Preacher
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Preacher was the inheritor of the intelligent title void left when Neil Gaiman’s Sandman run ended. Preacher was on my list of things probably too sacrilegious for me to engage with, must less be entertained by, when it first came out. The list was essentially Preacher and the movie Life of Brian. I realize that this might sound like an odd stance for a horror writer to have, but, if nothing else, I’m all about freedoms. We’re free to draw moral and comfort lines for ourselves, but we shouldn’t make our personal lines the demarcation for all people. I drew my line there, but this was back in the early 1990s. Obviously, I was in a different place in my faith walk then and I have since gotten to a point where I thought that I could “handle it.�
This also serves as my “fair warning� that this work isn’t for everyone.
Garth Ennis has always been hit and miss for me. He’s a maestro of violence and mayhem, as seen in his Punisher run, but even that can become tedious when he’s exhausted everything he has to say and the violence seems so pointless. When he’s on, he’s on (Unknown Soldier, Hitman); when he’s off, well, let’s leave it at I still haven’t forgiven him for Goddess. [For those waiting for me to comment on his Hellblazer run, I have so many feelings over that title, both good and bad, that it would require its own review.]
J
oe Lansdale, a horror writer who knows a thing or two about injecting fun and mayhem into a work, says in his introduction to the first collected volume of Preacher, “It’s our chance to look at the dark side without having to be a part of it.� Preacher has the feel and rhythm of a western, the language and tropes of the horror universe, and more than a dollop of a crime spree yarn tossed in. However, when all is said and done, Preacher is about one man’s search for God. That’s not me making a spiritual leap, that’s seriously the plot of the book. Jesse Custer—J.C., get it?—was a small town preacher losing his faith because what few members of the town that bothered to show up on Sundays did so to sing a few hymns and “then act like savages for the rest of the week.�
This pointed to a deeper problem to him: God had abandoned His creation.
So he decides to search for God: “I’m looking for the Lord ‘cause I figure He’s deserted His creation. I aim to bring Him to book for that little transgression: to confront Him and hear His answer to that charge. He has a obligation to do right by the world He’s made an’ the folks He’s peopled it with. He quits an’ runs, He ain’t facin’ up to His responsibilities.�
“There’s two good places you can look for God: in church or at the bottom of a bottle.� Tulip O’Hare.
So with his gun-toting girlfriend, Tulip O’Hare, and a hard-drinking Irish vampire-cum-best friend, (Proinsias) Cassidy, he heads out. Now’s when I have to explain a bit of the mythology of the comic book, and it’s not nearly as simple as “a guy got bitten by a radioactive spider.� Jesse merges with the spirit of Genesis—the spawn of an angel and a demon, a mix of heaven and hell—which represents a new idea, one that God is afraid of. Genesis gives Jesse the power of the word of the Lord, the word that must be obeyed.
[God left the seraphi (warrior archangels) in charge with the adephi (lesser angels/scientists) doing all the real work. The cast of characters in the book also include the surprising beloved figure, Arsehole Face, and the Saint of Killers (the patron saint of murderers and assassins). Sample storylines include a romp through sexual perversity (the Gomorrah People) and Jesse’s pursuit by Herr Starr, of The Grail, a group so focused on the Apocalypse that they fool themselves into thinking that they are about God’s work.]
Still with me?
Where does all of this hate and anger come from? Sadly, a lot of people have been hurt by the church. In fact, most times people who hate church/God have been burned by the church in one way or the other. Jesse Custer had religion forced on him by his family, stemming from his grandmother. Grandma taught that “God’s special because he’s always with you, Jesse. He lives inside you, in your heart, and he sees everything you do and he knows what you’re thinking. Always. God loves you very much because he made you. And God wants you to love him, because if you love him and do good things all your life, he’ll take you away to live with him when you die.�
Let’s pause for a moment and examine her proselytizing technique. For a start, there’s the issue of “witnessing� to kids this way. We have to think about what exactly gets communicated when we use phrases like “live inside you� or “in your heart� because what we are saying might not be (or rather, might exactly be) what kids are hearing. A lot of the time, this type of religious parroting amounts to well-intentioned coercion. Then there’s the issue of whether or not this is even the heart of the Gospel message. Though there’s some truth in her statement, is this what Christ meant when he said “follow me�? Either way, this didn’t play well with young Jesse as he responds with the statement that God sounded “kind of scary� (which He is, but not everyone is ready to think about that aspect of Him).
