Broken Frontier

The first trade paperback I ever threw away...

And then it was forgotten.

I think that’s what bothers me the most. They were strangers to me, but I knew most of them by heart. I’ve been on airplanes before, half-awake and hoping a mediocre cup of coffee would bring me some clarity. I’ve worked in cream-colored cubicles, as protected as I was bored by the routine pressures of my job. I know what it’s like to have dreams fade away, to find love and lose love, to want more out of life and yet be grateful for what I have.

On my thirty-sixth birthday, my boss told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I almost laughed out loud. In my mind, I could picture this little two-seater plane flying into a huge building, like the obvious but still hilarious ending to an Adam Sandler comedy. You have to be pretty damn drunk not to notice you’re about to run into a skyscraper, you know?

A few minutes later, another plane crashed into the other tower.

I spent the next few days in a numb fog, trying to understand something I will never be able to understand. I saw people run through plate glass windows thousands of feet above the ground, deciding in a moment of unfathomable fear that any death was better than being burnt alive. I saw buildings collapse in clouds of dust and flesh. I heard answering machine messages left by people who called their husbands and girlfriends and children and parents to talk to them one last time, because no matter what else happened, love was more important.

In the aftermath of September 11th, there was a brief moment when it looked like America would come together as one nation, indivisible, united in grief and determination. I’d always been a closet optimist, but at that point in my life, I couldn’t imagine being able to keep believing and hoping for things to get better if I didn’t know at least one good thing could come out of something so horrible.

Then everything ugly got even uglier.

George Bush used the attack to justify a war on Iraq, even though any connection between Iraq and the unfathomable destruction that Tuesday morning was solely manufactured by his administration. Michael Moore used the attack to justify his obsession with George Bush, winning awards for a biased “documentary”  that was little more than a glorified hate screed. The Dixie Chicks were boycotted on country radio and their CDs were burnt because they had the nerve to say they didn’t like the President. Then the Chicks turned around and called Toby Keith an idiot because he had the nerve to say the 9-11 attacks made him angry.

Christian fundamentalists blamed the attacks on pro-choice activists, gays and lesbians, and anyone else that didn’t conform to their high moral standards. Oddly enough, they never explained why God would be such an incredible asshole that He’d kill innocent people and let the pro-choice activists, gays and lesbians, and anyone else that didn’t conform to His high moral standards live.

But nothing could have prepared me for Janet Jackson’s right tit. I will never stop being angry that thousands of people died on September 11th and the only major effect on entertainment was that a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger movie was delayed and the debut of the “24” television series was slightly edited, while a one-second flash of a black woman’s breast changed America forever.

Everything in entertainment is questioned now, in case someone might think it offensive (because breasts, as anyone knows, are unnatural and disgusting). The most successful drama in years is “CSI”, which lovingly chronicles every minute detail of death until it becomes a form of pornography. But television stations refuse to broadcast “Saving Private Ryan” because people might be uncomfortable watching soldiers die for our country. That’s just sick.

People - real people, not movie stars or well-paid extras - are dying in Iraq, victims of terrorist actions that kill indiscriminately, yet the main news story is an eighteen-year-old-girl who disappeared in Aruba. Evidently an eighteen-year-old-girl has NEVER disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the history of ever, but people dying in Iraq is something that happens every day (literally) and thus is boring and not newsworthy.

If Jesus Christ really did exist, he wouldn’t be a petulant bastard whining because sometimes men like men and sometimes women don’t want to have babies. Instead, he’d be a basket case, trying to figure out why he ever sacrificed his own life for a species that cares more about exposed nipples than children dying in a rich man’s war.

For the most part, September 11th has been forgotten. It’s been reduced to a symbol, a sales gimmick, a promotional tool used by people on every side of the spectrum. Bush created a war that encouraged more acts of terrorism, and the death toll continues to mount. But you wouldn’t know it by watching TV. Why talk about Sgt. Manny Hornedo, a twenty-seven-year-old man who died three days ago in Tikrit, Iraq, when a runaway bride is more fun to discuss and dissect? Why bother to learn the names of any of the innocent Iraqis who have also been slaughtered by terrorists when it’s much more important to learn if Brad is really having sex with Angelina?

It just feels wrong.

Maybe it just had the bad luck to be the straw that broke my back, but I thought the third volume of “Losers” - the oddly titled trade paperback “Trifecta” - was bad enough that I threw it away.

For two weeks, I tried to write a straightforward column about the book, addressing some of its faults. Nick Dragotta, for instance, does a nice job with cars and settings, but when it comes to drawing people, he mostly fails. He’s also inconsistent. Windows change from three panels to eight to four in the space of a few panels, and Aisha’s facial piercing disappears and reappears constantly, sometimes ending up on her forehead instead of through her eyebrow.

When Jock returns to illustrate the origin story, the experiments with color that Lee Loughridge employs are distracting, undermining the effect of Jock’s unique style. Alé Garza does a nice job on the Aisha solo story, but he just pinch hits for one issue, so it’s not enough to save the graphic aspect of the book.

