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Night of the Living "Truly Awful Comic"

This feature has languished a bit, and some of that remains my own personal shame. However, to some extent, this feature requires a special kind of research, and occasionally a helping hand as well. So thanks and kudos to Brad Bankston of Austin Books for recommending to me this particular entry in the canon of Truly Awful Comics. His wisdom did much to keep this feature from going a full year without an update.

The whole process began with a question, when I asked myself, "How can I find Truly Awful Comics?" I had, in a moment of ill-considered priggery, destroyed two that would well have contributed to this feature, including Secret Wars II #1 and some no-name black-and-white comic featuring armed rapist-murderers preying on the ruins of a fallen civilization (which fall, I would suspect, derives from the presence of just such rapesploitation books). After I fed the two of these books to my Atlas Mercato Pasta Maker - a fine substitute for a conventional document shredder, in a pinch - I felt satisfied with myself and resolved to exercise more caution when fishing in the ten-cent bin at Half Price Books.

Having blown two opportunities, few new ones presented themselves so readily, and, even when I sought actively to locate equivalently awful pieces none turned up. Therefore I humbly asked my local comics merchant to recommend to me the worst item he could identify.

With little more than a moment's hesitation, he selected Spider-Woman.

The Culprits

As in previous cases, the credits of this work implicate talents whose work in other contexts frequently impresses me. John Byrne wrote this atrocious piece, and Bart Sears did breakdowns for the art. Sears remains mostly blameless here unless one chooses to consider that pride should guide responsible talents away from awfulness, unless they seek awfulness as their goal (as once did movie maker John Waters).

I don't like to criticize John Byrne. I don't consider his more recent work up to his best period, between 1979 - 1983, but still enjoy his art. I know he can write, at least when he respects the subject matter. I find pieces like Generations and other Elseworlds pieces of his entertaining. On the other hand, I have to give him due credit here: He has written a stinker. I understand what brought on the cancellation of Spider-Woman (with #18) and possibly also why Marvel disinvited him to continue writing Incredible Hulk.

The Awfulness Erupts

Look at the cover of Spider-Woman #16 and already you have some insight into what lies in store: crass, ugly, pointlessness that bursts from the page in the same way that Spider-Woman, and a few quarts of nasty green sputum, erupt from the slavering gullet of the ugly on the art.

The aesthetic qualities of copious green vomit have improved little since Linda Blair made such unpleasant matter a national phenomenon decades - almost a generation - ago in "The Exorcist." Comics, however, have become more dulled in their sensibilities. Folks who might have gone to school with the grandchildren of Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Julius Schwartz now run the show, and sometimes the comics make this far too clear.

While comics covers do not always adequately inform a prospective reader about what the books contain - covers can deceive, and during much of the history of the industry one could argue that the cover existed as a mechanism for bait-and-switch, with first-tier talent selling the outside to unsuspecting readers who would discover the fourth-tier talent on the inside when they got the books home. However, in this case, the cover represents the essence of one of the things the reader can expect inside.

If you won't enjoy a story about someone ejecting Spider-Woman from her stomach in one messy and emetic spasm, then, you could count on disliking this particular tale.

The Case for the Prosecution

It took some time - over a day - for me to muster the free time and courage simultaneously which I needed to explore what lay within these comics. To some extent, Mister Bankston did provide me with a summary - but I expected, somewhat, the awfulness of the book to recede as I approached it, as some subjective phenomena that others might point out tend to do.

I read the books, and it will take a lot to make me question the honorable Mr. B's judgment in the future.

In essence, the story works this way. Spider-Woman, at some point previous to the two issues described in this column, has encountered feuding villainesses "Flesh" and "Bone" (one would expect paired characters to enjoy the name "Skin" and "Bone," but the X-books may have included some character named "Skin" among their millions of superfluous mutants in time to preempt the handle). "Flesh" seems to lack a skeleton and survives by engulfing and assimilating victims. "Bone," on the other hand, possesses just the sort of structure that "Flesh" lacks, plus a nimbus of flames and big buggy eyeballs.

These encounters ultimately result(ed) in Flesh, and a married pair of witches in matching ensembles (including chastity belts), taking Spider-Woman prisoner and sewing her up inside of Flesh's baggy form, since Flesh must absorb young women to survive.

This, then, brings the reader to the inevitable conceit of the exposition scene, which, formalistically, involves a villain or villains explaining causes and origins, in the necessary detail, to the captured hero, for the benefit of the reader.

So we find Flesh and Bone once enjoyed a more human aspect as identical twin supermodels tyrannized by a helpless yet domineering sister who, instead of enjoying their bony and almost anorectic beauty, had inflated like one of those people sometimes featured on morning talk shows after becoming so fat that they can no longer walk or pass through doors.

The sisters, noting what has become of their larger sibling, suffer obsessions about the prospect of obesity, and travel to various doctors in order to find ways to lose weight they don't actually have on their bodies (which, to observe the art, probably have only skin, bone, and saline implants). Medical ethics keep causing this duo problems, as the professionals they visit don't really intend to provide weight loss services to underweight young women.

