Mindless Ones

Having just finished appraising the site in all its mindless glory, I feel slightly churlish contributing yet another miserable rant, bitching on and on about the state of the industry. The Disco Horror post was pure 20jazzfunkgreats, dosed up to the eyeballs with neon and ultra-viole(n)t good times. Anyone would think Qartthqrq, or whatever he’s called, actually enjoyed going clubbing. It’s that convincing. But, if you look a little closer, beneath the surface, I’m sure you’ll understand the poodle’s got hir sights set on a brighter, candy-floss horizon too. Only we’ve got to exterminate a few people on the way. And we all know death and destruction always leads to a brighter tomorrow.

Just ask Dagger.

Okay, next time with the celebration, now with MILLAR DESTRUCTION. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Mark’s a great guy and he loves dolphins and cuddles babies and whatever, but he still has to go. Or, rather, what he represents has to go, because, unhappily, it’s the enemy of candy-floss horizon’s everywhere – yes indeed it is – for there are no candy-floss horizons in the REAL WORLD.

‘I have a curious interest in seeing superheroes in the real world. It’s a theme that runs through my work, I suppose….’

Thus spake Millar in the first part of his ‘One Man Event’ interview t’other week, and, by God, what a time saver that little trip to Newsarama turned out to be! I could’ve spent a whole day trawling Millarworld and still failed to find a quote that so perfectly illustrated Millar’s attitude to writing comic books. So, let’s get down to business: what is this real world business about, anyway? What does it mean? Well, up until quite recently, it tended to reference the 80’s world of dark, deconstructionist superhero fantasy – Dark Knight, Watchmen, etc. – replete with its various obsessions concerning broken backs, rape, girlfriends in refrigerators, the Joker as a deviant gay and implicit apologies for reading about something as childish as superheroes in the first place. Broadly, it’s this sense of tedious guilt that continues to inform the superbooks, and writers there-of, that self-define as realistic. Ultimate(s)ly (see what I did there!) it serves as an emotional through-line, from the dark age to the present day and the advent of the wide-screen comic.

Post 1987, the comics readership quite literally grows up. I don’t know what the profile of the average reader actually is, but I’m willing to bet it’s not not ten year olds. And it’s not girls. No, it’s boys. BOY-MEN. And a lot of us seem to have a rather skewed, boys-eye-view of what constitutes ‘realistic’. Sure, the news comes into it – all proper grown ups are concerned with Iraq, the invisible enemy within and US foreign policy – and our stories have to reflect these concerns, but only if we throw superheroes into the mix, combined with a liberal dose of swearing, blood, huge explosions and homo-terror. And so we come to the big, dumb, but oh-so-topical movie-comics that inform the zeroes: The Authority and The Ultimates.

Don’t get me wrong, boys and gals, I dug the fuck out of both books when they debuted just like everyone else – in fact, typical apologist that I am, I defended The Ultimates’ lateness to all who came a’ moaning – but after half a decade of forgotten deadlines, even I began to jade a little. The cracks began to show. Essentially, for this reader at least, The Ultimates reached and breached its conceptual sell by date. I think it was 2005 when I really started to feel that the rot had set in; somewhere around the advent of Seven Soldiers, All Star Superman and when I first picked up Monkey vs Robot, Frank and Gon. In the end, I just wanted comics to weird me out again. I wanted strangeness and magic. Superman sat sleepily on that cloud was clearly both mission statement and manifesto – Grant Morrison proclaiming a return to the comic book as repository for fantasy and dreams. It was fairy story stuff. It was about the limitless possibilities of the imagination. It was childish. Everything The Ultimates with its grinning sadists and News 24 focus wasn’t.

Horrendousness!

And in the final analysis, that’s what bugs me. Millar’s a solid storyteller, streets ahead of a million people in the game, but in the end it’s just all so banal. Sure, there are action movie thrills to be had from his books, but his heroes rarely put the zap on our heads. If ever. To be honest, it makes perfect sense that the dawn of the Millar-age should have neatly coincided with the comic panel that confuses itself with a movie frame. This interminable aping of not just big screen blockbusterdom but also of the serialized drama has continued pretty much unabated from the early zeroes till now, and the horizon has necessarily narrowed because the biggest writers in the medium no longer refer to comics for their inspiration, instead relying on the easily absorbed tropes of the action flick. As the subject matter becomes increasingly pedestrian, so does the form. There’s nothing new or challenging going on when a comic so closely resembles a storyboard. We all know how to read a film, but what about Jimmy Corrigan or We3? Where are the boundaries being tested in Marvels current crop? Where are the comic books shouting ‘Look at me! Look at what the fuck I can do!’?

Millar, Bendis, et al have all entertained me at some point or another, but they’ve started to feel stale. I understand adult to mean mature, accomplished, daring, self-reliant… There’s nothing mature about sending Captain America to Iraq – it’s just tired and obvious. The topical has become a lazy short-hand for depth, and, to be honest there really is nothing to the alleged issues informing Millar’s books. This stuff isn’t exactly Joe Sacco or Marjane Satrapi and is in real danger of trivialising the subjects it sets out to explore. So fuck all that. I want superhero comics to stand on their own two feet, without the photo-referencing, the black gutters, the soap-operatics, the linear panel layouts and the rest of it. I want them to be a unique form that pushes at the limits of narrative and storytelling.

Accomplished, daring, self reliant.

I want them to stop apologizing for not being an everyday form of entertainment, and I want writers to stop apologizing for enjoying superheroes by placing them in ‘adult situations’. I may sound like a hard-arse about this, but I can’t think of a current Marvel title that doesn’t fall into the grown-up telly trap.

I want Millar to stop.

And what is that Maddy McCann business about, anyway?