Heroes Never Rust #54: Introductions

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Darick Robertson, Garth Ennis, Heroes Never Rust, sean ironman, The Boys

Heroes Never Rust #54 by Sean Ironman

Introductions

Now that the tone and racy content has been set, issue two of The Boys sets up the characters. In the premiere issue, readers were shown two of the main characters (Billy Butcher and Wee Hughie), but now the rest of the team comes out to play. There are twenty-two pages of content, three characters to introduce, two main characters whose stories must be furthered, and there’s still world-building that needs to be done. There’s not much room to spend on each character of the team. Plus, introductions shouldn’t feel like exposition. It’s a lot of work for Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, but they solve any problems with a strong structure.

The issue opens with Rayner (the CIA contact for The Boys) looking through files of past cases of The Boys. She gave Butcher the go ahead to start up again and seems to have doubts. Other than Butcher making superheroes pay for being dicks, readers haven’t been given much about what Butcher and his team actually does. In two pages, Ennis and Robertson set up just how devastating Butcher’s team can be, while still keeping a mystery element in play. Readers aren’t shown much, but they are given hints with excerpts from the files.

“Brutal beating unlike anything on record at this hospital”
“Prisoner demanded, then begged not be released”
“Extremely ragged decapitation, followed by”

It’s enough to set up the team and show that Rayner is not fully on board with Butcher. Most importantly, the plot doesn’t stop to tell the reader what happened in the past. It uses past events to complicate Rayner’s relationship with Butcher and gives the reader a peek at the team, which Ennis and Robertson then go into.

The rest of the issue jumps back and forth between a conversation between Butcher and Hughie as Butcher attempts to make Hughie a part of the team, and Butcher collecting the other three team members (The Frenchman, The Female, and Mother’s Milk). We all know Hughie will eventually join the team so I won’t waste time here discussing Butcher talking with Hughie. Now, I like Butcher and Hughie, but a conversation could be awfully boring to read. So Ennis and Robertson break up the issue so that it’s not shown in chronological order. At points in the conversation, the story jumps to Butcher approaching another member of the team.

The first is The Frenchman. He’s drinking espresso at a coffee shop and talking to himself. Some assholes in suits make fun of him. “Fuckin’ French faggot.” “Goddamn surrender monkey.” He stares at the suits cool and calm. Then, quickly, he puts goggles on and beats the shit out of them. Butcher walks in, and The Frenchman calms down, runs up to Butcher, and hugs him, happy to see his friend again. Then, they walk off, leaving the suits bloody and either dead or unconscious. The action scene does a good job breaking up the conversation between Butcher and Hughie, but it does so to show The Frenchman’s character. It’s not just random action scene. The reader sees that The Frenchman is dangerous but not wild. While he shows a range of emotions in the short scene, he’s not emotional. He’s in control and can go from sitting with a nice espresso into killing somebody within a second.

The second is The Female She’s on a doorstep, small and thin, with a jacket that’s three times too large. She knocks quietly, and the bad guys inside argue and then try to get rid of her. She grabs the man at the door and shuts the door behind her. Butcher watches the house from across the street. Readers only get the screams of those inside. Then, a face, not the skull, just the face, ripped from a man hits a window and slides off. That’s all readers get from The Female. She never speaks. But, readers can see that she might be more dangerous than The Frenchman. She uses her looks to her advantage, but in a different way than many comic book female characters. She doesn’t have huge breasts, long legs, and wavy hair. She looks sad. People drop their guard, and then she tears them apart.

A couple of summers ago, I took a poetry class and the professor said that poetry is about creating a pattern and then breaking that pattern. This is done by creating a structure to stanzas and lines, and, at the end, changing it up. It creates a tension in the structure. That’s what Ennis and Robertson do here. We get two introductions with violent action scenes. These scenes show the capabilities of The Frenchman and The Female. But, with the third member, Mother’s Milk, the pattern changes. Mother’s Milk, a large black man, is shown in his dining room drinking coffee from a mug that has “Bad ass” on the side. His first line of dialogue is “Butcher, man…I dunno.” He’s calm and seems tired of it all. He only gets a little worked up when Butcher puts his mug down on the counter without using a coaster. The first two introductions are three pages each, while Mother’s Milk’s intro is four pages. He seems more important than the other two because of the change in pattern.

Mother’s Milk’s daughter comes in dressed in a small tank top that shows off her breasts, and when he tries to talk to her about it, she yells at him and leaves. This guy can’t even control his own household. He’s a far cry from the other two, but I get the feeling he’s got something brewing inside. Butcher gets the action here. He goes outside and yells at the daughter and crushes the gun from two guys she’s hanging with. This introduction gives more color to the issue—it complicates the structure, making Mother’s Milk stand out and making the issue more than just the other teammates killing a bunch of people. Changing that pattern helps save the issue from a bunch of boring exposition and setup.

_______

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read inThe Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.

Heroes Never Rust #52: Choice Over Power

30 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Heroes Never Rust, Muties, sean ironman

Heroes Never Rust #52 by Sean Ironman

Choice Over Power

he other day I was driving down I-4 and thinking about Harry Potter and how much I don’t give a shit. Living in Orlando, I can’t escape all this talk about the new section of Harry Potter opening at Universal Studios. I was given the first book a couple of years ago, but I’ve only read the first chapter. Yeah, yeah, I know I should read it. I’ve been hearing that since the first movie was released. But I just don’t care. I thought most of the movies ranged from bad to okay, with a couple of them being good.

