Labor Day weekend offered itself to me, and I returned her favor by wasting the days completely. See, the woman I conned into wedlock was out of town. Like none of you, I'm sure, my relationship with my wife is one that often takes on the disgusting whiff of a mother/son relationship, wherein I incestuously depend on the presence of a strong woman to remind me when I must sleep, or that I must eat.
I wouldn't blame a lengthy tangle with comic books and the stunted emotional development they often bring about for that grossness, I'd blame my immediate elders, who fought both Hot and Cold Wars to ensure that people like me--inherently valueless white men who luck into rent money the same way a polio stricken refugee falls into a pit of waste--would never face the threat of extinction at the hands of Stalinist doctors well practiced in the art of eugenics. I can't wait until I have kids! They're going to want help with their homework, and I'm only going to be able to talk about
how badass Jim Aparo was.
With my wife gone, I devoted myself to the sort of pursuits--foreign to you, I have no doubt--that always captivate me whenever I'm not being hounded by individuals with self-respect. I watched Clint Eastwood kill people, I read some comic books, and I obsessively played a video game that let me pretend I was a fictional character. Then I woke up, freaked out because it was almost time for me to go back to bed, and realized that I had to write you a column.
Luckily,
Justice League: Cry For Justice had something to offer.
When
Cry For Justice # 1 first dropped, I was actually pretty excited by it. It's a style of art that I don't care for--if you've seen it, you probably already know how incredibly gusty the wind is everywhere the characters go, which about sums it up--and the dialog operates somewhere between Geez That's A Dumb Thing To Say all the way down to the bottom rungs of God, That's Kind Of Offensive, Maybe This Is Some Anti-Joke Style That's Beyond Me. But
Cry For Justice #1 was, in its fashion, a pretty entertaining form of bad. It's incredibly serious, so much so that its most obvious comparison, Brad Meltzer's
Identity Crisis, seems almost mawkish in comparison.
Few of the characters speak in any notably consistent fashion, choosing instead to interrupt each other and build long, prosaic novellas about "justice" and their shared hunger for it, while barely ever explaining what the term means to them. Their actions--which, by the third issue, have consisted of torturing people, including one notable portion where they torture the wrong person--form a motiveless reflection of Jack Bauer's school of Git Er Done, despite the fact that Jack only brings out the knitting needles when there's a bomb on the tracks, or a baby in the stairwell. Even by the third issue, there's little in the way of an active plot--an old Grant Morrison villain is forming the umpteenth version of 2009's secret cabal of villains trope, all for the purpose of "hurting" heroes where they live before going in for the killing stroke--beyond that, there's more strangely worded conversations, few of which have made any of the characters remotely likeable.
That's a common complaint, I suppose--a DC mini-series like this one is inherently geared towards the faithful, and most of the notable defenders of this title have made it a point to say they "trust" Hal Jordan & Ray Palmer, even while admitting that neither character comes across in this particular story as someone you'd call a hero. All that stuff--that's the way Big Two hero comics operate, and complaining too much about it is the equivalent of signing up to take Charlie Brown's place on the football field. If a DC/Marvel book is in continuity, it expects, and usually demands, that you know, trust and understand these characters long before you get started reading. If you're expecting different, and you're mad when it doesn't pan out, that's not really their fault--it's been that way for almost twenty years. It may not be preferable to me, maybe even to you--but that doesn't change it from being the way it currently is.
But there's one thing that
Cry For Justice has in it--something that I was led to by the
good people of the internet--that's unreasonably excessive. In the span of three issues,
Cry For Justice has killed off two male homosexual characters. There are in-story reasons, of course--it's not like DC hasn't progressed enough to realize that they can't make fag jokes and expect to get away with it--but they're cheap, stupid reasons. Writer James Robinson wants some random homosexual[1] character on the team, and since that random homosexual was foolish enough to date a character that has no real fan base, killing that guy's boyfriend works out just fine.
Whereas Hal Jordan & Oliver Queen are pissed off enough to get all hardcore merely because the Martian Manhunter and Bruce Wayne died in some comic that came out back in January, Mikaal couldn't be bothered to participate until somebody came along and killed his boyfriend. Why does the big bad of the series care enough about Mikaal--a character who has barely appeared since Robinson's
Starman series--to kill his boyfriend? No reason is given, although one could arguably be on its way. Has anybody else in the series been dealt this level of horrific motivation?[2] Not yet. Will they? Doubtful. After all, Oliver Queen is married to Black Canary--they won't be killing her. Hal Jordan's pals and gals are all stamped property of Geoff Johns, so they'll be fine as well. But some random queer and his BF? Man the torpedos. Who cares?
That little piece of nasty was in the first issue. At the end of the third issue, it's revealed that Prometheus--the villain of the series--couldn't find enough of a reason to prolong the emotional torture of the homosexual Tasmanian Devil character, so he killed him, skinned him, and made a rug out of him. Since I don't have a list (or the motivation to make one) I couldn't tell you if there are other gigantic hairy DC Comics characters that Prometheus could have killed and made rugs out of. But as for reasons why that had to happen, beyond the aforementioned "serious" quotient this comic seems to believe it has earned, there's really not that much ammunition with which to defend it. Because it would look cool to...sorry, what again? In the back of Cry For Justice, Robinson makes the claim that he's trying to "bring [Prometheus] back to his former glory"--believing that the character has fallen on hard, embarrassing times since his initial appearances in Grant Morrison's JLA comics. Based on these three issues, the manner he's using to pull off this restoration is by having Prometheus kill some gay guys and throw a wine glass on the floor.[3]
You know what? I don't really care to defend super-hero comics. If they're stupid, and they suck, and they hurt people's feelings--well, I shouldn't read them. I'm also not sure that I'd go all the way with an argument that they do that much to hurt anybody, or bring about some kind of rampant hatred for homosexual men. Not enough people read continuity driven DC Comics for them to have any major impact on relationships between groups of people, and if a homosexual man--or a whiny straight guy like me, for that matter--chooses not to buy something because we think the story is offensive...well, maybe that money will serve as a minor lesson in "do better and I'll pay you" philosophy.
And even if it won't--and since it's just me and I barely buy anything these days anyway, my four dollars won't be missed--there's almost zero potential for this particular piece of offal shaping the minds of young readers, since
Cry For Justice has about as much appeal to young impressionable minds as a squarely placed kick to the teeth. But it does make me wonder: why do it? There's no benefit to slaughtering the homosexual men of the DC universe, as far as I can see. There's not some uptick in sales from homophobic lunatics and bigoted zealots, happy to see the sights of the heathen brought low. Nobody shows up at a comic store for the first time and says "give me the one where they skinned the queer." That doesn't make it any better, the fact that this sort of offensive crap has no real world impact.
It just makes it another crappy Big Two super-hero comic. It will sit on the shelf for awhile, eventually go out of print, and someday exist as little more than a reminder that yes, this is what they thought we'd want. A repellent, juvenile product--lazy in design, ignorant in preparation, and blind to the response it would create.
Notes:
[1] Technically speaking, Mikaal Thomas has been portrayed by Robinson as being neither gay nor straight--he's an alien who views both sexes as equally viable relationship partners. But he's most often portrayed in male/male relationships, and the Cry For Justice series has so far depicted him as homosexual.
[2] One might bring up the gorilla, who lost all his gorilla friends, but...well. You know.
[3] If you've got the old issues where Grant introduces the character, take a look at them. Sure, Promethus still looks like a football player waiting tables at Medieval Times, but how is he established as being a scary villain of importance? He attacks the Justice League and almost wins.
That's how you establish a Justice League villain. This shit isn't alchemy.
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
