It Sure Ain’t Miller Time Any More

In case comic fans across the world haven’t seen it yet, Frank Miller posted a rant about the Occupy Wall Street crowd that basically says they’re a bunch of whiny spoiled brats and that if they really wanted to make a difference in the world they’d go out and join the army instead of fighting the made-up villains at home. I’m sure by now a lot of people have focused on the generally-accepted irony of the man who popularized Batman as taking down the status quo and Daredevil standing up for the little guy—not to mention the man who wrote all those Sin City yarns about life on the streets pulling down the corrupt in power—saying that the people who are right in the real-life application of his ideology are the Kingpins, the Sal Falcones and the Roarks. (If you’re interested, you can see his rant here: http://frankmillerink.com/ )

You know, I despair of what Frank Miller has become, but I can’t exactly fault him for it. You see, his apparent ideological shift to championing the Roarks of Sin City coincidentally mirrors another Miller whose ideology shifted in the wake of 9/11: Dennis Miller.

For those unfortunate individuals who did not get to see Dennis Miller before he became exclusively Fox News’ parrot, you missed a great comedian. He owed a lot of his attitude to George Carlin, but he had a sense of intelligence and wordplay that really made you pay attention to him. Who else would compare a transparent vending machine to watching people commit suicide? Who else would say, “I was in LA recently…always love Louisiana.” Or who else would compare East and West Germany’s reunion with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis? “I was never a fan of their material before, and I don’t want to see what they have cooked up this time.” I loved it all, and I shamelessly stole a lot of his jokes in countless failed attempts to be cool in high school.

Then September 11^th, 2001 happened. Then George W. Bush and Dick Cheney really seemed to take us down the rabbit hole, rights were thought of as quaint fads of yesteryear, and some genuninely scary news started coming out, including the little fact that Osama bin Laden was no longer considered a high priority, as opposed to staying in Iraq forever and ever, despite the ever-increasing obviousness of the fact we’d gone to war with them for no reason. Okay, from all this you can probably tell that I’m not a George W. Bush fan, but I do know that even as there were people who were really against what Bush was doing, 9/11 hit a lot of people hard. We were at war with a hidden enemy, and the only things we knew about them for sure was that they were terrorists, and they were Muslim.

The reaction was actually pretty similar to how people felt about the Japanese in World War II. If you looked Asian, then you were probably a Japanese sympathizer. The reaction at that time was to gather up anyone who looked Japanese and stick them in an Internment Camp. If you notice any parallels with the German concentration camps, you’re not alone. I will say, in the defense of the U.S., that the treatment of the Japanese was slightly better than at Auschwitz or Dachau. There were no gas chambers and  no mass graves, but they did live in tarpaper shacks with very public communal bathrooms and has only $0.45 a day for rations. Even in 1943, this wasn’t a lot.

My point in all this is when you look at history, a lot of people reacted badly to the surprise attack on our country. It shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of people’s ideologies took a hard right to conservatism, because after the Trade Centers were attacked, after all those people were killed…it’s pretty easy to reach the conclusion that national security and defense is not all that matters, they are the only thing that matters. As a corollary, if a few rights have to be given up in order to achieve this…well, the ends justify the means.

Here’s the problem with taking a side in politics, though—you start to get sensitive to attacks on “your side.” I know that once I got to the point where I was pretty sure I wouldn’t vote Republican for a long while, attacks on liberals became less funny. And I had LOVED making fun of such liberal staples as political correctness! I’ve laughed at attempts to decriminalize marijuana, and thought that people who staged sit-ins were being unrealistic in solving the world’s problems. Granted, I realize this, and even though I have apparently taken a side, I can still laugh when somebody calls someone “differently abled,” which to my mind seems to be needlessly sugarcoating an issue, or make a good joke about the fact that Democrats in Congress have less spine than a paramecium. I think that’s missing from Frank and Dennis Miller, and I also think that’s why their work has suffered in recent years.

See, if you’re an artist like a comic book writer or a comedian, you have to have an open view of the world. Artists reflect what they see around them, and if you wholeheartedly cling to one ideology, you eventually find yourself getting swept up in it. It’s like Catholics who refuse to acknowledge that the Catholic church has a problem with child molestation, or like Penn State students refusing to acknowledge their football program had a problem with child molestation. If you believe too deeply in an ideology, you can find yourself saying that, as Dennis Miller said when talking about cutting benefits, “It’s time to acknowledge that there are people out there that aren’t worth saving. Just let ‘em die!” OR you can find yourself on the opposite end of the spectrum from where you were years ago, saying things you might have previously found abhorrent. I don’t know that Frank Miller or Dennis Miller actually really changed, but they ended up believing so deeply in one part of the conservative ideology that they had to accept the rest of the conservative ideology as well.

