Mindless Ones

So, after a very quick web trawl I came across some of the images that’ve inspired Mr Grunt Morigund’s bat-novel.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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What

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‘It’s just superhero poetry’

Grant Morrison

Okay, I don’t have a link to it, but somewhere at the back of the collected Rogan Josh edition Milligan has a bit of a waffle about how you should read his book. I don’t know why it’s there – perhaps Karen Berger insisted on it, or maybe he just felt a mite uncomfortable about throwing it out there into the greasy mitts of the phillistines – but, regardless:

Who gives a flying fuck how to read this great shit?

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For those unaware of the distinction between hard and soft sci-fi, the former spends its time postulating imaginary futures that unfold out of pre-existing science/theory, whereas the latter jettisons notions of the possible, concerning itself with the imaginary part of the equation. In its most basic form, it deals with the psychological and sociolological impact of tomorrow – the soft sciences – but at its logical extremes it details societies, internal states and/or technologies beyond comprehension, whose function and form defy simple explanation. It’s the really far-out stuff that we’ll be focusing on today. Think Phillip K Dick or Slaughterhouse 5. Just when you think you’ve modeled the universe successfully, Dick gives you the finger and you’re unsure whether Valis is a satellite broadcasting psychic signals from behind the moon, a program hard-wired into the human genome designed to free us all, God, the ramblings of a psychotic mind or all of the above. The surfaces of things becomes slippery and the gravitational core breaks down. At its most exciting, soft sci-fi displays an anarchic disregard for reductive, straightforward readings and, resultingly, often ditches conventional prose altogether, segueing into deeply subjective, experimental and non-linear writing styles, a la Jeff Noon or Steve Aylett. The emphasis in these books centers around technology as pure aesthetic. The designer drugs of Noon’s cybernetic Manchester frustrate the boundaries between the inner and outer worlds. The psychic environments described by his fiction allow for a free exchange between fantasy and reality –– creatures are wrenched out of trips, the main drug of choice, the Vurt feather, is itself discovered in virtual reality and at points the characters themselves seem to collapse into pure text…..

And all of this is well and good, but what has it got to do with Man-Ape, you might ask?

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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.

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It took me a long time to crack it, but I feel I’ve finally got a handle on what’s wrong with the comics industry: The colon. And Mark Millar. But stepping back a bit, and pushing Millar aside till next week (inspite of the resonances – Millar’s obsession with anal rape, for instance), I can’t help coming to the conclusion that the preoccupation with storing, categorizing and consistency that typically characterizes the anal personality type serves as a fairly accurate general diagnosis for all that ails fandom and WHY SO MANY COMICS ARE SHIT ™.

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