So Grandma responds by having young Jesse put in a coffin and sunk to the bottom of the river until he accepted God. Go ye forth and make disciples... by any means necessary.
Another source for this anger is that many people feel abandoned by God, as if He has capriciously left them to their own devices in His creation.
“It doesn’t matter who you are, or how good you got things. Sooner or later, shit goes wrong for everybody. Sooner or later there comes a time when all you want to do is shout ‘F- You’ to the world.� Johnny Lee Wombat
There are several conclusions to draw from Jesse’s (spiritual) struggles and misadventures:
1. You don’t get angry about things you don’t care about or don’t think exist. We start with the fact that for him, the existence of God is a foregone conclusion. A friend of mine shared with me that a girl she was dialoguing with revealed that she “only believed in God because I’m mad at God. When I cease to be mad at God, He might not exist for me any longer.� She was pissed that she lived in a society that marginalized women and sexualized their existence, pissed at the list of dos and don’ts people prescribed as the only way to please God, and pissed that we’re not allowed to be pissed at God. Questioning God, being angry at God, isn’t the issue. He’s capable of handling that and wants us to be honest with him. The ironic thing is that Jesse Custer never completes his intended task, but, as it is with all of us, it is the journey for truth that forms him.
“Folks don’t like the truth. That’s the point. It’s easier lyin’. Stops us havin’ to face up to trouble when it comes along to do wrong insteada right.� Jesse Custer
T
he search for answers from questions without answers isn’t all it's cracked up to be. As Jesse found out during the course of his journey, “what seemed so easy to figure back then has become a hell of a lot more complicated.� There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the fact that it’s not like we’re owed any answers. We think we are, and the reasons for that I’ll discuss later. Many times, we don’t even understand the questions that we’re asking. (Again, we think we do. I have a four year old that loves asking me “why?� but when I turn around and ask him “why what?� all he can do is stare at me cutely because I’m supposed to explain to him the question as well as the answer.) For that matter, we probably wouldn’t be satisfied with the answers, because, as Jesse learned during his stint as a minister, “folks never believe more than what’s convenient.�
2. We ascribe human notions to a being beyond conception. Jesse does what many of us do, put human characteristics and motivations on God. “You got power, you got to use it right,� he says. You see, and I don’t want to overwhelm you with deep theology but, God is... big. In order to relate to Him, we project our own humanness on Him: sometimes our foibles and notions of right and wrong. We bring Him down to our level and put Him in an understandable box. So it becomes perfectly understandable that we forget his otherliness.
3
. Part of our frustration stems from a feeling of broken trust. Why bring us into this world of pain, God? Do you even have a plan? If Genesis has the power to rival God’s, then why would God suffer its existence? Also, knowing what would happen to creation, why do it? We wonder why He has to be so cruel about going about His business. He strikes us as capricious by our way of thinking. Yet, is it really so much for a Creator to ask of His creation that we trust him?
4. We have a low vision of God and an entirely too high vision of ourselves. We’re so quick to blame God for what is wrong with the world around us that we let ourselves off the hook. We have free will and we have a responsibility to our fellow man.
“The Lord announced His great leap forward. Life on earth, not in Heaven, that could think for itself and decide its own spiritual destiny. Men of free will. Every angel in paradise knew what that would mean. Without the love of God around them—tangible, real, as it is in heaven—men on earth would turn from God. Go their own ways. Divide into factions, fight war upon war upon war...� An adephi.
G
od created man in His image and gave man free will so that we could choose to love Him. However, we, in turn, have created a God in our image. So that instead of God being complete unto Himself, the Trinity in eternal community—creating from an overflow of that dynamic love—we’ve come to see God as an egomaniac who feeds on love. That is why we presume that he needs a helping hand with His divine plan, that somehow we’d know better how to do things. We’ve fallen victim to our hubris that leads us to believe that the creation has outgrown the Creator and need to be free of His machinations. That is the same pride that believes we could do so much better left to our own devices, without Him.
Again, after all the evil that we’ve seen—the day-to-day violence and degradation that we inflict on one another, man’s ever inventive ways of being cruel to one another—the question becomes not ‘how can we believe in God?’ but ‘how can we keep believing in man?’
“Preacher features more than its share of blasphemy,� one reviewer said. Is this a blasphemous work? My Oxford American Dictionary defines blasphemous as profane talk. To profane, from the same dictionary, is to treat (a sacred thing) with irreverence or disregard. The idea behind profanity is to take something which is high and trample it underfoot. I don’t know if there is disregard at the heart of the book, and if we are to engage people where they are, many are at a place of disregard and outright blasphemy. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t to be engaged with.
Crass in its humor, vulgar in its satire, and hyperviolent, Preacher is not an easy book to wrestle with. You may not like the way in which the tales are told, but it asks challenging questions. Questions that we all ask and we need to be prepared to be held to book on.
Back to Comix Index
Preacher was the inheritor of the intelligent title void left when Neil Gaiman’s Sandman run ended. Preacher was on my list of things probably too sacrilegious for me to engage with, must less be entertained by, when it first came out. The list was essentially Preacher and the movie Life of Brian. I realize that this might sound like an odd stance for a horror writer to have, but, if nothing else, I’m all about freedoms. We’re free to draw moral and comfort lines for ourselves, but we shouldn’t make our personal lines the demarcation for all people. I drew my line there, but this was back in the early 1990s. Obviously, I was in a different place in my faith walk then and I have since gotten to a point where I thought that I could “handle it.�This also serves as my “fair warning� that this work isn’t for everyone.
Garth Ennis has always been hit and miss for me. He’s a maestro of violence and mayhem, as seen in his Punisher run, but even that can become tedious when he’s exhausted everything he has to say and the violence seems so pointless. When he’s on, he’s on (Unknown Soldier, Hitman); when he’s off, well, let’s leave it at I still haven’t forgiven him for Goddess. [For those waiting for me to comment on his Hellblazer run, I have so many feelings over that title, both good and bad, that it would require its own review.]
J
oe Lansdale, a horror writer who knows a thing or two about injecting fun and mayhem into a work, says in his introduction to the first collected volume of Preacher, “It’s our chance to look at the dark side without having to be a part of it.� Preacher has the feel and rhythm of a western, the language and tropes of the horror universe, and more than a dollop of a crime spree yarn tossed in. However, when all is said and done, Preacher is about one man’s search for God. That’s not me making a spiritual leap, that’s seriously the plot of the book. Jesse Custer—J.C., get it?—was a small town preacher losing his faith because what few members of the town that bothered to show up on Sundays did so to sing a few hymns and “then act like savages for the rest of the week.�This pointed to a deeper problem to him: God had abandoned His creation.
So he decides to search for God: “I’m looking for the Lord ‘cause I figure He’s deserted His creation. I aim to bring Him to book for that little transgression: to confront Him and hear His answer to that charge. He has a obligation to do right by the world He’s made an’ the folks He’s peopled it with. He quits an’ runs, He ain’t facin’ up to His responsibilities.�
“There’s two good places you can look for God: in church or at the bottom of a bottle.� Tulip O’Hare.So with his gun-toting girlfriend, Tulip O’Hare, and a hard-drinking Irish vampire-cum-best friend, (Proinsias) Cassidy, he heads out. Now’s when I have to explain a bit of the mythology of the comic book, and it’s not nearly as simple as “a guy got bitten by a radioactive spider.� Jesse merges with the spirit of Genesis—the spawn of an angel and a demon, a mix of heaven and hell—which represents a new idea, one that God is afraid of. Genesis gives Jesse the power of the word of the Lord, the word that must be obeyed.
