Comix

Last Tuesday Teresa at Making Light posted about what Scandinavians thought about each other, which included a link to the delightful new to me webcomic Scandinavia and the World. I read this post on Wednesday; I also had a job interview the same day. Looking through a huge archive of slow loading but funny cartoons is not the ideal preparation for this.

Worth it though, if you like cartoons that gently poke fun at national stereotypes, mixed in with a bit of yaoi. Such as the tendency for Germans to dig holes in our beaches, as shown above. The characters btw are the countries they’re representing, so that is Germany digging a hole while Holland (with the joint) and Denmark (beer) look on.

What do y’all think of this sort of casual stereotyping, where it’s largely reciprocal, the countries involved are on a roughly equal footing and nobody really seems to take them very seriously?

No matter how long Tim O’Neil will continue his series on Dave Sim and Cerebus, the following is the most insightful comment he has made during it:

But for the longest time the dialogue inside the industry was completely dominated by competing views of masculinity, with only so much room for women as was provided by the stupendously large breasts of female superheroes. Some of the most formally adventurous and aesthetically rewarding work produced in the late eighties and the nineties was the product of artists who grew up in the hothouse of men’s adventure stories rebelling against the conventions of the dominant power fantasy by producing successive waves of anti-power fantasy – impotence fantasies such as I Never Liked You, It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, the aforementioned Jimmy Corrigan, American Splendor (which, to be fair, began in the seventies when the undergrounds were not yet entirely dead), almost everything by Clowes with (of course!) the exception of Ghost World. Which is not to say that this was the only ideological current stirring the tide in comics, but with so many of the medium’s foremost talents dedicated to untangling questions of masculine identity, it’s hard not to see that male identity exerted a powerful force on the evolution of the medium in our lifetimes.

Which is the sort of comment that’s incredibly obvious once somebody else thought of it. It wasn’t a secret that the socalled alternative American comics scene in the eighties and nineties was reacting vehemently against the decades long supremacy of superhero comics, setting itself in opposition to this supposed mainstream, but to look at it through the prism of masculinity? Genius.

What made the original Suicide Squad series not just a good, but an excellent series can be summed up in two words: Amanda Waller. Here you had an ordinary, middle aged, somewhat overweight woman who could dominate a room full of supervillains, who had a vision of what she wanted the ‘squad to be and was ruthless in the pursuit of her goals, with an inner nobility but who never stopped being the amoral political hack she started out as, never turned into yet another pseudohero. She was a character you’d either loved or hated and many readers of suicide Squad came back month after month to hate her. In short, she was one of the most fully realised, three dimensional characters in any comic — and now she seems to have been replaced by some sort of bimbo with shirt unbuttoned, tits trust out and fifty kilos lighter..

Seems, because the woman on the last page of the first issue of the new Suicide Squad is never quite introduced as the Wall and it could all be a switcheroo. But I don’t think so. It fits in with the mentality that turns the wheelchair bound Oracle (another Suicide Squad creation) back into Batgirl, losing one of DC’s few disabled heroes, or that puts Harvey Quinn into fetish gear or –less seriously but just as dumb — let’s Floyd “Deadshot” Lawton lose his moustache. It’s change for the sake of it, where it’s not needed, going for some lowest common denominator idea of cool, just like all those stupid costume changes in Justice League.

The rest of this first issue of Suicide Squad is not much better, as it’s basically a long torture scene interrupted by flashbacks that’s ultimately revealed to be a danger room session, a test by the ‘squad’s backers to see who’d stay loyal. It’s only in the last three pages that the Squad go on their first mission, to kill 60,000 people in a football stadium. Why? No idea yet, but so far it all reads like a Hollywood idea of what a government conspiracy would look like, all very over the top. What misses is the original series sense of realism, where of course you are dealing with a world in which there are superheroes and supervillains and alien invasions and magic is real and all that, but the way John Ostrander and Kim Yale handled the idea of how the American government would use an undercover squad of supervillains worked. This however is just one big action movie cliche.