One Must Imagine Batman Fucking
I write these words to you on an altogether far too sunny for my tastes Tuesday afternoon, on the eve of a second shot of the Moderna vaccine, which I expect will leave me too zonked out to do anything else between its injection and the moment you will read this. The topic of the day, brought on by some type of interview snippet about the third season of the Harley Quinn animated show (a show that I still have not seen because the rent-seekers in charge of things have not deemed my country worthy of accessing it in any convenient way whatsoever) is asking us to consider whether Batman can perform cunnilingus, or indeed if he has at all over his near-century of trials and tribulations. The answer, as anyone in the know should tell you, is yes. Batman fucks, and Batman sucks, no matter what the bean counters say.
The case in favor of the "Batman has fucked" theory is historical, with the most recent evidence being found all over Tom King's run on the character; but more important to me, it is philosophical: if Batman and indeed most superheroes represent our desires and aspirations for a stronger and more just society, as I believe they do at their deepest core, if they are manifestations of our impulses, sublimated and four-color printed on paper ready to be assimilated back into our dreaming minds, then they must fuck at least as much as we ourselves want to fuck. It is ever so rarely consummated, but it is there, a fact of life itself: these people are fucking, and Batman being an older creation means he has fucked for longer than most. It follows, then, that Batman has done oral. It's just how these things go.
But anyway, by the time you read this, someone else will have made that case for Batman eating out Catwoman in longer and more eloquent terms, taking the time to do the historical research and showing all the work. What alarmed me most about this week in the discourse was the number of people who have just given up. Simply too many people were ready to accept some executive's fiat without pushing back in the slightest. These people were told that "Batman doesn't do oral" from a single, corporate, source, and they agreed, like it's up to the bean counters to define the terms of the debate. It's not. They're the custodians of these characters in the legal sense, but we have a claim over these characters too. Collectively, we can say that Batman fucks, and these people can do nothing but deal with it. Batman fucks, and that's that.
It is all the more important that our power be known to us this week, because of DC Comics' recent announcement that noted piece of shit and Breitbart contributor Bill Willingham has been allowed back into the proverbial building to shit out twelve new issues of Fable and do a Fables/Batman crossover. The announcement is shitty on its own, but the fact that it happened during Pride Month, on the week when DC released a genuinely beautiful and affirming anthology of LGBTQ+ stories makes it sting just a little more. Pushing the disgrace just a little further were the calls for collegiality in this matter from the industry's elder statesmen, who love to pretend their insight isn't just another word for "survivorship bias". We can, and we should, do something about this. At the very least, I will.
As regular readers of this newsletter will know, earlier this year, we dealt with Marvel having a similar bigot problem by not reviewing any of their books altogether. In light of the Bill Willingham announcement, I think it's worth examining what this little editorial boycott has done for us. It has had a dramatic effect on how the newsletter is run, but I don't think it has helped in any way. I think it has kept me from calling out some of the more objectionable shit that Marvel have released (I'm looking at you, Excalibur #20) for little to no gain. I tried protesting against something this industry did, in the terms it finds the most comfortable; indeed, how many people in and around "team comics" love to bandy around the advice that it is better to champion those things you love rather than denounce those you cannot stand to see? The answer is far too many, and the fact is that they are all wrong.
So was I, but not anymore. I'm going to be a louder and more annoying loudmouth than I have ever been in the course of running this newsletter. I'm going to poke and prod until you beg me to stop. No one is safe. Everyone's a target. The boycott is off, and my power is unleashed. Beware my wrath.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: FULLY VACCINATED AND READY FOR VIOLENCE
For your benefit and mine, since we haven't been there in a while, allow me to give you a quick recap of the Hellfire Gala so far: it's been duds all the way, but at least it made some celebs happy, and isn't that really the purpose of comics? Okay, fine, X-Force is still good as hell, but what this should tell you is that the current volume of X-Force is still a book that's worth following. Nothing else has even come close to being interesting, not even Hickman's final issue on the main X- Men book, which is 7 pages of absolutely unimpeachable comics done with the always-great Nick Dragotta, and three other stories, two of which will be done better in a few weeks' time when the next volume of X-Men starts.
