Mindless Ones

Riddle me this: why are so many writers completely at a loss when it comes to E. Nigma?

Poodle has noted that the Batman TV show of the 60s has been something of a touchstone in his rogue’s review considerations, and you know what? I completely agree that it should be. Many of you will worry that the camp fun therein is at odds with the skein of grim ‘n’ gritty darkness that runs through Batman at his best, but I put it to you that your inner child experienced that show as deadly serious, and that’s what we’re trying to tap into here: the way it felt to you as a kid, which as far as I’m concerned is completely at odds with flooding the Batverse with all out silliness.

The Riddler of the TV show always made me uneasy. There was something very wrong with this slippery man that hid behind the question mark, building deathtraps and giggling like a child. In fact puzzles themselves were worrisome. My Grandad’s cheerful, yellow bumper puzzle books were at heart mysterious. At the time my mother was regularly reading me Greek myths, and I knew with certainty that those friendly cartoon characters that ushered me towards maze entrances weren’t to be trusted. At the centre of the labyrinth something dark and secret lurked, at once frightening and exhilarating. Further into the books matchstick men hung from matchstick nooses, and cryptic crosswords muttered their inscrutable clues with oracular force. Even the dot-to-dot lattices were pregnant with powerful revelations, always threatening much more than a jagged representation of Micky Mouse’s head. Always a disappointment when the numbers ran out and the picture was complete, as if the introduction of a few more elements would bring some transcendental force to bear and unlock a hidden reality.

Yeah, to my five-year-old brain puzzles were something more than distractions. When I grew up I wanted to build impossible mazes and stock them with bizarre and often terrifying creations: traps, monsters, and fiendish brainteasers. After being exposed to D&D my obsession switched to dungeons, but the principle remained the same - I still wanted to explore the places where we lose our way, and harness the unknown. In my tweens when I encountered The One Game, a television series based around a character trapped within the nightmarish machinations and manipulations of an enigmatic mastermind, the puzzle’s existentialist and mystical connections were concretised. Did we live in a deterministic reality, or could its code somehow be cracked? Was the mysterious universe that unfolded around me moving towards some sort of totality, some hidden truth, a kind of dot-to-dot in macrocosm? Sure it sounds pretentious, but think about where we find puzzles and the tasks they’re set and it all starts to look a little less so. In our fiction we have the Da Vinci Code guarding *ahem* profound religious truths, in science the magical properties of quantum encryption threaten to lock our secrets away in multidimensional prisons. The riddle of the Sphinx, the koans of the Buddhists, the liar paradox of Epimenides, the maze and the Minotaur, etcetera, etcetera. In fact it’s only in relatively recent history that puzzles (in particular the riddle) have been seen as mere diversions, or sources of uncomplicated humour. Certainly the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse didn’t view them that way, and neither did the Ancient Greeks, with both culture’s utilising the unique properties of the puzzle to educate and, in a bolder move, gesture towards profound truths.

Do ya see where I’m going with this?

It’s as if the Riddler has somehow suffered the same fate as his pet puzzles - he’s been trivialised and subsequently rejected as a worthy villain. There’s some truth in that, I reckon, but the problem is probably compounded by something far more straightforward. It’s the same difficulty faced by all the Batvillains: writers, in common with the rest of us, like to follow the path of least resistance, meaning that threats that aren’t purely physical or obvious tend not to get much play. It takes imagination, an interest in the character, and hard work to tease out the place of a riddling baddie in a world of broken backs, weaponized fear gas, guns and terms like vigilante. How does a “silly” character like the Riddler function in that oh-so-serious space - do you turn him into another *YAWN* psychopath? Beef him up with venom? Have him retire? Make the character reflect upon the tragedy of his own dumbness and go straight?

No thanks. Let’s get back to basics.

The last writer to present the Riddler as a viable threat was Jeph Loeb in his Hush story-arc, where he has the character work with the (truly atrocious and profoundly unconvincing) eponymous villain to bring Batman down. Now, I might not be Loeb’s biggest fan, but I think it’s fair to say he tapped into something key to getting the Riddler right. Yeah he was super-smart - he figured out Batman’s identity and manipulated a host of A-list characters - yeah he was tricksy, yeah there were riddles, but none of that’s what really counts. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Loeb got something very important wrong with his portrayal of the character, in that his Riddler didn’t announce himself, didn’t openly challenge Bats to a battle of wits, failed to be the showman we all expect him to be. Loeb would probably argue that he was sketching a cleverer Riddler, one that refused to let his psychological foibles undermine his devious plans, and he’d have a point. Paul Dini certainly seems to be convinced. His Riddler brings back the ostentation but eschews crime altogether, instead he’s set himself up as Batman’s not-entirely-honest competition - a brilliant and showy private-eye intent on out sleuthing the World’s Greatest Detective. An unraveller of riddles as opposed to a puzzle-setter. But what Dini doesn’t have a handle on, what Loeb understood, is that if the Riddler is about anything he’s about mystery.

What’s strange about the Hush arc is the redundancy of the principal villain. To my mind Nigma, taken seriously, would have been the perfect fit, but for some odd reason Loeb didn’t trust him to sell the story on his lonesome, and instead had him back up an ill conceived anti-batman. Reimagining the arc with the Riddler at the helm is easy enough, however, and points the way towards exactly the kind of Riddler I want to see: one that haunts the Batman. His presence all pervasive, ambient. Only tenuously, and occasionally linked to a physical body. Rather he should manifest through labyrinthine schemes, puzzles, riddles and elaborate deathtraps. To take the idea further, the Riddler’s presence should engender such a profound degree of uncertainty that Batman’s entire environment starts to seethe with suspiciousness. For an example of the kind of thing I mean, check out the lastest issue of RASL (#2 reviewed by Bobsy below), in which the titular, dimension hopping character starts to worry that his last jump didn’t in fact bring him home, just somewhere worryingly similar. Jeff Smith builds the paranoia to exquisite levels, so much so that ostensibly innocuous panels - a cigarette burning down, RASL sleeping - are transformed into abstract representations of the unknown, and positively hum with foreboding. Morrison (again with the bloody Morrison) appeared to be tapping into the same idea in DC One Million where he imagined the Riddler of 1000,000 years hence literally as the scenery, a semi-sentient Riddle City.

The problem faced by the majority of writers is that they’ve become far too caught up in psychology - in explaining the Riddler in those terms. In that light of course the character comes off badly. Only an idiot would leave clues for Batman to find, surely? It goes without saying that writers would struggle with a guy hell bent on undermining himself. That more often than not the temptation would be to paint him as ineffectual, a second rate villain, or, I dunno, a PI, perhaps.

I should add here that just because I think psychologising characters can be a bad thing in that it can lead one away from some really interesting stuff (the Joker as a sickness, say), and force one into narrative cul-de-sacs, I am categorically not out to deny the Riddler any kind of personality. It’s just that the sort of personality I’d offer him would be impressionistic as opposed to realistic. To go back to the TV show, Frank Gorshin’s Riddler would be the obvious jumping off point. Like all the Batvillains brought to the small screen in the 60s, you wouldn’t want to argue that Gorshin’s creation was anything like a real person - that there was a recognisable bloke beneath all that manic cackling and wild gesticulation. But nevertheless the character made a huge impression on the audience, and continues to resonate today. In fact I’d go as far as to argue, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the reason the Riddler has any kind of Bat-cachet is largely down to his prancing telly presence 40 years ago.

If the baddies of the TV show were anything they were show offs, celebrity monsters, with Gorshin’s Riddler somehow managing to outshine the lot of them. In that way Gorshin’s interpretation has much in common with the Riddler’s earliest comic book appearances, where the Prince of Puzzles was nothing if not powerfully ostentatious, showy. And that’s the line into the character I’d want to take: the showman who uses Gotham City as his stage. The Riddler’s crime’s and attendant puzzles are essentially epic performance pieces - giant typewriters, and skyscrapers his gargantuan props. This is a Riddler who’s as smart as any of those mad science villains, but who hasn’t slaved his brilliance to anything as pedestrian as scientific discovery. No, he’s an artist, a creative genius, a producer who always gets the world’s most talented superhero to pull out his best performances. It doesn’t matter that Batman often “wins”, it’s the taking part that counts, the work itself. Besides, it’s not like any prison is going to hold the Riddler for long, and, who knows, perhaps that’s exactly where he wants to be.

Remove the focus on the Riddler as a man, absorb him into the text and you get something else entirely: a quintessential (perhaps the quintessential) Bat-threat: the mystery waiting to be solved. Think about it, there should be no greater challenge to the World’s Greatest Detective’s deductive abilities than the Riddler, no tougher puzzles to crack. As Bane is to physicality the Riddler should be to mystery. What I’m proposing here isn’t particularly radical. As I’ve noted above, the Riddler’s presence has a long and venerable history of being articulated outwith his body. The notion that the Riddler should infect all the panels of a given comic is simply the recognition that his puzzles are as much part of him as his arms and legs, and that puzzles are non-local in that they permeate the stories that house them. In detective fiction the real antagonist is always the mystery at hand - I’m proposing a deliberate and carefully articulated blurring of the lines of distinction between the character and games he sets in motion. A Riddler that literally embodies mystery.

I want to be taken back to those intricately patterned crossword puzzles, pentagonal number games, and haunted treasure hunts. I want the Riddler from Batman’s early years to make a return. The one whose origin story failed utterly to explain or account for what he had become*, and the grandiose nature of the threat he posed. A Riddler at home standing astride the rooftop of Gotham Museum, hands on hips, head thrown back, back lit by a skyscraper’s illuminated windows, spelling out the letters of some gargantuan brainteaser. I want a Riddler that hurtles out of the shadows to cast his puzzle-nets, and makes impossible escapes that even the Batman can’t decipher. A King of Conundrums whose schemes trap the Caped Crusader in their dark twisting labyrinthine depths: plans within riddles within riddles within plans. I want that One Game feeling of not knowing if the game is played out. Did the Dark Knight defeat the Creepy Quizzer or is it - to paraphrase Nolan’s Joker - all part of the plan? I want to see Batman baffled, bemused, and beffuddled by exquisite, terrifying deathtraps built from interlinked question marks, not all of which are physical.

