strait’s new album.

Also as Splice, I talk Lindsey Buckingham and cocaine.

Other Links

Pussy Goes Grrr has a juxtaposition blogathon, where contributors compare two or more films.

Matt Seneca on the DC relaunch.

C.T. May on Paying For It.

I Spit on Your Quietism

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This piece first ran on Splice Today. I’m reprinting it here as part of the Juxtaposition Blogathon at Pussy Goes Grrr.

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If I were going to remake I Spit on Your Grave, the notorious 1978 rape/revenge thriller, I’d add more women. Not necessarily to the rape, but definitely to the revenge. The reason’s fairly simple: I think it would make the movie more feminist.

This is hardly at odds with the intent of the original. Director Meir Zarchi has said that he made the film after encountering a young rape victim and attempting to aid her despite police indifference. The film’s infamous 25 minute rape scene captures that sense of blunt, hopeless outrage — it has to be one of the most harrowing depictions of violence in film. Jennifer (Camille Keaton) attempts again and again to escape, only to be captured and recaptured, humiliated and brutalized until she’s little but a traumatized, naked slab of blood and terror. Meanwhile, the four rapists talk and joke among themselves, urging each other on with taunts or threats. It’s clear throughout that they’re much more interested in each other than they are in their victim. She’s just the excuse for extended male bonding and one-upmanship, a convenient non-person onto whom to safely displace and act out the real male-male passions. As Carol Clover writes in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, “the rapes are presented as almost sexless acts of cruelty that the men seem to commit more for each other’s edification than for their own physical pleasure.” Clover also notes that one of her male friends “found it such a devastating commentary on male rape fantasies and also on the way male group dynamics engender violence that he thought it should be compulsory viewing for high school boys.”

While I Spit on Your Grave is very aware of how men relate to each other, however, it has virtually nothing to say about how women interact. Its vision of female, and, indeed, feminist empowerment is entirely individual. Jennifer fights the patriarchy herself — abetted by the abject stupidity inflicted upon men by their own hierarchical obtuseness and sexism. Jennifer avoids death because the rapists deputize the mentally retarded Matthew (Richard Pace) to do the dirty work of killing her, and he wimps out. Weeks later, after she recovers, she is able to murder her assailants in large part because they are ideologically incapable of believing (a) that she is able to kill them, and (b) that she didn’t want to be raped in the first place. She seduces Matthew, fucks him, and as he cums she slips a noose around his neck and strangles him. She then finds Johnny (Eron Tabor) at the gas station, convinces him to get in a car with her by flipping her hair winsomely, and then drives him out to the middle of nowhere and forces him to take off his clothes and kneel at gunpoint. He starts to explain himself…and he’s so stubbornly obtuse that he thinks he’s swayed her, and actually allows her to seduce him again. So Jennifer takes him home with her, maneuvers him into a tub, tells him she killed Matthew (he doesn’t believe her) and then, under pretense of giving him a handjob, cuts off his dick.

Finally, she climbs aboard a motorboat with Stanley (Anthony Nichols), fools him into thinking she’s going to kiss him, then pushes him into the water and disembowels him with the motor blades. (The final rapist is the only one who doesn’t get seduced; he’s so upset at seeing his pal menaced with the motorboat that he rushes into the water, where Jennifer kills him from the boat with an ax.)

There’s obviously some satisfaction in seeing the men hoisted by their own…bits. But it’s a bitter pleasure. To get her revenge, Jennifer has to turn herself into the sexual thing the men imagine her to be. It’s notable that while the rape itself is probably about the least arousing half hour ever filmed, the seduction scenes have a queasy erotic charge. Jennifer caters to men’s desires only to cut them off, but she’s still catering. It is, then, not the men, but Jennifer who completes her degradation. The loss of her self is the price of her victory — though it’s not clear what other option she has. Men are despicable — and they are also, in this world, effectively all there is. Jennifer wins, but it’s man’s game she wins at. There isn’t any other.

Of course, feminism offers some other options — most notably sisterhood. Nor is it unheard of for rape-revenge (or rape-revenge inspired films like Tarantino’s Death Proof) to explore female relationships . So if you had to do a remake, and you wanted to throw in some clever plot twists for the jaded exploitation viewer, adding female relationships to the plot seems like it would be an unexpected but not unprecedented tack. Why not see what happens if, say, you had Johnny’s wife (who gets a notable ball-busting walk-on in the original) find Jennifer after the rape and take her side? Or perhaps more realistically, you could have Jennifer come out to the cabin with her sister, her mother — or perhaps with a girlfriend? Certainly, gay rights would have some of the polarizing power today that feminism has in the ‘70s. As such, including lesbian themes in order to ramp up both the exploitation and the political edge would be perhaps the best way to stay true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Zarchi’s original.

It probably goes without saying, but this was not the path taken by the actual 2010 remake of I Spit on Your Grave.

In fact, the remake takes the opposite approach; instead of an additional revenger, it adds an additional rapist. At one point in the remake Jennifer (Sarah Butler) maces one of her four attackers and manages to escape into the forest. She runs into the town’s sheriff (Andrew Howard), who takes her back to her cabin…where the other rapists reappear. Instead of running them in, the sheriff rather inexplicably joins them.

As I noted above, the original film took some care to show that male bonding and rivalry were central to the rape. The men’s mean-spiritedly jovial desire to “help out” sad sack Matthew by using Jennifer to deflower him; their need to impress Johnny, the way they only expressed their emotions for each other (whether affection, dislike, or envy) through aggression and humiliation — it’s those interactions which powered their misogyny and violence. And the film also took pains to show these impulses as unremarkable. In a scene before the rape, where the men chatted with each other, they didn’t appear dangerous.. Indeed, they seemed like naïve adolescents, wondering (mostly, but not entirely in jest) whether really sexy women shit or boasting about their plans to visit New York or Los Angeles. It was only in retrospect later in the film that their casual abuse of one another and their casual jibes at women appeared ominous.