That said, holy fucking shit Planet-Size X-Men #1 is a singular achievement for the X-Men line, it's easily its best issue since the incredible highs of House of X/Powers of X, and it might just be better than those. Of all the explanations why, there is an easiest one, so let's get it out of the way: once again, this is career-best work from Pepe Larraz, who has done nothing but career-best works since he's been doing these books. See how his mastery of scale and composition enables him to drop definitive and iconic imagery on almost every single page. Marvel at his capacity to lay out mind-bending full-page splashes that are just as incredible as the stuff he does with strips and panels. This is a book that is filled, beginning to end, with huge game-changing moments, and it would not work if Larraz wasn't here on every single page meeting it in kind.
The other incredible thing about Planet-Size X-Men #1 is that, while this is a book that follows Jonathan Hickman's lead, and returns to some of the ideas he's explored elsewhere in his career, it reads wholly, in tone and in pacing, like a Gerry Duggan comic. The Hickman trademarks -- the grand statements full of cryptic foreboding, the data pages stepping in and telling the story when the comic can't, sentences just like this one, framed by pairs of dashes -- are completely absent, replaced with Duggan's habitual sense of playful theatricality. Like his other work at Marvel, especially Savage Avengers, the characterizations are big and bold and the tone is light and playful.
What changes between then and now is the ambition. Where House of X and Powers of X rewrote the history of the X-Men, Planet-Size concerns itself with geography. In one fell swoop, it dramatically alters the landscape of the Marvel universe in a way that only an event of even bigger magnitude could undo. It grounds itself with a sense of practicality that loudly and proudly recalls Joe Casey's Wildstorm version 3.0, each new problem to solve pushing Duggan and Larraz to throw pages and pages of big ideas, each serving to showcase the incredible power of mutants as they work together to give birth to a new world.
The end-result, as I said up top, is awe-inspiring. It's a comic best paired with as good a rendition of Dvorak's New World Symphony as you can find (I went with the Vienna Symphonic, hard to go wrong with that). It will make you excited for the future. At the end of the day, when people are gonna ask you how they can catch up, this is the book you'll point them towards; skip the Gala entirely and let them enjoy the fireworks.
Me being as white and as French as it gets, I will never be able to tell you the full impact of the many little revolutions that play out in Static Season One #1, the first regular issue of this new era of Milestone comics. It's very recognizably Static, the nerdy black kid who is trying to deal with the extraordinary powers he has developed, while trying to live a normal life at home and at school. That's there, as loud, as proud and as undeniable as it has been since the days of McDuffie, Leon and Washington. But it's going to mean different things in 2021 than what it meant in 1993, and the updates brought on by the team of Vita Ayala, Chriscross and Nikolas Draper-Ivey make this new venture into the Dakotaverse feel essential.
At the core of these is the shift in tone and focus. This is a book that is centered on Virgil and his internal struggle with the fear of being seen as something other than human, informed by his trauma of going face-to-face with the wanton cruelty of police brutality during a Black Lives Matter protest. This is the hook, and Ayala's script takes great care to make it as powerful as it can be by making the stakes clear and relatable. Virgil's fear is that what's happening to him might lose him his friends, his first foe is going after his family and his neighborhood. It's stuff anyone can grasp, and it's a smart way to get you to the big ideas.
The other update, of course, is style, and Draper-Ivey, working over Chriscross' layouts, delivers a unique brand of coolness that is just spectacular to behold. The anime influences are about as plain to see as they can be, but they bring a color and a texture that is seldom seen in American comics. Put simply, every page feels animated in some way, which is super interesting in addition to looking dope. Ultimately, what I take from Static #1 is that, if you're gonna launch a superhero comic in 2021, for people in 2021, this is the way to do it.
Would it really be a HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS if I didn't extensively gush about Tom King's latest? Probably not, so it's a great thing that Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow #1 is so gush-worthy. The reason why is because, as well as being his return to officially in-continuity comics, Supergirl marks his return to the kind of fun genre-bending he did on books like Grayson. Only here, we're not riffing on spy fiction, but on the literary western and the sword-and-sorcery comic.
Yes, it's very openly True Grit but with swords. That's cool to me because I'm no good with regular books with just words in them. It's also cool to me because Bilquis Evely and Mat Lopes illustrate it, so it is drop-dead gorgeous. Krypto is in there and he's a tip-top good boy in this. As per the HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS charter, sometimes that's all you need. It's a good time, it's a fun time. We love it.
Sorry for the later than usual drop! The combo of extreme heat and the second vaccine shot got me in all kind of ways and it was a struggle to get writing! But I did! Because I love this! I love you! Subscribe! Tell your friends to subscribe! Kurt Busiek the twice-disgraced woke up a terrible fury within and here we are! The only way to escape, as always, is to HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!