I don’t mean to tear into conservatives here, just so we’re clear. It can happen to almost any group. I think the solution is not that you shouldn’t believe in anything, but to keep in mind a sense of persepective. Otherwise, you may find yourself on Fox News. Or you may find yourself ranting against people and looking foolish online. Or, you know, you may find yourself pressed into service as a suicide bomber.

Sex, Lies, and Joe Paterno

 If you ask people who know me, they’ll tell you I’m not a sports fan. I used to have sports heroes, like Alan Trammel and Pete Rose, but these days I’m not really surprised when a scandal breaks out, like Tiger Woods or Brett Farve or the current mess with the Minnesota Vikings and their little spat with the state of Minnesota about whether they deserve a new stadium, paid for by the state of Minnesota of course. God forbid pro sports teams have to pay for something.

So in the last week, when the scandal broke at Penn State, I wasn’t too surprised that people rioted on behalf of Joe Paterno. What’s a few raped kids when winning a football game is at stake? That was before I did some reading into Penn State. It was also before This American Life devoted its show to Penn State. It painted an entirely different picture of the Penn State football team than I was expecting. I felt conflicted, and I was happy to feel that way. I’ve gotten much too comfortable with thinking of athletes as bad people by default. It was good to get the other side of the argument.

                 

Joe Paterno, if you weren’t familiar, has an incredible other side. After he wins his first championship, he tells the university they’re going to build…a new library. Because a top-notch university should have a top-notch library. I think that alone blew my mind. Most of the coaches I’m familiar with simply don’t care about academics. When I was in East Lansing, for instance, the Michigan State University football team got a new athletic center. This building was easily the nicest on campus at the time, and I found myself wondering how much money they had sunk into this place and how much could have been spent on renovating some of the older academic offices. Of course, the donor was a pro basketball player, but still…Joe Paterno was different. He held his players to a higher standard, and he chewed out a player for celebrating too much in the end zone after he had made a touchdown. For that kind of person, I think I would have less of a problem being a football fan.

                 

And yet. He ignored the fact that a graduate student had said one of the assistant coaches was raping children. He ignored it for ten years. That’s a hard thing for me to comprehend. How could someone who thought so much of doing the right thing, of holding people to a higher standard do that?

                

 You know what? I was going to dig in deep and bring up some psychological motivators. I was going to talk about the infamous case of Kitty Genoveese and point out that everyone involved pretty much just passed it on, doing the bare minimum in each case without really confronting the problem and then just assuming the proper actions had been taken. I was going to talk about whether things would be different if he had raped underage girls, and how strange it is that raping girls seems to be more of a concrete wrong to stop and that raping boys seems to not only be wrong, but surreal somehow, and how we can change that. But I’m sure other people are talking about the reasons on every single medium available to them. I wonder if they’ve brought in a psychologist on ESPN or if it’s the same bunch of journo-fans spinning their wheels. What I’m really thinking about is an associate in high school, Joe X.

                 

Joe and I fought sometimes, but toward the end we were kind of on good terms with each other. I knew nothing about him—we shared some classes together—and I cannot for the life of me remember seeing him at graduation, which was not uncommon.

                 

A few years ago, while I was talking with my mom on the phone, she asked if I’d gone to school with Joe X, and I replied that I had.

               

“Oh,” my mom said, and then paused. “Well…Joe was arrested for raping and murdering a woman last week.”

               

 Even now, it’s still hard for me to comprehend. Joe didn’t seem like a killer at all. Let me say that once more—he didn’t seem like a killer at all. I have no idea why he did what he did, and even now it’s hard to reconcile the Joe X in my mind with the Joe X who is on death row. It’s hard to think of Joe X and not feel some sympathy for Joe Paterno. Hey, someone you’ve known for a long time likes raping children—now what do you do?