The remake follows through on the group dynamics to some extent — the guys egg each other on; they bring Matthew along to lose his virginity, etc. etc. But it abandons the effort to make the men appear like just folks. Ironically, the director Steven R. Monroe gives one of his characters a video camera, and we see some of the rape through the lens. This is an obvious effort to implicate the viewer — but in fact, this version of the story is much less accusatory than Zarchi’s original.

That’s because, instead of seeing the rape as a result of standard male group dynamics, Monroe tries hard to decollectivize the guilt. In Zarchi’s version, the men were typical guys, and the rape, too, was therefore typical — a possibility for any man. In Monroe’s version, on the other hand, the rapists are individual monsters — a much less frightening idea.

In the original (top), the rape is about the interactions between the men. In the remake (bottom) it’s about individual sadism.

Thus, for example, in the first film, when Jennifer first meets Johnny at the gas station where he’s an attendant, he’s nondescriptly polite with the distant friendliness of the perfect service employee. In the remake, on the other hand Johnny (Jeff Branson) is a lecherous jerk right from the get-go. Monroe even makes sure Jennifer (Sarah Butler) humiliates him explicitly (though accidentally) to add an additional personal motivation. This is carried through into the rape itself, in which Johnny devises elaborate humiliations for Jennifer — humiliations which are predicated on his commanding her to, for example, drink booze or show her teeth like a racehorse. There are no such commands in the original, and, indeed, there can’t be, since the rapists barely talk to their victim.. The rape, in other words, becomes about Johnny’s wounded vanity and his investment in elaborate sadistic games, rather than about the way the men perform for each other. In fact, in the first film, when Stanley starts to yell personal insults at Jennifer and generally to treat her as if she’s a person to be dominated rather than a piece of meat to be used, the rest of the men get more and more disturbed, and finally pull him away.

The remake turns Johnny into a sociopath; Matthew (Chad Lindberg), on the other hand, is given a conscience. His mental deficiency, the fact that he isn’t as much man, is, in Monroe’s version, a sign that he is not as evil or irredeemable as the others. There was no such shilly-shallying in the first film; there, Matthew’s incapacity simply made him less able to rape, not less eager to do so. When confronted by Jennifer in the second half of Zarchi’s film, Matthew does apologize and claim that the assault was not his idea…but Johnny and Stanley do the exact same thing when Jennifer comes for them.

Again, for Zarchi, the culprit is all the men and the way they interact, suggesting that violence against women is a systemic, social sin. For Monroe, though, Matthew really is sorry, while Johnny, even up to the moment of his gruesome demise, expresses no sorrow, feigned or otherwise. In the remake, the crime is a crime of individuals, which means some are more guilty than others and some (like Matthew or, the men in the audience) are less guilty.

Where the group dynamics completely come apart, though, is with the introduction of the sheriff. As I said above, his actions are inexplicable. We never even see him with the other men before the rape. He does mention that he’s known them since they were boys — but he’s in no sense their peer. We quickly learn (through a cell-phone call mid-rape) that he has a loving pregnant wife and a daughter in the honors program. He’s got, in other words, a lot to lose — and he’s willing to throw it all away for what? To have sex with some random city girl? To impress some subordinates?

In the first film, where it’s Johnny who has a wife and kids, Zarchi confronts this issue directly: Jennifer actually asks Johnny if he loves his wife while she’s seducing him. In response he says, “She’s okay. You get used to a wife after awhile, you know?” His family is a routine; it doesn’t particularly touch his inner life, to which, in any case, he seems to be only tangentially connected. The sheriff, on the other hand, is shown to be deeply invested in his child and his wife — he’s a doting middle-class family man. The idea that his spouse or daughter might find out about the rape sends him into a panicked rage. So what could possibly have led him to participate in a felony with a number of extremely untrustworthy accomplices?

We don’t know the answer to that question because the movie doesn’t tell us. And it doesn’t tell us because it doesn’t really care what his motives are. He joins in the rape because he’s the villain and, more, because it’s surprising. The sheriff is a plot device — a contrivance. Which means the real fifth rapist here is, in some sense, the director, who throws logic and coherence to the wind for the sheer pleasure of a cheap thrill.

Cheap thrills are what exploitation is supposed to be about, of course. But, while you certainly couldn’t say that Zarchi had a light touch, you also never felt that his hands were on the scales. This is part of the reason that the first I Spit on Your Grave had such an indelible, inevitable power. There weren’t plot twists or clever reversals; there was just sex and violence and their remorseless attendants, rape and revenge. Zarchi’s world fit together. Men were rapists. Rapists destroy women, and also themselves. QED.

Monroe, on the other hand, doesn’t believe any of that. His men don’t die because they’re rapists; they die because they’re in a movie and Monroe can do whatever he wants, damn it. In the remake, Jennifer doesn’t outthink the men because they’re sexist idiots and then dispatch them efficiently. Instead, she kills them because the script calls for her to turn into an avenging, unstoppable force of destruction — a petite Jason. From the moment she escapes her assailants by diving into a river and improbably disappearing, she ceases to be an actual person and becomes, like the Sheriff, a contrivance. Her revenges are much more elaborate than in the first film, but the rituals of torture aren’t her triumphs (or her degradations): they’re the directors’. A vision of essentially communal, and therefore political, justice has been replaced by individual punishment. Karma becomes deus ex machina.