I want the man who giggles in the centre of the maze. I want the mystery.

Riddle me that.

*Just as the Joker’s origin story (if it can be called that) utterly fails to explain him away.

Because you lovely people are linking here looking for our rogue’s reviews, here’s a round-up

Rogue’s Review #1: Harley Quinn

Rogue’s Review #2: Catwoman

Rogue’s Review # 3: The Penguin

Rogue’s Review #4: Bane

The idea here is to find alternative or better ways of making characters work, so even if you’re not interested in, say, The Penguin, I urge you to check out Poodle’s thoughts. Without wishing to blow our own trumpet, I think he’s done a truly amazing, often hilarious, job.

Who would have thought that Bane could be my new favourite bat-villain? Weird.

More to come in the very, very near future.

Oh good, a new hobby horse to savage with my bugbear: No sooner have I finished blogging about how annoying I find a current half-trend of imposing pick-and-mix music decisions on the otherwise private stereoheads of readers, when it starts appearing all over the place. Okay, well, in one place only so far, maybe two if what I’m told about Lapham’s latest is right, but little bloggy subcategories have been built out of far less.

The offender is Wisdom no. 3, which came out some time last year. The reason I’m so hideously late jumping on this bandwagon’s throat is that I’ve only just bought the trade of this fun little series, after being so happy with the first ish of writer Paul Cornell’s ongoing follow-up, Captain Britain and MI-13. Every inch the modern, inclusive British superhero comic book, Wisdom 3 is the Welsh issue, where Pete Wisdom and co. meet the Red Dragon, embodiment of fiery Welsh nationalism and stuff, in a Cardiff boozer, and then send Shang-Chi, Master of Kung-Fu in to beat him up. Send a dragon to catch a dragon goes the marvellously dumb logic here, because Shang-Chi is like Bruce Lee, who was in a couple of films with the word ‘dragon’ in the title. Ah come on, just go with it. You’ll have fun. As you can already tell, it’s a cool and funny set-up for a done-in-one superhero comic, and is in fact one of the undoubted highlights of the series. Amid all the goodness, however, keep popping up these little captions with band names and track titles in them, telling you the musical accompaniment appropriate to the. What? But that sounds like. No. Oh dear no. By the ghost of Aled Jones, please no. No!

Yes. It’s a soundtrack. In fact it’s a ‘Welsh pop mixtape’ soundtrack, and if you are sane you’re already running for your lives (you can itunes it here through Cornell’s blog from back when it first come out).

As I keep saying, Wisdom 3 is a lot of fun, with sharp dialogue and tight action, an interesting, ‘why has no-one done that before?’ central maguffin, and a moment of genuine formal lovelinessness. Everything a modern disposable piece of trash art should aspire to. Apart from the soundtrack, which is really only annoying in a very mild manner, the only problem permeating it is the fishingboatbobbing undercurrent of anti-Welsh racism. Cornell has Wisdom, who, lest we forget, is from Lahndan, make a lot of anti-Welsh jokes, and although the other characters are castigating him for it by the end, however many layers of irony are at work, there they are: anti-Welsh jokes of a sort not seen since the seventies, in four-colour black and white, on the page for everyone to see.

To be frank though, this is utterly forgivable. Why is it OK to be down on the Welsh and all Waleian things from Wales. Why? Why should the Welsh who, due to their careful preservation of Greek and Latin manuscripts basically rescued Europe from the Dark Ages AND gave the world Batman (Batman is Welsh!), be so derided by civilised society? I’ll tell you why: Torchwood motherfucker, the rubbishest TV sci-fi since Baywatch Nights went X-Files. Paul Cornell hasn’t written for Torchwood – he writes instead for it’s parent show, Dr. Who, by general consent the modern pinnacle of British achievement, and is responsible for probably the great show’s greatest moment yet – the brillaint ‘Human Nature’/'Family of Blood’ two-parter from last year. So he’s well-acquainted with the modern Welsh Who-mafia, who much like the medieval monks with the written foundations of Renaissance and Enlightenment thought, through tenacious wangling of licensing rights, audio books, low-distribution novels and wide-distribution fan mags, got the product out to keep the Who torch burning through the long years in the wilderness, to be eventually rewarded by a Cardiff-based production unit for the main show’s return, and more Welsh plots, sets and spin-offs than you can kick a rugby ball at. With this in mind, Wisdom 3 is probably best read as a long, affectionate nudge in the ribs of Russell T. Davies and co., and their unassailable dominance of modern British TV SF, the significance of which really can’t be overstated. Fact is, these Welsh gents are shaping the dreams and nightmares of the next generation of British children, and their influence will be as much an undeniable fact in twenty-five years’ time as it is today.

Wales is brilliant, by the way. Only had the pleasure of going two or three times, bowled over by the friendliness of the folk and the beauty of the scenery. The train route from Bristol to Bridgend is one of the most fascinating journeys I’ve ever been on: on the coastal side, endless arrays of concrete and metal - pipes and docks and factories and warehouses and dumps and cranes. Inland, tiny terraced hamlets perched on the valley foothills, so dainty and fragile-seeming, glittering green valleys beyond, a picture- perfect rural world nestled so close to the industrial icons of a grand and tragic history. Worth the trip all on its own – and the beach at Bridgend is nice too.

On another visit to Cymru, the bouncer in one particular pub on one particular stag-do was particularly lovely – frankly, if I was as hard as he clearly was, I probably would have beaten us up, bunch of pissed-up druggy English twats from London (or wherever). But he didn’t, just smiled and chatted, and told us how to get a taxi – what a hero. (There’s a fine pedigree of Welsh superheroes, while we’re on the subject.) Thanks to that lovely guy’s good nature, later on that evening I think I saw a UFO, and was for definite literally rescued from an eternity of torment in Mephisto’s infernal realm by… Captain Britain himself, albeit in his less cool original costume. True story. Incidentally, as you’ll know if you’re reading Captain Britain and MI13, which you should be, CB draws his powers from a mystical place called Avalon, where I was in fact born and raised. Perhaps I am Captain Britain. Well, maybe not, but I certainly felt touched by the ‘cross-section of contemporary Brit types react to the death of the hero’ bit in this week’s CB&MI13#2.

If with these digressions into Our National Hero, Welshness and TV politics I appear to have strayed from my ‘Soundtracks are Annoying!!’ theme tune, then I haven’t, I was going somewhere: the obvious love and knowledge of Welsh pop music that Cornell advertises in Wisdom 3, through the use of the soundtrack, serves as an entirely necessary counter-narrative to firmly undercut the ‘comedy’ jingoism displayed elsewhere. Towards the end of the issue Dai Thomas, Welsh-as-fuck Donald Pleasance-alike and perennial moral centre of the Marvel UKU, upbraids Wisdom for his boorish racist banter, but by then the music has done its work and steered the story round to that perspective already, for Thomas to make explicit. It’s okay for Cormell to take a friendly pop at his mates and employers, but it’s not OK to let those sentiments go unchallenged in a comic which is going to be read (fingers crossed) on both sides of the Atlantic. So the soundtrack is an important part of the book’s overall meaning - it’s not just self-aggrandising hipsterism, as these things usually seem. There is a more pertinent reason for its inclusion: the music is the message.

Right then. Enough of all this Pobl Y Cwm, let’s get listening:

CIS Vol. 1.
Wisdom no.3
Page 1 Track 1: Guns Don’t Kill People, Rappers Do by Goldie Lookin Chain

Some things in pop are inevitable, and I think GLC were one of them. Bored Welsh kids, forced indoors by so many rainy afternoons, steeped in an endless adolescence of gangstas, video games, cheap highs, crap telly, bad sports wear and celebrity gossip, fascinated and absorbed by the absurdities on offer from of the latest colonial-cultural overlords. If realness is the measure of good hip-hop`(it’s not really, but if it was) then they would qualify: poor (I guess), smart, funny people making catchy, quickly-annoying music that probably reflects themselves perfectly. I’ve met people like GLC, and this music is what they are like, only in rhyme.

Pete Wisdom is at the bar, cracking jokes and talking shit at the Red Dragon. This pub setting is perfect in so many ways, most importantly for us in that it gives the soundtrack a diagetic context: the songs on the jukebox while all this shit is going on.

Pgae 4 Track 2: Life Becoming A Landslide by Manic Street Preachers

I actually own the CD EP - in fact, I actually think I bought it on a school trip to Cardiff. The fourth track is a blistering cover version of Comfort Comes by Stereolab forerunners and 80s indie pinko-pop supremos McCarthy, and is well worth a listen. LBAL is the Manics at the height of their second album idiot savant phase, meaning it ’s a stupid, enormous rock power ballad like something out of a Rocky film, with a way-over-the-top yet madly gnomic and depressing ’singalong’ chorus:

‘My idea of love comes from
A childhood glimpse of pornography
Though there is no true love
Just a finely tuned jealousy

Life becoming a landslide
Ice freezing nature dead
Life becoming a landslide
I don’t wanna be a man’

The Manics are like the elder statesmen of Welsh Rock now, up there, legs akimbo atop Mount Snowdon along with Bassey, Jones (of whom more shortly, sadly), Gartside and Church. The Manics are different though. Their third album is basically the greatest record of the 1990s, and despite the enormous blandness of their later years, they’ll always be among a very select elite of completely original bands that at their best deserved every breath of the great fervour they inspired in their fans. Like Public Enemy, Dexys, perhaps Tindersticks, but very few others, they present a weird breed of high-camp and absolute sincerity, mixing obscure and politically or personally controversial lyrics, bizarre fashion choices and a near-religious belief in themselves and the redemptive powers of pop music. Pure Rock and Roll, at its very very best.

