Bastards, Body-counts and Brooding
Sep. 10th, 2007 06:20 amThis was mostly inspired by flipping through several of my roommate ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kafeixuesheng's comic picks. Taking another look in some cases at a couple titles I avoid...
Bastards
So first I decided to flip through the last three or four issues of Garth Ennis' The Boys. Where EVERY character is an utter bastard. And by that I mean a shit-head. A fucker. A total waste of fucking skin. The good guys are depraved psychopaths. But they're the good guys because they beat up on the even more depraved and fucked-up "heroes". Its a meaner version of what Millar's The Authority was like. Which is meaner and more thuggish than Millar's Ultimates. Comics about bands of assholes, who get to be the hero because their opponents are baby murdering, whore abusing, crack smoking, evil bastards. Right, let me get right on forking over money for that...
Look I enjoy an anti-hero story. Criminal is a personal favorite. As was Van Lente's Silencers. But the main characters were/are LIKEABLE. Even if they're criminal scum, you end up rooting for them...
Body-Counts
You can tell which stories are meant to be the BIG ones. Because people die in them. Nameless soldiers or Amazons or civilians or Bob the Lizard Alien Green Lantern. And nowadays as violently as possible. Or they'll stack up a horde of third or fourth tier characters. Whose entire reason for being involved is to be fed into the meat-grinder. I shouldn't be so happy when Invincible manages to go several issues without anyone being eviscerated. Characters don't need to be mown down wholesale so that new, "cooler" and more marketable versions can be created. Its not the revolving door for the major, main title characters that cheapens death in super-hero comics. Its the ease with which writers use it now...
Suicide Squad was shocking originally BECAUSE it would kill off people. Now everyone does it. Hell, when the Squad shows up in anything now, its EXPECTED that someone will get gacked. Theirs no shock, no pathos. Just oh well, Tattoo Guy is dead. Time to create his replacement...
(This one is a bit hypocritical of me, since I really LOVE Marvel's two Annihilation mini-series. And the both have a multitude of spear carrier and minor character deaths. AND a character who dies and then gets replaced by someone who takes on their name. I don't know, it works for me there, but doesn't in most other places.)
Plus of course a potential hero's family now is just a potential pool of victims to help propell their origin. Which leads to:
Brooding
Its not just for X-Men and Batman anymore. Now all the best heroes are driven by their dark and horrible pasts. Citizen Steel got his powers by basically being bled on while watching his ENTIRE family get literally ripped to pieces by modern Super-Nazis. Speedball becomes Penance to make up for...well getting blamed for a villian killing a mess of people. Hulk stops beating up on the X-Men who try to stand between him and Professor Xavier because one of them points out the mass graveyard of X-Family types (located right by the window of their main classroom)...
And then you have Misfit. A newish teen character introduced in Birds of Prey. She can teleport and has some other skills. Plus she has a battle cry of "Dark Veeeeeeengeance". Really, its cute. And she said she came from a well off family and was doing the super-hero thing because she enjoyed it and liked helping and so on. Except no. She actually had a dark past where her family dies in a fire and she can't save them and she blames herself and waaaah. So she gets adopted into the extended Batfamily by Barbara Gordon aka Oracle. After all she now fufills the requirement of My Parents Are Dead. Babs actually aren't, but she gets a bye on it for being crippled by the Joker...
kafeixuesheng's comic picks. Taking another look in some cases at a couple titles I avoid...Bastards
So first I decided to flip through the last three or four issues of Garth Ennis' The Boys. Where EVERY character is an utter bastard. And by that I mean a shit-head. A fucker. A total waste of fucking skin. The good guys are depraved psychopaths. But they're the good guys because they beat up on the even more depraved and fucked-up "heroes". Its a meaner version of what Millar's The Authority was like. Which is meaner and more thuggish than Millar's Ultimates. Comics about bands of assholes, who get to be the hero because their opponents are baby murdering, whore abusing, crack smoking, evil bastards. Right, let me get right on forking over money for that...
Look I enjoy an anti-hero story. Criminal is a personal favorite. As was Van Lente's Silencers. But the main characters were/are LIKEABLE. Even if they're criminal scum, you end up rooting for them...
Body-Counts
You can tell which stories are meant to be the BIG ones. Because people die in them. Nameless soldiers or Amazons or civilians or Bob the Lizard Alien Green Lantern. And nowadays as violently as possible. Or they'll stack up a horde of third or fourth tier characters. Whose entire reason for being involved is to be fed into the meat-grinder. I shouldn't be so happy when Invincible manages to go several issues without anyone being eviscerated. Characters don't need to be mown down wholesale so that new, "cooler" and more marketable versions can be created. Its not the revolving door for the major, main title characters that cheapens death in super-hero comics. Its the ease with which writers use it now...
Suicide Squad was shocking originally BECAUSE it would kill off people. Now everyone does it. Hell, when the Squad shows up in anything now, its EXPECTED that someone will get gacked. Theirs no shock, no pathos. Just oh well, Tattoo Guy is dead. Time to create his replacement...
(This one is a bit hypocritical of me, since I really LOVE Marvel's two Annihilation mini-series. And the both have a multitude of spear carrier and minor character deaths. AND a character who dies and then gets replaced by someone who takes on their name. I don't know, it works for me there, but doesn't in most other places.)
Plus of course a potential hero's family now is just a potential pool of victims to help propell their origin. Which leads to:
Brooding
Its not just for X-Men and Batman anymore. Now all the best heroes are driven by their dark and horrible pasts. Citizen Steel got his powers by basically being bled on while watching his ENTIRE family get literally ripped to pieces by modern Super-Nazis. Speedball becomes Penance to make up for...well getting blamed for a villian killing a mess of people. Hulk stops beating up on the X-Men who try to stand between him and Professor Xavier because one of them points out the mass graveyard of X-Family types (located right by the window of their main classroom)...
And then you have Misfit. A newish teen character introduced in Birds of Prey. She can teleport and has some other skills. Plus she has a battle cry of "Dark Veeeeeeengeance". Really, its cute. And she said she came from a well off family and was doing the super-hero thing because she enjoyed it and liked helping and so on. Except no. She actually had a dark past where her family dies in a fire and she can't save them and she blames herself and waaaah. So she gets adopted into the extended Batfamily by Barbara Gordon aka Oracle. After all she now fufills the requirement of My Parents Are Dead. Babs actually aren't, but she gets a bye on it for being crippled by the Joker...
