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Warren Ellis’ cult hit STRANGE KILLINGS is back with “combat magician” William Gravel’s most gut-wrenching mission yet! Deployed to a steaming Philippine island, Gravel’s assignment is to assassinate an investigative reporter about to expose a chemical weapon lab sanctioned by the British government. But double-crosses and political intrigue have marked Gravel for murder by his S.A.S.? comrades as he realizes that he has been led into a trap by a vengeance-seeking superior. And it only gets worse. There’re zombies: Scores of flesh-ripping, reanimated corpses seeking to shred and devour everyone and everything in their path. If Gravel is able to uncover the shocking truth hidden within the jungle on this island of the dead, can even his otherworldly powers help him escape from a madman, and army of the undead and four squads of heavily armed S.A.S soldiers out for his blood?
Generally, I like Warren Ellis sort of okay. As far as white dudes doing comics go, he’s not one of the very worst. For example, he’s not Mark Millar or Frank Miller. At least, that’s what I thought.
Let’s summarize this in one page. Well, two pages.
Yes, that is exactly what you think it is. A woman of color–of the Philippines, to be specific–is commanded to strip by Edgeworth, a white man, in exchange for 500 pesos (a Southeast Asian woman–why, she’ll do anything for a little bit of cash). She is then thrown to zombies, who proceed to rape her and turn her into one of them. In her zombie state, she fucks a male zombie mindlessly and then proceeds to kill him.
In a different scene, the same zombies beset and attempt to rape a white woman. No worries though, Gravel–our titular “hero” and white man (of course! British as well, I believe)–is there to rescue her, the blonde white woman. Most of the zombies appear to be corpses of men of color as well, so we get quite the package: undead men of color want to rape a white woman, is then defeated and killed by a white man.
Is anyone getting uncomfortable? Is Warren Ellis just deep down one more racist, sexist stain in the swirling excrement ocean that is the comics industry? Probably: Transmet wasn’t exactly awesome about those things either.
It’s not even as if there is anything to recommend about the Gravel comics. It’s mindless tat of the lowest order, devoid of any merit whatsoever. Gravel is a Gary Stu who is never wrong about anything and who always wins, so much so that after this–
–we very quickly see him well and healthy again, the arm restored with nary a scratch to show, because he’s an AMAZING “combat magician” who’s more powerful and more awesome than anyone. The storyline is fairly incoherent, such that I suspect the only reason these got published is because it’s Warren Ellis and everyone likes big names, right? A lot of women die in these comics, by the way. One of them Gravel personally killed, but her ghost shows up to cry at him because he’s Harry Dresden I guess and sometimes Ellis is basically Jim Butcher. Keeping in mind that the woman in question was, in life, a powerful sorceress. They kiss. She says it’s nice to see him again. The thing anyone would say to their murderer, naturally.
There’s some vague pretension that Gravel is for “social justice”–in the class sense that is, with him wanting to dismantle the aristocracy–but it’s, well, incoherent cockrot. I never really pursued these comics anywhere; I happened on the zombie issue and called it quits. Haven’t had enough yet?
Edgy, no?
So yeah, I’m done with Warren Ellis. Quite apart from everything else, this is just juvenile.
ap0cryphal
/ June 29, 2012Speaking as someone who’s read almost everything Ellis has written, yeah, there’s no point defending any of the Gravel books. It’s consistently…bad. He’s written worse series, certainly (Blackgas – rapetastic omnivorous zombies, and Wolfskin – a Conan riff, with all the shitty hypermasculinity that entails). In general, anything Ellis publishes at Avatar is going to be….kind of bad. At best.
