Or the one where I harp on the title of the blog a lot

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Before you read this – Tucker Stone went on vacation this week and he called in an eight-man blogging murderers row crew to do Comics of the Weak for him – featuring Jog the Blog, David Brothers, Matthew J. Brady, Tim O’Neil, Tim Callahan, Chris Mautner, Noah Berlatsky, and me and we’re still not as funny as the man himself.

Dark Reign: Zodiac #1-2 by Joe Casey and Nathan Fox

The concept of the supervillain has been debased completely in superhero comics. While I didn’t really bring it up in the previous Green Lantern/Iron Fist/ Ghost Rider essay – that’s another thing about superhero comics these days: supervillains are broken at Marvel and DC. They don’t exist in the classic sense as you’d understand supervillains, I remember when I was an X-Men fan as a kid the big criticism was that the book ended up being “gangs vs. gangs” . Now that’s every book. Though it’s not for the same bullshit “400 guys with vague powers trying to kill each other thing”, it’s just that no one holds the world hostages with a time machine anymore or blows up a bank vault. Superhero comics – usually for the better – have done away with the classic supervillain and in their place have gone with bad guys who they can actually use in a story. Which makes sense if you follow the logic of storytelling – it makes more sense for the Flash to fight Flash villains, Spiderman to fight Spiderman villains. The problem is that what’s appealing to someone writing one of these books is likely going to avoid the classic bad guy cliches. And it’s amazing at first – the first time you read that stupid speech in the beginning of the Gaiman/McKean Black Orchid miniseries it’s genius – but by the time you get through the past 20 years of supervillains commenting on cliches it sounds like a fucking 14 year old who read Watchmen wrote it. Grant Morrison essentially put the cap on the classic Marvel comics megalomaniac when he made Magneto into a joke at the end of New X-Men. It’s blatant that this kind of character just doesn’t work anymore, at least not in the same way. The way the best writers do it these days is to avoid the “destroy the world” type guys and get more personal, more goal-based. The villains in the big two now very rarely want to take over the world, they either a) end up mutilating the superhero’s closest family member/former teammate or b) present a very specific danger to the hero’s power source/livelihood. While both of these approaches are a good source for stories (more the second one), both are just as boring when done ad naseum. Brian Bendis’ current Avengers books essentially dictate the way the Marvel universe works these days. His approach to supervillains in that book has systematically either moved all the Avengers villains into organized factions underneath the Hood or the Skrulls or Norman Osborn’s government-funded H.A.M.M.E.R. That or they’ve been pulled off the board entirely. Being the flagship, that means that nearly all of the Marvel universes’ villains are working toward unified goals and all that bullshit. This is one of the big reasons that stuff like Immortal Iron Fist takes place in a kind of pocket universe with it’s own laws, because they need to give these stories stakes and without access to most of the bad-guy-of-the-month characters anymore, they’ve got to set their own set of rules. This isn’t new, but it’s interesting now because Marvel books now either operate on the fringes or have to buy into the Avengers crossover of the year (I’m speaking in generalities, this isn’t true across the board). This affect everything in these books, but it’s very interesting the way that fundamental elements – like antagonists – have to be used in a very different manner.

Dark Reign: Zodiac is a tie-in to the big crossover going on right now, along with X-Men/Dark Avengers: Utopia (which is actually part of the same crossover). Both of them position former supervillain Norman Osborn as the new head of the world’s biggest and most powerful military organization, leader of the new government-funded Avengers, and owner and operator of the Thunderbolts.  He’s running a secret cabal consisting of  The Hood, Namor, Emma Frost, Loki, and Dr.Doom. The Hood is running most of the minor supervillains as one gang, Emma Frost and Namor are putting together an evil X-Men, the Avengers are all bad guys, the Thunderbolts are all black ops-style bad guys, etc. The nature of line-wide continuity means that all these books have to jibe, and the final result is that all the bad guys in the Marvel universe – nearly all of them – in some way work for one guy. They’re all government employees, legally or illegally. There’s no lone crazy guys anymore. No weird fringe groups with their own agendas, no one robbing banks, no one holding cities hostage. So the word “supervillain” as I understand it just doesn’t apply anymore.

It’s been a long time coming, but Joe Casey is here to save the supervillain. Fucking Finally.

Joe Casey’s one of the best writers in comics – a guy who can easily be put alongside Grant Morrison, Howard Chaykin, and David Michelinie – doing high-grade journeyman superhero work, psychedelic metafiction, and idiosyncratic personal work without ever really changing his style that much. He’s kind of been relegated to the fringes himself, currently working on two crossover tie-ins  for both of the big companies to keep his name out there so he can get back to blowing me and three other guys minds with GØdland. The thing is – this is the best thing that Casey has written in years. As much as I love GØdland, Casey hasn’t done anything even close this good since his Wildstorm work. It’s an angry work. He seems a pissed off and wants to poke holes in the entire comics industry, and he has the skill to back it up. On top of that, Nathan Fox (and colorist Jose Villarubia) is pumping out these frenetic shimmering pages where stuff doesn’t stay on model, and everything looks like it’s on the brink of catching on fire (which happens a lot too).

