Heroes Never Rust #48: War at Home

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Heroes Never Rust, Violence

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Alan Moore, Saving Private Ryan, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Violence

Heroes Never Rust #48 by Sean Ironman

War at Home

This morning, I watched the opening battle scene of Saving Private Ryan. My internet was down and I decided to check out what DVDs I had while I ate breakfast. I don’t know why I chose Saving Private Ryan. It’s been years since I’ve seen the film. I only watched the first twenty minutes or so. I left off a couple of minutes after Tom Hanks and his crew make it off the beach and start obliterating Nazis in retreat. I was fourteen when the movie was released and I thought the battle scenes were the best part. Explosions. Limbs blown off. A Nazi throwing his hands up and surrendering just to be gunned down. It was good action and that’s what I was looking for. But I’m old now and tired. Today when I watched the film, it was horrific. Not just because people were dying. Not because I understand that real people had to go through this. Before I turned it off and went to start my work for the day, a few Nazis began to run away. About three of them were in their trenches, not firing, just running. Running to safety. Running home. Running from death. And then, about two dozen U.S. soldiers, who are above the retreaters on solid ground, gun them down. As a kid, I probably cheered when that happened. Take that Nazis! But watching it now, there was something so animalistic about it. I understand these same Nazis were killing American soldiers just a few minutes earlier. But I felt the scene showed what war does to a person, how it changes a person, how it destroys everything.

In the conclusion to volume one of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, war has come. Professor Moriarty’s airship bombs Limehouse, which is engulfed in flames by page two. In the opening, Moriarty says in regards to the cavorite, “This wonderful, celestial material…It’s given me the sky, this element that I was surely born for. Ah, Sergeant, does your soul thrill as mine does to these seas of cloud, to this God-like perspective? To this God-like power?” Moriarty is an evil son-of-a-bitch. He even comments on the “countless tiny lives” below before commencing the bombing. He must kill thousands this issue. And for what? So he can defeat a rival crime lord? As the neighborhood is burning to the ground, I no longer see Kevin O’Neill’s beautiful artwork. Even though it’s fiction, I think about all those people who were sitting down to dinner, who were getting ready for bed after a long day working construction. They have no stake in what’s happening. And now, they’re dead.

When the Chinese crime lord, The Doctor, sees the destruction, he orders his troops to attack. They fly at Moriarty’s airship with their own personal flying devices. I feel bad for them. What do they get out of this? They fly to their death, and from what we see later, it is a gruesome death. Nemo and Mr. Hyde lay out what looks to be hundreds of men. In the end, when the league wins, and of course they win, men fall to their deaths. And, again, for what? Because two crime lords can’t get along? What’s a crime lord any way, other than an asshole? What’s he a lord of? We’re smart people. How does someone lord over us? Why would anyone follow these mad men? They can’t pay well. The hours must suck. Who’s dream in life is it to work for a crime lord? To kill for someone else? I say if The Doctor and Moriarty can’t get along, then let them fight, but leave everyone else out of it. They can kill each other all they want, but London would be safe. The battle is made worse because people follow the villains. The villains themselves can do barely any damage. It’s the numbers of men, the numbers of bombs. Moriarty didn’t make those bombs, or his airship. He didn’t load those guns, sharpen those swords. He told someone else to do it, and someone else did as they were told. Why?

In the television show Game of Thrones, Varys poses a riddle to Tyrion. I couldn’t find the quote for the show, but riddle in the books is: “In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me – who lives and who dies?” The sellsword has the power over the three men. He can kill them all or just walk away. Yet, people go on and pretend the other men have the power, and most people do what others tell them.

At the end of volume one, the league triumphs. Moriarty is beaten. London is saved. But it all seems so anticlimactic. It was all for nothing. And I don’t mean that as a criticism of Moore’s script. That’s just he way things are. A couple of crazy, power-hungry men cause destruction, and then we’re left to clean things up.

Maybe I’m thinking too hard about things. Maybe I should just look at the pretty pictures and be in awe of how the league fights their way through the masses of soldiers to win the battle. I can say that it’s pretty cool, and I enjoy the comic greatly. But maybe I’m just tired. Tired of seeing new mass shootings on the news. Tired of soldiers killing people. Even tired of people who do work they don’t love just because they’re following what other people tell them to do. No one can tell us what to do. I think from time to time about superheroes in our own world. If they would be helpful or not. But we wouldn’t really need them if we just did what we know is right. The league of extraordinary gentlemen would have no purpose. Maybe if the league didn’t have to fight these mindless battles, Mina could fight for equal rights of women. Nemo can fight against England’s treatment of India. But I guess the important things will have to wait. A little orb that makes things float seems to be much more important.

