No Trenchcoat for the Giant Squid

So, as some of you probably know, I’m currently working on a Patreon to fund one column a week about topics I can’t get mainstream sites to publish. (The column will be called Twisted Mass of Heterotopia, by the by — or it is called that, since this is the first one!)

This piece is a kind of sample of the sorts of things I might write about. I initially placed it at a lovely little crime fiction site called The Life Sentence. But before it could get published, the site shut down. Because there’s no business model that makes printing things like this affordable.

So, since it was homeless, I figured I would run it here. If you’d like to see essays like this on a regular basis, please consider contributing.

Thanks also to Lisa Levy, my editor, who offered a bunch of suggestions that made the piece better.

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Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s 1987 graphic novel Watchmen famously opens with a murder mystery: the Comedian, superhero and government operative, has been thrown to his death from his upper-story apartment. The detective investigating the crime, trench coat and all, is the brutal, deadly superhero Rorschach. After the police leaves he invades the Comedian’s apartment in a grid of light and shadow, his body leached of color as a semi-silhouette against dramatic squares of black and yellow. In this context, Rorschach’s masked face, with its shifting globs of black on white, becomes a genre reference. The superhero’s secret identity in Watchmen is noir — at least until Moore and Gibbons undermine that, as they undermine most everything else.
 

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Watchmen is probably the most critically acclaimed superhero comic ever ;,regularly appearing high up on best of comics lists, and even garnering a spot on Time’s list of 100 Best Novels,. It is perceived as, and presents itself as, serious art . And part of the way that it presents itself as serious art is by using the tropes of tough pulp crime .

Compared to highbrow lit, crime fiction can seem declassé. But superhero comics have long been aimed at children, and have a tradition of whimsical goofiness — Captain Marvel fighting an evil sentient worm, or Wonder Woman bouncing off to the stars on the back of a giant space kangaroo, In comparison, Raymond Chandler and Jim Thompson come across as relatively validating and adult. Crime lends superheroes grit, seriousness, and realism.
 

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And so Rorschach’s origin story involves the true-crime 1964 Kitty Genovese rape . In a case early on in his career Rorschach investigates a child’s murder, and ends up killing her killers in bloody fashion. He later breaks a man’s fingers for information, and tracks down a crime boss in a shadowy prison saturated with enough blood and tough talk to fit neatly into the lineage stretching from Assault on Precinct 13 to Oz.

Watchmen created a whole slew of adult, gritty violent superhero narratives in its wake. One of the most notorious was a 1994 Green Lantern story in which GL”s girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. Another was the 2004 series Identity Crisis in which Sue Dibny, the wife of that silly character, the Elongated Man, was brutally murdered. These comics were not necessarily highly thought of, but they show the trend towards using crime and pulp violence as a way to signal adult fare, and separate superheroes from their infantile past. There’s nothing like a murdered superspouse to demonstrate that comics aren’t for kids any more.

The most recent high-proifle example of superhero crime as validation is the highly aclaimed Daredevil Netflix series. Daredevil is the most ground-level, grimy, street-level-crime focused Marvel franchise since 1998’s Blade.  The series is loosely based on the also much-admired Frank Miller/Dave Mazzucchelli graphic novel Born Again  — not so much in its plot as in its vision of Matt Murdock fighting alone against the Kingpin and his tangled web of organized villainy. Daredevil’s origin story (in both comic and television) involves his boxer dad enmeshed in a price- fixing scheme. On Netflix, his first episode battle is against human traffickers. These familiar genre narratives signify realism because they ooze a familiar corruption and sleaze.
 

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The fact that the Kingpin is involved in a complicated gentrification scheme seems like meta-commentary . The upscale skyscraping jauntiness of Iron Man or Thor or even Ant-Man has no place here in these grim, rent-controlled, crime-ridden streets. Daredevil is tougher and truer because he’s fighting street-level dealers and pimps and local-news-headline scum. The hero has supersenses (not very realistic that) but he usually uses them to figure out whether people are lying so he can torture them in classic tough guy style. The interdimensional alien invasion which closes out the Avengers film serves as the backdrop for the Daredevil series — the evil Loki’s monster army destroyed all the buildings that the Kingpin plans to rebuild.  But that decidedly un-gritty invasion backstory serves as a foil. Those silly things fly around up there in someone else’s superhero narrative. Here (for the most part) our superpowers are dark, serious, and earth-bound.

