I tend to get a bit apprehensive whenever I come across a comic purportedly aimed at "adult" or "mature" readers (unless it's a porn comic, in which case I just get incredibly depressed), as the material thus labeled very rarely exhibits any sense of sophistication or maturity. For every work that does meet the actual criteria, there are countless others whose idea of "adult" amounts to little more than the adolescent posturing of a junior high school kid, chock full of the hormonal angst and predictably "shocking" edginess one would expect from a thirteen year old boy who still thinks that Easyriders is a real porn magazine and Boone's Farm is quality hooch.
It's not a phenomenon strictly limited to comics, but the medium's endemic inferiority crisis means that many fans tend to grade on a curve, and material that would be seen hopelessly embarrassing or dodgy in films or prose writing has a better chance of being lauded as "cutting edge" or "groundbreaking" when applied to sequential art. This applies to superheroic fluff with delusions of grandeur as well as onanistic "indie" auto-bio nonsense -- there's more to being a grown up than dressing up in mommy's or daddy's old clothes and dropping some f-bombs.
My quest for suitable panels to use in Bahlactus's current "black and white" incarnation of Friday Night Fights has led me to revisit some of Marvel's magazine format titles from the 1970's. Apart from the Jack of Hearts appearances (in Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, of all places), I hadn't flipped trough these books since 1985, when my uncle discovered Jesus and passed the bulk of his comics collection onto my brother and me. As I mentioned in this post, the more "adult oriented" aspect of the magazines' content fell within the lines described above, awkward half-steps ahead of what was already occuring in Marvel's regular titles in terms of sex and violence, and utterly tame by today's standards.
Well, except for the second half of Chris Claremont and Marshall Rogers's "Daughters of the Dragon" two-parter (from Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #33, February 1977) that is. I mentioned it briefly in last Friday's post, but the mindblasting WTF factor of the story deserves a detailed examination. If you thought, as I did, that Marada, The She-Wolf marked the slimy nadir of Claremont's storytelling tropes, just wait till you plunge headfirst into this sub-basement of sleaze.
Having thwarted the machinations of the sinister Bra-Snap Tong, the two-woman Ebony, Ivory, and Jade team of Misty Knight (being the "Ebony" component) and Colleen Wing (combining both the "Ivory" and "Jade") proceed to....
...hell, why not JUST let the RANDOM caps-heavy RECAP explain it FOR you?
Not only are the pair of private investigators ALIVE, but they've been treated to a scented bath and attended to by a entire harem of scantily-clad women!
The owner of the Evil Mastermind Day SpaTM also happens to be the man behind the arms smuggling operation Knight and Wing busted up in the previous issue. In order to recoup his losses, he decides to sell the women into sex slavery, but not before offering them a taste of Afghanistan's finest...
The ladies resist, but are trumped by a set of electrified bolas, as well as the layout of the arms dealer's secret lair, which was designed along the "random floating platform aesthetic" pioneered by the architectural firm of Ditko, Dormammu, and Strange.
The pair are chained to a wall and shot up with smack. In true Claremontean fashion, it's an experience that the characters learn to "reluctantly enjoy" and leads to this lovely expose of the horrors associated with drug addiction and the writer's personal demons...
...but just so no one gets the wrong idea or anything, Claremont makes sure that we're aware that Colleen Wing is a woman possessing great strength and dignity...
Colleen is saved from the lecherous Dr. Hartmann by Misty. Apparently Hartmann was so preoccupied by his new twist on the "ass, gas, or grass" formula that he failed to notice he'd been tying off and shooting smack into Misty's cybernetic arm, which she uses to break free and crush the bad doctor's trachea.
Misty heads off to do some reconnaissance and find a means of escape, leaving the strung-out Colleen behind to exorcise the monkey from her back via zen meditation...or maybe not...
But if no one is convinced it will work, why would Colleen make the attempt?
Oh, I see now. She's doing it for the fans.
While Colleen gains a deeper appreciation for the music of Lou Reed, Misty tangles with their arms dealing, slave trading captor, now sporting a kicky bondage harness ensemble and a pair of sword canes. She manages to hold her own at first, but the cards are stacked against her, as Claremontean story logic decrees that it must be Colleen who vanquishes the foe, thus mastering her physical and psychic adversaries through three pages of poorly blocked fight, exposition, and flashback scenes...
As for Colleen's smack habit? No worries there, true believers!
In a 1979 interview with The Comics Journal, Claremont stated that Misty's emotional support for Colleen was something that he'd have worked into the story even if had involved two male leads.
What I'm wondering is if he would also have kept the perfumed baths, sexual slavery, and disturbingly eroticized drug addiction aspects of the story if it had featured, say, Power Man and Iron Fist instead of Misty and Colleen.
The Boo Radleys - There She Goes (from the So I Married an Axe Murderer OST, 1993) - The members of The La's, who released the original version of this oft-covered favorite in 1988, claim that the song is not about heroin addiction. A shame, really, because I got a perverse sense of glee over the idea that the nauseatingly precious "Christian rock" outfit, Sixpence None The Richer, stumbled into covering a song about spiking the vein.
Curtis Mayfield - Pusherman (from the Super Fly OST, 1972) - No ambiguity here, just some superlative funked up soul.
The Insane - Chinese Rocks (from the "El Salvador" 7" single, 1982) - Written by Dee Dee Ramone and Richard Hell, recorded by the Heartbreakers, covered by a Wigan-based UK82 outfit, and purchased by me for a fiver from Looney Tunes in Central Square sometime in the fall of 1991.
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