[God left the seraphi (warrior archangels) in charge with the adephi (lesser angels/scientists) doing all the real work. The cast of characters in the book also include the surprising beloved figure, Arsehole Face, and the Saint of Killers (the patron saint of murderers and assassins). Sample storylines include a romp through sexual perversity (the Gomorrah People) and Jesse’s pursuit by Herr Starr, of The Grail, a group so focused on the Apocalypse that they fool themselves into thinking that they are about God’s work.]
Still with me?
Where does all of this hate and anger come from? Sadly, a lot of people have been hurt by the church. In fact, most times people who hate church/God have been burned by the church in one way or the other. Jesse Custer had religion forced on him by his family, stemming from his grandmother. Grandma taught that “God’s special because he’s always with you, Jesse. He lives inside you, in your heart, and he sees everything you do and he knows what you’re thinking. Always. God loves you very much because he made you. And God wants you to love him, because if you love him and do good things all your life, he’ll take you away to live with him when you die.�Let’s pause for a moment and examine her proselytizing technique. For a start, there’s the issue of “witnessing� to kids this way. We have to think about what exactly gets communicated when we use phrases like “live inside you� or “in your heart� because what we are saying might not be (or rather, might exactly be) what kids are hearing. A lot of the time, this type of religious parroting amounts to well-intentioned coercion. Then there’s the issue of whether or not this is even the heart of the Gospel message. Though there’s some truth in her statement, is this what Christ meant when he said “follow me�? Either way, this didn’t play well with young Jesse as he responds with the statement that God sounded “kind of scary� (which He is, but not everyone is ready to think about that aspect of Him).
So Grandma responds by having young Jesse put in a coffin and sunk to the bottom of the river until he accepted God. Go ye forth and make disciples... by any means necessary.
Another source for this anger is that many people feel abandoned by God, as if He has capriciously left them to their own devices in His creation.“It doesn’t matter who you are, or how good you got things. Sooner or later, shit goes wrong for everybody. Sooner or later there comes a time when all you want to do is shout ‘F- You’ to the world.� Johnny Lee Wombat
There are several conclusions to draw from Jesse’s (spiritual) struggles and misadventures:
1. You don’t get angry about things you don’t care about or don’t think exist. We start with the fact that for him, the existence of God is a foregone conclusion. A friend of mine shared with me that a girl she was dialoguing with revealed that she “only believed in God because I’m mad at God. When I cease to be mad at God, He might not exist for me any longer.� She was pissed that she lived in a society that marginalized women and sexualized their existence, pissed at the list of dos and don’ts people prescribed as the only way to please God, and pissed that we’re not allowed to be pissed at God. Questioning God, being angry at God, isn’t the issue. He’s capable of handling that and wants us to be honest with him. The ironic thing is that Jesse Custer never completes his intended task, but, as it is with all of us, it is the journey for truth that forms him.
“Folks don’t like the truth. That’s the point. It’s easier lyin’. Stops us havin’ to face up to trouble when it comes along to do wrong insteada right.� Jesse Custer
T
he search for answers from questions without answers isn’t all it's cracked up to be. As Jesse found out during the course of his journey, “what seemed so easy to figure back then has become a hell of a lot more complicated.� There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the fact that it’s not like we’re owed any answers. We think we are, and the reasons for that I’ll discuss later. Many times, we don’t even understand the questions that we’re asking. (Again, we think we do. I have a four year old that loves asking me “why?� but when I turn around and ask him “why what?� all he can do is stare at me cutely because I’m supposed to explain to him the question as well as the answer.) For that matter, we probably wouldn’t be satisfied with the answers, because, as Jesse learned during his stint as a minister, “folks never believe more than what’s convenient.�2. We ascribe human notions to a being beyond conception. Jesse does what many of us do, put human characteristics and motivations on God. “You got power, you got to use it right,� he says. You see, and I don’t want to overwhelm you with deep theology but, God is... big. In order to relate to Him, we project our own humanness on Him: sometimes our foibles and notions of right and wrong. We bring Him down to our level and put Him in an understandable box. So it becomes perfectly understandable that we forget his otherliness.