Kinda bummed you’re stopping with his stuff though. I’d point out Ocean and Nextwave as decent entertainment material. Quick, shallow reads.
acrackedmoon
/ June 29, 2012No, I’ve read those. Hell, I read FreakAngels, which was fun but fairly bullshit. Ellis doesn’t ultimately seem very worthwhile–rare, rare bits of pretty good here and there, but mostly it’s forgettable, and sometimes it’s really fucking bad.
saajanpatel
/ June 29, 2012The gang rape of the Indian woman in Transmet, where Ellis seemed to be going for laughs along with his “message”, was pretty bad too.
acrackedmoon
/ June 29, 2012Yeeep, and of course Spider is never taken to task or suffers any consequences from it.
ap0cryphal
/ June 29, 2012The message being “There is no one Spider Jerusalem will not screw over (LITERALLY AND OR FIGURATIVELY BUT THIS TIME LITERALLY GUYS LOL) for the sake of JOURNALISM.” The kicker being of course that she was the shithead’s assistant at the time and what happened to her was his fault entirely and he doesn’t even remember any of that.
For something that gets lauded as amazing spec fic in nerd circles, Transmet has some really skeevy sexual politics going on.
acrackedmoon
/ June 29, 2012Most things lauded as amazing in nerd circles have skeevy sexual politics!
saajanpatel
/ July 8, 2012I was thinking about this scene and it’s really disturbing on a number of levels (sadly, TRIGGER WARNING):
1) The woman is a woman of color. The issue makes a point of noting how Spider doesn’t learn anything from this scene, yet with his new white assistants he seems inexplicably to care about them more.
Of course there’s a reference to “Kali”, like this whole thing was a joke.
2) The woman is a woman. If the point was to show his expected readership how Spider could be evil, why not use a male assistant? This is not to say sexual of any kind is better, but if one feels the need to include rape why not speak to the reader in a way that better gets the point across?
Note also that we don’t see a real examination of the victim’s life, IIRC it’s a few panels of narration…yet we do as I recall she her performing various sex acts in which she is a supposed willing participant though she’s been brainwashed.
I question the choice of depicting the “willing” sex acts and not the psychological ramifications of gang-rape. I question Ellis’s ability to handle the latter, but even *listing* and sourcing the ramifications would have been the expected response of a mature adult who had even read about sexual abuse.
3) The “Is it rape?” escape clause. It’s hard to rank what part of this is the most disgusting, but for me at least this is the worst part. Of course Spider wouldn’t be so careless as to let her be kidnapped and violently gang raped….instead we have this invention that makes people go crazy with lust…if such a thing existed, especially in Spider’s post-Singularity dystopia, the ability to manipulate emotion would be Grail of the very people Spider is fighting. It wouldn’t be left to porn companies.
Barring the shitty world building, which I ascribe to Ellis’s proven laziness and poor ability to follow ideas all the way through, apparently the victim is just overcome with lust and loses all sense. Would a straight man become bisexual in such a situation, or is this just running with the idea that women really want sex even when they say they don’t?
4) The woman is cast as the villain, and when hearing her story Spider’s boss doesn’t bother to inform him, “Hey, your selfishness destroyed this woman’s life.”
Conclusion being that Women of Color are, in this unfortunate case, little more than props to further a plot. Why does it matter? Well, most of us will never use post-Singularity tech to unravel a political conspiracy, yet most of us will be in a position to support or deny the experiences of Women of Color who have been mistreated.
It’s pathetic that a work meant to be subversive (though really is a copy-pasta of Hunter S. Thompson into the future) fails at what is probably the only genuinely real problem it might have addressed.
the twisted spinster
/ June 29, 2012Man, I see stuff like this, and can’t help but think “Western civilization is so done.” And good riddance too, if this is what is held up as entertainment of any sort. In a real civilization, this sort of garbage would get someone shunned by all upright citizens at the very least.
Well I like to at least try to be upright. So here I am, shunning Warren Ellis.
Alasdair Murray
/ June 29, 2012Reading your blog has given me the depressing realisation that comics, as a medium, are stuck in perpetual adolescence. Pretty much all (Western) comics are written for teenage boys; and the more ‘adult’ they try to be, with all the sex and violence that supposedly entails, the more juvenile they look. I’ve read most of the ‘big names’ – Ellis, Mark Millar, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman – and they’re all the same in that respect.
