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.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1929: The Demon #26, August 1992

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I think I'll have to find #s 28 and 29 of this series, because the idea of Etrigan running for POTUS, backed by a group of conservatives who want "to put a real conservative in the White House" (this being published during the first Bush's administration), and to "restore America to greatness" is just too good, and too real, to not read.

 

I just want to point out that this comic, scripted by today's featured creator Dwayne McDuffie, is 28 years old this year, and still, with the possible exception of everyone being on cell phones, reads like it could have been written today. I suppose this offers a nice illustration of just how long people have not only been dealing with but also commenting upon the systemic inequalities of Western culture. That the Republicans have been such an easy target for such a long time really only underscores the necessity of the uprisings happening throughout the United States at the moment. And Etrigan really is the Orange Man, literally. All that the current President is missing is wings and scales, but we have to assume he's got good make-up people. The Demon's plans of course include taking all the power for himself and using his position to invade Hell, and with the possible exception of the destination of Hell (we can hope), this sounds like most of the dodgy politicians that we've had to put up with the world over for, well, longer than I can imagine.

 

The aforementioned Mr. McDuffie, who passed away in 2011, is a luminary in comics, and has done work for just about every major publisher in the industry. His first major comics work was the first Damage Control series, which I remember buying when it came out, though it's since disappeared from the collection. Mr. McDuffie is also one of the founders of Milestone Media, a publishing concern that focuses on diversity:

 

"If you do a black character or a female character or an Asian character, then they aren't just that character. They represent that race or that sex, and they can't be interesting because everything they do has to represent an entire block of people. You know, Superman isn't all white people and neither is Lex Luthor. We knew we had to present a range of characters within each ethnic group, which means that we couldn't do just one book. We had to do a series of books and we had to present a view of the world that's wider than the world we've seen before."

 

After his death in 2011, the Long Beach Comic Con established, with McDuffie's widow Charlotte, the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics, and McDuffie was also included for posterity in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

More to follow.

Further Reading and Related Posts

I honestly don't know how much Milestone work I have in the collection, but I have read at least one comic for the project.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 778: Hardware #1, April 1993

 






















(Link, because my Web Fu is bad: https://www.comics.org/issue/871010/)

We've got two cover images today, one for the actual cover, and one for the polybag within which the comic is shipped. What this tells us is that Hardware was produced in that time of comics that was all about collectibility, rather than readability. Fortunately, in this case, the comic is more readable than it was collectible. At least, it is now.

First, let's briefly talk about Milestone Comics. Far from being a thing of the past (almost 25 years past), Milestone, as a home for creators of colour, is alive and well, as the above link attests. As the editorial in the middle of the comic, written, I'm assuming, by EIC Dwayne McDuffie, notes, "Diversity's our story, and we're sticking with it. The variety of cultures Out There make for better comics In Here." I don't think I could say it better. This is especially important to note given the recent comments from Marvel on potential reasons for a market slump (and, as I noted when that article blew up the Internet for a bit, there's no mention of the rising price of comics [the reason I've stopped buying so many], or the drop in the U.S. economy). One of the few comics I still regularly read is The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, a thoroughly positive and diverse bit of comics if I've ever seen one.

We've already thought a bit about penciller Denys Cowan in Iron Man from a few days ago. Today's comic comes about 4 years later, and one can see that there's more passion behind this project than the mainstream Marvel fare. It's not surprising, really, that a creator would put more passion into a project that hits a little closer to home. In my own work I'm far more passionate about teaching comics (or occasionally Lego) than I am many other things. And Mr. Cowan's (and writer Dwayne McDuffie's) passion seeps through these pages, creating a story that engages the reader as much as it probably engaged the writers. So let's talk a bit about writer Dwayne McDuffie, a powerhouse creator in the comics world who sadly passed away in 2011. As with Mr. Cowan, Mr. McDuffie's passion for this project is palpable. Hardware, a.k.a. Curtis Metcalf, is a very, very angry character. As the tag on the cover proclaims, "A cog in the corporate machine is about to strip some gears," though it would be more apt to say that the gears are blown up and sprinkled as dust across Dakota City. It's appropriate to bring up Iron Man in the context of this comic, as Metcalf is a scientific genius who is exploited by a tech magnate very much like Tony Stark. (What a great story that would be to see Stark accused by one of his employees of institutionalizing racism in Stark Industries.) We have, of course, seen stories of the downtrodden corporate employee retaliating against their bosses, but very often the character is Caucasian, and in the end becomes a villain. And while Hardware kills a fair few people in this issue, it's hard to call him a villain. In fact, I could see the series moving into the territory currently being explored on Arrow vis a vis heroes who kill. Though given the time period within which the comic is written, perhaps the hero who kills is not that big a moral problem.

Mr. McDuffie's writing bears some resemblance here to the style of the early Image titles, which is unsurprising given their popularity at the time. But Curtis Metcalf's angry inner dialogue rings much more true than the over-muscled badasses of Youngblood or Deathblow. (As I write this, my English class are writing their final exam, and one of the terms we've covered is "verisimilitude." This is the insertion of detail into a fiction that allows the fiction to more closely resemble reality. Hardware's grievances with society are far more verisimilitudinous than any member of Youngblood.) What this accomplishes for a reader like myself is to see that the kind of dialogue that I despise in some comics actually works and is far more appropriately deployed and executed in a comic and setting where it actually makes sense. Dwayne McDuffie will undoubtedly come up again in this project. He left an indelible mark on comics, working not only in the print media aspect, but also the business and animation sides of the industry. But Milestone might be his most significant contribution, and one that will hopefully live a long and prosperous existence.

To be continued.