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The Incredible Sulk: The Avengers, The Death of Art and Me

Until this last year, “The Avengers” has, to British people at least, always meant Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg (and possibly Honor Blackman, and the other lass with the short hair might show up on a pub quiz from time to time). Now, due to Avengers Assembled, renamed to avoid confusion with the fantastic black-suited fascists of 60s television, it evokes images of alien invasions, Samuel L. Jackson hamming it in a trenchcoat and eyepatch, and the Hulk punching Thor in the side of the head. Even though it conjures the possibility for some particularly deviant fan-fiction—picture John Steed beating Iron Man to death with his whangee umbrella over the naming rights—it still seems a shame that our cultural semiotic library has traded debonair surrealist sleuthing for comic book shenanigans.

It didn’t have to be this way, of course: the Nick Fury comics I remember, illustrated by the wonderful Jim Sterenko, looked like a Sean Connery James Bond on LSD. Here, disappointingly, he’s Mace Windu with depth perception issues. I say disappointingly because I am one of the few people left who actually rate Jackson as an actor: nobody who can muscle an on-song Robert De Niro around, as Jackson did in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, should have their Thespian chops questioned as often as he. But like a lot of talented black actors, Jackson must settle for being thought of as “cool” or “awesome” by middle class white youth rather than landing challenging roles, and so it is here.

Indeed, a lot about Avengers suggests a missed opportunity. Some of the more interesting characters from the original comic books have been left out of the line-up. Wonder Man, who must balance his dual life of superhero and Hollywood movie star, certainly seems more relevant to our celebrity-preoccupied 21st century society than the flag-wearing WWII relic Captain America, whom even the script has to apologetically admit is a bit old fashioned. Likewise the Scarlet Witch, whose probability-altering powers would surely chime better with an internet era awash with Schrodinger’s Cat jokes and the latest exciting reports from CERN than Thor, a being who can control the weather. The clang of iron, the cascade of thunder, the roar of patriotism…these are things that have cowed or awed generations past in various stages of humankind’s development. What we want now is quantum physics and Brad Pitt’s lovelife.

Consider, also, the Vision, an artificial intelligence who begins a romance with the human Scarlet Witch in the pages of the comics. If we are, as some futurologists suggest, on the verge of a Nano Era that will inevitably lead to posthumanism and eventually a technological singularity, the love triangle between Wonder Man, Witch and Vision, who began life as a simulacra of Wonder Man but outgrew him, would be an interesting thing to explore, speaking as it does to our anxieties about more and more rapid advancement and the increasingly intimate relationship we have with technology as we go about leading broadband existences through our laptops and smart phones.

But, as evidenced by these omissions, Avengers Assemble was never to be about us. It was about marketing and money-making, so only the most saleable heroes were chosen (with the exception of Hawkeye, a character so obscure and dull the most interesting thing in connection to him is that he shares a nickname with someone who once gave me amphetamines at a party, and the Black Widow, who is there to offset the S.H.E.I.L.D. helicarrier’s locker room smell). It almost seems strange to assess Avengers as a film, because it represents perhaps the biggest intrusion of marketing into cinema in history. If we’re generous enough to accept Iron Man as a film in its own right on account of its undoubted quality, we cannot also do the same for its sequel, or The Incredible Hulk, or Thor, or Captain America: The First Avenger. Whatever merits or lack thereof these movies had on their own terms are irrelevant next to the fact they were conceived and intended as two-hour advertisements/brainwashing packages for Avengers Assemble.

The audience for this film has been so expertly cultivated that no conversation about it is now complete without mention of its box office gross, which has even bodyslammed the latest entry in the far more famous Batman series. Nor is any dissent to be found: the reviews of Avengers have been overwhelmingly positive, to an almost unprecedented extent for a Hollywood blockbuster.

This is in spite of it being a film characterised chiefly by formulaic laziness. Much has been made of writer/director Joss Whedon’s “unenviable task” of bringing these divergent personalities together under one vision, and yet anyone who was paying attention to Avengers‘ predecessors in the series will note everything has already been set up for him. An anti-auteur entity, the aesthetic of the franchise so far has been uniform, the scripts likewise all high in the sort of knowing irony and nerdy witticisms Whedon thrives on generating. The McGuffin was introduced in Thor and showed up again in Captain America, and Thor also gave the film its mincing, effeminate, intellectual villain for the muscle-bound protagonists to treat to a sound thrashing. Anyone who caught poor Tom Hiddleston in Terrence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea or as Harry in BBC’s The Hollow Crown recently should be in little doubt of the range of his abilities, to the extent of not looking out of place sharing screentime with England’s finest living actor, Simon Russell Beale, but here he is merely a foil for Robert Downey Jr. to talk down to or for the Hulk to smash.

Which gives a certain visceral thrill, of course, and it must be noted that Whedon has had an ambivalent relationship with geek culture for some time. The villains in his Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Three, certainly seemed an aggressive caricature of some of the unhealthy and fetishistic facets that fandom can fall prey to, and perhaps Hiddlestone’s Loki was drafted with the same colour pen. That would be a magnanimous interpretation; more likely is that we’re being invited to being accessories to bullying, the Richard Hammonds to the Hulk’s Jeremy Clarkson.

Of course, the intelligence of Bruce Banner and Tony Stark are also stressed, so perhaps I’m being unfair by implying Avengers is overtly anti-intellectual and jockish. These characters are two rare success stories in this saga. Whilst Marvel has been for some time operating in the schizophrenic mode of venerating Jack Kirby, the artist who created many of these characters, and urinating on his grave by refusing to give his heirs even a fraction of the enormous profits now being generated from his works, a sensible person does neither, and can recognise that Banner and the Hulk have been interminably boring almost since their inception, a cheap low-culture misappropriation and misunderstanding of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. Similarly, though it seems unbelievable to us in a post-Warren Ellis world, the desperate attempts over the years to make Tony Stark seem anything more than a bargain-basement Bruce Wayne without the darkness in the comics even led to him being given an alcohol addiction in one lamentably cheesy storyline. But Downey’s Stark is now the star of the show, and Mark Ruffalo gives us an enigmatic Banner. Their onscreen ailments—in Stark’s case, a clear spectrum disorder (for instance, he can’t abide being handed objects) and, in Banner’s, clinical depression—are their strengths, and Whedon, whose preoccupation is chiefly with character, is in his element during their interactions.