3
. Part of our frustration stems from a feeling of broken trust. Why bring us into this world of pain, God? Do you even have a plan? If Genesis has the power to rival God’s, then why would God suffer its existence? Also, knowing what would happen to creation, why do it? We wonder why He has to be so cruel about going about His business. He strikes us as capricious by our way of thinking. Yet, is it really so much for a Creator to ask of His creation that we trust him?4. We have a low vision of God and an entirely too high vision of ourselves. We’re so quick to blame God for what is wrong with the world around us that we let ourselves off the hook. We have free will and we have a responsibility to our fellow man.
“The Lord announced His great leap forward. Life on earth, not in Heaven, that could think for itself and decide its own spiritual destiny. Men of free will. Every angel in paradise knew what that would mean. Without the love of God around them—tangible, real, as it is in heaven—men on earth would turn from God. Go their own ways. Divide into factions, fight war upon war upon war...� An adephi.
G
od created man in His image and gave man free will so that we could choose to love Him. However, we, in turn, have created a God in our image. So that instead of God being complete unto Himself, the Trinity in eternal community—creating from an overflow of that dynamic love—we’ve come to see God as an egomaniac who feeds on love. That is why we presume that he needs a helping hand with His divine plan, that somehow we’d know better how to do things. We’ve fallen victim to our hubris that leads us to believe that the creation has outgrown the Creator and need to be free of His machinations. That is the same pride that believes we could do so much better left to our own devices, without Him.Again, after all the evil that we’ve seen—the day-to-day violence and degradation that we inflict on one another, man’s ever inventive ways of being cruel to one another—the question becomes not ‘how can we believe in God?’ but ‘how can we keep believing in man?’
“Preacher features more than its share of blasphemy,� one reviewer said. Is this a blasphemous work? My Oxford American Dictionary defines blasphemous as profane talk. To profane, from the same dictionary, is to treat (a sacred thing) with irreverence or disregard. The idea behind profanity is to take something which is high and trample it underfoot. I don’t know if there is disregard at the heart of the book, and if we are to engage people where they are, many are at a place of disregard and outright blasphemy. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t to be engaged with.Crass in its humor, vulgar in its satire, and hyperviolent, Preacher is not an easy book to wrestle with. You may not like the way in which the tales are told, but it asks challenging questions. Questions that we all ask and we need to be prepared to be held to book on.
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dedicated to my friend Mysterious Faith.
http://www.mysteriousfaith.com/
This puts me in mind of a prayer by Thomas Merton
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Hmm, I didn't see this review, of yours, Maurice... It's very comprehensive (well the description of the comics is.)
I always knew Garth Ennis was a wackjob... (I finally remembered where I had encountered him in the early 90s before.)
Well, anyway, this comic sounds a *bit* more intelligent, far-ranging and broader in scope than his much earlier "Judge Dredd" novella, "Democracy Now", which was, not to put too fine a point on it, pants.
So THIS is what he means by good modern comic... I see!!
Blasphemous? Yes, it sounds rather like it... and yet you survived it!
Going by the precis, I WOULDN'T compare it to "The Life of Brian", though, which is harmless nonsense. Life of Brian, indeed.
There are OTHER horror writers, though... like Anne Rice, who isn't really a horror writer I suppose, she's too refined and intelligent, excuse me! Yet she writes about vampires and that sort of thing; she might have written about a priest, say ('cos she's Catholic) with a friend who's a vampire. She hasn't yet, though, to my knowledge.
If she DID, though, I'm sure I'd find it superior to this Ellis confection... Well she wouldn't have a character called Arseface in it for a start.
Ennis... he smacks of an Irishman who's too much at the whiskey, doesn't he?
So, it's all cry and little wool, is it? The Preacher man doesn't find anything he's looking for in the end.
Doesn't surprise me. Most modern comics are like that. Fundamentally pointless.
