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The "Why Did I Read This?" Feeling

Sometimes bad comics immediately cue the reader concerning the form and method of badness. They might crassly overindulge in some component that can do more with less, such as gore (such as in Bloodstrike #5. They might numbly glorify or collude with great wrongs done to characters (as in examples here or here). They might evoke an unpleasant aftertaste with needless ugliness (as this one). Or they might play to morbid sentimentality over imaginary personal crises that make little sense within or without the context of the tale (this one).

Other times, the clarity of a book's fundamental failure to entertain does not accompany a particular understanding of how it fails to do so. Nonetheless, where a reader encounters the "Why Did I Read This?" feeling - especially before even finishing the book - we can suspect the presence of a Truly Awful Comic, notwithstanding the inability to categorize the failings that earned it the title.

Badness doesn't necessarily require dim-witted writing or horrendous art; occasionally, it can accompany an understated humor and art of almost any quality. Yet when the overall piece fails - when scenes with a cyborg mutant stands musing and drinking coffee hold the attention as well as the big rumbles in the streets - we then experience the overall failure of a story as a whole. And where a comic fails in all its attempted hooks, scenes, and effects, we again might diagnose a piece as a membership in the brotherhood of the Awful.

Marvel Comics UK made a winner with Death's Head II #5 from 1993, a piece by writer Dan Abnett and artists Dell Barras and Liam Sharp, who came together to prove that not all grapes make wine worth drinking.

A Story, or Something

Our tale begins with Death's Head (assuming this serves as his name) kvetching about his unhappy circumstances before dropping the aside to show a two-page splash of our hero fighting some alien goober who needed to wear more - not just clothing, but tissues to cover his naked rib cage and crawly exposed organs (no, not that kind of organ).

Death's Head and the alien goober, then, plough through some historical London scenery until our hero topples a pillar with a statue of an admiral on it (Nelson?) and crunches his enemy into nothingness.

The scene then cuts away to elsewhere, showing culties in a cave plotting, then some captions explain that a world, like an ecosystem, can produce antibodies against foreign intrusions, creating perfect antagonists to confront an infection. Then the scene cuts to a discussion amongst members of the "MyS-Tech Board," who plot and hint. Then the scene cuts to something that looks like a typical Marvel Comics diabolical power - a la Mephisto - gutting British truckers.

Whereupon we find our hero wandering around London, noting the panic of crowds, until he grabs a bystander and compels him to explain what has induced the panic in the mob, and a duplicate of Death's Head (II), with an inverted color scheme and a diminished vocabulary, starts butting heads with him. The two fight for pages, until our hero pounds his duplicate through the pavement and into the subway system.

By the next page, of course, the duplicate Death's Head (II) starts glowing and returns to the Earth or unEarth that spawned him, and a small group of culties somewhere (Irrelevantham?) note some kind of power surge somewhere, as if the dynamic of the world has to change when duplicate Death's Heads (II) come and go.

This leaves our hero somewhere in a diner, pouring cream into his tea until he hears a noise, steps outside, and sees three normal humans - evidently ones he knows - floating towards him and saying menacing things about destroying him. They have big guns. And the story ends.

Any one of these pieces could have served well to build the story. But they don't. It flies as well as a cast-iron paper plane might. And it fails for a number of flaws discernible to the scrupulous observer, detailed in the sections following.

A Hero No One Can Care About

Readers want to care about the hero of a comics story, regardless of form or genre. Perhaps they wish him to fulfill himself through achieving his goals (if he has any). Perhaps they want him to suffer for crimes or faults of character. Where a comic leaves the reader utterly indifferent to a hero and his sufferings, we can assume that it has failed in a major particular.

A vaguely British extraterrestrial cyborg with a face that looks like a biker's belt buckle, in spite of his self-effacing ways and gentle humor, can provide a storyteller with certain difficulties in allowing readers to relate to the character. Readers can overcome the extraterrestrial barrier when this feature does not make the character too foreign-seeming (for instance, DC's Superman, for whatever reason, had physical attributes allowing him to pass for a native of small-town rural Kansas in spite of coming from an altogether different planet). Nor need the presence of numerous mechanical prostheses of sufficient sophistication to warrant the label "cyborg" for our hero alienate the reader.

Action Figures in the Making

While I don't inherently reject especially ugly comics characters - the ugliness of a comics character can provide considerable charm, in the same way that the ugliness of a dog can - some kinds of ugliness tend to raise alarm bells. In the case of the main bruisers presented here in Death's Head II, the evil(e) appearance of our fist-flinging stalwarts seems to serve a marketing purpose.