It’s not really a surprise that a 2010 remake lacks the political charge of its 1978 prototype. The last thirty years or so have been rough on radicals, and while feminism has certainly made advances, the vision of apocalyptic, violent gender justice which inspired the rape-revenge films now seems both naïve and distasteful. As Terry Eagleton put it in his 2003 book After Theory, “Over the dreary decades of post-1970s conservatism, the historical sense had grown increasingly blunted, as it suited those in power that we should be able to imagine no alternative to the present.”

Perhaps the best demonstration of why a 2010 I Spit on Your Grave was bound to suck can be seen in another movie; Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. This film (in both its 1997 Austrian original and its 2008 American shot-for-shot remake) does not suck. It’s also not technically a rape/revenge. Instead, it’s a negation of the genre.

The brutality in Funny Games is flagrantly, explicitly unmotivated. In I Spit on Your Grave, humiliation and aggression is linked to gender politics — and also to class. The men in I Spit on Your Grave are hillbillies who resent Jennifer’s affluence, freedom, and economic power. This is shown most clearly in the 1978 film when the rapists, as part of their abuse, read sections of Jennifer’s novel-in-progress out loud, mock it, and then destroy it. Her work is, to them, not work at all, but a ludicrous affectation. (“I really despise people that don’t work,” Johnny says at one point, “they get into trouble too easily, you know?”) The movie does not suggest that these class antagonisms justify the rape, but it does show that they facilitate it. Economic imbalances, as any Marxist knows, are linked to violence.

In Funny Games, on the other hand, there are no economic gaps. At the beginning of the film, a comfortably upper-class family arrives at its lakeside vacation home. There, mom, dad, and son (Anna, Georg, and Georgie in the original) are trapped and systematically tortured by Paul and Peter two well-scrubbed young men with a passion for golf and sadism. The two torturers refuse to say why they are brutalizing their victims; when asked, they propound a series of more or less ridiculous scenarios (I was a poor child! I had sex with my mother!) which are clearly supposed to be bullshit.

Just as the film teases the viewer with reasons, it also teases them with rape — the two sadists force Anna to strip to her underwear, but never precede any farther than that. Most of all, though, it teases with revenge. Anna makes repeated attempts to escape and to turn weapons against her assailant. In the most startling of these moments, she actually manages to grab hold of a rifle and shoot Peter dead. At which point Paul finds a remote control and uses it to rewind the film to the moment before Anna shot his companion. He then casually takes the gun away from her

This flagrant breaking of the fourth wall can, of course, be seen as a way of (here it is again) implicating the viewer in the onscreen violence — of exposing our own sadistic and/or masochistic investment in tales of torture and brutality. And it does, certainly, show very nakedly the kind of narrative contrivance epitomized by the sheriff in the 2010 I Spit on Your Grave. Diagetically, it is the evil characters doing these things to these people we care about. But really it’s the director doing it for our amusement, which calls into question whether we in fact care about anything.

The use of the remote control is, though, not primarily an accusation of complicity. It’s an accusation of naivete. We in the audience are hoping the rape-revenge narrative will play out; that justice will be done. And the film mocks us for that — or (what is effectively the same thing) pats us on the back for knowing that such narrative justice is only a convention, not the truth.

Paul (Arno Frisch) knows the score in the original Funny Games

My hope that I Spit on Your Grave might have more of a feminist consciousness in a remade version was, then, clearly idiotic. The climate even for a film as vacillatingly feminist as the original I Spit on Your Grave has, it seems, evaporated. In current iterations of rape-revenge, violence is disconnected from causality, which means that it can call forth no real retribution. Some random God-surrogate pulls the strings and people suffer and that’s that. The best that can be offered as a political vision is a land in which people turn off their televisions to avoid political visions. Only suckers still believe that you can rise up against your oppressors and disembowel them with an outboard motor.

Great Haircuts of Future Past: The Explanatory Brochures Will Tear Your Heart Out

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To finish up our Cable/Soldier X blogathon (here and here) Tucker and I harnessed the power of the internets for one of those virtual chats all the kids are talking about. Our conversation is below.
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STONE: So, I was trying to remember why it was we ended up doing a back-and-forth on these particular issues, and while I’m sure I could resort to searching my email, I think I’ll just take a guess and see if I’m right: you and I got tired of going back and forth and not feeling excited about the possibilities we were throwing at each other, and our exhaustion timed out around the same time that I suggested Cable/Soldier X. Does that sound right?

NB: Yes, I think that’s right. And so I ask you…why did you suggest these? Was it Jog’s discussion of them that inspired you? I know I’d never heard of them…and indeed, barely knew who Cable was. I had pretty much completely stopped paying attention to Marvel by the 90s, and certainly by the early 2000s when this came out.

STONE: It was a couple of things that put these on my radar. I don’t know which came first in my reading, but Jog had written about these comics for Savage Critics, and Sean Collins had written about them for Robot 6. (Marc Oliver Frisch had also mentioned them as well.) Another thing that made these interesting to me was that I had met a cartoonist–I’m not sure who, I think he’s a Spider-Man person, one of those people who drew it when it was coming out on a weekly basis–who drunkenly rambled about how Cable was “the perfect character” for a full 15 minutes one night at a party. It wasn’t a totally cogent argument, but it made an impression on me–like you came to realize, Cable isn’t that interesting of a character when you actually read Cable comics. The final thing, although this came up after we’d agreed to write about these, was a general curiosity about this “nu Marvel” time period, where Marvel was publishing oddball creative teams and seemingly letting people do whatever they’d like. I wasn’t reading comics during that time period, so it’s a total blind spot. I know a few people who don’t normally get into super-hero comics talk about that period fondly, and it’s got a bit of novelty because of that.

Also–I read some Cable comics a couple of years ago, and I actually enjoyed them. They were artistically all over the place–sometimes it would be Paul Gulacy, sometimes it would be Jaime McKelvie, and other times it was Ariel Olivetti–but it was a grindy, strange comic that didn’t seem to have any “importance” to it, and I seem to appreciate that a lot more nowadays than I do a comic that wants to be important and tries to make that clear on every other page.


Paul Gulacy art for Cable

I know you didn’t really like these comics that much, but I was hoping you might be able to expand a bit more on the differences between the Kordey/Macan/Lis issues and what came after. Those last four issues are, as you noticed, fucking horrible–but they’re a lot more like what Marvel usually publishes.

NB: Yeah; I didn’t hate the Macan/Kordey issues, thought it’s clear you were much more taken with them. Kordey is an interesting artist; not spectacular, or anything, but I like his bent for caricature and the enjoyment he takes in drawing weird stuff — he clearly had a lot of fun with Blaqu-whatever-his-name-was. And I appreciate his cheesecake too; he likes the women with the curves and sensuous street clothes. Compared to Power Girl’s boob window or super-proportioned bimbos in skintight nonsense and unsensible shoes, it’s really a relief to see just garden variety lascivious male-gaze with some mild suggestions of dwarf-porn. You feel like Kordey has probably met actual women on occasion, and maybe even had some sort of relationship with one. It’s refreshing.


Macan/Kordey

STONE: I wonder–and I wonder this off and on, not just specifically because of our differing levels of enjoyment–how much my engagement with what Macan and Kordey tried for with Soldier X has to do with the fact that I’m more engaged with contemporary super-hero comics than you are, selling them, reading them, just knowing about them. I get a weird, pleasurable reaction off of this, and how much of that is because I know how rare it is to see one that’s drawn well? Hell, just Matt Madden’s colors in those issues he did–I can’t remember seeing a Marvel comic that’s colored that well from the last few years. Some of Dean White’s stuff on the Avengers is quite nice, but that comic has a tendency towards all talk, no show. But for the most part, this is just better looking than the rest of that shit.

NB: Yeah…to get back to your question about the last four issues we read (were those the last four issues of the series? Did Soldier X go on?)…I mean, part of the reason I didn’t really talk about them that much is because the only way to adequately express how horrible they are is to ignore them. It’s not just the badness that gets me…there’s lots of bad art, obviously. I think the Macan/Kordey issues are kind of bad art for most purposes. They’re fairly incoherent, a lot of the ideas are stupid, the good ideas peter out or just sort of sit there thrashing stupidly, like someone hit in the head with a large haddock. That thing with the innocent girl turned cynic for example; it’s kind of funny and kind of creepy, but it’s really rushed and then she’s crying because she’s going to kill her mom — you get, what? A page of her being cynical and creepy and then she’s back to being traumatized little girl again — the pacing is just a mess. I wouldn’t consider that something I’d be excited about reading under normal circumstances.


Soldier X #11, Bollers/Eaton/Stucker

But, you compare that to the last four issues of the series and holy shit, Macan and Kordey look like geniuses. The art is just garishly, ridiculously horrible, of course; horrible pacing, anatomy a mess, layout cluttered — but, you know, I expect that from mainstream comics, pretty much. But then the writing is so egregiously pointless. I do get what you were saying about enjoying comics that aren’t trying to be important, and I hear that…but these are comics whose whole purpose appears to be to have Cable wander around more or less aimlessly till the page count runs down. The first two part series (Bollers and Ranson, I guess) is basically just, well this precog foresaw he would meet Cable, and then he does, and he loses his precog ability and kills himself. Which might be fun if there was a hint that anyone involved had figured out that this made a mockery of the whole adventure/superhero format…but no one seems to be in on the joke. It’s all terrorists and this-guy-is-a-deadly-supervillain and overemoting nonsense….

I guess what gets me is really the lack of professionalism; the inability to even deliver the really stupid genre product you’re attempting to deliver. Which is what drives me crazy about mainstream comics in general. Because I really like pulp genre crap, you know? I’ve just been rewatching Jack Hill’s women in prison films, and they’re amazing — shower scene, mudfight scene, torture scene — you’ve got the idiotic, prurient genre trappings, and you work a movie around them that gets in as much of genius and energy and passion as you can. Macan and Kordey were trying to do that, basically — not as successfully as Jack Hill, but they seem to be trying. Whereas Bollers and Ranson and…oh I guess it was still Bollers with different artists — anyway, the point is, these guys don’t even seem to know how their own genre works. I mean, obviously they’ve got a superhero there, but they can’t figure out how to put together a story that is even marginally entertaining as a superhero story. In some ways, I don’t even know if it registers as bad; it’s just a blank. I’d rather look at blank pages. There’s just no reason for these stories to exist.


Still from Jack Hill’s The Big Doll House (1971)

It’s not unlike what I thought about looking at Richard’s review of JL 1. The baseline for publishing a comic just seems to be, “well you’ve got these characters in it. People like these characters. Put that sucker out there.” With women in prison films, you’ve got to at least figure out how to get everyone to the shower scene, but in superhero comics that’s not even a worry; all you need to do is make sure you print the name right on the title, and after that nobody seems to care.

So that’s a long answer to your question which could basically I guess be answered by just saying that Macan and Kordey didn’t wow me, but they clearly have a bare minimum level of competence, and appear to have occasional flashes of brain activity. Bollers writes like…I can’t come up with an analogy. He writes like a bad mainstream comics writer. There isn’t anything more insulting to say.

STONE: I can’t get with women in prison films, but I can see your point. I also totally agree that those final issues of Soldier X (Cable went on to do a buddy comedy comic with Deadpool that lasted for years, I’ve never read it) are fucking terrible, terrible comics. Really out and out stupid, but then again: I’m not sure how much of the blame can be ladled atop Bollers shoulders. Super-hero comics, especially ones made at the bottom (which I’m sure these must have been) get assembled in such a clusterfuck of problems that the blame really has to be shared amongst the tribe of names you see listed next to the word “editor” in the back matter.

I don’t really care to mount a defense of the guy. Those are shitty comics, I agree.

I wonder how much of the problems of things like these are more a reflection of the way they’re made, though. Justice League–I don’t think it’s a good comic, but I also didn’t find myself getting that worked up about it being a bad one, either. It didn’t have enough of a pulse either way to make an impact, there’s just no way on Earth I’ll be able to remember what happened in it. But how could it be good? It has too much to do, too many editorial gaps and story requirements to set up. It’s the base-line of this dumbass publishing initiative, it exists as a comic because you can’t make money off of selling an explanatory brochure.

I need to specify something really quick: earlier, when I said “important”, I think you took that to mean “has something to say”. That’s my fault for not being clear. I don’t want to read super-hero comics like Justice League–super-hero comics that are trying to build franchises or explain super-hero continuity, or basically do anything driven by wider, soap-operatic need. The weird Cable issues I liked–not these, but the ones I mentioned from a few years ago–were just like that. Nothing ever happened in them, the characters just wandered around from place to place, trying to escape one another. Side characters were created, murdered, and that was it. It was totally repetitive, pretty silly, and I loved it. I would totally enjoy a Batman comic where he didn’t do shit, ever. But there’s a fine line between that, and a boring super-hero comic where the characters talk about meeting editorial demands, or each other’s feelings, or whatever else. Ramshackle super-hero comics that are at the bottom of the sales rung, written and drawn by hungry, work-craving freaks. Those interest me.

NB: That’s fair enough about Bollers; I find it difficult to believe he could do anything I liked after reading those issues, but people do often do their absolute worst work for the mainstream — there’s no reason he couldn’t have done something significantly better than those four comics.

Also, just to be clear…there are many, many horrible women in prison films. Incoherent, rambling messes of movies; poorly constructed tottering scaffoldings on which indifferent slabs of incompetent sleaze are dumped more or less at random.

I guess the thing I would say about even the worst of them, though, is…I sort of understand what they’re trying to do. That is, you make a women in prison film, you’re aiming for prurient interest on a low budget. They’re kind of obsolete now that the internet has blessed us with infinite porn…but the result of that has been that they’ve largely disappeared. There was this demand, and these things met this demand, sometimes with skill and verve, like in Jack Hill’s films, and sometimes with utter incompetence and wretched stupidity. But competent or incompetent, I understand where they’re coming from.

But the Bollers stuff is baffling. Why would you want to write that? This is true for the Macan/Kordey books too, to some extent. Wanting to see T&A I get. James Bond I get. Twilight I get. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Sailor Moon, Harry Potter, Ben Ten, even the X-Men — I don’t necessarily love or even like all those things, but I understand what’s happening. But Cable? You have to write a story in which Cable does godlike things, mutters about his incomprehensible backstory, and whines? Who wants to read that? What’s wrong with them? What the hell?

I sort of wonder if that ties into what you said in one of your posts:

“I doubt whether the color selections had any specific meaning, but doesn’t it add a certain layer of…not seriousness, not maturity, but a certain adultness to the material? You know, that sort of fake adultness that super-hero comics still, even now, does better than iCarly or Big Time Rush? Maybe it’s just me. I doubt it, that I’m the only one who still gets a bit jacked in when super-hero comics play at being grown-up and serious in ways beyond somebody cutting the Joker’s face off and hanging it on a wall while the Joker makes a joke about how said torture made him cum. (That example is from a comic that was released today.) It’s that feeling, the one you get when fake-Thing realizes what friendship can mean in “This Man, This Monster”, or what Bruce Wayne’s say when he shakes his fist at his empty costume in “Death in the Family”, that feeling that has nothing to do with being a real grown-up but still encompasses what you thought being a grown-up meant.”

I think it’s interesting that the first in that list is a Lee/Kirby story, because Lee/Kirby is arguably when comics started really being aimed at an audience that was older — 15 year olds, maybe, rather than 8 year olds. Now, though…who was reading those Cable comics? Not 8 year olds; probably not 15 year olds; these are early 2000s, right, which means that the audience for them is probably thirtysomethings. So really, if the comics are about the allure of adulthood, it’s not about imagining what you thought being a grown-up meant so much as about being a grown-up imagining being a kid imagining what being a grown-up meant.

That sort of sounds like Lacan actually: for Lacan your self-image is always a mistake, a kind of misreflection. And actually he sees it especially in infants mistaking their image for being older than it is; the child sees itself and thinks it’s grown up and is euphoric. You could see mainstream comics as maybe a way for adults to try to go back and recapture that; trying to remember what it was like to have mistaken themselves for adults. That works with Cable too; this weird cobbled-together cyborg going back into the past to reimagine the future.

I guess the result of that is that the nerd-knowledge itself, the fact that the character makes no sense except to the initiated, ends up being the draw; to see yourself in Cable is to see yourself as a time-lost master of nostalgia-fu; the imaginary grown-up is a joyfully integrated comics consumer…..