It’s story where the film falls down again. As mentioned, it hinges on a McGuffin, nothing more exciting than a glowing blue cube, the properties of which are left deliberately vague. There’s an invasion by an alien race of poorly-designed B-movie space orcs on flying bikes that we know nothing about except that they’re all bad and must be killed without compassion. It also involves several very tired stock plots, such as the authority figure manipulating the heroes and pulling paternalistic cloak-and-dagger, carry-a-big-stick stuff behind their backs; or the villain pulling a Trojan horse move and being captured of his own volition; or the protagonists all falling out before going away, learning something about themselves and reuniting, stronger than ever. The latter template has clearly been imported over from Pixar’s office next door, which has got so much mileage out of it over the years it’s amazing they continue to escape any critical analysis whatsoever. On the evidence of Avengers, Marvel Films, like Pixar, seem poised to enjoy fawning hegemony from the professional film media.

It makes you wonder whether the aforementioned marketing machine has made nerds of us all, incapable now of examining what we love out of fear of finding any fault with it. Because Avengers doesn’t hold up under analysis. Even Whedon is bewildered by the ubiquitous praise, regarding his work as “not a great movie”. It relies heavily on its setpieces, its explosive action sequences (one of those rare things I am unable to assess objectively and find uniformly tiresome, like fireworks displays and Jim Broadbent) and its humming and hahing dialogue. This all strives to construct a tone of “We know superheroes are daft—but look how much we need them! Look how much fun you’re having!” The first assertion is inarguable, but the other two? The very fact superheroes don’t exist shows how much their presence is unnecessary, and we should always be suspicious when being sold a good time.

But sold it has been. We’re now at the point where even Agent Coulson, such a dramatic non-entity in this film series that he barely qualifies as a repeated cameo, now has his own following. In an act of shameless fan service, the heroes follow their real life audience rather than vice versa—Coulson’s death, and his blood-stained comic book memorabilia collection, are used as the motivational catalyst for the inevitably redemptive third act of the film, a piece of writing so unconvincing and inept that I’m amazed it came from the word processor of a professional writer. “It never would have worked if they didn’t have something to [avenge],” Whedon forces the unfortunate actor to say as the character, and any hope of taking the film seriously, die in Nick Fury’s arms.

The Avengers franchise has now become so ironic, so self-satirising, so meta that it’s a house built on and of sand. It’s product, not art, and gleefully revels in being so. It seems that consciousness is a zero sum game because, the more it gains in self-awareness, the more its fans lose theirs. More than anything, Avengers Assemble represents the final triumph of commercialism at the expense of aesthetics or indeed, considering the exploitation of Kirby’s work at the expense of his family, of ethics; a breaking of the Aristotelian covenant between art and its observer by an invading force far more threatening than Skrulls. It’s a situation so strange and unnerving even Steed and Peel would struggle to make sense of it.

Judging Dredd

It’s a hot day in Wallasey, sometime in the mid 90s. My little brother and I take shelter from the oppressive heat in John Menzies, what is now W.H. Smiths. True to the instinct that still tends to dictate my actions when walking into bookshops today, I walk immediately to the section labelled “graphic novels.”

I’m a weird kid, at this point; regularly treated with derision or contempt by primary school classmates and teachers for my almost obsessive love of Batman comics, Batman movies, the Batman animated series. (The same thing would later happen in high school, when I became a pro wrestling fan.) The strange thing is that it’s considered reasonably okay (though not cool) at my school to like the Beano or the Dandy, but – Batman? That’s too childish, somehow, in spite of the urban setting, in spite of the violence and adult themes that were permeating 90s comics. Dennis the Menace bullying Walter, or the hideous Bash Street Boys bullying their classmates, or Desperate Dan bullying everybody? Fine. Batman breaking up a coke dealing gang? Daft, even to an 8 year old.

Actually, I now realize that, like pro wrestling, it’s too American. British people have never “got” superheroes the way Americans have. They’re too grand, too ostentatious, too good to be true, too ridiculous. Even my childhood self never really had any real connection with also-rans like the Green Lantern, the Hulk, Spawn or Iron Man – you had to be one of the Big Two, Batman or Superman to catch my attention in a meaningful way. But that’s fine, because there’s plenty of Batman to go around.

So there I am, sitting on the floor in the aisle of Menzies, flicking through the trade paperbacks. Which are, this being the 90s, mainly crappy crossovers with poor art… but whatever, cool. Batman is fighting Captain America, Batman is fighting Spawn, Batman is fighting Superman, Batman… Batman…

Batman is getting the shit kicked out of him by Judge Dredd.

And arrested, and unmasked, and thrown in an isocube. And Dredd doesn’t even break a sweat.

And the art isn’t crap. It’s weird, and it’s a bit scary to a kid used to John Byrne or Alan Davis, but it’s not crap. And the writing, though deliberately over the top and silly, is sharp and witty, with a knowing irony to it.

Still. Judge Dredd just filled Batman in. Informed him of who the boss was. Just beat his blue nappy-wearing arse down.

I close the book and leave the shop.

Last Saturday, it was another hot day in Wallasey. I’m an adult, now. Pro wrestling died for me with Eddie Guerrero, and my love of comics has faded in the last year – Warren Ellis has been writing a novel, Garth Ennis has been writing a film, Alan Moore has been doing everything but comics, Grant Morrison’s Superman just isn’t clicking with me. More so, the corporatisation and mainstreaming of geek culture has raised nothing but bile and contempt in me – someone, somewhere, in between my putting down Judgment on Gotham and today, realized that geeks are geeks because they’re addicted, and realized that if they could cut the corners off this shit and polish it up, they could make everyone addicted and get filthy rich. Much like a smack dealer who clocks the fact he can water down his dose and spread it to more fiends, who need to buy more in turn because of the watered down dosage – that is the current manufacturing ethic of Disney, Time Warner, Sony and Marvel Films.

Hence some of the aforementioned also-ran superheroes getting films, and these films actually making fucking money. I mean, did anyone really need a Thor film? Did anyone crave Mickey Rourke slicing up Formula 1 cars with his electro-bondage whips? And is anyone with a functioning mind and a sense of self-respect anything but repulsed by the openly-viral internet marketing of these cinematic abortions?