Hmm, yes: I would say that the way in which fundamentalist religion can exploit people, and the hypocrisies of some people who PROFESS to follow it, and child abuse and all that, SHOULD be covered more in modern popular fiction. But I just question myself whether THIS is the way in which to do it. It sounds just like a porn comic, and that is the problem with so many modern adult comics; they are violent porn and that is the limit of their aesthetic. With Anne Rice's kind of vampires, you WOULD get a little bit of (homo)eroticism, as I joked with our Libertarian friend, but honestly, it would be so subtle as not to be jarring.
I said it a couple of years ago in a letter to a friend: that the modern graphic novel industry consists of two basic forms: 1) Trash 2) Porn!!
For the information of Christian readers: it WOULD be possible to have comics which were socially critical yet not "extreme" nor containing violent, slavering porno-sadistic scenarios, etc. I am a socialist so I know!
In fact, I would be very much in FAVOUR of a new style of "humane" comic!
As for Garth Ennis - drunken irishman as I've already said! My psi-powers tell me so!
All these graphic novelist types are drunks or on drugs. Sorry to be so "judgemental" if it bothers you, Maurice - but my mother was a Lutheran! Not a perfect one but there you are. Compared to MOST people I meet, even on the web... she was a saint, my dear!
Anyway, there's people on amazon.co.uk who agree with me, even if they like the comic! Take Grant Morrison's "Batman Gothic". This is a line from one review from Northern Ireland: "Anyone familiar with the work of Grant Morrison will find this a bit on the mild side. The guys a surrealist drug addled genius, and this is one of the few mild stories he has done".
There. And comparing my dislike of these wackjobs to fundies' dislike for Joanne Rowling is frankly specious. Joanne Rowling is harmless (though writes pointed and sometimes veiled satire, WITHIN CIVILIZED BOUNDARIES) and she is a GOOD WOMAN. That being the point. She is more like Agatha Christie whereas Ennis and Morrison and ...co... are like the gene-spliced love child of Pol Pot, Ghenghis Khan and Aleister Crowley! YES, Christians beware of them!
These people are extremist nihilists, occultists in the WRONG sense... and wackjobs!
And I'm not surprised anyway that "Preacher" came out of the Judge Dredd comic... which I haven't seen for years in Britain, because they've long stopped selling it in supermarkets and newsagents.
Well if it NOW contains material like THAT, I'm not surprised that they're not ALLOWED to. That explains a lot!
They should do proper science fiction and science fantasy in comics, not this porn. Old-time scripters would and should turn over in their graves.
"I said it a couple of years ago in a letter to a friend: that the modern graphic novel industry consists of two basic forms: 1) Trash 2) Porn!!"
well, as long as that's an informed opinion.
there is quite the variety within the graphic novel form. my particular bent is the super-hero genre, but that doesn't preclude my love of the "lone wolf and cub" series (wandering samurai) and i haven't explored the world of manga (the largest segment of the comic book world. in america, manga is exploding and it's doing so because women have been buying those books)
ennis to me is quite hit and miss. he's like tarantino: a maestro of violence, but even that can get one-note sometimes. i enjoyed his "hitman" and "preacher", but "punisher" became boring to me after a while. and "goddess" was a mess.
and while i appreciate wanting society to have boundaries and i mourn the death of polity, i still wouldn't force my lines on others as the standard demarcation of good taste.
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at my local comic shop, i found all genres and types of comics represented.
lone wolf and cub were re-issued over the last three years. a 28 volume set.
Didn't I explain to you, in my ABOVE post which you DELETED, Maurice, WHY I said to that friend, that most comics fell into the "trash" or "porn" categories??
(Don't ask me to give justifications if you don't want me to answer! Nor imply that my opinions aren't informed.)
Didn't I give examples to illustrate my categories, including an example from the "porn" category?? YOU type in "Ship of Fools" in the Amazon.co.uk or .com search box and see what you find... Quite a few different titles, because the phrase itself started life as a medieval legend/woodcuts. But anyway, there's this guy called Ignacio Noe, who seems to be the same one as I read... yeah, I found his reviews on amazon.com to start with, and they were more detailed there! Here we are, here's a page referring to a selection of graphic novels by him, with the emphasis on "graphic"... http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books-uk&field-author=Noe/202-5776594-3171051
Ha ha! Satan, Convent of Hell, serial killers/rapists in space, "Doctor I'm too Big"... etc, etc.
