What would the Hulk do?

When I was a wee lad I tried to order Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing on inter library loan from my local library.  They came back and told me that “it wasn’t in good enough condition” to be lent.  I would later discover that Saga of the Swamp Thing was “mature readers” and that they probably thought my nine year old self would be warped in some way if I read the Anatomy Lesson, which is the story in which Moore revealed that (gasp) Alec Holland wasn’t really the Swamp Thing, the Swamp Thing was a collection of plants that thought they were Alec Holland.  And there was blood and guts and incest and stuff.  It’s hard for me to decide now whether they were right or not to do that, because a couple of years later I was buying Shadows from the newsagent which had a Grant Morrison Hellblazer story in which people are driven mad, and a man digs out his sheepdog’s eyes with a spoon and then his own.  And someone else is castrated (we don’t see these things happening, just the aftermath in the case of the first, with eyeballs on the tabletop and the lead-up in the latter, where people walk into a room with a knife and a sharpening stone).  It also had Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid story which fascinated me as a boy because of the bits that weren’t fantastic.  Phil and Susan as kids playing house, and the beginning with Black Orchid in disguise, and when her rubber mask is taken off, she’s wearing her costume underneath.  Shadows folded before the story could be completed, and when I finally read the conclusion I was underwhelmed by an open-ended conclusion where a Black Orchid and her clone, robbed of the distinctive design of the costume, disappear into the forests.  (Gaiman’s endings are always weak, like he just sort of stops writing, but could go on a while longer.  Compare it with the ending of Halo Jones Book 3, something I also read around the age of 10, where Halo casually murders her lover and then runs away in his personal spaceship, after all the tortures of being a soldier in a hopeless war.  Everybody read Halo Jones.)

My mother, when I had a long bout of insomnia as we moved and which looking back was no doubt brought about by a fairly heavy trauma of losing all my friends and being then isolated in the middle of a forest, told me it was down to the comics I read.  Probably this was brought about by me asking her to pick up Judge Dredd/Batman: Judgment in Gotham, in which Simon Bisley goes mad in displaying Judge Death’s capacity for murder.  It was a bout of insomnia that I think also ruined my eyes.  But the fact was that the comics weren’t the problem.  The comics presented a world that was, if nothing else, bound to end well.  There was an issue of Doom Patrol I picked up, in which characters talked about dying their pubic hair green and there were men with skulls for heads that was a little too weird for my imaginative self, but generally John Byrne Superman stories and issues of Excalibur and X-Men were a salve, because here were people to look up to.

And that was what I was looking for.  Interaction with intelligent funny people, not with crass, ignorant children.  The monsters they fought weren’t to be feared because those monsters were the things that I had to fight.  If Peter Parker kept trying, being a brainy nerd and always being beaten up, and he managed to get girls and save the day, then so could I.  Kurt Wagner, similarly, was someone I aspired to be like.

(I should point out I never noticed things like the way women were drawn.  Someone looked at a comic I was reading, I think it was an issue of New Men, an underrated rip off of X-Men, and commented on the size of a female character’s breasts.  And I hadn’t really noticed until he said.  But then, I had no way of making a comparison.  And the men were drawn in a similar overblown way.  Nowadays it’s slightly more obvious to me but I write it off as part of the shorthand.  It’s like drawing long eyelashes and big lips to make it more obvious that a character is female.)

Nowadays looking up to heroes is difficult.  The writers nowadays have a way of dirtying characters up.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed but a lot of writers in television and comics inject a lot of sex into everything and force women to be sex objects, in a supposedly ironic way, but there’s little ironic about it.  They use terms I don’t understand, and have to look up and then wish I hadn’t looked up.  But what’s worse is they don’t think big enough.  Alan Moore routinely writes his stories as an expression of what life is.  He undoubtedly inspired the work of Neal Stephenson in this.  He shows violence for what it is, doesn’t glorify it.  (Oh how I hope they reprint his Miracleman/Marvelman stuff so I can talk to other people about it.)  A lot of writers nowadays take a Tarantino kind of joy in their violence.  They took the graphic representation Moore, amongst others, brought to comics, but they didn’t see the morality behind it.

I can’t respect Mal Reynolds when he kicks a man into a spaceship turbine, but I can when he won’t take advantage of Christina Hendricks.  I can’t feel that a Captain America who uses a gun is someone to look up to or a Superman who spies on Lois Lane.  Superman!  Superman is goodness personified, don’t sully that.

Moral integrity is something that should be valued.  Maybe it’s a difficult thing, but it should be allowed.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy the anti-heroes.  But I always wonder where the kids today find their heroes.