Ugly American # 30 – It’s a Trap!

Let’s talk about the end of Justice League of America # 4 because it has many layers, and some of them are even vaguely interesting. I guess I’ve decided not to spoil anything specific, but in order to talk about the book, you need to understand that the issue concludes with what appears to be the “death” of a fairly prominent female character.

So…..where to start? I guess I’ll start with some of the market aspects. I know Monster Mike was worrying about folks finding a copy, thinking that a pack of dirty speculators (like myself) may have erased all available supply. It appears that won’t be an issue for a couple of reasons. One being that there really doesn’t seem to be much of a fervor in the secondary market on this, which I find exquisitely fascinating. To me, that’s bold and direct evidence that the golden goose of empty hype may have shat out its last egg for a while. You can only go to the whip on the same magic trick so many times before the audience becomes numb to it.

The comics audience has been particularly resilient (some might say moronic) about maintaining their fascination with the “Death” bit. But as I type this, there are copies of JL of A # 4 available all over the place for cover price or less. I can even grab a copy of the Howard Porter variant for the same price as the regular edition over at Lone Star. So much for death fever! And in any case, I don’t think Monster Mike needs to worry about speculators ruining the reading party any more, at least for 95% of the comics material out there. Mark Millar is making the digi-heads wait a little bit for Jupiter’s Legacy, but most everything you’d like to catch up on is available (for rent) from Comixology, infinite copies in the supply, and all you need is internet access.

This is not to suggest that speculator runs can’t do any damage. I think we should be rewarding any interest in our local comic shops. If a patron, particularly a new patron heads to said local shop only to find that the super exciting “what’s all this hullaballoo about?” issue isn’t available for purchase….well, that’s a problem. That’s an interested party that may never come back. But again, that doesn’t seem to be the case here. I was in my LCS today a good three days removed from launch and there were stacks of this issue available.

I wonder, though, does the lack of mania here actually reflect the masses finally giving in to richly earned cynicism, or is the fact that DC was actually able to keep this a secret partially to blame? It’s pretty common for the punditshphere (myself included) to lambast the publishers for leaking their big reveals to the press early. But when you think about it, whether we’re talking about Johnny Storm , or Miles Morales, or Superior Spider-Man, or the nineteen other secret Marvel deaths they’ve bungled, it never did seem to hurt sales, did it? So maybe they knew something we didn’t.

Hard to say. I still think this is just mass apathy from a very tired and abused comics constituency. Whatever the case, I don’t know of any fellow comics reader or article on the usual sites that really believes this “death” is real or will stick. Which is a bit sad. We’re jaded past the point of no return, which is kind of frightening, but also kind of liberating. The Big Two have been using empty hype like a bad drug for too long. There will be some withdrawals coming down from that, but the recovery is surely going to be better than the junk we’ve been getting lately.

Contrast that with Alpha Flight # 12, circa 1984. Different time, different attitude. In 1984, John Byrne killed off Guardian and we all considered it deliciously ballsy. It’s not like comic book deaths were rare or permanent back then, but there was no obsession with the hands of the puppeteer, and no sense that the publisher was “just fucking with you”. I guess I don’t know why Byrne decided to ace the team leader of Alpha Flight, but I suspect it had to do with A) Introducing a sense that anything could happen at any moment and B) Forwarding the character arc of Heather Hudson.

Who could forget the final pages of that comic? The good guys were not doing particularly well, and this was in keeping with the themes of Alpha Flight to that point. Mac Hudson was a scientist, not a military guy. Same with Sasquatch. Shaman and Snowbird were mystic protectors, sure, but the Beaubier twins were basket cases, Marrina was psychopathic more often than you’d like, and Puck was just a midget with a giant “P” on his chest. How’s that gonna work? And what the hell was Mac doing dragging his non-super-powered wife into that mess? That ship was destined for trouble from the start, and boy did it hit the rocks in # 12. It isn’t just the fact that Guardian died, though, it was the way he died. His battle suit failing catastrophically, a harried Mac Hudson is interrupted at a critical moment by his wife Heather. No telling for sure if that’s what ultimately sealed his fate or if he was doomed any way…but if you’re Heather, how do you not interpret that as causing the death of your husband? A few seconds after that interruption, there was nothing left of Guardian but a little pile of ash. Heather had a lot of growing up to do, and grow she did, right on the page.

Nobody had a clue that was coming, mind you. There was no such thing as Previews or Newsarama to spoil things for you. There was simply word of mouth after the fact, and Alpha Flight 12 left quite a few jaws on the floor. Perhaps I’m not remembering correctly, but there was no speculator run on that kind of thing in ’84, either. Alpha Flight # 1 cost more than cover, because, DUH, but after that the issues in demand were # 13 and # 17 because they had goddamn Wolverine on the cover, man! Don’t you know that Wolverine on the cover is big bucks, man!!! Talk about a magic trick that’s lost its magic.

No, everything was a secret. Any info you had on upcoming projects was likely to come from the publishers themselves in the form of house ads. They didn’t tell you much, either. Can you imagine the emotional wreckage that would be the comics landscape if there were an internet just before Marvel unveiled the New Universe? None of us would have survived. Our brains would have been burnt little nubs, and Kickers, Inc. # 1 would have produced a brief burst of incalculable rage and then instant death. As it was, we got a few months of a purple lightning bolt on the back cover our Marvel books. We were lucky.

Or were we? I feel like we were better off then, but maybe not. The downside was that there was no rational way to make decisions about your reading habits, other than live communication with other actual human beings (the horror!) and quizzing them about what was going on in the comics they were ingesting. There was no solicitation telling you that Frank Miller was about to unleash perfect comics with Born Again. One month, Daredevil was absolute rubbish. Then came Born Again, and then you blinked and the month after that you got goddamn Madcap by Mark Gruenwald. To call that a jarring shift of the gears would be the understatement of the millennium. That was life. You either collected Daredevil or you didn’t, and there was no way of discerning the potential quality until you dove in face first. Sometimes you got some poop on your face doing that, but at least in the Born Again era, the feces only cost 75 cents, so you almost didn’t mind.

Most retailers will tell you that prior knowledge is critical to the game at this point. It’s hard to order non-returnable comics correctly, and the money is made on the hits. You don’t make any money ordering 5 rack copies of Firestorm. Yeah, you’re ordering at a discount, but if one of your readers drops the book, and another takes a vacation and buys her copy in Sarasota instead of your shop, you are fucked. There’s no upside, and there’s no margin for error on most comics. You make money with hits. If you order 50 copies and two people drop the book and one goes to Sarasota, you’re still OK.

So if the Justice League of America # 4 contains the “death” of a prominent character, that’s something a retailer wants to be privy to if he or she thinks it will sell a ton of copies. Sure, some folks will take the time to request a re-order or get a second print on a sell-out. But really, if you miss the boat on a hot book you just lose. Everybody loses, actually. The reader is disappointed, the retailer is out some significant money, the publisher is out a small amount of money, and there’s just bad will all around.

The retailer needs to have some indication about how to order, but of course you can see the problem when said retailer has to rely on the publisher to give them that information. I don’t know how to tell you this…but the publishers are slightly biased about the number of books they are sure will be big hits and change everything about comics forever. In fact, if you listen to the publishers, you’ll find that they are producing a dozen of these books every single week. It’s amazing.

And that’s the problem with Previews. The reader wants information about the upcoming books so they can make informed decisions about where to spend the ridiculous sums of money it takes to buy comics these days, but how can the publishers relay that information accurately without spoiling everything? The retailer wants the same info to order correctly and serve their customer, but it’s in the publishers best interest to spin everything as The Next Big Thing, and again, how can they tell the retailer what they need to know and preserve any kind of surprise? If Admiral Ackbar were here, he would promptly bark at you that the whole situation is a trap. And he’d be right.