An alien of sorts also whooshes in at the conclusion of Watchmen — and not coincidentally, that ending has often been seen as one of the series’ weakest moments. All the grim darkness and dark grimness, and this is the end? Rorschach’s pulp investigation turns out to be a preposterous red herring set up by super-villain/hero Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias. No one was out there murdering superheroes, as Rorschach thought. Instead, it was all a distraction from Veidt’s plan to build a giant Cthulhu-analog complete with broadcasting psychic-brain and explode it in New York, thus uniting the world against the alien invaders. The whole thing is utterly preposterous sci-fi goofiness. And Rorschach, our intrepid detective, is disintegrated by Dr. Manhattan with an energy blast. So much for realism.
 

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I remember reading Watchmen when I was in high school and being hugely disappointed by the goofy conclusion (did I mention Ozymandias catches a bullet? He’s got Tibetan mystical skills or something, so he catches a bullet.). But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate the ruthless silliness with which Moore undercuts his own pulp validation.  Rorschach thinks that crime and the brutal law of the streets is reality. As a ground-level detective, he figures that the problems he faces are ground-level problems that he can work out. Solve a murder, find the killer, break a few fingers —maybe it won’t save the world, but it’s doing good by inches in the muck of Real Life.

But what if Real Life isn’t particularly real? What if all that local-news-panic crime doesn’t actually matter? Veidt saves the world in one big rush by dropping a gigantic alien bomb — or possibly he doesn’t save anything, and just kills a whole mess of people, like George Bush rushing into Iraq. Either way, he and his ridiculous megalomaniacal schemes are a lot more real, in the sense of real consequences, than Rorschach wandering around looking for some cape-killer who seems small-scale enough to exist but actually doesn’t. Pulp conspiracy theories are too small; the people at the top have bigger plans. There are supervillains, and they always win. All the time.

Watchmen is often credited with deconstructing, or undermining, superhero tropes — with showing how naive and silly the caped saviors are. That’s a reasonable way to read the comic. But I think, by the end, you could see it not as a deconstruction of supeheroes, but as a way to use superhero tropes to deconstruct, and undermine, the grim gritty myth of pulp noir crime realism. At the end of Watchmen, Rorschach is dead, and the debris and blood is being washed and cleansed away from the New York streets. The future is gleaming and shining and new. and littered with dead bodies. The small scale cop solving just one murder at a time seems almost too cheerful—an exercise in Nostalgia, which, not coincidentally, is the name of the perfume line Ozymandias’ company abandons at the conclusion of the comic. A fake alien is more real in the end than a fake gumshoe. And compared to the machinations of the superpowers, crime looks less like reality, and more like a distraction.
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Anything but Capes: More Crime

Bronx Kill
Writer: Peter Milligan
Artist: James Romberger

I learned two things from reading Bronx Kill.

1) In my previous post on crime comics, my definition of the genre was too narrow. Most crime comics tend to be about hard-boiled detectives, vigilantes, or dangerous heists. In other words, they’re typical male adventure stories. But there is another type of crime story: the missing loved one.  Like hard-boiled detective stories, the plot is based around a mystery – what happened to my missing wife/lover/child/etc. – but the mystery is much more personal for the protagonist, and the emotional impact of the crime is far greater. Missing loved one stories can sometimes function as vengeance fantasies, which could be seen as empowering. But more often than not they’re much bleaker stories where death and loss are inescapable, pain is all-consuming, and discovering the truth is actually far worse than not knowing. The most famous example of this sub-genre is The Vanishing, in which a man obsessively searches for his missing wife for three years, only to discover her terrible fate by sharing it.