So really, the last thing you’d expect the 24 year old me to be doing on this hot Autumn day is walking to see a comic book movie. And if I was doing that, the last thing you’d expect me to be feeling is excitement, to the point of being struggling to contain myself. Especially if the last film I’d seen at the cinema had actually been The Dark Knight Rises, which I found depressing. That had Batman being beaten up, too, with none of the style or comic timing employed by Messrs. Grant and Bisley.

But there I am, almost skipping, to see Dredd. Because in the years hence, I’ve really clicked with this character. What seemed frightening to me as a child is fucking hilarious to me as an adult. The cynical, almost nihilistic satirical tone of the Dredd comics has hit a chord with me as I’ve grown more political, more apathetic, more evil, more British than I was as a peculiar pre-pubescent, and left little room for any emotional bond with the American superheroes that are now crammed down everyone’s throat by bloodsucking multimedia companies who still won’t give Jack Kirby’s family his fucking money.

Which is a really roundabout way of saying that this is not a review that can be trusted. There’s too much emotion going on here, and too much backstory, for me to put my prejudices aside and judge (heh) Dredd entirely on its own merits. I confess that I (even while fully expecting the film to be terrible) have been wanking over the release date of this film just as feverishly as the Nolan freaks have been over TDKR. I’ve become everything I’ve hated, and though I’ll endeavour, I can’t be expected to come to a proper critical evaluation.

I’m reminded of another time Dredd and Batman mixed it up – the day I went to see Batman Forever with my aunt, I could have gone to the Stallone Judge Dredd with my uncle, a huge 2000AD fan. He came out with the expression I’ve seen on many a “geek” since the comic book movie explosion: faintly grinning, enthusing… but without emotion. Eyes dead; expression painted on. The gaze of the junkie, having just been sold junk that was 2% as advertised and 98% whatever the dealer found underneath his car seat. I’m not that far gone, I don’t think, and if I detect I’ve become that person, I’ll put a Lawgiver to my head.

All that in mind, I think I should go through what I didn’t like about Dredd, or its limitations, rather than jumping straight in with the praise.

First is that this is not the definitive Dredd film. It couldn’t be. The scope, which in the comic spreads from the irradiated Cursed Earth, to Brit-Cit, to outer space, to time travel, to parallel universes, is too narrow. The whole film is set in one city block, over the course of one day, and in this sense, even the Stallone movie comes closer to the span of Dredd’s world.

Second, is that it isn’t quite silly enough to be a thoroughly representative adaptation of the works of Alan Grant, John Wagner, Pat Mills et al. It plays itself straight and leaves room for inference, rather than reaching out and punching you in the face with its satire as a Paul Verhoeven film might (and really, we’re never going to get the definitive Judge Dredd film unless Mr Verhoeven agrees to direct it). In this way, weirdly, the Stallone version again comes up trumps – its key failure wasn’t that it was ludicrous, but that it lacked any irony. This version, starring Karl Urban as the titular character, has irony, but lacks the ludicrousness of the comic.

But we don’t appreciate films by how well they’ve uploaded the source material to the screen, we critique them on whether they work on their own merits. Blade Runner, Die Hard, even The Godfather have pretty glaring downfalls as book adaptations. Watchmen doesn’t. And yet the first three are excellent films, whereas Watchmen is filthy arse gravy not fit for human consumption.

This in mind, Dredd does reasonably well. The aesthetic, for starters, is fascinating. Mega-City One holds up in comparison with the London of Children of Men and the Johannesburg of District 9 in the strikingly realistic urban sci-fi stakes. But whilst Alfonso Cuaron and Neil Blomkamp shamelessly appropriate Balkan and Soweto imagery, respectively, Pete Travis seems to have taken the uglier, bleaker, concrete aspects of the American and African metropolis and extrapolated them (which, it must be said, is a very 2000 AD thing to do), limiting his incorporation of the same kind of South African slum photography as D9 to the opening and closing spanning shots. The resulting fictional city is unnervingly familiar whilst being alien and distant, in a way that Blade Runner must have seemed to audiences in the 80s when it made the innovation that the future might not be any cleaner or smoother than the present. The dim, grime-encrusted corridors of Peach Trees, the humorously named city block where Dredd and telepathic rookie judge Anderson do battle against the druglord Ma-Ma, suggest a run-down slum motel combined with an abandoned military complex, a setting which charges the film with energies of oppression and claustrophobia.

Anderson, played by Oliva Trilby is the real protagonist, the character the audience identifies with. Which is exactly how it should be, as Dredd is not what you might call a relatable comic book character character. He’s not a tortured wealthy socialite pushing himself beyond human limits to make himself a superhero, or a teenager with powers trying to balance his dual identities, or a weapons designer trying to make amends. He is the faceless embodiment of penal violence, or even fascism, the essence of a hardcore action hero distilled and stripped down to its core element and unleashed upon an unsuspecting array of criminals.

In a century where Clint Eastwood is talking to empty chairs and the 80s guard are farting around slapping each other on their wrinkly backs in The Expendables, where Matt Damon and Liam Neeson can survive and even thrive as action stars without difficulty, where Chow Yun Fat’s career went from bad to worse when he left Hong Kong and The Rock’s career never really got started, Rock’s Doom co-star Karl Urban looks and feels like the real deal as Dredd. Armed with a far more convincing and coherent Eastwood-esque growl than Christian Bale’s lamentable drivel as Batman, and partaking in slow motion sequences that take the Matrix bullet-time concepts and force them to confront their brutal Peckinpah origins, he bludgeons his way through the film in a way that his contemporaries must long to do, or be allowed to do. His nasty and sustained beating of a suspect, his smashing someone in the windpipe and leaving them to wheeze to death, his silently throwing a henchman over a balcony to send a dispassionate message to his enemies… these feel like they don’t belong in a time of more liberalized and introspective Hollywood thrillers than in years past. They’re genuinely quite shocking. Good – the irony here is that Judge Dredd, a British concept designed to parody American politics, has produced the most hard-hitting and workable American action flick in years.