___________

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 #47: And So, Then, to the Death?

25 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Heroes Never Rust #47 by Sean Ironman

So, Then, To the Death?

The penultimate issue of volume on of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen gets everyone caught up on the villain’s plan and moves everyone into position for the climax. Not much actually happens in this issue in terms of moving the plot forward. We find out Professor Moriarty’s plan and the league heads out to stop him. But the issue is held together because each scene shines in the dialogue. Also, it’s great to finally see the league begin to come together as a team.

A flashback to Reichenbach, Switzerland in 1891 starts off the issue. The final showdown between Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes. The scene is interesting, even though it’s somewhat unnecessary. It explains how Moriarty is still alive, but that’s about it, since Sherlock Holmes doesn’t really play a part in the rest of the volume. But it works because their fight is so proper. Moriarty, while a villain, allows Holmes to write a letter to Watson before they fight. As Holmes writes, Moriarty stares off the cliff. “Ah, what is to be a man below so blue a sky.” But when Holmes asks him if the fight is to the death, Moriarty replies, “Oh, yes. Yes. Absolutely.” He relishes in that moment. There’s an animal underneath the proper, intelligent man, something more primal.

They fight. Holmes wins, and throws Moriarty off the cliff into the water below. But Moriarty doesn’t die. Campion Bond finds him. Then we get why the league is necessary, why superheroes are necessary. “He thought me…an enemy…of the state…never reasoning…that it might suit the state…to create…its own enemy. Shadowboxing, Bond. We’re all just shadowboxing.” The league must exist to fight against any enemy, even if the enemy is the government. It’s common in Moore’s work to have a corrupt ruling system. Here, we have Moriarty as both a government man and a criminal ruler. Even he doesn’t know which one he really is. “Am I, for example, a director of military intelligence posing as a criminal or a criminal posing as a director of military intelligence or both?” I think, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. Not to the league, at least. In turns out, Moriarty had the league steal the cavorite from The Doctor, a criminal ruler, in order to use against The Doctor and fuel Moriarty’s own warship to bomb Limehouse, destroying The Doctor’s criminal empire.

One thing I really like about the comic, and one of the things the movie got wrong, is how focused on England the whole thing is. Moriarty’s not out to rule the world. Maybe eventually, but he makes no mention of that here. He’s fighting over London. The threat against the country had come from the inside, and to continue the treatment of minorities from earlier issues, Moriarty, in the words of the Invisible Man, plans for the cavorite to be “a weapon in his war against he Chinaman.” Moriarty’s going to destroy part of what he’s fighting for to destroy the foreigner.

Most of the league just stands around this issue and learns about Moriarty’s plan. Although, the Invisible Man, the member to sneak out and discover Moriarty, proves just how horrible he is by killing a police officer. The officer didn’t discover him. The Invisible Man killed him because “I was cold. It’s getting rather chilly out there, you know.” He smashes in the man’s face and stole his clothes.

Mina is mad at the group in most scenes because she feels they don’t take her seriously because she’s a woman. To be fair, they don’t. But I don’t think it has much to do with her gender. Maybe a little. But there’s more to it. Nemo says to Quartermain, “Why the authorities chose her to assemble our group, I have no idea.” And I have none as well. Jekyll/Hyde is a monster. The Invisible Man can spy. Nemo has his contraptions. Quartermain is a national hero. And Mina is…? One thing I will give her is she gets shit done. Maybe that’s it. She’s capable of getting the job done and making sure there’s a plan. She’s a good leader, even if, in the field, she doesn’t help much. She complains to Quartermain for not catching on to Moriarty earlier. “Now half of London’s to have horror rained upon it. All because of my ridiculous female naiveté.” With the mistreatment of women in the background for most of the series, it was interesting to hear Mina go along with it. But in a move that speaks to the team coming together, as well as Quartermain’s own romantic interests in Mina, he says, “You were no more naïve than I. We’re just lucky that Nemo was ingenious enough to work things out.” The person who’s a representative of England’s past speaks well of two minority groups in one line. Things seem to be changing and the team is finally a team who respects each other.

Well, maybe not the Invisible Man. He’s just a bastard.

___________

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.

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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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