Tag Archives: comics

If you’re going to have an epic showdown, try to do it in Texas.

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I decided to take a day off this week to read comics. Yeah, I know. I’ve got shit to do and the comics will wait patiently on the shelf for me to read them later. But I just really needed a day off and it was either comics or more Star Trek. I chose comics. Preacher by Garth Ennis, to be specific. Which is one of the best comic series ever EVER EVER! If you don’t know Preacher, get thee to a comic shop posthaste, friends. Because it is fantastic. So fantastic, in fact, that I’m putting off reading the final issue so as to increase the deliciousness of the conclusion. Which is sort of pointless, seeing as how I’ve read this series before. But you see where I’m coming from.

There’s too much going on to sum up the series well. But, briefly, you’ve got your alcoholic vampire, your classic love story with an angry gun-crazy woman, your crazed inbred mutants, your church-run global nuclear apocalypse conspiracy, your badass German hitman and his merry band of psychos, your immortal murderous gunslinging cowboy, your illegitimate angel/demon lovechild run amok, and your hero ex-preacher who’s been endowed with the power of the word of God and is hunting Him down to make Him answer for abandoning humanity in our time of need. It’s a smorgasbord of fucked-up, irreverent awesome. Plus, the art is amazing. Which, with so many ethereal, conceptual things going on, is pretty impressive. Steve Dillon takes the unimaginable and makes it gory and dynamic and wonderfully funny. Genius.

Like I said, I’ve read these before. But I was much younger and I think that, at the time, I liked them for different reasons. I was in high school (and maybe my first year of college – that whole period is really fuzzy), which as we all know is a tremendously weird time. Why does adolescence have to suck so much? Stupid brains, being all soaked in hormones and new sociocultural constructs and tears and shitty marijuana. Anyway. There are a lot of religious questions raised in Preacher. It’s a pretty basic good vs evil kind of story, but the sides are unclear and the players are sometimes ambivalent about which side they’re on, both to each other and to the reader. And I can’t think of another story, off the top of my head, where the author made not only the church but God himself the bad guy. Not in a bitchy, whiny way, either. It’s completely logical within the context of our hero’s morality. “I believed in you and gave you everything and you still disappeared and left us all hanging so fuck you.” But where most of us would let it go at “fuck you,” the Reverend Jesse Custer takes it upon himself to hunt the bastard down and make him answer for his behavior. Brilliant. Point is, when I first read these comics, I was having a huge crisis of mind about religion and my own beliefs. You know, like most people do at around sixteen or so. “What do I believe and why?” is a new and exciting (and occasionally painful) question at that age when we’re just learning how to ask those questions subjectively and how to stand by our answers. Sixteen is about the age when we stop just repeating what we’ve always heard or been told. Ideally. I mean, if one just keeps doing that forever, that regurgitation, one becomes a tremendous waste of space and electricity. I sympathized only with Custer’s anger at the time, whereas now I feel like I sympathize more with his logic and steadfast dedication to an ideal. It’s interesting to revisit those moral and ethical conundra as an adult. A kind of intellectual nostalgia.

Something else I find weirdly intriguing that I probably wouldn’t have taken much notice of as an angry teenager: Preacher is unabashedly patriotic. Not in a hamfisted all-the-bad-guys-are-foreigners kind of way. But in subtle ways, and some really beautiful ones. Having John Wayne be Custer’s spirit guide. His leaving his father’s Congressional Medal of Honor at the Vietnam Memorial. Blowing up Monument Valley with an atomic bomb (if only to later point out that there were millions of native Americans murdered there and hundreds of atomic bomb tests happened nearby so it could’ve been worse). There are a lot of flashbacks from the characters’ lives, so their travels all over the country are also, oddly, all over time. They show the Empire State building as it’s being finished, New Orleans in several different decades, the western frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as soldiers in Vietnam and World War II. It’s a love song to America and Americans, cheesy as that may sound. And not the sort of homogenized strip-mall America where every city in every state looks exactly the same. Dillon’s done a great job of making each locale have its own personality, even if it’s as simple as changing the color of the sky or the types of trees in the background. Excellent work. And don’t even get me started on Texas. There is a drooling appreciation for Texas here that I didn’t know could exist (that is, without riding a horse through dusty streets, naked and covered in barbeque, shooting Colt revolvers into the air, and screaming “Yeehaw”). But it’s not one-sided, blind faith-type Texas love. Ennis takes great care to point out the racism, classism, redneckery, and utter madness that also make Texas the wonderfully weird place that it is. You take the good with the bad. That’s America.