So I’m driving and thinking about how I don’t care about Harry Potter and I don’t want to read the books and I figured out why. I hate the character of Harry Potter. I think the story would be much more interesting if he was killed toward the beginning and Hermione, who is clearly the best character in the story, had to fight against Voldemort and his gang. I don’t care for characters who are special. Something happened to Harry Potter that he had no control over and now he’s some special kid who’s the only one who can defeat the great big bad guy. Give me a break. I know it’s not quite fate, but it’s close. I don’t like characters who are special so that they are the only ones who can save the day. It’s boring.

Yet, I love the X-Men, a group of superheroes born with superpowers. For a minute, I was stumped. How can I dislike a story that focuses on a character who’s in a situation he has no control over and like a story that focuses on characters who are in a situation they have no control over?

In 2002, there was a mini-series called Muties. The difference between a mutant and Harry Potter, in regards to my earlier issue, is that mutants might get superpowers, but that doesn’t make them superheroes. They are hated and feared for who they are. They are killed for who they are. If Harry Potter was born a wizard, and then had adventures just based on that, I might be into it. But being some special kid makes me think of greater issues in our society, of people thinking they’re special. No one is special. But that’s my own issues.

Back to Muties. The mini-series presented the daily life of mutants in the Marvel Universe, away from the X-Men. What’s it like to have mutant powers without having Professor Xavier and his school? Each of the six issues focused on a different character, unrelated to the other issues, and was drawn by a different artist. The first issue focused on Jared, a boy who was smart enough to skip three grades. As the youngest in high school, he’s picked on and doesn’t have many friends. His single friend is a girl he’s crushing on named Kate. The basic plot is young Jared likes Kate, but he walks in on Kate making out with one of the bullies. Jared asks Dunk, a bully who is having Jared do his homework, if he could get his friend to lay off Kate so Jared could have a shot. Dunk refuses and beats Jared. Then, poor Jared makes a poor decision. He gets his father’s gun and brings it to school. He fires at Kate, her boyfriend, and Dunk, killing Kate and Dunk. Then, Jared is taken to jail.

That’s the story. It’s not much on plot, but I don’t know if you noticed, I didn’t mention anything about a mutant. Jared is not a mutant. He’s smart, but smart just like a lot of kids. He doesn’t have telepathy. He just reads a lot. The only mutant that’s in the story is Dunk, and he’s not shown to be a mutant until the very end when Jared shoots him. Dunk, a star basketball player, stretches like Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four. He doesn’t use it to save the day. He doesn’t stretch to protect his friend or Kate. He’s desperate, reacting, trying to save his life. Being born with mutant powers hasn’t made him special. It won’t save him. If anything, he’s had to live in secret, keep his power hidden. After Dunk is shot, the students say, “Jared stopped him” and “You saved us, man.” Poor Dunk was hanging out in the hall, talking with friends. He wasn’t using his powers. But that doesn’t matter in this universe because mutants suck. Even the title of the comic, Muties, is a derogatory term for mutants.

Issue one has an interesting art style where the pages change style. The first page is in a painted-style with no gutters. It’s a full-page shot of the high school with a small panel laid on top, with a thin black border. The second page is another full page painted shot of Jared in class. Then, the third page showing a scene in class features panels without a tight border on a loose-leaf background. The panels change from a painted style to tight pencils. The lines from the loose-leaf run into the panels. It’s like the notes Jared takes in class. We’re getting closer to his point-of-view.

Most pages stick to one art style, but later, the styles start to overlap. Whenever we need to get closer to Jared and his viewpoint, the notepad style returns. On one page, his drunk father sends him to the store to get more frozen dinners. The page is painted when we are far from Jared, but the one panel of him at the store, upset he’s had to go out again for his father, is back to the notepad. It’s also the first panel on the page that gives us a few words of interiority. To sympathize with someone who will kill two people by the end of the issue, the reader needs to really feel for Jared. The change in art style allows an almost silent method to understand his motivation. Words are kept too a minimum throughout.

When I read a great comic, there ends up being a page or two that I can recall for years afterward. The opening of the second volume of Maus with Art Spiegelman and his drafting table on a pile of corpses, for example. Or when Magneto says, “I can’t. I’m concentrating,” and rips Apocalypse in half at the end of the Age of Apocalypse. Here, it’s the two pages with Dunk being shot and the aftermath. The first panel on the page is in the painted style of Dunk stretching to get out of the way of Jared’s fire. Then, the second goes to a panel closer to most comics. The gun in Jared’s hand is three times the size. This panel is where Dunk is shot and killed. My reading of it is that we are in Jared’s mind here. He’s thinking of himself as a hero gunning down one of those evil muties. On the next page, when one of the students thanks Jared for killing Dunk, the art style returns to the notebook style, minus the loose-leaf blue lines. We’re closer to Jared there. When Jared realizes that Kate was gunned down too, the comic starts to distance itself from Jared’s point of view and returns to the painted style of the first couple of pages. Again, comics can’t just rely on text. The visual medium requires more than just someone drawing pictures in panels. Muties shows us what it’s like to be a mutant. A kid can shoot one in the hall of a high school and people congratulate him. When he shoots a regular person, that’s when things turn sour. Being able to stretch didn’t save Dunk. He wasn’t meant for something greater. He just wanted to live like every other kid, and when he’s killed, people are glad, even though he never caused any of them harm.

___________

Sean Ironman (Episode 102) is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

Heroes Never Rust #49: Is Gud Dog?