That’s kind of typical of Dredd, though. Garth Ennis once commented that the reason he could never care about American superheroes was that their publishers would never have the courage to put them into the positions to make the sort of decisions 2000 AD forced Dredd to contend with. Batman can fanny around with non-lethal boomerangs and tear gas, but Dredd isn’t fighting the Penguin in Gotham City; he lives in a place so big and terrible he and his comrades in arms can only respond to 6% of the crimes committed, and thus end up dealing with the most vicious, dangerous and deranged individuals in fiction. They regularly fail and die, and the only reason Dredd survives is that he’s tougher and crueller. Smarter, too, and more resourceful, but he mainly gets by, as Ma-Ma observes, through being a real piece of work.

This anarchic freedom for the writers of Dredd’s comics came from the punk rock ethic of 2000 AD (it even made its début in 1977), and the relative (to most comic book adaptations) freedom of scriptwriter Alex Garland to stick whatever sick shit he likes in the film likewise results from the lack of a huge budget or a well-defined expectant audience. Whilst the fan in me is fantasizing about a sequel, the realist hopes there’s some financial flaw in this movie’s DNA make-up that stops it from becoming a successful franchise. A Daily Mail review once said that an idea as good as democracy deserves a television show as great as BBC’s The Thick of It. Well, an idea as threatening and dangerous as fascism deserves a comic as masterfully perceptive, irreverent and cutting edge as Judge Dredd, and that comic deserves a film that isn’t primarily a money making exercise.

Whilst Dredd certainly has the relentless bleakness of its comic counterpart, and the same dark humour (a tramp holding a “will debase self for credits” sign was a personal favourite), it’s at its heart a good, stylish, grimy, dystopian thriller with the 2000 AD elements generally little more than dressing that, admittedly, raise it a few notches. There are reasons to go and see it, and even get excited about it – but there are more and better reasons to just grab some old progs and read the Apocalypse War, the Cursed Earth saga, the battles with the Dark Judges. Nothing makes you feel like you’ve been born in the wrong generation than paying £7.50 for a movie ticket and £1.50 for stupid 3D glasses with the knowledge those old issues would have once set you back no more than about 7 odd pence.

The geek in me was ecstatic. The perhaps further-sighted, critical side of me is conflicted about where Dredd can go from here without moving further into the aforementioned consumerisation of cult.

It’s peculiar that, all these years later, Dredd is still challenging and perturbing me… as well, of course, as beating the shit out of Batman, budget and audience be hanged.

Garth’s Heroes

“I love comic books. And I will fight anyone who has a problem with that.”
- Stewart Lee

Preacher’s Jesse Custer is confronted by his nemesis, the sadistic Jody.
Preacher’s Jesse Custer is confronted by his nemesis, the sadistic Jody.

My last few articles around here have been somewhat aggressive and negative on the subject of comics, whether it be unkindly describing the online fans of Wonder Woman as mentally backwards manchildren or people who play Arkham City as functionally illiterate.

It was pointed out to me that I might have given the impression I somehow consider myself above comics, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. I am, of course, an enormous nerd, and an exponent of Stewart Lee’s aforementioned advocation of them/violent threat. So I wanted to do that undertake that very rare blogging task and write about something that I actually think is decent. Read more

My Problems with Game of Thrones…

I might as well bear my throat for the pygmies early on: I haven’t watched the HBO TV series of Game of Thrones. Nor did I finish the books. So, those who disagree with my oncoming critiques but can’t be bothered coming up with a counter argument can rest safely in the belief that they know the world of George R.R. Martin better than I.

But then, I’m not writing a review. My intention here is to dig for myself a well on which to draw when I’m asked once again why I’m not currently pursuing the books or the television series any further, despite being a reader of fantasy and an admirer of the programmes in whose company Game of Thrones is often named. This is, apparently, a contradiction–how can you like, say, Mervyn Peake but not Martin? How can you obsessively talk about The Wire when engaged on the subject, but neglect to even give the same studio’s newer flagship series a chance? Indeed, why dismiss something without even giving it a proper try?

One friend, after pressing the issue, was more surprised to learn that I hold Michael Moorcock’s essay Epic Pooh in high regard. In said piece of writing, Moorcock savages the work of the emperor of high fantasy, J.R.R. Tolkien, categorising it as elitist, classist, even borderline racist. From a more aesthetic point of view, however, it’s the tone of The Lord of the Rings that Moorcock and others find objectionable, a nannyish, nursery room prose that the essay’s title directly equates with that of A.A. Milne. Apparently my friend is not alone in considering the bleak, grimy attitude of Martin something of a tonic to this.

Another advantage that Martin’s book certainly has over Tolkien’s is the former’s lack of what the latter called eucatastrophe, the victory from the jaws of despair trope that categorises many of the major battle scenes in Middle Earth. A gripe I have with Tolkien that I rarely if ever see brought up is that in order to realise this eucatastrophe he has sanitised his sources, namely Pan-European epic cycles. Whereas Wagner, who used many of the same pagan stories for his Ring Cycle, allowed the Norse Ragnarok to unfold, Tolkien turns it into an opportunity for redemption. This very Christian tendency of the Inkling writers leaves a sour taste in the mouth of anyone who values a dramatic debt’s being paid – if Sauron has all but won, then I’d rather he won than have something like Gollum losing his balance be the thing that decides thousands of pages of perilous journeys and over-long battles.

Martin, of course, sentimentalises nothing. Right from the off, we’re never in any doubt that anyone in Game of Thrones can die, supposedly lifting it beyond convention to the lofty heights of a faux-Medieval Spooks. Not only can they die, but these can also be messy, rather un-grand demises. Martin never shies away from blood; in fact, his description bathes in it every chance it gets (though didn’t Karl Edward Wagner do this rather more convincingly?). If there was a deep fat fryer on Westeros, we are left in little doubt that Martin would make unconventional use of it.

There’s also a lot of sex. Whereas in Tolkien the chasteness of courtly romance is made to look like hardcore fucking, the hardcore fucking of Martin (I apologise for the ghastly mental image I’ve just imparted upon the literal-minded) extends again beyond everyday (well, maybe if you weren’t a fantasy reader) heterosexual union into casual sex, rape, necrophilia – even homosexuality!

Yes, the books loudly proclaim, no subject is too taboo for Mr. Martin. (Although I didn’t actually come across any characters we’re meant to care about who were gay; perhaps Martin has graciously decided to leave this last shred of conservative Western civilisation intact after apparently carving through everything else like a 21st century Marquis de Sade.) The distance between the infantile Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones could scarcely be made more apparent, at least on the surface.