This has nothing to do with Shang-Chi entering the boozer to square up to the Red Dragon, although it is good ‘make an entrance’ music. I guess you could draw a line of association between the Master of Kung Fu and the implacable natural power of a landslide, or even compare the heightened, undeniable skilliance of Fu Manchu’s wayward son to the Manics themselves. Those are both silly things to do though, and require effort, so let’s move on / hit skip / turn the page.

Page 6 Track 3: History Repeating by Shirley Bassey

Surely Bassey’s voice sounds like being whacked around the ears by the flat side of a spade? She’s only good when doing Bond themes, the air-raid noises wrung from her larynx somehow fitting the essential cruelty and ballistic materialism of JB’s Cold War personality.

Luckily, this clanging nightmare of a song comes with a good little page, as we see the Red Dragon’s Secret Origin, spanning thousands of years of history and a particularly telling phrase: ‘King Ludd trapped him in a pit full of mead.’ Lots of layers there: The Ludd/Lludd thing is a bit confusing - King Ludd is one of the many legendary founders of London, so English, though presumably a pre-Saxon, Keltic ‘English’. The historical reading intended here is shirley that the English used drink (indicating literal intoxication and exploitation, which themselves are arguably social symptoms of the greater forces of demography and trade) to subdue the mighty Welsh fighting spirit. The comic takes place in a pub, remember. This reading becomes difficult though when you onsider the cognate figure and likely template for King Ludd is Lludd Llaw Eraint, a kind of solar hero-type from Welsh mythology, a saviour, not an oppressor. Lludd’s story from the Mabinogion, where he vanquishes three plagues of which the red and white dragons are one, is also the clear model for the first three stories of the Wisdom series itself. Lludd’s other plagues are an invasion of dwarf or fairy sorts, (like Tink’s people in issue 1), and the other is a giant whose presence causes an epidemic of strange dreams (the Pantagruel celestial from issue 2. Incidentally, it seems probable that this would also be a key source for Cardiff-born Roald Dahl’s kiddy-favourite The BFG).

So what’s actually being said here? The Welsh nationalist spirit, is self-defeating - drowned in booze, it eventually becomes its own worst enemy? Or that the ethnic identities of Wales and England are basically too similar and commonly-founded for a distinction between the two to be useful? Yummy thoughtfood whatever, none of which tastes like Shirley Bassey at all, which must be good.

Page 9 Track 4: The Bartender and the Thief by The Stereophonics. No video for this one for some reason - oddly, as I’m sure it was a single. Here’s a live version instead, recorded, as it hapens, in Avalon:

The Stereophonics are one of those bands that came along after all the daft and interesting Britpop bands had gone away, leaving these and other sturdy dadrocking pillars to prop up the charts. The kind of stodgy, plodding ‘anthemic’ MOR that they tend to stick to is a fine traditional recipe for bland music soup, the success of which at the turn of the century makes them directly responsible for the unholy likes of Keane, Coldplay, Snow Patrol etc. pissing their bedwetter stadium pop all over this poor bloody decade. Actually though, The Bartender and the Thief is an alright bit of latterday power punk, and the only song of theirs I can hear on the radio without switching channels.

Good fighting music, for a good fighting scene: Shang-Chi, Him Out Of the Seventies, versus a pub full of double-hard Welsh bastards. Hi-Ya! Wallop.

Page 10 Track 5
Sex Bomb by Tom Jones. Don’t click the screen. Seriously – that video is bloody horrible.

If the very mention of Tom Jones’ name doesn’t make you heave a little then you must have had all of your digestive organs surgically removed, and you have my sympathy. This video is really quite vile – a nipped, stretched, and ‘toxed old Tom trying to do ‘urban’ hand moves with his awful sausage-cigar-penis fingers. Just don’t look at it.

Let’s try this: think about sex for a bit…mm, yeah, just there, that’s nice… are you moist or turgid yet, according to your genitalia? Now think about Tom Jones! Yuk, wasn’t that horrid? That face, those fingers!! Whaddayasay Tom?

In the comic, this incredibly erotic song goes with a suitably raunchtastic cunnilingus scene as Wisdom goes down on Mo. Funny, oral sex always gets represented the same way in comics: conspicuous gap to one side, facial reactions and innuendo telling the rest of the shocking story. A kind of safe, tacit convention between comic book producers and consumers: we are all grown-ups now and so we will have muff diving superheroes in a book, only we will always present said act it in the same way to avoid confusion, embarrassment or pubic hair. Grumble grumble - I blame the Authority, superheroes be like rabbits since they turned up. Come to think of it, many of Mark Millar’s characters might sound a bit more believable if you imagine them talking with Sid James’ voice.

Page 11 Track 6 God! Show me Magic! by Super Furry Animals

When the Tories closed the coal mines in the Eighties, the future of Welsh pop music was assured: no local jobs plus a natural climate that couldn’t be more perfect for the natural proliferation of magic mushrooms equals great pop music forever. The best of the best are the Super Furry Animals - probably, all things considered, the greatest British indie pop act of the last fifteen years or so. The problem with rock and roll bands, of the kind a young soul wants to hand their life to in return for a soundtrack for their formative years, is also the thing that historically has been one of their main assets: they’re adulterous, impulsive bastards. Eventually, they will fuck up and disappoint you, make a crap concept album, discover teetotalism or Scientology, split up into murderously boring side projects and retire to a farm to make cheese or some bollocks.

Not, I repeat NOT the Super Furry Animals – twelve years in, they’re still going strong, and they’ve done the side projects and the concept albums and for none of that do they deserve shotgunning in the face, like so many of their contemporaries (yes, I mean you, Blur.) In fact, lead singer Gruff Rhys has released two spin-offs in the last eighteen months alone (the pastoral, acoustic, psychedelia of ‘Candylion’ and the retro-electro soundtrack dirt of the Neon Neon collaboration with Boom Bip) and they’re both absolutely fab, establishing him as a proper modern neglecto-pop genius. Last year the band also released their tenth album Hey Venus, and it’s ace. Here’s the second single off it, a blissful Spectoresque pastiche called ‘Runaway’. (The version on the video is stripped right back to its sweet skeleton, so not Spectoresque at all - still good though):

Back in comicbook Wales, the other three from Wisdom’s MI13 gang, Tink, John the Skrull and Captain Midlands, sit around and not much happens, although the daring Dudley Destroyer, the brave Brummie Battler, that loveable Coventry Kraut-Crusher, gets in a great one-liner. These three characters are real fine work by Cornell & co., fresh and effortless-seeming, the kind of fancy backup that a new superteam needs but rarely gets.

Page 16 Track 7 I’ll Be Your Mirror by Velvet Underground & Nico

So what’s the best American band of the sixties? It seems like a difficult question but it’s not. Like every sane human I need a Beach Boys day every now and again; you can’t beat The Isley Brothers for raw stomping Northern Soul mania; the way The Monkees and their story continue to predict every twist and turn of pop culture still regularly delights me; and the 13th Floor Elevators are the only good reason for the existence of Texas that I’ve ever heard (check the bottle-playing on that clip. God, aren’t drugs brilliant?)

Really though, there ’s only the Velvets - a better group in its design, and a sound in its conception and execution, really can’t be imagined. Aside from a bunch of four skouse Skrulls, there doesn’t need to be any other band from the sixties. They may of course have been the epitome of New York cool, of New York everything, but amazingly one of the Velvet Underground, in fact the one most responsible for their musical eccentricities, was Welsh ! I know!

According to Google video, there is no extant film of the Velvet Underground and Nico performing I’ll Be Your Mirror. Isn’t that sad? Have this instead, and feel emptiness and regret at how you were never at The Factory:

This track, the best on the album, accompanies probably the best page of the issue. Things get all deep and meaningful, as Shang-Chi uses the powers of ultraviolence to enlighten the Red Dragon as to his true nature. The action shifts outside itself, casually but quite wonderfully using the forms of cave art, Medieval Christian iconography and traditional Japanese art from I-don’t-know-when to illustrate man’s eternal struggle against, erm, Dragons. The only singular thing about Dragons is that they are a multi-purpose symbol for whoever wants it when – Dragons essentially stand for ’spirit’, and are as fit for as many contexts, impressions and (re)interpretations as that word. This being a superhero book, albeit a witty one, a dragon is something strong, resistant, and entitled to its own existence, as long as its prepared to struggle for it against apparently oppositional concepts of equivalent strength. Both man and his mutable, reptilian, symbol-system other, derive form from one another. By virtue of their conflicting yet mutual natures is the balance of life and its challenges struck. That is the lesson.

(Stirring theme tune aside, it would have been good to have a little more questioning of the Rorke’s Drift episode – there’s lots to get your brainteeth into there, to do with how the ‘fighting spirit’ of Wales, presented in Wisdom 3 and other contemporary narratives as a nation suffering under colonial rule, itself became a tool of oppression during Britain’s C19th South African adventures.)

Page 17 Track 8: Shinobi Vs. Dragon Ninja by Lostprophets

I know it’s way trendy lately, but I just can’t get with Metal, in any of its permutations, although that said I’ve been introduced to the Black and Death subgenres lately and they do raise a smile, as well as a sort of baffled admiration for the eardrums of those who love it. I dunno - when I came up KISS t-shirts were highly embarassing items, to be ‘lost’ at the back of the wardrobe, never something you’d find gracing a supermodel’s front, doing a bit of grungey slumming. That’s because: KISS are a rubbish band, and anyone who reckons different are an idiot and can fuck off. Lostprohpets, however, sure know their way around a cool song title, amazingly apposite for the comic, raising interesting ponders on how informed Cornell was by the music here when he was writing the script. But I just can’t get with the track, my ears don’t know how to hear it. My loss, no doubt.

Red Dragon punches Shang-Chi off the page and almost into orbit. The inherent nobility of the King of Karate is only accentuated by the play of sunlight on his unconscious form, so much so that even the Dragon, who’s miles away by now and facing the wrong direction, has a change of heart and flies to his rescue. It sounds like I’m taking the piss, but actually it’s quite a touching scene, with excellent work form the art team – Manuel Garcia and Paul Neary, I think, who really should have been mentioned before now – making the Dragon’s facial expressions work so convincingly within his cartoony stylings.

