Comic Opera

Now and then I try to read comic books, but I find that I do with relatively little conviction. When I was a boy I read comic books, though back then we didn't read comic books; we looked at them. Mostly I read the World War Two-based comics that were fairly common back then, most notably Sergeant Rock and The Ghost Tank. There was another one (I can't remember the name) that retold the stories of Medal of Honor winners in World War Two; the only one that really sticks with me is the story of a Marine machine gunner on Guadalcanal (my grandfather was a Seabee who served on Guadalcanal and the remainder of Halsey's drive up the Solomons toward New Britain and beyond, so anything having to do with Guadalcanal tends to stick with me. My father was an ordinary GI who served under Eisenhower and his contribution to the war effort was guarding German POWs. Not glamorous, but someone had to do it).

Anyway, I have reasonably fond memories of comic books, and I know a fair number of people at work who buy comic books with almost religious zeal, and now and then I try to catch the wave. But most modern comics don't appeal to me. I think what I miss is the idea of a comic book being about ordinary people. Sergeant Rock and his riflemen weren't mutants with super powers, or supernatural beings, or ninjas from shadowy organization that has developed techniques for mind control or anti-gravity. They were just ordinary guys, a squad of perfectly normal guys who had nothing but Garands, BARs, maybe a Bazooka, and their brains.

When I try to read X-men comics (of which there must be six or eight titles at least) all the mutants run together on me, and some of their mutations seem a little strange. Or a lot strange. Why is it that nobody has maladaptive mutations, like only being able to digest peanut butter, or having two left feet, or having one nostril large enough to house a teacup? The movie Men of Mystery parodied this - I especially loved The Shoveler, who, when his wife criticized his mutant power as being silly, just shrugged and said "It's what I do. I shovel." And then I get all wound around the figurative axle trying to make sense of some of them. Like Magneto. Can he only affect ferromagnetic metals, like iron? Or can he manipulate any metal, like aluminum? What about paramagnetic materials, like liquid oxygen? You see my problem. It gets even worse when I start to obsess about the various conservation laws. I once sat down to calculate how many Cheezit crackers Magneto would have to eat to generate enough energy to lift an airplane, but fortunately I came to my senses before I got very far along.

I found that I really liked the series The Red Star, with its odd mix of technology, magic, alternate history and brilliant artwork, but its creators seemed to stumble over their own egos and plans for a new line of The Red Star comics seem to have been scuttled.

I generally like The Punisher, which tends to be coarse and heavily R-rated, but at least harkens back to the moral clarity of Sergeant Rock (whatever else you want to believe about World War Two, it has to be admitted that there was a Good side and a Bad side, and it was imperative that Good triumph over Bad. Exactly how Good triumphed can and should be debated - was it necessary to nuke Hiroshima, for example - but whether Good should have triumphed is very much a closed question). But later runs of The Punisher seem to be falling into the same general trap that brutal death metal wandered into - the need to constantly one-up itself by constantly raising the brutality bar. It's not bad, really, since it is just a comic book, but I still get the feeling when I read certain panels that the writers sat around a table in a pizza shop saying "We need to kill this guy in a really cool way. Any ideas?" "Let's burn him to death!" "No, we did that in the last one." "Oh. Let's burn him to death with a plasma arc cutter!" "Yeah!" It's not the brutality that bothers me; it's the crass way brutality is exploited that bothers me. And you always know that no matter what happens, Frank Castle will get banged up, he'll grit his teeth, he'll emit some grim monologue, and then he'll mow down the Bad Guys. And then there's the backstory as shown in "Born" that suggests that the Punisher isn't really just a normal guy any more...

Frankly, I'd be just has happy with a new version of Sergeant Rock. No mutations, no god-like powers, no super-stealthy ninjas from obscure schools of martial arts, and no strange artifacts like the lasso that compels you tell the truth.