When Is It Okay To Pirate Comics?
We’ve been at this for a while now, so we know how this awful game they call social media works: every minute, a new topic is introduced for the rabble to turn into Content, which shows up in data analytics as Engagement, which is then sold to cryptocurrency scammers with fake money to advertise. If the topic is complex enough that it can’t be solved through the posting of Content, it is saved for later re-use and a Discourse Cycle is born. As it happens, the American Direct Market Comic Book Industry is plagued by many complex problems, all ready to be regurgitated into impassioned hot takes and vulgar invective at a moment’s notice.
Many people are more qualified than I am, and they will bring much more interesting perspectives and ideas on the big questions like “What is to be done about the abusers and the predators roaming around the industry, enabled by the indifference of men in positions of power within the industry?” (Hi Warren! Hi Brandon! Hope you’re having a miserable time with your new books at Image!) and so I thought that, for this week’s newsletter, I could take a moment of your time to talk about last week’s Big Topic, as launched by one Erik Larsen: Comic Book Piracy. Is it ever okay? Yes it is.
I’m not just saying this because I’ve had to do it myself a few times over the course of running this newsletter. I think there are many valid reasons why one would pirate a comic book, and I’m about to run through a few of them right now.
COMIC BOOKS ARE EXPENSIVE AS HELL
Lately, comic books have doubled down on being a luxury good. Slowly but surely over the last decade, publishers have normalized the $3.99 price point, and now, they’re trying to get away with $4.99 comics. They justify it with “more pages” and “backups”, but the truth is that if your budget is tight, say because you got into buying boutique yoyos to try and pick up yoyo tricks because learning any skill, no matter how useless or marginal, is the only thing that’s brought you actual joy over the past few months, it’s getting harder and harder to keep up with the industry. Times are tough, is the point, so maybe it’s okay to steal a COUPLE funny books.
THE COMIC BOOK INDUSTRY HATES ITS OWN HISTORY
The history of comic books, and indeed the history of most contemporary artforms, is far too precious to be left to the whims of capitalist greed. And in a medium where the big selling point is History, preservation and study of the classics is all the more important. You shouldn’t have to wait until February of next year to get a copy of Truth: Red, White, and Black by Kyle Baker and Robert Morales. The quintessential 1990s work of Awesome Studios is basically held hostage by some random wack-ass millionaire. And THEY would have you try and forget that the current Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics released a terrible anthology comic about his shitty sex life. All those things are equally important to the history of the medium, and piracy is the only mean by which to access them.
YOU’RE A NEWSLETTER WRITER AND YOU GAVE YOURSELF AN ARBITRARY DEADLINE TO HIT
Look, sometimes you’re a very cool and very handsome newsletter writer, and supply chain problems get in between you and the comics you need to have in order to do your work. You could wait, you could delay, but you’re hard set into talking about the new releases of this week, and every other book stinks to high heaven. What are you supposed to do, not pirate a comic that you are going to buy later? You tell that to your beloved readership, to whom you owe a high-quality newsletter every single week! They will tear you apart!
YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE TO PAY FOR A FUCKING ERIK LARSEN COMIC
Are you kidding me? The guy stinks! Savage Dragon stinks! It’s a comic carried on cheap stunts! If you’re paying to read that, how do you not feel ripped off every single month? Sometimes comics just stink! Life is too short and money is too scarce! Paying for bad comics is for SUCKERS! And it’s not just Erik Larsen! You know who else stinks? Jason Aaron! Yeah! Have you even SEEN what he got up to in Heroes Reborn? Don’t pay for it, is all I’m saying! It’s not even out of spite or anything like that, it’s really just a matter of not wanting to pay for something that stinks. You don’t have to! Money is fake anyway! It’s all fake!
HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS: I WILL MAKE YOU PAY (BUT THE NEWSLETTER IS FREE)
The biggest compliment that I can write about Infinite Frontier #1, DC Comics’ follow-up to the line-changing one-shot we couldn’t help but love, is that, to the uninitiated, it will be complete fucking nonsense, beginning to end, almost to the point of self-parody. It is the best sort of capital-E capital-C Event Comic: the one where big stuff happens at every page turn, and where all the characters you love deal with so much world-shattering History that the book should really come with a suggested reading list. It is a comic that is gleefully throwing readers straight into the deep end of the pool, expecting them to either remember that Extant using the Worlogog to rewrite time was the setup for Zero Hour or to just pick up the essentials from context clues.
A comic that is that deep into big action and self-reference can only be incredibly well-served by the pencils of Xermanico, who already showed he could operate in that mode in the openly parodic Green Lantern: Blackstars. There’s nothing as outright laugh-out-loud funny as Bat-Manson in Infinite Frontier, but there is just about everything else, from the glorious return of Justice Incarnate to high-speed treks across the Known Multiverse, including a page where star color artist Romulo Fajardo Jr. gets to flex his ability to mimic coloring styles from across the history of comics. It’s beautiful and it’s epic at the same time.