I find myself wondering, is there something essential about the medium of telling stories through sequential images that prevents it from being used to tell sophisticated, subtle stories for grown-ups, that aren’t about people getting raped and murdered all the time? I don’t think so. I’m aware that there are at least a few counterexamples of ‘comics for adults’ which show otherwise, like Art Spiegelman’s ‘Maus’ and Marjane Satrapi’s ‘Persepolis’. It’s more that there’s something about the place of comics in American-British culture which keeps them in that teenage boy place and stops them from ever developing into something better. Maybe it’s different in other countries.
(To an extent, this is true of fantasy/sci-fi literature as well; but even if it’s a minority, I can think of several examples of sophisticated, literary science fiction which aims for something higher than ‘dude, look how cool this is!’. It’s much harder to do that for comics.)
phnxprmnt021
/ June 30, 2012There’s definitely nothing about the medium that inhibits mature, nuanced storytelling, you pointed out some good examples yourself. I think it’s mostly – at least, in America – this concrete belief that only a certain type of person reads comics, for a certain reason, with certain expectations. Most of the articles I’ve come across make it seem like the bigger companies – DC, for example – refuse to believe that anyone does/could read comics beyond the 18-34 male demographic, and that the piles of unfiltered shit that they’re producing is what the customers want, ostensibly what’ll make them money. Hence the 20 million Batman titles, matched only by the number of books that Rob fucking Liefeld not only draws, but writes as well. That pretty much tells you all you need to know about DC’s attitude right now.
It seems like it’s also at least partially a case of the inmates running the asylum? The American comics industry is kind of at the point where the guys writing the books are the ones who grew up reading them, and, well, haven’t seemed to develop any sort of adult-like greater social awareness. I mean, there are exceptions, but Christ, DC publicized the Hell out of Alan Scott’s debut as a homosexual man, and what happens? End of the second issue: gays effectively buried. That has to be some sort of record. Not to even bring up the friding of the entire female half of the JLI team, the numerous retcons to the Amazonian influence on Wonder Woman’s mythology, the cancellation of Static and Mr. Terrific, the presence of four Robins vs the conspicuous absence of two Batgirls, the dick-ification of nearly every male superhero who previously possessed a personality that didn’t resemble Batman’s (fun fact: in at least the first eight issues of Green Arrow, he didn’t once refer to a woman he didn’t know without using a gendered slur). They just don’t get it, and apparently don’t care to.
Er…that kind of went on a tangent. Sorry, trigger issue. POINT IS, cultural overhaul seems necessary. Perhaps some sort of mass industry brain-altering experiment.
Emil Söderman
/ June 29, 2012^ Eh. The romans managed a thousand years or so by having people actually murdering each other for kicks.
I’ve always found Warren Ellis to be… A bit off, occasionally he’s brilliant, usually he’s pretty much shit. And he quite often makes me want to punch a brit just on general principle. (But then again, so do a lot of the brit comic-book-people)
the twisted spinster
/ July 1, 2012What do the Romans have to do with this subject?
ap0cryphal
/ June 29, 2012@moon
but spec fic’s not GRITTY and REAL without skeevy sexual politics, doncha know. *facepalm*
seriously though, yes, quite true. i am still learning about this most obvious of things.
saajanpatel
/ June 29, 2012What’s sad about comics – or at least superhero comics – is the pandering to the troglodyte demographic.
There are comics I won’t by because they embarrass me with their wank material covers.
There was an article on Ars Marginal about the financial success in presenting well-rounded minority characters (Cassandra Cain, Black Panther, Storm).
One can see similar reactions with representation of other historically marginalized groups but somehow this fails to have any major impact. A little here and there, but it’s amazing how willing people are to watch their industry die rather than try and branch out.
Applesauce Parker (@apgeeksout)
/ June 29, 2012For example, he’s not Mark Millar or Frank Miller.
Eesh. Does any medium set us lower bars than comics? Still, I’ve often liked Ellis.
I’ve never read any of these comics, but from your description here, it sounds as though Ellis could be using the title to recycle the Hellblazer plots he didn’t get to do on that book: John Constantine also being a white British dude with a fridge full of supporting (mostly female) characters who occasionally literally haunt him. Depending on who’s writing him he’s a more or less “totes powerful and awesome” magician and more or less invested in social justice and a more or less insufferable jerk and a more or less interesting character. I remember Ellis’s run on the title as being one of the colder, more “edgy” characterizations. Except perhaps for the gunplay, I could see Ellis’s Constantine turning up here to fill the untouchable-badass-in-a-cool-coat role.