The other thing that I find cool about Preacher is how well its early 90′s cultural references hold up. There’s a whole Vietnam/Desert Storm analogy between Custer’s timeline and his father’s timeline. Another character has a fucked up face because he tried to shoot himself in the head following the death of Kurt Cobain, a sad but real phenomenon that happened worldwide in ’94. There’s a group of pathetic pseudo-vampiric goth kids who hit particularly close to home for me. Bleh. I don’t want to talk about my black fingernails and heavy eyeliner phase. Double bleh. And, probably my favorite, Custer says at one point that he started out on his quest because of the death of Bill Hicks. One of the best descriptions of Hicks I’ve ever heard: “Guy kept goin’, kept performin’, with the license granted a dyin’ man to say what he likes without fear…An’ a guy who’ll tell the truth in this bullshit world, he’s worth his weight in gold.” I should really do a blog post about old Bill. I’ll do that soon. He’s amazing, and it made me really happy to see this nod to him, especially since it was done well. The 90′s may seem like a cultural wasteland to the outside observer, but to those of us who were teenagers (read: sociopaths) during that time, I think it means a lot to see the things we thought were important treated properly. That’s not just the 90′s, obviously. That’s anybody’s view on their own youth. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting to an age that demands I look back with positivity instead of angst. And I’m sure these sorts of culturally reliant things would read differently if they were written now, rather than in the thick of it, what with the wealth of irony that hindsight affords us.

So, yeah. Go check out Preacher if you haven’t already. It’s totally worth the read. I will offer a disclaimer (“disclaim”? Is that a real verb?), and tell you that if you hold religion, particularly Christianity, dear enough to say that it shouldn’t be satirized or criticized or even closely examined, this is not the comic for you. It turns dogma on its head and shakes the shit out of it. Which is fearless and hilarious and awesome, but I can see how it would offend. It’s also bloody and violent and overtly sexual (often in twisted ways) and uses a lot of fuck words. But still, awesome. I can’t recommend it highly enough to those of you with a dark sense of humor and a thick skin for controversy.

A perfectly valid reason to overuse the word “awesome.”

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“Who is Neil Gaiman?” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to answer this question. It boggles my little nerdy mind. There seems to be a glitch in the awesomeness-to-famousness ratio matrix here. I recently answered the “Who’s Neil Gaiman?” question by saying that he’s the greatest living scifi/fantasy writer, having forgotten that Ray Bradbury and Terry Pratchett are both still with us. My sincerest apologies to those two elder statesmen, but to say that the three of them make up a triumvirate of badass is the highest form of flattery. That I can muster, anyway. I doubt there’s better company to be in amongst the living.

Here’s the thing about Neil Gaiman: the man can do anything. He writes comics, fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, kid’s books. A multifaceted ninja of the weird, this guy. Which is why it’s even more baffling that people don’t know who he is. Comic book geeks, literature geeks, movie geeks – all of these groups have a damn good reason to adore him, and in a sociological-Venn-diagram-of-normal-human-conversations kind of way, he should be a household name, right? You would think. Although to be fair, my love for Gaiman’s work mostly centers around his novels. Neverwhere blew my mind so completely when I read it. Fucking outstanding. I think I gave a copy to everyone I had to buy a birthday present for that year, which is saying a lot because I don’t normally give store-bought gifts. I could go into a lengthy, gushy review of all of his work, but it’s too much to take on. We’d be here for days.

