It’s an impossible promise, of course. I’m reminded of a scene in the television show Criminal Minds in which Mandy Patinkin’s character informs a vigilante, “You can’t kill fast enough to keep up.”
It’s an impossible promise. But it’s a heroic one. Of a sort.
And yet, Fell is presented without the gloss of auctorial approval so often offered to protagonists who do morally muddy things. Even though Fell is a first-person point-of-view narrator (every scene we see, we see narrated from his perspective – sometimes literally, including one issue in which every single panel is a shot taken by him through the digital camera that is his constant companion), the narrative never stops being aware that some of what he does is not just questionable but reprehensible. That Fell’s actions can be understood as reprehensible and simultaneously as heroic is a peculiar gift or skill of Ellis’s.
It’s not just about the morally ambiguous hero: Those are common enough, after all. There’s something more going on here than the antihero, the gray-scale, the tarnished knight of the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler-influenced noir tradition.
Because Ellis also often gives us an inside view into horrible people doing horrible things. He’s perfectly capable of showing that without committing the error of either softening the edges of the evil or removing culpability, agency and motivation from the characters who perform it. His work is aware of the evil by which human beings so often exist, and more – he doesn’t glamorize it. He shows it as banal, and tawdry, and as narcissistic as it really is.
That he balances this with a similarly banal and nuanced and everyday heroism – and that he doesn’t glamorize or valorize the flaws of his protagonists – is, for me as a reader, the real core and draw of his work.
On the topic of the banality of heroism (and isn’t that an interesting concept? We hear so much about the banality of evil, or of pain, but it takes real art to demonstrate that heroism, too, is a quality of the ordinary human being – and that the two extremes can exist simultaneously inside the same skin, and, in fact, arise from the same root), let us consider another Ellis project, Global Frequency.
While Global Frequency has an apparent pair of central protagonists – the pseudonymous Miranda Zero and her human nerve and command center, Aleph – the narratives themselves revolve around a familiar trope: In each episode, a different team of carefully selected private citizen volunteers respond to some sort of superhuman-level crisis situation, usually caused by the machinations of some world government or another.
These agents are said to be “on the Global Frequency.” And Global Frequency itself is described as a “rescue organization.” It is multicultural, transnational, and completely apolitical. All it cares about... is saving the world. In some ways, it’s a modern outgrowth of a great fictional concept of the 1960s – the United Network Command For Law and Enforcement, fondly known to millions of television viewers the world over as the U.N.C.L.E.
But where U.N.C.L.E. was a quasi-governmental organization, Global Frequency is presented as ambiguous in its origins and sources. Obviously, there is money and technology behind it... and a great deal of both. Where that expertise and capital comes from is never established – but it’s pretty clearly not from the governments that, time and again, Global Frequency rescues from the consequences of their own hubris and folly.
These governments resent the Global Frequency... but they also need it, because when one of their ill-conceived experiments in transhuman power-mongering goes awry, somebody has to clean up the mess. It’s fairly clear that Global Frequency is a citizen agency – a nonprofit, of sorts. In a world without superheroes, it’s everyday human beings to whom that task falls.
As I said, it’s a familiar trope, but as Ellis works it, it’s also a rewarding one.
One of the things I love best about Global Frequency is how strongly it presents this human heroism as something latent in everyone. Global Frequency operatives appear in every ethnicity, sexual orientation, and level of neurotypicality. The world is as likely to be saved by an MIT computer scientist who doesn’t bother to pull off his zipper-mouthed bondage mask to engage in a little light hacking as by the true love of a lesbian operative for her civilian partner. Our heroes – the agents of the Global Frequency – include punks and police officers and contract killers and psychopathic Soviet assassins. They are scientists and spies, cat burglars and computer technicians.
And every one of them is ready to die in order to rescue the world from the people who are supposed to be protecting it. It’s a wonderfully subversive series, and it undermines and strips away the idea that only governments and corporations are powerful enough to have a positive impact on the fate of humanity.
