The mighty Bahlactus has once again sent out the call to battle, and the Master of the Funk Cosmic has decreed that this time it's all about the monochrome. I welcome this two-tone restriction, as it has motivated me to delve deep into my archive and spotlight some black and white treasures that I've been wanting to discuss, but never managed to get around to.
So without further ado, here's some punk-on-punter pugilism from the pages of Baker Street #6 (1990; written and illustrated by Guy Davis).
Some folks never learn....
I first stumbled across Baker Street on a spinner rack in Newbury Comics in the summer of 1991, a time when my interest in comics had taken a back seat to my interest in all things punk-related. Even though Baker Street's combination of subject matter and medium seemed specifically tailored to young Andrew's tastes, it took a while before my curiosity was able to overrule my deep-seated suspicions regarding popcult depictions of the punk scene, especially in the realm of comics, where "punk" tended to equal mohawk-sporting thugs or disco nightmares.
My reservations turned out to be entirely unfounded, as series creator Guy Davis was himself a veteran of the scene, and strove to create a sense of authenticity in his depiction of the subculture and its assorted trappings. The series is a direct homage to the Sherlock Holmes stories, set in an alternate universe where the Second World War never happened (therefore preserving London's pre-Blitz achitecture and layout), and a thriving punk subculture (early 80's version) exists on the fringes of Britain's neo-Victorian society. Rather than being a simply stylistic flourish, the dichotomy serves to highlight the concepts of class conflict and systemic marginalization in a more effective way than using the real world of Thatcherite Britain could, while preserving the proper Holmesean flavor (only with more cuss words and graphic violence).
In the series's all-too-brief ten issue run (supplemented with a couple of short one-off pieces) Sharon Ford, a former-police-inspector-turned-punk-investigator, and Susan Prendergast, a baffled American medical student, took up the Holmes and Watson roles in two five-issue story arcs (the first a collaboration with Gary Reed) and chased down leads and unearthed clues to intricate schemes that stretched from the illegal basement ratting dens of punk clubs to the highest levels of the constabulary, and eventually to even darker places.
Davis's art, which I acknowledge can be an acquired taste, perfectly expresses the seedy, spiky, bristly atmosphere of this alternate London perfectly. This is especially true in the second half of Baker Street's run, when the last vestiges of his earlier genero-indie leanings fell away in favor of the Barry Windsor-Smith-meets-Phiz style exemplified in the above panels.
The series abruptly ended with the tenth issue, which resolved the mystery of the second story arc while leaving several overarching plot threads unresolved. Davis moved on to become the regular illustrator for Sandman Mystery Theatre, part of DC's Vertigo imprint similar in theme to Baker Street, but with the alternate history punk scene swapped out for the not quite as cool late 1930's DC Universe. (Davis also contributed art to the World of Darkness series of role-playing game manuals, but I won't hold that against him.) Some sketches included in one-off collection of Baker Street miscellanea hinted at a possible follow-up miniseries from Vertigo, but it never materialized.
I'll guess I'll just have to content myself with rereading the existing material for the umpteenth time, and thanks to this handy collected edition, I need no longer worry about being accidentally killed by an avalanche of nerd debris while searching the attic for the individual issues. Highly recommended. (The Baker Street collection, that is, not the being crushed to death by stack of Ray Conniff LPs and vintage Fisher-Price playsets.)
One of the reasons Baker Street resonated so powerfully with my younger self was that its visual and thematic components dovetailed perfectly with the love for "UK82" punk I had at the time. (Not that I don't still love it today, but there was a period back then that I listened almost exclusively to early 80's Britpunk and Oi! material.) In memory of those not-so-wild days, I offer this pair of perennial favorites from my 1991 playlist:
Abrasive Wheels - Just Another Punk Band (from When the Punks Go Marching In, 1982) - It starts off like "Holidays in the Sun"/But turns into a catchy punk anthem.
The Samples - Fire Another Round (from the b-side of the 1982 "Dead Hero" single; collected on No Future: The Punk Singles Collection, Vol. 2, 1999) - Picking up where "White Riot" left off.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Friday Night Fights: Say What You Wanna Say
Friday, January 25, 2008
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.)
Saturday, December 23, 2006
I think that that right jolly old elf better make out his will
You’ll know I’ve gone past the point of no return when I do a theme week featuring songs about getting kicked in the face.
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