Remember when I said superhero comics shouldn’t lose their sense of wonder, because bad things happen? Well, um… yeah. Anyway, as you now know, Sue Dibny was brutally raped and murdered in a cheap shock tactic so manipulative it made me pine for the simple subtlety of The Passion of the Christ. What’s next? Maybe we’ll find out Sapphire Stagg’s a fecal freak and makes Metamorpho turn into thick viscous shit she can rub all over herself when she needs to get hot. Apparently, some people like wallowing in the stuff.
My first instinct was to tell DC to go fuck themselves, but a) I don’t want to punish a group of talented freelancers for DC’s misdeeds (so they’ve got me over a barrel there) and b) they’ve already fucked themselves in a number of ways. They’ve veered away from the relatively quaint “comics aren’t for kids anymore” territory and wandered into the barren wasteland known simply as “comics aren’t for kids… AT ALL.” The Ralph Dibny character is ruined forever, as you can’t be light-hearted silly detective guy after your wife was raped and murdered. One can see Ralph now, brooding and angry, viewing sex as nothing but brutal and ugly, stoically strangling criminals with his elongated dong. Am I trivializing rape with my inappropriate sex jokes? No more than DC did by using it as a shock tactic in a comic that’s just a huge publicity stunt in the first place (WHO LIVES? WHO DIES? THE DC UNIVERSE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN!).
The fact that they’d do this in a comic without a mature readers tag isn’t just tasteless, it’s flat-out senseless. But that nasty incident got me thinking about the relevance of sex in comics and how sex is rarely presented in a tender, loving way. The only incident I could think of was the Kraven’s Last Hunt arc (Wow… where do I go to turn in my elitist card?) when Peter dug himself out of his grave and went home to Mary Jane. They embrace and slowly descend from frame as they disappear from the page. OK, so it was implied, but maybe the implication of sex is the only way you can do a sincere display of sex as an act of love.
Most sex in comics is fairly tortured and ugly (Frank Miller and Howard Chaykin’s style, where sex often leads to death) or a little… off — for instance, in Watchmen, after Nite-Owl and Silk Spectre have their sexual encounter, it was more about the fetishistic design of superhero costumes than about two people sharing a connection (“Dan, was tonight good?… Did the costumes make it good?”). As a matter of fact, the sex dream Nite-Owl had about Twilight Lady and Silk Spectre finished with a nuclear blast, so sex is once again seen as a destructive force.
Why am I talking about superheroes and sex? Because, it seems superhero comics have always had a lot of hang-ups about sex. Superman is basically Clark Kent’s way of proving his virility, flying in the face of the impotence he feels as Clark. Batman has mommy issues. Wolverine’s a short, hairy dude who has sex with hot redheads not unlike Ron Jeremy. Does sex really have a place in mainstream superhero comics? In all seriousness, does knowing that Sue Storm likes to be on top really add anything to the character?
I understand how desperately superhero comics want to grow up, but the way they do reminds one of those child beauty pageants: it doesn’t look quite right, it makes you a little angry at times, and it’s sufficiently creepy. Is it really all that mature to show sex in such an adolescent manner? I don’t know. Maybe I’m way off base, here. Perhaps the supposed sedimentary make-up of the Thing’s dork is a question that seriously needs to be addressed.
Speaking of guys with sexual dysfunction…
THE WANG: THE BIG ONE
Stan Yan
Squidworks
$9.95
ISBN 0-9755041-1-8
Eugene Wang is an inveterate loser. He barely graduated college with a Philosophy degree. He works for a shady investment firm and is on his way to becoming Shelley “The Machine” Levine. His mother stole his girlfriend.
Yes. His mother stole his girlfriend.
The Wang, a continuation of Stan Yan’s On-Campus Crusader mini-comic, is a playfully crude, hilariously lewd story about a neurotic young man and his misadventures in the real world outside of college. The cover, which features a vibrator in a cleverly satirical packaging idea, was deemed unsuitable for publication in the Diamond Previews catalog and they chose to go with something less offensive like half naked women in spandex and whore-boots. Way to go, Diamond!
This book is a complete a breath of fresh air in a self-publishing market full of self-indulgence. An Asian American sex comedy, who’d have thunk it? It may not be a big deal to you, but to a very proud Asian male who celebrates Bruce Lee’s birthday, this is a huge. Asian men have been desexualized since the 1800′s, when the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Cable Law made it almost impossible for Chinese American men to find wives (Ah, Asian American History course that I audited and rarely attended, how I love thee!), and this book at least proves that we think about sex.
Eugene Wang is a revelation as a character — a nebbish, a coward, and highly likeable, he’s one of the few Asian comic characters who isn’t a ninja, Yakuza assassin, or a British woman trapped in the body of a Yakuza ninja assassin. He’s just an average Joe with girlfriend, mother, and job problems. In Eugene’s case, his three problems are inextricably linked, as one problem can’t be solved until the other two are. The resignation with which Eugene handles these should be disheartening, but Yan’s nimble comedic touch turns these situations into a laugh-out-loud tragedy.
Besides, who doesn’t like crass sex comedies? These types of stories move you at a basic human level and when they’re executed as effectively as The Wang, they’re downright entertaining. You may be a king or a street sweeper, but sooner or later, you will laugh out loud at a dick joke.
Stan Yan’s like an Asian-American Woody Allen, spewing psychosexual Freudian high jinks at a nervously feverish pace that is jarring, discomforting, and liberating at the same time. The stark black and whites in his art reminds one slightly of Jim Mahfood, but make no mistake about it; Yan’s a complete original. Chock full of sight gags, such as the very clever image of Eugene thinking of a brain being scraped across a washboard, while he’s at group therapy, his masterful rendering of uncomfortable situations is truly a sight to behold. These moments should elicit an uncomfortable chuckle, but I found myself giggling girlishly like Charlie Chan in one of those horribly racist movies I can’t force myself to dislike when everything tells me I should.
Even though I know how it ends, I’m pulling for Eugene Wang. I’m also pulling for Stan Yan who didn’t let the lack of a publisher stop him from getting his book in print, Diamond’s myopic sense of taste force him to stop promoting his book, and will most likely not let my jittery, self-referential review get in the way of his success.
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