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The New Guardians #1 - What Makes Bad Comics Happen?

Truly Awful Comics often grab our attention more strongly when talents we've seen deliver the goods in other contexts nonetheless fall completely flat on some project that, at best, consumers soon will forget, and, at worst, readers will remember and dread for decades.

The question arises, more often than it should: "Who came up with this stuff?" Or, a related, and similarly philosophical query: "Who dared imagine that someone somewhere - anyone, anywhere - wanted to read some unquestionably awful stuff like this?

After all, a number of forces push a comic from idea to printed reality. Sometimes someone will have a character that so inspires them that they will continue pitching the concept in various places until someone bites; Superman came to the world this way. Other times, the memory of some real or imagined high period of the medium will inspire material which either derives from an earlier style or continues the adventures of some character(s) or group that existed, however tenuously, in the printed matter of the past. Thus, we see titles like Defenders and JSA. And, in other cases, a coherent vision of a setting and concept will spawn material from pieces that may have earned a role in a comics canon; Universe X and The Kingdom owe to previously-published works that fit this pattern.

This leaves us to ask, in certain cases: 1) Who wanted to see this stuff enough to bring it to press? 2) Why did something so utterly hopeless ever manage to drive the imagination of anyone?, and 3) How could theoretically-sane and presumably-competent editors allow this one to get approval in the first place?

Sometimes we may never really get meaningful answer. We know that a comics crossover "event" called millennium happened, and someone made a pitch to DC to use some of the concepts derived therefrom in a title called The New Guardians. We know that Steve Englehart, Joe Staton, and, later, Cary Bates would contribute to this work. But none of this answers the three essential questions raised above.

The Central Premise

Without having read Millennium, I may have missed some subtle nuance of the circumstances that created the characters who compose the New Guardians, perhaps something that makes them significant and substantial. However, I doubt this. I suspect that the child - the book The New Guardians - shows a strong resemblance to its parent, the "Millennium" event.

We have, in the members of this team, a group of human(oid)s somehow considered to bear an improved genetic code superior enough to warrant giving them a mission to spread this genetic material through the ailing human race. Probably committee thinking came in here, because looking at the team roster, one sees maybe three of them who may actually have the power to breed, the female members of the team. For the males, we have 1) a sentient plant (to my knowledge, no human / plant mating has yet produced a viable hybrid offspring); 2) a gay brujo from Peru who, from the beginning, disavows any ability or intent to pass on his genes in any way understood to biology; and c) a man made of silicon chips (which strongly implies that the makeup of his body may include other ingredients than the chemical mix, particularly as regards his genetic material, which would prove cross-fertile with a human mother).

This across-the-board uselessness of the male half of the New Guardians for breeding strongly implicates a serious flaw in the design of the team. Nonetheless, a Guardian and a Zamoran, in an attempt to preserve humanity from extinction, assembled this group. The text of the story omits certain details, like what particular mixtures of strong liquors could have inspired this pair to invest such a hopeless team with such a pre-doomed mission, but nonetheless there we have it.

The Justice League, theoretically, exists with a mission to resist earth-threatening menaces with their cumulative firepower. The X-Men exist to protect and advance the cause of mutantkind. And the New Guardians exist to pass on their genes. Well, some of the new Guardians do - the ones who have human-compatible genes, and the ones who want to.

But we could go into more detail about the specific characters. Just don't expect anything to become more interesting, nor to make any more sense.

"Barney-Miller" Style Tokenism

I haven't seen a good delivery of a superhero group composed of superheroes from various nationalities and ethnicities since the New X-Men in 1974. This doesn't mean that the concept can't work, it just means that it usually doesn't. Such groups often involve characters reminding leaders, at every other verbal utterance, of their foreign or international definition. In real life, however, I don't recall anyone spouting lines like "I, as an Igbo from Nigeria, must go to the bathroom," or "It's time for me, a French-speaking Arab from north Africa, to go home for the day."

Nonetheless, Steve Englehart, perhaps as the heir to the intellectual properties resulting from whatever happened in "Millennium" (and nothing in New Guardians really tempts the reader to investigate the crossover event that spawned, or disgorged, this by-product), gave us at least two loathsome caricatures.

For sheer nuisance value, Jet must prevail, since characters with unusual speech patterns generally run the risk of annoying, and doubly so when writers attempt to work in dialects, and trebly so when this dialect treatment seems to involve little more than attempts at phonetic spelling rather than acquiring a knowledge of the cultural baggage that provides colorful dialects with their unique lexicon. Anyone, or almost anyone, after all, can seed a character's speech with "de" instead of "the" and end all sentences with "mon." It takes more - including, perhaps, subtlety - to make such linguistic patterns credible as dialogue.