Bronx Kill faithfully sticks to the missing loved one formula. The plot follows a novelist named Martin Keane, who wakes up one morning to discover that his wife is gone. Her disappearance has a strange connection to the murder of Martin’s grandfather and a rundown section of the Bronx riverfront named, obviously, the Bronx Kill. As the weeks go by, Martin’s sanity begins to slip, and he becomes increasingly irrational and violent until he finally stumbles upon the awful truth. And as these stories tend to go, the truth is far worse than the mystery.

Judged solely on its merits as a missing person mystery, the Bronx Kill is a decent comic. Milligan never strays far from genre conventions, but he knows how to pace a story and arrange the pieces of a plot so that the outcome isn’t obvious from page 1. Romberger’s art is functional and unassuming; it doesn’t add much to the comic but at least it doesn’t distract from the story either.

The one tedious aspect of the mystery is Milligan’s attempt to connect the main plot to a crime novel that Martin Keane is writing. The comic will occasionally be interrupted by a few pages of text about a murder in 19th century Ireland. Unfortunately, the novel is boring, and Milligan’s prose is often a chore to read. Rather than function as a thematic reflection of the main plot, the prose sections simply screw up the pacing.

2)  The other thing I learned from reading Bronx Kill is that writers are not manly. I’ll repeat for emphasis: WRITERS ARE NOT MANLY. Apparently, this is the great tragedy of being a writer. You can create entire worlds and populate them with fascinating characters who enrich people’s lives, but at the end of day you’re still an impotent wimp. Worse, you’re a wimp who has to be saved by your girlfriend after being threatened by a bum.

And then there are the daddy issues. God help the writer who has a father with a manly profession, like law enforcement. 50% of Bronx Kill is just Martin dealing with the fact that he can never live up to the expectations of his old man, a respected New York police detective. And while I’m trying to avoid being spoilerish, I can’t resist noting that Martin is cuckolded in an exceptionally emasculating manner.

To be fair, Milligan seems to know just how ridiculous it is for writers to constantly fret over their masculinity. Martin Keane may not be as tough as his father, but he eventually realizes that his dad is full of shit. And Martin is at least competent enough to solve the mystery of his missing wife (albeit only after a big clue falls conveniently into his lap).

But acknowledging the shortcomings of the masculine ideal isn’t the same thing as coming up with an alternative. And Milligan is still working within the confines of a male genre, so the climax of Bronx Kill is the same as the climax of most crime stories: fists, guns, and screaming. Nor are the wife’s motives of any real importance. This is yet another story that’s all about men dealing with their crappy fathers.

Bronx Kill is an uneven, occasionally engaging entry into an often overlooked sub-genre of crime, though a reader’s enjoyment of the comic is dependent on their tolerance for writers with daddy issues.

Anything but Capes: Crime Time

So many crime comics, so little time. Vertigo alone must publishes half a dozen pulp crime monthlies, and that doesn’t even include the Vertigo Crime imprint. I already reviewed one of the Vertigo Crime graphic novels here, so I’ll limit this post to monthly titles.

Reviews

Choker #1
Writer: Ben McCool (that can’t possibly be his real name)
Artist: Ben Templesmith
Publisher: Image Comics

Crime and horror are an unlikely pairing. They may share an appreciation for violence and brooding scenery, but the primary appeal of the genres are at odds. Crime stories are generally empowerment fantasies, whether the focus is on the criminal (empowerment against authority) or the detective (empowerment in service to authority). Horror is more about powerlessness, and the thrills and scares that come from being vicariously helpless. These are two genres that just don’t mix well. (Now, some of you will argue, “What about Seven? That had detectives and it was scary up until the moment the killer was revealed to be Kevin Spacey.” But Seven wasn’t really a crime story, because the detective scenes with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman were not critical to the film’s appeal. They just filled in time between the big gross-out moments). All of this is a roundabout way of explaining why Choker is not a good comic.

Set in the future, the plot follows a lowly private detective named Johnny Jackson. Formerly a cop, he’s given an opportunity to get his old job back if he can capture a drug dealer. About as basic a crime plot as they come, but the story quickly veers towards horror because the drug in question transforms its users into something akin to vampires.