Zodiac is a new character – he has no real identity so far, he’s just a guy in a suit with a bag over his head. He starts off the series by killing all twelve members of the original Zodiac, just to avoid confusion. He carries their heads around in a sack. The plot focuses on Zodiac building up a team to pull a job, but it appears to just be chaos until the very end of the second issue. His team consists of a clown formerly of the Circus of Crime, the daughter of Nekra and who’s kind of a groupie, former Spidey villain Manslaughter Marsdale, Whirlwind – who’s been relegated to  Norman Osborn’s limo driver, and the Trapster. They all hang out in a destroyed Hydra airbase.Zodiac singlehandedly kills 100 H.A.M.M.E.R. agents, beats the shit out of Johnny Storm and calls him gay, has sex and fetishizes blowing up a hospital, has his team steal a Shogun Warrior robot, and faking a Galactus attack on New York City. At the end of the second issue we finally get to hear Zodiac’s plan – which is really to do what he should: sow chaos and anarchy. It’s no mistake, I think, that Zodiac resembles the first supervillain (check out bottom left).

(French Supercriminals by Paul Pope)

It’s great to see good old-fashioned senseless destruction, the anarchist impulse let loose with all the insane sci-fi tools of the universe. Faking an attack of an ur-cosmic being with trashed supervillain tech and a stolen giant robot – that’s the kind of thing I should be able to get from a bad guy in a superhero comic. No one wants to read about some girl getting cut up and shoved in a fridge when they could read about a city being exploded by an army of engineered sci-fi clones. Who cares about what the first implies about sexism when it’s already boring. Zodiac beating Johnny Storm senseless for apparently no reason is exhilarating, just because you haven’t seen an actual fight where you wanted the bad guy to win for a while now. We find out later that the plan is to take the Fantastic Four out of commission and to distract H.A.M.M.E.R. while they fake them out, but it doesn’t really matter.

From the metafictional angle the book is even more playful. The opening scene evokes Newman Xeno from (Casey’s friend and Iron Man/Uncanny X-Men writer Matt Fraction’s) Casanova – voiding the concept of the H.A.M.M.E.R. acronym by listing out pointless interpretations of it. At the same time it’s similiar to the opening of Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson’s Batman: Gothic, with the main character soliloquizing to a near-dead man suspended upside down. It’s a deliberate move that doesn’t draw anyone out of the story, but the antagonistic spirit behind Morrison’s book to the current status quo is alive and well here. Jog has pointed out that it evoke the Heath Ledger variation of the Joker – he even blows up a hostpital – maybe Casey is pointing out that even Hollywood versions of these guys have a more “burn the world down” ethos than the average Marvel villain. Blowing up a hospital is exactly what a maniacal dude with no sense should be doing, not running a world peacekeeping force. I understand that in the real world it’s a lot scarier and harder hitting when evil people rise to power, but superhero comics are not the real world and I want to see some shit get blown up by robots. The choice of Galactus by Zodiac is pretty inspired, as is the selection of Johnny Storm. He picks the Torch because the FF is first, because that’s the heart of the world. He picks Galactus because no matter how much the rules change – Galactus doesn’t. He’s a force of unknowable destruction that can’t get co-opted for a 5-year Avengers arc where the government is bad.

As much as it’s nice to read a book about gleeful villainy, that wouldn’t make it that much of a book. No, Casey is clearly using Zodiac as a mouthpiece for some of this. DR:Z has found a means to have it both ways – Zodiac’s accusation of Norman Osborn is entirely character based and works on an in-story level. At the same time, it works as a critique of the way the Marvel Universe is being run right now, using the same characters that Bendis uses. It’s old school vs. new school in both approach and content. “One minute he’s the Green Goblin, gloriously certifiable in every way. The next, he’s some kind of super hero cashing a government check. I don’t know about you… but I’m personally offended by the hubris on display here. Osborn expects to run the show and the rest of us will simply fall in line…? That just ain’t how I roll.” That’s Casey talking as much as it’s Zodiac, and he’s got a point. While it might make sense in Warren Ellis’ and Brian Bendis’ books it’s faintly ridiculous to ask every writer to deal with this if they want to do something as simple as take place in NYC. The indignance not just held by Zodiac, but by the entire cast from Whirlwind’s sneer at being made into a servant to one of the few remaining S.H.I.E.L.D. agents being treated as a useless appendage by his bosses and as persona non-grata in the superhero community. The second issue is even more direct – the first page introduces the Trapster, aka Paste-Pot Pete, a character that Bendis has deemed unsuable even as he revamps everything he gets his hands on. Immediately after we have Clint Barton and Hank Pym in their new, ridiculous costumes and identities, whispering to each other that they can’t see Hawkeye being Ronin or Giant Man being the Wasp. Casey is the voice of dissent and indignance and it’s a good place for him to be as a writer. He doesn’t know how he got here and he thinks the only sensible thing to do is to blow it up. Norman Osborn doesn’t seem to think that taking over the world means he has to save it, and that makes him the good guy. He’s co-opted and that makes him game. Maybe that’s how Casey feels about Bendis. Or maybe he just thinks that writing a book any other way would be a pain in the ass while Dark Reign is still going. A hero is only as good as his villains, maybe that’s why comics are boring these days.

Maybe it’s time for a murdering psychopath we can believe in.