STONE: The answer to your Bollers question is this: Marvel knew the comic was getting cancelled, and they brought on Bollers to keep the Cable money coming in until the next version of the series was ready to launch. And Bollers probably agreed to take on what amounts to a thankless task simply because he wanted to get his foot in the door, he wanted to have the note “is a good employee who will take one for the team” attached to his name when editors were looking for better, plusher gigs. It’s the same reason anybody does something for these companies–so they can do more stuff for these companies, and maybe that “more” might include something they’ll have more control over. I don’t believe there’s anything else to it.

I’m trying to find a way to combat some of what you’re saying, but I don’t know that I really can. I think there’s definitely some accuracy to the idea you’re describing at the end there, that part of the attraction to Cable (or other needlessly complicated super-hero characters) is the needless complication itself, the inherent difficulty and time-expenditure that it might have once required. (Obviously, wikipedia and digital piracy remove all difficulty from the “learning about Cable” hobby.) But that presupposes the idea that satisfaction can be automatically found in “mastering” nostalgic super-hero information, and I think that requires a certain set of personality quirks to be true–and obviously, not everyone who gets into Cable and enjoys Cable comics is necessarily going to have the same type of personality.

I really have a hard time answering to the question “what these are trying to do”, because I’m honestly no longer sure that the answer isn’t a hard line “absolutely nothing”. They’re the back side of trading cards expanded to 22 pages, and the only purpose of a trading card is to be bought and sold, and that makes super-hero comics…you see what I mean? At the same time, I do think that answer is inherently problematic and hole-pokable, because it’s obvious to me that there’s a lot of pleasure found in certain strands of super-hero comics if the person is a fan of extended, serial soap opera stuff, because there’s some of them that clearly still do that. (The X-Men are a prime example, I think, although I’ve had at least one conversation about the various women Bruce Wayne dated to know that DC did used to know how to get that right too.)

I’m not sure if the passage you quoted has a lot of connection here, although there’s a bit of willfull obtuseness on my part that might prevent me from spotting it anyway. Generally, I just wanted to acknowledge that the way those covers were colored jumped out at me as being a blatant sign of Kordey behaving as an artist when the product itself–and the environment it was produced in–would have been just as content for him to behave more like a product designer, a maker of widgets, an industrial supplier. Those moments are the sort of reminders I’m starving to find when I come to this stuff, the sense that the people involved are doing something that’s just beyond what’s being asked of them, and the gamble is paying off. Starlin and Aparo spent quite a few pages in Death in the Family failing to make it clear exactly what Bruce Wayne was going through, except for the part where they succeeded, and that success is what sticks in my memory. It’s the proof that somebody was trying, maybe? That makes more sense than “adult”. No big deal though, it got you to bring up that Lacan stuff. Worked out for the best.


Steranko/Aparo, “A Death in the Family”

NB: Yeah…not sure anyone else is ever really happy to have me bring up Lacan.

I will stop talking about him in a moment…but I should maybe point out just briefly that as far as I understand it, Lacan doesn’t like anything having to do with the imaginary. Presuming you were able to create some sort of alternate reality where you could resurrect him and force him to read large swathes of popular culture, it seems extremely unlikely that he would distinguish between Cable comics and, say, Harry Potter…or maybe even Jane Austen. It’s all false reflections in the mirror.

But! Leaving the dead phallus guy aside for the moment; it’s absolutely true that there’s some sense in which Bollers is doing what he’s doing for money, period. The thing is, though…the same is true of Mariah Carey, or Jack Hill, or Janet Evanovich, or tons of manga (all the BL titles kinukitty reviews, for example.) Pulp crap is pulp crap…but that isn’t quite the same as an explanation, I don’t think. Even if it’s just a machine grinding out product — why that product? Why do people want to see this, or, at least, why do the creators think people want to see this? Why does Marvel think people want to read a Cable story where a mutant sacrifices herself in order to show that mutants aren’t above the law while Cable fights giant dogs in her head? Like I said, I can understand the appeal of a lot of pop culture crap which is made for money; with superhero comics, I have real trouble.

I do sometimes wonder (and you kind of say this in your last response) whether part of the appeal for some readers isn’t the abject awfulness; the stuff is so bad, that there’s a charge in seeing glimmers of competence; in watching folks like Macan and Kordey take this totally bullshit concept that nobody could possibly care about and cobbling together a couple of moments of meaningful narrative out of it.

There’s something of that in exploitation film too — the scrappiness of the filmmaking, the
often rudimentary acting, the glommed together costumes, the patchwork scripts — there’s this kind of corporatist punk rock aesthetic, this naked, desperate scramble for cash which gives the moments of beauty or genius a kind of gutter purity. That’s definitely a feature rather than a bug if you like those films; “Friday the 13th” or “I Spit on Your Grave” with high gloss production values and Shakespearian actors would be worse movies, not better ones. Getting rid of the exploitation in exploitation gives you a more pretentious movie, not necessarily a better one.

For me, I just feel like superhero comics are in general bad by those standards; like the moments when somebody manages to do something interesting with the corporate dictats are fewer and farther between than in exploitation film or post-disco pop. Britney Spears or Macan and Kordey — I mean, that’s not even close. I like Macan and Kordey okay, but Britney has been making bizarre, sublime robotic confections for a decade now.

Do you strongly disagree with that? Would you make the argument Macan/Kordey > Friday the 13th? or >Britney? Or is it the fact that it’s worse that in some ways is the appeal; that there’s so little gold in mainstream superhero comics that each little bit of it is all the more precious?

