The Boxer, true comics horror, and how to go on
Gonna give some misc. 'news of the day' notes before the piece proper this time, and probably will continue doing so in the future.
Got about halfway through this piece, then learned Buttondown only starts autosaving once you press a button, which seems to me to sort of defeat the purpose. So this is round 2.
Finished my first book of the year last night, Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, "An adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts." I think it juggles more balls than it can handle - though better that than a lack of ambition - but the prose clicked with me and its emotional highs are exceptional. Some trigger warnings regarding it really getting into the dirt and muck of treatment of young trans folks for one of the main characters, but I can pretty unreservedly recommend it as at least worth a library checkout.
I'VE BEEN FOUND OUT. Every cell in my body is clenched waiting to see how this plays out.
As I wrote this was the announcement of SHIN JAPAN HEROES UNIVERSE, a three-company initiative overseen by Hideaki Anno seemingly leading into a massive shared film down the line. I've watched about a third of Kamen Rider Build including the big crossover movie so I'm all about those guys, I've seen Ultraman Zero: Revenge of Belial and enjoyed it pretty well so I'm definitely conceptually onboard with that franchise, I have inevitable cultural exposure to Godzilla and know I want to see Shin, and Evangelion has been on my to-watch list forever, so thankfully I've dipped my toe in just enough to have an inkling of what a gigantic, exciting event this is. Mostly though I'm happy for friends who are already much more into all of this; I was talking with Ritesh Babu and he basically described it to me as 'what if there had never been any DC and Marvel crossovers and then you got Grant Morrison to do it as the Ultimate Genre Epic', so yeah, I'm down for that and am basking in the spillover joy.
I've never been a horror fan. I don't have any big ideological hurdle against getting into the genre, I've just had sensory issues since I was a kid so anything built in large part around jumpscares was never going to work for me. We've all sure been enjoying some horror comics lately though! The Immortal Hulk, The Department of Truth, Ice Cream Man, The Nice House On The Lake, Blue In Green, even DCeased. Insert your thesis here on the time being ripe with the last 7 years tearing up the floorboards of the American psyche and preventing us from denying the stench underneath anymore - or maybe it was just an inevitable outcome of a generation raised on Vertigo books - but their time's come back around in a huge way, and I've been getting as much of a kick out of it as anyone. Although for me personally, they haven't really been scary. They'll send the odd tingle down the spine, they'll unsettle me, they'll thrill me as I wait to see what unthinkably shitty thing will happen to our lead next, but gut-deep terror isn't really what they've traded in from my point of view.
Which is fine, as that'd be redundant. Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, Pamela Rambo, and Clem Robins already delivered the scariest moment in comics over 20 years ago.
Some important caveats that need to be delivered when citing that moment: I've never been buggered for money (no disrespect to sex workers), or beaten a partner, or killed a man and only remembered two days later, or been addicted to heroin for a decade, or O.D.ed and had to claw out of my own grave. But I have my own version, same as all of us, of laying awake at 3AM and knowing full well that I'm the most thoughtless, careless, callous person anyone I know has ever met. And like everyone else, I've understood that wallowing in my fuckups doesn't actually help anyone, that you apologize if you can and you try to do better next time. That's how life works.
Cassidy's face as he realizes that's all bullshit haunts me.
His version of that isn't nearly the same as most peoples' - he's got a century of abuse and relapse behind him, totally inured to consequence by his condition. But the core fear? That self-forgiveness isn't growth or healing, it's an undeserved absolution to go right back to being someone who hurts the people around you without a second thought? I feel that every time I try to explain to myself why I need to come to terms with a mistake and move on, and my internal voice sounds less like my own and more like an old-timey gangster reassuring a mook with second thoughts "What we're doing, there's nothing really wrong with it m'boy, nothing really wrong at all..." To put it in those hardline terms is a destructive way to think, but for all that I believe in forgiveness and the better angels of our nature having their day? I also think that for most of us that kind of shame and guilt is what shapes us into human beings, rather than something that just rolls over everyone in our paths. In my experience, it's rare there's a before-and-after moment someone decides to be a better person that isn't accompanied by its fair share of pain.
But how do you live with that?
I've been thinking about that moment since the recent finale (barring a few 'spinoff' episodes coming up) of The Boxer, a Webtoons serial I got into shortly before its conclusion by Jung Ji-Hoon, aka JH. It's the story of Yu, a young man with an unknown but clearly horrifically traumatic past that has left him emotionally 'empty'; in spite of his total lack of fighting spirit however, he possesses a disturbing, preternatural capacity for violence that leads to his recruitment into and domination of the world of professional boxing. I don't want to get much into the story - beyond that this is one of my favorite comics of all time now that all's said and done, and I intend to follow the creator wherever he goes next - but it's one about the unfairness of life and death, and what's revealed in fighters when up against the seeming embodiment of the latter in Yu that no power, skill, or will can overcome.
The enormity of death and what it means for the relevance of life follows every character at every step: the fear that the cessation of consciousness, the end of the ability to make a legacy whether after a lifetime or in the face of sudden tragedy, strips life of any meaning, and the fear that the agonizing journey into the void is one ultimately taken alone. And while like Preacher there is a hand outstretched in the end, there are no easy outs - one of the final lines of the series is "The world was still filled with pain and suffering...and life still ended in death." There is no more escape from the vastness of eternity in one story than the weight of life's sins in another, because that's not how life works.
How do you live with that?
The common understanding is that limited-run comics are inherently more emotionally authentic than endless serials, as they can push their characters forward towards a defined ending rather than maintaining an eternal status quo. This has never quite been my own experience. To me contained stories capture the feeling of life in the rear-view, with a retroactive arc clearly defined. 'Endless' stories with their sense of day-to-day familiarity, their seeming massive changes that don't really affect your life in the long run after all except when they suddenly do, their occasional defined before-and-after moments, strike me as much more the flavor of the everyday as you're living it. But Preacher and The Boxer say something to me of life on the endless treadmill, the pain of going on without promises of absolution or peace. Because the only answer they truly have to how you live, the only real alternative to becoming a monster or being empty, is 'however you can, with whatever help you can get whether you've deserved it or not, because you have to for yourself and everyone around you'. Without guarantees, without a chance of being washed clean of all that's been done, only the threadbare hope of doing better in spite of everything. No true triumph over life; only management, and any grace you can find in it.
-- David Mann, 2/14/2022