D (@pinstripeowl)
/ June 29, 2012Sigh. I do like some of his work, but sometimes he does do that whole hyper-masculine thing that just makes for really awful stuff.
Emil Söderman
/ June 29, 2012RE: Comics.
American comics (and I presume the british comic-book writers who work in the american comic-book industry, there doesen’t seem to be that much native british stuff going on) is really very niche. Superheroes, Grim’n'Gritty adventures, and Archie, pretty much. There’s occasionally an indie-graphic novel ala. Maus but they’re very rare.
Japan is of course different, but so’s the european comic-scene. Yeah, France has it’s share of skeevy exploitative stuff. (I remember reading more late 80′s/early 90′s comics about scantily clad barbarian women in a possible post-apocalyptic society than probably is good for me, or anyone) but there’s also some more sophisticated stuff, and eg. the swedish comics-scene seems to be (apart from newspaper strips) to be dominated by autobiographical or semi-autobiographical works. (that is in output, The Phantom, Bamse & Donald Duck still outsells everything else)
saajanpatel
/ June 30, 2012There’s nothing very Constantine about Gravel. The story pretty much runs on him being a “bad mother fucker”.
He runs out of bullets, so his guns shoot flames. One of the most ancient of sorcerers are tricked by some scheme out of Saturday Morning cartoons. And of course since he’s a “combat magician” he can whip out some violence on the weaker, academic types.
It’s a series of deus ex machina that rob the story of any momentum.
There’s only one issue, involving the (I think) mythical black dogs of folklore (shagfoal), which had no violence in it, that was any good.
Darius Wilkins
/ June 30, 2012Jim Butcher is way worse than you seem to think he is. Or at least the depths, anyways. Like I said, Changes was…shocking. I know the proprietress asked me what was so bad about it, and I sorta just thought it was just too much to say, clearly. It starts off with MRA badness with the reveal that the incipient monster of an ex hiding the fact that she has had Dresden’s kid. The depths of despair exhales in a sex scene with Queen Mab permeated with total bad faith. The victorious act is in murdering his ex-girlfriend and the rugrat’s mommy. Dies from a hidden assassin’s bullet. Just giving skeletal details here because detailing it would be…, but…completely Scots-Irish in their absolute worst, self-satisfied, light.
Warren Ellis has nothing, and I do mean nothing on Butcher, or Harris (and she can’t top Butcher either). All that stuff up there, gary stu being all apex rapist? Shallow, ridiculous, nothing that sticks to the amygdala. Butcher is…catholic.
biyuti
/ July 1, 2012Big sigh. “A Philippine island”??? Which one? Just any one? You mean it is a mere prop for this colonialist, racist garbage. Oh. Okay. Blech. This makes me kinda super happy that I stopped reading comics years ago.
saajanpatel
/ July 1, 2012There’s a lot of good work being done in the medium, though your tastes might veer outside of the superhero stuff.
Persepolis is worth reading, for example. Air, as G.Wilson’s perspective as a female convert to Islam is reflected in the work.
Gravel may really be one of the worst comics I’ve ever read. People always think that’s an exaggeration, but it is utterly incoherent.
narrativeeschatology
/ July 11, 2012Argh. Oh god. Like quite a few spec-fic guys, he strikes me as quite likeable, if only he didn’t write things (and get lauded by society for doing it).
hypervoid
/ July 19, 2012To the guy who compared Ellis, Millar and Miller to Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman: you are very, very wrong. Neither of them never indulged in these gratuitous womanizing ultra-violoent shocking tactics clichés. Nor Grant Morrison, by the way. And comics are not just super-heroes and garbage like Gravel. You have lots of excellent work being published by Fantagraphics, Oni Press, Top Shelf, Dark Horse and even Image these days. Just don’t go near any Marvel, DC, Dynamite or Avatar title and you’ll be great.
Gourmet Neurovore
/ July 19, 2012I dunno – Moore, at least, can get pretty rapey.