I'd never SEEN this author, Noe, before then... I just typed in "graphic novel" or something like that months ago, on amazon.com... and that is what it took me to! Just like that! (I believe I was actually looking for Anne Rice graphic novelizations at the time, with only limited success.)
This is obviously a VALUABLE "subgenre", Maurice... valuable to capitalists, that is!
And funnily ENOUGH... whenever I try to extend my research into graphic novels, to see if there IS something there really worth my while... I tend to run up against this stuff!! When it's not, like, pompous superhero fantasies, (That might be most of what I define as trash!) it's porn all the time. For some reason! I am ASSUMING, that that is because there is a LOT OF IT ABOUT, as the doctor said about the virus!!
Well, you know... that is OBVIOUSLY what one of the "basic applications" of the illustrated, graphic novel format, is!! People think pictures, they think porn... Writers and publishers seem to find this a very comfortable stretch.
(I saw another article on the Christian Science Monitor, I think, quite coincidentally, I was looking up Chavez articles, he's FAST becoming a BIG hero of mine, and it said how many Christians including pastors had porn addictions, and how they were forming self-help groups to combat them!! http://search.csmonitor.com/2005/0825/p14s01-lire.html?s=u )
Mm. I wonder what that says!
Yup: pornographic graphic novels are certainly a big subgenre. Even if they DON'T amount to "half" of all comics!
If you have a *proper* comics shop in your locality, then perhaps you must be quite spoiled for choice... I think that Americans always must have been, BECAUSE... now listen... to my ENVY, I have known for eons that you could get things *over there* like VAMPIRE comics, which I would have LOVED to have got my hands on, but which one could NEVER buy in the UK, not even in London, so far as I have ever seen. Yeah. I would be very happy reading just basic pulp in comics format, such as yer vampire comics. As long as they had the odd fascinating character, along the lines of Lestat, I wouldn't *care* if they were "experimental" or not, had glossy production values (though I love good draughtsmanship - but it doesn't have to be computer-inked!), or whether they "pushed the bounds of the medium" or not, in current pretentious lit-talk. MOST things that are *said* to do that, well, it's just shorthand for vile and pointless, in any kind of literature! Same in modern art: Damien Hearst is said to be "pushing the bounds", ie, he's tasteless. (THERE ARE SO MANY SIMILARITIES BETWEEN PRETENTIOUS MODERN COMICS AND CONTENTLESS CONCEPTUAL ART THAT IT'S NOT TRUE.)
Whereas true literary innovators, like Joanne Rowling... well, they're so subtle, that critics don't realise, until YEARS later, what their true contribution has been!
I like good entertainment. What a pity I never seem to find enough of it, in THIS particular medium these days. That of comics.
But anyway, IF I were to live in, say, San Francisco for a while (I'd love to, had I the money... watch this space! I've been told it's a hotbed of Trotskyists so I should feel at home in the Bay Asylum Area, as one wit put it!)
If I were to live there for a while, it would be a challenge to me, to frequent all the comics shops in the area - INCLUDING, of course, the "alternative, underground" ones and the "head shops", and just to see... IF there truly wasn't something that I WOULD REALLY LIKE!! A selection of comics that would totally meet my requirements. I think I would quite like to read "Z" comics, which are still going... but you can't get them over here or on Amazon.
I've never had great experience with comics shops, even in London. There was one right outside my college, in South East London... but it was pants! They didn't even have regular issues of Batman titles, or many back issues of same, or of other "regular" superhero titles. They were mainly interested in selling graphic novels, I assume because of the markup. Well thankyou; I can get those in any high street booksellers... at least, one USED to be able to! Get quite a selection of these, especially ones that were DC-related. But these too, the graphic novels, seem to have gone down in popularity in Britain in recent years... Probably because they're not allowed to sell "Killing Joke" to kiddies any more. Or, rather, because more and more adults have "seen through" Moore, Morrison, et al, and are far more likely to curl up with a good J K Rowling.
