I'm not what you would call a connoisseur of violence. I like what I like, but I'm not going to pretend I eat it up on a regular enough basis to know how to describe what it is like I about it. I don't watch a lot of gory movies. Most of the time, if something is particularly graphic, I enjoy it just because it makes me feel--well, bad. Kind of sick. That's not a very good reason, or explanation, but it's an honest one. I like dark stuff, sure. My wife says that all the time, when she isn't telling me to shut up about how cute Timothy Olyphant is. (But seriously, he is very fetching.) "Do we have to watch this? It's so depressing."
But yeah, dark stuff. I like the dark stuff. Sometimes the dark stuff has violence in it. But that's not what interests me, to be honest. I like the whole "how the violence made you feel" kind of thing. Super-hero comics--and this is a blanket statement, so it's obviously got a myriad of contrary (see
Punisher MAX) examples--seem most interested in the violence
itself. They like to examine how it looks and what it sounds like.
Sometimes there'll be a couple of lines thrown in about whether it's "useful" or not, there are a litany of scenes where somebody "goes too far", but there are rarely moments where super-heroes rest their battered knuckles in ice while questioning what, if anything, the beat-the-crap-out-of cycle is doing to them. Now, I'm not trying to file this into a complaint or request for change--I'm no more interested in comics where Batman collapses into Alfred's arms, his voice cracking as he weeps over the graphic holocaust of carnage his fists have wrought than you are.
This is from a recent issue of
The Outsiders.
Not very interesting. It surprised me, sure, so maybe that was the point. But honestly, I'm enough of a comics nerd that now I just look at that panel and question why Metamorpho-- he's the guy on the left of the panel-- didn't turn himself into any of the hundreds of minerals that could withstand getting hit with a promethium sword. Beyond that, it led to this panel:
Why is the blood boiling up like that? Did this guy have lava in his body? Why does he...I don't get it. Do you get it? Never mind that, I don't want to know. There's probably a comic-book-logic explanation. I don't want to know what it is.
There's a tendency where people immediately respond to violence in comics by saying it's "catering to the lowest common denominator" or "trolling for sales", and while I'd imagine there is some truth to that, I'd also have to quibble with it a bit. I am the "lowest common denominator", and I don't like it. And the
Outsiders-- look, I realize that we're all supposed to ignore those monthly "sales figures" that show up on various websites, but I think we could all agree that very few people are buying the
Outsiders on a regular basis.
Maybe those "few people" are buying it for the gore, but considering these particular panels make up less than 5% of the comic, considering they involve a victim who isn't even addressed by name, and considering the cover is advertising a comic where Alfred Pennyworth is brooding with steepled fingers while Owlman tries in vain to flex his biceps behind him--I'm thinking the gore is just a touch of poorly imagined icing on the cake. A cake made out of sadness.
This is from a recent issue of
Destroyer.
Okay, you see how the guy hitting the other guy is all red? He's covered in blood. By the time you get to this point in the comic--the point where the lead character tries (and fails) to exhaust his shame and failure by punching a prostrate bad guy so hard that the guy's only remaining eyeball squirts out of his head like it's riding on one of those fountains at Epcot Center--he's already killed so many people that he's been coated, head to toe, with blood and gore. That's horrifying. It's a hideous thing to do.
I loved it. I loved it because it's the culmination of a series of escalating events that started back on the first page of
Destroyer, where the same character did almost the exact same thing--only quicker--with a huge, shit-eating grin on his face. I loved it because
Destroyer has shown zero interest in being anything but a rock solid "EXPLICIT CONTENT" action comic since the first issue showed up, and yet it's still found time to tell a weirdly compelling story about the way obsession will supplant responsibility.
It's covered itself in all the trappings of juvenalia--check out that the way they've lettered the title, and ask yourself where you've seen it before--and yet still ended up looking absurdly mature alongside its contemporary peers in the violence game. It gets what
Outsiders--and for that matter, any comic that flirts with everything, but marries nothing--doesn't. It's a pretty simple equation. If you're going to be violent, Be Violent. Not a random throwaway moment designed, apparently, to showcase the stupidity of a couple of characters and the depravity of one. Be Violent All The Way.
Otherwise, you're trapped in a place where violence has to take the place of the plot, and violence. Isn't. A Plot. It's just a thing that characters do in a story, it isn't a story itself. When it's just randomly thrown around, as it is on the "cut dude in half" page, it reads like somebody's rubbed caramel over a novel. More time gets spent asking why it's there then gets spent going "dear god, this is Something Else!" And that "dear god" moment--well brother, that's what the blood punch festival is supposed to do. You can't take a gory headwound page out of the Miller/Darrow
Hard Boiled and stick it in the middle of
Ultimate Fantastic Four and win an Eisner. It wouldn't make any sense.
Well, I guess if you did it to Invisible Woman, you'd get a controversy.
So it would
sort of make sense.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
