Broken Frontier

It’s Tuesday and you’re here at the hippest comic book news/reviews/interviews site on the web.  Three trillion new comic books are being packed and shipped to comic stores and warehouses all over the planet and you need guidance, don’t you?  Well, brace yourselves for a few incredible minutes of quality direction. 

Straight up - I’ve got to thank Robert Venditti and Andy Runton for sending me some cool feedback on last week’s ramble.  No, I wasn’t observant enough to see that there was a giant ‘Eyecatcher’ article on the front page of Broken Frontier with a perfectly fine review of ‘The Surrogates.’  My bad.  As a man claiming to provide keen insight into the world of new comic books, is this a disastrous omen for future misperception?  Most likely.  But at least it’ll be interesting, right?  Ah, forget you – I’ll prove you wrong.

Last week, I called Top Shelf Comix out for marketing The Surrogates as a super hero comic book when even my illiterate Ethiopian adoptive daughter knows it ain’t no super hero read.  Thanks to the corporate fatheads that run our art form, the comics community has a never-ending obsession with men and women with super-powers and now even the smelliest independents are surfing the genre all the way to the bank.  I mean, if you’re going to go old-school on us and call your special words and pictures ‘comix’, at least steer clear of capes and tights.  But if you must sell-out, do so honestly and tell stories with characters that have super powers.  Don’t get me wrong – I still dig The Surrogates bunches, but fans of sci-fi reads need to be directed its way, not power fantasy-ites. 

The thing about the seductive label of ‘Super Hero’ in our hobby is that it will not only sell well but be understood better.  We know where creators are coming from when they make their versions of heroes with incredible powers.  In the past, I’ve argued that all stories are Hero Epics and can easily be told inside a super hero context.  Unlike the outside world, we all know that just because a story features masked vigilantes and macho fight scenes doesn’t imply that the story in question can’t also contain romance, politics, drama, science, humor, religion, social insight or overall intelligence.  The flipside of this is that other sorts of stories can have a completely different focus and force themselves into the hero genre with very clever side-effects.  Unlike creators that want to tell the super hero in a different way, some produce other narratives and adapt them to the oh-so-popular category.  By bringing superheroism into potentially awkward environments, we expand the rules of the genre the way Lee and Ditko did with brainy Peter Parker.

Which brings me to my second recommendation:

I’ll tell you what I think of when someone says the words “Emo Boy”: young fans of this horrid new whine-rock that spew their self-loathing all over my radio station.  These kids aren’t brave enough to be goth and too stupid to be nerds.  As a college student, I worked with high-school kids and saw these guys everywhere as I rolled my eyes.  They could never decide if they were too cool for something or that if it was too cool for them.  Usually, it would turn out to be the latter and they’d spend three class periods writing bad lyrics explaining their situation. Giving these overly-emotional unappreciated brats an icon with super powers is brilliant. 

Steve Emond is the writer and artist on this Slave Labor Graphics series and he has a firm grasp on the niche he’s uplifting and bashing at the same time.  Like white-trash winning the lottery, once you give an Emo Boy super powers, he shouldn’t be ‘emo’ anymore – at least in theory.  Emond sees this paradox and runs with it.  Emo’s gifts (the character doesn’t have a name) manifest themselves in the form of emotional outbursts.  He blows girls’ heads up with a kiss, turns invisible when ignored, writes poetry only he can appreciate and generally uses his ‘emo genes’ not for the good of mankind, but to self-alienate.  It’s important to note that the star isn’t the super powers in this read—it’s Emo. His awkwardness doesn’t force the reader into being charmed by him to enjoy the book.  For those looking to hate on Emo, the read serves your tastes just as well (if not a little better). 

The art is beautiful.  With endless curves, just enough exaggeration, and mastered use of negative space, Emond shows off his mad skills well.  Taking the perspective of an overly-dramatic pubescent only validates the silliness of the world.  No other characters in the book look like Emo—and he is shown predominately in almost every panel.  Maybe Emond just likes drawing his title character, but I like to think that E.B.’s ego can be both tortured and self-obsessed. 

It’s refreshing to see that a comic creator doesn’t have to be hindered by so much ownership of a character that he’ll allow slap-stick humor and goofy gags to move things along.  Personally, I’m sick of drudging through angst of any kind to get to the heart of the story.  Despite all of my ravings of Emo’s self-doubt and alienation generating humor for those looking to bash him, it has to be said that even the biggest bullies may start to get a little soft for E.B.  I even find myself humming Weezer’s ‘Suzanne’ while turning the pages. Overall, the comic still promotes the high school clique as honest, artistic and most important… emotional.  Emo kids will embrace this ongoing series the way goths went ga-ga over Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Lenore—and that’s a very good thing. 

Yeah, this will be my first ‘super hero’ recommendation for this column, but you probably should put ‘humor’ & ‘teen drama’ ahead of that as a proper description.  What can I say?  I like a challenge and will do my best to continue to maintain a different genre for each week’s recommendation.  Thanks for reading and the gobs and gobs of fan-mail.  Sigh – now I’m off to mope in the garage where I belong with my Dungeon Master’s guide, twelve-sided die, Kitty Pride and Nightcrawler too.

Guiding Line: If you’ve been too scared to try a SLG title before due to the publisher’s perceived target audience, grab Emo Boy.  Steve Emond will be with us for a long while and his writing, art, letters, and perspective are enhancing the comic landscape while taking new readers by the hand.