What is it that makes, not simply for a bad comic, but for the worst comics?
Last week, in a shameful attempt to get readers to update my weblog for me, I asked for nominations for the worst comics of the twentieth century. All the suggestions were genuine stinkers, many of them of the amusement-posing-as-derision, remember-this-loser variety. Which was what I'd initially been going for, to be honest, but as more and more of the geek nostalgia candidates rolled in, I began to wonder: Is that all there is? Shouldn't the worst comics be... well, worse?
What should qualify something as one of the worst comics of the century? Is it just artistic incompetence? If so, the legions of the damned are too many to mention, but it's nearly impossible to separate any one bad comic out from its equally insipid peers.
Is it artistic incompetence from somebody who should know better (in which case Neal Adams's Skateman probably does take top honors), or from somebody who doesn't know any better but is inexplicably popular anyway (hello, McFarlane's Spider-Man and Rob Liefeld's hideous Captain America)? Still too wide a field.
Is it a particularly odious story development, something that not only results in a lousy comic but spits on the past efforts of more gifted creators? Fans have become notably more irate about this class of comic since the 1990s (I'm not sure if this is because the stories got worse or because the internet has preserved a lot of conversations that would otherwise have died stillborn on the floors of the comic shops where they belonged), but often it's too hard for the unfamiliar reader to notice the problem. Some character's retconned history or pointless death may indeed produce a spectacularly bad comic, but usually only if you're already reading the thing - and half the time, you shouldn't have been anyway.
Is it an offensive ideology, a disturbing moral implication, or a just plain vile view of the world? Once again, so many comics have promoted offensive ideas - some more acceptable in their own time, like the 1940s war comics, others atavistic embarrassments from the moment they were conceived, like the 90s Bad Girls - that their profusion probably keeps us from singling out any one of them. (That being said, I'm sure there are a number of incompetent, grotesque, bitterly misogynist or just plain misanthropic Bad Girl, bondage, and porn comics out there that deserve to be on a list of the Worst of the Worst, but I have no interest in surveying them to find out who's at the bottom of the pile. And happily, none of my readers seem to have any, either.)
So I've looked for comics that go above and beyond the aforementioned call of duty. Comics that aren't just stupid or offensive but are willfully so, comics that fail not in one or two areas but in all of them. Here, in no particular order save perhaps that of ascending scorn, are five of the Worst Comics of the Twentieth Century.
TOD HOLTON, SUPER GREEN BERET
Matt has already covered this one in detail, but a few of its more obvious crimes bear repeating. This comic covers all the bases, from the total creative bankruptcy of its Captain Marvel rip-off (I think the kid's even mugged Billy Batson and is wearing his sweater) to the more disturbing spectacle of watching a pre-teen boy slaughter dozens of Viet Cong with his bare hands while calling them "sawed-off monkeys." Yes, this one's got it all!
RON MARZ'S GREEN LANTERN
This is the one fanboy bete noire I'd include, albeit not for the reasons it usually gets panned. Some fans objected to Marz's tenure for the undignified way he and editor Kevin Dooley disposed of previous Green Lantern Hal Jordan ("rather the classic model," as Grace Brannagh might say). Other readers took issue with the endless parade of autofellating stories in which Kyle Rayner, Marz's all too transparent fanboy-projection vehicle, met with and was proclaimed "the one, true Green Lantern" by a new DC hero every month, each of them apparently as smitten with Marz's creation as he was himself. Both features made for some pretty lousy comics, but neither would lift this comic above (or drag it below?) the mass of equally uninspired superhero comics of the 1990s.
But one thing set Marz's run ahead of the pack. Kyle Rayner had a nasty habit of sleeping with women who would then either kill themselves or get murdered; or rather, Marz had a nasty habit of mandating their suicide or murder. Again, this is hardly unique; Marz was neither the first nor the last comic book writer to gratuitously off his female characters. But one death in particular - Kyle's discovery of his murdered girlfriend inside his refrigerator - was so vile, and such a signature of Marz's work, that it has since coined the name for an entire website devoted to chronicling dead superheroines (despite the fact that Alex herself was never a superhero), and become the industry standard for pointless misogyny.
Poke around on that website and you can find Marz's defense of his totally gender-blind writing technique:
Take Gwen Stacy, for example (even though it's a example more than two decades old). Her death was a tragedy, obviously, but it also served as a tragedy in Spider-Man's life; a case of a supporting character's death being used to adversely effect the life of the main character. Since most main characters are male, a way of introducing tragedy into that character's life is to have something adverse happen to a woman in his life.
See, ladies, it's not that comics writers (and I am not singling out Marz alone here) hate you, it's just that they know your deaths are wonderful sources of tragedy for the men in your lives. Your needless slaughter gives our tears meaning.
Surprisingly, in the course of defending his decision to kill off one female supporting character, Marz brings up his decision to kill off another female supporting character:
In the case of Marvel's Nova, she died at the hands of a villain during my Silver Surfer run. Mainly, she died because she had been the current herald of Galactus, and I personally could not justify how a human being could willingly serve the world-devourer. Since she had been shown doing this happily for a number of years, I thought a sudden pang of conscience would come out of left field. And I wanted to give Galactus a truly amoral herald, one who actively enjoyed his job. There were secondary reasons for Nova's death, including illustrating how truly despicable that new herald was. But her death had nothing to do with her gender. Had a male character been willingly and currently serving Galactus, I would've knocked him off as well.
"Not because I'm a misogynist. Because I'm a fucking hack."