09 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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Frank Quitely, Grant Morrison, Heroes Never Rust, sean ironman, We3

Heroes Never Rust #49 by Sean Ironman

Is Gud Dog?

To me, the comics medium is my favorite medium for stories. I like movies. I like TV. Prose. Poetry. Music. I like stories, but I love comics. One of the reasons I love comics is that I feel artists can do more in a comic book than in other mediums. You have visuals and text, so the best of both worlds can exist. But there’s also really no money in comics. It costs an artist just as much to draw a planet being destroyed as it does to show a person drinking a cup of coffee. Ideas can get wilder without some suit coming in and saying it’s too expensive.

Over the next three weeks, I’m going to take a look at one of my favorite comics from the 2000s, We3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. We3 can’t exist in another medium—at least, it would have to change quite a bit. It’s about three animals (dog, cat, and rabbit) who are put in robotic suits by the military for research. The military is going to shut down the program, so the doctor who cares for the animals lets them loose. The military goes after them. When it was released a decade ago, it was described as Homeward Bound meets Terminator. It’s extremely violent, with very little dialogue. And there’s barely a plot. Basically, I described everything that happens, minus the ending, already. It’s mostly a showcase for Frank Quitely’s artwork.

But it works. The focus on art has been lacking from comics in the last decade or so. Comics goes back and forth, with a few years of writer-driven comics, and then a few years of art-driven comics. Hopefully, more focus on art comes around soon. I think when there’s a focus on art, a comic becomes less of a storyboard for a film. In a writing community, I hear people say the art doesn’t matter when it comes to comics. It’s story, they say, that’s important. Yes, story is important, but by taking a step back when it comes to word balloons and captions, a strong artist can tell the story in a new and innovative way.

When I say We3 is focused on the art, I don’t mean to say the comic has very detailed art that gives the reader something pretty to look at. It has that, but Quitely is also focused on how the comic presents such pictures, in the service of a story.

The opening sequence of We3 is amazing not just because how well Quitely draws a man running on a treadmill or the detail he puts on a close-up of a man’s eyes as he sweats. The sequence is amazing because of how Quitely paces the scene and how he builds tension until the three animals obliterate the man running on the treadmill. There’s no dialogue, although Morrison does get in some cheats with a couple of question marks and exclamation points in word balloons. There’s so much the scene doesn’t show. A group of armed men sit in a rundown living room. We see them look at glowing red eyes in the chimney. Then, we cut away to the man on the treadmill. We don’t even see the animals fire. We don’t really see the animals much, except in shadows and a glimpse of them entering and exiting a room. It’s creepy and plays like a cold opening on a TV show. The scene sets up how dangerous these animals are.

The next scene is of Doctor Roseanne, the woman who cares for the animals. For those of you who have trouble with exposition, study this scene. It begins with here trying to get a parrot to talk. Through this, we see her holding a series of cards. One has RIP printed on the cover. She opens a door to another room in her house. It’s an empty bed and an empty desk. Beside the bed , there seems to be some medical supplies. The page finishes with a close-up of tears in Roseanne’s eyes. When she exits the room, we see a photo on the desk of a man with a young girl in a graduation gown. There’s no talk about her father dying. We’re just shown these little details as she gets ready to leave.

The first issue’s highlight, in terms of art, iis the six-page sequence of security camera footage. We get six rows of three panels each for these six pages. Eighteen panels for six pages showing Roseanne letting the animals go after she’s told they will be decommissioned. We see her let them loose. We see them escape. We see other scientists and security respond. Once again, there’s next to no dialogue. This sequence works, I think, because of a little detail—the panels don’t fit on the page .The last row on the first pages is cut off. The top and bottom rows on the next page are cut off. We aren’t looking at separate comic panels, not really. What we’re looking at is a spread of the security camera footage that security is looking at. We’re in that little room where a security officer has a whole bunch of little TVs. There’s a few lines of dialogue, but the word balloons have ripples around them. It’s an interesting way to show that the dialogue isn’t heard clearly. Security is watching the footage. That makes the scene more interesting because we aren’t getting some random artistic layout that means nothing. The decision to show the security footage is story-based.

I can’t end this week’s column without talking about the animals. The dog is named 1. The cat is 2. And the rabbit is 3. Together, they are We3. The animals talk and have personalities. But they aren’t like animals in Homeward Bound or other stories. They have a fractured diction and have the personalities of the respective animal. The dog is a dog, not a person in a dog body. The dog asks a military man, “I. M. Gud. R. U. Gud 2?” When the military man doesn’t respond, the dog tilts his head, upset and curious, and says, “? R. U. 2?” The man says calls the dog a good dog, and the dog says, “Gud dog. Is Gud dog?” The dog just wants the person’s approval. The cat is more wild. “Mmmmmen st!nk. Bossssss! St!ink!” The rabbit just seems a bit dumb. “No. Grass. East. Now. Grass.”

After they are let out, the cat and rabbit look to the dog for direction. He tells them they will go “home.” The sad part is that the three have no home. The cat says as much on the last page. “We3 no home now.” Then they run into the forest and military helicopters in the distance fly toward them. The animals don’t get much to say, but their limited dialogue works well. I care for them much quicker because I don’t lose focus on what the military has done to them. Even when they speak, I think about the torture they have had to endure because man sucks. I think it’s important to build a story that enables the reader to imagine aspects that they are never shown. I want them to find home and I really know nothing about them.

