How I Became Who I Am: My Most Influential Reading List

If you’re a fan of the WITWAR extended network, you’ve probably seen the recent posts by occasional collaborators MediaMaven and Petpluto wherein they discuss the books that most heavily influenced their lives and shaped who they are today.  I’m nowhere near as well-read or as skilled at literary discussion as either of them, but I figured it would be fun to try my hand at this little exercise.  So, without further ado, here are the books that led me to become who I am today (in chronological order):

COMICS: John Reviews “Abyss” by Kevin Rubio

Given the fact that both Superheroes and Humor are somewhat “dead” genres in the world of independent comics, Kevin Rubio’s Abyss is a breath of much-needed fresh air that shows the mainstream comics world exactly what they should be producing monthly.  The best way that I can think to describe Abyss is a combination of the following elements:  Imagine the premise for Wanted (check my review if you don’t know it, and the movie doesn’t count!) being executed in a style that reminiscent of The Incredibles, “ The Tick“, and “Clerks: The Animated Series,” with a touch of “Robot Chicken”‘s referential and self-parodying humor.  Are you intrigued yet?

Abyss is the story of Eric Hoffman, a privileged teenager whose father (a military weapons contractor) kept a dastardly secret.  After his dad’s tragic death, Eric finds out that Papa Hoffman was Abyss, the most feared and reviled supervillain in the world, and that the mantle must now be passed to him.  He learns this from his very-much-alive father, who faked his death so that Eric could take over the real family business.  Eric is not cut from the same cloth as Wesley Gibson from Wanted, however, and rebels.  When Mr. Hoffman decides he’d rather kill his son than let him go, Eric steals the Abyss costume and jet and flies to San Francisco to stop a bomb his father planted from killing hundreds of innocent people.  Imagine Eric’s surprise when his father’s arch-nemesis, The Arrow (and his plucky sidekick, Quiver) tries to apprehend and arrest him for supervillainy!  And that’s just the first issue!

While Abyss shares an initial premise with Wanted, it is certainly a much more straightforward comic book tale than Millar’s groundbreaking “villain’s journey.”  Eric doesn’t get savagely beaten or forced to butcher livestock, so he isn’t of the mindset to murder an entire precint house full of cops.  I found him to be a far more identifiable character than Wanted’s Wesley Gibson/The Killer, which contributed greatly to my ability to enjoy the story.  Even the villains of Abyss seem more well-rounded and interesting, with clearer and more reasonable motivations.  Perhaps I’m being too easy on it (and too harsh on Wanted) by comparing the two, but with such similar story points it is difficult to avoid.

Abyss is a parody of superhero comics, but not in that annoying (GENRE) MOVIE style that has saturated the film market over the past few years.  It’s far more up the alley of movies like Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, as interested in telling its own story as it is at goofing on the genre’s conventions.  Characters actually have dimension, and the gags never feel forced or contrived.  It makes sense that Kevin Rubio would choose this style for his first major comics, since his most prominent non-comics achievement is a fan-made film called TROOPS, a parody mash-up of COPS and Star Wars.  Jokes range from the cliche (calling superhero costumes homoerotic) to the spot-on (having the heroes drive around in a compact hybrid car because they’ve “gone green”), with most being fresh and clever.  There’s even a bit of English language humor:

ERIC: “Quiver?! You can’t be serious.”

QUIVER: “What? It’s a good name.”

ERIC: “It’s a transitive verb that means ‘to shake or tremble.'”

That joke cracked me up, and hopefully it at least gave you a chuckle.  There are plenty of throw-away visual gags as well, especially during the scenes at a comic convention.  My favorites are the sharks with laser beams attached to their heads and Pollack, a parody of Rorschach from Watchmen whose mask is haphazardly splattered with paint.  There’s also a brief cameo appearance by fellow Red 5 Comics character Atomic Robo (whose series is written by Brian Clevinger, known for his webcomic 8-Bit Theatre.)

Abyss is one of the few post-1990s comics that understands exactly what made fans want to read them in the first place: Action and fun.  If Wanted left you with an unpleasant feeling, if you like wisecracking, relatable heroes and if you enjoy poking fun at the conventions of the superhero genre as much as (or more than) you enjoy the genre itself, Abyss is the comic for you.

COMICS: John reviews “Wanted” by Mark Millar

Some of you out there might have heard of a movie called Wanted, starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie. It was a breakout success, and has already been greenlit for two sequels. What you may not have heard is that Wanted is an adaptation of a comic written by Mark Millar, and his second comic-to-film property, Kick-Ass, stars Nicolas Cage and is expected to hit theaters next year. Expect more details on Kick-Ass in a later review.

