THINGS COMICKAL AND RANDOM

So I finally got around to watching Red, the Bruce Willis movie theoretically made from the comic book by Warren Ellis and Cully Hammer. And I will tell you right now that the only surviving part of the comic is the "retired agent yanked out of retirement because people are trying to kill him" part of the story; the rest of it is pretty much an original story. Oh, and the mayhem. Not so much the specifics, just the general quantity. Oh, and the CIA building caper, sort of.

NOTE: FROM THIS POINT FORWARD, HERE BE SPOILERS. I don't think you can reasonably spoil a film that's been out for four months, and out on DVD for one, but consider yourself warned. Any road, there's nothing major revealed...

2008 proved to be an interesting year. Fewer zombies, thank the deity of your choosing—or at least, I read fewer of them, so they didn't make it onto this list. A few more superheroes, depending on how you define things (and no, I didn't read Marvel's Secret Invasion or Dark Reign, and since DC's Final Crisis periodically made me want to bludgeon the DC brain trust vigorously about the head and shoulders with its own output, that won't be here either). Perhaps not as much space opera as I would have liked, but that's somehow a surprisingly difficult genre to find a lot of in comics. And it turns out that the world ends with a bang, a whimper, and just about every unpleasantness in between that you could imagine. A few themes did emerge in this year's reading:

1. Apocalypse yesterday

2. The War of the Worlds redux (see also: apocalypse yesterday)

3. Warren Ellis (what can I say? Man was busy this past year. See also: apocalypse yesterday.)

4. Everything old is new again (see also: War of the Worlds redux, apocalypse yesterday)

A very few items did carry over from last year's list—though for most of those, the noteworthy thing isn't so much the quality as the fact that at some point during the year, some of them just seemed to trail off mid-story, with their creators having to push them to the back burner due to other commitments, the stresses of life, etc. In any event, there were far fewer carry-over titles than I'd initially expected, which indicates that this year was pretty good for new speculative titles.

And as for the stuff that's new to the list, some of them may actually not be comics. Given the last two columns, that's probably not a surprise.

And so: alphabetically by title, forward into the fray! [...]

Indie Boy Strikes? Again!
Part 2: Slipping into the future

So, as we've seen, in tales of the future near and far, frequently it all falls apart. War, famine, pestilence, and death can all cause society to collapse in strange and interesting ways. But what happens when it doesn't all fall apart, when society manages to cobble something together, and people and places continue into the future in new and different ways?

Writers seem to like extrapolating current trends into the future, assuming that it's going to get darker and meaner because even as things get better for some, life really does get comparatively darker and meaner for many more. The future does not by default make anything better, except technologically—and even that depends on what you consider to be "better." In pretty much any futuristic comic you look at, with the possible exception of space opera (a genre which will not be examined at this time), things seem to get worse for at least a significant number of people. Of course, part of that is that perfection makes for boring fiction. It's much more interesting to put a shiny high-tech outside in contrast to the rotten, damaged insides of the real society in question....

And finally, of course, there's Transmetropolitan, the life and times of Spider Jerusalem, an anti-hero cum involuntary pied piper with a driving urge to make people change their lives, hopefully for the better, whether they want to or not. He investigates, he writes, he exhorts people to change their condition. Sometimes, as when he convinces people to vote out The Beast and vote in The Smiler as president, he makes terrible mistakes that then need to be corrected. The society in Transmetropolitan is anesthetized by media—although Ellis makes the assumption that some part of the media is not only trying to inform the public, but also succeeding; after all, even though having Spider publish is good business—he's controversial, his public persona is bizarrely entertaining, and he writes real good—it's also true that employing him causes several problems for his employer. For the most part, the futuristic setting only serves as a layer of distance—although, even then, in a moment of peculiar prescience, the Smiler presides over the destruction of a major North American city, partially destroyed by a storm and by a combination of malfeasance and deliberate neglect. (The issues of Transmetropolitan collected in "Dirge" were originally published in 2001, four years before Katrina—peculiar prescience indeed.) Oddly enough, despite the character design, given the lead time necessary for art and whatnot, the Smiler as a character actually predates the appearance in our national consciousness of the Fearless Shrub himself, from before George W.'s campaign was even a mote in his brother Jeb's eye. When the Smiler was created, our Fearless Shrub was back in Texas, laughing it up about executing a woman. (It's only because executions of women are so rare, even now, that it was at all noteworthy. I'm sure he laughed himself sick about some of the 151 execution warrants he signed for men, but the sheer number meant that nobody noticed. I suppose one could call him the Laugher, but really, Fearless Shrub has a certain something...)