___________

Heroes Never Rust #46: The Turning Point

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, Heroes Never Rust, sean ironman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Heroes Never Rust #46 by Sean Ironman

The Turning Point

The fourth issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is the most action-packed one yet. The league attempts to retrieve the cavorite from “The Doctor” and stop the devious foreigner from building his airships. We finally see Mr. Hyde cut loose and rampage his way from room to room creating a distraction so Quartermain and Mina can get their hands on the cavorite. Of course, the team succeeds, escapes unscathed, and hands over the cavorite to Campion Bond. Job well done. Britain has been saved.

But wait, this is the fourth issue of a six issue miniseries. It’s not over. It’s just beginning. With all the violence and death and dismemberment in this issue, many readers might think the gruesome deaths of the countless evil henchmen take center stage. But there’s a lot of suspicious behavior to be found. There are a lot of secrets.

The issue opens with Captain Nemo talking with two of his own men (Ishmael and Broad Arrow Jack). Nemo doesn’t trust Campion Bond. “Bond believes we are his pawns. He thinks no-one observes his game. But I am no-one. I observe everything and to play with Nemo is to play games with destruction.” He refers to himself in the third-person so you know he’s serious. Captain Nemo sits out most of the action, putting together his plan.

Another trick of a character is Mr. Hyde pretending not to see the Invisible Man. We get a couple of panels from Mr. Hyde’s point of view, and we see that he can make out the heat signature of the Invisible Man. Mr. Hyde is like Predator from Predator. But he pretends that he can’t see him. When the Invisible Man points in the right direction to go, Mr. Hyde says, “You keep forgetting, Griffin. I can’t see you.” The reason behind this lie doesn’t come out in this issue. But it does change the way the reader views Mr. Hyde. He isn’t a mindless hulk. He might not look like a person, but he’s not quite an animal either. Dr. Jekyll’s more dangerous than a beast. When the Invisible Man tells him they have to rescue Mina and Quartermain, Mr. Hyde still holds a grudge from when they captured him. “Murray and Quartermain. Huhughh. Yes, I remember them from Paris. They shot me, poisoned me and abducted me. I don’t think there’s any great hurry, is there?” I don’t know why Mr. Hyde lies to the Invisible Man, but I can make an educated guess that it’s not for something good. The Invisible Man better watch out.

The last segment of the issue reveals the largest and most dangerous of the hidden truths. Last time, I wrote about how based on Alan Moore’s previous work, we were going to get to a point when the league turns against the government. This issue features the beginning of that turn. Campion Bond leaves with the cavorite, but then we find out the Invisible Man is nowhere to be found. He’s following Campion, seemingly under the orders of Captain Nemo. I really enjoyed that the only reason we now see where Campion goes off to is because one of the members of the league follows him. Many writers might have just chosen to reveal to the reader the identity of Campion’s boss. But that always comes off as bullshit. If the reader is following a character or set of characters, then we should know what they know. There may be exceptions to that rule, but I think it’s a good one to have. If a point-of-view character knows something, the reader should know it to. We find out the identity of Campion’s boss because one of the characters finds out. We don’t just get the writer revealing it to the reader. It’s a part of the story.

Mina Murray thought Campion’s boss, Mr. M, meant Mycroft Holmes, is the elder brother of Sherlock Holmes. She was close. While Mr. M is not Sherlock’s brother, he is a Sherlock Holmes’s character. Mr. M is Professor James Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s arch-nemesis. Apparently, he used the league to fight a rival crime lord and to steal the cavorite for his own insidious schemes. We’ll have to wait until the next issue to see what the league does with this knowledge.

___________

Heroes Never Rust #45: Undercover

11 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, Heroes Never Rust, sean ironman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Heroes Never Rust #45 by Sean Ironman

Undercover

Now that the team has come together, the mission can begin. As Captain Nemo puts it, “An enemy of Britain has stolen its one sample of cavorite, the key to the mastery of the air.” The more I re-read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the more I think about Alan Moore’s other works. Moore wrote Watchmen, a comic that asks the question, if we put our trust and power into superheroes to save us, who’s there to keep them in check? In V for Vendetta, Moore’s story follows an anarchist who fights against a repressive Britain. In his best work (at least in my opinion), Miracleman, Moore follows a superhero who slowly separates himself from society, from humanity, and comes to be thought of as a god. There seems to always be an anti-establishment thing going on in Moore’s work. In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the heroes work for the British government. But I still think Moore is fighting against the establishment.

The so-called villain, “The Doctor,” has stolen the cavorite (a metal introduced in The War of the Worlds), which will help create airships that can drop bombs on England. But we never see this. Not once, at least as of yet, has the heroes seen the Doctor, or has the reader been given a scene with The Doctor, or even a henchmen running off with the cavorite. Campion Bond, a government stooge tells the league and they go off. There have been no threats, no attacks. The league is trusting the British government, and I fear they will regret it.

The idea of the foreigner, of the outsider, being less than a white male British citizen is staying with the comic series. To blend in, the Invisible Man puts on the whitest makeup. Take a look on page two, at Mina’s waist, it’s pencil thin , being held tight by a corset. Captain Nemo, the foreigner, must stay on the ship, even though he seems to be the most capable member of the team. In talking to Dr. Jekyll about Mina, Quartermain lets on that he believes something “ghastly happened to her last year.” Then says she divorced her husband. How ghastly.