It took more than a few revisions for Wanted to even see publication as a comic, and the movie bears only about 40% similarity to the source material. Wanted was originally pitched as a DC comic starring the Secret Society of Super-Villains. Presumably, much of the story remained intact when Millar took his script from DC to Top Cow Publications, but the supervillains had to be created from whole cloth instead of being established characters. Fans of DC Comics will still recognize the very close analogues to characters like Catwoman, Bizarro, Clayface and Lex Luthor, as well as Marvel Comics’ Red Skull, Captain America’s arch-nemesis. Not surprisingly, the superhero elements that made up a large portion of the story were all but completely removed from the film adaptation.

The story of Wanted is as follows: Ordinary beta-male twentysomething Wesley Gibson works long hours at a job he hates, while his barely tolerable girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend. His mother died not long ago, and he never knew his father. Suddenly Wesley is kidnapped by The Fox (think Halle Berry’s Catwoman meets Jada Pinkett-Smith’s character from The Matrix) and welcomed into The Fraternity, a secret society of the most evil supervillains ever to walk the earth. It turns out that Wesley’s father was one of the greatest among them, and with his help they killed all the world’s heroes in 1986 and have been running the world ever since. Wesley discovers that he has inherited his father’s superhuman ability to kill just about anything, and is such a precise shot that he can shoot the wings off flies (without touching the flies themselves) from across the room. The Fox and several other villains “rehabilitate” Wesley, turning him from corporate drone to hedonistic killing machine.*

The next paragraph contains SPOILERS! Skip ahead if you don’t want to know!

Wesley then lives out every revenge scenario an eleven-year-old could possibly imagine: He kills everyone who has ever so much as looked at him funny, cuts his best friend’s head off and stuffs both it and the body in his apartment’s dumpster, dumps his girlfriend (and informs her that her boy-toy is now headless in the alley) and murders an entire precint building’s worth of police officers on a whim. Since the villains rule the world, there is no need to think about the consequences of his actions. He almost feels a twinge of guilt when the one police officer begs to be spared for her kids’ sake, but this passes quickly. He battles a rival gang of super-villains for control of America, chief among them the man who supposedly killed his father. But wait! It turns out that Wesley’s dad is alive and well, and faked his own death so that his son could get to live the life he’s been leading all these years. Finally, The original Killer asks his son to put a bullet in his brain, and Wesley obliges. Wes and Fox ride their helicopter into the sunset, completely guilt-free and intent on making everyone else’s lives miserable for the sake of their own enjoyment.

I’d like to talk about the last two pages, but don’t worry. There’s nothing here to reveal the plot. Wesley provides some narration that sums up the entire theme of the book, and presmuably Millar’s reason for writing it:

There, happy now? Pleased to see the mystery resolved? … God, you’re such an asshole, and I speak from experience. It only seems like yesterday I was at your level on the Pathetic-o-meter. Why should you give a shit how my life works out? You’re killing yourself working twelve-hour days, getting fat on cheap take-out food, and your girlfriend is almost certainly fucking other guys. Just because you’ve got a plasma screen TV and a big DVD collection doesn’t mean you’re a free man, motherfucker. You’re just a well-paid slave like all the other cattle out there. Even this comic was just a fifteen-minute respite from how hard we’re working you. You used to think the world was always like this, didn’t you? The wars, the famine, the terrorism, the rigged elections. But now you know better, right? Now you know what happened to the heroes. And you know the funny thing? You know what makes me laugh now that I’m on the other side? You’re just going to close this book and buy something else to fill that big, empty void we’ve created in your life.

Is that you, Slim Shady?

This is my face while I’m fucking you in the ass.”

Get it? He’s pointing out that you, the reader, are an incompetent and impotent waste of life. The only good people in the world are the bad ones, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just jealous of the fact that they’re not the ones screwing everybody else over so they can live like a fat cat. Naturally, this bizarro logic is my biggest problem with the book. Not the fact that evil wins, because in much of life it does, but that the realization of our ultimate dreams would be to dress in black leather and shoot anyone who looks at us funny, then go sleep on top of a pile of money with seven scandinavian supermodels. I don’t know about you, reader, but I would get bored of life pretty quickly if that was the highest plateau of civilization. But I suppose this has always been the problem with supervillainy: What do you do when you finally win? Is ruling the world really what you wanted to do, or was it the thrill of the chase and the hero/villain struggle? Take, for example, a villain like Lex Luthor. Lex would never fit into the world of Wanted, because he’s not a petty crook. He wants to rule the world because he believes he’s the right man for the job. If he ever did get rid of Superman, I wouldn’t be surprised to see his version of the world look more like Brave New World than 1984. He has no interest in making people miserable, as long as they live according to his plans. He’s ambitious, which is one thing I cannot say for the villains in Wanted. They may have all the power in the world, but they’re phenomenally boring about exercising it! Where are all the mad scientists who seek to unlock the mysteries of the universe by any means necessary? Where are the megalomaniacs who would unite the world under one banner and have unity (through tyranny) across the planet? Heck, even Hitler wouldn’t sit around and kill cops for fun if he had the world in a vise-grip. He’d expand to the stars and we’d have Nazis in space!