Page 21 Track 9
Bulimic Beats by Catatonia

The fights over now, and we’re in reflective post-battle analysis mode, so we get this surprisingly nice little track from Britpop also-rans Catatonia. Their lead singer, Cerys Matthews, has recently made a change of career direction, from indie folk singer to reality TV celeb type, more known now for her slightly predictable on-off romance with an extremely bad ex-soap actor than her undeniable singy-songwritey talents. I saw Catatonia in a tent in, yes, Avalon once, and their music has always left me cold – easy, bouncy indie, perfect for shit nightclubs and bad beer - but watching them made me realise one thing: Matthews has got soul. It’s simple, elusive and impossible to describe, but when you see it you know it, and can’t help but be moved by it.

On a beach, presumably somewhere on the aforementioned, beautiful South Wales coast, Tink and Wisdom rake over their politically contrived marriage and weird love-lives, and Tink decides not to let her hurt feelings provoke a war that could wipe out two parallel Britains. Good on her. Shang-Chi shows up, and does a brilliant impression of his holiness guru rinpoche Steven Segal.

And that’s where the record ends, with a quiet moment where we can look back fondly and consolidate our memories on the musical and comicsy memories we’ve just shared. Tom and Shirl aside, it was pretty great, and we didn’t even get to Cate Le Bon or Los Campesinos!, or quite have the time to relax and trip over Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci. I think I’ve learnt something y’know – comic soundtracks aren’t always innately and horrifyingly annoying – sometimes they can be just fine. Although, if you know of any particularly try-hard stinkers, please do write in and let me know, so I can pretend to get all angry again.

Thanks for listening. Thanks Youtube. Thanks Paul Cornell for picking the tale and the tunes, and most especially, thanks Wales.

There’s lovely.

I had no idea….

You really wouldn’t have thought that one of Batman’s most famous rogues would have such a tangled backstory, would you? After sifting through that Nine Lives of Catwoman book, Ed Brubaker’s run, that shitty old Year One rip off miniseries and the most convoluted wikipedia entry I’ve read for any supervillain so far, I found myself absolutely none the wiser when it came to figuring out who the buggering fuck Selina Kyle is (or was) and where she came from. Catwoman’s sported enough spandex all-in-ones to start her own fashion line and has been, variously, a glamorous, uncostumed jewellery thief, a reformed criminal, a rich, kept, but abused housewife, a cat-gadget toting, punning and quipping 60s supervillainess, an unstable murderer, a prostitute, definitely not a prostitute but posing as one, a dominitrix, a street savvy rube and finally, in her present incarnation, a begoggled, leather-clad burglar.

And as for her supporting cast - her sister Maggie, her best friend and *pretend* daughter/little sister/ward Holly, Stan the pimp and her actual daughter, Helena - well, they’ve been run through more iterations than the original infinite earths could muster. Only sixty or so years of DC editorial could fuck it up this bad. No-one’s quite sure, even post-crisis, who the hell Catwoman really is. In short, then, Catwoman is one confused mess of a character, which is bloody ridiculous considering she’s as integral to the batverse as Two-Face and the Penguin. Sure, the latest take will be the one that’s considered cannon, but I think Cat’s many tailed, flailing history makes a mockery of that idea. And anyway, these posts aren’t about endorsing the current status quo, which I know is very strong, they’re about trying to make sense of and, hopefully, revitalise our top supervillains.

They could have made it easier…..

But maybe the apparent problem of cat-discontinuity is a good thing. Perhaps we should heed the advice of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards and ‘Honour thy error as a hidden intention’…..

Selina Kyle, in the way that she’s so bloody difficult to pin down and the way that she resists easy categorization, is nothing if not hugely autonomous. Dogs are dependable - they’ll come when you call, they’ll do what they’re told… Basically, they’ll be whatever you want them to be. But cats? No chance. Catwoman ploughs her own furrow and no one take is enough to nail her. She’ll be off out the cat-flap before you can say ‘Catillac’. And this could be a good thing - afterall, if her psychological/historical slipperiness ceases to be an inevitable component of who and what she is, we’ll have lost an essential ingredient that defines her. She should be by turns unstable, solid as a rock, muderous and heroic - not in a giggling, white faced clown kinda way, but there needs to be a ‘I want to stroke your belly but I’m not sure if the fangs will come out’ schtick going on. You’re never sure if its a good idea to get too close. We may egg on her relationship with Batman, but she might give him a claw to the face if he gets too complacent and doesn’t remember exactly who he’s dealing with. For all of her realism, the modern Catwoman is missing some of the mystery and unpredictabilty that makes her such a great character.

And that leads on to the second point. Loads of bat-foes have mystery - what the bejesus is going on the Joker’s mind? who can fathom the puzzles of the Riddler? who is the Black Glove?, etc. - but none of them deal in the same brand of mystery as the Batman, the just-when-you-think-you’ve-got-me-cornered-I-suddenly-vanish-into-thin-air kind. Except for Catwoman. And I think, after perusing recent copies of the book, that this is one of her strengths that isn’t played to nearly as much as it should be. She’s a super thief, for lordy’s sake, and that’s not just about carrying around a swagbag-rucksack on yer back and hanging, suspended, from the ceiling above a priceless work of art in a vaulted showroom that’s riddled with hi-tech, anti-burglery hooha, no sir - its about nicking the bloody thing in such a way that the readers are left as bemused as the museum guards, who, only minutes after the crime’s commited, arrive on their scene scratching their heads, because the piece has gone but there’s no fingerprints, the skylight above appears untouched, and as for the burglar themselves….*?* Catwoman should be the Harry Houdini of crime. No one knows how she gets in and out, and if we do ever get a glimpse of it, we’re only left with more questions than we had before. Like one of those annoying Derren Brown tricks where he sets about explaining the bastard, but only so he can reaaally confound the fuck out of you when he sics the prestige on yer ass. In this regard Selina Kyle is a great batvillain. She meets Brucie baby on his own territory and sometimes, in fact quite often, beats him at his own game. The Penguin and co. don’t hang out on the rooftops and free-climb superscrapers, but Catwoman does. She’s in many respects Batman’s female equivalent. Well, if it wasn’t for a few things.

She’s a burglar, she’s a woman and she’s poor.

I’ve never been too at home with the idea that Catwoman was a sex-worker in the conventional sense. Dominitrix, fine, but an out-and-out ‘I’m was a prostitute with a brutal real-life pimp and everything’, not so much. To start with, it just feels a bit creepy and exploitative (and God knows there’s enough of that shit going around) - a post 80s vision of adult superheroics - but I also find it difficult to believe that a character as dangerous as Catwoman ever let herself get pushed around by anything as lowly as a man. But having said that, perhaps, a la the Joker, there’s nothing wrong with a big question mark hanging over Selina’s past (I mean, there is anyway). How she snatched and grabbed her super-identity might be better left unsolved, like the empty pedastal in the untouched museum. Catwoman is classy and alluring, sure (even though that’s probably just a trap), and she can pose as an it-girl if she chooses, but underneath it all she’s a kid from the streets. Why? Why can’t she be a bored housewife/society gal who turns to crime for kicks? Because these are the character elements that make her such a great foil for Batman.

Because who does she steal from?

People like Bruce Wayne. She’s up there on the wind-swept ledges for one reason and one reason only: to invade batland and rob rich men. The top of Gotham’s twim towers is Bruce Wayne’s safe space, isn’t it? It’s where he lives, yes? His domain? Wrong. Catwoman’s there too and she’s going to rub his face in it. I’ve got nothing against complexifying and humanizing Ms Kyle, but I still think she should be a criminal. She’s the working class kid made good who gives the finger to the aristocrats, exemplified by her batty arch-enemy. Okay, Wayne might have had a tough go of it, but a million young’uns the world over lose their parents every single day and its only because he’s so stinking rich that he can indulge and nurse that wound forever. Most people just have to get on with it. Poor Bruce, yes, but poor Selina? Definitely yes. Literally yes. ‘At least you get to work out your neuroses in a palace surrounded by stuffed tyranosaurs and batbikes…’, she seems to say. The point is, every time she thumbs her nose at Batman, something inside us should give a little cheer. Batman represents old money, old power and, essentially, patriarchy. He’s stiff and uptight and privileged. Selina Kyle is none of these things. Basically there’s an element of class war to everything she does and all of her best incarnations reflect this. Have a look at Year One again…

This is one of the reasons why DC writing staff and fans have had such an ambivalent relationship with the character. Thieves are bad, yes? Well, maybe not. Maybe its good to see a working class woman take charge and bring it to the big boys duking it out in the clouds. Afterall, they’re such an anally retentive, sexless bunch. Catwoman flaunts their po-faced self-righteousness in front of them, challenging it, mocking it - everything about her is designed to raise an eyebrow to their high and mighty attitude. These guys colonize the sky, like Greek Gods, but Cat’s not afraid to run a bit of home invasion on Mount Olympus. Selina, quite literally, gets away with it, and in the post-feminist nineties and zeroes what does she become but a super(anti)hero in her own right. We all instinctively question the financial and executive hegemony of the mega-rich. We no longer feel the need to desperately defend the rights of the arch-capitalist to his stack of money, and the modern take on Catwoman intuits this. She’s not presented as a straight down the line bad guy anymore because all of us have pinched a packet of chorizo from Tesco. Catwoman does steal from the rich and give to the poor, but the poor is herself. So, yeah, I think she should have a moral code but one that flies out the window when it comes to the world’s biggest diamond.

Take that, little Lord Fauntleroy!