However, loudly declaring yourself above childish things doesn’t make you an adult: it makes you an adolescent. This, I suspect, is the reason behind people describing Game of Thrones as “original.” No matter how old we are, we come to new things as a child, and for the vast majority of people, there have only been two mainstream fantasy series up to now: Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. One of the two (people nowadays can hardly be expected to have read both!) will have served as the cot, and now here at last come the acne and mood swings in the shape of Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones is mainstream fantasy giving its parents the finger and storming upstairs to listen to toneless music. Of course, there’s a reason to think this is even more of a false dawn than it seems: Martin has spoken of his admiration for the depth and resonance of the ending of Lord of the Rings. (‘Which one?’ might well ask anyone who sat through the last twenty minutes or so of Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King, where we were treated to a series of half-hearted resolutions each more offensively saccharine than the last.)

Because there is no originality that I can see from Game of Thrones. In fairness to Martin, this is a problem with a lot of fantasy. In theory, it is the most liberated of genres; in practice, it’s extremely conservative. Despite frequently having the advantage of magic, for example, the denizens of high fantasy worlds are rarely allowed to advance beyond the European Middle Ages in terms of technology, language, custom. Which has always struck me as strange, as I was under the impression that the atavism of our Dark Ages and the political and societal make-up that followed was the result of the fall of the Roman Empire, and yet high fantasy writers fail to mention any equivalent event. Martin, likewise, has not fleshed out his world beyond the usual sword and sorcery tropes. Here is a violent ravishing of someone else’s lands, there a royal succession crisis.

Worst of all, Game of Thrones imports an even more regressive social framework than that of Lord of the Rings. For instance, for all the lamentable backwards-looking exaltation of the white aristocratic male in the latter, there are at least women, like Eowen, who are courageous and admirable–that is, when she isn’t spending her time fawning over Aragorn or marrying the first single male who comes along in Faramir. The equivalent strong-woman archetype in Game of Thrones is Daenerys Targaryen, who is varyingly a knowing seductress, an overly protective mother, a matriarchal battle-axe, and an embodiment of chaotic feminine wrath. Despite being cursed to run from one stereotype to the next like a one-woman puppet show of sexism, Daenerys actually has it better than most women in Game of Thrones. These are usually whores, rape victims or simply sniveling wretches, deriving their power from either their husbands or their high-born male children (actually, this is likewise the case with Daenerys), with no head for violence or politics. This is despite the politics of Game of Thrones being almost painfully straight forward, a simple choice of who would make the slightly better king. And you were complaining about only having Labour and Conservative!

Yet to call Game of Thrones misogynist would be doing great injustice to the effort it puts into its more general misanthropy. The men in Game of Thrones are, at best, noble murderers. More worrying is that, like in the Lord of the Rings, social organisation is by blood, and not just in terms of hierarchy. The Lannisters and the Starks are respectively wealthy and self-obsessed and wintry and tough, defined by some of the most unimaginative and unconvincing heraldry in all of fantasy – a lion and a wolf. They, though, are the ‘civilised societies’, for all their barbarism. The Dothraki are tattooed, Orientalist savages who haven’t even advanced to a Medieval level, unable as they are to get their heads around the concept of boats. The Targaryens are a higher people (urgh) but no less homogenised – and if their fair skin, light hair, violet eyes, island-dwelling and obsession with dragons sound familiar, it means you too have read Moorcock’s Elric series and can recognise the Melniboneans Martin has plagiarised.

If it was just that Martin was unoriginal, I wouldn’t have such a gripe with these books. That the lack of invention is characteristic of so much fantasy is more depressing. But to then hear that this economy of imagination with sex and blood thrown in is a game-changer, a red letter day for the genre, as every review of the book or show seems to do, is every bit as annoying as the marketing tagline for superhero funnybooks in the 90s was: “comics ain’t just for kids any more!” The supposed progression here has followed much the same pattern: instead of growing up, the genre has just elbowed its way onto the grown up’s table and demanded it be given a shandy. Somebody, please, ask to see its ID.

The one thing it does try to do different, the narrative structure in which the third person perspective changes with the chapter, also has its limitations. It necessitates each chapter being a somewhat self-contained dramatic event, in the manner of… why, a TV programme! I have no idea whether Martin wrote Game of Thrones as a closet television pitch or not, but maybe that’s why it reputably translates so well to the small screen. This is how Martin can sell paperbacks the size of bedsits and rightly call them pageturners, because each episode in the book is halfway between a short story and a cliffhanger. Well, whatever works, and there’s no doubt it’s made him a lot of money, but as a piece of literary experimentation within genre fiction it’s hardly up there with Ursula K. le Guin’s incorporation of Taoist and anarchist themes, Samuel R. Delany’s endless getaway drive from whatever confine in society or format he perceives, Poul Anderson’s more convincing and authentic excavation of epic myth cycles, China Mieville’s urban psychogeographies, Brian Aldiss’ Joycean language deconstruction or Moorcock’s Eternal Champion multiverse project. What he’s done is transmigrate TV into fiction and then back again, even to the extent of mentioning he’ll try not to ‘do a Lost‘ when he does come up with an ending.

Wait… he doesn’t know how it will end? That must be why Game of Thrones feels less like a Wagnerian opera than it does a soap opera. Which goes a long way to explaining its popularity: doubtless, it being HBO, the series is well produced and competently directed, but it would take more than that for a sword and sorcery cycle to be so talked about. Even when it was just a book, it was inordinately popular–A Feast For Crows was a New York Times Best Seller despite being no more than an enormous set-up for A Dance With Dragons. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying it on the level of soap opera–HBO’s True Blood was entertaining for the same reason. But also because it didn’t take itself entirely seriously, whereas, if the books are anything to go by, Game of Thrones will take itself very seriously indeed (and someone who has seen the series please correct me if I am wrong). Watching or reading Game of Thrones because it’s exciting and fast paced (it is) or because there is a visceral enjoyment to be had (there is) or because the character arcs are unpredictable (they are) is perfectly acceptable. Just please don’t tell me it’s the revolution when it’s the emperor in a funny hat.