They are a team pretending to fit in with the British government, but they can’t. Nemo. Mina. The Invisible Man. All outcasts. Quartermain is a product of a past time, no longer fitting in with the current society. Dr. Jekyll is the closest to a regular British citizen, except for underneath his gentleman-exterior, he becomes a hulking beast.

Where do these heroes search for the bad guy? In the Chinese district. Of course, the “real” British citizens couldn’t have anything to do with it. Go to the foreigners.

I shouldn’t be too hard on them, though. In the end, they do find an airship, with a cartoonish offensive Chinese drawing on it. Mina and Quartermain (along with the Invisible Man) sneak in. Well, not so much sneak in. They lie and tell a Chinese man that they have no place to sleep so the man lets the couple in. `

At the end, we’re given a splash page of men working on a giant airship with guns much larger than a man. It seems to spell doom for the league, and for Britain. Ending each issue, Moore gives up a little paragraph that speaks directly to the reader and sets up the next issue. This issue ends with a box with a green dragon wrapped around it. “Tremble, dearest Reader, at the horrid spectacle of Johnny Chinaman, armed with the mighty weapons of our new Electric Age and bent on turning them against our island home!” Johnny Chinaman. Of course, we aren’t meant to take this seriously. I don’t need Moore’s past work to tell me that. He’s setting us up for when he pulls the rug out from under us, for when the league must turn against Campion Bond, the status quo.

___________

Sean Ironman is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

Heroes Never Rust #44: Outsiders

04 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, Heroes Never Rust, Kevin O’Neill, sean ironman, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Heroes Never Rust #44 by Sean Ironman

Outsiders

While the second issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen begins with the gang taking down Mr. Hyde and features the team stopping the Invisible Man from molesting women, the comic still seems very concerned with the treatment of minorities and outsiders in England. When the team returns from capturing Mr. Hyde, Mina Murray tells Campion Bond that she has been nearly killed twice in six weeks. Caption Bond responds, “A waspish tongue, Miss Murray, is to my mind but one of the many unattractive features of the modern suffragette.” He shuts her down right away. Also, nearly all of the panels for the two-page scene between the characters is framed from far away. They meet at the docks, which are under heavy construction, building a new London. The conversation can take place anywhere. It’s really only two talking heads. It’s exposition to set up the team going after the Invisible Man, as well as laying the groundwork for later plot developments. But Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill put the construction workers and the poor city folk up front. They are making sure the reader sees what’s going on in the city. Workers rush around machinery. The poor sit in alleys starving. They look miserable. In one panel, a woman argues with a man in the background, and the man seems to be punishing a small child. Campion and Mina ignore them. The focus is most definitely on the poor and the immigrants who are building London’s future.

The team later travels to Edmonton to Miss Rosa Coote’s Correctional Academy for Wayward Gentlewomen where the women believe the Holy Spirit is impregnating them—it’s really the Invisible Man. The team is undercover, so they play into stereotypes. Mina plays the wife to Quartermain, and Captain Nemo plays the couple’s manservant. They easily get into the academy.

As the team is shown around, they pass a room where a teacher is punishing a student. The teacher slaps the woman’s bare ass with a rod, while another student holds the woman’s hands down. It doesn’t affect the plot at all. It’s a single panel and the scene is quickly forgotten. As they pass the punishment being dealt, the woman in charge, Rosa Belinda Coote, says, “Strictness and discipline, Miss Murray. That’s the key to everything!” Then, we are shown the beating. But, the key to this panel is in the dialogue and in the eyes of one of the characters. The student holding down the woman being punished has crazy eyes. She seems hypnotized. O’Neill is a fantastic artist and works with incredibly detailed images. I don’t believe she has the eyes of a hypnotized person just because. She’s losing her individuality, or has already lost it.

As she swings the rod, the teacher says, “Take that, Olive Chancellor, you willful girl! And that! We’ll soon thrash your independent American ways out of you!” To which the student being beaten says, “Ahhh! Mercy, Miss Carr! I am dying! Aah!”

First, the dialogue is comical. It makes the whole scene ridiculous. Also, there’s a reason the teacher mentions the student by name. Olive Chancellor is a character from The Bostonians by Henry James. In that novel, Olive is a feminist and falls in love with a woman. In the comic’s panel, the only member of the team visible is Mina Murray, who earlier was chided by Campion Bond for being a suffragist. The teacher, Miss Carr, is Katy Carr from a series of children’s books by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey under the pen name Susan Coolidge. In the first novel, What Katy Did, Katy Carr is a tomboy who wishes to be beloved and to grow up and do something huge with her life, like paint a famous painting or save the life of someone drowning. At one point, Katy falls and bruises her spine, leaving her bedridden. In the end, the children gravitate toward her and she takes over running the household.

So here we get Mrs. Carr, who represents what the feminist movement is fighting against, beating a feminist into submission with some ridiculous dialogue in a throwaway panel. To me, Moore and O’Neill are showing readers throughout The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen the absurdity in bigots, in standing in the way of the future. The final scene introduces the next villain the team must face—The Doctor. We don’t know much about The Doctor, only that he’s worse than Captain Mors, who is described “as Satan Himself.” Captain Mors is another literary character, a German air-pirate from a popular German dime novel, Der Luftpirat und sein lenkbares Luftschiff. Captain Mors is basically Robin Hood in the air—he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. He was incredibly smart and traveled the solar system in a ship he designed. In many ways, he’s similar to Captain Nemo. A Nemo and Robin Hood mix. His crew was a combination of Indian and European, and he fought against evil. Doesn’t seem like a bad guy to me, but he protects the poor and whoever those in high society deem less than human, so I guess he must be stopped. The bastard. What’s he doing protecting the poor and the immigrants? I guess if the League thinks The Doctor is worse, they have a real lunatic on their hands.