When it comes to her aformentioned supporting cast, I don’t really give a damn. Except for Holly everyone else can take a running jump. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be other people in Catwoman’s life, just that no-one should take precendence over her little pal. Her relationship with Holly serves to underline Selina’s inability to settle, to remain fixed, owned or known by anyone. I like the idea that Holly is the only stable point in her wayward existence. That by bringing out the closeness between them, we effectively illuminate the lack of any real intimacy she shares with anybody else. By making Holly the exception to the rule, Selina emerges as even more independently minded, even more elusive. Holly should be the one corner of her life that Catwoman will defend tooth and nail. She’s the fulcrum and the repository for Selina’s past, all her secrets - her loves, her hates and fears - wrapped up in a tiny bundle of girlish flesh. In short, her defenseless humanity. The part of her that can be touched and loved and hurt. Everything and everyone else she should be able to drop at a moments notice, like a cat who discovers the neighbours supply tastier food than hir would be owners, who wanders out into the night one evening, never to return.

Finally, there’s the supernatural thing: cats and their nine lives. I don’t mean literal superpowers that allow Selina to thwart Thanatos, but, again, did she fall, or didn’t she? The Penguin must have skewered her with his umbrella that time, surely? Well, if you can’t pin her down in life, then you musn’t be too sure about her in death… That would go some way to explain all her different incarnations. She disappears for a while and returns, reinvented, to plague the penthouses of Gotham all over again. Perhaps the Joker isn’t the only DC baddy with a super-persona? Perhaps Catwoman enjoys one too, but an infinitely more benign one. If the Clown Prince of Crime is Batman’s distorted reflection, then possibly Selina Kyle’s different looks are all about tweaking his nose. ‘You’ve got a Batmobile, have you?’, she laughs. ‘Well I’ve got a new Catmobile too, but I stole all the parts!’

The problem with my position on Catwoman is, I think, that this take on the character doesn’t sit well with an ongoing book. How can she retain any real ambiguity if we’re prying into her innermost thoughts every week? This isn’t to say that I dislike the modern cat-book - I absolutely don’t - just that I don’t think she’s the pure form, the essential, platonic cat, that resides somewhere in the back of our minds. She’s just another good revision. I want to make it all fit. Just as Grant has melded the entirety of the bat-continuity together, I’d like to see the nine lives of Catwoman made sense of, split-leg skirts and all. I’m interested in interrogating Catwoman as super-position - the gestalt of all she is and has been. Perhaps each new persona is consciously arrived at, like a form of super-armour, like drag, and the throbbing core of her is deliberately fenced off in an attempt to not only shield itself, but also for fun. She undermines the hard surfaces of the known world viewed from the roof of Wayne Corp - the eternal whisper in Batman’s ear, Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway-style:

‘YOU CAN NEVER HAVE ME?’

Consciously deconstructing and reconstructing herself - in and out, like a good bank job - Catwoman can never be effectively policed.

If Batman’s a self made man, then Catwoman’s very definitely a self made woman and she’s probably more ingenious considering she’s had to work that much harder for all of it. Afterall, she didn’t have the luxury of trust-fund funded moral high ground when she was starting out.

Faster pussycat! Kill! Kill!

P.S. Obviously I’ve completely ignored the fact that Holly’s the new Catwoman. Do I look like I give a shit? Also, there needs to be more Catwoman stories with fuck off great black panthers.

Mustn’t let the twenties pass without a mention of Casanova 14. Non-specific spoilers hereafter, about a spF 8, mildly alkaline spoilers.

The past few issues have established this book as a real star of the stands. Building on a run of at least two good issues, no. 14 is itself a huge step-up in quality even from the impressive heights it had reached earlier. Be under no illusions - it’s an intelligent, ambitious book, that manages to fizz the forebrain, thrill the adrenaline glands and softly touch the heart. It has action, romance, sex, fun, pain, and all manner of high strangeness, and puts them to work in a way that is currently unique. The layers of structure, delicate and subtle, make the reader sit right upright and engage with the text - a living thing with wise and curious eyes. Reading Casanova makes you Read. No other genre book out there today does that - Casanova makes you realise how complacent you’ve become, how prepared to put up with any old spandex-wrapped crap you are, and makes you ashamed of that state of affairs. It’s a good comic, and it’s good for comics.

Basically, in issue 14 there’s a Twist. Way back in the history mist, there was a Hallowe’en bash and two Mihndless Ones were talking about the new Bruce Willis movie, out that week. The Mindless knew exactly four things about the movie: it was called The Sixth Sense. It had Bruce Willis in it. It was about some kid who could see dead people. It had a Twist. ‘Bet Bruce Willis is dead’ slurred a Mindless. And really, what else could Bruce be? Ever since that moment, Twists have been shit.

The Twist in Casanova 14 is not shit. It arrives stealthily, beautifully, ringing like a downpour of golden pennies. Crucially for a Twist, it entirely recontextualises all the previous issues, renews them completely. It is a generous and open thing for the comic to do - it instantly turns seven comic books you have read into seven comic books you have not yet read. The inevitable return to this second volume, ‘Gula’ (ancient Iraqi goddess of health and punisher of bad rulers - cheers Wicky-P; Latin for ‘gluttony’ - cheers weird knowledge of unknown provenance and origin), will be an utter delight.

There has to be a But, of course. No free blowjobs here.

It’s the same old moan unfortunately - for all its many staggering highs and various well-groomed charms, Casanova hasn’t shaked the winnet that’s been hanging off it’s arse since the first issue of book one: It just can’t stop fucking smirking at you. It absolutely will not wipe that ‘aren’t I cool?’ smug grin off its face. This means that there are a number of Mindless Ones out there - smart, sensitive, sexy souls to a Mindless - who don’t get this book, who sneer right back in its handsome face, not bothered by the treats they suspect they’re really missing. The problem, the cause for this willful nose-chopping and face-spiting, is unfortunately the man himself, Matt Lightscameraction! Fraction.

(First rule of cool school - Stop waving your arms about telling everyone how cool you are.)

16 pages of strip + covers isn’t great for a printers. You”re going to need some padding. The no-ads, one-colour, low-price format of Casanova is one of the many things that makes it exceptional, and also that makes Image the most interesting comic book publisher - for Mindless action freaks anyway - currently in America. But there will be some pages at the back which you’ll need to fill. There is a perfectly good, time-honoured method of doing this, and it’s called a letter’s page. Folk seem to call it ‘backmatter’ these days. For whatever reason, perhaps a noble notion to emulate some of the advantages of hypertext by providing a few annotations; or a thought to give the fan horde a peek behind the green curtain; or just a smart business move to cultivate the extent of his name/brand recognition, Fraction has always opted to fill out Casanova’s flab with some ‘this is me’ first-person reflections on some aspect of the issue itself (with occasional interjections from his art-supremo partners Ba or Moon). It seems like a small thing to bitch about, and it is, but we fanboy princesses have delicate skins that can feel a pea through limitless layers of paper and mylar and acid-free backing board. (And it’s shame to mar such a good bookwith anything, especially something as aviodable as, whisper it, artistic ego.) These rambles, though frequently well-written or interesting in their own right, have covered such burning topics as Fraction’s general circumstances and state of mind as he was writing the issue, and the story’s influences and intentions. And something about it doesn’t sit right. For a comic as broad and multiply rewarding as Casanova, to have the author give an editorial at the end of each episode can only be a limiting exercise, can only serve to reduce, not increase the range of possible responses that the reader can make. Behind the curtain is just a crap old guy, not an all-powerful wizard, remember?

The backspatter is most annoying (and this whole problem is just annoying, not evil or anything, but sometimes it is very annoying indeed) when Fraction lists his megaclectic musical influences, as he does frequently. One can only assume he is doing this for the best, Pater-esque reasons, but sadly (annoyingly!) he always comes off like someone from an indie band giving their first fanzine interview. Id est: Annoying. Just as all the best elements of Casanova peak with issue 14, so has this unfortunate tendency, to the point where he lists tracks for a mixtape to accompany the reading experience, the definitive soundtrack. This even bleeds over into the strip itself, with each scene given its own title-tune, as to be enjoyed simultaneously. This might seem like a novel, harmless idea - but it doesn’t match up. It’s just damn daft compared to all the smart moves made in the rest of the book. Example: probably the best-known track on there is Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’, an enormous, bombastic, affirmative track, that for some reason is matched with the most downbeat, saddest, almost tragic scene that this book has yet managed. Scene and song do not belong together, even if one does begin with the line ‘When I was a little girl…’. There’s a problem of taste here too. What if the reader isn’t interested in Dan Le Sac? (Dan My Sack more like - for the blissfully ignorant: Basically the ‘Preach! Preacher!! Preacherman!!!’ episode of Nathan Barley stretched out into a music career. Schoolboy French puns and cheap soapboxery somehow escaped from Speaker’s Corner and on your radio. Samples so obvious even Kanye West would turn them down.) Don’t tell me what to listen to with my comics, cheers. That’s up to me. Besides, dense and layered though this comic may be, you can’t spend four minutes reading three pages. Even if you pore over each panel, you’re still going to be finished by track five or so, with nine more to go. Fraction isn’t a film director. Matching music to the visuals isn’t one of the options availabe to him, but for some reason he thinks it’s worth a try anyway. Each individual reader is the one who gets to decide what music accompanies a comic book. That’s one of the good things about reading comics (websites, books, newspapers…) - you can experience and enjoy them alongside music (telly, conversation…) as you see fit.

This is getting petty of course. But there’s quite possibly a deep malaise at work here, and it’s not just Disco Vicar syndrome. By flashing its cool credentials so desperately, as though responding to critical voices that in reality disappeared long ago, Casanova dates itself. As if it isn’t just comfortable being a comic. When really, is anyone really telling the comic fans they aren’t hip anymore? Is anyone really still trying to ghettoise comics?

(Second rule of cool school - Ignore all the rules. I contain Multitudes/hypocrisy rocks

Because despite the regular gripes, comics are good and hip and way ahead of the mainstream, and don’t need to apologise for themselves or shout about how they’ve ‘got all this other cool shit going on in their lives actually’. Because we already won that battle. We’re there being cool already. We got the cool jeans and turned into god on the dancefloor. We haven’t had the ‘comics aren’t just for kids anymore’ conversation for nearly a decade. We don’t need to worry about our comics making us feel hip and validated, alluding to the crazy, sexy, cool world of the latest swinging tunes, like it’s another world or something. So a bit of Casanova, for all its composure and swagger, is really still battling with the shadows of the long departed, when it could leading the form into brand new territory.