Through this metaphor of world-saving, in other words, Ellis illustrates that personal responsibility – personal choice – does have an impact on reality for the better. It’s a powerful refutation of nihilism, couched – even as it is – in existentialist terms that deny the existence of an objective morality.
The subjective morality of the protagonists, this book says, is sufficient unto the decisions they must make. Even when those decisions are life-shattering, life-evolving. World-changing.
World-ending, potentially.
If subjective morality is all we have, if the tools at hand are what is offered – well, an ideal universe isn’t about to pop out of the shipping box any day soon. We work with what we have.
Sometimes, in fact, it’s the weapons themselves that save the day through their own self-sacrifice, because Ellis never forgets that his superhuman monsters were human once, themselves – and something made them monsters.
And he never forgets that it’s important that every human being see her or himself as a potential hero. Not the blonde, butt-chinned Hollywood hero – but a scarred ex-soldier, or a child, or a widowed detective, or a weedy mohawked genius punk with big tits. There are scenes in which one of Miranda Zero’s operatives charges into a crisis scene and deputizes everybody in sight. “You’re all on the Global Frequency now.”
All of you. Citizen operatives. Saving the world.
I think the thematic freight there is plainest in a single wonderful panel near the end of the issue entitled “The Run,” in which our protagonist for this particular episode – a parkour traceuse named Sita Patel – is climbing the outside of the London Eye to reach a terrorist armed with a biological weapon. A little subcontinental Indian girl, clutching her father’s hand, sees her – and cries out – “Daddy, look. Spider-Man’s a girl. And she’s just like us.”
She’s just like us. In Snowtown, in London, in New York, in Tokyo – anywhere we go. Spider-Man’s the everyman hero, the banal hero, the guy with a dayjob saving the world because it’s the right thing to do. And so is Sita Patel.
And she’s on the Global Frequency.
And if we’re honest with ourselves, so am I. And so are you.
Crush on a Superhero
Colleen Doran is an illustrator, film conceptual artist, cartoonist, and writer whose published works number in the hundreds. Her clients include The Walt Disney Company, Lucasfilm, Marvel Entertainment, DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, and many others.
I had a crush on Aquaman when I was a little girl.
I saw him in the 7-11 store, on the cover of a comic book, the King Arthur of the Seven Seas in goldfish colored hues. He was handsome and noble and ruled three-fourths of the Earth. What more could a girl want?
Aquaman cost twenty-five cents, which was the price of five recycled bottles. I spent hours scouring the gutters and trash bins fishing for cash so I could reel in the Aquacutie catch.
Lucky me found a pile of discarded comics under the school bleachers, and added them to my stash. Wrinkled and coverless, to me they were treasure... but Peter Parker as Spider-Man was not nearly as smoochtacular as Arthur Curry/Aquaman.
Then we moved away from the city, and my parents tossed my comic book hoard in the trash.
Oh, woe.
I didn’t see a comic book again for years. Our little town of 1,500 people didn’t even have a magazine stand at the local store.
I settled for Saturday morning cartoons. The Super Friends show restored Aquaman’s prime place in my Temple of Crushdom, and even though the writers did not seem to have a clue what to do with a super powered being who ruled most of the planet, he was still blonde and wore a shiny gold top, so I was content.
I eventually forgot comic books existed. The 7-11 stores stopped carrying them, and mom and pop stores went out of business everywhere. No newsstand carried comics anymore.
When I was 12 years old, I got a bad case of pneumonia. A friend of my dad dropped by with a huge box of comics for my entertainment. One shot of my old habit, and I was hooked again. Stories made with pictures, exciting images, cosmic turmoil, and romance!
However, this pile of mostly Marvel books had a darker, more intense sensibility than my old DC Comics. And the guys weren’t as cute.