I'm not sure I buy his argument - he killed Nova because she was too amoral and so he could give Galactus "a truly amoral herald"? - but even if we do take it at face value, it just shows that repeatedly killing female characters due to artistic impoverishment is scarcely different from doing it out of hate; the net result is the same. Killing women for shock value is a staple of far too many comics, but Marz has become eponymous for it. Which is probably the only sort of accolade he deserves.
SAMBO AND HIS FUNNY NOISES
The title alone tells you all you need to know about this one. Racism has never been a stranger to comics - even The Spirit wasn't untouched - but this early comic strip existed purely to promote racist caricatures (and to make a cheap buck from them). Happily, scholar Ian Lewis Gordon reports that stereotypes like Sambo actually didn't go over well in national syndication, and by the end of 1914 the strip was cancelled. Gordon also makes the interesting argument that, while Sambo is long gone, his brand of antics live on in marginally deracinated animal characters like Felix the Cat or, perhaps, Mickey Mouse.
There's a direct connection between Sambo and Felix, by the way. This site provides all the details. When "Sambo" creator William Marriner died in 1914, his assistant Pat Sullivan took over the strip. After Sambo's cancellation, Sullivan went into animation and created "Sammy Johnsin," a Sambo character with the serial numbers filed off for copyright purposes. A few years later, Sullivan asked his partner Otto Messmer to create Felix the Cat.
Why the gap? That Felix the Cat page explains it all:
In 1912 Messmer had met Anne Mason at Midland Beach on Staten Island, a happy marriage that lasted for fifty-nine years. But Pat Sullivan was not as fortunate, and on May 10th 1917 he was arrested for the rape of an underage female. He made a quickie marriage to Margaret (Marjorie) Gallagher on May 21, 1917 and was indicted the next day of rape in the second degree.
Hey, you know who was really not as fortunate? That underage female! (Are you paying attention, Ron?)
So let's see, we have an ugly, racist stereotype, who inspired an equally ugly, racist cartoon character, and who was drawn by a convicted rapist.
Sambo - you're in the Comics Hall of Infamy!
VICA AU PARADIS DE L'U.R.S.S.
VICA CONTRE LE SECRET SERVICE ANGLAIS
VICA DEFIE L'ONCLE SAM
Just to show that Americans hardly have a lock on repugnant ideologies and lousy comics, we now present two foreign series for your perusal and dismay. I only know about this one because of a paper that Clare Tufts presented at ICAF last year. Granted, it's an incredibly obscure set of hard-to-find comics from over sixty years ago; I couldn't even find a web image to show you. (And really, that's a good thing.) But I think you'll agree that Vica merits a special place in all our hearts - a place of unmitigated scorn.
Vica appeared in the French children's newspaper Le Temeraire back in the 1940s. He's a ruddy-cheeked sailor, a rough-and-tumble potbellied fellow, a basic happy-go-lucky Popeye type.
He's also a Nazi.
Well, he's not a Nazi per se, in much the same sense that Marshal Petain was not a Nazi per se. He just happens to hate the Soviets (and their evil masters, the Jews), the English (and their evil masters, the Jews), and the Americans (and their evil masters... why yes, how did you know?). There's no evidence that the occupying Germans directly created or controlled Le Temeraire or the Vica comics, although they did tolerate them... and allow them to print... and choke all of their competitors out of existence with strict paper rationing. Oh, and apparently they shared the same address. But other than that, these comics were the products of Frenchmen (or in Vica's case, Vincent Krassousky, a Russian emigre), willing subjects who were just dying to tell the children of France that their Aryan masters had finally arrived.
"But wait a moment," you may be wondering. "I'm sure the Nazis had lots of cartoon propaganda. For that matter, I'm sure many odious philosophies and dictatorships have developed cartoon spokesmen. What sets this Vica character apart?"
Well you see, he's a Nazi and he's French.
SENSO-RON (ESSAY ON WAR)
TAIWAN LUN (ON TAIWAN)
This discovery I owe to my colleague Jeffrey Miller (who, incidentally, is running for Congress in New York). Jeff's clearheaded but scathing criticism of On Taiwan appears in the same issue of the International Journal of Comic Art as Clare Tufts' piece on Vica. That's the International Journal of Comic Art, volume six, number one... your one-stop shopping for articles about racist shit comics.
Jess Nevins has already mentioned "those really atrocious Japanese comics from the late thirties and early forties." If I had any more familiarity with them I'm sure you'd see some of them here. But what do you say about someone who's promoting the same repulsive messages - only 60 years later?
You say "He's an asshole," and if you're saying it about Japanese cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori, you'd be right. Kobayashi is part of a right-wing revisionist group that seeks to expunge all references to Japanese atrocities during World War II from history textbooks. (He's also famous for his work with legendary international criminal Keyser Soze... no, no, no.) Essay on War, part of Kobayashi's series Goman-Izumu Sengen (which translates, I shit you not, as "Declaration of Arrogance"), does the same thing as a best-selling comic book.
And because one attempt at erasing historically documented crimes is never enough, Kobayashi followed it up with On Taiwan, which throws up a smokescreen of lies to deny the Imperial Army's enslavement, forced prostitution, and murder of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of "comfort women" during the war. These comics don't even have the "we didn't know any better" or "I was just following orders" excuses (or non-excuses) of the last couple of winners, and thus they have truly earned their place at the very bottom of this list.
War, jingoism, propaganda, racism, misogyny, denial... This wasn't very funny, was it? But that's what you get when you really start looking for rotten comics - a set of works as disturbing as the times and events that produced them. The Worst Comics of the Twentieth Century.
Here's to the Twenty-First.
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