And, you know, it's not as though we can't say that we didn't get a certain amount of warning right off the bat. After all, when his first public position is effectively, stop counting votes because we don't want every vote to count ... well, we should have known what we were getting, shouldn't we?

Subsequent events gave our Fearless Shrub all the excuse he needed to clamp down on those pesky and inconvenient things known as "rights and privileges". One must admit, he was able to handle things with a bit more subtletly, if that's quite the right word, than the Smiler was. He has not yet had to resort to assassination -- that we know of. (The Smiler was notably ineffective at that, anyway.) By contrast, we have had quite a remarkable number of the Disappeared, albeit not quite at Argentine levels; the Smiler doesn't seem to have resorted to such things. The Smiler also seems not to have had to really deal much with Congress. Then again, neither has our Fearless Shrub; Congress seems to think that we elected them to office to be our national doormats. And as doormats, they've done an exemplary job. (Though I will note that their recent lack of doormattitude has been both unexpected and refreshing. The FISA bill keeps stalling, and the Shrub keeps threatening to veto it if they don't insulate the telecoms for their previous unwarranted -- literally -- violations of our rights. Which means that as of this moment, no warrants of the type can be authorized, because they lack statutory support. A situation most salutary. Not that he'll pay the least attention to that, of course. It's clear that he regards the Constitution as very old toilet paper, and uncomfortable toilet paper at that. Still, you have to take the miniscule victories and the odd appearance of something like a spine where you find them.)

An interesting thing to see about both the Smiler and our Fearless Shrub: they both want to be president because they want to be president. It's the big dog, the one everyone has to pay attention to. They got the Biggest Dick of All, and it's right there in your face, so to speak. The Smiler gets so excited at just being president that he masturbates with the American flag next to the desk in the Oval Office. To be sure, I can't imagine our Fearless Shrub mastubating on the flag. Or, you know, at all.

Neither the Smiler nor the Shrub wants to use the position to better the country, or to make anything work for most people living in it. Neither of them really believes in anything. Corporatist though he was, Clinton still clearly believed in this country and its principles and in using the power of the presidency to try to help people. (He also, unfortunately, believed in the power of his dick and his personality to get him out of problems that his dick caused. But I digress.) The Beast, the Smiler's prececessor, believed that if 51% of people in the country got up and made it through a day that didn't suck, he'd done a good job. The Smiler didn't believe even that, and sure as hell our Fearless Shrub doesn't believe that. Far as I can tell the only thing he really and truly believe in is dancing with them what brung him. That is, making sure the rich people get richer, and that all public policy works to make that happen. Thus, the rich/poor divide in this country is the worst it's been in ages. Tax policy is terribly skewed. The Environmental Protection Agency seems terribly puzzled at the very idea that it's supposed to protect, you know, the environment, and not the people trying to exploit it with as few safeguards as possible. And so on, and so on, lather rinse repeat.

Spider talks about the new scum versus the old scum, but in our Fearless Shrub's limited view, that's the wrong way to put it. The issue is the rich scum versus the poor scum -- and I think that even the Shrubbery would agree, in his innermost self where he dreams of setting the newspapers of the country aflame, that many, many of them what brung him are utter and absolute scum. Mind, I'm not sure he wouldn't agree that he's scum, as well -- viewed through a narrow and moneyed filter, of course -- but since he's rich scum, he's better than you and me. Since we're poor scum, the only things we've ever been able to offer him are the votes to keep him in there, and the votes to encourage Congress in its doormancy. And, for reasons beyond imagining, those votes we've given him.

Yes, the Smiler and our Fearless Shrub really do have a startling number of things in common. But perhaps the most notable are their attitudes about the law of this country. Despite being the highest elected constitutional officers, despite swearing to uphold it, their concept of "uphold" seems to be remarkably ... flexible. And, ultimately, hostile, to the Constitution and to us.

---

There ought to be limits to freedom.
* George W. Bush news conference (May 21, 1999); also quoted in "Satirical Web Site Poses Political Test", Washington Post (November 29, 1999)

---