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Heroes Never Rust #43: Literary Superheroes

28 Wednesday May 2014

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Alan Moore, Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Hawley Griffin, Heroes Never Rust, Jekyll and Hyde, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mina Murray, sean ironman

Heroes Never Rust #43 by Sean Ironman

Literary Superheroes

Let’s get this out of the way up front. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be studying The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol 1. For those of you who haven’t read it, please (sigh) do not confuse it with the Sean Connery film. While the movie is based off the comic, other than the names of characters, they’re nothing alike. For one, the comic is good. Very good. The same basic idea exists—characters from literature exist in the same world. A team of literary characters is formed—basically a literary Avengers—to protect England. This team consists of Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo, Hawley Griffin, Jekyll and Hyde, and Mina Murray.

There’s a quote in the opening of the first volume from Campion Bond, an ancestor of James Bond and the man who sends Mina Murray to form the League—“The British Empire has always encountered difficulty in distinguishing its heroes and its monsters.” It’s a perfect quote to start a story about a team consisting of characters more damaged than heroic. We’re not introduced to the whole team in the first issue. Campion Bond sends Mina Murray and Captain Nemo to collect the team.

They make two stops in the first issue. The first is to Africa to collect Allan Quartermain. Quartermain basically acts as a screwed up version of Captain America. He’s the nation’s hero from a previous era. Mina grew up listening to stories about him. Except here, instead of being given a super solider serum, like Captain America, he’s an opium addict. He’s thin and can barely walk or open his eyes. On their second stop on the Rue Morgue, Quartermain messes things up by going to the pharmacy and lets Mina get captured by their next member, Mr. Hyde, who here is the team’s version of the Hulk—a monstrous ape-man who towers over everyone else. That ends the first issue, so we’ll have to wait to see what happens when the team goes up against Mr. Hyde.

The interesting aspect of the first issue, and I didn’t notice this the first time through when I read it years ago, but the white males (Quartermain, Jekyll/Hyde) are corrupted. Quartermain is a drug addict, and Jekyll has turned into Mr. Hyde again. Both men are capable of great things, but they basically let drugs get in the way.

The other two members of the team (Mina Murray and Captain Nemo) are outcast from society. No one thinks much of either, but they are far more capable. Captain Nemo is the son of the Hindu Raja of Bundelkund. He’s a foreigner. When some lowlifes are chasing Quartermain and Mina, Nemo saves the day with a huge harpoon gun. Because of him and his Nautilus, the fledgling team can travel in secret. He’s proven much more useful already than Quartermain or Hyde. Yet, later in the issue, Quartermain says, “That’s Captain Nemo. Nemo the Madman. Nemo the Science-Pirate…” Characters don’t seem to think much of Nemo, and there doesn’t seem to be much basis for it other than they don’t understand him.

Here, Quartermain is not the leader of the team. He’s in no state where he can manage a team. Mina Murray, the team’s lone woman, leads. She’s the one who tracks everyone down. She goes out after Mr. Hyde. She goes in search for Quartermain, while Nemo stays with his ship. She’s the proactive one. The minorities bring the team together. In the opening, Campion Bond tells Mina, “Your history has placed you far beyond the social pale. Divorce is one thing, but that other business…ravished by a foreigner and all that. Quite against your will, of course, but then people do talk so, don’t they?” The worst thing you can say about Mina is that she’s a divorced woman who may or may not have been raped. And this makes her worse than the opium addict and the monster, apparently.

I don’t know what any of this says about the treatment of minorities, other than the obvious. I’ll be interested what it adds up to over the course of volume one. I don’t even know if it will. But I think it’s there. I think there’s a reason why Nemo is the one to say, “The winning side writes the history books, Miss Murray” in response to Mina pointing out that Nemo was the villain of the British Empire and Quartermain was its hero. Hopefully, the rest of the volume will continue this discussion, wherever it leads.

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Sean Ironman is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.

Heroes Never Rust #42: Aftermath

21 Wednesday May 2014

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Heroes Never Rust, New X-Men #138, sean ironman

Heroes Never Rust #42 by Sean Ironman

Aftermath

There’s only so long a person can hide from their failures. Even though the X-Men put an end to Quentin Quire’s rebellion, failures (both personal and professional) are the focus of each story in New X-Men #138. The issue begins with the X-Men flawlessly taking down the last of Quentin’s gang, Glob Herman, a mutant made of wax who set himself on fire in the last issue and ran toward town. Cyclops shoots Glob with his optic blast and Xorn covers Glob in wet cement, capturing him. The scene has no dialogue or sound effects, which shows the precision and talent the X-Men have in battle. They work together as a team without talking to one another. They just know. But, eventually, soldiers must return home.

With all their talent in the field, the X-Men are failing at home. The cover of New X-Men features a weary Professor X removing the Cerebro helmet. During a banquet speech, Professor X announces that at the end of the summer he’ll be stepping down as headmaster of the school. “My goal is integration with humankind, through peaceful coexistence and mutual self-development. My methods are non-violent and require time and patience. In light of recent events, I’m willing to consider that my approach may be in error.” How long can a person go without seeing their work pay off? It’s a big step for the professor. At least, he’s willing to accept his failures. While I think I’d be more on Magneto’s side of humans and mutants will never get along, I can respect Professor X in this issue. He wants things to be better. He wants his students to have a full life, one not spent in fear of who they are.

