Once again eager blogwatchers thinking I'll be posting the porn I'm supposed to be drawing at the minute are disappointed by random sketches of brain-farts rendered only to keep things nice and clean so Blogger feels no need to ban my arse. Although if you actually know who Sailor Moon is, there's probably a narrow but Rule 34-affirming strand of fanfiction that blends her and Spidey for some pseudo-bukkake action involving the latter's web shooters, and if I had half an ounce of sense I would discard the small but persistent measure of decency and restraint I possess and draw it and charge for prints. Seriously, go to Deviantart and search for random fetish terms, chances are someone's commissioned something along those lines from that site's users. Always an option if this graphic novel lark comes to nowt, I guess...
Been reading Colsmi's great blog about 2000ad of late and it's made me think there's nothing wrong with a bit of overthinking, so I thought I'd put down my two pennies' worth why - even though his post Brand New Day tales have been entertaining - I don't like Spider-Man and think he's a dickhead.
One of the Marvel universe's most beloved conceits is its ability to have characters be in some way defined by flaws as much as their superpowers, and Peter parker is flawed from his first appearance where he's the shy kid who gets picked on, gets some powers, then basically tells the world to fuck itself hard because he's gonna get him some poontang and benjamins and don't owe nobody nothin'. He has powers, but he isn't going to use them for any noble purpose - he probably swings by burning orphanages without helping just after he became a superhuman, he's that kind of A-hole and total dick until his uncle gets shot, after which Pete suddenly feels he should "contribute to the betterment of society" using the only language a bullied kid understands - he beats people up and mocks them as he does so in order to make them feel insecure to the point they hate him and thus continue a cycle of violence and enmity that would most likely have burned out if the villain had managed to get away with that loot from the bank robbery and retired to Hawaii like they'd planned - there are a lot of Spider-Man villains who really, really hate Spidey and do what they do as much to get to him as to make themselves rich, cure their mutated conditions or Take Over The World, and as for the odd story where he struggles with powerful opponents who initially best him before his coming back in the last act to trounce them, those can be reduced to Spidey basically being upset because he's found someone he can't beat up.
Spider-Man is a story where the bullied kid not only becomes the bully and we're supposed to applaud, but a story where violence begets violence and happiness is fleeting and ultimately unattainable because even when Spidey goes through hell for something or someone he holds dear, when he finally starts to give back by becoming an educator and showing his face to the world instead of hiding behind a mask, he'll just sell it all to the devil in the end so that he can regress back to being a bully again, living the life of a mooching wastrel and contributing nothing.
Don't get me wrong, we're rarely in doubt about certain people needing kicked in the face, but Spidey takes pleasure in doing so, antagonises his victims unnecessarily, and at the end of the day, after he's wound them up something rotten, it's the faceless, nameless inhabitants of the world he occupies who end up paying the price when they fulfill their only purpose in existing in the Marvel universe by becoming a bodycount. Ben Parker and Gwen Stacy die and it's a tragedy that scars his soul, but the thousands of others sent to their maker fail to register beyond the tale's end and the villain will do it all again when he breaks out of prison because in not even having the courage to kill someone like Carnage - whose entire deal is that he murders people because he can - Spidey has basically put his own sense of morality before the actual lives of other people. You're either making the tough decisions and taking the safety of others into your own hands or you aren't, dude.
You're a grade-A wanker, Spider-Man, and I've never liked you. Well, maybe when Erik Larson was drawing you. You were fun then.
Friday, 18 September 2009
Still redrawing the sample pages of the GN, as they were the wrong resolution and dimensions - D'oh! Remarkable how crisp lines and a chance to fix some SHOCKINGLY POOR ANATOMY (that luckily didn't sink the submission) can keep me happy enough redrawing pages I thought I was done with.
Thoughts on rewatching Smallville season, 1 which I have on in the background to keep me amused while I scribble:
1) I'm struck by the generic 'menace of the week' format and lack of glaring story-arcs, but it seems to suit the format, not least because it doesn't make the show seem inaccessible and up its own ass like current seasons, which seem to start every installment with stuff exploding and people shouting even though most of this has little bearing on the actual plot of the episode that follows. 2) I was once asked by a younger family member of Clark/Lex "why are they friends?" and I had no answer then just as I have none now. For the most part it seems to be barely-sublimated attraction tinged with a bit of frisson created by neither character trusting the other, and this is slightly troubling because of how likable Michael Rosenbaum is in the role of Lex Luthor: despite later turning into a sneering panto queen before the character was killed-off Ernst Blofeld style in an exploding truck, you really get a vibe off the guy that he's trying to be a better man than his dad, and despite knowing metatextually how the Clark/Lex dynamic plays out in lore, there's no indication of Lex actually being evil within the confines of the Smallville show itself, he just seems to come from a bad home but is trying to be a good guy by fixing the damage his massive asshole of a father caused to a rural farming community. So when Pa Kent gives Lex the evil eye in early appearances, it's baffling to see that behavior from someone held up by the main cast as being a paragon of heartland American values, unless you're willing to stretch the homoerotic attraction subtext to read Pa's hostility as a dislike of what he sees as a growing attraction between his son and another man, but that would make Pa more than a little unlikeable, and he really doesn't need any more fuel for that fire, because one of the main things that struck me about early Smallville was that
3) Pa Kent is a self-righteous, sanctimonious prick. I don't just mean because he hates gays - though that doesn't help - but because he really is a stifling presence best summed up when he goes to one of Clark's football games after telling the boy that he didn't trust his son around other kids. Clark makes an effort to reach out to his dad by telling him that he's glad his father is there to see him play, only to be rebuffed with "I don't support your decision, I'm just here to see no-one gets hurt" in much the same way Dewey Cox's dad tells him that the wrong son died. 4) Clark isn't much of a hero. I don't mean because he doesn't have a costume or get into fights, but because he has to be guilted into acting by believing himself responsible for the deaths caused in the meteor storm that bore his starship to Earth from doomed Krypton. Before this, he's basically "fuck those armed robbers and that baby that's dying in a crackhouse fire - my dad wants me to hang at the farm" which is just bullshit. Superman can help people so he does: that's what makes him not only a hero in a long-running series of funnybooks, but in popular culture as the ideal American, acting out of good conscience rather than a guilty one, with nothing to gain and no guilty secrets to keep at bay with bravado and funny quips. In other words, the antithesis of that cocksucker Spider-Man, who I've never cared for and don't give a toss that the Devil showed up and gave a divorce in a comic one time that fans are still bitching about.
Watching: Smallville Reading: Scott Pilgrim 3, X-Factor, Batman and Robin Listening: player on shuffle Playing: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel
