Friday Night Fights: Love Like Violence

Violence is to superhero comics what MSG is to cheap Chinese takeout. In fact, the genre is pretty much predicated on equal lashings of over-the-top beatdowns and melodramatic exposition. Yet for all the facekicks and collateral damage, superheroic violence operates under a different set of rules than the less entertaining genuine article, working on a level only a couple short steps above what one would encounter in a old Warner Brothers cartoon -- the permanently crippling injuries and sprays of gore that would realistically be associated with being hit with a swung lamppost or casually tossed automobile traditionally kept to a minimum (and that even applies to the ostensibly "darker" and "grimmer" tone of today's stories).

It's larger-than-life light entertainment, after all, and there's a significant number of people out there who get a kick out of seeing, say, Hercules and Wonder Man beating the stuffing out of each other in a relatively consequence-free environment. But while the superheroic genre can accommodate a wide variety of other genre tropes -- sci-fi, western, heroic fantasy, crime procedural, humor -- it does possess definite conventions that a writer should at least be aware of, even if their ultimate goal is to upend or subvert them.

Of these conventions, the one where many writers fumble with is the notion of "realism" (which, like the notion of "authenticity" in rock music, actually refers to verisimilitude.) It's not that superheroic material can't be delivered in a more true-to-life fashion (see Watchmen or even Astro City), it's that haphazardly dragging and dropping "realistic" elements into an otherwise genre-standard material puts excessive stress on the desired quality known as suspension of disbelief, kind of like featuring a brutally graphic murder in the middle of a light teen comedy without ever bothering to reflect the implications or shift in tone. If you're going to toss these things out, you have to be willing to follow them all the way to the ground.

Which brings me to Avengers v1 #213. After an unanticipated membership drive leaves the Earth's Mightiest Heroes short-handed, founding member Hank Pym (a.k.a Yellowjacket, Ant-Man, Giant Man, and Goliath) decides to rejoin the team, where his wife/superheroic partner/fellow founding member, Janet (Van Dyne) Pym (a.k.a. The Wasp), had already been serving in an active membership role. Dr. Pym had never been the most stable of personalities. Despite being one of the earliest characters in Marvel's roster of Silver Age superheroes, he never achieved the same level of popularity as Thor, Hulk, Spider-Man and the rest and experienced a series of rechristenings and reinventions which centered around an inferiority complex and a history of mental instability.

During his first outing with the new Avengers lineup, Pym (as Yellowjacket), tries too hard and screws up badly, almost causing a castastrophe. An understandably miffed Captain America, acting as team chairman, calls for court martial proceedings, which only feeds the unstable Pym's persecution complex. Wasp does her best to shake her husband out of his funk, but Pym's growing resentment spills over into his personal life and, like too many shitheads, decides take it out on the one person who sincerely wants to help him.

Pym has his own plan for redemption, namely a giant killer robot designed to crash the court martial procedings, and whose weak spot is known only to himself, thus giving him an opportunity to look cool in front of his accusers. The Wasp finds out about this plan and tries to dissuade her husband from this craziness, and gets a fist to the face for her efforts.

Grotty in the extreme, yes? Still, within the context of a genre where taking hits from spandex-clad psychopaths is commonplace, it's not too offsides...

...except that in this case, "realistic" consequences are applied. Even as broad melodrama, it's incredibly heartbreaking...but the consequences are constrained by the genre conventions:

Wasp reveals her black eye during the hearing. Pym summons the giant robot. Giant robot nearly kills Pym. Wasp takes down the giant robot. Pym slinks out of the hearing in shame. (Because when you've got an individual who is violent, unstable, and who has access to super-scientific gadgets and the Avengers' secrets, it's best just to let him wander off somewhere.)

The results are akin to those generated by the requisite "very special episode" of any given seventies or eighties sitcom. If you lived through the era, you know the drill: the stale gags are swapped out for a single episode dealing with rape, molestation, or drug abuse before reverting to the old status quo in the following week's installment. It's not the lack of continuity that makes such efforts problematic, but rather the cognitive dissonance in tone for the sake of ephemeral relevance.

Pym's storyline did continue for another eighteen months, but the primary focus was placed upon the further downfall and eventual "redemption" of Hank Pym as he gets caught up in the plot of old archenemy attempting to exploit Pym's misfortune. The Wasp's reaction to these life-changing events was muted in comparison, consisting mostly of her keeping a stiff upper lip while other characters wondered whether she was just putting up a strong front. She did win the role of Avengers' leader in issue #217, and even scored what perhaps writer Jim Shooter considered a bit of payback...

...but lensed as "comic book violence" which just feels shoddy and weak (not that any type of violence or tit-for-tat nonsense could have worked in the context of what had occurred previously).

Everyone handles things differently, especially in matters concerning relationships and love. I knew a woman who punished her cheating beau by forcing him to live with the "other woman." Hillary Clinton was able to work past Bill's philandering ways. I know that if I ever pulled anything like Hank Pym, though, I'd be lying in a hospital bed awaiting facial reconstruction surgery. Yet, still, in light of all that, Wasp's behavior in these stories feels "off" to me. Not in a sense of being out of character, but in lacking any sense of who the character is.