The solution? Destroy the internet, I guess. It’s only going to end up as Skynet, right? We don’t need it.

That’s my answer. You may offer alternative resolutions by commenting below.

Ugly American # 25 – Daredevil Vs. Vapora!

The Ugly American Presents: Daredevil Vs. Vapora (1996)

• “A Season for Tears”
• Script: Mindy Newell
• Pencils: Mike Harris

Once upon a time, Marvel liked to publish weird little one-off comics that operated like after-school specials. Hulk would teach you to brush your teeth with Aim, or Power Pack might warn you about people trying to inappropriately grab your junk. I think that one was mostly about avoiding Woody Allen, which is pretty sound advice.

Daredevil Vs. Vapora was a comic about the dangers of gasoline, published in conjunction with the good folks at the Gas Appliance Manufacturer’s Association. If anybody knows good comics, it’s them. Let’s foray into this festive feast of fossil fuels, true believers!

The story opens with Daredevil saving a little girl named Angel from a burning building. Angel, huh? We’re already laying it on a little thick, I would say. Angel remembers watching her dad head up to the kitchen earlier that evening with a can of gas and a bunch of old rags. I think I might know how the fire started.

Mandy Sewell’s prose is quite purple. There’s some obligatory tripe about all brave men feeling fear, and there’s a lot of clinical vocab. When DD hands the girl off to the paramedics, one of them orders up an IV of “lactated ringers”. There’s a lot of odd quasi-sexual stuff in this comic, actually. Before Daredevil can pause to wonder if he’s just relinquished his victim to a pack of fetishists feeding a little girl breast milk, he hears a spectral laughing from the top of the burning roof. Radar can’t quite confirm a physical presence up there. It’s all very spooky.



Daredevil then asks one of the firefighters if everyone got out of the building. The guy starts working out some of his stand-up material and says that all the living people escaped. Oh, so none of the dead people walked out there, then? Glad we cleared that up, Louis C.K. Did everybody make it out OK? Well, the folks still alive got out, but I’m sure there’s a stack of burnt, crispy dead people in there, Mr. Daredevil. Thanks, you macabre son of a bitch.

Cut to a week later, when intrepid lawyer Matt Murdock is interviewing the landlord of the burnt up apartment. Daredevil wants to know if this dude put a ten-year old girl at risk so he could make some insurance money.

If this comic were published in 2013, that’s exactly how it would have went down. The rich, white building owner would have been evil, and then a bunch of Occupiers would poop into Ziploc bags and throw them at him. After they got done raping a few women, turning over some police cars, and stopping a lot of responsible people from getting to work, of course. Then everybody would cheer about how wonderful “progress” is.

But no, this was 1996, when the world still made a sliver of sense. So instead, Daredevil interrogates the landlord and discovers that in this case, he’s innocent. So then it’s off to the scene of the crime to see if Murdock can piece together what actually did happen.



As he walks the charred husk with an inspector, Daredevil’s keen senses start picking up that phantom vapor demon again. She’s kinda there, but not really, it’s all very creepy, and by creepy I mean slightly arousing. Murdock’s reaction to staring down this vapor demon is a strange tickling of his coccyx. I’m thinking this is a line originally from the Power Pack molestation special that got cut for being gross. It probably should have been cut from this comic as well.

Now, if you’re a respected blind lawyer, and you happen to sense an invisible vapor demon with your superhuman abilities, there’s a couple of ways you can play this.

• You can question your perception, since the radar hit isn’t strong, and keep your mouth shut.
• You can recognize that this ethereal threat is probably out of your league, and again, keep your damn mouth shut. You quickly get yourself and the inspector out, then contact Stephen Strange as soon as possible.
• You can shout idle threats at the invisible creature right in front of the inspector like a schizophrenic, and then ask the guy if he can see the invisible creature that your superhuman radar isn’t really hitting on.



