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Thursday, September 9, 2010
JUSTICE UNPLUGGED 2 at last !!!
By Fabrice Sapolsky & Xavier Fournier
First, and once again, I owe everybody maintaining this site and making it grow better than ever (Hi Michael, Caleb and the others!) an apology. Many of you wouldn’t imagine how hard it is to keep a decent deadline for an internet column! It looks like on the net time flies faster. Since the new year is always the time to make wishes and take engagements for the future, I promise to deliver my column more regularly. We’ll start in January with an interview with French Spawn penciller Aleksi Briclot. But for now, here’s our second part to the Justice Unplugged saga, hosted by my pal Xavier Fournier: I’m writing this column from France, where the death penalty was abandonned nearly 25 years ago. Now, let me reassure you all, I do not intend to lecture anybody on this topic since a lot of democratic countries still have it. But when you read American comics, you don’t have the impression that death penalty exists in the US! How many times has the Joker told Batman that to end his plans he has to end his days? But Batman refuses to kill even the Joker! What about the death penalty in that? It’s rarely mentioned in comics except in a few like Sin City. And when the characters do talk about it, most of the time it's to say that an innocent has been framed (see Fantastic Four #234) or that the execution was faked. It is totally understandable that the writers let their opinions (pros and cons) about the death penalty transpire in their comics. I have always been amazed by the face to face between the hero and his arch-nemesis. Where, as in Batman: the Killing Joke, the villain throws the hero’s morality against him by saying, "Hey, if you can’t kill me, you’re responsible for my crimes, because I can’t help myself." Oddly, a scene like that could be totally understandable in Europe where the death penalty has been abolished decades ago. The villain wouldn’t care being jailed knowing that he wouldn’t lose his head there. But in the US comics, it looks weird that criminals are not afraid of Justice in their country. On the other hand, the merchandising effect is totally understandable. It would be logical in a liberal country to preserve Marvel and DC (among others)’s rights to produce villains' action figures if they want. That could be a reason why major villains can’t be killed too often. In the meantime, the Punisher or Wolverine can kill 2000 unknown ninjas in each episode. Bottom line: if you’re a mouthy villain, you’re safe. Otherwise, Hela herself will come pick you up! In the end, it can be said that in American comics, crimes finally pays. The greater your crime, the less you’ll be punished for it, and your rank in the Top 40 Criminals will go up (with a bullet of course!). Kill Spider-Man’s love interest; destroy Genosha or even planets; you’ll be a legend. You'll even get your own mini-bust and be collected! It’s incredible that you can collect every villain’s mini-bust, even the most disgusting ones like Red Skull or Darkseid. In real life, collecting Hitler or a convicted Nazi’s mini-bust would be considered a "faute de goût." Publishers are consciously making their villains loveable to avoid any comparision with real life threats. In comics, all bad guys become curious characters. They dance around the heroes without harming them directly. As an example, pick up the last two Green Lantern issues of the last series (#180-181). In this storyline, Major Force, the villain of the story, asks GL to give him his power-ring. Rayner refuses at first believing that Force has decapitated his mother. But the purple-faced villain reassures him: his mother is safe, Rayner just saw a mannequin! Then, Rayner, the powerful Green Lantern, spends half of the last episode questionning himself (will he give his ring or not?) forgetting that Major Force has done a lot of harm to many people and even killed Rayner’s girlfriend ten years before! Bottom line: killing GL’s girlfriend’s death is not so important to Kyle Rayner himself. How many of us would trade somebody’s life for a bus ticket? Rayner (in that same episode) is THAT close to giving one of the most powerful weapons in the universe to a guy who killed seomeone he was supposed to love. Strange comics! And if you look closer, you’ll find that scenes like that are somewhat common: in Paul Jenkins’s Spectacular Spider-Man, Paste Pot Pete gives a pizza to the Green Goblin! Let’s say that some explanations are hard to swallow… How do you want, after all those scenes, that readers believe in a character’s death? It’s barely possible. And the situation won’t change until editors change the image of serial-killers, most of the time depicted as noble characters. The way we see it, Dr. Doom, Venom or Dr. Light have their personal moral code distinguishing between what’s correct and what’s not. And when an Identity Crisis type of event happens, it’s like thunder ! Dr. Doom can wipe out an entire country from this plane of existence, but it’s shown in two panels and the fans don’t click. Let him terminate Alicia Masters and there will be flows of letters and email from angry fans. Comic-books have a curious logic when it comes to crime and punishment. I wouldn't say -- like Fredric Wertham -- that the problem lies in comics themselves, but continuing to read stories where criminals, killers of all sorts, and crooks take the lead, a strong bond is forged between those characters and the readers. The audience develop some kind of unholy sympathy for them. As I said, the problem doesn't lie in comics. The problem is that some of us readers sometime forget that these super-hero stories are crime stories where a lot of characters are anything but admirable. See ya in the funny books ! NEXT MONTH : French Spawn penciller talks !
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April 22, 2008:
February 4, 2008:
November 20, 2006:
A Comic-Con without the Captain