                

 You know what again? It doesn’t matter. The part that’s indefensible isn’t that he knew—it’s that he knew about it ten years ago. Let me repeat that. Ten. Years. Ago. That’s ten years of more kids at risk, ten years of almost willful blindness. That’s the part that is so hard to wrap my head around. If not once in ten years did Joe Paterno look at Jerry Sandusky and think, “I wonder if he’s raped any more children,” then I will go cliff diving off Niagra Falls.

                 

To me, the biggest tragedy is that the more I learn about Joe Paterno, the more I think that there is someone who could have shattered the negative stereotype into a thousand pieces if I’d heard of him without the scandal. I would have liked that. Instead, I’m just unsurprised. Again.

Female Characters and Nerdy Birds

Noted comics blogger Jill Pantozzi recently put up a post discussing why Marvel doesn’t have any famous women. She also discusses the mystifying cancellation of X-23, written by novelist Marjorie M. Liu.

I’ve got to be honest, I agree with her, with one caveat—Marvel women can absolutely kick butt when it comes to team books. Here are some notable female characters that stand out for me who have only existed in teams:

Wasp, Scarlet Witch, Tigra, Storm, Rogue, Psylocke, Jean Grey, Moonstar/Mirage, Invisible Woman, Valkyrie, and Spider-Woman II.

These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure I could come up with more, but you get the idea. Then there are the female characters who apparently can’t keep a single title running to save their lives. She-Hulk is a pretty obvious stand-out in this category. So is Ms. Marvel. I should include Spider-Woman I in this category, but her ongoing was canceled decades ago.

I’ve got to be honest, part of the problem has to be the writers. She-Hulk seemed to be doing pretty well under Dan Slott’s guidance, but when Peter David took it over he disbarred She-Hulk, made her a bounty hunter, and introduced all sorts of subplots that first left me confused, and then just left me cold. As an aside, I hate to come down on Peter David like this because I genuinely like most of his work…but his She-Hulk run was completely unmemorable. The same goes with Ms. Marvel. It was somewhat interesting, but Brain Reed just constantly failed to deliver. I think part of that had to do with all the fallout from Civil War and Dark Reign, but come on—she recruits Machine Man and Sleepwalker to aid her in one issue, has a beach wrestling match with Tigra in another issue, and then disappears to be replaced by Moonstone, with absolutely no suspense, at least not to me.

This leaves us with one question—why are there so many great female characters in team Marvel books? I hate to harp on the point again, but let’s face it, female characters in team books have been fortunate enough to get some grade-A writers. Chris Claremont invented some of the greatest female characters in X-Men. Jean Grey became Phoenix under his reign, and then simply settled for being one of the most powerful telepaths and telekinetics in the Marvel Universe. Storm became the leader of the X-Men, Rogue became a mainstay and he turned Psylocke from a British telepath into essentially the female version of Wolverine—put through the wringer only to come out stronger on the other side.

John Byrne turned the She-Hulk into the fun-loving character we know and love today, someone who can either beat you in a physical fight or beat you in a mental battle using the legal system. He also turned the Invisible Girl into the Invisible Woman, and in the process made her one of the most powerful characters in the Marvel Universe.

I’d also like to point out that Fabian Nicieza is no slouch at this, either. Namorita and Firestar were second-rate castoffs before he put them in the New Warriors. Then he introduced Silhouette, and then Turbo, a new character based off an obscure old character.

You might be able to say that with team books writers can juggle characters, give each member some kind of subplot that you don’t have to spend too much time with before leaping to another character. So all the characters can shine, and everyone gets a chance to look good. You might also be able to say that when you put women in their own book, they are mostly written by men, and the target demographic is largely male, so who cares unless the heroines are being fetishized.

However, here’s another thought. Wolverine, one of the most popular characters to spin out of a team book, got his own miniseries back in the 80s when his popularity was soaring. It worked so well Marvel started putting out more miniseries, like Meltdown, and then spun him off into his own series. In the 90s, they did the same thing with Gambit. Over at DC, the same thing happened with Robin. I also think the same thing happened with Power Girl, too. Geoff Johns put her on the Justice Society, she got a two-issue spotlight in JSA Classified, and then got her own book. I’d like to make the case that maybe, what Marvel should do, is spin one or two characters off into their own miniseries for a bit. Maybe Brian Michael Bendis has a Spider-Woman solo project he’d like to do for four issues. Maybe Rogue needs to go off on her own for a bit. It’s worth thinking about.

