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Just over a week ago I attended the Small Press eXpo (SPX) in Bethesda, MD; silkscreens were stacked, noses were sketched and I bought X-Men back-issues without even thinking of the implications. "No more thinking" - that's our motto here at the Watchman. I needn't have felt too anxious anyway; Saturday afternoon saw a panel discussion titled
The New Action (
transcript here), focused on ‘action' (or at least genre-based) comics in the contemporary small press.
Now if you're like me, and you spent the last half-decade plus following funnybook rhetoric on the internet instead of partaking in the new golden age of television or stockpiling canned goods for peak oil, you probably looked at that panel title and, somewhere behind the cobwebs of your brain where Bill Jemas now resides, you thought of
The New Mainstream.
Do you remember that? It was a semi-movement in the early part of the decade broadly resolved to provide a sort of ‘mainstream alternative' to the Direct Market dominance of superhero comics, without resigning itself to the niche of ‘art' comics or the rarified tone of literary works. There were several antecedents and corollaries to that notion, of course, ranging from Fantagraphics' Kim Thompson making a near-contemporaneous request for more ‘
crap' to that oft-cited entreaty for a print-format comics magazine to occupy the space between the Comics Journal and Wizard. But to paraphrase former Journal managing editor Milo George, what people don't realize is that Wizard and the Journal are not cities on a continent, they are
islands. Between them is only water, and if you go there, you will sink.
‘Sinking' might come to mind with the new mainstream too, or maybe burial. Put simply, all the television-and-movie-like comics and message board ripostes conceivable didn't do much to dent the armor of DC/Marvel -- alloyed by its hegemony of
volume, i.e. the simple fact that their comics come out every single week, often demanding you check in with
other comics of theirs, dominating conversation and assuring a good piece of the shops' cash flow -- while meanwhile the tumbling of manga into bookstores circa 2002 built up to an avalanche that formed essentially the same alternative mainstream envisioned by North American pundits, albeit one that succeeded largely in part by seeming different from
any North American entertainment medium, and proved damn hard for Western artists to break into.
I take it the New Action is different, in that series like
Cold Heat or
Night Business tend to emphasize a
continuum on which all comics exist, rather than defining themselves in opposition to much of anything, be it superheroes or lit comics. Individual artistic style is treasured, without overt concern for fitting in with whatever polished look the mainstream demands. There is little that is messianic about these books, although their artists, as demonstrated in the above transcript, have plenty of ideas.
Still, I bet most of the New Mainstream authors feel the same way, apart from how the rhetoric went back in the day.
All of this I think is interesting to know when looking at
The Surrogates, a 2005-06 sci-fi miniseries now available at your local theater in the form of director Jonathan Mostow's feature film adaptation. And feel free to add in the idea that the high-concept happy, readily adaptable New Mainstream comics of the early half of the decade bear some resemblance to the current, hated Movie Pitch Comics. This is a diabolical league of villainous comics that hate justice and exist mainly to attract the attention (and money) of Hollywood studios and want to kill Batman, I think.
The implication there is that the Movie Pitch Comic is half-formed, or somehow incompetent as a comic book because the siren song of California finance has sucked away the artists' vigor or something. That doesn't apply to
The Surrogates; writer Robert Venditti was an employee of publisher Top Shelf Productions before presenting them with his idea, and the eventual comics beam with the energy of a much-pondered concept, information spilling Watchmen-style into back-of-issue text pieces. Some saw this as an attempt by Top Shelf to court the ‘mainstream' of comics, in that their publishing identity had been mostly formed by the sensitive, emotive, ‘cute' works of Craig Thompson (
Blankets), Jeffrey Brown (
Clumsy) and Andy Runton (
Owly), although their bestsellers of the time also included Doug TenNaple's movie-ready sci-fi action piece
Creature Tech.
The Surrogates wasn't a great comic, as it turned out. It's a police procedural, mostly, set in a world where people sit in chairs and have humanoid robot bodies (surrogates) perform almost all of their daily work. You can tell our grizzled hero, Lt. Greer, is an old-school salt of the earth type since his surrogate looks almost just like him, as opposed to the beautification undergone by much of the rest of his city's population. Anyway, some costumed guy called Steeplejack is destroying people's surrogates and, as expected, a web of intrigue crossing political lines and heading straight up to the halls of corporate power is duly unraveled, and there's also moral ambiguity because the villain just wants humanity to Live for real.
It's a catchy enough concept, though fascinated with its own backstory, enough so that the final chapter alternates between windy explanations and action scenes rendered by artist Brett Weldele, working somewhat shakily in a scratched-out, rust-washed style reminiscent of Ashley Wood and Ben Templesmith. Its theme of what it is to really ‘live' is never so much demonstrated as
stated in multiple speeches of varying drama, save for the unctuous presence of Greer's nagging, surrogate-loving wife whose psychological instability is never much in doubt. She also delivers a variant on the ol' "this case is killing you, honey!" speech, which emphasizes how deeply the script is indebted to cop/detective clichés.
