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Vertigo and Marvel MAX are the two publishing imprints that exist so that DC Comics and Marvel have some place to publish stories that contain what's jovially known around the sweat lodge as "Explicit Content." While that name can mean a lot of things, it usually can be boiled down to
one thing, and that's explicit violence. There might be a hint of sex now and then, either through some nudity and the occasional spot of Cinemax level intercourse (no genitals, just breasts and rear ends), but for the most part what you'll end up dealing with in comics like
Scalped,
The Punisher,
100 Bullets,
Foolkiller and the rest is one thing, and that's bloodshed. (Oh, and cursing, but if that still counts as explicit content, then more parents and publishers should try going to any and every middle school on the planet, especially the ones filled with suit-wearing rich kids. Those lovely little walking arguments for birth control will teach you about filth in a way that no 30 year-old can imagine.)
Comics haven't had to operate by any real rules for a while, but there did used to be a sort of gentlemen's agreement across the board that the publishers would tack some kind of "warning label" on comics that went over whatever arbitrary line had been determined to be the one most in line with conventional "morality"—nowadays, it's less and less important. The Marvel MAX line is still pretty strict about it, attaching the "Explicit Content" twice on each issue in the line, using the same font that prints the publisher's name, but many (if not all) of Vertigo's titles seem to have abandoned putting their agreed-upon tagline, "Suggested for Mature Readers," in a size that is noticeable enough for anybody to pay attention to, even going so far as to put it along side the UPC code of some of their trade publications. (Oddly, this is the same location that chain stores like Borders often affix their own price tag to, thereby putting the book store in the unwise position of obscuring what arguably exists as a form of legal protection for the retailer.) Other companies, like Avatar (the company that publishes anything Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis come up with) and IDW (where
30 Days of Night art star Ben Templesmith exclusively plies his trade) don't even waste the ink. For the most part, that still isn't something that they are likely to get too much criticism for—if a parent can't tell by looking at the cover of
Crossed that it isn't for little kids, then that parent probably has a hard time getting out of bed in the morning due to the lack of a functional brainstem. Beyond that, the likelihood that any child is going to take a look at the gritty brown art of Vertigo's
Scalped and prefer that over the bright tones of
Superman and His Punch-A-Bunch Tales is pretty close to slim to none. (Sure, there's an anecdotal story that somebody will tell you, but don't believe it. No kid ever said "I'll take Dashiell Bad Horse. I tire of Peter Parker, but thank you.") The mature readers/explicit content tag may have once been there as a warning to the parent or the queasy, it may have been there to keep the non-comics-shop-haunting evangelicals at bay, but that was then. Now? It's a neon sign, a greasy guy in a trenchcoat, and it's beckoning the reader down the street, and around the corner—and he's saying "You want some gore? I got you some gore. I got it right here." For whatever it's worth—that cat ain't lying.
A good bit of the titles that operate in these little off-the-beaten-path imprints aren't true gore festivals, so it's not like you should chuck your copy of
Salo—more often than not, they earn their violence in a way that regular super-hero titles, those chucked out with no labeling at all, fail to. When a character in
Scalped decides he's going to kick somebody in the groin, it doesn't come across as being out of character, or funny, or anything more then what it is: a rough man with a tenuous grip on his temper who, due to his status as a police officer, can get away with doing something that he shouldn't. The art helps too—although the title is one that doesn't shy away from nudity, neither that nor the violence ever reaches a sense that it's there for exploitative purposes. A woman is naked because women and men are naked when they have sex. (It gets in the way, if you're asking.) While there might be some argument that what's being depicted is some plastic form of exploitation, little of what you find in comics like
Scalped,
Hellblazer or
War is Hell is going to serve as useful to a fan of the nudity—after all, actual pornography has a better distribution system and has an availability in airports that makes it a far less embarrassing purchase then a stack of
Secret Invasion tie-ins.
What's the point of these labels anymore, anyway? Whereas they might once have existed because kids might end up in a comic book store and want to read something like Lobo, a character who had crossed back and forth between various "For Mature Readers" comics where he had sex with trophy wives and killed his way around the universe to regular appearances in "fine for kids" titles like
Superman and the
Justice League, those ballyhooed days of a fanatical pre-teen customer base have pretty much been exhausted—something publishers themselves even acknowledge. Comics like
Infinite Crisis feature gruesome slaughter, Marvel titles like
Captain Britain practice the happy art of genocide—god, any time spent on the internet will provide a hundred other examples, and that's without even broaching the Sue Dibny slash fiction. (Of course, there's also those out there who want to debate the idea that all this nasty is a negative thing, but that requires one buying the idea that a comic book has the potential to not only negatively impact the reader's own morality, but that the comic book has the potential to even physically end up in enough hands to make some sort of public impact. Comics don't need to worry about censoring themselves—their abysmal sales rates handle that for them.)
Opening up the door of storytelling to allow for anything, be it violence and sex or just the simple rejection of any and all continuity, might even help the writers themselves—it's this columnist's firm opinion that the Punisher, a character who had seen a fleeting popularity in the 90's that dwindled into nothing, has really only been well-utilized as any sort of interesting narrative character when Garth Ennis came along and rejected just about everything that had come before short of the concept, followed that up by taking his stories out of the regular Marvel universe, and then amped up the violence in his own twisted way. The argument isn't that allowing writers to embrace their own personal understandings of "mature" storytelling would somehow make all comic books better—the argument is that there's really no reason to put some forgotten stricture on the morality of the stories they're telling. It just doesn't apply anymore—it's a fake predicament, erected against a concern that's no longer valid. Meanwhile, the sales for these things are pathetic—and that's after a summer where the most financially successful movies (from a global standpoint!) were about costumed super-heroes. If nothing else, it's high time to change things up. When something is broken, and it's limping its way around with nothing more then a straggling group of aging fans who can't find anyone who wants to join them, the solution isn't to just keep going in the same direction you've been going in at the same incremental pace. The solution isn't necessarily that you make everything into
The Boys and
Lost Girls, either—but that's a potential consequence of freedom that has a hell of a lot more craziness to it than the stagnancy of decelerating failure. That kind of freedom—to tell stories with these characters that allow for anything—is the same kind of freedom that produced comics like
Doom Patrol and
All-Star Superman, comics like
Batman Year 100 and
The Ultimates. It's the freedom to take the character and do absolutely anything with it, because the character can't break. Right now, comics have to come up with something and crazy is just about the only thing that's left to try. Boring sure as hell isn't working.
Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