If you started reading comics today, and this was your entry point, I think you would love it, it’s everything that is wild and cool about the medium in this particular form, and I can tell you from the vantage point of being slightly more experienced that the mysteries being teased in there as just as thrilling to me as they will no doubt be to you. It’s a very good shared touchstone, and that’s what you want from an event comic.
You should know what to expect when you pick up “a Batman book by Garth Ennis,” and, by golly, Batman: Reptilian #1 aims to be exactly that. Ennis’ contempt for all things costumed is beyond well-known, and the fact that it was still publicized ahead of this week’s release feels wholly unnecessary. It will not surprise you, based on what he’s said and his vast library of work, that Reptilian paints Batman as an overly-theatrical borderline fascist inflicting his brand of hyperviolence on the underprivileged of Gotham in pursuit of a child-like vision of morality, while the rich get away with everything their twisted minds can imagine. You wouldn’t want your Garth Ennis Batman any other way, and to be honest: I wouldn’t either.
The unexpected part of the equation comes once you learn that Batman: Reptilian is painted by the always-incredible Liam Sharp, fresh off his Green Lantern run and ready to blow minds once more. Working from a script originally meant for the eternal Steve Dillon, he accentuates Ennis’ subtext and stretches it to its extremes. In a dream-like fugue, the theatricality of all Batman stories turn the caped crusader into an impossibly operatic figure, stretching itself taller like a creature of nightmare, while his rogues gallery becomes grand-guignolesque caricatures poking one another in the eyes in deadly slapstick. There is danger afoot, but everyone seems too self-absorbed to do anything about it, and before you know it, there’s a shocking cliffhanger.
Garth Ennis has always been a maximalist kind of writer, and the artists working with him have always shown incredible skill in meeting him in kind. In going above and beyond, Liam Sharp exceeds this and brings out from Ennis something entirely new, which is incredibly exciting to see. In terms of sheer boldness, the only thing it recalls is the singular vision of Tim Burton’s two Batman movies, and it has them beat so handily that I would feel an urge to step it all the way up if, somehow, I was working on a comic set in the exact universe of these.
Al Ewing, ever-omnipresent fan-favorite Marvel Comics writer, was poised to have a great week. S.W.O.R.D. #6 is exactly the kind of game-changer issue it was advertised as, which is no small feat in the aftermath of Planet-Size X-Men (see last week’s newsletter!) and Guardians of the Galaxy #15 completes the tapestry of current goings-on in the Cosmic corner of Marvel with remarkable thrills. These are two great books, they manage to feel essential, they’re exciting, so it’s all gravy, right?
Well, it isn’t. There’s a third book. It’s called Gamma Flight #1, it is co-written by Ewing and Crystal Frasier, it is illustrated by Lan Medina, and it is none of these things. It is a spin-off from The Immortal Hulk, following the team of former Hulk hunters in a deadly game of mutated cat and mouse, on the run from the authorities while they seek the source of a whole mess of new gamma horrors. I cannot tell you why exactly it exists, and I don’t think it’s particularly good.
The problem isn’t Medina, who’s executing on every mode you’ve seen Joe Bennett pull in Hulk (hardcore body horror, big superhero action, and interpersonal drama) with better consistency and far less hate in his heart. It’s the script, which, when it’s not outright clumsy in its attempt to add pathos to the relationship between McGowan and Samson, just never really gets going. There’s some lovely stuff in there, likeable characters having fun interactions and all the like, but there’s nothing new or provocative in there, which wouldn’t be a problem if this wasn’t following in the footsteps of a book known for being new and provocative. There’s a big reveal, but this is more of a sideshow than anything.
Finally, here’s something just for me: it’s called Checkmate, it’s got cool people posturing at one another in as many beautiful and imaginative ways as Bendis and Maleev can pull off, rattling off intrigue and conspiracy like it’s running out of style, and I am a sucker for all of that. It helps that Event: Leviathan was the most fun I had reading an event comic in 2019. I will not apologize for any of it, not the slightly-too-self-satisfied dialogue, not the editorial inconsistencies, nothing. I don’t care. This is my bliss, and I will fight you if you try to take it away from me. I don’t have to explain myself.
And that is all for this week, gang! Took a little longer to get out than I expected because there was a lot of books to sift through, and I got caught-up in semi-virality with a tweet about how much Warren Ellis stinks! Ah well! That’s the life of an industry mover-slash-shaker! The only solution against it? Nose against the grindstone, do the work, and HUMBLE YOURSELF BEFORE COMICS!