The horror factor is also emphasized by the artwork. Ben Templesmith is best known for his work on several popular horror comics, particularly 30 Days of Night. His art in Choker looks very similar: distorted bodies, the heavy use of black, grimy backgrounds. Though in Choker, he also uses lurid red and orange coloring to highlight the corruption and decadence of the future.

It looks very cool, but the flashy art can’t hide the fact that the comic doesn’t function well as either horror or crime. The horror aspect is undermined by the concepts inherent in a crime story. For example, by focusing the plot on the hard-boiled detective, McCool deflates any anxiety that the reader might have, because we all know that the chain-smoking tough guy isn’t going to die. At the same time, the crime story is diminished by the comic’s awkward attempts at being scary. The vampires in the story are meant to be creepy, but they’re really just super-powered junkies. It’s impossible to take the central conflict seriously. The book has a lot of ideas, but they remain incoherent and poorly executed.

Criminal – The Sinners #1
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Sean Phillips
Colorist: Val Staples
Publisher: Icon (Marvel)

Criminal is one of the least innovative comics being produced by any mainstream publisher. Ed Brubaker writes stereotypical crime stories: square-jawed protagonists, femme fatales, and endless monologues. Sean Phillips and Val Staples illustrate the comic in the most predictable manner possible: dark colors, thick black lines, a general impression of an overbearing world. We’ve seen this all before.

The plot of this issue is also familiar. Tracy Lawless (a character from an earlier story arc) is stuck working as a hitman for a mob kingpin. He’s offered a chance to walk away, but only if he can figure out who’s murdering the mobster’s lieutenants. It’s a typical anti-hero plot, with the obligatory sub-plot involving the mobster’s sexy wife.

Brubaker and company aren’t doing anything new or original – and that’s okay. So what if they don’t re-invent the wheel? Wheels already do exactly what they’re supposed to do. I suppose I should laud innovation, but to be perfectly honest I’m only interested in innovation when it produces a great story. If creators tell a great story by inventing an entirely new genre of entertainment, then I’m happy. If creators tell a great story by relying on familiar tropes from a well-worn genre, then I’m happy.

Brubaker may not be an innovator, but he’s a reliable craftsman. The characters are all archetypes, but they’re enjoyable archetypes that fit perfectly into the world that Brubaker and Phillips have created. The plot is predictable, but it plods along with the implicit assurance that the payoff will be worth the wait. And while Phillips isn’t a daring artist, his pencils and inks effectively conveys both story and tone.

Criminal is nothing more and nothing less than the work of professionals who are doing exactly what they want to do.

Scalped #36
Writer: Jason Aaron
Artist: Davide Furno
Colorist: Giulia Brusco
Publisher: Vertigo (DC)

I’m not a regular reader of Scalped, but from what I’ve seen of the series I’m pretty sure it’s about Native American gangsters who run a casino. I think I read a review that described it as Sorpranos on an Indian reservation (hopefully without the pretentious dream sequences), or maybe it was Goodfellas on a reservation. But since it involves a casino, perhaps it should be Casino on a reservation. Scalped readers need to help me out here. What is the proper analogy? And is there an Indian Joe Pesci?

The first thing that came to mind as I read this issue: Scalped is a remarkably exploitative comic. A team of white creators produced a story about violent, lusty ethnic minorities who kill and fuck each other for the amusement of the predominantly white audience. And they even throw throw in a nod to Indian spirituality (one character actually narrates from beyond the grave). I suppose I should find all this offensive, but I’m actually impressed that Vertigo published a comic about Indians that didn’t involve Jonah Hex shooting them.

And once you get past the Indian-sploitation, it isn’t half bad. It has all the elements readers would expect from a gangster comic: sleazy casino owners, brutal violence, macho men. And there are a few things readers wouldn’t expect, such as the fact that the macho men enjoy gay sex.

The art is okay, in the way that art in Vertigo comics is always “kind of,” “sort of” okay. Davide Furno deserves some small praise for his character design, because at least Native Americans don’t look like white people with tans. But the art isn’t memorable in any way, which is the harshest thing I can say about it.