The other characters here are not so noble. We get a short scene between Beak and Angel, two members of Xorn’s Special Class at Xavier’s Institute. Angel is pregnant. I guess their failure is that of a failure to use birth control. Not quite the same as Xavier’s failure, but still a very serious one. They’re afraid they’ll be thrown out of the institute once the teachers find out. I went to a Catholic high school, so, for me, that would be a real fear. But, what I like here is that the reader is given no clue as to whether Angel and Beak’s fear could happen. I don’t think the X-Men would throw out students in need—I doubt they would. But, from a student’s view, it’s quite terrifying. This also shows another failure of Xavier’s. He seems so caught up in the mutant/human debate that normal life never seems to get discussed. Maybe his beliefs are just fine, but now mutants need to start living. Maybe if he didn’t preach at the students, they wouldn’t be afraid to come to him when they need help.

The biggest, or most shocking, failure revolves around Emma Frost and Cyclops, who’s married to Jean Grey (Phoenix). One of Emma’s students was killed stopping Quentin Quire, a member of a five-telepath group called the Stepford Cuckoos. The remaining four tell Emma off. Emma tells them that she loves her students and the remaining four respond, “If you love them so much, then why do you let them die all the time, you silly old woman?” It wasn’t Emma’s fault one of their own died. In fact, the Stepford Cuckoos took it upon themselves to stop Quentin. But, they’re children. They’re lashing out. They even rat out Emma and Cyclops to Jean.

This is a gray area that to me isn’t that gray, although others disagree. Cyclops is married to Jean. Cyclops has been sharing sexual thoughts with Emma, who is a telepath. Technically, they have done nothing physically, but they have done a lot in each other’s minds. Jean mentally walks in on the two right before they have sex. Some people don’t think what Cyclops did is that bad because they never actually touched. But, I still consider it cheating. The worst part about being cheated on isn’t that your partner has sex with someone else. Quite honestly, I care very little about that part. It’s the broken trust, the other person hiding. Cyclops still did that part. yclops cheated.

Some may find this a shocking turn for someone they consider to be a boy scout: for him to cheat on his wife. But it’s very fitting with his character. When Jean Grey returned from the dead, Cyclops left his pregnant wife to return to Jean. He’s a good field leader, but not very good with women. I don’t think he wanted to hurt Jean. Jean is his childhood love. They met as teenagers and have been in love for years. Emma challenges Cyclops. I actually think she’s a better fit for him than Jean. Him and Jean love each other, but I think they pretend to be other people. They pretend to be better than they are. In a way, Emma brings Cyclops down to Earth, gets him to accept who he really is. He can still be the hero. He can still save the day and lead the X-Men, but he gets the okay to fail, to not have to pretend to be the boy scout. He gets to take some of the weight off his shoulders. This is a man who can’t open his eyes without being worried he’ll kill whoever he’s looking at. Emma gets him to relax.

There’s a lot of people failing in this issue, some accepting their failures, others not so much. But I don’t think the failures here are meant to be bad. Professor X will change his ways. At least, we hope so. He’ll become better. Beak and Angel will become parents. Cyclops will have to face what he’s done to Jean. Things are changing, and for change to come, some things must fail so that other things can be built up. But you’ll have to read those stories on your own. This is the end of “Riot at Xavier’s,” and even though Quentin lost his rebellion, he changed the school from here on out.

___________

Heroes Never Rust #39: Kids

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Grant Morrison, Heroes Never Rust, New X-Men #135, sean ironman

Heroes Never Rust #39 by Sean Ironman

Kids

The cover to New X-Men #135 says it all. The X-Men (Professor X, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Wolverine, Beast, and Xorn), all teachers at Xavier’s Institute for Higher Learning, stand around helplessly, each looking at another member of the team for an answer. Newspaper articles make up the background. The articles detail mutant discrimination. Quentin Quire, a student at Xavier’s and budding supervillain, says it best, “Didn’t humans provide the weapons which just killed sixteen million of our people in Genosha? Didn’t they just murder one of our greatest artists, Jumbo Carnation? We live under constant threat?” The X-Men, with all that they have done and all the battles they have fought, have not really changed the world that much. Discrimination is difficult to fight. It takes generations, and even then, it may never fully go away. Quentin is a frustrated young man. He’s turned to drugs and he’s angry. Bad things are about to happen.

In Grant Morrison’s first story arc on the X-Men, “E is for Extinction,” he killed Magneto, the X-Men’s long-running enemy. Magneto became more powerful in death because he became a martyr. In this issue, Quentin wears a T-shirt that says, “Magneto was right.” Contrary to popular belief, Magneto doesn’t really want to kill all humans. He will kill to protect his own, but he’s not a madman (not in most stories). While Xavier believes humans and mutants can coexist, Magneto thinks the two can never get along. Many times through the comics, Magneto wants to have his own land, a safe haven for mutants. That’s where he was when Cassandra Nova used Sentinels to attack, and Magneto was killed.

Quentin tells Professor X: “You’ve always encouraged us to dream…I just wondered what would happen if one of us had a dream you didn’t like?” That sums up the conflict for the “Riot at Xavier’s” storyline. A good school encourages critical thinking and not forcing students to think a certain way. Students are taught to question. A good teacher doesn’t shut down their students because they think something different than the teacher. When a supervillain comes out and attacks a city or a person, the X-Men can jump right in and fight. But what happens when a student begins to think like Magneto?