It reads as if having set up the situation for the sake of telling a story about Hank Pym, the writers (Jim Shooter, then Roger Stern) decided to back-burner the Wasp's side of the story, which ought to have assumed at least an equal degree of pathos. (To be fair, during his run on The Avengers, Stern did more to establish the Wasp as a three-dimensional character than any other Avengers writer before or since.) Even the issue spotlighting Wasp's brief rebound fling with Tony Stark (until she discovers he is actually Iron Man) was presented more in terms of its effect on Pym and as another catalyst for Stark's own impending downfall as a hero.

It reaches its creepiest, however Avengers #230, the conclusion of the storyline, when a "vindicated" Pym is lauded by the Avengers for his heroism and offered a place with the team again (an idea Pym himself thinks is incredibly stupid). The vindication in question is wholly predicated on his foiling the villain's frame-up scheme with his previous unstable and violent behavior (toward his ex-wife the other Avengers) marginalized and euphemized as a "breakdown," since recovered from and left as that.

Or, actually, as this...


Again, everyone deals in their own way, but the default setting for such encounters is probably closer to this, based on my own empirical observation of similar events....


The serial storytelling format being the voracious Ouroboros that it is, Hank Pym and the Wasp eventually got back together as a romantic couple, with the "abusive" aspect softened into a "tempestuous but destined" one, which I suppose would make them the Luke and Laura Spencer of the superhero set. All sins can be forgiven forgotten, if by doing so more grist is generated for the plot mill.

According to Wikipedia, the incredibly dysfunctional shrinking couple have parted ways yet again, with Pym currently shacking up with Tigra. Interesting, that, given the history...

Hey! This isn't another example of that "women prefer assholes over nice guys" bullshit, is it?

Ike & Tina Turner - You Should'a Treated Me Right (from Proud Mary: The Best of Ike & Tina, 1991) - What? Why are you giving me that look? It's a contextually appropriate and outstanding bit of old school R&B. That's all, honest.

(He is above all mortal concerns.)

any old step will do

I have dreamt of sausages on occasion. It’s not a Freudian thing, but a nostalgic one.

Having grown up in a blue-collar, albeit bohemian (some might say “Bukowskian”), household, I have eaten more than my share of functional, economical meals in my time. The dish that best typifies that style of cuisine for me is instant mac’n’cheese with sliced kielbasa, preferably served with slices of fresh Wonder bread and a cold glass of off-brand fruit drink. It was a stick-to-your-ribs meal where sugar, salt, fats, and starches all worked together in perfect harmony, with only a better than even chance of causing an impacted colon. It could be bolted down quickly, which was great for a child seeking to squeeze the most from the post-suppertime daylight hours.

I haven’t eaten the stuff in years, being older and wiser and saddled with a less forgiving adult digestive tract, yet every so often the cravings hit me. I’ll be walking past the meat aisle in the supermarket and find myself lingering over the loops of kielbasa, pondering whether or not to make the effort to recapture that childhood magic. I never do, mostly because those longings are so perfectly Proustian that I fear that the reality would fall far short of my expectations.

That’s what happened with the Deviled Ham Episode of 1996, where I emerged from beneath the yoke of a virulent flu strain with an irrational craving for a deviled ham sandwich. As soon as I was able to travel to the supermarket, I bought myself a can of the potted meat product and some relish, and made the best damn deviled ham sandwich I could possibly hope to ever make. After eating it, I spent the rest of my day violently retching into the toilet. Thus my cravings for deviled ham were permanently laid to rest.

Plus, it’s hard to enjoy sausage once you’re aware of the place they occupy on the chart of meat-related products. Even the less creatively fashioned ones are a mix of fat, skeletal meat, and bone chips coaxed into edibility with copious amounts of sugar and other spices….and that was my attitude before I read the story, “Captain Marvel and the Famine Foiler” from Captain Marvel Adventures #130 (March 1952):

SWEET PROVIDENCE, WHAT HELLISH VISION IS THIS?
The premise of the story is that Captain Marvel’s eccentric inventor friend attempts to feed a colony of starving hillbillies with sausages created out of stones, which are filling, yet lack nutritional value. The hillbillies are less than happy with their new foodstuffs (but to tell you the truth, I’d rather take my chances with a dinner of ground basalt than with a questionable mix of organ meats and nitrates stuffed into an intestinal casing) and attempt to lynch the inventor with a rope made of sausages in one of the most disturbing sequences in comic book history…

I’ll never look at the breakfast menu in the same way ever again. The Deviled Ham Incident pales in comparison.

Doc Sausage – Sausage Rock (from Hoy Hoy: Rock Before Elvis, 1995) – I wouldn’t go so far as to label this 1950 track “rock.” It’s boogie-woogie/swing blues with elements that would later be incorporated into rock and roll, but it’s a distinction that needs to be made. The ongoing fishing expedition to establish the decisively earliest rock song has led to much overreaching. It’s only a matter of time before Hildegard of Bingen’s works are put forth as the first examples of rock music.

