I don’t really like writing reviews, because what am I gonna say about the Muppet Show this month – “hey this is fucking brilliant!” and junk? Just like last month. Or here’s a review for ya – The FCBD Avengers is the closest thing comics have ever gotten to injecting bloody urine into your iris, and the people who made it should be fucking ashamed enough to not put their names on it. I’m not too keen on doing straight reviews because I have little tolerance for shit and I can’t really force myself to be funny unless there’s money involved. So in light of that for the next few weeks it’s going to be reviews. Of a lot of shit. If only to make up for last week’s crappy column.
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“I’d like to remind everyone that devolution is real and that we are the house band on the Titanic.”
- Jerry Casale, co-founder of DEVO.
Seaguy, I think, is the comic that Devo would appreciate. It’s heavily influenced by the same science fiction that Mothersbaugh, Lewis and Casale were into. It’s just as interested as presenting it’s ideas in as surreal manner as possible. Most importantly it’s got an incredibly dark, fucking jet-black, outlook on the future of humanity covered up in a weird and fun presentation. Hell yes, they are the house band on the Titanic, and maybe that’s why people try to read Seaguy as obtuse – it’s a comic that’s not exactly telling you to enjoy yourself. Seaguy is really coming up front and saying that your life is empty, the world is falling apart, and if you step out of line you will be not be hurt but you will be quickly silenced. It’s not the obtuse mindfuck that it’s gotten a reputation as. Trust me, I’ve been reading Burrough’s The Soft Machine this week – which is his cut up experiments, post-Naked Lunch. So far I’m halfway through it and it’s been nothing but terrifying hallucinatory visuals, intentionally unmanageable grammar, and transgressive sex acts – normally tied directly into the awful hallucinations. Morrison, Gibson, Moorcock and Cronenberg may have all been heavily influenced by Burroughs, but not one of them has ever come close to making me feel as sick as I have reading this. They’ve all processed his influence, and some of his imagery, but they’ve all watered it way down and with good reason. I read Naked Lunch in high school a couple times, and loved it, but never ventured into the rest of his catalog. So far Soft Machine feels more empty than Naked Lunch, it doesn’t feel like there’s a point which is probably the point.
So when people read Seaguy and say “I don’t get it its too weird” – I think they’re treating it like it’s The Soft Machine. When it’s not. It’s straightforward and not really interested in any of the tricks that such a perception would link it with. Actually, Seaguy really has a lot of similarities with another one of my favorites – the Venture Brothers, which I’ve never really heard anyone describe as too weird to be explained, because the preconceptions of viewers going into it are much different. Both are these complex psychodramas about adulthood dressed up in adventure-fiction drag, both walk the line between legitimate character and visual comedy. The Venture Bros, S3 of which I just ran through in one shot for the first time since I got the dvd, is about failure and comprimise and growing up. It understands that at it’s heart all the things it’s characters are obsessed with – being a supervillain, superscience, magic, continuity etc. – is either the product of denial or stunted emotional growth. Of course, this applies to everyone who obsesses and creates this stuff as well. What makes it great is how it implicates the viewer and creators in it’s initial premise. The brilliant thing about S3 is after the crazy game-upping of s2 – where a huge cast was fleshed out as characters and some made big steps forward in their lives – is that they all spend S3 in stasis. No one grows up willingly or successfully, decisions made last season might have been wrong, no one’s happy, everyone’s regressing and refusing to move forward. Like in life. We learn a lot more about these characters backstories, and as always the series is anchored in a lineage of great adventurers – from the Jet Age on back to Tesla and Fantomas. But all this does is show how the past is just as fucked up as the present – how much of it is artifice. Eventually you realize that being adult means just accepting you’re going to have to take a lot of shit to to get through the day. The show presents that all these people’s greatest problem is that it’s really appealing to get caught up in things that are fun and silly and pointless (and at their core, deeply sad) instead of actually becoming adults, because it’s hurtful and boring. The Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend’s marriage is clearly heading for divorce, no matter how much they love each other because 90% of their attraction came out of seething hatred and obsession. Brock Samson’s blood-soaked rampages that were once so much fun have kind of taken on this gutsinking pathos, and at one point it’s exposed that he doesn’t have any other way of interacting with people. Billy Quizboy’s dreams (and memory) are shattered young so he spends most of his time watching cartoons. Hank and Dean are drifting apart, discovering friends and girls and Dean is clearly ten minutes away from a psychotic break, while Hank is just clueless. I won’t even begin to simplify Rusty Venture’s season-arc into a sentence, other than after his early in the season self-realization of what kind of person he is, he goes right back to his denial-drenched existence. Increasingly over the course of the season, the psychological issues of the characters externalized as physical threats – in fact it seems to feel a lot of influence from Todd Alcott’s readings of S2, pushing on how far they can really take it without flopping. This season, while it doesn’t feel as overall good as S2 because that’s a high watermark, doesn’t ever become a nasty toothless parody the way like “Guess Who’s Coming to State Dinner”. No, in large part everything here works, sometimes mindblowingly like in “The Invisible Hand of Fate”