So why bring him up, then? Well, because he made me cry the other day. (I’ve been talking about crying a lot on the blog lately. You should probably not read anything into that. I’m really ok, I promise.) He gave this year’s commencement speech at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, which was basically just some good advice for young artists from someone looking at them hopefully from the other end of a successful career. The sort of things I wish I’d been told ten or twelve years ago. You can watch and/or read the whole thing here. It’s about twenty minutes of awesome. He’s just so damn charming. One of those guys that you feel in your nerdy bones you’d like to hang out with some day, but you know you’re just not cool enough. Oh, well. One can dream.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what he said in that speech. I can’t imagine someone that talented ever struggling with the sorts of writery problems that schlubs like me deal with. The torture of syntax, the agony of the first draft, the heart palpitations when staring at a blank page. There’s a sort of hero-worshippy thing we do where we imagine those folks don’t sweat over their creations like us, the mere mortals. They just poop out perfect finished novels, don’t they? No, they don’t. Art is hard, but it should be fun. If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right. (Or, as my mother would say, “If it feels good, do it. If it feels bad, stop.”) I grapple with the idea of being a writer. Well, that’s not entirely true. I know I’m a writer. If I’m not here to write, I don’t know why the fuck I’m here, frankly. What gets me stuck on the hamster wheel is the word “successful.” What does that even mean, in the context of art? That one becomes rich? Famous? Well-known? Happy? I’m incredibly shy and nervous around people, and I hate money. So I’d like to say that happy is enough, that I can write for writing’s sake. And I do. If I don’t feed those ideas, get them out of my head, they just scream and scream and bounce around in there like angry demon children trapped in a ball pit. On the other hand, my brain is wired for words. I think about words probably more than I think about anything else. Putting them together, their sounds and harmonies, their meanings and implications when they’re strung along in a beautiful (or horrible) line. Thinking of them as little gears, clockwork in a bigger machine, and making that machine work properly – that’s heaven.

But to what end? So I can bitch about pop culture on the interwebs? Not really. Don’t get me wrong. This is tremendously fun, and I can’t even begin to express how much it means that you guys actually read this drivel. It keeps me writing; it keeps me thinking. But I look at my novel, sitting lonely in its sad little box, and I feel like I’ve ignored my child, forgotten to pick him up after school and he’s standing in the rain, waiting, trying not to cry. Would it be “success” for me to have it published and make my millions? At this point I’d be grateful to the universe if I could even finish it and be proud of the work. Robert Frost rewrote Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood ninety-two times before he would let it be published. Am I that much of a perfectionist? I really don’t know. But I would like the damn thing to someday see the light of day. To have someone say that they enjoyed it. That it made them think about something they’d never thought about before. That it made them happy. That whole process, the after-the-work-is-finished process? That’s the part that gives me nightmares. And I think that’s the most important part of Gaiman’s speech, that last bit about how the landscape of distribution of art is changing. This is all new territory. There’s no reason to wait for someone to discover you, or tell you your work is valuable. Just do it because you love it. And if it makes even one person happy, or makes even one person think they can do the thing they want or love to do, that’s got to be worth it. Doing it all yourself? We’re allowed to think that way now, and I’m kind of in that weird generation gap where that’s something I have to learn, something I was never taught. Hard to wrap my mind around, still.

I’m glad that there are folks out there like Neil Gaiman who, while they may not be household names, mean so much to the people who do know their work and take the time and the energy to share with us what they’ve learned. There’s something tremendously laudable about not just sitting in some high castle wallowing around in a pile of money, and instead choosing to come down to tell us how to be real artists because artists are important. That we are important, and that it’s up to us as much as it is to the people we admire to create good and beautiful things. So if you don’t know who Neil Gaiman is, I’m not going to try to explain him to you. My advice? Go pick up four books right now: The Absolute Sandman Volume One, American Gods, Graveyard Book, and Blueberry Girl. It’s an expensive but comprehensive overview of Gaiman’s…what?…I don’t know, but I can’t use “awesome” any more in this blog post or I’ll make myself ill. Check out all of his stuff and his wicked (haha! I didn’t say it!) blog at neilgaiman.com.

