The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1947: Clive Barker's Hellraiser #9, 1991

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 As I sat to write today's post, I cast my mind back over the various Hellraiser films that I've seen, and I couldn't for the life of me think of any queer characters in any of them. Not that I've watched all of them (but they're on the list, I love the setting), but I'm pretty sure that the sex that is linked to pain in these films is all hetero. And given the links between the BDSM community that inspired the looks of the films and the queer community, you'd think it would be a no-brainer. Except, sadly, it would also likely alienate a large portion of the audience for these films.

Setting that depressing fact aside, today's featured creator is someone that I think will go down in history as one of the great queer creators of our time, Lana Wachowski. Honestly, The Matrix and Sense8 have to rank up there as some of the best pieces of media we've seen in the new millennium (I know The Matrix is 1999, but I think it presciently grabbed hold of our current zeitgeist). Sense8 is perhaps the best metaphorical articulation yet of how we ought to be reshaping our social systems, and The Matrix, no matter how many times I watch it, fills me with the fires of revolution. Ms. Wachowski got started, however, writing for the various Clive Barker properties that were under the aegis of Epic Comics in the early 90s. Indeed, it's somewhat fitting that the story that she writes here is called "Closets." The tale, of an abusive mother and her child, uses one form of violence to articulate an other - the damage done to the child in the story, his being locked in a closet, ends up corrupting him despite his escape from the Cenobites and Hell. Those of us who grew up in closets can perhaps see what the story is trying to say. In an interview with The Mary Sue, Lana's sister Lilly acknowledges that re-watching The Matrix from the point of view of the two creators' transness shows how the film is addressing that part of their lives, and of the lives of closeted queer people. I think in future we're going to have a lot of pieces of media that have to be read this way. Just as we might go back and read George Eliot from the perspective of a woman hiding in a man's world, we'll see stories told that must be considered from the point of view of the hidden queerness of the creators.

Who else was in this issue, though? The Hellraiser books are anthologies, brimming with talent, really. Two of my featured creators from the recent past, Denys Cowan and Dwayne McDuffie grace these pages, and Miran Kim, who illustrates Ms. Wachowski's story, is of Korean descent. Add to this some bloody (literally) brilliant painted artwork, and one can see how this series lasted as long as it did. If you're a fan of the franchise, this is one of the few times that I've seen an adaptation be almost as effective as the source material.

One last note, as I'm celebrating queer creators right now, is that Clive Barker is also queer, having come out in the mid-90s. I remember the furor over it, but I wish I could remember how I, personally, felt about it.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I've read a bit more from Epic Comics for the project, including the very queer-sounding Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool.

And since Ms. Wachowski and her sister are, primarily, filmmakers, here's some thoughts I've had on movies.

Walking the Shadowline part 3: Critical Mass

This post will not be opening with a Marvel Age comic!

It's interesting that, though the main series' were cancelled due to low sales, the Shadowline was granted a prestige-format 7-issue series to finish out the first big storyline that had been building through the first 8 issues. I don't know much about the production side of comics, but I would guess that this single large-format issue on a monthly basis was less expensive than bi-monthly single issues. However, given that each issue is basically 2 issues of the previous series', meaning the same amount of scripting and art, it could only have been on actual physical production costs that any money was saved. Regardless, I'm glad they managed to give us at least one epic (pun intended) storyline before the characters (well, most of them) descended into limbo.

What's more interesting, though, is that in this format, the Shadowline Saga really finds its footing. The story is far more coherent, in that shared universe manner, than the previous issues, and we're treated to short interludes between chapters that highlight some of the minor characters to whom we've been introduced over the past year and a half of stories. These interludes come to be fundamental to the overall cohesion of the shared universe. With something like the Marvel U, or the DCU, there are enough titles that one can get both the superheroic and the mundane in large portions, enough to sketch, or sculpt, a believable fictional world. With only three titles, the Shadowline often had the feeling of taking place only around the main protagonists. The interludes in Critical Mass remind us that not only do the actions of the main characters have ramifications, but also that the minor characters have relatively vibrant lives of their own. Something like this could certainly have been incorporated into the main titles, but to have them right there, sandwiched between the larger chapters, makes those events far more immediate and important, rather than simply seeming to be a back-up feature.

With regard to the style of the stories, not much changes from the independent series to this anthologized one. The world is a grim place, and it only grows grimmer as Henry Clerk returns from the lobotomization to which Dr. Zero subjected him, and decides to destroy the United States. But for, y'know, the purpose of forcing Darwinian survival traits on the population. What I am quite curious about is whether or not the way this series plays out is how things would have played out if a) the comics had remained discrete entities, and b) if the Shadowline had somehow been able to continue, whether through large-scale events like this one or through smaller monthly comics. The status quo at the series end is slightly, but only slightly, different. Zero is still Zero, though we see a more human side of him (a statement he'd almost certainly take as a great insult), Michael Devlin is far more comfortable with his role as the Knight, and Lenore and Victor are more comfortable with their public Powerline personas. Where would they all go from here? We'll never know, I guess.