*RE: The title. A music reference. As if I know what the fuck I’m talking about - been listening to one bloody Hawkwind record for nearly a year now.

See - it’s annoying, isn’t it?

This post contains some pretty strong stuff, so if you’re under 18 or easily offended, it might be better if you turn round and go back the way you came in.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you….

Anyway…. When I was twelve Games was a nightmare.

Okay, so I’m a comics geek and we’re always the last to get picked for the squad, and when the numbers finally whittle down to us, our selection is always greeted with moans and groans. But I was popular enough off the playing field, so I didn’t give a toss about that. Football’s rubbish anyway. No, what really got me was shower time. It’s bad enough hitting puberty without having to strip down to your nadgers in front of a room full of braying schoolboys. Anyone that had an inkling of hair down there, or was starting to grow or droop a little was fair game. I remember how poor old Simon Hudson’s massive, hairy willy was always a source of vicious fun.

‘It looks like an elephant!‘, they’d cry.

Poor bloke. Anyone would think he was King Dong, instead of a little boy in an outsized body obsessed with being a ninja and perfecting the art of deflecting shuriken, blindfolded in the dark.

Flash forward three years and the mockery’s still a go go, just that it’s the bald kids who are taking the flack this time. You couldn’t win. Everybody got a taste of shit pie. Everybody joined in with the taunts at some time or other. We were all bastards. By commenting loudly on other’s *deformity* we were somehow diverting attention from our own funny bits - the strange shapes and eruptions that burst and sprouted from our hard, clean, pre-pubescent skin. But there was another motivation too, apart from denial, for all the pointing and name calling. We wanted to look, to marvel, to test out the new language we’d use in this new world. We just didn’t want other people to know how fascinated by all of it we really were.

Step into the time-teleporter for a third time and our fizzing molecules settle into human form once more, somewhere in a field in deepest darkest East Sussex. This time I’m ten years old, traipsing through shoulder length corn with my brother, my friend Scott, and my then nanny, Wendy.

‘How do I know I won’t be gay?’, I ask.

I mean, I had a girlfriend [AAAaaw! - ed], Suzannah, and I definitely felt something powerful for Sarah Cox when I was 7, but was it lurve? Adolesence was on the horizon and I’d heard that it did things to you. I had yet to settle. It was all free-floating, up for grabs, for negotiation. Who knew what twisty contortions I’d undergo? Would I recognize the end result?

Would I be happy with it?

Or would it be like being buried alive?

THUNDER BOOMS!

And this time we venture back further still to a bedroom in the year 1978 where a young poodle tosses and turns in the night, reliving his least favourite nightmare. He’s left the safe confines of the dream living room, dream mum and the house-that-he-knows and begun, once again, the spiralling journey down, down, down the lonely staircase shrouded in red curtains. Each step, he knows, will bring him closer to the basement and the cackling crone that waits for him there. And he cannot will his feet to turn back. Who knows what terrible operations she will visit upon him… She stirs and stirs the swirling, noxious mixture in the vast metallic vat on her stove, like she has all the time in the world….

LIGHTNING FLASHES!

The nigredo, or ‘blackening’, is the first stage in the alchemical process, where the base matter separates out into the individual elements that inform it and, one by one, they begin to putrefy. The shadow-self of rotting, twisted flesh and mind has to be confronted and reassimilated into consciousness before the aenigma regis, the divine mystery, can unfold.

The alchemical laboratories of medieval and Renaissance Europe are so often depicted containing, not just pots, bubbling pans and steaming alembics, but other strange items like the suspended body of a crocodile or the cadaver of a toad. In fact, the toad was, in some manuscripts, one of the key symbols/ingredients of the nigredic process. It represented matter and soul in its sulphurous state - unclean, primitive and reptilian. But alchemists did not deny the physical, instead they desired to sublimate it. The end result of their work was to reveal the golden eagle that resided in that hunched, scaly, sickly body, and by doing so ascend to the Divine.

THE TOAD WAS BLACK

Charles Burns’ Black Hole refuses to turn away from it’s denied, fleshy subject matter. Instead it looks it straight in the face, pins it to a wall and rips out its guts. Perhaps its goals are less noble than those of Paracelsus, but its intention is certainly to bring all the hidden material that informs so much of our repressed, physical, life to light. Burns’ comic tells of the disturbing reality that festers beneath a small American town in the late 1970s, where ‘the bug’ - a virulent, sexually transmitted, skin distorting disease - wreaks havoc upon the flesh of its teenage inhabitants. It focuses primarily on three protagonists: Chris, a popular cheerleader type, Keith, a stoner, and Rob, a fairly straightforward (but from the outset already infected) love interest for Chris. But Chris straddles two realities - the world above, with it’s parties, shopping malls, dates, made for TV movies and high schools, and the world below, full of alien sex and kids whose deformities are so acute they’ve left home and gone into hiding, sheltering and forming their own outcast community in the dense woods that surround the town. All the lead characters will come to know this secret landscape/society intimately before the strip is through, because they will all contract the bug. Black Hole chronicles their journey from the light to the dark and what they do with it when they get there.

It would be tempting to indulge the obvious here and leap straight to the bug-as-AIDS metaphor, but I’m sure there’s already a ton of stuff of this type cluttering up the web. In short, it would be too obvious, and it isn’t really what interests me about Black Hole in the first place - in large part because I’m not sure its a terribly accurate parallel to draw. In fact I think its a fairly specious one. Sure the bug destroys lives, but not physically. It’s the townspeople’s response to the disease that fucks up its victims, not the disease itself. Indeed, its often conclusively stated within the text that the physical transformations it engenders can serve as a powerful lens through which we can reinterpret identity/the self and a gateway to exciting new brands of sexual pleasure. The bug isn’t necessarily limiting. In fact all those feelers and bony protrusions could, can and sometimes do act as tendrils connecting each of the main players to a radically overhauled sensual reality.

If only it wasn’t for those arseholes in the shower.

That first panel precis the whole thing very nicely, thank you. The chapter heading introduces itself as Biology 101. It tells us that this is a comicbook experiment whose focus is the body - a bold foray into the occult environment of the forests of veins, innards, spleens, tracts and cancers that compose our secret selves. This is the world behind the red curtain and these are the black magics of the gnarled witch who inhabits it, her cauldron frothing and bubbling with unspeakable things - torn limbs, faeces, sperm and other mystery fluids. But this is the body of an amphibian with all its conotations of damp, dark, wet places. This is the body of an alien, as all bodies ultimately are, and the hole torn in its chest is the portal, the siege perilous we have to confront if we are to seriously engage with this work.

‘It’s what’s inside that counts!’, goes the war-cry of Oprah Winfrey fans the world over.

Charles Burns agrees. Black Hole takes literally the standard narrative/thematic trope of 80s teen movies in that it sets about illuminating the private, hidden selves of its characters, exposing their insecurities, their sense of alienation, their deviancy and the hard fact of their physical bodies to the harsh light of day. But it doesn’t conclude, a la The Breakfast club, that once it’s all out in the open we’ll be greeted with love, cuddles, acceptance and a real, honest to goodness girlfriend. In Black Hole we’re not the vessel for a luminous being of radiant light, in point of fact we’re not a vessel at all, but we do contain….*things*. What we contain, however, might make others sick to look at. The girls will faint as the toad’s sliced open, and we’ll probably be told to put it away or just fuck off for good. Our skin and id are rigorously policed by our society, our peers and our super-egos, and woe betide anyone that allows them free expression. That way ostracism lies.

Teenagers are obviously the most fertile ground for exploring what happens when our physicality detonates into new forms. If Black Hole is a metaphor for anything, its the confusion, terror and excitement of this bodymind-warping period in each of our lives, when we are opened up to a whole new realm of experience. We slough off our childhoods, in order for the revised and eroticised body of the adult to emerge.

But it’s a very difficult time, and it’s hard to enjoy all the sensual novelty on its own undefinable terms. The sudden rush of teenage transfiguration is obscured by the desperate urge to reduce it all to something knowable safe and unthreatening. Everything gets lost in the all too predictable ritualistic jeers to ‘get them off!’ so that everyone can see ‘that lilly white ass!’. And the heteronormative sarcasms buried beneath statements like ‘I think I’m in love!’ defuse the lumpy, inert, dangling reality of the penis and its forbidden, glaring physicality. The thing itself seems like a strange creature from another dimension intruding on the scene. That can’t be what all the fuss is about, can it? That curiously inert trunk of flesh? That hairy sack? What is this weird beast caught up amid all that bluster and emotional armour? Let’s have a look at what’s underneath the layers and layers of laddish bullshit, shall we? How do we really appear beneath our clothes? What happens when we take our *suits* off and let it all hang out?

The teenager as depicted in Black Hole is symbolic of the broader feelings of confusion, disgust and fascination we all feel towards our bodies and our sexuality all of the time. The Conservative MP who turns out to enjoy the whips and chains and handcuffs of the S&M dungeon, the housewife who dreams of being violated by the tall dark stranger, the jock who likes to kiss boys - what do we do with these twisty versions of ourselves, but try to hide them behind a respectable veneer, the right clothes, the right language, the right groomed and scrubbed heads, shoulders, knees, toes and sexy bits? The flesh will not do as it’s told - it’s unruly and frightening and it won’t be boxed away. All of us have experienced homo/poly/whateversexual desire at some point in our lives, all of us have enjoyed pain, all of us have degraded ourselves or someone else for kicks and we all know about the sexy contours of the swimming pool or the plant - we’re just, by and large, deeply fucking dishonest about these things. Black Hole makes the darkness visible. It tells us that these unseemly cul de sacs on the road to pleasure, no matter how hard we try to negate them, are always hanging there, suspended, ready to be plucked. It understands that sexuality is a continuum instead of a binary, either/or process, just as a child does when he wonders about the sexual orientation of his future self. The penis would get as much pleasure from a man’s mouth as it would a woman’s, assuming the closed off heterosexual has no knowledge of the sex of the person performing the act. These aesthetic distinctions reside in our minds. And Burns is having none of it. He knows that, no matter how much we protest that we are normal, that we are straight, the body will always have its freakish way and its surface is never flat and dull, but always fantastically twisted and perverse.

