Snuff, Sidekicks, and the Apocalypse Suite

This summer’s comic book equivalent of a snuff film has finally come to an end with the release of Ultimatum issue 5, Marvel’s swan song for their Ultimate imprint.  The imprint was launched in 2000 with the idea of luring in new readers by using existing popular characters (Spider-Man, X-Men, etc.) without the baggage of thirty to forty years of history and prior storylines.  I guess the editors and writers put themselves into a corner so it was time to thin the herd, in the most violent way possible.

Every month in this blog I seem to go back and forth on the value of gratuitous comic book events, crossovers, and retcons.  In some cases they are fun and interesting.  Other times they turn out like Ultimatum, where its that old World War II slogan, “Was This Trip Really Necessary?”.

On the one hand, I believe that people read comics books (or watch telenovelas, soap operas, and movie sequels) to find out “what happens next?” The reward is in knowing the characters past history and seeing how their present and future stories unfold. People want  to see consistency and they have an attachment or a stake in what happens to characters.  This is why people got pissed off when Ianto Jones died in the recent Torchwood: Children of Earth mini-series.  Or why readers object to Frank Miller’s borderline psychotic Batman from the All Star Batman and Robin series with artist Jim Lee.

On the other hand take the DC hero, the Flash. There was the Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick.  Then the Silver Age Flash Barry Allen.  Barry has retired, disappeared, “died” over the years so his sidekick Kid Flash, Wally West, too over as the Flash.  Then Barry’s grandson from the future took over as the Flash when West left Earth after Infinite Crisis.  How is a reader supposed to catch up when a character has 50 plus years of convoluted history?  I can almost forgive writers and editors for feeling that they have to wipe the slate clean every so often.  Its just that it happens so often nowadays, that it loses it impact.

Off the snuff and on to the sidekicks.  I think it depends on how old you are and when you got into comics– how much you like or disdain sidekicks.  I’m not talking about the partnership type: Captain America and The Falcon, Lone Ranger and Tonto.  I’m thinking along the lines of the youthful apprentice sidekick.  The DC heroes are replete with them Robin, Aqualad, Kid Flash, Speedy, and Wonder Girl to name a few.

The heyday for sidekicks began in 1940 when Robin was added to soften up the gritty Detective Comics’ stories of Batman. The character was an instant hit with young readers so then everybody got a sidekick. Then in 1954 psychiatrist and best selling author Fredric Wertham went to the US Congress to explain the link between kids reading comics books and juvenile delinquency.

Wertham’s book, Seduction of the Innocent turned the youthful sidekick into a Freudian landmine of hidden and repressed issues.  Wertham proposed that sidekicks only helped to hide sexual subtext and show young people committing violent acts. He also complained about horror comics featuring zombies and ghoulish murder scenes. (Wertham must be spinning in his grave with kids today having access to the Internet and videogames like Grand Theft Auto and Left 4 Dead.)

The introduction of sidekicks subsided in the 1960s, probably as a reaction to Wertham and the Comics Code Authority.  Marvel’s Silver Age heroes tend to have a distinct lack of sidekicks.  Outside of Rick Jones, the whole impetus of Stan Lee and the other Marvel creators was to have young teenage heroes: the Human Torch, Spider-Man, and the X-Men so that they could sidestep the whole issue of having sidekicks.

Now in the twenty-first century we don’t have a need for young sidekicks, because the kids are doing it for themselves.  We have homicidal kids in comic books.  Take a look at Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.’s Kick-Ass. The main character doesn’t kill, but one of the supporting characters, Hit-Girl, does.

And folks Kick-Ass is coming soon to a theater near you, directed by Matthew Vaughn who did the brilliant Layer Cake.

Speaking of Millar, his story arc has come to a close on Fantastic Four.  Not sure what to make of it.  Not really great, not awful. There were some fun bits with Ben Grimm hearing wedding bells.  Millar’s final issue #569 did clear up his bizarrely confusing antithetical Dr. Doom story.  Somehow Victor Von Doom was a servant of the Marquis of Death.

The Marquis comes back to Earth and is unhappy with Doom’s failed attempts to kill the Fantastic Four.  So the Marquis “kills” Victor and then wipes Latveria from the map.  At which point the editor is supposed to step in and remind the writer that Victor and the country of Latveria are center stage in the Thor series and Victor is making lots of cameos in the Dark Reign books.

Ok it wasn’t all bitching for me last month.  Increasingly, I wonder why I still read comics.  They have gotten damn expensive, I remember that my first one costs 60 cents back in 1983.  Now I’m forking over $5 in some cases for one issue that fails to impress (Incredible Hulk #600, anyone?).

However, there are some books out there that make wading through mediocrity worthwhile.  One such book is Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba’s Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite from Dark Horse Comics.  For me this was Killing Joke (Batman), Terror in a Tiny Town (Fantastic Four), Trial of Magneto (X-Men), good. Ba’s art is highly stylized but its one of the few times where a kind of cartoony art actually fits the theme and dialogue perfectly.

Gerard Way of the band My Chemical Romance provides the dialogue for an estranged family of superheroes brought together again by you guessed it– the impending apocalypse.  Think The Royal Tenenbaums meets Frank Miller, its quirky and violent yet darkly funny.  Its got multiple immaculate conceptions, aliens, talking chimps, time travel, sibling rivalry, and literal orchestras of death– What more could you want out of a comic book? The second series Umbrella Academy:Dallas was just completed but I’m waiting for the trade paperback to come out in October.  I would love to see an animated Umbrella Academy on Adult Swim.