Baldhead Growler – The Sausage (from the Trojan Calypso box set, 2002) – I was thinking just the other day that Armagideon Time was lacking a certain something, and then it hit me: There simply haven’t been enough calypso songs featuring phallic-related double entendres featured on this site. Problem solved!

Steve Gray – The Sausage Machine (from Electronic Toys: A Retrospective of 70’s Synthesizer Music, 1997) – Or as I like to think of it: “What If Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes Recorded Music for a Porn Film?”

I’m in love with only you

The new issue of Spin arrived in the mail yesterday. It’s nothing I’d ever pay money for, but my wife got a cheapo subscription deal for the magazine, and it’s a handy way to keep my finger on the pulse (or is that "dissect the corpse?") of the current pop music scene. There were a couple of things that caught my eye amidst the nonsense of the ridiculous scene guide (complete with an assortment of photos presumably yanked from either random MySpace pages or Girls Gone Wild vids) and a fashion feature chock full of skuzzy looking hipster models dressed in earth tone corduroy (Rock and roll!).

The eyewitness history of the ’82 and ’83 Us Festivals was interesting, but full of weird transitions between segments. Was following up Andy Gill’s recollection of the Gang of Four’s set with Marky Ramone’s assertion that The Ramones were the only “hardcore punk” band at the ’82 festival an intentional decision? (It’s funny how The Ramones used to distance themselves from the “punk” label until punk became “cool,” meaning “commercial,” in the 1990’s. It strikes me as a case where you stop spinning your wheels and change your address to the rut you’ve dug.) The Clash got mentioned a few times – the 1983 festival was the last time Mick Jones played with the band – but dismissively, due to their unhappiness over the bloated “rawk” atmosphere. Yes, The Clash were a mass of contradictions in thought and deed, but I didn’t need Steve Wozniak or David Lee Roth to tell me that.

After that informative and depressing musical history lesson, I flipped ahead to the only part of the reviews section I bother to read, the roundup of recent noteworthy reissues. Most of them I’m already aware of, but there’s always a chance that something noteworthy has slipped passed my radar. Second on this month’s list was the Stax Records 50th Anniversary Celebration, which would have been a must buy if didn’t already own the Stax/Volt singles and Atlantic R&B box sets. The Spin folks liked it, as well they should (though I take nothing for granted where modern music criticism is concerned), but the last sentence made something hard and bitter catch in my throat:

It’s what Amy Winehouse eats for breakfast.

Hey, I’m all for getting “the kidz” into what I consider to be some of the finest popular music ever recorded, but that…that’s just plain wrong. It’s an “Amazon.com recommends” level of wrong. (If you like Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, you’ll love Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road!) Jon from Underneathica has already discussed the vortex of contradictory comparisons that surround Ms. Winehouse and her music, which I partially attribute to critics unfamiliar with jazz and/or soul making facile connections that most of their readers will never pick up on in any case. How do you reduce decades of output from a diverse stable of artists to a simple single "sound"? And why does music that has stood the test of time have to be presented in terms of the industry’s current darling of the moment?

It’s a common enough practice, but still irksome. When Interpol and The Killers were being lauded as the next big things, one couldn’t swing a dead optical mouse without landing on a reference to Joy Division specifically or postpunk in general, despite the fact that neither band really had a sound that fit the tags. Strong bass lines, mopey lyrics, and black dress shirts do not automatically equal “postpunk,” not to mention the fact that postpunk wasn’t so much a genre as an aesthetic notion of pushing punk’s “anything goes” ethos to the limits. To quote Jon’s excellent piece, “…is [it] the equal of the classic recordings that it tries to evoke? If not, why listen to it when the originals are readily available?”

I freely admit that my love of soul music came from a secondary source, in this case the Blues Brothers, but the Blues Brothers did not musically aspire to be anything more than two white comedians paying homage to a style of music they loved. (Well, that Ackroyd loved. Belushi was apparently a huge fan of Fear.) Plus, they were backed by a roster of veteran soul musicians who had been part of the original scene. The critics were decidedly unimpressed by the results, but they were an unparalleled gateway band by which to develop an appreciation for the sound before graduating to the real deal.

Otis Redding – I Can’t Turn You Loose (from The Very Best of Otis Redding, 1992)

Wilson Pickett – Everybody Needs Somebody to Love (from Wilson Pickett’s Greatest Hits, 1987)

My wife still says she prefers the Blues Brothers’ version of the two songs. She also prefers the glossy Motown sound to the pressure cooker beats, yelps, and moans of Memphis soul, so her opinion doesn’t count.

I went with “best of” compilations for the purchase links to keep things simple (and affordable) for the budding enthusiast. If you have the cash and inclination to dive in head first, the complete Stax/Volt singles collection and the Atlantic Rhythm & Blues box set both make for some exceptional listening.