STONE: I don’t know, Noah. From where I sit right now, I enjoyed what Macan and Kordey brought to the table…I don’t have a gauge on whether that was a higher level or a lower level of pleasure, just that it existed. Matt Seneca’s recent writing on the Justice League makes a great case for the lack of depth that most super-hero comics usually have to offer, to say nothing of their various artistic failings. Soldier X was trying to do something interesting, it wasn’t just trying to do something different–different is easy in super-hero comics, they shoot outside the box so rarely, they’ve followed the same patterns for so long–but interesting is really rare, it’s harder. Craftsmanship–which I think Kordey had, and has, when he’s not working at the pace that Soldier X demanded–is just as rare.

I know that I’m not being fair, by the way. I’m giving credit to my imagined, idealistic version of what I think these guys were doing. But I look at where they are now–all of them are gone from Marvel, with some measure of dignity and integrity still intact–and I can’t not be impressed by the sight of it.

You’re right about what would happen to Friday the 13th and I Spit On Your Grave if they were “made better”, but I don’t know that I can participate in the compare/contrast in the way you seem to be doing there. For one, I dislike both of those particular movies in every iteration, I’d just rather watch Spooks, or another one of those slick Korean crime thrillers that keeps getting churned out. But for the other, I just don’t have it in me (today, I could totally have it in me tomorrow) to claim Roz Meyers hanging bankers > Igor Kordey drawing slaughter in a 9-panel grid. My brain isn’t firing in that direction right now.

I totally agree that the moments when corporate hero comics “get it right” are fiendishly rare. I wonder though–how much of that is due to the thing that people like Alan Moore and Jodorowsky have been recommending for so long? How much of it is because the people who once would have been stuck churning out awesomeness can go somewhere else, and do something better? I don’t know if you’ve read things like Hellboy or BPRD, things like Bone or Amulet or Usagi Yojimbo or, really, whatever, competent, creepy shit like Locke and Key, but how, if you’re a halfway intelligent cartoonist with something interesting to say, do you end up doing what guys like Jim Aparo (who you know I love) did? You’d have to be fucking crazy to sit around and draw or write super-hero comics for any length of time that doesn’t exactly equal however much you HAVE to do it, to get something else going. Mike Mignola, Jeff Smith, Stan Sakai–those guys could do a pretty cool Batman comic, I’m sure. But why the fuck would they ever do that? Why would anybody who doesn’t have to? How is that not the ambition of something with no ambition whatsoever? It would be like Vince Gilligan giving up on Breaking Bad so he can write episodes of CSI Miami.

I know I haven’t covered your Britney question, but that’s okay with me. I’ll leave that one for next time.

NB: Nobody wants to talk Britney, damn it. I love that picture of her I posted above where she’s got no hair. I think it’s the only picture of her where she looks happy and cute rather than kind of vapidly terrifying. She somehow seems most herself when she’s a mannequin.

Is it embarrassing if I admit I’d never heard of Jodorowsky?

Anyway, I don’t disagree with you; I think it can maybe be summed up by saying that it’s a serious problem when a popular genre loses its audience but somehow keeps generating product anyway. It’s not a good situation to be in aesthetically.

Maybe to end I should just say that, though I didn’t love or even quite like these comics, I have respect for Macan and Kordey and what they were trying to do. They wanted to make good comics, and I think had the ability to make good comics; it just wasn’t really a time or a place or a venue where good comics were a possibility, I don’t think. I’d certainly look at work by either of them again (which wasn’t something I was saying about Steve Gerber after I read Man-Thing.) I wish I’d been able to read the story they wanted to tell here, too. That’s comics, though, I guess.

Utilitarian Review 9/10/11

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On HU

Tucker Stone and I did a blog crossover even this week on the Macan/Kordey run on Cable/Soldier X. My posts are here. Tucker’s posts are here

Also this week, Ng Suat Tong on Umezu Kazuo’s Left Hand of God, Right Hand of the Devil.

Kinukitty on Azira Minuzuki’s Tonight’s Take Out Night.

Richard Cook reads Justice League #1 so you don’t have to.

Utilitarians Everywhere

This week’s featured archive post is my downloadable Beyonce vs. Doom Metal mashup.

At Splice I talk about Martin Buber, world music and Beirut’s new album.

At the Atlantic Online I talk about Sailor Moon, Wonder Woman, and the superhero boys’ club.

Other Links

Yan Basque on JLA #1.

Alyssa Rosenberg on Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, and the randomness of political attention.

Tucker Stone on Van Halen.

Matt Brady blogs the GOP debate.


The GOP Presidential Candidates

Great Haircuts of Future Past: Does It Mean You’re a Christ Figure If Crucifying Your Sorry Ass Would Make the World a Better Place?

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Tucker Stone and I are blogging through old issues of Cable. Here’s my part. Here’s Tucker’s part.

I am somewhat impressed by how few people seem to care. “Cable,” the general attitude seems to be. “Isn’t the internet replacing that?” And the answer is yes; in the future the techno-virus will fuse the entire globe into a machine with the sole function of auto-googling Pippa’s ass. Then all we need to do is send it back into the past to posteriorly murder Arnold Schwarzenegger before he makes Terminator 3.
____________

Anyway. Cable. No point in putting it off, I guess.

Last time I talked about this, I noted that Cable seems to be the star of this comic mostly because Macan and Kordey are ensnared in the unforgiving hieroglyphics of their stupid title. “Soldier X” is Cable and Cable is Soldier X and they’ve got to talk about Cable even though it’s clear they’d rather talk about cyborg Russian superheroes with bad teeth and James Cameron dueling to the death with the hind-end of British royalty. Or maybe that’s just me. But I don’t think so.