One last thing really struck me about the final parts of this story. There is a scene on board a cargo plane where the main characters are all gathered for the first time. Lenore has some vague recollections of having met Zero in the Black Forest in Germany, and she stumbles upon him changing into his costume just before the climactic confrontation. They flirt, and that's that. Now, each story, since their beginnings, has been narrated in the caption boxes in the first person, so we get not only the interactions, but the internalities, of each character. This same scene is told three times, each time from a different focal point. And, surprisingly since Chichester and Clark scripted all of them, the dialogue is different depending on which focal character we're witnessing the scene through. And the art is different too. Not just in that it's different stylistically, but also in the composition of the scene. In one version a character is present, in another that same character is not. Think about this for a second. Does this mean that not only the captioned dialogue, but also the visual-linguistic elements of the panels is parsed through a particular focal character? Are we not only getting their point of view in their words, but also in what is represented visually? Like we're seeing a memory that is not quite perfect? I love this idea, which also kind of hints that the whole story is being told from some future point by each of the narrative voices in each of the series. It gives me, at the very least, another perspective from which to read the stories next time I go back.

That's about it for the Shadowline. A comment from reader Brad in part 2 of this series alerted me to the fact that the Shadows will be showing up in the Squadron Sinister series spinning out of Secret Wars this summer, so I'm pretty excited for that. The hope, of course, is that all kinds of people will want to know who those characters are, and what their stories are, and we'll see a reprint of all of the issues, and maybe a continuation of the Shadowline Saga. Until then, if you have friends who want to know who they are, and what they do, send them over.

Walking the Shadowline part 2: Into the Night

This installment begins with another issue of Marvel Age, though this time the larger-format annual version of the news magazine. The annuals of this publication are occasionally worth a look, as they'll often include exclusive comics content. Such is the case with MAA #4, in which we're presented with a recap story of sorts by Chichester, Clark, and Cowan. Whether or not the Shadowline series were suffering low sales, and thus deemed in need of a boost in a more public forum, or if it was just enthusiasm for the line that prompted this little comic is hard to say. And, to be honest, not much is added to the overall story by this little interjection. I can only imagine that it was intended to drum up interest in the three main titles.

I don't think it worked, unfortunately.

With issue #5, both Doctor Zero and Powerline underwent shifts in artist. DZ lost Denys Cowan, who was replaced variously with Brett Ewins, Dan Spiegle, and Gary Kwapisz, where as the Powerline team lost David Ross and gained Gray Morrow. The quality of art doesn't change, to be fair. But one of the troubles comics face, especially comics such as these that do not feature well-known characters, is the loss of readers through an inability to follow a story because of inconsistent art. 

 

Let me explain: though the costumes are quite iconic, in the pages of each issue, the main characters wear their costumes only seldom. Thus it's vital that there be consistency in their non-costumed appearances in order that one know who a given character is at a given time. Of course, context explains much, but not all, especially in a visual medium like comics. Add to this the characters that move from series to series who are also victim to this inconsistency, and the comics become a bit confusing. Even on this read through, easily my fourth or fifth since they were published, there were some characters that I couldn't immediately identify, though from the context it was clear that I was supposed to.

But, again, what of the actual stories. In this run (really a run-up to the solicited "Critical Mass" crossover), we see the various heroes taking on challenges inherent in the clash between humans and shadows. Michael Deviln takes his powered armour back to a village in Nicaragua in which he preached, and takes on guerillas while searching for his predecessor as Knight of St. George. The Powerline team takes on strange cases across the country, all the while trying to figure out how to take vengeance on the Ravenscore family for their brutal slaying of both Victor and Lenore's families. And Doctor Zero encounters a covert military group nicknamed "The Merchants," who manage to capture him and begin to analyze him before he escapes and makes known that The Merchants have joined Henry Clerk as enemies of "The Dragon." So the story is moving along, and has veered a bit from the thoroughly conjoined feel of the previous four issues. I think this was a wise move. With the bi-monthly publishing schedule, we'd basically been given 9 months of world-building with the first 4 issues of each series. Not to say that there weren't stories and plots interwoven through that world-building, but the establishment of the connectedness of the titles was obviously on the minds of the creators. The subsequent issues loosen that connection (but only a bit) and allow the characters, and by proxy the readers, to explore the world a little more, to build a sense of there being events taking place on this version of Earth (Earth 88194, according to the Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe) that don't all revolve around the conflicts between the orders and families of Shadows to whom we've been introduced.

With issue #8 of each series, however, things change. The regular writers and artists disappear, and we have what can only be described as fill-in issues, but these are fill-ins with the words "Final Issue" plastered on the covers. The text within tells the tale: "Due to dropping sales, it has become necessary to cancel Epic's Shadowline titles."

The news, however, is not all bad. Instead of continuing as three separate series, the storylines within each series are to be picked up and published in a monthly single volume entitled Critical Mass. It is to this epic (see what I did there?) story we'll move in the next installment. I'll consider what works and what doesn't, and what the ramifications of this kind of concurrent publishing for a crossover story might be for the mainstream crossovers that flood the market nowadays. Critical Mass is not a crossover series in the way that something like Secret Invasion or the current Secret Wars, but is instead the individual series taking part in the crossover published under a single title. I'll get into it more next time.