I have critical insights; you delete them. Maurice Broaddus evades the issues yet again. Rock on.
And while we're on the subject of "comic book porn", how about THIS "gem", Maurice, also found by me on amazon.co.uk, QUITE by chance, while looking up Garth Ennis' "Goddess", to see if it's as rubbish as you say it is! One of the reviews recommended it for the best art he's ever seen. As there are second hand copies available on that site, I might just buy a copy!! Though it does sound a bit like an "adult" version of kids science fiction!! I think, you see, that there are a LOT of people "fancying" themselves concerning knowledge of the occult, of witchcraft, magic, and the supernatural, and MY personal opinion is... you shouldn't write about ANY of that (except maybe the odd ghost story) unless you REALLY know about it... It takes YEARS to read your way through the paranormal. I've done it and I bet Garth Ennis hasn't. They all talk rubbish on the subject, these comics writers. CONVERSELY, Terry Pratchett, who never claims to be a "magician" and who consorts with materialists... now HE seems to have rather a lot of intuition on the subject!! I think he's definitely read the old classic, "The Golden Bough". (A classical education also helps, BTW; that's what Joanne Rowling had and I missed out on.) But as to where he gets the rest of it from... anyone's guess. Interestingly enough, he's scheduled to speak at Witchfest in Croydon this November. I might very well go!
But anyway, retournons a nos moutons: how about THIS for a little piece of porn: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560972025/ref=pd_huc_gp_ss_1/202-5776594-3171051?%5Fencoding=UTF8
Completely leaving aside the manga market, which I know is huge, and has several pornographic subgenres, such as "hentai" (furry animals!! People dressing in animal costumes! This kind of fetish always makes me laugh!).. Well, most of these S&M-y things seem to be done by people with "Mediterranean" surnames, to put it nicely! (Seeing as I can't put sp*c!)
It must be another national thing.
Now YOU'VE given me the notion, thrown down the gauntlet, I shall go all over the Internet book sites, searching for examples of comic book porn! I'll give YOU "informed"!
Anyway, the genre's full of porn, Maurice: deny it if you can!
please don't take any of my comments as some sort of gauntlet. the last thing i want is you trolling the internet looking for comic book porn in order to prove a point. it's out there. my point was that none of the examples that you have cited (convent of hell, ship of fools, aside) are examples of it. nor do those titles represent mainstream comic book work.
what i'm saying is that miller, morrison, ennis, ellis, etc. are not examples of comic book porn. they might not be to your tastes, but they aren't porn.
and i will continue to delete comments that are too long. i put your last comment into my word processing program. it came out to seven pages.
What, you mean the last but one above, of mine?
DEPENDS WHAT BIG LETTERS YOU USE ON YOUR WP PROGRAM, NOW DOESN'T IT MAURICE?
What a shame, you read my mind! I WAS intending to "troll" or "trawl" the internet, looking for porn in graphic novel format, and I was going to send you a whole E-MAIL full of links to the stuff! Well if you don't want me to... if you find it too tempting - like some of those pastors do - well I can still do it for my own amusement, can't I? Without sending you the offending e-mail, I mean! Excuse me, I'm just a satirist by nature; everyone should know this... and I don't think they mind my rambling comments any more than they mind Michael Moore's. Of course you never actually get to hear my voice - I must remedy that some time!
"Mainstream" comic book work - which is - what? Isn't the "mainstream" related to what makes the most MONEY/has the biggest readership? I would say the Noe-type graphic novel (well it has a definite plot, albeit a SM/sexy one) has a large enough readership... there are certainly enough internet entries for this type of thing... probably about the same as certain manga titles? Anne Rice started her career as a pornographer, BTW.
And... isn't it strange.. how all these authors in "non-porn" graphic novels... did I SAY DC's et al were porn? I don't think I ever DID, with the exception of "Sin City", which I followed David Walsh in dismissing as porno-sadism.
Anyway, isn't it WEIRD how all these "mainstream comics" guys nowadays have similar NAMES, starting with the same letters.... Miller, Moore, Morrison. Ennis, Ellis. *Like a cult*...
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