Ugly American # 31: Comics and fridges and death, oh my!

I want to talk about Avengers Arena again this week, because it’s fun and it’s worth it. The comic itself is several grades more interesting than it gets credit for, even from its supporters, in my opinion. It’s an interesting artifact, and what’s even more fascinating is watching people react to it. Does any comic encapsulate what’s right with comics and wrong with the people who read them more perfectly than Avengers Arena? I say thee nay!

The only thing I like better than good comics is watching humans respond to them like deranged amoeba in my personal petri dish. The whole package is too delicious.

A good number of the amoeba have really freaked out about Avengers Arena # 10, to the point where Bleeding Cool ran a story on it. Sister Grimm “dies” at the end of the issue, and this produced quite the fit of Pharisee robe-tearing, over-taxed tear ducts, and many a “fuck Dennis Hopeless”. Which when you think about it is sort of a sweet offer, but I’m betting he already has someone lined up for those duties. But I digress.

You may have noticed that I didn’t announce any “spoiler” warnings about the Nico “dying” bit as I normally would. This is actually related to my main point about all these histrionics:

THEY TOLD YOU UP FRONT THEY WERE KILLING EVERYBODY (BUT MAYBE ONE) IN THIS GODDAMN COMIC BOOK.

Why is anybody shocked or upset that their beloved characters are dropping like flies in this thing? That’s what they said they were going to do! If the idea of a character dying in this comic causes you strife….I don’t know….maybe this isn’t the comic for you? Just a thought.

Imagine going to a restaurant and ordering from the nice French waiter.

YOU: “Yeah, how’s the Peking Duck? Just to let you know, I don’t like things that are salty. Love Peking Duck, but just can’t handle a lot of salt.”

WAITER: “Zee Peking Duck is tres magnifique, madame, but I’m afraid eet eez quite salty. Quite salty.”

(Apparently Batroc the Leaper is your waiter, which is awesome. Good to see him working)

YOU: “OK, I’ll take the Peking Duck, then. And some raspberry tea.”

BATROC: “Oui, madame. I would just like to remind you, howevair, zat zee Peking Duck eez very salty.”

YOU: “Uh-huh.”

BATROC: “Very well, madame.”

Now, if you get your Peking Duck and you don’t like it because it’s too salty….who is to blame? Is it the chef’s fault? Would it be reasonable to start shouting and cause a scene, then run to the internet and start trashing the restaurant about how crappy the food is and how poorly they treated you, or are you just a stupid asshole who didn’t listen to what the waiter plainly told you? I will let you, dear reader, solve that mystery for yourself.

Meanwhile, the chef wrote the shit out of that issue. Listen, the traps are easy to identify. If this is just a mousetrap built for blood, it’s pandering to the worst of the worst of us. But that’s never been what this book is about.

Avengers Arena is a giant character study about what happens to (mostly) good people when you strip away the trappings of civilization and throw them into pure survival mode. It’s not a “snuff comic” any more than Nolan’s Dark Knight was a snuff movie. Same themes, same questions, except Hopeless has a lot more space to make the drama breathe, and he’s been using it to grand effect.

The point of AA # 10 isn’t that Nico “dies” at the end. The point is the continued ascendancy of Katy, and the fact that nobility took a major hit this episode. Katy is a Machiavellian bitch on wheels, a joy to root against, and a fantastic example of a comic book creating something out of nothing. I didn’t care about Katy, or Death Locket, or Cami, or Kid Britton six months ago. They all mean something to me now. What are you reading these days that means something to you now? I’m digressing, though.

The point is that in issue # 9, a group of the kids finally understood that Katy was a real threat that probably needed to go for the good of the group. For wonderful character-driven reasons I won’t ruin for you here, that seemed like the wrong thing to do.

That decision split two very good friends and fellow Runaways, Chase and Nico. Nico couldn’t pull the trigger on Katy, but the lessons of Murderworld have been teaching Chase that he can’t necessarily afford his best impulses, so he dissented. Nico kicked Chase out of the group, and then Katy used Chase (against his will) as a tool to destroy Nico. Heart-rending stuff, and all plausible given the mechanics of Katy’s power set and Chase’s new toy. Nico, for her part ushers the rest of her group to safety and then stands off against an entire pack of combatants that includes her best friend in the arena and a friggin’ SENTINEL.

Now, if you’re paying attention at home, here’s what the scorecard looks like - Dennis Hopeless just engineered a result that includes perfect emotional poignancy while escalating the tension of the plot while simultaneously forwarding his moral themes. And by the way, all of that unfolded seamlessly in the organic action of the story, without shaking the car or making you reach for the KY bottle. What in the FUCK are you people bitching about? That was virtuoso. This is comics at their best.

And by the way, people, look at the last page again. Nico has no bars lit on her life-o-meter, but her last act was to grab the Staff of One (with the only hand she has left) and cast a “help” spell at it. Maybe that spell was too late, and maybe it isn’t. Maybe next issue the staff brings her back. Maybe she doesn’t come back until Bendis or somebody important decides they want to use her again a year from now.

To me, that 'aint the point. To me, the point is that this book is really about to ramp up and get down to the nitty and the gritty. There’s a bunch of young people on Murderworld now who have no choice but to realize that this game isn’t a game, and that a moral code is a death sentence. Sympathy and friendships are death sentences. How will the remaining players react? I don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out. For me, that’s the point.

The points on the hater boards seem to revolve, as they always do these days, around Southpaw Bunny politics and blind emotion. Lots of talk about “fridging” Nico, which doesn’t impress me. You can’t just reference “Women in Refrigerators” and drop the mic like you said something meaningful.

Well, you can do so on the comics news sites, but that doesn’t play here at the Ugly American. I think it’s possible to have a debate about the frequency of female death/trauma in comics, or the validity of the “helpless female useful only to drive male vengeance” stereotype.

The Bunny side is going to lose that argument to about 15 minutes of real research, because this just in…every character in comics suffers atrocities. It’s kinda part of the gig. Remember that Capt. Everything Goes Right All The Time For Him series? No, you don’t. Because it never got pitched, much less published.

So yes, we could have that debate, but that’s not what’s going on over at the boards right now, or on your local Twitter. It’s a pervasive reactionary mindset that says “I didn’t like it, the character was female, so it must be sexist”. If you disagree with them, then you’re sexist, too.

Actually, I think pervasive is the wrong word, though. I think the vast majority of comics readers either don’t care about this stuff, or maintain a more reasonable attitude. The problem, in my opinion, is that this hyper-vocal manic minority get a lot of ink on what passes for comics news outlets, offer little in the way of dissenting opinion, and it gives the nonsense more weight than it deserves.

One of these idiots actually had the audacity to post a hate-tweet post script of:

#okay kill the Asian woman that’s totally fine…

I wonder if that person recognizes that their “defense” of Nico is uglier than any imaginary bigotry he ascribes to Dennis Hopeless. I’m guessing not. No, there’s no thought process necessary to hear clapping at the end of your rage any more. It’s just “I didn’t like it, the character wasn’t white, therefore it’s racist.” Absurd.

No charge of racism or sexism against this series in particular will stand up to an ounce of actual rational analysis. Meanwhile, Marvel just had Brian Wood build an X-Men team of X-Women, and they’ve been actively courting pitches on what Tom Breevort is calling a “Black Avengers” book. Does that sound like a publisher cultivating bigotry to you?

To recap on a more positive note - Dennis Hopeless is putting on a clinic, and regardless of what you may have had tweeted at you, Avengers Arena is fantastic in all areas.

You may disagree below.

Ugly American # 23: Surprise!

I read a lot of good comics this week, but the one that struck me the most – both for its contents and the nuances of context was Avengers Arena # 7. We covered the book briefly here at Ugly American Inc. when it first broke, but for the uninitiated the basic conceit is this:

A group of young Marvel B-D listers are captured by a suddenly amped-up Arcade and forced to fight to the death “Hunger Games” style.

It’s a dirt simple, powerful hook. Well, sort of. Detractors might question the derivative nature of the premise. Mostly people were upset about the concept of a comic devoted to “whacking” semi-beloved characters for sport. Particularly in a medium where deaths seem to be awfully cheap and temporary.

For a story like this, I think feeling guarded is justified. Is any of this real? Is it canon, or an Elseworlds tale? How do we know that Arcade hasn’t ripped off some of Xavier’s Danger Room tech and plugged these kids into his own little matrix? Or if that’s the case, why bother tempting an ass-whupping by kidnapping the actual kids when you could just run the sim with life-like holograms? I guess I can only speak for myself, but I found it difficult to fully invest myself in Avengers Arena because in the back of my head I’m waiting for Bobby Ewing to come out of the shower. That’s a slightly tantalizing but mostly uncomfortable feeling.

Avengers Arena # 7 shines a spotlight on Arcade, his sexy assistant Miss Coriander, and the origins of this new-and-improved Murderworld. All of the important questions get answered here. I think there’s still some room for button-hooking, so they may not end up being THE answers. But if you want to know if Murderworld is a tangible place in a physical locale, the answer is “yes”. Is Arcade really as powerful as he appears to be? Ehhh….sort of. And you may not entirely buy the premise of those powers or their limitations, but at least you’ll understand the rules the book is playing by. Were the kids physically captured and physically present inside of Murderworld? Definitely “yes”. Are the kids actually dying? Again, I think there’s room for fudging, (this is Arcade and a comic book after all) but this issue is presenting the answer as “yes”. Is there a reason why this scenario is so reminiscent of other pop culture memes? “Yes”. Does that take it off the hook? Probably “no”. But at least the book is now finally playing fair with us.

Now here’s the real question – why in the world would ever take seven issues to play fair with your audience?

The answer is this:

Comics are in such a dark hole of incestuous recycling of ideas, and so ravaged by the spoiler-obsessed comics “news” industry that the only vestige of novelty left to the creators is to try and confuse the shit out of you.