My night with Wonder Woman

I’m told I do my best work when I’m either drunk, hungover or suffering from a major debilitating illness. Since I’m currently all three, and having just read Paul’s article lamenting his favourite character being misused or something, I thought I’d take a quick whack at Wonder Woman (narf narf).

Preface: I’m not a fan of Wonder Woman. I’ve maybe read one Wonder Woman comic ever, and it involved Poison Ivy trying to kiss her and a villain called The Chauvinist, who was a giant muscular guy who carried chains around to enslave women with. (I’m not making that up.) I never watched the TV show or the direct-to-DVD animated movie. The extent of my emotional ties to Wonder Woman was one wonderful night when, in one of my weaker moments, I masturbated to the fetish artist Eric Stanton’s parody of Wonder Woman in which she was tied up by her own lasso and performed oral sex on Cheetah… which, in fairness, as a storyline, makes at least as much sense as the one official comic I read that I mentioned before.

I am however an admirer of Alan Moore’s Promethea, which uses a very loose Wonder Woman-esque framework in order for Moore to wax magical for what to normal people who aren’t me probably seems like forever. In this story, Moore introduces the concept of the Immateria – a sort of noospheric or memetic realm where ideas and stories live, that has a mutually reliant relationship with whatever we might mean by “ordinary reality.”

Think Alice in Wonderland, but weirder
Think Alice in Wonderland, but weirder

Moore, like most sexually mature adults (and I know that’s rich considering my confessions earlier in this article), is a bit dismissive of superheroes at best. In fact, he, along with the estimable Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis, were very nearly the death of superheroes. Once these three guys lay their critiques out on the table, it was hard for anyone with a functioning brain to not see what should have been obvious all along: superheroes are at best adolescent power fantasies, and at worst icons of the sort of murderous arrogance that drives American foreign policy. You know, “Them Iranians would get their shit in order fast if we could turn into the Hulk… OH WAIT SHIT WE SORT OF CAN.”

But Moore, being probably the finest mind to work within four colours, with the Immateria laid the groundwork for the only conditions in which superheroes could really survive after having their throats torn out by this UK contingent of writers. The environment of a sort of sideways reality co-dependant on our own was at roughly the same time also fleshed out by our fourth British Isles genius, Mr. Grant Morrison, in comics like All-Star Superman. And, while I wouldn’t want to downplay the achievements of Moore, as I say, he probably wouldn’t want to be too heavily credited with saving superheroes anyway. So he probably won’t mind if I say that he created the mechanism that Morrison then turned into a full-blown life support machine for these concepts, because the only people doing worthwhile superhero genre work right now (Matt Fraction, Dan Slott etc.) are singing from Morrison’s hymnbook.

[EDIT: It's also occurred to me that Morrison actually started doing this with Animal Man, waaay before anyone else.)

What does this shit have to do with Wonder Woman? Probably a lot more before my priorities changed ten minutes ago and I had to vomit up snot into the toilet, but let's give it a go.

It was Morrison, in an interview about his controversial Final Crisis (which incurred the wrath of Wonder Woman's apparently quite sizeable online fanbase of mentally backwards manchildren and nerdy but basically okay gay men as it had Wonder Woman enslaved and whipped... and if this seems like a recurring theme, it's because poor old Wondy was invented by a guy who thought that widespread femdom was humanity's only path to utopia. And I'm not making that up, either.) who mentioned the internal contradictions of the character.

Well, that's just what I said!
Well, that's just what I said!

I mean, Superman and Batman… their pre-eminence is unquestionable, probably largely to do with the fact Superman is the most coherent Apollonian archetype in 20th century culture and Batman is his Plutonian (yeah, don’t think Nietzsche ever used that one, but you get the idea: lord of the underworld, not great with the ladies etc.) counterpart.

But whilst Wonder Woman seems on the surface like she fits into this mythology – her real name is even Diana, for goodness sake – there’s a lot about her that doesn’t make sense. First off, she’s meant to be a symbol of peace, despite being a warrior from a warrior culture. Secondly, she’s meant to be a symbol of feminine power, despite having “bracelets” (read: kinky handcuffs) and a bondage rope as part of her basic costume … and that would be easier to buy if she hadn’t managed to get herself tied up with it in almost every one of her early stories. Finally, she’s meant to be an emissary of truth, and yet her origin story involves what a lot of people would charitably call “fiction” and others would quickly recognise as a pack of lies. Lies, you might remember from Sunday school, are the opposite of truth – not of course that Christianity’s magical space daddy ranks any higher in the Immateria than do Wonder Woman’s menagerie of mythical beasts and Greek gods.

Let’s say that one day I committed some awful crime and as a punishment I was told I had to reboot Wonder Woman, as DC Comics are currently doing for the 294th time according to Paul’s article. I would quickly realize what dawns on me every time I am told to cook something more complex than toast. Yes, I am no more the world’s greatest comic book writer than I am the world’s greatest chef. But I don’t have to be. Other people have already written the recipe, and all I have to do is follow it to the best of my ability, and we’ll have something halfway edible. Let’s take a look at the Wonder Women that worked:

Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III’s Promethea. This gets us over the truth vs myth element straight away, doesn’t it? Yes, Ares, Themiscyra, minotaurs, the invisible benevolent guiding hand of the free market, Wonder Woman herself… these things aren’t real in the way that you, New York, cats and coming Communist Revolution are real (fuck you, it’ll happen). But they are nevertheless a kind of truth. Our myths say a lot about us.

Warren Ellis and John Cassady’s Planetary. Yes, the aforementioned scourge of superheroes has found his own way, independent of Moore and Morrison, of acknowledging them as anything more than the pathetic power fantasies they are currently – as icons of the past or as transhuman adventurers of the future. Wonder Woman, or her analogue, here is the former, and she works by Ellis stripping her down to her most enduring tropes: the royal ambassador of a highly advanced all-female culture who inspires those around her. (Seriously, he just knocks the Hellenic, magical, wishy-washy, Princess of sparkly-poo Bridge to Teribitha shit right on the head.) The conservatism and selfishness of the Four, who stand in for the money-grabbing owners of comic companies who misappropriated every fantastic idea of their creators into corporate logos, is what kills her. The enemies or thieves of progress are usually the antagonists in Ellis’ work.

William Moulton Marsden and H.G. Peter’s Wonder Woman. The original iteration of the character. As I might have dropped in before, these are reputably some weird-ass Golden Age comics, man. But they sold. And I honestly don’t know whether they sold because the mild bondage themes gave people in the 40s and 50s an inexplicable dick twinge. But I’m going to pretend that was the reason, because… well, I don’t think the bondage angle should be covered up. Let’s face it, like all corporate bullshit, comics are extremely conservative, and it took them the longest time to recognise that gay people exist (and apparently die more often than non-gay people, but that’s a different rant about the hilariously old fashioned values of funnybooks). Right now, gay rights are a fashionable cause; transgender rights, less so, but kept alive because they’re thrown into an incomprehensibly wide “LGBT” category. The full mainstreaming of BDSM, on the other hand, has yet to happen, which is a bit of a relief on a personal level, because if I had to do kinky shit all the time it would cease to be as special. But let’s get in on the ground floor.

"... and now let me show you what we consider the sexiest!"
"... and now let me show you what we consider the sexiest!"

Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Okay, we’re roaming pretty far here, but bear with me: Joss Whedon admitted he based Buffy on a comics character, but that it was Kitty Pryde of the X-Men, not Wonder Woman. That overlooks three things, however: Kitty Pryde a) is Jewish, b) doesn’t have super strength and c) sucks. My point though is that Buffy worked because she was a normal girl, just with a sacred mission and super powers. This is apparently what passes for feminism in geek culture these days, but we’ll have to make do. Promethea, by the way, also worked because of Promethea’s human host was a normal girl called Sophie.

We have the ingredients. Relatable main character, all-female culture, myth vs truth, kinky shit. Let’s put them together for the first issue of the never-to-be-seen Laurence Thompson’s Wonder Woman #1 and #2:

Normal woman (eh? Eh?) Diana Prince wakes up in her apartment in Coast City – a 21st century American Eastern seaboard town. The guy she brought home last night has already gone, the tit, and she has a killer hangover. She kicks her box of sex toys underneath the bed, walks past her shelves (which are all full of popular science books on anthropology and quantum mechanics – girl has a job and a hobby) and gets ready for her job at the museum.

She arrives at the museum only to find her boss Steve Trevor is ill again, as are several key members of the archivist staff, and that she as assistant curator has to deal with the arrival of the new artefacts. She banters with a sore head with the delivery man and then sets up in the storage section with rolls of red tape. It’s a bad day.

Eventually she comes across some items she wasn’t expecting: two ancient bracelets that don’t seem to match any specific historical period she can identify and some scroll fragments. She phones her friend, who is the archaeologist who sent the items, but she can’t seem to remember sending them there. So she phones her friend Helen at the university, who was Diana’s tutor when she did her master’s degree in classical languages, for a consultation on the scrolls. Helen banters with Diana about when she’s finally going to come back and do her Ph.D., but Diana laughs it off and tells her to get her backside to the museum.

At this point, we need to introduce a villain. And, honestly, Wonder Woman’s villains completely suck. I spent ten minutes on Wikipedia and the best I could find was a Communist egg. Yes, an egg, as in “the chicken or.” When it comes to secondary adversaries, Batman gets Two Face, Wonder Woman gets a sentient shelled embryo that’s read some of Das Kapital.

Also, well, this is just plain racist if you ask me.
Also, well, this is just plain racist if you ask me.

So we’ll go ahead and create a new enemy, who is basically the sort of internet/comics nerd I have nightmares about becoming, the type who never gets laid because he goes on forums to argue that female superheroes having huge boobs and wearing next to nothing is empowering. Physically, though, he’s young and good looking enough to make those self-same real life nerds feel even more insecure about themselves. (Look, I’m essentially trying to cause as many suicides as possible so that comics will have to market themselves in a new direction, and if you don’t like it you can go eat shit and die, literally). Anyway, he’s a renegade scientist who’s been travelling the world and the internet looking for the sort of fragments that have been delivered to Diana, because he knows what they actually are. He’s a bit of a techno wizard, and we see him torture the kindly old professor (an analogue of Marsden, who actually invented the polygraph, apparently) archetype who actually sent them to Diana with another artefact he’s managed to get working – the Lasso of Truth – before killing him with it by ordering him to die. He now has Diana’s address!

Diana makes some nuclear strength coffees whilst Helen looks over the scrolls. After some long bemused hours, Helen starts to mention that what they’re looking at is very strange. The scroll fragments are an invocation to a deity in something called Aeolic verse, three hendosyllabic lines followed by an Adonic line. This means they were either composed by the Ancient Greek poet Sappho or one of her disciples on the all-female island community of Lesbos.

(On a side note, I have actually written in Sapphic stanza, or at least an update to qualitative meter. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. I could totally do this.)

The only known invocation by Sappho was to Aphrodite, as many of her works were lost. Diana, looking over the bracelets, asks which deity this one is devoted to. Helen replies that it’s to Artemis, also known as … and as Diana says her own name, the bracelets emit a huge blue energy explosion.

Diana has a vision of the very ancient world, where Robert Graves’ White Goddess hypothesis was roughly true – women once held great power because men feared the mysteries of childbirth etc. However, this power has faded, and a group of women philosophers withdrew from society, founding an island community. Over time, this community, which is sustained by unwanted (because of primogeniture) female babies being sent there from ‘Man’s World’, has completely outstripped everywhere else in terms of scientific development. By the time of the building of the Pyramids, they’ve already invented the steam engine. By the time of the heroic age of the Ancient Greeks, we’re into Clarke’s Law territory, where their mystics have stumbled upon quantum mechanics. Noting the increasing brutality of Man’s World, the Amazons (as they are now called) are torn between withdrawing completely from our reality into a pocket dimension of their own devising or trying to change it.

Meanwhile, the museum has been closed off by the emergency services following the blast, which curiously didn’t destroy anything but has done something to the immediate atmosphere, making it taste cleaner, crisper. Diana is in a coma, the bracelets attached to her arms, whilst Helen explains her story to the police and Steve Trevor, who has rushed in with the flu when he heard what happened. Outside, the villain approaches.

Back in Diana’s vision of the Amazons, their queen, Hippolyta, decides on reintegration via sending her only daughter, also known as Diana, as an ambassador for peace in Man’s World. Anyway, as Hippolyta says goodbye to her daughter Diana, some spell is performed and there’s a flash of blue light similar to the one from before – the Amazons have been banished to the pocket dimension against their will.