Yet the limp-wristed caricature Extraño offers considerable opportunity to generate offense as well. To me, he seems like the sort of homosexual character someone would write who either hasn't had much day-to-day interaction with the gay Everyman out in the world, or like the sort of character someone would write because he feels the audience couldn't catch on to the homosexual aspect without frequent references to only one of the variety of components of character that define a personality. Take a flat character and make him gay, and all you have are the stereotypical attributes: loose, flowing garments; a somewhat insulting code name; unlikely speech patterns (thankfully, no one had the gall to make this character lisp); and not-exactly-funny demands by the character to have others call him "Auntie."

I really can't see any excuse for Extraño. By this I don't intend to say that gay superheroes don't belong in comics; but gay superheroes whose concept involves little more than a sexual inclination and a somewhat insulting handle to go with it (one could render the English pejorative label "queer" as Extraño with a slight semantic stretch, and obviously someone did).

Which leaves us the remaining members: Harbinger, who perhaps represents Anglo-America, though her origins do not connect her to more than outer space and the pre-Crisis multiverse; Ram, who tries to merge the image of a Japanese computer geek into a single, superheroic synthesis; Floro, who appropriates some of the conceptual baggage of the Floronic Man in his Swamp Thing interpretation, with all the smugness but none of the malice or insanity that made the latter villain interesting; and Gloss, the red-headed Chinese woman who serves as Designated Cleavage Provider, and, to a certain extent, team flirt. In this mix, theoretically, we somehow have the necessary biodiversity to preserve the human species through another millennium. Yet with this one Adam, these three Eves, and two no-shows, one could entertain serious doubts about the future of the species.

Even if we move beyond the one of these, one of those aspect of the casting, we still come up with nothing worthwhile: just a cluster of unpromising costumed adventurers left over from one (or more crossover events).

Characters generated for crossover events sometimes find meaningful existences in the greater world of comics outside. However, in other cases, such as Waverider, one sees no particular purpose for them beyond serving as visual reminders that a comic belongs in the category of "event books." Therefore the presence of Lyla, the servant/messenger/whatever from Crisis on Infinite Earths, seems neither compelling nor inevitable. Did some groundswell of fan demand for this character force DC to reintroduce her in another book? Or did they see her as a kind of anchor to connect new characters to the superhero establishment?

The Bad Dialogue

Sometimes Steve Englehart hits home runs and sometimes he strikes out. Given the context of this piece, within the domains of the "Truly Awful Comics" columns, one might deduce how I interpret New Guardians #1 and Englehart's delivery therein.

The dialogue in this piece begins with the kind of forced self-description one sees in faux-friendly business meetings, in therapy groups, and in some church counseling groups. It does not flow. It somewhat reads like what one might expect to see on a particularly long-winded name badge.

DC's editors may have acknowledged as much after New Guardians #1 appeared to clutter the shelves, since in #2, Cary Bates had taken over the dialog chores (and, indeed, the word balloons at that point became much less of an ordeal to read).

Some of the dreadfulness of the verbiage here may come from attempts to stretch the characters' utterances to serve more purposes than they should. A story should tell some things, and show some things; and, furthermore, writers can achieve exposition by a number of tools. However, the first few pages of this book involve characters laying all this down - unnaturally - in their conversation. And, unfortunately, too much of this conversation involved a high-level and abstract set of observations about the sexual inclinations and appetites of the principals.

The distaste this elicits comes from other channels than simple prudishness. Instead, consider instances where someone attempts, through their words, to invest himself with credentials of hipness by claiming to some achievement which (evidently) only he considers an achievement. For instance, in a recent Joe Kelly Superboy where Superman attempts to demonstrate his own coolness to Superboy by owning up to listening to metal albums. We sigh and shake our head at Superman's silliness, but here we might respond more appropriately not by shaking but by hanging our heads.

The Sexual Self-Gossip

Because Englehart makes us suffer through so much of it, we might do well to explore the issue of the persistent sexual self-gossip that bloats conversations into unnecessary ordeals.

As mentioned in the section above, a good story reveals information about characters in a variety of ways. It may show the reader things; it may uncover such details after whetting the reader's interest; it may set up situations where the reader can infer them by context.

However, having a cluster of dubiously-defined superheroes come together for no obvious reason and then discuss their sexual histories and appetites comes of surreal, and not in a way that entertains, nor inspires the imagination. Instead, in this piece, what we have is a dull and diluted session of sexual self-gossip that might result from some inept television producer attempting to recreate the Jerry Springer show, but with superheroes (and rather uninteresting ones at that).

These characters fail to realize the key element of what makes such talk inherently trifling. While the self-designated sexual athlete may have a severe streak of self-admiration, beyond this one-hero admiration society, few people actually care. Sexual adventurism and colorful lies about sexual history both represent tiresome kinds of bragging and do little for those who have to play audience to them. Where the braggart only appears as an imaginary character on a piece of paper, so we have something even more trivial and forgettable.

Also, one could claim that a reader must care about a character before he begins to care about whether that character enjoys a fulfilling sex life. Otherwise, the temptation to say "Come back when you have something interesting to talk about" begins to burn in the reader's breast.