Seaguy though, it’s very much taking the opposite approach to adulthood. If The Filth shares a lot of it’s dna with Blue Jam, it kind of works that Seaguy feels a little bit like the Mighty Boosh. I swear to god that Octomariner saying “undersea mavericks” is a reference to the episode “Journey to the Center of the Punk“. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? The Boosh’s aesthetic is very much pro-childlike imagination, built of children’s tv and prog rock, enjoying the disconnect it’s cultivated from the real world. At the same time, most of it’s comedy is about adult subject matter like bad dates, friends using each other, getting high, being raped by multiple versions of Rich Fulcher. Seaguy is a kind of anti-Venture Brothers, in that it’s against all te things in society that call superheros silly, or wants to force characters into a state of constant bland happiness forever. In Venture S3 adulthood and maturity are shown as positive or just realistic, where the same signposts are shown as pure evil. Not completely – Seaguy is shown to be too naive because the world around him has made him that way. The violence at the start of issue two scares the shit out of him, completely catches him off gaurd. Real, legitimate violence isn’t something he has any concept of. The idea that Seaguy is constantly searching for adventures and never realizing that he’s already having them is made explicit. 3guy says he was inspired by Seaguy’s adventures and Seaguy going “Adventures…?” – on top of that, another of Morrison’s trick about being replaced by a more competent doppelganger. Slaves of MickeyEye gets a lot of it’s frission from the anxiety of becoming an adult, of all the psychological implications of imagery like this -
But once again, holy fuck Cameron Stewart. Slaves of Mickey Eye 2 – in which a superhero escapes from a mental institution, gets married, becomes a matador (or nonviolent bulldressing), becomes the best, has a PKD-style self-revelation involving a talking ghost fish, and leaves her to become a superhero again – is something that only Cameron Stewart could have drawn. It’s the kind of story that unless the artist could completely pull it off it would be stupid and ridiculous. And somehow Stewart has gotten even better in the month between this and the first issue – the El Macho pages have a completely different feel to them, maybe a slight Mad Magazine influence being incorporated, but as a reader you can feel him adapting his style to the story page-by-page, but not in as flashy manner as a JH Williams would. It’s his book, and if he can maintain this for the 3rd issue and into the 3rd series, it’ll be his career best. He brings so much out of the work that he’s up there with Quitely as a collaborator for Morrison. Right now I’d say he’s even better.
I got into a conversation last week with Zom and David Uzumeri on twitter about Morrison’s upcoming Multiversity, and how I think it sounds like a terrible fucking idea. To reiterate and expand my argument – If you ask me what Morrison is better at, creator-owned Vertigo work or massive DCU crossovers, there’s absolutely no question as to what he’s better at. I know that Morrison will never admit to it, but Final Crisis was a failure on at least some level. The key difference between Morrison’s best work this decade and his worst has been what artists he works with – and the simple fact is that whenever Morrison has any sort of major big two project he gets stuck either with a hack or with two dozen people who are too rushed to put out anything good. He is saddled with editorial rewrites (whether he wants to admit to them or not), and the product ends up being terrible comics, bordering on the arcane. I’m not against Morrison working on mainstream superhero characters, I’m interested in what Morrison does better. His best recent work on both sides of the game – Seaguy, AllStar Superman, most of Seven Soldiers – have had some of the best artists in the world working on them and were not under heavy deadlines. I understand that monthly Batman junkies aren’t waiting for Frank Quitely, I do. But for the same token – I’m going to be rereading All-Star for the rest of my life. Morrison going back immediately to a big fuckoff crossover sounds like he hasn’t learned anything from Final Crisis. The interviews for Multiversity sound like a guy who doesn’t understand his own strengths, or how much his talent lives and dies on his collaborators. The man is a profoundly great writer who works with (and gets the best work out of ) the best comic book artists alive. It would be nice if he understood that maybe his best work is partly because of them, or that maybe the way he writes scripts needs a fucking master to get it clearly on the page.
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More Emma Peel Sessions coming up sooner than usual, probably on a tv show.
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