Moreover, the work curiously plays into superhero iconography, through Steeplejack's sleek outfit and propensity to leap or swing from rooftops. It brings to mind Marvel's tendency early in the decade to blend superheroes with virtually any other genre they could find, as a means of attracting unfamiliar readers. I wonder if this book, initially serialized in pamphlets, tried to keep the makeup of the Direct Market in mind? Today the aspect seems like a mark of the time, of New Mainstream books struggling to set themselves apart from the superhero pack while often not venturing far out enough to alienate.
Maybe it goes without saying the movie (titled simply
Surrogates) immediately tosses out Steeplejack and all the superhero-ish stuff, like the
Wanted adaptation before it. I've gone into this before, but superhero movies aren't successful because they've uncovered a hidden vein of public desire for superhero fiction, but because proven, successful action movie aesthetics can be imprinted on them with the added bonus of readymade franchising. If a work can't do that, why bother with the superhero stuff at all?
So, we've got Bruce Willis as Agent Greer, taking on a suddenly tighter conspiracy to rip down the surrogate society. Everything in the film is simplified from the comic, from character relationships -- now
everybody is somehow involved in exactly the same plot, no red herrings or digressions in these 89 minutes -- to the basic flow of information; at one point, when special guest star James Cromwell is informed that his son was killed in error while using his surrogate, he exclaims something like "but, if my son hadn't been using my surrogate, he wouldn't have been killed!" You know, to make sure everyone
gets it.
In fact, there's exactly three interesting things in the movie. First, there's a bit with people doing electronic robot drugs, which will improve any movie, up to and including
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Second, there's a car chase where the fact that pedestrians are just robot shells causes Bruce Willis to ram through everything, piling hapless bodies onto this windshield while firing a gun through the roof. That's fun, though nothing Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor didn't do a hundred times better in last month's considerably flawed/still sort of brilliant
Gamer. I like an action movie where you need 15 minutes afterwards to readjust to society.
Most effectively, though, the film keenly presents all of the surrogates as ‘Hollywood beautiful.' Like, you know how you look around in a big studio picture and nearly everyone walking around is somehow young and pretty? Surrogates makes that a
plot point, intermingling the unrealistic standards of beauty promoted by so many films (and television shows, and advertisements, etc.) with the sci-fi concept at the heart of the film. It gets so that anyone
not perfectly thin with smooth, flawless skin can immediately be identified as non-surrogate as a matter of visual shorthand.
The very participation of Bruce Willis plays into this; his surrogate
doesn't look just like him, it looks like a younger, familiar-to-us Bruce Willis in his prime, yet sort of ‘off,' with odd hair and too-sleek skin. Soon we see the movie's real hero, a Willis that
looks like a man into his 50s, and his participation in this plot against the surrogates becomes, metaphorically, a man's fight to look as he is in a movie world that demands sex and youth and vigor above all else.
This subtext -- that the fight is as much against Hollywood's pernicious effect on our self-image as the more vaporous need of people to Live without surrogates -- illustrates the aptitude of a big budget major studio action movie to comment on issues applicable to mass culture; compare this to the comic's mild superhero citation and uneasy position in a New Mainstream reacting to a dominant (and still niche) genre of the medium. If the movie lost the comic book stuff, it replaced it, more effectively, I'd say, with the stuff of cinema, a
popular cinema with massive cultural impact.
That doesn't make the movie
good or anything, just more interesting. Actually, the film gets sillier and sillier as it stumbles forward, replacing the no-more-surrogates threat of the comic with the potential for
worldwide genocide -- can't you just
hear some producer whispering "RAISE THE STAKES! RAISE THE STAKES!" -- which hinges on the movie's villain performing a select all on every surrogate ever and uploading a virus via a terminal (manned by one person, easily taken hostage) that somehow can shut down literally everyone on Earth. Also, there's a riotously easy non-genocide option on the table that Bruce Willis uncovers just in time for a pulse-pounding moral choice conclusion, which I will now spoil. Buckle up!
Given the story the movie's telling, its critique of the media culture of beauty, there's no way Bruce Willis wouldn't turn off the dumb surrogates and restore all the world to fleshy wonder and stuff. It's meant to be subversive, I guess, marking the hero's triumph with the ruin of the pretty illusions of pop cinema. But, as always, it doesn't help to think about the movie very much, or else you might wonder about the moral aspects of stripping everyone in the whole world of their liberty to do what they want with their bodies, to say nothing of the now-unmanned jumbo jets that should be crashing into major population centers about halfway through the credits.
Surrogates tries to do something, but it's not nearly enough; even its subtext winds up coming off as an aging movie star exercising his vanity by forcing everyone to behave like him, so he can thrive again.
The downer ending of the comic, where Lt. Greer immediately discovers the downside of Living in a prescribed way, is totally missing. But then, comics knows well you can't bring the old ways back with the push of a button.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