Captain America had some sort of identity crises and became Nomad. Peter Parker was such a loser that no matter how many people he saved while wearing long johns, he couldn’t seem to get a decent apartment. Tony Stark as Iron Man was kind of a jerk. Comic books weren’t the colorful escapism I remembered as a very little girl, and none of these had really yummy guys in them. The men snarled a lot. I disliked the stack of Conan comics so much that I tossed them in the trash. Later, I found out they were incredibly valuable early issues drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith.
I wanted escapism, and bright colors, and fun, and cute boys to giggle over. I’d started reading comics just in time for them to become dark and gritty.
I’d had enough dark and gritty in real life already.
When I was a little girl, we lived in a small Southern city where black people could not marry white people without getting arrested.
I saw my first riot when I was six, on the steps of my elementary school. My father was a policeman. I ran to him in the middle of the fray shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” Someone was swinging a chain about, and blood spattered everywhere. Dad shouted, “Go home, Colleen! Go home!” I ducked and dodged my way out of the mess, and quietly walked home. I think I was in shock. Then I went to the bathroom and rinsed the blood out of my little navy sailor dress.
Even though my parents had once been homeless and were still very poor, my father risked his job by refusing to arrest a serviceman and his Asian wife for the crime of miscegenation. People used to shoot at our house, and die in our front yard.
So, I’d had enough of grim and gritty and snarling already.
In Marvel Comics, everybody snarled.
Aquaman was cute and he talked to fish. And he lived in a world where the good guys always won.
I wanted more Aquaman. But Aquaman didn’t have his own comic anymore. He was reduced to an also-ran in Adventure Comics, and a sidebar in Justice League, books to which I had no access except as a tantalizing glimpse in the ads of the few DC Comics I’d been given. The only way to get these treasures was to subscribe.
I developed an intense, temporary interest in babysitting. I’m sure this is why I have no children today. But I earned enough money to buy my first comic book subscription.
The Super Friends comic was dreadful, and I wrote the publisher to complain about the art. Even though I was only 12, I had ten people’s worth of opinions. DC Comics printed my letter and edited it to be far kinder than I remembered when I wrote it.
My dad popped a gasket when he saw I’d had a letter printed with my name and address in a public forum, certain 342 people he’d arrested were coming for the house. That didn’t happen. However, some pervert wrote me asking me for a pair of my panties, and a random convict asked me to be his pen pal.
I did not discuss these disturbing developments with my mom and dad because I really hated it when they were right. And I was afraid they’d make me stop reading comic books. I didn’t write any more letters to comics for a long time, but I got an early lesson in just how much unwelcome baggage goes along with being a girl comics fan.
While Super Friends the comic was bright and sparkly and cheerful, it also sucked. When you’re turning off 12-year-old girls who have hopeless crushes on comic characters, you’re doing it wrong. Super Friends got a mercy killing after a short run.
So, it was off to Adventure Comics and Justice League for me.
I read each issue over and over. I read them until their covers disintegrated. I drew pictures from them. I learned how to draw wonky knees, just like Jim Aparo, and plasticene hair, just like Dick Dillin.
I also learned that Aquaman was married, and went into a period of mourning. I’m pretty sure Aquaman was married even when I was a little girl, but I blotted the horror of being separated from my one true love from my mind. And I kept hoping his wife Mera would get hit by a bus. Or a sperm whale.
Comics ate up more and more of my time, and my parents fretted. I spent hours alone drawing and making up stories. Household infractions were punished by the removal of comic book privileges. My subscriptions were snatched from the mail and stored in my parents’ closet, where I was not permitted to read them for six solid months. I snuck in and read them anyway. Much tastier when the fruit was forbidden.
While avoiding real life by sneaking into my parents’ closet to read comics, real life crept into Aquaman’s tale. The real life comics problems I had once rejected, now riveted. Aquaman’s baby was slain by the villainous Black Manta, and I sobbed and sobbed. I sobbed so much that my folks came home to my swollen face and red eyes and thought I’d been beaten up in school.
