Biff! Bam! Pow! Comics Aren't Just For Child Pornographers Anymore
Plus: What's going on in the comics for regular perverts?
"Dateline Angoulême, France, and it's a bad day for lovers of Hardcore Eurofilth as organizers of the international comics festival announce the cancellation of an exposition of the works of Bastien Vivès, bande dessinée's latest and greatest latest and greatest, following weeks of protest that had escalated into threats, as is the way in which these things play out nowadays. It's a sad day for comics, it's a sad day for freedom of speech, these moral panics are eating us alive, oh how sad it is to be enlightened in the deepest darkness"
is what I would write about the last few days in comics news, were it not for a small problem: Bastien Vivès had no business getting his work showcased as part of the festivities in Angoulême, because he had no business being a celebrated cartoonist rockstar, because he's a child pornographer, by which I mean that he has drawn pornographic works whose characters are children, some as old as fifteen, and some as young as eight. These works were published, printed, and sold, by some of France's most notable publishers. Some are still available right now! And to many people, this is completely fine, and Vivès should be celebrated!
As is all too often the case in these matters, his defenders are trying to create a context surrounding these works; in this version of the story, Vivès exists in continuity with France's adult comics scene of the 70s, as seen in L'Echo des Savanes and Fluide Glacial. Vivès himself will tell you his incest comics are meant to be absurd and satirical, that the fantasies are about the ludicrous exaggerated bodies, and that one shouldn't read deeper into it than that. This is, of course, a lie, and not a particularly strong one. One need only look at one page of any given Edika comic to see a genuine master of self-referential grotesque scatological absurdism at work, in pages so brimming with gags they seem like they're about to burst. Edika, Gotlib, and all their contemporaries took the relentless style of Kurtzmann's Mad and pushed it beyond the boundaries of taste as the genuinely censorious 60s made way for the liberated 70s. Meanwhile, Vivès' comics just plod along, in barely moving and barely drawn panels, and nothing seems able to threaten his career. It's just not the same, and anyone claiming that it is is lying to you. (Also, Edika never drew child pornography! Pretty important!)
Also, and speaking of context, there is everything else that Bastien Vivès has done and said, from his final short as an animation student being about a girl getting sexually assaulted by her father to the many interviews in which he readily admits incest turns him on, or that it would be really fun, to him, if children came across his pornographic work. You don't have to dig deep to find those. But if you were to dig deep, you'd also find old forum posts where he's asking people for help in identifying a lolicon manga! This is a man whose stated goals was not just to entertain, but also to excite! You could make a case that these are the provocations of a deeply immature man, seeking to create a "dangerous and perverse" persona for himself, except here's the thing: our man is pushing forty! The bulk of this controversy concerns comics that were made in 2017 and 2018, when he was an already accomplished thirty-three year old man!
And then, there's everything else: this story is playing out in France, a country where the cultural elites and the taste makers have a historical blind spot when it comes to the promotion of sexual predation against children. It is playing out in the comics industry, which has largely been run by and for men, at the expense of women. Here is where we pile up some more context: Vivès' 2018 album Décharge Mentale, about an incestuous family, was made in response to a comic feminist cartoonist Emma published on Facebook about her experience as a mother and the concept of mental load. This is pretty fucking hostile, right? If you can, on your name alone, get a comic specifically targeting one woman published and sold, we can all agree that something fucked up just happened, right?
But what of the notion that art, because it is born from the whole of the human experience, will sometimes deal in complex, controversial, and disturbing topics, and that any act of censorship must be carefully considered so as not to set a precedent that may be used against genuinely worthwhile work from underrepresented creators, who are dealing in their own way with their own circumstances? Well, I think you can, and should be able to, if that's what you want to do, make a story that deals with difficult topics, like pedophilia and incest. I just don't think you should do it while very evidently jerking it off. The cancellation of this Bastien Vivès showcase is a failure many times over. It's a failure when threats to someone's safety force an event to be cancelled. It's also a failure that Bastien Vivès got an Angoulême showcase in the first place.
Anyway: Lastman is available in English from the good people at Skybound right now!
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: THE ONLY COMICS NEWSLETTER TO DELIVER FRENCH-ON-FRENCH VIOLENCE
It had been known, and this went all the way back to Hellions, that some day during the Krakoan Era of X-Men comics, there would be a reckoning for the many awful things that were done to one Madelyne Pryor. For those not in the know, the story goes like this: Madelyne Pryor was loved, until Jean Grey came back. From then on, she was discarded, literally as well as figuratively demonized, used and abused by creators that should have known better, until all that remained was a character whose interiority and feelings were sacrificed to create the picture of a woman forever scorned, whose fury and costumes only grew to be more and more embarrassing.
