Sophisticated Badness

I was reading the Jog's critique of the end of the Ennis run on The Punisher. I can't really talk about Ennis' work on The Punisher because I don't particularly like either the writer or the character, but in the course of the review the character brought up Grant Morrison with great praise. The same critic also critiqued one of Morrison's Batman comics, again quite glowingly. The upshot is that Morrison does all these really cool things, or so the Jog says, and that is perhaps true - but at the end of the day I seem to be dissatisfied with Morrison's work. It took me a long time to figure out, but I finally did, and it's true not only of Morrison, I feel, but a number of comic book writers nowadays - they're bad in a more sophisticated way.

In particular, Morrison will have all these big ideas and concepts and the miss out on a lot of really basic things. So when people argue about whether "he made the Beast gay" or whatever, they never think to ask, "Why on earth have the X-Men accepted into the highest positions of authority a petty, vain and vindictive mass murderer like Emma Frost?!" So while people are going on about how Morrison was trying to make a point about the plight of people who are discriminated in society without the support mechanisms of gay people, I'm sitting back boggling how he put a mass murderer in charge of a bunch of children. Which is literally criminally stupid. Or the way that, y'know, relationships born in adultery are corrupted from the get-go. Stuff like that.

I feel roughly the same way about, say, Warren Ellis. In my opinion, he totally trashed the Thunderbolts - which had hitherto been a campy book about a fairly sophisticated subject, itself: how do people who know only how to do bad get redemption? They suck at it. Even when they are honestly seeking it, they suck at it. Which is a fairly intelligent social commentary relevant in a society which imprisons more people than China - even prisoners who might legitimately wish to change their ways are stuck with all the natural responses and knowledge and behavior that make it nearly impossible for even the most honest amongst them to reform. Yes, yes, the book had a lot of camp, but the point was significant and meaningful.

Ellis' run, however, is nasty people doing horrible things to each other. And then you find Ellis' Internet cult saying it's "realistic". Which is a stupid argument in comics where people have superpowers - wouldn't real realism, y'know, confine itself to the actually possible? - but also stupid because nothing like what happened in the Thunderbolts happens in life. Or, at least, I can't think of a government run program that transforms the most hardened criminals in our society into slaves of the government to hunt down other hardened violent criminals being run by an insane mass murderer. So, it's not realistic. It's so far from realistic that you can't see earth from where it's at.

Which is the problem for me. Not that it's not realistic, but that it's stupid. A government run program that transforms the most hardened criminals in our society into slaves of the government to hunt down other hardened violent criminals being run by an insane mass murderer. That's what Ellis' Thunderbolts are. And it has these profound implications. For instance, it implies that the US government is the kind of government that is okay with law enforcement agencies being run by insane mass murderers. Tony Stark is behind it, too, so he's also okay with an insane mass murderer running a government law enforcement program. It means that Tony Stark and the US government are too blindingly stupid to notice when this insane mass murderer goes on killing sprees and murders fifteen government agents or so evil they don't care. It means that these people are legally responsible for the actions of Norman fucking Osborn! I mean, for me, that's the story. The story isn't how much of a whore Moonstone is or whatever. The story is the profound and multifaceted corruption that would be necessary for Tony Stark's SHIELD and the US government to legally sanction Norman Osborn with law enforcement powers that he immediately abuses.

It's bad. Very bad. Stupid, even. But bad in a more sophisticated way than you'd find in comics from, say, the 50s. Bad in a way that acknowledges that these characters might have a few marbles loose (but always in a heavy handed way - far more interesting to me than Batman's potential insanity is, say, Reed Richards' psychological abuse and neglect of his wife and children), but then ignores even the most basic rules of internal logic and verisimilitude.

And I find myself surprised by it all, though I suppose that I shouldn't be. Comic book fans are desperately seeking approval for their medium (and, generally, these days finding it), and the sophisticated pose of comic book writers since, say, Frank Miller helps them get this respectability. This sophistication provides for many insecure comic book fans, who have some guilt over their fantasies about superheroes, social validity. I don't even mind that. What I mind is that this sophistication gets in the way of what I feel are basic storytelling skills. Worse, by it's very nature, sophistication encourages us to think about the stories - what do the writers mean? And when they do that, when guys like Morrison and Ellis do that, I find myself going, "That's a nice point, Grant, but you realize that the story falls apart?"

I believe that this is allowed to endure because of a certain elision that many fans are expert at saying that the senseless is the greatest form of sense. Not just comics fans but pretty much everywhere amongst fans (and especially amongst anime fans). What they do is work very hard to make sense from the senseless. If it doesn't make sense what they'll do is pretend it does make sense (and is, indeed, quite significant), and then criticize anyone who doesn't agree it makes sense by saying that they don't "get it".

(I also personally hate that, and it's wrong. I will look them in the eye and say, "I got Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. I get Bergman's The Seventh Seal. No, really, I get it. I just think it's dumb." And then they shut up because none of them have the faintest idea of who Hegel is but they think they should or something. Sometimes I also ask them to explain it, and we can talk about that, but that's generally pretty bad for them.)

What I get is that the pose of sophistication in comic books is eroding basic coherent storytelling with internal logic and verisimilitude. And I wish people would start to say this basic and easy to understand fact!