Well, Matt Murdock decided to select option “C”. But then he ups the ante further by inexplicably declaring the creature that isn’t there to be a “vapora”. Now, if you’re the inspector and this lawyer starts rambling on about a vampire in the corner of the room…that’s pretty bad, but at least you have a concept of a vampire. It’s in the shared mythological lexicon. Nobody knows what a vapora is, because there aren’t any. Not just in real life, but in fiction. They just made it up for this comic, and he’s spouting off about it like it’s a thing now.

If you’re the other guy in that room, you pretty much have no choice but to call the appropriate authorities and have Matt Murdock committed. There is zero chance you’d allow this guy to try the case, he’s clearly a lunatic. If I’m that inspector, I’m ringing the sitting judge and putting distance between myself and Mr. Murdock post haste. Instead, he just kind of blows it off. Comics.

In the meantime, Vapora continues to go on a little pyro rampage, and this is where the comic’s message loses me a little. Vapora runs around town and sort of “pushes” people into playing around with gas.



Like this woman here, scrubbing the floor with gas, as we all do approximately six inches from our caged toddler. Again, none of this would appear in a modern comic. That child would be incarcerated in a dolphin-free detention area, and also would be wearing a helmet. In this comic, the mother has several gallons of gasoline parked in front of the child, and then she lights up a cigarette. Heavens to Wertham, can you even imagine it, kids???

Well, folks, don’t worry – they get their just rewards. When mom finally gets her Virginia Slim lit, that baby goes up like a roman candle. Score one for Vapora!

Next she heads over to little Laura’s house. Laura’s brothers are cleaning the family motorcycle with gasoline. Apparently all this time I’ve been using CLR like an asshole. What you really want for that tough grime is some petrol. It strips your floors, makes your motorcycle shine, and if you’re out of vermouth, just go ahead and splash some gas in there, I guess. It’s versatile. We’re learning a lot in this comic, kids.

Well, seconds after these two jackholes wipe down the bike with the world’s most flammable substance, they start it. You can guess how that story ends. And this is the point I was getting to about the point of this comic. In the first place, if you’re stupid enough to smoke around a gas can and your youngest child, I don’t want you around to breed more children. Same thing with the guys and the motorcycle. We need to weed these people out.

Secondly, I don’t want the vapor demon taking people off the hook. People don’t light themselves on fire because a mystical vapor demon talks them into it. They do it because they are aggressively stupid, and the sooner we allow these morons to reduce themselves to a small pile of ash, the better.

Lucky for Laura and her brothers, Daredevil doesn’t share my opinion. He smells some gas fumes from across town and storms in there to save the day. It’s an epic battle, for sure. Daredevil stops, drops, and rolls.



He calculates that opening the garage door will cause a backdraft, and that pouring water on the fire will only make it worse. As “Eye of the Tiger” plays faintly in the background, Daredevil crawls his way to what he prays is a functioning class B extinguisher. I don’t want to ruin the surprise for you or anything, but it all works out. He sprays some fluids on Vapora’s chest and then she disappears. Pretty much business as usual for ol’ Matty Murdock, although usually there isn’t a little girl involved. Maybe she needs to read that Power Pack comic.

The story ends with Murdock winning the case for landlord Abraham Rutkowski. Take that, Zuccotti Park! We find out that little Angel Jusko will require a king’s ransom in medical bills, therapy, and will likely be horribly disfigured. But she’ll live, so….result!

And now dad will know better about peeling up floor tiles with gas. How about next time we rent a power scraper, huh, Mr. Jusko? But maybe not. Maybe he’ll just get conned into using gas again by that pesky Vapora. That’s the final message of Daredevil Vs. Vapora. Good may have triumphed this time, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Whatever you do, pain and misery are coming. It’s always the season for tears, kids. That’s a message the Ugly American fully endorses.



Until next week, you play safe now, y’hear?