Singles Bars and the Mission to Breed

This brings us back to the central mission of the New Guardians: to pass on their genes. Two of the New Guardians, Jet and Gloss, strike out on their own to pursue the crusade to propagate by going, in full costume, to some kind of dance bar. We can suspect a flaw in the premise of a comic when the characters go cruising for guys as a central and necessary task in the fulfillment of their superheroic purpose.

Having already weeded out the male half of their team, only two thirds of the remaining, female, contingent, seem interested in the eugenic aspect of their Overarching Purpose. Oddly enough, Harbinger, who perpetually grouses about her own sexual inexperience, does not care to seek enlightenment with her fellows. And the attrition rate continues, with Jet deciding to sulk in silence while Gloss finds herself a prospective partner.

After a venerable tradition of comic-book coincidences, she chooses as a (dance) partner a man intimately connected with the enemies of the team, a group of South Africa-connected white supremacists who resent the New Guardians' mission as the Last, Best Eugenic Hope when they feel that they (themselves) represent this hope after some 400 years of inbreeding down on the southern tip of the African continent.

The Inevitable White Supremacists

Sometimes the concerns of the modern day make for compelling reading. Other times they make for poor storytelling, with overused bogeymen providing more menace to the reader, who must endure another avalanche of cliches, than to the characters with whom they interact and whom, theoretically, they intend to menace.

Meaningful villains have, in general, at least some trait that allows writers to use sympathy as a hook that throws their character flaws into stronger relief, and, in addition, adds an element of tragedy. Goons, on the other hand, show up in order to stir up trouble and to provide something for heroes to beat on. We would not expect a writer of Englehart's sympathies to attempt to add a human angle to a loathsome owl-hoot like the goon pictured in the image, above, spouting race theory to his pet vampire. However, this means that we can expect no depth here, just a two-dimensional simplification of a man.

Flat characterization and unimaginative conception aside, however, the creative forces behind The New Guardians nonetheless intended an edifying function in their villains, if the examples provided in the first two issues provide adequate material from which to discern a pattern. The villains of the first issue represent groundless hatred and contagious disease; of the second, drug addiction and its consequences.

As avatars of a theoretical next phase of evolution, the New Guardians rightly need to contend with forces that hold humanity back. Nothing in this equation, however topical, requires empty villains that fail to grab the reader.

Vampires with AIDS

If, after reading this far in the treatment of this generally dreadful piece, you suspect that I may find in some corner of the work a point at which the affronts to aesthetics let up, now might provide an excellent moment for despair. For the central monster in this story remains of a piece with the dubious setting, the general lack of a meaningful mission ("find a stranger in a singles bar to get you pregnant" sounds somehow hollow), the flatness and pointlessness of the characters (whose crass concepts seem to provide the sole potential point of interest), and the USDA-approved All Around Rotten Dialogue.

We have, for a heavy, a vampire called "Hemogoblin," who seems to prefer eating valiant souls of richly African heritage above others. We could speculate that a) his vampirism may involve symptoms that force him into a specialized diet; b) he buys into the white supremacist blather that motivates his controllers and so-called allies; or c) he simply has more exotic tastes and finds food from northwestern European bloodlines hopelessly bland. Had he appeared a second time, we might have found an answer, but that assumes a further condition that anyone would care enough to analyze his behavior and deduce or adduce more information.

We have the given of a vampire directed to eat Jet - we can't really hope for him to succeed, but some glimmer of hope might incline those of us who read this piece to wish that she suffer some injury that might stop the endless stream of faux-West Indies dialect that pours out, unsolicited, from her mouth. Then again, I can't really conceive of an injury that wouldn't result in "Ouch, mon" or "He bit me in de abdomen, mon" every panel or so.

This vampire, having failed in some vaguely-defined mission to undermine the New Guardians, and thereby usher in a new age of Eugenics for Sunscreen Consumers, quietly died off-panel, in time for Tom (possibly Pieface from the Silver Age Green Lantern comics) to arrive and say that Hemogoblin's accelerated metabolism, combined with AIDS, caused him to die. This, after this sickly-faced goober had, more or less, planted his fangs in everyone, so the story can end with a cliffhanger.

Topical, or tawdry? This ending certainly instills a certain disgust, but one feels more inclined to cast an angry gaze at Steve Englehart than at the corpse of a terminally-ill vampire with delusions of racial adequacy. Also, from a story structure angle, this amounts to a rather poor cliffhanger: To answer the question it raises - "Have the New Guardians collectively contracted AIDS from the bite of a racially-motivated vampire?" - could take many blood tests and years of waiting to resolve.

I doubt that New Guardians could have endured, after a start this lame, long enough to answer the question. The book did continue with these themes, with at least one of their number developing the symptoms of a compromised immune system, but bad writing and bad design doomed this team long before any retrovirus infection came into play in an attempt to build pathos into an empty concept.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 242. Completed 23-Mar-2001.