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The top seller for super-hero titles in the month of February was the return of…
X-Force! Marvel's latest revamp of a formerly successful super-hero title, the new
X-Force has all the same trappings of their other forays into the revamping--this new
X-Force isn't your older brother's
X-Force, with all the pomp and circumstance that came with wearing a lot of pouches and having tiny ankles—this
X-Force doesn't
Take Any Prisoners, they aren't going to
Forgive and Forget, so on, so forth. They are violent, they are Hardcore, they are a lot of Capitalized Words and
bold letters and
italicized phrases. (And you can buy a bloody version of the comic, or a sanitized one.) Following in the line of a million and one failed attempts to make the idea of a "proactive" super-hero team successful, this latest iteration includes Wolverine, X-23, Wolfsbane and Moccasin Lightfoot, or whatever terrible (and somewhat bigoted) name somebody gave to the Native American character. Obviously, since it was one of only
three titles to pass the 100,000 issue benchmark that, for comics, defines "a big success," there are a lot of people in the comics-buying public who have been biding their time, hoping that someone would finally find enough characters with personalities similar to Wolverine, and then those characters would join Wolverine in a house, where they would get to find out what happens when Wolverine drinks all the chocolate milk and one of the characters in the house tries to start a "serious" discussion on race relations in a Post-Katrina America. Oh wait, no, they just want Logan and Co. to kill stuff, and they want it to have candy-colored blood all over it.
Back in 1985, Russian film director Elem Klimov released what would be his final film,
Come and See. The film, a hallucinatory war story centered on the savagery of Hitler's attempts to dismantle the Russian countryside, became what Klimov is most identified with. It's a brutal film—far more unsettling than anything even attempted by American directors, with such a heightened level of personalization to its grotesqueries that it works upon the viewer not just as a story, but as a delivery system for Klimov's rage and sorrow.
It's a tough, scary movie about the worst possible things that humanity can do to one another. It's also an incredibly courageous work of art.
There's nothing at all inherently
wrong with using violence in works of fiction. When used for a purpose, when used as an organic part of a story—sometimes, violence can even work as sheer entertainment. To put it simply, there's nothing "wrong" with a comic like
X-Force. It is what it is—and what that is seems to be what a lot of people are looking for. But, unlike
Come and See, if you took out all the actual violence that exists in
X-Force, if you tamed the drawings a bit, and you edited the dialog to change "I'll kill you!" to "I'll get you!", what you would end up with is something that still reads
exactly the same. You'd read a comic about some good guys trying to stop some bad guys, and it would make perfect sense, and it would be almost exactly the same story—except the guys who were previously dead would now just be sleeping. Just a little nap after a punch out, like E. Honda used to dispense.
If you took out the immolation of screaming adults and children in
Come and See, if you left the blood covered legs of a young peasant woman on the editing floor, what you would end up with is a film that makes no sense whatsoever. The faces recoiling in horror, the screams of anguish, the horrible, horrible emotional pain—all of these things would lack any discernible reason whatsoever.
And
that is how you would know you were right to bring violence, and murder, and horror into a story. You would know because the story
would not work without it.
And that lack of maturity is one of the many reasons why no one can pick up something published in the super-hero field right now and honestly refer to it as a "courageous work of art."
That's not to argue that violent stories or rampant bloodshed should only be permitted when they're delivered by arty European filmmakers—there's a lot to be said for some high-quality entertainment with zero pretensions whatsoever that are
mired in blood: Takashi Mike's slaughtercore films, the golden age of 80's action movies, the zaniness of
World War Hulk, punching, punching, punching all the time. These are pleasures, they aren't guilty ones, and no one is denying that. That's not to say there would even be a merit in drawing a line in the sand—the second that's done, Brian Azzarello or Joe Casey would cross it anyway—but it is to say this: ask for more. You want to read something that's soaked in gore? Make Marvel give you the real stuff. Ask for an
X-Force that really is about a proactive, take-no-prisoners assassination squad. Ask for an
X-Force comic book that demands the use of murder, hands covered in knives, and a healthy dose of red ink. Swallowing poorly written, fence-straddling garbage that pretends to dole out a dose of the demonic while embracing the tiresome repetition of yet another super-hero team up book where all consequence is already set to zero? That's just another way to amplify the argument that the best comics America has to offer are the ones about the banalities of everyday life, the perversions of compulsive masturbators, and the intricate architecture of an apartment building. It's the way to ensure that your hobby never becomes anything more than a test market for poorly made super-hero movies. Or maybe, it'll be something even worse. After all, there's plenty of room in the cultural inferno—just ask baseball cards and pogs about that one.
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Hey! We're Still Publishing Comics Over Here!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