Okay, this sequence clearly depicts Keith, and by inference the reader, being reborn as a sexualized, adult being as he sinks into the cavity in the frog’s belly, passes into blackness and reemerges with secret knowledge. This primal scene - this descent into a whirlpool of sperm tadpoles, phallic serpents, tangled, broken skin, death and the fragmented, washed up effluage of teenage lives - prefigures the experience of reading the comic and depicts, beautifully, the tatty building blocks of the walled-off self. This is the genetic code of the new Keith. The Keith that is the subject of Burns’ fascinating experiment. Is his being being flushed down the plughole here, or is he spurting forth, exploding from the centre? It’s difficult to find your way hereabouts. Up is down and left is right and all times seem to collapse into a moment. The gun, the vagina-like hole in the foot, and, again, the similar tear that stretches across the length of Chris’s back, the discarded bones - all of these things are important story elements that will occur later. The entire narrative is intuited in one massive, prenatal rush that posits the text not as a progression from point to point, but as a whole process. An organism. Because the realm of the flesh and the heart - of touch, taste and feeling - isn’t concerned with linearities. It lives in the endless sensory, mythic moment of pain and pleasure and orgasm - the eternal DNA coiled timeless and snake-like inside our genes. The teenage experience is forever and its uncalled for bodily explosions are a timeless component of the human experience which, despite our best attempts to compartamentalize them, refuse to be boxed away quite so easily. Our flesh and its vivid, scarlet desires spills out into the psychic environment in ways that we will forever try to forget, but lurk, unseen and waiting, nevertheless. And all the primary characters, in the dream sequences that criss-cross the book, will experience this fundamental, primeval, sensual reality.

And Burns takes this idea to its obvious conclusion. Just as in Woodring’s zany frankverse, Burns’ small town America - its trees, it’s lakes, its rock formations and its toilet bowls - contain a brooding, gaping animism.

Are those bushes or veins? Is that a beach at night or are we looking at microscopic photgraphy of an arm, say, or our intestines?

In Black Hole, our sexuality, our unfolded epidermis, is everywhere. We cannot escape it. Everything is fetishized, an extension of our skin-hunger, and, resultingly, even the ragged edges of a broken bottle or the brutal surfaces of a gun become imbued with a kind of iconic, libidinous power - novel territories of shattered bone and ripped feet - hard gun barrells and the sharp fingernails of shattered glass embedded in our backs. All of these things act as new and original entry points for suffering and pleasure. The reader is invited to venture forth, using the characters of Keith, Chris and Rob as hir vehicle, into this reconstructed, scrambled vision of the body. The body exploded out into the waking world, messy, slimy and beautiful.

It seems essential to Black Hole’s success that Burns chose to portray his character’s adventures in vivid black and white. Everything is constructed out of light and shadow. Particularly the shadow. As if we, the reader, and Burns himself, are peering into the gloom in an attempt to fathom the sunken mysteries that lie within it. The entire comic is presented to us as one vast black hole which we must penetrate if we are to unearth its treasures. Or is it the folds of the text’s skin? You see, the black and white serves another purpose, too: making good on the promise above, it confounds any clear differentiation between the flesh of the characters and their surroundings. This heightens the feeling that we are looking at a superorganism, the cells of which we might politely call Liza or Keith, but that inevitably extends beyond them - a sea of skin covering the land. Nowhere is this idea more powerfully articulated than in chapter 10, Window Pane, where Keith stumbles through the forest loaded on LSD and comes to the terrifying conclusion that it is alive, that the path itself is the winding spine of a monstrous creature, and it’s giant, baleful eye, the Moon. Unlike Woodring’s anthropomorphised bushes, houses and trees, however, the universe of Black Hole rings with a different kind of life, always fleshy as opposed to plastic and, unlike almost everything in Woodring’s work, fiercely sexy. And in the same way that the extended cartoon universe of Frank suggests the unbounded possibilities of a world outside the rigidly policed physical and moral jail cell of conventional toonland, so does the uncharted skinscape of Black Hole imply a similarly wide-ranging, perhaps shocking, plethora of psychosexual experiences. An environment of unrestricted pleasure and pain, where the traditional semiotics of sexuality, gender, sensuality, beauty and ugliness are destabilized and shuffled like a deck of cards.

Whether they like it or not, Rob, and Keith’s girlfriend, Liza, are made to sport mutations that perform sexual functions and serve to complicate their genders in outlandish ways. Liza’s phallic, protruding tail is not only, an indicator of sexual pleasure, what with it’s snaking and stiffening in response to her progress towards orgasm, but also a source of said pleasure itself. Holding it actually turns her on. It feels good. Sexy good. And this is all quite beside its implied potential as a masturbatory tool in and of itself…. Rob’s considerably more uptight about the vaginal mouth beneath his collar, but eventually, when he feels at his most safe having sex with Chris, he gives in to the revised eroticism it provides. In fact, it would appear that without the added stimulation it affords, his sexual encounters have previously been incomplete and that by letting Chris lick and kiss it, he’s opened himself to the fullness of his sexual potential. Gender starts to look blurry around the edges, like an out of focus photograph. Rob has a woman’s genitals in his neck and Liza has a penis attached to her spine. But is it a vagina or is it a mouth? The gasping neck wound is the repository and mouthpiece for Rob’s unspoken fears and lusts. It moans during coitus and later it whispers his nightmares to Chris while he sleeps on the beach. In the everyday world we have inuendo and our signs and signifiers point in one direction. Mouth equals pussy. Woman equals pussy. Gun equals cock. Man equals cock. In Black Hole these straight, conceptual throughlines are sabotaged, endlessly collapsing in on themselves.

etc…. (see below)

Burns relocates meaning, sexual symbols and gender signifiers like a big land developer relocates villagers and be-dreaded road protestors. The wound in the foot opens up to reveal a phallic tube that unfolds into a picture of a sea serpent who guards the fleshy gateway to an unholy womb of human filth and wasted lives. And who knows what we will find if we’re bold enough to voyage further inside this twisty genatalic labyrinth. Roles reverse and each intimation of a reproductive organ contains the suggestion of its opposite. It’s difficult to say where we are, what we will become or indeed what functions as what in this russian doll depiction of desire and self. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s only the popular kids at school that have a problem with it. the trick is to give in. To float with it.

‘Will I be gay?’

Who the fuck knows what you are?

When this stuff hits us, it is confusing and limitless. I probably had a more extensive sexual education than most kids before I ever had an orgasm or touched a girl’s special bits - Wendy and another nanny, Sandy, saw to that (and for the more unpleasant minded among you - NO, that’s not what I mean) - but that doesn’t mean that when it all eventually happened I had any kind of substantial handle on it. Who knows what I would have morphed into if I hadn’t learnt that this was right, and that was wrong. How many of our hang ups, neuroses and indeed psychoses are the product of the sexual and physical tramelling we’re constantly subjected to? Burns points out how grossly unfair it all is, how terribly unhappy it makes us that our most private selves have to go into exile, relegated to the filthy hovels of the unspoken, cowering in the tight thickets of our back-brains and nervous systems.

Our dreadful hideaway….

But tonight there’s visitors around the campfire. Rob, Keith and Chris all eventually make their way to this forgotten zone, fleeing persecution and seeking acceptance. Here they meet the other lost children, all of whom sport glorious and nauseating mutations of their own.

Some of these transformations are obvious, worn on the face, whereas others hide beneath the clothes. It’s telling that at least one of these sad specimens, Carla, never reveals her condition. We fail to glimpse the terrible truth that catapulted her from the cosy space of home and out into the night. Or do we? The kids around the camp fire are described as ‘losers’ and ‘freaks’ - they were the kids no-one spoke to at school. Perhaps the metaphor is fairly heavy handed here. Carla is, put simply, a fat girl. Burns could be underlining the fact that even this smallest of physical transgressions roots her firmly in the category of the unwanted. Could she be the skinny kid who brazenly dared to get big and flount the strictures of the body police? Whatever. They’re all unhappy, some probably suicidal, and I’m not sure Burns blames these sorry creatures for what happens next.

Out there in the badlands things decay, invert and go wrong. Denied healthy expression, the blacker urges of the body corrupt and dissolve the individual’s humanity. Before long, two of the outcasts are engaged in murder and, together, begin to litter the forest with doll-like visions of septic, misogynistic reality.These frightening totemic forms represent the mind untethered from the actual fact of bone, tissue and blood - a disturbingly alienated mind, shut away from the outside world and genuine interaction. They feel like an attempt to reconstruct a fallen, fragmented humanity. The last ditch efforts of a Frankenstein’s Monster mind to somehow explain and articulate itself, before the loosely bound string, wood and bone that hold it together gives way before the roaring dark. ‘Go no further!’, they warn, ‘You’ve seen enough!’

And we have.

Because madness and death are the ultimate black holes, and their inexorable, crushing gravity will, before the story is out, claim at least five lives.

Dave, the most disaffected of the runaways, denied the affections of the object of his desire, Chris, eventually loses it altogether and kills his partner in crime, himself and three others. This dark chain of events begins with a jock picking on Dave in a liquor store, demanding he leave the shop without food because his hideous appearance is too ’scary’ for his girlfriend. And this is the meat of it. Everything that placed Dave in the position he’s found himself in by that point - the homelessness, the vilification, the abandonment by friends and family, the deep, deep sexual alienation he feels - all of it is right there, in microcosm, bursting out of the cruel jock’s mouth. And finally he decides he’s had enough and he goes on a killing spree. As I pointed out above, Burns is at pains to point out how awful these kid’s lives are and how difficult we make things for ourselves. There’s something so real about the casual, banal unkindness of the macho, swaggering bastard denying a homeless man a meal just because he doesn’t look right. Again, it’s not the contortions of the flesh that are at fault, but the repressive cudgels of society at large. Perhaps Dave represents the next stage in human evolution, like an X-Man, but we’ll never know because he hates the world too much to stay in it and he wants to wipe it clean of his stain generally, using bullets to cut his friends from the Earth as though they were tumors.