Death's head, and his exposed-rib-cage enemy here, seem to enjoy principles of visual design better suited for six-inch action figures than for pencil-and-ink rendered superheroes and supervillains. And even under the action figure test, their looks seem more likely derived from a no-name off-brand one would find in great heaps at the dollar store, based on a combination of Alien movies, biker tattoos, and whatever colors of plastics didn't seem to sell particularly well at Celanese Plastics.

The "bigger, uglier, and more absurd means better" school had a lot to say in the design of heroes and critters for this title, with elements of the emergent Image Comics style, Iron Maiden posters, and sketches on a high school textbook cover all vying for dominance in his visual treatment. Somewhere, back in the sixties, some observer of the medium noticed the weirdness of some of Marvel Comics' creations, decided to proclaim this a virtue in and of itself, and started a ball rolling to generate bigger! and uglier! and more extreme! heroes, which, by the early 1990s, frequently had very little of the "hero next door" about them.

A Look-Alike Story in the First Arc

Look-alike stories generally indicate trouble, even in mature franchises and in the middle of runs by talent with some idea of how to handle the material. Perhaps some aesthetically-minded people of the future will eventually pass much-needed legislation to outlaw the look-alike story forever, but until this happens, at least back-seat editors, amateur comics journalists on the web, and dedicated kvetchniks will enjoy the guilty pleasure of calling comics pros to task when they fail to resist the temptation to haul out the evil-twin chestnut.

The earlier a comics franchise trots out the cobwebby and worm-eaten evil double tale, the more indication that the ideas have run out. In some instances, indeed, we can interpret the appearance of the duplicate as a villain as an indicator that the writer got sick and an understudy pulled a story out of the file-card box labeled "Stories too lame to ever use." We often see these as filler in otherwise healthy franchises. In the first dozen issues of a comic, they strongly implicate the possibility that the whole comic never used anything but file cards from this source.

Furthermore, the question "Why would a secret twin exist?" suggests, to me, another - and possibly dangerous to a tenuous comics concept - question that I couldn't really answer either: "Why does the evil twin's prototype exist?"

Grasping at Intrigue

A little bit of conspiracy, some may think, can instantly add substance and depth to a story. One need only cut away either to darkened figures in a smoky office vaguely alluding to some Ominous Secret Master Plan or show some heroic lawyer / detective / mole discussing his / her findings with interested parties.

However, not all conspiracies amount to much. For instance, although this comic does break to interject a scene with a few characters without chromium-plastic heads discussing the Evil to Come, one could glean from the context that the likely outcome of the success of this conspiracy will involve the hero having to fight with some more things.

We can deduce, at this point, that our extraterrestrial stalwart will then have to fight a) something that looks like him, b) something that doesn't look like him but which he has fought before (such as the action figure archetype in the panel way above), or c) something that doesn't look like him and he hasn't fought before.

In short, the grand overarching scheme just serves as a means to set up the next round of fight scenes. This, and the general dulling of conspiracy as a means to build interest after decades of overuse, mean that our scheming scoundrels enjoy the same kind of terror-inducing impact as a cup of warm water.

The Cumulative Effect on the Psyche

I won't claim that reading this comic damaged my mind. Given the stuff I've read since I learned how way back in 1969, to claim this comic made a dent in my ability to think or feel would resemble claiming that someone who dropped a cigarette butt on the radioactive Chernobyl grounds had messed the whole place up. In both cases, the scale minimizes the possible impact.

However, in the very short run and very local sense, this work did affect me. It consumed energy as I tried to enjoy the story and couldn't; as I tried to like the hero, and couldn't make myself care whether the bad guys - both the inside-out alien thing and the inverted-color-scheme duplicate - pounded the innards out of the hero (in fact, at points I wondered what this would look like: Would they pound out drippy muscle and organ tissues, or wires and microelectronics?). Nor could the conspiracy elements in one short interlude in the book reach me, coming from the few human characters who suggested a doom overhung their world.

Let it hang, I said - in fact, let them all hang.

Through various attempts to read this piece all the way through, the question "Why read this?" kept hammering me. I could get through a few pages, and then would turn to avoidance behaviors like doing a few dishes to get away from the immediate prospect of reading further. And each time I picked up the book, I tended to read less before I found something more compelling towards which to direct my attention.

It would take a weekend and cabin fever and a spasm of obstinacy ultimately to get me through it. And, once having finished the work, that "Why did I read this?" feeling hung (albeit lightly) on my shoulders; I wanted some of the time I spent reading it back, maybe to investigate other bad comics whose badness involved more entertainment through a kind of aesthetically sadomasochistic appeal.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 232. Completed 02-MAR-2001.