But before that reckoning could get reckoned, Zeb Wells had taken on the impossible task of relaunching The Amazing Spider-Man, in a back-to-basics approach that proved to be quite controversial with the worst dullards you've ever seen in your life. And, just to twist the knife, the weekly series immediately before it adds more fuel to the fire, by stripping generally-decent-guy-with-unfortunate-circumstances Ben Reilly of his identity, his memories, and his good costume. (Before we discuss anything else, let's get THAT out of the way: Chasm? That's just wholly and completely bad, as far as the aesthetics go) But, hold on a ding-dang minute here! That makes two clones that were used and abused, doesn't it? Almost as if one was set up as a way to get back to the other!
And that's Dark Web, more or less a spiritual successor to Inferno, in which two clones walk in hand in hand with Revenge. Here, then, we have the potential for something very dramatic and quite serious. Within and without the fiction, there are big questions to tangle with, and a long overdue rehabilitation of poor old Madelyne Pryor, who's earned it ten times over. The Free Comic Book Day teaser had not been especially encouraging, but one shouldn't really fault a teaser for being light in substance. However, as of this week we are three issues in (Dark Web #1, ASM #15, and the first issue of the X-Men tie-in), and the problem has made itself obvious: there is a whole-ass Gremlins 2: The New Batch in the way of Marvel acknowledging one of the most notorious failures in X-Men history.
It's good. Obviously it's good. Adam Kubert opens the hostilities, and his capacity to turn anything into a capital-E capital-C Event Comic by pulling out all the stops and showing remarkable inventivity when laying out a page are, at this point, a known quantity, and when paired with Frank Martin's moody tones, they make everything look like the most important thing on the shelves that week. In The Amazing Spider-Man, Ed McGuinness gets to draw a Venom fight, which is just about the most perfect vehicle for him to showcase his gift for characterful plasticity and elastic expressivity in pages that somehow manage to be the perfect amount of loose. And then, as a topper, you get Ivan Reis pushing the wacky cartoon slapstick to the extreme in X-Men, which you don't need me to spoil with words; it was always going to be a winner, and guess what? It's a winner.
It helps, of course, that Zeb Wells is legitimately one of the funniest people working in comics today, and that Gerry Duggan, in charge of the X-Men tie-in, gets to cut loose and do the relentless action comedy that brought him to the dance in the first place, after a year of mostly serious comics that we're going to call "uneven" because that's exactly as harsh as they deserve. Taken on its own, outside any sort of context, this is the kind of gleefully dumb fun comic that is incredibly easy to love, a superhero comic desecrated by absolute nonsense in the grand tradition of Nextwave. It falls apart in context, because it all feels, at best, like a time-killing distraction from the necessary character drama at the heart of it, and at worst, like we're just repeating the mistakes of the past, but louder and dumber. Are we really doing justice to Madelyne Pryor and her story when she's out there doing the full-on Rita Repulsa shtick? The connective tissue that is meant to hold this together, the serious ideas that the story needs, that all has been absent from Dark Web so far, and that's a bit of a problem.
At the risk of stating the obvious: it has not been a good year for the Fantastic Four. I mean, obviously it wasn't, Dan Slott was writing the book. But, as is often the case when Dan Slott stops writing a comic, things are looking up. Ryan North, a certifiable genius, is not the first writer since Jonathan Hickman to promise a return to the world's greatest comic magazine adventure roots (he's the third), but, two issues in, he might be the best of them.
Let's take Fantastic Four #2 as our case study. In all of three pages, it gives you "Reed and Sue and a town full of Doombots", which is as killer a hook for a Fantastic Four comic as there has ever been. By page fourteen, you'll get the issue's big twist, which is the exact kind of game-changing reversal that it needs to be to set us up for a big action climax, and a fully-earned resolution, which has all the intellect and romance you are entitled to when you buy one of those comics. Who knows, it might even illuminate some fundamental truths about the characters along the way (it does! the thing it has to say about Reed is really great!)
It's simple. It's foolproof. It is exactly what it needs to be, and Iban Coello, on the pencils, plays it perfectly. This is an issue loaded with Iconography, whether that's small town Americana, Doombots, Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman, or, that thing in the twist, revealed in a full page splash that is as arresting as it is classic comic book storytelling. It looks and it feels right, in way that it hasn't in a while.
Then you pull back, and you realize there is a deeper game being played here: this is the second issue in a row where members of Marvel's First Family have found themselves staying the night in a small town with a big secret. And why are they on the run in the first place? Sure, just about everyone in the Marvel Universe right now seems to have a big exploding secret they're running away from, but this one seems like it's going to be more satisfying than the others. So yeah, things are good!
And that's it! We've finally done another one of these! Times are pretty crazy right now, so I thought I'd provide the kind of stability that only the world's greatest comic book newsletter can provide. Obviously, we'll come back to talk about the year that was, and maybe next week will have some comics worth talking about, but in the mean time, let's plug the socials worth plugging. Find me on Cohost! Find me on Mastodon! Find me far the fuck away from the bad website! And if you need anything else, just remember: HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!