But the moon-eye continues to gaze down on the survivors and the beast lumbers on.

Rob bites it, but Liza, Chris and Keith survive and, as the book draws to a close, begin their individual journeys across America. Although the scary stuff is never forgotten, the comic ends on a hopeful note. They’ve come out of hiding and the real business of dealing and getting on with life can begin. True, we have no idea how things will resolve themselves, but there’s the feeling that Keith and Chris are growing up and beginning to accept themselves. As the picture blurs and the channel starts to fizz with the interference of whatever it is we’re going to do when we put the book down, we leave Keith in bed beside his partner, Liza, as he slowly drifts away, returning to the tidal seashore of dream, womb and childhood, and the flotsam, jetsam, and forgotten trinkets of our discarded lives wash over him. Chris makes her way out to the shore too - our final glimpse of her resting in the crinkles and creases of the sea, gazing up into the night sky. ‘How could I leave all this behind?’, she wonders, exhausted with the tired, aching mysteries of the body, pointing to the fact that there are deeper mysteries still. In the end, the nigredo was only the first operation. It’s easy to get lost in the fleshy zones, but, Burns reminds us as we spin out and up into the Milkyway, we must always remember to keep one eye on the heavens, just so long as we don’t forget to be a little kinder to the different inside ourselves and those around us down here on the ground. Because, cornily, its only by ripping open the armour of our incarcerated, forbidden biology - the meat of who we are - that we open ourselves to the limitless possibilities represented by the stars. Burns, whether he knows it or not, is intuiting the latter stages of the alchemical process in the final images that complete his piece. Gold from shit? Black Hole’s too adult to fully endorse trite shit like that, but hopefully…..

For all of its apparent obsession with deranged faces and genetics run amok, Black Hole is still a distinctly anti-ocular piece. No, I’m not back in ‘It’s what’s inside that counts’ territory (although,as I’ve said previously, it does seem to make that claim, both literally and as a social rule), I just think that its primary concern is the realm of sensation. Throughout it, like the characters, we feel ourselves bound in a tight wad of fleshiness. We feel our bodies more vigorously, our skin closing in like a trap, or extending in tattered, fraying dispersions across the page. It is an acutely resensitizing work, and for all of its body horror, it holds out the promise of something more. Looking up at the sky with Chris, we feel relieved to have escaped - to be outside - but our appreciation of the glimmering, distant lights above would never be the same if we hadn’t been made to experience our physical forms so intensely, disturbingly and wonderfully. It feels as though it’s the first time in the course of the story that we really ever really get a glimpse of the world around us - that we ever really see it - without the filter of our suffocating, awesome biomass intruding. As I’ve mentioned somwhere up there, because it is anti-ocular, Black Hole isn’t too bothered about the neat categorizations that define our waking, everyday lives. It doesn’t give a monkeys about this being a table, that being a wood, or this, over here, being a man or a woman. Left or right. Good or bad. Burns brings home to us the everpresent but forsaken understanding that the needs of the body will so often conflict with the ways in which we’d prefer to view ourselves. We can flagellate and starve the toad as much as we want, but we can still never fully turn away from the fact of its existence.

Black Hole invites us to get to know it a little better, warts and all. It’s nice to see the old boy out of the cage and running wild, if only for a little while and even if the thrills it provides are largely vicarious because, well, we’d never knowingly allow ourselves do….that…..would we?

Earlier on this week, before I got started on this post, my girlfriend sent me out to get some toilet roll, and on the way I almost bumped into a man with a severe deformity. I like to think that I’m getting better at not staring, at treating people with a bit of dignity, but how does one pull away from the warped aesthetic gravity of a face like that? I returned with the toilet roll 10 minutes later and got on with the business of blogging, doing the washing up, hoovering the flat, being a boyfriend, preparing for work and general everydayness, until now putting his face to the back of my mind.

By God I’ve written some long winded posts. Everyone else has only managed to throw up one or two bigguns, but this here mindless poodle has at least five to his name and it’s time to give myself a break, in the name of my love-life, my free time and my sanity. So here it is, the first of a what will be an occassional, but altogether less masochistic, series of posts where I try to get to grips with what makes some of our fave baddies tick and why they have proven to be so popular. And maybe along the way unearth a few ideas that will serve as pointers, guiding today’s creative powerhouses towards a deeper understanding of their subject matter and, resultingly, a brighter, altogether more interesting future for the characters themselves.

Because everyone at DC gives a flying fuck what I think.

I’ve got this annoying writer’s nervous tick which means I try to make sure that each of my posts somehow segues neatly into the next - that there’s a thematic throughline, even if it’s only tangential. Of course, with this in mind, it makes sense that today’s Rogue of choice, Harley Quinn, should initially spring from a cartoon.

And you can tell because, to this very day, no matter how much time is spent on trying to flesh her out, she still retains cartoonish qualities: she’s wildly expressive, kooky and wide-eyed, she wields Acme style mallets and, moreover, there’s something springy, two-dimensional and slippery about her - all that insane bouncing and backflipping between frames and the way she pours herself across the panels. But there’s something else that adds to the general feeling of intangibility that pervades Harley. Something to do with her obsessive love affair with the Joker and the way that it’s almost her one, essential, characteristic. The way he defines her. She’s incomplete. Ephemeral.

But we’ll save further musings on that score for later….

There are very few comics characters who have successfully made the transition from cartoon to comic book. To be honest, I really can’t think of any off the top of my head - certainly not any with the enduring power of Ms Quinn. So why is she so popular? Well, I would hazard that there are a variety of contributory factors. To begin with, she has oodles of cheesecake potential - I had to wade through a sea of Harley porn in order to find the images that litter this post. Fandom just loves to slaver over a new, curvy, supervillain, but I think there’s more to it than that. As I mentioned above, her toonish roots come with the suggestion that she’s a caricature of a person. The line is simpler, less complex and perhaps less threatening, and her overall *plasticity* allows for a multitude of (im)possible permutations and violations - we’re back in Wile E Coyote territory, but for mature readers. Nasty. This combined with her potentially slashable relationship with Poison Ivy and the strong S&M dynamic between her and the Joker (more on both of these things later), make for some very dodgy, err… ‘fan art’ indeed.

Okay, Harley Quinn equals sexy-time - so far, so good - but moving on (because, you know: Eyyeuew!), there’s another good, surface, reason for her mass appeal…. Batman’s rogues can be divided into roughly two camps, the flamboyant colourful lunatics with their special gadgets, themed crimes and punned names (The Riddler, The Penguin, The Mad Hatter, Calender Man) and the leering, bestial, monstrous grotesques (Clayface, Bane, Killer Croc, The Joker). Alright, so there’s some overlap, but broadly speaking I’d say Harley fits very nicely into the former category. No matter how backbreaky the Batbooks get, this 1960s type tendency always makes its voice heard - it never quite goes away - and Harley remains its most recent, and consistent, expression. If Batman’s Gotham is, quite literally, an Underworld - with all its mythic conotations of dream, delirium and madness - where one man attempts to engage in battle his primal demons, then it makes sense that the shapes it adopts should occassionally veer towards the garishly improbable and dementedly carnivalesque. Psychosis doesn’t just come in grey - sometimes it sports its very own jokermobile and oversized, branded, chainsaw.

How’s that for a defence of the sillier aspects of the Batverse?

So Harley’s representative of a grand old bat-tradition, but she’s also reflects a more modern comic book trend - reiteration. If Botswana Beast ever gets it finished, you can look forward to a more complete overview of the new Prismatic Age and what it means bedecking your screens at some time in the future, but, for today’s purposes at least, the basic idea doesn’t require a great deal of preamble: comic book fans have started to really dig *anti-matter* knock-offs of their favourite heroes and villains. Just look at everything from early nineties Spiderman, to Supermans Red and Blue, to the replacement Batmen. Something about these clones serves to reinforce the original, underlining their iconic status and extending their reach. They appeal to the post-modernist in all of us, who secretly enjoys seeing the superhero subverted, reappropriated and transformed. Harley performs this function in relation to the Joker. And that really leads me onto the core ideas that inspired me to put together this article.

Harley Quinn’s origin story can be summarised like this: top psychiatrist, Dr. Harleen Quinzel, sets out to unravel the mystery of the Joker, but very quickly becomes dangerously infatuated with him, spiralling into a psychotic love affair that spells doom for all things bat-related. It’s the classic needy oddball meets charismatic murderer and falls head-over-heels narrative all over again. We’ve heard it all before - in the movies, the cliches people spout over a pint in the pub about the magnetism of the psychopathic personality type and in a million fan letters winging their way to the maximum security wing of your local prison. It’s a cliche, and, frankly, pretty boring. So why should we give a shit? Why on Earth does Harley’s tale resonate so powerfully? Because, inspite of some crappy writer’s best attempts to make him so, the Joker is no ordinary psycho.

Say what you like about Grant Morrison’s Joker diagnosis, at least his Joker-as-reflection-of-this-year’s-current-shadowy-zeitgiest is as brave, insightful and ambitious a take on the Clown Prince of Crime and his instruction manual as any I’ve seen. It explains away his unpredictability and all his various, disjointed incarnations better than any other model so far. In short, it makes him scary again. Just as, I would argue, the sad fate of Harleen Quinzel does too. You see, I relayed the skeleton of the Harley/Joker pairing above, but I think there’s a different, deeper and infinitely more terrifying story to tell that roils and churns beneath the surface. There’s a new myth here that the readers feel in their hearts and bones. What really happened there in that padded cell that night, as the lightning flashed outside and the madmen wailed and Harleen Quinzel gave way to Harley Quinn?

A lot of the bat-writers seem to forget that