Story? Who cares? We’ve heard it all before, and if we haven’t, it will be well-trodden and used up a full month before the issue actually hits stands. Comics are no longer constructed to be enjoyed or understood. Today’s comics are adversarial in nature. They aren’t trying to please us, and we aren’t politely expecting to be pleased. We aggressively fight to crack the code, and they in turn go to increasingly bizarre lengths to encrypt the message into gibberish. Who will win? Answer: nobody.

The stories are lost. What they’ve turned into are Hobbit riddles in the dank corners of Gollum’s cave. Once all the carefully crafted gems have been used up, all you can do is repeat them or cheat.

“What do I have in my pockets?”, says Marvel.

“Uh….I don’t know, and that’s not even a riddle”, you reply.

“Fuck you, then, I win!” says Marvel.

That’s where we’re at as a medium now, at least for the Big Two. Before I go any further, I want to make a couple things clear. I think Dennis Hopeless is an excellent storyteller with a superlative grasp of character and what makes us care about people. Avengers Arena # 7 is a prime example of that, actually. What grabbed me was not the plot reveals, which were fine and much needed. What grabbed me was peering into Arcade’s life outside of Murderworld, where he is strangely vulnerable, detestable, broken, and oddly charming about it all.

What I want is the inside baseball. I want to know what the frost giants of Jotunheim are doing when Thor isn’t bouncing an uru hammer off their skulls. That’s where the juice is for me, and Dennis Hopeless is really good at delivering that stuff. Hopeless gives us the inner workings of Arcade’s bizarre celebrity villain birthday parties, and a previously undeveloped relationship with his assistant. As good as the Arcade stuff was, the Coriander bits were better. She was a nothing to me last month, this month I’m in love. Now I want to know how much of that relationship is genuine affection, and how much is just two broken people trying to get over on each other. That’s interesting. That’s character. That’s story. That’s magic!

Now, how much of that magic is lost if they just lead with that information, in a first issue or zero issue, or an Avengers lead-in issue? None. The story is stronger for it. I am not less interested in Arcade and the concept of Murderworld now that I know the emotional impetus and some of its basic working elements. I was less interested when I didn’t know that, because I had no anchor with which to ground my investment. The “mystery” of Arcade’s Murderworld was not driving me deeper into the book, it was constantly threatening my ability to continue. I held course because Hopeless provided enough character moments in the interim to counter-balance my plot reservations. They got lucky on that one, I often bail. We all do.

And again, to be clear, I’m not picking on Avengers Arena. A lot of comics are guilty of confusing intrigue with confusion. Remember East of West last week? Loved the art, only liked the story. Clearly something is there, but I don’t know what, and that’s by design. It’s hurting my ability to connect with that material. How about Five Ghosts? I really enjoyed the pulp tone of that book, the design, the spider-monsters, the look. I know a little something about the nature of Fabian Gray’s abilities, but I got most of that info from the solicit, the back matter, and because I’m tuned into comics podcasts. The content of the first issue itself establishes little that is concrete or compelling about the most critical element of that character and the comic. The move is to provide core clarity and then dazzle us with the depth. What’s a literary ghost, and how does Fabian use them? It’s important to have a basic understanding of that. What’s the benefit in confusion?

Listen, I’m not suggesting that I need to be spoon-fed or that you have to play all of your cards instantly. Remember Preacher? Lots of twists and turns and mysteries to be solved around the way, but in the very beginning the guts are spelled out very clearly:

• Jesse Custer is a tough sonavubitch ex-preacher who has lost his faith

• Jesse Custer is ironically hit with a divine power to compel others to do as he says

• Jesse Custer wants to use his powers for a reckoning with God

Boom – you’re in! No, you don’t understand right away exactly what happened to Jesse, or why. You don’t know how he got hooked up with an asshole vampire or why he’s so bad with women, or why Starr liked it in the can. Garth Ennis left plenty of room for the story to breathe, but you knew exactly why you were there and what you were dealing with.

I think I get where all this is coming from, and believe it or not I have some sympathy for Marvel and DC. So much of their clientele are now middle-aged and jaded, and have seen it all at this point. We say we want new things, but we only ever seem to buy the old icons, and how do you keep it new? They won’t be expecting a punch in the balls, right? Pow! Except I don’t want to be punched in the balls, or lost at sea.

We’re in trouble as a medium when I hear Bendis selling Age of Ultron based on the fact that nobody can guess how it ends. Two weeks in all of that gets leaked, and then what’s that worth? It was rubbish from the beginning, though. Making your audience get the answer wrong isn’t the same as telling a good story. “What number am I thinking of?” is kind of a shit game with no real skill involved.

Here’s a secret that seems in danger of being forgotten – human beings are story machines, designed specifically for the transmission and reception of lore. Stop trying to jam the signal in the name of novelty. God help us, we need a little more Jim Shooter in comics right now.

Avengers Arena was an enjoyable # 7 but it would have been incredible # 0.

Somebody give me an “Amen”, or challenge my commentary with their own!