So this is a comic about gay, Native American gangsters, and (lackluster art aside) it truly is the best damn comic about gay, Native American gangsters that I’ve ever read.

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State of the Genre: For a genre that was once almost completely absorbed by superheroes, crime has made a massive comeback. In itself, the success of the crime genre is hardly surprising. Stories of crooks and heists and square-jawed detectives have remained popular in every other media for decades.  What is surprising is just how long it took for crime to recover as a prominent genre of American comics. Blame Wertham, the Comics Code, superhero fanboys, etc., etc.

But over the last couple decades the comics market has evolved to the point where it can sustain a significant number of crime comics. And given the size of the genre, it deserves an extra post, which is why I’ll be reviewing Peter Milligan’s Bronx Kill next week.

Katrinasploitation

Nola
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Creator: Chris Gorak
Writer: Pierluigi Cothran
Artist: Damian Couceiro

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters in American history, killing over1,800 people and flooding the city of New Orleans. But despite the scope of the disaster, there are surprisingly few comics about Katrina or its aftermath. Perhaps comic writers, who tend to be white, northern, and middle class, are simply indifferent to a disaster that mostly affected people who are black, southern, and poor. Or if I were to be more charitable, perhaps comic writers are trying to be respectful, given that Katrina is still a very recent tragedy from the survivors’ perspective. But if I’ve learned anything from my years of consuming pop culture, it’s that somebody will eventually find a way to turn even the worst disaster into a frivolous pulp thriller.

Which brings me to Nola, a 4 part mini-series created by Chris Gorak (an art designer for several big films) and written by Pierluigi Cothran (writer of several Heroes graphic novels). The story is about the oh-so-cleverly named Nola Thomas, an attractive African American woman who falls for a married man. Who’s rich, white, and named Chevis, so obviously he’s an asshole. In fact, he’s an asshole of Kennedyian proportions, because when he drunkenly flips his car off the road with Nola inside, he sets the car on fire and flees rather than get caught having an affair with a black woman. Of course, Nola survives but she’s badly burned.

Hurricane Katrina finally factors into the story while Nola is in the hospital. Abandoned by the medical staff, Nola wakes up in a flooded room, bandaged like a mummy in the tradition of horribly scarred noir heroes. After she discovers that her mother died in the hurricane, Nola decides it’s time to set the plot in motion and get her revenge. So she travels around the ruins of New Orleans, killing the doctor who left her to die, killing a few cops (it’s okay, they were jerks), and eventually hunting down Chevis. Along the way she also uncovers a rather convoluted murder mystery involving her long-lost father and another evil, rich white guy.

Ignoring the presence of Katrina, Nola is just an old-fashioned pulp crime story. It does occasionally touch upon race, but only in a shallow manner that helps advance the plot. And the colorful setting of New Orleans (pre-Katrina) is never used to its full potential. None of this is to say that Nola is awful, so much as it isn’t notably ambitious or original. Damien Couciero’s artwork, best described as generic, reinforces my impression of Nola as a by-the-numbers crime comic.

But the use of Katrina can’t be casually set aside. The plot hinges on the disaster in a number of ways: Nola is abandoned in the hospital because of the hurricane, her mother dies during the flooding, and she’s able to sneak around the city and get away with murder because law enforcement is already overwhelmed. The flooded landscape of New Orleans also give Nola a few memorable scenes, even if Couciero’s art is rather boring.

Most importantly, Katrina is a massive tragedy, and real-life tragedies can impart the illusion of relevance on otherwise irrelevant stories. Is it crass and shameless to use a real disaster to elevate low brow entertainment product? Yup, but Gorak and Cothran would probably insist that the personal tragedy of Nola is deeply interwoven with the larger tragedy that befell New Orleans. Because you see, Nola is scarred, just like New Orleans, and … um … Nola will never be the same again (after all the murdering and what not) and the city will never be the same again! It all makes sense, as long as you don’t think about it.

But if you do make the mistake of thinking about it, you’re left feeling dirty. It’s bad enough that so many people died while the government dithered, but Nola adds insult to injury by treating that catastrophe as a plot device for a trite revenge story.