Having failed to get what they want - and muttering about a doom which overshadows them (the bloated character of their missing third sister), they return to visit said sister, who rants about how they conspire against her, then stands up to threaten them, has a heart attack, keels over, and drops dead.

Neither sister seems overly troubled over the death; one might better describe them as relieved. Nonetheless, they both fear her doom and visit a witch, who describes to them a process whereby they can avert the fortune their departed sister just suffered. They follow instructions, and wake up the next morning changed, which brings the reader - with that headachy, nauseous feeling typical to some kinds of extreme dehydration, with hangovers, and with reading really bad comics - mostly to the present. One sister has lost her skeleton and has become a big sack of flaccid skin; the other has become a flaming skeleton; and, at first, Flesh could swallow Bone and the two of them would form a single female body indistinguishable from the original sisters.

At some point, however, it didn't work out, as this story had mostly failed to from its inception. The sisters must have failed to get along, and now Flesh must capture and absorb victims.

The Superheroic Side of Eating Disorders

Art need not shy away from controversy. Art, indeed, can make a simple or addled slogan become an eloquent tale that moves the inner selves of persons otherwise disinclined to credit the idea that lies behind it.

On the other hand, a topical theme does not suffice to convert dung into roses. The test of the nose will convey the truth to the observer, however much he may wish to believe that, owing to a few petals distributed here and there, he holds flowers instead of fertilizer.

So, even if John Byrne intended with this piece to say something about themes close to the hearts of many - for instance, how the ethic of beauty per se entraps females and consumes their potential in the pursuit of a trivial and ephemeral property - we do not here have a message to rival the "comix that give a damn" of the heyday of Green Lantern / Green Arrow. Nor does the tale's exploration of themes of eating disorders and dysfunctional families offer wisdom or hope to anyone in particular - rather, the treatment seems more to suggest an especially pointless episode of the "Jerry Springer Show", perhaps as that show might run should Mister Springer include superheroes and supervillains among his guests.

What Makes This Piece Awful?

Let's leave, for a moment, the notion that Byrne can do better and that Sears should demand gigs where the story does not affront his own abilities. What, in the absence of the notion that the guilty parties can produce better material, justifies the claim that, in Spider-Woman #16-#17, we have encountered a Truly Awful Comic?

We might begin with the flatness of all characters involved. The issues of sibling rivalry, dysfunctional households, and female captivity to the demands of the cult of beauty (and its attendant risk to subjugate women to psychological problems that manifest as eating disorders) all could provide a backdrop to bring out the salient features of the personalities of the principal players. However, to do this, such personalities must exist. A few readings of both pieces of this story do not, to me, suggest that any such personality or personalities exist to find.

Moving from this concept, we can explore the intersection of seemingly-random elements to produce a picture that fails to resonate with particular themes. We have twin supermodels made monstrous. We have the dysfunctional family bit. We even have a pair of witches, evidently male and female, clad in matching swallowtail jackets, eighteenth century hats, and chastity belts. Does any of this point in any particular direction? If it does, Byrne has discovered a subtlety of approach lost on the likes of this observer. From this side of the book - as a consumer, rather than a producer - all this seems like an incoherent mish-mash of unconnected concepts, perhaps in a failed attempt to create a tone or style (much as Joe Simon, in the early seventies, strove to create absurdist visions on a scope with those of his colleague Jack Kirby).

But even then, let us ignore the cardboard-cutout characters and the impossibility of focusing from the elements of the story to a larger picture. The overall ugliness of this picture - the thong-clad witches, the vomiting Flesh, the flashbacks to family arguments, the casual violence to no particular end, the vampirism inherent in sewing Spider-Woman up into a being made only of skin and appetite, and the ugliness of the consumptive curse laid upon Spider-Woman as the cliff hanger of the second episode of this piece - all of these things deserve the label ugly in a way that does not have any particular point. The ugliness does not educate or edify the reader; the ugliness furthermore fails to entertain; and the ugliness does not serve as an element of some new style that the artist and writer hope to create. Instead, we see here the grotesquerie of a piece made unpleasant possibly because someone felt an ugly page meant more than an empty one.

The Wisdom of the Marketplace?

In the light of the cancellation of my favorite DC title, the Peyer and Morales Hourman, I don't truly feel like commending the wisdom of the marketplace, nor the "invisible hand" that, in capitalist theory, serves to connect rewards to products and services that most deserve them. I can't honestly say that I believe quality, as I choose to define it, will succeed in the marketplace.

We find more credibility, however, in the converse notion, that bad things will tend less to thrive than to perish when subjected to the rigorous demands of a picky consumer who can opt to vote elsewhere with his wallet. The cancellation of Spider-Woman, given the contents of issues #16 and #17, does not particularly surprise me.

After all, I can hardly imagine someone out there, breathlessly hoping, that someday someone will create this story. So this book rots on the shelves, and another Marvel title lands on the ash heap of Canceled Comics History.