The final point I’d like to make is that female writers on female titles, which should be the best combination ever, seem to be criminally undervalued. I thought Marjorie M. Liu was doing a great job on X-23, giving someone who was created with no personality some personality. Similarly, Gail Simone’s run on Wonder Woman was pretty good—and as a plus she made Giganta an engaging character, which seems to have been forgotten after her run. I’m not going to speculate on any goings-on there except to say I think pulling those writers off their respective books was, and still is, unfair. Right now Gail Simone is writing Batgirl—we’ll see what happens.

Bad Babes of the 1990s (and why they could have been great)

I was reading a review of the old “Lady Death” animated direct-to-video movie, and the reviewer was quite frank about how terrible he thought it was. Actually, I say that as though it’s the reviewer’s opinion, but the plot alone made “Red Dawn” seem like “Citizen Kane.” I’m probably in the minority here, but I think this is a shame. I remember the old Evil Ernie comics, and based on those, Lady Death seemed like an interesting character. Let’s ignore for a second the fact she had a bra size among the later letters of the alphabet and go with the fact that she was behind this demented undead punk’s mission to kill off the earth’s population. That’s a pretty good villainous motivation. Now add in the fact that she was pretty much a walking wet dream, and you have an interesting representation of the Grim Reaper. So far, so good—you get the standard horror comic tropes, including a buxom bit of eye-candy, only this time around she was villain instead of the victim and her selected minion was unstoppable. Not the greatest moment in female comic character history, but it was fairly original for the time.

Then it turned out that a voluptuous, sultry woman wearing little clothing was popular among comic-buying males, so Brian Pulido did what anyone would do—gave Lady Death her own title, and in the process gave her a backstory, one that made her slightly sympathetic. I want to go on record here as saying the overall backstory was pretty good. Yes, it hinged on the fact that you needed to be sympathetic to someone who wanted to make humanity extinct, but it was still going to be interesting to see what Pulido would do with Lady Death. That’s where things started to get unhinged. I did read some Lady Death comics, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell WHAT was going on. What I do know is that there were a bunch of buxom female supernatural babes, including the demon Purgatori, the vampire Jade, the vampiric vampire hunter Chastitity, and a Lady Demon storyline, who was originally a corrupted Lady Death but later spun off into HER own series.

The problem with all of these characters is that they spent more time in cheesecake poses and being seductive rather than acting like normal human beings. It’s no wonder they were so popular, and it’s no wonder that the company that published them eventually went bankrupt.

I should point out that the publisher, Chaos! Comics was not the only transgressor. There were a TON of books which featured the so-called “bad girls.” I could name quite a few of them, but they all had a few things in common—women with killer bodies in clothing that covered less than your standard bikini, all of whom spent half the book in cheesecake poses and the other half slicing through their villains du jour. Very few of them have actually lasted, and with good reason. It’s hard to care about characters whose only trait is their sexiness.

In fact, sexiness in comic books falls on two sides of a fine line. Most of the time, writers try not to acknowledge that a superhero or superheroine (okay, let’s face it, this discussion is mostly about superheroines so let’s just admit it) may in fact be sexy, no matter what she wears. When the topic is brought up, it is usually not dealt with well. There are exceptions by, say, almost any Joss Whedon comic series, or a few Neil Gaiman stories where characters talk frankly about sex, but for the most part your two choices are all or nothing. Which is weird when you think about it—when your friends all wear spandex as a baseline, it’s only natural that some people will be more comfortable with showing off their bodies than others.

What could have really made a lot of these “Bad Girls” great, though, was that they didn’t have to be exploitative. They had some of the essentials for good stories—strong lead characters and decent artists to name two. I thought a couple of them were objectively interesting, too. Plus, since most of them were done by independent artists, they weren’t bound in place by the Comics Code and could have done some mature stories, in both senses of the word. Just off the top of my head, I would have thought they could have done a storyline with Lady Death being a half-succubus and trying to rise above her baser instincts, discuss what exactly about Chynna and Jazz’s personalities persuaded them to go around in bikinis for spywork and write about how it affected their missions, or discuss how Satan warped Hellina, seemingly a normal college student, to the point where her superheroine costume is a slingshot swimsuit.

I know that Lady Death and Hellina are over at Avatar Press, which gives me some hope for them. After all, their current roster of writers includes Alan Moore and Garth Ennis, both of whom handle sexuality…okay, scratch that. Both of them don’t shy away from sexuality. Moore, though, tackles it maturely. Ennis just dives straight in and goes for the jaw-dropping shock value. On the other hand, Avatar has put out some comics that could charitably be called “exploitative.” We shall see. I know there’s a fine line to be walked here, but I think if someone is willing to walk it, they could find a lot of good story potential.

An Unwritten Entry

Most comics I buy because I like the characters, either because I like the new spin a writer has put on the characters, like Ed Brubaker’s fantastic run on Captain America or Geoff Johns’ run on Green Lantern. I also buy comic titles because I think a character has unmined depths, like the recently ended Power Girl series. But very few comics I pick up because they fill my head with new ideas to the point of bursting, and I have to pick up each new issue to not only see what the writer is going to do next, but also to see what new ideas they will introduce. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman was one such title. Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing (among other titles) was another. So was Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.

I added Unwritten to the list with the graphic novel.

Almost from the first issue this series grabbed me. It starts with a series of books about a boy wizard—a fantastically successful series of books about a boy wizard who, shall we say, greatly resembles Harry Potter. There are some definite changes—the Lord Voldemort analogue is a vampire named Count Ambrosio—but you can tell where the writer of Unwritten ,Mike Carey and Peter Gross, was aiming.

In the world of Unwritten, the boy wizard is named Tommy Taylor. The writer of the Tommy Taylor series is named Will Taylor, and he named the boy wizard after his real-life son. Then Will Taylor vanished off the face of the earth, after publishing thirteen Tommy Taylor books.  Tom Taylor, as you might expect, doesn’t really care to live in the shadow of Tommy Taylor, but still makes the sci-fi/fantasy circuit, signing books as “the real Tommy Taylor.” It’s at one of these conventions where a man claiming to be Lord Ambrosio tries to kidnap Tom, a man who seems at some points to be a crazed fan in a poorly-done costume and at others to be much more realistic. Tom is saved by a woman named Lizzie, but she saves him “the right way”—the way that makes millions of Tommy Taylor fans worship Tom Taylor.

After that, as they say, things get strange.

As I mentioned before, I love characters in a story. Unwritten gives you plenty of those. Even minor characters are given interesting personalities, and the way characters interact with each other is not only realistic, but fun. I would pay to read an issue of Unwritten where people do nothing but talk to each other. Seriously, sometimes the action can only take away from the talking. But then if there were no action, there’d be nothing to move the story along, and I am loving this story. The whole point of this story is to talk about stories—how they influence us, the power they have over us, the way they can affect us, and how a good story, told at the right time, can even alter reality. Of course, Unwritten tiptoes over that fine line that divides reality from fiction, but consider this—in the last election, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all wrote books. In this election, Rick Perry, Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin all have books that they have written, three-hundred page manifestos, each one telling the story of that candidate to hundreds of thousands of readers, building up their narrative slowly but surely. At the debates, the candidates aren’t answering questions—they’re building up their own personal narrative, while their opponents try to deconstruct it with ill-fitting facts.

Stories matter—the study that found vaccinations give children autism was a story, told properly, and published by the right people. You may have thought you were reading a factual study, but it was a story, told in language that made it seem plausible. Mike Carey and Peter Gross know that, and the Unwritten is as much a story about stories as it is about a young man named Tom Taylor.

The big problem when you get to a story that has so many mysteries and so many allusions that the answers are out there is that you risk disappointing your audience if you don’t already know the answers. Battlestar Galactica suffered from this. I think Lost did, too. What’s nice in comics, though, is that the story isn’t necessarily driven by sales. It ends when the writer or writers think it should. I really hope that Unwritten is plotted out and that the big ideas are thought through beforehand. I’m optimistic that they are, too. For one thing, I can understand where Carey and Gross are coming from. When they talk about the “negative space” of a story, for instance, I can understand what they mean, and why it would be particularly frightening in a children’s book.

I should also mention the artists. There are a few of them, but the main ones seem to be Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon. They do a great job of portraying the real world, and they do it so well that when fantasy starts to creep in it feels like the real world, and yet somehow out of place. Kurt and Zelda do expressions particularly well, which gives the entire book a sense of groundedness that is missing in other comics.

In case it’s hard to tell, I love this book, and I highly recommend going out and reading it at the first opportunity. Don’t blame me if you find it hard to put down.