Aquaman and his wife separated, and I felt genuinely sorry.
Over at Justice League, writer Steve Englehart pumped new life into the old franchise, bringing soap opera-ish elements and complicated multi-part storylines to the series. I loved all the little character touches: Aquaman ice skating, while the Atom perched on his shoulder. Such a nice break from saving the world.
But what really got my interest was a crossover epic featuring the Legion of Super-Heroes. It was my first introduction to this teen super group from the future, and I was dazzled by the myriad of funky costumes and wild powers. I was skeptical that any of these people were supposed to be teenagers, since they were all drawn to look aged 32, but that didn’t matter. I wanted more. And how to get more, living in the land of no-comics-except-by-subscription?
I ached for comics. I pined. I fretted.
Out with my parents scouring the flea markets for antiques, I spotted comics for sale at only 25 cents each. I bought everything I could afford. Tattered and torn, it didn’t matter.
By now, my parents glommed on to the fact that my interest in comics wasn’t a problem, and had some nifty side benefits: My drawings won awards. While in a bookstore, I found a flier for a science fiction convention where I displayed my art in a show for the first time. I sold every piece I had for sale and landed my first job for an advertising agency.
Now with cash, and old enough to drive a car, I went on a wild comic book buying tear. The only comic shop in the nearest city was a dive where my father had once confiscated child porn. I was forbidden to go there, so I went. The comics were displayed right next to the pneumatic women porn, and once some old guy next to me enjoyed himself a little too much. At first I thought he was having an asthma attack.
Undaunted by pervy customers and pervy old men who wrote asking for my used undies, I forged ahead. Nothing would keep me from my comics, and nothing would stop me from becoming a real cartoonist.
Now devoted to the Legion of Super-Heroes, I ditched the Aquababe for teen hottie Element Lad. He had a bag of character background angst, and curly blonde hair, and a really cool super power: the power to manipulate and change elements. That would make him even more powerful than Superman, IMHO, because he could just turn Superman into kryptonite. That is the sort of thing fangirls think about.
I gleefully shared my comics with my high school friends. I took them to drama club a
nd we read them backstage. I recall one memorable day when we all sat around reading the first issue of Dazzler. The book was ghastly, but we dove into it and did live readings, attracted to the idea that a superhero might also want to be an entertainer. Comics got passed around every class. It was subversive fun. We figured out a dozen ways to read them without being caught. Everyone from the quarterback to the cheerleader to the uber-nerd wanted a comic.
One day, my history teacher caught us and scornfully read The Defenders aloud in an attempt to shame us with its awful prose. A futile exercise considering the awful prose we had to listen to every time the principal read the daily announcements. No one was deterred from the comics.
I joined clubs and Amateur Press Associations (APAs). In the days before the Internet, fans could only communicate by mail, and APAs were gathering points for that mail. Usually limited to around 50 members, each member created their own zine, sent copies to a central mailer, and the copies were stapled, collated, and shipped to all 50 fans. Fandom wasn’t for anyone who had access to a computer, it was of necessity limited to people with intense dedication to obscure subject matter. It took hours, weeks, months to track down favorite comics, and the price on back issues skyrocketed. If you missed an important storyline, you either had to find someone who would trust you to read their own precious copies, or you had to pay through the nose to some comic store run by some guy who spent most of his time scorning you for being a girl and trying to talk you out of whatever it is you wanted to buy. While fans in fan clubs delighted in having girls around, fans running comic shops did not. Apparently our girl cooties devalued our cash.
Perhaps the comic shop of my teen years made a deliberate GIRLS GET OUT decision when he displayed the comics next to the Playboy.
After years of loving comics, buying every one I could find, spending countless hours drawing them, joining clubs, going to portfolio reviews and entering contests, the closer I got to pro-dom, the more resistance I encountered, and it was resistance I did not understand at all.
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 24