Tom King, Mitch Gerads & others Batman: I Am Suicide (2017)
I've worked out what I dislike about superhero comics - not all superhero comics, because obviously I'm partial to a few of them, but the central flaw inherent to the genre. At the risk of stating the obvious, superhero comics - as first envisioned in the thirties or whenever - appealed to the powerless, or those who saw themselves as powerless by presenting a fantasy of something big enough to get the better of the school bully or whatever other terror, real or imagined, might give one cause to fear leaving the house. The superhero is essentially a cop, but a perfect cop, one who will transcend the laws and red tape of small men to give that bully a bloody nose. He's there for the snitch, for the angry loners who feel helpless in their own homes because thieves, rapists, even communists are everywhere, just waiting to pounce. He's there to beat up the dirty crook, and return the stolen wallet to that rich guy, that wealth provider, that creator of jobs. He's there to defend capitalism, the status quo, and authority whilst allowing us a safe fantasy about wild cards and visionaries who don't play by the rules. He's there to normalise the system which keeps us in place.
I think this occurred to me as I was watching the Suicide Squad movie on a plane - a truly awful film and possibly one of the worst I've ever seen. Suicide Squad is about a bunch of superpowered criminals who work for the government, getting sentences reduced in payment for espionage and the usual shit which secretive government agencies supposedly undertake. Suicide Squad comprises mostly psychotic killers and their obedience is secured by each being implanted with a bomb which can be blown at any moment. There's a scene where one of them gets lippy, but is silenced as Amanda Waller, their boss, holds up an iPad. We see six or seven icons on the screen of the iPad, each an image of a member of the squad. All she has to do is to touch the icon on the screen and one of them dies. The point is illustrated when this happens to a character called Slipknot. Lacking humour, and additionally featuring appalling overacted pantomime character Harley Quinn - Tank Girl as the magic pixie kinderwhore who'll either suck your dick or kill you, Suicide Squad feels like the normalisation of torture, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and human lives reduced to expendable military commodity.
Suicide Squad helped me to identify what I dislike about DC comics, and have always disliked about DC comics, at least in a general sense. The quality of superhero fare, at least for me, is dependent on how far it has come from being authoritarian tales of good cops for the paranoid and insecure. The success of Marvel has mostly been in their treating the genre as soap opera, as with most of those mutant titles, and so the best superhero comics do something other than ferrying an endless string of unfortunates to their penitential just desserts, if they do that at all - Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Keith Giffen's Justice League, Swamp Thing and so on; and this is why DC, even before I developed critical faculties, always seemed dated and stuffy. Marvel was Adam Warlock, weird mutants, and all manner of strange shit, whilst glancing in the other direction it mostly seemed to be Batman doing what he'd always done, and if enduring popularity has left him looking undeniably iconic, he's still a wealthy cop beating up criminals in preservation of the status quo, and the best anyone can do is at least try to make the story more interesting by use of lighting; but too much lighting and it ceases to be Batman, and there, in the shadows, I always get the feeling I can see the gun nut who lives a couple of blocks from me, who posts on our neighbourhood forum warning against local ISIS cells and Obama still coming for our firearms. By comparison, Judge Dredd at least has the decency to take the piss out of itself.
Nevertheless, the ever classy Tom King does what he can with what he's been given, at least moving this story on from what we saw in the first volume, doing his best to keep things interesting. The tough cop aspect is further downplayed as he tries to examine Batman as something human and vulnerable, and in doing so making a little more sense, or at least poetic sense, out of that fucking ridiculous origin story - dealing with bereavement by dressing up as a flying mammal and fighting crime. Similarly most of what happens is played out as a freakish fight between monsters, thus mostly avoiding the parallels and clichés I mentioned earlier. I'm not too sure the sequence of him nobbing Catwoman really said anything which needed saying, but this is probably about as good as a Batman comic is ever likely to be in so much as that it at least makes an effort.
I've worked out what I dislike about superhero comics - not all superhero comics, because obviously I'm partial to a few of them, but the central flaw inherent to the genre. At the risk of stating the obvious, superhero comics - as first envisioned in the thirties or whenever - appealed to the powerless, or those who saw themselves as powerless by presenting a fantasy of something big enough to get the better of the school bully or whatever other terror, real or imagined, might give one cause to fear leaving the house. The superhero is essentially a cop, but a perfect cop, one who will transcend the laws and red tape of small men to give that bully a bloody nose. He's there for the snitch, for the angry loners who feel helpless in their own homes because thieves, rapists, even communists are everywhere, just waiting to pounce. He's there to beat up the dirty crook, and return the stolen wallet to that rich guy, that wealth provider, that creator of jobs. He's there to defend capitalism, the status quo, and authority whilst allowing us a safe fantasy about wild cards and visionaries who don't play by the rules. He's there to normalise the system which keeps us in place.
I think this occurred to me as I was watching the Suicide Squad movie on a plane - a truly awful film and possibly one of the worst I've ever seen. Suicide Squad is about a bunch of superpowered criminals who work for the government, getting sentences reduced in payment for espionage and the usual shit which secretive government agencies supposedly undertake. Suicide Squad comprises mostly psychotic killers and their obedience is secured by each being implanted with a bomb which can be blown at any moment. There's a scene where one of them gets lippy, but is silenced as Amanda Waller, their boss, holds up an iPad. We see six or seven icons on the screen of the iPad, each an image of a member of the squad. All she has to do is to touch the icon on the screen and one of them dies. The point is illustrated when this happens to a character called Slipknot. Lacking humour, and additionally featuring appalling overacted pantomime character Harley Quinn - Tank Girl as the magic pixie kinderwhore who'll either suck your dick or kill you, Suicide Squad feels like the normalisation of torture, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and human lives reduced to expendable military commodity.
Suicide Squad helped me to identify what I dislike about DC comics, and have always disliked about DC comics, at least in a general sense. The quality of superhero fare, at least for me, is dependent on how far it has come from being authoritarian tales of good cops for the paranoid and insecure. The success of Marvel has mostly been in their treating the genre as soap opera, as with most of those mutant titles, and so the best superhero comics do something other than ferrying an endless string of unfortunates to their penitential just desserts, if they do that at all - Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Keith Giffen's Justice League, Swamp Thing and so on; and this is why DC, even before I developed critical faculties, always seemed dated and stuffy. Marvel was Adam Warlock, weird mutants, and all manner of strange shit, whilst glancing in the other direction it mostly seemed to be Batman doing what he'd always done, and if enduring popularity has left him looking undeniably iconic, he's still a wealthy cop beating up criminals in preservation of the status quo, and the best anyone can do is at least try to make the story more interesting by use of lighting; but too much lighting and it ceases to be Batman, and there, in the shadows, I always get the feeling I can see the gun nut who lives a couple of blocks from me, who posts on our neighbourhood forum warning against local ISIS cells and Obama still coming for our firearms. By comparison, Judge Dredd at least has the decency to take the piss out of itself.
Nevertheless, the ever classy Tom King does what he can with what he's been given, at least moving this story on from what we saw in the first volume, doing his best to keep things interesting. The tough cop aspect is further downplayed as he tries to examine Batman as something human and vulnerable, and in doing so making a little more sense, or at least poetic sense, out of that fucking ridiculous origin story - dealing with bereavement by dressing up as a flying mammal and fighting crime. Similarly most of what happens is played out as a freakish fight between monsters, thus mostly avoiding the parallels and clichés I mentioned earlier. I'm not too sure the sequence of him nobbing Catwoman really said anything which needed saying, but this is probably about as good as a Batman comic is ever likely to be in so much as that it at least makes an effort.
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