Despite my misgivings, there is a lot to like about Wanted. The notion of an inverted hero’s journey (a villain’s journey, if you will) is novel, and there certainly aren’t many stories of this type in the fiction landscape. If you’re sick of villains acting like anti-heroes instead of proper villains, this is the book for you. If you just want to root for the bad guy and enjoy the fun of turning a genre completely on its head, this book has plenty of charm. Also, J.G. Jones does a fantastic job of making the world of Wanted feel like a comic about supervillains in the real world: It alternates between gritty realism and fantastic over-the-top splashes of action and color. His paintings (most notably the cover) rival Alex Ross for their iconic quality.

I guess the point I’m trying to make about the story is that Wanted is like Fight Club with superheroes, plus a dash of Pinocchio, but seriously lacking in imagination. The Fraternity of Supervillains are the boys on the island, turning into jackasses because all they do is smoke and drink and carouse. Once Wesley abandoned every principle he once held in favor of reckless pursuit of anything that would give him an adrenaline hard-on, I lost all ability to identify with the character. It all just felt like an adolescent revenge fantasy disguised as a ground-breaking new type of storytelling. Then again, if I were giving this review in his world, he’d shoot me repeatedly in the crotch after raping my girlfriend in front of me and setting my dog on fire.

Comic Books???!!! (Originally posted on 7/15/08)

They say that to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. For nearly two years, I seemed to live in a sort of social bubble populated almost exclusively (or so it seemed) by people who read or at least condoned the reading of comics in their various forms. Over time, though, I began to see through this bubble and was forced to face the reality of the here and now: People think comic books are beneath them.

WHY? These same people line up in droves to see the latest superhero movies every summer, so clearly it’s not an aversion to the idea of a superhero. The money talks: We LOVE Iron Man, Batman and all of their amazing friends.

Is it the stigma left over from the Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954? From the days when your mother said comic books would ruin your eyes and turn you into a no-goodnik? I doubt it. No one thinks of comic book readers as badasses these days.

I’m not really sure when it happened, but at some point comic books went from being dangerous and controversial to being the exclusive territory of geeks and nerds. The weirdest thing about this stereotype is that the subject matter of those comics was NOT seen as exclusive territory. Shows like Wonder Woman and The Incredible Hulk (not to mention ’60s Batman) would never have been huge successes if only geeks and nerds were watching. Unfortunately most people think of ’60s Batman as the epitome of comic book storytelling, which could not be further from the truth these days. In fact, I think the campiness of that show may be the root of a lot of this stigma.

There is also an equally prevalent common mentality of “Silly Rabbit, comics are for kids!” While children may have been the target audience after the Comics Code Authority was established in the 1950s, the ratio of teen-and-older comics to youth comics today is closer to 5:1. It’s an interesting phenomenon to examine: Adults and young adults think that comics are for kids, while kids would rather be facing off against adults in GTA4 or Call of Duty 4 on their XBox.

Is it just the name “comic book”? Artistically inclined people refer to them as sequential art, and it’s really the only blanket term that encompasses the whole of the genre. If you want to bump up your “indie cred” a notch, you say you read “graphic novels,” almost all of which are actually collected editions of graphic periodicals.

Perhaps it’s just that people don’t know what they’re missing. Yet every time a comic-book based property is transferred to another media, we eat it up. Wanted almost overtook WALL*E at the box office! Unfortunately, I don’t think more than 5% of its viewers knew it was adapted from a comic (and it was actually watered down for theaters). Perhaps it wouldn’t have sold as well if people had known. An interesting property to watch will be The Exterminators, a non-superhero horror series which has landed a series deal with Showtime. Of course, there are also the planned movies for Ex Machina, Runaways and Y:The Last Man (which somebody will rush to claim is some sort of tangential rip-off of Children of Men. Just you wait.)

There are comics out there that would probably appeal to you, by the way. Do you like zombie stories with great characters and suspenseful plots? Try The Walking Dead. Interested in modern drama, mystery and action with fairytale sensibility? Try Fables. Love crime fiction? Check out Criminal. Big fan of procedural police dramas? Powers takes that genre and adds a superheroic twist. Do you like stories about a teenage group of friends who can’t catch a break and have to deal with terrible (literally villainous) parents? I recommend Runaways. I could do this part all day, but who would even listen?

Well, I’m fresh out of ideas and entirely lacking in an outsider’s perspective. I’m willing to bet you have your own reason for not reading comic books. Care to share it?