They Watched As Rome Burned
I could use my limited time on Earth to express the whole of my anger and my disappointment towards the creators involved in the second wave of comic announcements Substack has rolled out. I mean, it did happen barely one week removed from Substack's leadership coming out in favor of trafficking in the kind of COVID conspiracy theories and vaccine denialism that is killing people right as I am typing these words. You think that would give people some pause, but it very obviously didn't. The fact that Substack still have not come up with a decent user experience to read the comics on their platform should be worrying, but again, it doesn't really seem like anyone cares, even when some are in the business of making very formalistically demanding works. No matter how many times I say that Substack is a uniquely awful company to entrust with the future of comics, nothing seems to change. At some point, you have to take the hint: principles are all well and good, but principles can't pay for your newfound addiction to Gunpla, not even under the somewhat advantageous terms of the Bandai Hobby Store's loyalty program. (If your store does take integrity as a currency, I'd like to purchase the Master Grade ZZ Gundam Ver. Ka please, my DMs are open)
Anyway, the point is: it's about goddamn time I started selling out, so I did. This week's HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS is brought to you by the following sponsors:
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SUBSTACK
Substack is the world's biggest all-in-one newsletter distribution platform, making it easier than ever for anyone to share great art, thoughtful journalism, or incredible fiction. Sign up today at Substack dot com to get started, or check out one of our great newsletters. This week, Bari Weiss talks to a protester who dares to eat small packets of silica gel. Meanwhile, Graham Linehan posts the names and addresses of trans women to his rabidly violent and transphobic audience. And finally, Glenn Greenwald takes on the COVID hysteria of twitter user @italiano_goblin. All that, plus: more columns about cancel culture than you'd know what to do with. Substack: Oh, And We Do Comics Now, Also.
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: BLOOD MONEY ON THE DANCE FLOOR
The more attentive readers of this newsletter may have picked up on the fact that, for the past couple of weeks, and indeed for the few months preceding those, I have been pretty worried about the future of X-Men comics. I think I will be for a while longer, since we do have seven more weeks of an admittedly pretty okay but not all that thought-provoking Wolverine serial to get through. But you know what? I found out this week that I could still be surprised, and that the X-Men Brain Trust could still, when they wanted to, get real weird with it. And somehow, it happened in a comic called Sabretooth #1. Ostensibly, it is about catching up with the eponymous character, after he was thrown down into a dark pit from which there is no escape, in the pages of House of X. "How can you go on from there?", you may ask. The answer is a 32-page character study that delves into pretty big topics. Specifically, it is about prisons, and the purpose they serve in a society. Through a couple of well-placed twists, it begins its argument by laying out the fact that The Pit, where Krakoa's criminals are exiled, is both shockingly useless and unusually cruel. So what is it for, and why do people end up there? That is a good first question, and its urgency is only exacerbated by the issue's cliffhanger.
On the other side of the coin, there is the matter of what all that cruelty does to someone's mind, and this is where we get most of the issue's thrills and chills, because Sabretooth is a violent man, with a very violent imagination, who, when left to his own devices, chooses to escape further and further into his baser instincts. It is a violent fantasy, getting bloodier and bloodier all the time, savagely depicted in a debauchery of gore by Leonard Kirk, in most excellent form. In between all the impaled bodies, one could begin to wonder if all the isolation isn't making him worse; if all that cruelty only ever begets more cruelty. The argument that Victor LaValle makes isn't really anything new, but it is always unusual to see it made in Big Two American Corporate Comics, and it is made all the more potent by the fact that it is taking place in the shadow of the supposedly utopian status quo of the Krakoa era.
The Pit, as it appeared in Jonathan Hickman's comics, was always meant to be a dissonant note, a complication in the mutants' paradise ready to blow up in their faces. What Sabretooth does is embrace the dissonance, fully own the fact that there is something rotten in the kingdom of Xavier, and it makes for the X-Men comic with the most interesting complications the line has seen in months. It's a very interesting conversation starter, and pieces way more interesting than my hot take have those conversations. Check it all out, it's worth it.
I am struggling to make sense of The X-Cellent #1, and not just because of Peter Milligan's knack for rapid-fire snapshots of satirical surrealism. Being a sequel to X-Statix, the bulk of its big ideas come from 2001, but that isn't necessarily a problem, because the things that made that book relevant back then, the navel-gazing of celebrity culture and the ways in which Capital repackages everything into easily digestible narratives, are not only still here today, but now it is all faster, cheaper, and dumber than it has ever been. So, of course, we return to our heroes in front of a green screen, as they are trying to re-create the climactic confrontation from 2019's Giant-Size X-Statix and arguing about the shallow business of show, before realizing in horror that they were beaten to the punch at the commercializing of their own story by their new arch-rivals. I'm telling you this in order to tell you that yeah, Allred and Milligan can still make this work. It is a little disjointed at times, but it is still very funny and very potent.
The problem is that while it nails the broad strokes, the circumstances of the book's production mean that it is a book about social media and fake news that, if only in feeling, is from a time before COVID and the Capitol riots. It is a world of big outdoor events and holographic rockstars. It is a world where people are still engaging with the monoculture. Critically, it is also a world before Krakoa, and that feels like a missed opportunity to see how both premises interact. But is it bad that it feels out of place, or is it just kind of a bummer? I'm not exactly sure. I mean, I am a fan of this weird 2001 superhero team book about shallow weirdos surrounded by hardcore death. Why start worrying now?
And we're back to regular service! That's how it's done! And then, at the end, I say thank you, I tell you to subscribe if you haven't already, and then I tell you to tell your friends! But what if I took it a little further? What if I told you that you can follow me on Twitter for more goofs and bad takes? What if we made some ENGAGEMENT, baby?????? Look, either way, the most important thing you can do is HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS