Mindless Ones

Man, no-one writes assholes and losers like David Lapham. His merciless dissection of Middle America’s underbelly easily matches Dan Clowes or Chris Ware. Plus he has tonnes more fights and dancing. In fact fighting and dancing is a nice way to sum up Young Liars his new ongoing from Vertigo, seeing as how the first issue begins with a band about to start a riotous gig before cutting immediately to a girl’s fist smashing into a bouncer’s nose.

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Kick-Ass #2
Written by Mark Millar
Drawn by John Romita Jr
Published by Icon

I was uncertain after reading the first instalment, but this confirms it. There’s a very bad smell around this comic. The smell of unwashed boy. The smell of socks encrusted with… well, let’s just say “encrusted” and leave it at that, shall we? Sure, Mark Millar’s wannabe superhero (a kid from the really real world who loves to talk about the things you the reader love to talk about) had the shit kicked out of him last issue, but this time – tres excite! – he’s back and KICKING the bad guys ASSES.

With his truncheon.

Turns out that Mark is, in all seriousness, spaffing off the worst kind of nerd power fantasy*. That he keeps highlighting his obsession with really real superheroes, and thereby tacitly suggesting that KICK ASS is written with the really real world in mind, causes me to worry about his mental health, if not his mental age. Hackneyed talk of the supersuit as fetish gear, and having the hero enjoy being bashed up as he administers street justice do not confer a sense of the really real, signpost a skein of maturity, or hide the trite storytelling dynamics at work here (dynamics that couldn’t be more at odds with Millar’s talk of realism), they just serve to make the icky even ickier.

So, now that I’ve forced my way through issue 2, my feelings are crystallized: I wouldn’t want to describe Kick-Ass as bad, in the same way that I wouldn’t want to describe the aforementioned sock as ‘bad’. ‘Bad’ doesn’t really capture what I think is wrong with the book; it’s not so much that it’s poorly written, and, hey, the art is predictably skilful. Nope, there’s just better, more accurate ways of describing it, just as there are better more accurate ways to describe the sock. Words like ‘rank’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘covered with spunk’.

*I say ‘the worst’ because we’re kinda in the business of nerd power fantasies around here. Never let it be said that I don’t enjoy a good nerdish power fantasy. I live and breath nerdish power fantasies

Secret Invasion #1
Written by Brian Bendis
Drawn by John Romita Jr
Published by Marvel Comics

Say what you like about this issue, Secret Invasion’s premise is about fifty quadrillion times more sturdy than Civil War’s. Marvel’s attempts to map their last mega-crossover over real world events didn’t so much come across as implausible, more downright fraudulent. Some might say distastefully opportunistic.

Secret Invasion, on the other hand, is traipsing across well worn ground, so even if it doesn’t manage to keep the continuity hounds at bay, there’s no excuse if it fails to work for those of us who don’t care whether Luke Cage couldn’t have been kidnapped by Skrulls because blah, blah, blah, boring, boring, boring. So I’m happy to say that on the strength of this issue it seems to be doing fine. Out is Bendis’s trademark decompression, and in comes the destruction of S.W.O.R.D, the implosion of the Baxter Building, the hijacking of global weapon systems, the neutralization of Iron Man, three big Skrull reveals, and one rather hefty curve ball. Okay, it ain’t All Star Superman 10 (more on that later), it isn’t particularly inspired stuff – quite the opposite, in fact. What it is is a competently written book that sets up the story at a rapid pace, and manages to entertain in the process. Granted, those of us who’ve been following the Avengers don’t need to bother with the first few pages, but the expository stuff is thankfully short-lived and probably entirely necessary.

If I had to point towards anything faulty, I’d suggest that the twist ending is somewhat undermined by the fact that a number of the character’s in question have their own books. To fuck with them, in the way that’s being suggested, would be pretty unforgivable, and as a consequence I can’t help but feel that it’s all a big Skrull fake out. On the strength of this I’ll be happy to check back next month to see if I’m wrong.

All Star Superman #10
Written by Grant Morrison
Drawn by Frank Quitely
Colours by Jamie Grant
Published by DC Comics

Perhaps the best superhero comic ever written.

That is all

Kick-Ass #2
The last comics I bought by Mark Millar were the quietly-released final issues of The Unfunnies. It ends **SPOILER** with an evil comic book creator literally writing himself into his own strip, free to rape and murder his characters as he sees fit, a life of fictive freedom being preferable to a life of reality on death row. It was an amusingly nasty take on Grant Morrison’s fond old hyperfictionsuit riff, but not one that added much to the idea. Or at least it didn’t until Kick-Ass 2, where it is revealed that at some point in the recent past Mark Millar evidently wrote himself into the Marvel universe, for real. As in, that’s where he actually lives now. How else to explain the contents of this issue, where realism apparently reigns supreme, but comes in the form of circumstances and psychologies that could only ever seem plausible to someone who really lives in funnybook land?

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If I have to make up a bloggy reason why this post was written, it’s recent noise from the Factual Opinion that Andy Diggle’s current run on Hellblazer is the best it’s been in years. I picked one up, saw with relish that the colour palette they’re using still contains every conceivable shade of mud, put it down. To say it’s currently firing on all cylinders isn’t saying much, as Vertigo’s old horror warhorse is a perpetual disappointment, which it shouldn’t, because the basic ingredients are so solid. It’s about the street-sorcerer John Constantine, magic, and a bit of London grime, all mixed together with a quip and a crafty fag. Despite these perfect alchemical elements something inevitably goes wrong with the final potion, which rarely drips the creep and splatter I hunger for from anything so keen to proclaim itself a horror comic.

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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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We might be mindless monstrosities from the underverse, but like all geeks we’re convinced we know how comics should be written. We’re just self-involved and dumb that way. Hence this column, which I strongly suspect will be a staple of the blog for a long time to come. Blessed are you, the reader.

Now then, Disco…

Horror

What’s disco horror?

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So. Mindless Ones is good name for a comic blog, isn’t it? (I didn’t come up with it.) Conjures the notion of a ravening* horde, slavering* devotion to Dormammu, the Dark One, battling NeilAlieN on some etheric plateau adrift in this noosphere. Perhaps that’s exactly what we are. Perhaps we really are just that.

*Having no mouths to eat, only hands to type, I’m not so very sure a Mindless One such as I really can raven“? I can surely slaver, though.

Anyway, enough bullshit. I came here today to talk about the entire history of superhero comics because, well, better to start big and THEN drift into meandering personal vendettas and general self-loathing with a little credit hopefully in the bag, you know? Oh, and the love. Of the thing. Because they’re important to me, no matter how – generally, if the internet is to be believed – repugnant the fandom (like, whenever there’s a fan ‘outcry’, I’m like, “good”; I love seeing these risible chuds bathing their innards in acid,) how venal the publishers, how dubious the sexual and racial politics… there’s a massive iconic energy these things harness, or can harness, thousands of cultural, thematic and generic worlds they (can) straddle in bright, tight trouserpants and they’re just. my. favourites.

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Barbelith cracks open and ten thousand demons claw their way into the world