In the museum, there is another explosion, this time from outside. Our villain has arrived in an exoskeleton he’s built from misappropriated Lexcorp blueprints he illegally downloaded from the internet. He uses it to put down the emergency services and gets inside as Steve and Helen are trying to remove the bracelets from Diana. He tells them that the bracelets are reality artefacts, part of an extradimensional exchange that’s been clumsily undertaken for thousands of years. An all-female culture has been trying to get us messages for that long and he’s the only one who has been listening.

Helen asks what he plans to do. The villain replies that, once he’s got the bracelets to go along with the lasso, he can reverse-engineer both to get the dimensional frequency of the Amazon reality, send in some chemical and biological weapons he’s grown to wipe out the inhabitants, and then steal their technology. Any survivors, well, he can use the lasso technology to turn them into his personal harem.

Issue #2: Diana’s vision. She is shielding her eyes from a very bright series of images, which are continuing to relate the Amazon’s story. It turns out their plan to send an emissary was sabotaged by Hippolyta’s rival, a mystic/scientist called Circe, who claimed not to trust men. Circe performed the spell that will bind the Amazons to another dimension… or, more accurately, she solves the super-advanced mathematical equation that proves the Amazons never existed in our dimension. If science equals magic in Clarke’s Law, then mathematical symbols even more obviously equals magic sigils, right?

In the museum, Steve grabs an unconscious cop’s gun and fires at the villain. A lucky bullet knocks out one of the suit’s pneumatic ligaments, and the villain admits he threw the suit together last minute just in case anyone had managed to access the Diana program. Nevertheless, he quickly knocks Steve unconscious. Don’t mess with me, he boasts, I’m a scientist.

Helen asks what the Diana program is, and the villain replies that the information he has is hazy, but if the correct person manages to bond with the data archives contained within the bracelets, then they’ll become endowed with the strength of the Amazon emissary, and as they were considered at least equal to the inhabitants of the Greek heroic age such as Hercules and Achilles, then he decided he wouldn’t take any chances. Good idea, Helen, who is a classicist, agrees.

Diana is now having a vision of all the Wonder Women that could have been had someone accessed the artefacts sooner – visually, Marston’s original, the crappy DC reboots, Ellis’ analogue from Planetary, Promethea etc., though none are explicitly named in the narrative. They all blur across each other in a never-ending montage. The idea is that the Amazons, and the emissary ‘Diana’, blended into myth in our reality when their mathematical existence was disproven. The voice that told her the story before tells her that she must cast the lasso, which is in fact symbolic of a non-linear mathematical feedback loop (I got this from Douglas Hofstadter I think) that will engineer them back to reality, to discover the truth and bring the ambassador from the higher world through. Diana replies that she doesn’t have the lasso.

Another police team distract the villain, and Helen picks up Diana’s unconscious body and runs… not very quickly, obviously. The villain quickly dispatches the cops and begins to give chase. He finds her down a corridor where she is standing in front of three wheeled desks. He asks what they are, and Helen replies that, during the English battle against the Spanish Armada, the English would use fireships. The chemicals she’s put on the desk are used in preparation of artefacts for radiometic dating and are very flammable. She then starts to explain that she’s holding her lighter that she uses to light cigarettes, but reckons aloud that he probably gets it. She kicks the desks at him one by one and shields Diana from the resulting explosion. Don’t mess with me, she boasts, I’m a historian.

The villain emerges damaged, but not defeated, from the explosions. He is angry … doubly so when he can neither locate Helen nor the lasso. Switch to Helen, who is hiding in one of the archive rooms, trying to figure out how to use the lasso. Screw it, she says, and places it across the bracelets that are attached to Diana’s unconscious body.

In Diana’s vision, Diana now has the lasso. She casts it into the montage thingy, which are actually a collection of wavefunctions and there’s an explosion (or rather implosion, as the wavefunctions collapse) of white light.

Outside the smoking, damaged museum in the daylight, Helen is staggering away from the building in a daze. A mechanical hand grabs her neck from behind. The villain, furious, demands to know where the lasso and bracelets are. If Helen tells him, he’ll let her live as one of his sex slaves.

Diana now shows up, awake. Except she’s now over 6 feet tall. She was good looking before, but now she’s statuesque (whilst being realistic and, ahem, in proportion). She’s Wonder Woman (though it’s the papers who call her that later!). The villain says that, while damaged, the suit he’s in is based on an anti-Superman design. And since I can’t stand drawn out comic book brawls, Wonder Woman smashes it with one punch.

*

 Right, that’s enough fanfiction. Well, almost. Future issues might deal with stuff like:

  • The Amazon reality and Hippolyta being a manifestation of “the Wonder,” a magical force that exists across universes;
  • Other ways the existence of Amazon reality subconsciously influenced Man’s World, such as the (reactionary) idealist theories of Plato
  • The super-adjusted Diana/Wonder Woman hybrid (rather than a Captain Marvel/Bill Batson or Marvelman/Mike Moran style dynamic) trying to adapt to being a wholesome celebrity whilst maintaining a healthy social/sex life and managing it;
  • The Amazonian reintegration, and the new influx of Amazon technology and philosophy into our world;
  • Diana as diplomat vs the patriarchal structures of power;
  • The nerd villain from the first two issues being the agent of an underground online community called Stormhead, who are neofascists under the control of Baroness Von Gunther, a Nazi who wants to use Amazon technology to establish a Fourth Reich that will last forever
  • Helen’s encroaching jealousy at the fact she could have been Wonder Woman leading to her being possessed by the renegade mathemagician Circe, who it transpires actually just wanted to take over Man’s World for herself but managed to trap herself in the un-reality between the Amazonian world and ours, occasionally inspiring moments of chaotic feminine wrath putting checks on male dominance to amuse herself, like Boudicca burning Rome, the Tangut princess that fatally castrated Genghis Khan (or the werewolf in Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing…)
  • So, in other words, feminism (Wonder Woman) versus matriarchy (Von Gunther) versus radical feminism (Circe) versus patriarchy (everyone else)

…But you’ll never know, as I’ve just overdosed on Lemsips and manuka honey, and by the time I wake up tomorrow afternoon I’ll be back to normal and won’t give a fuck about Wonder Woman any more.