The plotting is also bad. After two entertaining collections that gave the “Losers” the feel of an intelligent thriller, the situations suddenly seem pointless or drawn out. Huge gaps in logic are ignored - would a mastermind like Max really forget to tell his servants the Losers were coming into town, then feed one of the villagers to wild dogs because the man tried to protect Max? Events seem so manipulated it reaches the point of condescension (a truckload of sexually-abused children arrive just when the Losers are about to blow up the bad guys, for instance).

And when Cougar discovers Skeleton Man, the tortured victim is barely able to mumble a desperate plea for death. But a few panels later, the guy is babbling on as if trapped in a reenactment of the famous scene in “Titanic” where Leonardo DiCaprio is drowning in Arctic waters but still bizarrely finds the strength to deliver a fourteen-hour monologue.

That’s all beside the point though, at least for me. I can’t imagine anyone that’s a fan of comic books who hasn’t read a few stinkers along the way. It’s inevitable.

In my opinion, Diggle crosses a line that shouldn’t be crossed. Whether it’s because he’s not talented enough or he’s just lazy, Diggle has the Losers battle a squadron of the most ridiculously inept, laughably stupid terrorists this side of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It’s not clear why Diggle thinks pitting his heroes against a group of bad guys that could be defeated by Lindsay Lohan on a bad hair day would be impressive or even worthy of a two-issue story. But in his frequent attempts to ridicule them, he makes the terrorists seem more harmless than the Three Stooges.

The goofballs use a Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher to destroy CIA headquarters, but everyone is left miraculously untouched. Stregler, an unofficial Loser, manages to run toward a terrorist who is raining bullets down on him and he never gets a scratch. A few pages later, he bursts into a room where dozens of terrorists are waiting and escapes their gunfire with nothing but a leg wound. He crawls to another room, leaving a trail of brightly-colored blood in his path, yet none of the terrorists find him.

I could go on and on, because every time you think they couldn’t be made to look any dumber, Diggle somehow goes that extra step. By the end, you can’t imagine how the terrorists could defeat a Girl Scout troop, let alone a rogue team of operatives. But talking about it brings back all the anger. I can forgive Diggle for being a bad writer. I can’t forgive him for being a thoughtless one.

The “Losers” is an “Eisner Award-nominated Vertigo series” that seeks to be taken seriously, a mature comic book that uses real places and events to reinforce the notion that the events depicted could actually happen. Yet it takes a very real threat and makes it into a bad punch line.

I can deal with the idea that September 11th has been reduced to a political hat trick, because there’s nothing I can do to change that. I can do my part to remember the people that are dying on foreign soil to protect me, even though having a bumper sticker on my car that reads "Support Our Troops” seems ridiculously inadequate. I can go to http://icasualties.org/oif/default.aspx and honor the memory of the fallen by praying for them. I might not believe in God, but there’s a good chance the victims and their families do, so that’s more than enough of a reason to justify taking a few minutes to wish them peace.

But when I pay $14.95 for a book that’s supposed to be a “consistently enthralling, action-packed comic”, the last thing I want to see is terrorists depicted as clowns and idiots. The soldiers in Iraq aren’t fighting cartoon characters. The soldiers in Iraq aren’t dying because they’re incapable of defeating bug-eyed morons.

I could understand it if this was a comedy series, because at least it would make some sort of sense. In comedies, we laugh all the time at the things that scare us the most. But this is a dramatic and realistic thriller written for adults. Why does Diggle then resort to such ridiculous and offensive caricatures?

I can’t stop the outraged millions from obsessing about Janet’s titty. I can’t stop the media from picking and choosing what is considered news, breezing over the war in Iraq to focus on Tom Cruise’s inane views on psychiatry and celebrity pedophiles on trial.

But I can decide what is acceptable to me personally, and “Losers: Trifecta” isn’t. It’s the first and only trade paperback I’ve ever thrown away, and it still has the power to offend me. I’ll let other people argue the humanity of terrorists; as empathetic as I usually am, I could care less what motivates people to murder themselves and others out of blind hatred and fear. But I will not remain silent while the work of a writer minimizes the danger people are facing every minute in a war that should never have been declared and diminishes the deaths of people whose only crime was to go to work or board a plane.

Four years ago, lives were lost because of an unprovoked terrorist attack. Today the carnage continues, but this time it’s soldiers and innocent Iraqis who are being slaughtered by other terrorists. And it’s not just Americans who are suffering, although it seems we were the last ones to understand what the rest of the world already knows: terrorists know no boundaries, no ethnicities or religions, no remorse, no compassion. They only know how to kill.

I don’t think ignoring the victims of terrorism or using the events of September 11th for political gain is the answer. I also don’t think portraying the killers as innocuous buffoons is the answer either.

We deserve better. The people being killed every day by terrorists for no reason deserve better.

And the people who have died certainly deserve better.