Johnny really IS a homicidal maniac…

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I got a nerd bug up my ass and bought a bunch of comics the other day. I reread Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. It’s still awesome. I had the individual comics once upon a time, but I’m not sure what ever happened to them. One of those growing up and moving all your stuff out of your parents’ house things, probably. Kind of sad, really. The trade paperback version is basically the same, with one extra Happy Noodle Boy. Also, I feel like the subliminal messages are different, but I have no way to prove that. It might just mean that they’re not as easy to read since I’m not stoned all the time anymore. But whatever. I realized, too, that Johnny looks like me in high school. Stupid 90′s. Urgh. Fucking mortifying, that. Moving on.

It’s trippy comic book art at its finest. Vasquez has a really great, super simple, pen-and-ink-meets-woodcut kind of style. The characters are somewhat bobble-headed and the perspective is skewed or off-kilter most of the time. All done in black and white, which makes the blood splattery bits even more striking. There are a lot of fun, subtle details in the background of each panel, too. Little treats for the very close observer. It does date itself with all the goth jokes, but having been there I think it holds up pretty well (nostalgia counts for a lot there, for some reason). And all the girls have undercuts. Remember undercuts? What the hell was that about?

Living up to his name, Johnny’s fucking twisted. He’s such a psycho. Page after page of the most creative, interesting ways to kill people. It’s hilarious. I love it. For the same reason I love zombie and slasher flicks, I guess. There’s something really purgative and awesome about watching people do abhorrent stuff that we’ve thought about but would never do. It’s just an outlet. A pressure valve. It appeals to our baser instincts. JTHM is the oh-so-very deliciously gory result of that idea. I honestly don’t know if the intention is satire or pure shock value. Could legitimately be both. I’m ok with that. I love me some hyperbole. I’m also (on a seemingly unrelated note) a rabid Tarantino fan, so I don’t mind a bit of violence if it’s done with some finesse, you know? Some style, some class. Yeah, the book is awful damn bloody, but there’s a point to it. Or, at least, one could read into it and find a point, were one so inclined.

Cue the violence in the media conversation: apparently it impacts the weak minds of our stupid children, making them into murder robots because they can’t think for themselves and we can’t, obviously, as busy adults, be bothered to parent them (but they turn around and cut school funding – whaa?). Then these heathen brats who are somehow trained killers lose their shit and lash out and kill a bunch of people who have wronged them in a gruesome cloud of vengeance! And it’s all society’s fault. Can we just grow up a little bit here, talk about this like adults? Seeing gore on a screen or a page doesn’t mean that you should think it’s ok and go out and do it. Here’s my theory. We tend to forget what we absorb pretty quickly in our soundbite (soundbyte?) culture, right? So if you watch a lot of horror movies or read a lot of gory books (especially comics), you become desensitized. It all  becomes cartoonish, almost. You end up thinking in more realistic terms when it comes to your own actions and reactions. You know, if your brain is healthy and all. This is just me talking out of my ass about anger management, though. Shrinks would probably disagree with me. They have, actually. But I stand by my statement. I also love that wacky heavy metal, so maybe don’t take my word on this stuff. (Disclaimer: Horror movies are not therapy. Ass covered.)

But why is it always just violence that gets all the blame? Other things don’t seem to come up as often in our “bad influences in the media” discussions. Theft, fraud, lying, cheating, drug use. Or sex. Jesus, don’t even get me started on sex in the media. That’s not a blog, it’s a goddamn dissertation. Maybe the real problem is that we don’t intellectualize or rationalize violence. Too visceral. Our culture has to account for the lowest common denominator and assume that monkey-see-monkey-do will be a pretty typical reaction. Which is fucking pathetic, but I won’t say it’s invalid.

Bottom line, if you don’t mind a lot of blood in black and white, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is fan-freakin’-tastic in a sick, snarky way. I highly recommend. Get thee to a comic shop.

(To give credit where credit is due, the version I have is: JTHM: the Director’s Cut by Jhonen Vasquez, Slave Labor Graphics, 1997, ISBN 9780943151168)