Do you have a dream comic? I have a couple of scenarios, which I do almost no work on, apart from telling myself the story as I go to sleep, hoping that this will one day stimulate me to actually write the things. Really all I have is a cute premise or two, which I’m told is not enough for a comics writer. I should follow in the masters’ footprints and pastiche in someone else’s plot and characters. Let’s see; how about Anna Karenina…..in space…..involved in the plot of Casablanca? Vronsky could be a cool space-cowboy type and I could kill off Levin in episode one. Perhaps too Nikolai Dante. How about a thinly-disguised version of the kid from Terminator II, but with some kind of animal sent back in time instead of Arnie? Too Doraemon! It could all happen in the world of Scarlet Traces; a world in which the War of the Worlds really happened and the British, equipped with the aliens war surplus stuff are rulers of the earth and even more obnoxious about being top dogs than they actually were at the time. I’ve always felt that the Scarlet Traces premise could stand a lot more exploration. Not necessarily from me.
A lot of comics start off unpromisingly as rip-offs of one kind or another. ‘Sinister Dexter’ began as a pastiche of from Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’, albeit set in a sleazy futuristic European city called Downlode. All that was kept from the movie was that they were two amoral killers, one was black, one white who cracked wise while they killed with no compunction. I loved it from the get go but have often wondered if the series has begun to buckle under the strain of keeping its origins squared with the characters developing and becoming more lovable, as anti-heroes always do. Judge Death, Flashman, Dracula, evil characters unlike evil people, always get more approachable with age.
Of course, while with the Flashman books, it took about three brilliantly written and researched comic novels for Harry Flashman to go from saying that rape is really too much bother to indulge in more than once in a while, to respecting his daffy wife’s stoicism under pressure (“she was a soldier’s wife alright. It was a shame she hadn’t married a soldier” he thinks). With Sinister Dexter, a mere five or so pages in a weekly comic, the process took less than a year. The first job we see the lads doing is massacring a computer nerd for defacing websites. They move on to killing the boss’s girlfriend’s lover and the rot sets in soon after, as they start to explain their code (something about not killing really nice people, or not cops unless they have to, or…oh who cares?). I always liked them as ‘the killers with chalk outlines around their souls’ who answer the question “What’s the word?” with “‘Eviscerate’ and ‘maim’ are favourites tonight”. Since developing The Code, they’ve wavered between being their old fun loving selves and portentous, implausible stuff about holding the city together. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect that the writer, Dan Abnett, thinks he’s writing something like Godfather II here. The difference is that in the Godfather movies, there is always a family and society to hold together, from the very first words of the first film. Downlode, on the other hand, is supposed to be a chaotic wasteland, not worth holding together in the first place. But enough of pastiches, I’ll get there one day.
My other kind of dream comics are the ones which are ideal versions of what I’m actually reading. According to the recently deceased American philosopher, David Lewis, there are actual worlds in which every possible variation on our world is realized, although travel from one of these worlds to another is impossible for reasons I forget. There’s a world in which I did the dishes instead of writing this column. There’s another in which Australia’s Prime Minister isn’t an evil liar. There must therefore be a world in which Sinister and Dexter don’t make me cringe by debating about ‘the Downlode way’.
There’s also a world in which Preacher isn’t so PC whilst pretending to be (yawn) gloriously non-PC. I used to think that Preacher was perfect, and certainly don’t want to live in the world in which it wasn’t written. However, the various complaints about Preacher on the 2000 AD message board must be seeping into my subconscious because I keep thinking about ways to fix it. The hero’s girlfriend tells him that 70 percent of American men won’t administer oral sex to their girlfriends, to which Jesse nobly announces that those men are all fools. How terribly brave of him! I could have lived without that bit; not the oral sex, but the smug self-congratulation.
Just now I’m reading a Daredevil story from after I stopped reading him in the 80s (with my usual brilliant timing I stopped just as Frank Miller got his hands on it). It’s called “Typhoid Mary” and shows a keen awareness of the techniques of Alan Moore, without any of the heart. Moore has said he wanted to create three dimensional comic characters. The quest for Moore-like depths in ‘Typhoid Mary’ gives us characters who take themselves more seriously than Nick Cave takes himself and who won’t shut up. There’s a female character who’s allegedly evil-sexy (you can tell because she keeps killing people and wears fishnet stockings with a hole over one knee). Her rear end, which we see a lot of, is possibly less than one dimensional, in stark violation of the ‘nice arse’ rule of all female characters in comics. It’s flat, not because the artist doesn’t want to demean women by drawing them with nice bums, but because he can’t. ‘Typhoid Mary’ is not a tale I mentally tinker with while I read, it’s one I mentally hand back to the creators with ‘you’ve got to be joking’ written across the cover page in red ink. In the end Daredevil has an epiphany whilst fighting an implausible demon who has burst through the window, infuriated at all the self-analysis and sub-Moore seriousness the characters are indulging in. Come to think of it, the demon looked a lot like Alan Moore.
In the 1970s I was going through adolescence, so my ‘what if’ thoughts tended to revolve around the heroines in spandex. When not wondering what Valkyrie really looked like without her metal breast cups, I wondered about the annoyingly super characters. Not Superman, who I’d always found boring because of his invulnerability, but, for example, Thor. Being a god, Thor’s adventures should have been a series of rapid monotonous triumphs. The writers kept this logical outcome at bay with a mixture of having his girlfriend kidnapped, pitting him against other gods (although since none of them could be killed, it didn’t really help) and, for the most part, by completely ignoring it. In one story another Godlike character, the bald woman from planet whatsit, named Moondragon* accused Thor of slumming it. Being taunted by pompous bald chicks years before the invention of Sinnead O’Connor bought the Son of Odin to his senses and he promptly wiped the floor with the bad guys and set off on a tour of the universe to make himself feel better.
It was a shock to come back to comics in the 2000s to find that the issue of annoying superness had been confronted again and again. Superheroes having sex left right and centre, logic inconsistencies being made fun of. These days my ‘alternative world’ comics tend to be ones in which everybody just gets on with it. Of course, the exception to this is 2000 AD, which changes so much that I just wait for something different to come along.
*No, I didn’t remember her name, I’m proud to say I had to look it up