My evidence is the last Macan/Kordey issue, which imagines what Cable would be like in the future, and what he would be like in the future is dead. And not just dead, but dead in the name of an ambiguous philosophy which looks suspiciously like Christian pacifism. The entire story (set in an ambiguous post-apocalpse medieval setting) focuses on some random kid and his grandmother (?) who, in the name of Cable’s sacrifice, allow themselves to be (respectively) beaten up and killed. It’s a kind of “fuck you” to the Marvel honchos and their idiotically pugnacious immortal properties. There aren’t too many comics that come right out and condemn violence unambiguously — and that’s because if you condemn violence unambiguously, the whole super-hero concept becomes untenable. What’s the point of powers if you don’t use them?

There is no point. Powers are pointless, which is why Christ isn’t the superman. Even Nietzsche had that figured out, and, with nothing left to lose, Macan and Kordey shift from half-hidden parody to an outright rejection of the genre that they’re purportedly engaged in.

The writing is too rushed to carry a ton of emotional weight, honestly, and the Cable-as-Christ thing is just too ridiculous to take seriously — not to mention the painfully cutesy conceit of having “Irene” the biographer Cable’s always internally monologuing to turn into “Iryn” the totem god. But despite the script’s inadequacies, Kordey almost sells it. Aided by a beautiful coloring job from Matt Mardden, the artist turns in some of his best work of the series, all expressive rubbery faces, solid tactile bodies, and spaces flooded with light — flesh and spirit not so much contrasting as testifying to each other’s reality.

The last words of the comic, “I cried then so I could laugh later,” take on a heft placed against the shipyard with the shadows of the bird on the dock, the horizon line spreading off, and the boy kneeling by the water with his back to us. It’s like he’s turning away not just from his past, but from his audience; the idiotic, mouth-breathing editorial staff which wanted carnage and super battles and morality plays, and looking out towards a future as an adult, which means a future in which you don’t randomly hit people for no reason.

______________

So much for utopia. In the real world, adults hit people and super-heroes hit people and religion is for drooling redneck terrorists who believe any old shit as long as they get to shoot some federal agents. So says writer Karl Bollers, anyway, who takes over scripting duties with Soldier X #9. Bollers’ qualifications for this job appear to be, (1) he’s not Darko Macan and, (2) please read 1 again. As god is his witness, Bollers swears, there will be no sumo wrestlers in sailor suits, no incompetent SHIELD agents with weird teeth, no thirty-year-old-henchmen-altered-to-look-like-children. Eyes front soldier! There’s no place for that kind of weirdness in this man’s army! Nosir! What we want here is mutants and rednecks and things blowing up. And, most important, we want irony!

So irony we’ve got. The villain is a precog who sees a future in which he meets Cable, and so he spends his entire life working to meet Cable by doing terrorist things, and then he meets Cable, and loses his precog ability, and kills himself.

No really, that’s it. But, hey, things blow up.

And the villain screams tragically.

You can tell it’s drama because Arthur Ranson draws it in the mainstream-default broken-dolls-with-serious-expression style that somebody somewhere thinks is pulling them in at the cineplexes. None of Kordey’s pliable caricature here. It’s serious superhero artwork illustrating a serious superhero strip, just like god intended. Admittedly, colorist Madden still dreams of competence, but you can’t blame Marvel for that.

In theory I guess I should now go on and discuss issues 11 and 12.

So quickly; there’s a tragic mutant, there’s an poignantly ironic death, there’s the standard super-battle inside the mind wheeze so somebody can get a chance to hit something without the writer actually having to come up with a plot.

Oh yeah, and there’s this panel where Cable says: “The mind is my business” while his neck muscles struggle to pop his head like a zit courtesy of artists Scot Eaton and Lary Stucker.

That’s really the only part that’s worth mentioning, I think.
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So I think it’s fairly clear that this hasn’t exactly engaged me. As far as our last crossovers go, I loved the Haney/Aparo Brave and Bold and I worked up a good head of bile for Man-Thing, mostly based on my anger over the way Gerber screwed up a perfectly good horror concept. But I’ve had real trouble caring about Cable one way or the other.

Part of the problem, maybe, is that I’m not convinced that anyone else much cared about Cable either. Not that Bob Haney loved Batman, or that Steve Gerber loved Man-Thing — those were obviously corporate characters too. But with Haney and Gerber, I got the sense that they were using those characters to tell stories they wanted to tell — whether it was Haney tottering around through tripped out genre mash ups or Gerber bewailing the agony of a nine to five job in advertising. There’s certainly a lot of personal touches in Macan/Kordey’s run — the Eastern European setting,the T&A, the Christian themes. But it always seems to be fighting for room with the incoherent mess of a character that is the star attraction — the future/past/techno/mutant/god who doesn’t know what he’s doing or whether his power work or why on earth he’s ended up trapped in a Gogol story when all he really wants to do is zap stuff and mope.

I wonder if mainstream comics, with its more and more homogenous audience and it’s greater and greater editorial centralization, just doesn’t have much room for idiosyncrasy anymore. Alan Moore has left the building; Neil Gaiman has left the building; Frank Miller’s mostly left the building; Grant Morrison has rubbed off most of his edges and earns his psychedelic butter by rambling on and on about how awesome the big name properties are. I don’t know that Macan and Kordey ever had it in them to do a Swamp Thing or Animal Man, but you get the sense that they never really had the chance to try. Like Tucker says, the last three issues of Cable were a holding pattern — then they had 8 issues of Soldier X in which they thrashed around trying to figure out whether they were or were not allowed to openly mock their main character — and then they learned that they weren’t and were promptly booted.

Basically, I look at this, and I see mainstream comics grinding to a slow, still-ongoing, but definitive standstill. Forget the audience; it’s hard for me to see why the creators themselves would want to read this stuff. Macan and Kordey seem like the last, feeble flickering of the EKG before the final, merciful flatline.