My favorite scene in all of Grant Morrison’s run on the X-Men is in this issue. The X-Men meet in Professor X’s office (and mind, it seems) to discuss Quentin. But what can they do? Wolverine says to wait for Quentin to grow out of it. Quentin, as we see earlier in the issue, has taken to the streets and attacked humans. How long can the X-Men wait? But they also can’t walk into the classroom and beat the child. If they turn him into the cops, then the institute will get bad press. If mutants are so hated, then bad press will tear the school apart.

The teachers turn to blame a drug called Kick, which Quentin has been taking. I think that shows the weakness of the X-Men. They can’t understand that one of their students believes something different than they do. While Kick is making Quentin a bit crazier and amplifies his mutant power of telepathy, he believes the X-Men’s way doesn’t work. Maybe in twenty years he could change his mind, as people do when they get older. But, now, he truly believes the X-Men aren’t doing enough.

While Quentin’s story unfolds, we also get the story of the special class. Quentin puts together a five member team, similar to the original X-Men, and the special class also harkens back to the original team. There’s Angel, Beak, Basilisk (who has one eye), Ernst, Dummy, and No-Girl (who has no body). The special class doesn’t question the X-Men’s philosophy. They follow Xorn on a hike and camping trip. Xorn breaks things down into simple terms. He’s not teaching a philosophy. He’s teaching a way of life. When Basilisk asks why Xorn was imprisoned, Xorn responds, “Crime? There was no crime. I became strange and different. Like you, my difference made me a target of ignorance and fear.” Xorn is turning the special class toward his own end (which is made clear in a later story arc), but he’s not lecturing them. He tells the special class his story and leaves it at that. Maybe that’s what Professor X needs to do. Stop teaching in abstracts, in dreams, and just state his history. Leave it up to the students to decide their own beliefs. Maybe if you level with students, give them the freedom to decide, then they’ll come around. I don’t know. There are no easy answers to a student like Quentin Quire. If he’s going to go evil, if he’s going to strike out against humanity, that’s what he’s going to do. The X-Men will have to be ready.

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Heroes Never Rust #38: The Next Generation

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Grant Morrison, Heroes Never Rust, New X-Men, sean ironman

Heroes Never Rust #38 by Sean Ironman

The Next Generation

I love the X-Men. No matter how long it’s been since I’ve read new comics, when I come back, I read X-Men comics. I follow them even when I’m not reading comics. One of the reasons I like them is that they aren’t just fighting to fight or fighting to save the world (even though that does happen as a byproduct many times). They fight to live. They fight for equality. In 2001, Marvel Comics brought on Grant Morrison, one of the industry’s leading creators, to write New X-Men. At once, Morrison brought the X-Men into the 21^st century, by not only bringing in new concepts, but by taking the characters back to basics. It’s one of my favorite runs on an X-Men title. While some stories are better than others, I find all to be great and worth reading. I’ll be taking a look at the strongest X-Men story Morrison wrote over the next few weeks, “Riot at Xavier’s.”

Xavier’s Institute for Higher Learning is the focus of the story arc, and for much of Morrison’s run. While it may be difficult for fans of the X-Men movies to grasp this, but the X-Men’s school was not really used for many years before Morrison focused on it. It may have still been referred to as a school, but other than the danger room, it had long stopped feeling like any learning was going on there. In New X-Men, the school acted like a private boarding school, just focused on mutants. The students, especially a young telepath named Quentin Quire, are the focus of “Riot at Xavier’s.”

If the purpose of a school is to get students to think critically, then what happens when students come to different conclusions that their professors? That’s the basic idea behind the story arc. It opens with Jumbo Carnation, the best mutant designer in the world, being murdered by five men. The students hear about it and tension begins to build.

Quentin has a run-in with another student, Slick, who wrote a song about Jumbo. Quentin doesn’t understand how writing a song about the man’s death will help in anyway. And quite honestly, I don’t either. I’m with Quentin on this. He’s very easy to relate to, and that makes the story more powerful. He wants action, He’s tired of the world he lives in. He’s tired of just accepting things the way they are. He gets called into Professor X’s office, and, by then, he’s fed up. “Well, I livein the brave new world and it’s not as shiny and perfect as you’d like to think. You’re always selling this future that never arrives, you preach Utopia but you never deliver on this “dream” we keep hearing about.” It can be easy to think like Quentin. How many times have we heard someone say racism doesn’t exist in the United States today? Of course, it still exists. Everyday people experience racism in this country. We hear that things are getting better. And they are, in a way. But things still aren’t great. It can be easy to get fed up with the world. And Quentin does. He’s tired of waiting for this world he was promised. He’s going to take it.

In the end, at least as of the first issue, he doesn’t attack anyone. He doesn’t strike out against the world. He gets a haircut. It might not sound that bad, and in the end it isn’t. But it’s a start. He gets his hair cut to match an article that was in the Daily Bugle many years before, when the mutant “problem” was just beginning. The article is titled “Mutant Menace! Are they for real?” It features a picture of mutants with whips in a destroyed city. A threatening image of the future. Quentin starts his rebellion by taking back the offensive imagery and making it his own. It’s an empowering act for the young man. The first issue is just the build-up to the riot. Other than Jumbo Carnation’s death in the opening two pages, there’s no violence, no big villain fights. Just a boy who’s tired of being told the world is a better place.

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