A Smart “Dumb” Comic or Putting Out A Fire … With Gasoline!: Benjamin Marra’s Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror)

Cartoonist: Benjamin Marra

Publisher: Fantagraphics
 

KEITH SILVA: There are comics and there is Benjamin Marra’s Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror).

Think of an off-brand Regan-era actioner too big for Kurt Thomas and too small for Michael Dudikoff. Imagine it’s directed by the non-union Panamanian equivalent of Joseph Zito. Now add to this make-believe midnight movie with its sure-to-be-astronomical body count, novelty deaths, leaden one-liners, and ka-rah-tee with the most hardcore pan-sexual sex like … ever. Whatever such a movie would look like comes close to what’s in the pages of Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror).

The story goes George W. Bush orders the formation of a top secret team of Foreign Service agents as a big ol’ ‘Merican FUCK YOU!!! after 9/11. These ‘Terror Assualtors’ hold licenses to kill and one mission: defeat terror (4EVA). One agent, codename: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) takes this mission to the EXTREME because … why do you hate America so much?

Perhaps, big, dumb, and full of cum acts as a better description of this comic. Such critical shorthand gets at its inherent crudeness, but lacks the satirical charm, artfulness, and subtlety of something so indulgently indulgent and so blatantly blatant. Marra wants to honor the silly extremes of 80s action movies and hardcore porn and dumb it way down so it becomes whatever the reader wants to see: political parody, sexual satire, or so mundane and so geeky as to question the fundamental show-and-tell binary of comics.

So dumb. So smart.          

Marra’s fellow Fantagraphics stablemate and friend Dash Shaw often talks about the “dumbness” of a line. It’s a philosophical approach to cartooning that attempts to inform the reader through a lack of affect. Shaw says, “so much of illustrative drawing is about showing you what something is and simultaneously telling you how to think or feel about that thing. What the dumb line does, I think, is completely remove that from the equation. Everything is drawn with the same even-ness, or thickness, or lack of nuance … and finally you’re allowed to think for yourself! Finally there’s room for conflicting thoughts and feelings.”

The world of Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) is nothing but a collection of cubes in the guise of buildings, everything looks like a facade. Dumb. Cars look like tissue boxes with wheels and the difference between a desk, a video camera, a pack of cigarettes, and a bed is slight. The design of the characters maintains Marra’s distinct hip pinball machine art as drawn by underground comix legends like Art Spiegelman or Bryan Talbot. But the character’s movements are stiff and stolid as if Marra has never seen how human bodies move except in the pictograms of Airline safety cards. Dumb. The exception is when his characters take off their clothes: Marra’s men have six pack abs, long veiny hardons, and bulging scrotums that look like they’re smuggling cue balls in there. The women retain a constant 36-25-40 body shape with nipples that look like they could cut clear through adamantium. Even in the throes of the zesty enterprise of sex, the motion remains stiff, but the sex is “hawt” regardless of who’s zooming who. Even at his nadir of his career Steven Seagal was never asked to fuck a dude while jerking him off and crash land a jumbo jet (well, at least half of one) at the same time. Dumb.

It’s hard on the reader to take anything in Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) with any scrap of seriousness. Harder still is to avoid reading into the extreme situations of terrorism: hijacking, an invasion of the US and the war on drugs. It’s satire, sure, but what’s Marra’s point? With his blond hair, aviator sunglasses, John McClane-badassery and John Holmes’s sexual prowess, special agent O.M.W.O.T. is one cool customer. Isn’t he also a walking piss-take of American jingoism, fear-mongering and ignorance, not to mention a big cock in every way. If this comic fell out of the sky into the Afghan badlands or the mountains of Changang like some Coca-Cola bottle would it be taken as truth? Of America’s depravity and lack of morals? Is this the real ‘dumbness’ of this comic? Or should readers sit back in their red ‘Make America Great Again’ hats, tuck into a cheeseburger, chase it with a Budweiser with a tube of lube within arm’s reach and just enjoy the thrill of it all?               

DANIEL ELKIN: You’re asking leading questions again, Silva, pushing prosecutorial procedures out the emergency exit as this Airbus A380 is stuck circling the skies gobbling up fuel in order to make an emergency landing in the parking lot of some abandoned manufacturing plant in Detroit.

These are hard times. Don’t make me go tit-for-tat. I don’t have that kind of stamina and my one-liners are divided into two.

But hard times deserve hard commentary and slick Swiftian satire, right? And it appears O.M.W.O.T. fits the bill of fare here in this pre-apocalyptic hash house serving, as it does, crude crudités, moist meatballs, and a thick apple pie with a slab of cheddar stuck in it like a caseiculture hammer. There’s a jukebox in the back corner stocked with the entire discography of both Ted Nugent and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Every waitress is named Blanche and they all have an ax to grind about Syrian refugees.

Sweet gibbering gobstopper, it sure does take a thick stomach full of hot bile to macerate what Marra is cooking, doesn’t it? But we breed them big here in America. I mean, it unquestionably takes a capacious, dumb mouth to ingurgitate and bloviate simultaneously. Thank goodness we have a 24 hour news cycle to provide us with role models in that game.

Now I’m hungry. I think I need a ham sandwich.

Mmmmmmmm…...

Finally full of meat, I’m starting to second guess my chuck wagon metaphor. Maybe, instead, O.M.W.O.T is all about big hands? You know, the ones we use to grab our cocks and our guns and our cash at the same time as we throat punch perceived threats, jam thumbs in the eyes of those less fortunate, cover the mouths of those who disagree, and give the finger to the calm voice of reason? The ones that hold flimsy signs scrawled with misspelled hate in front of federal buildings? The ones that violently pull the lever on the voting machine to cast ballots out of blind frustration and against self-interest?

Benjamin Marra creates a book for the reptilian brain that explodes from within and without, whose shock waves push you back into your couch covered in Funyun(™) crumbs and Coors. It throws you out in the cold without your jacket because you have something to say. It complains about how inconvenient it is desperate, voiceless people have blocked your way to the mall with their protests. It whines about how much your city smells like urine in the summer because all those dirty children are living in tents under the overpass.

Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) is crude and over-the-top. It’s rude and uncomfortable.  It’s thoroughly inappropriate and bat-shit bonkers. And it is of and for our times. Or at least until the Iowa Caucus.

SILVA: So, it’s all politics then or at least political satire and that’s it? One big cock-and-bull-story about America’s (current?) obsession with vengeance and eye-for-eye diplomacy in post-9/11 Dick-Cheney- America? Thanks Obama!

Bullshit.

Marra is better, smarter (and dumber) than you are giving him credit for and so are the publishers of  American independent comics! And yes, Elkin, even a West coast lefty like you with your liberal leanin’s and not so nonchalant references to sandwich fixin’s must be able to see through the superficial scrim of political satire here? Call this Elkin-baiting, but your refusal to engage this comic on any other level than as political satire reads like some mealy-mouthed millennial … yes, millennial ... agog at the senseless violence and gratuitous sex, yet mindful (desperately so) of the instant credibility that having Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) on their bookshelves brings them while they’re drinking Headys with their fellow douchebag friends, all of whom lack the intestinal fortitude to make a fucking point or decision and stand by it. You’re a gotdamn American Jew, Elkin. Good Christ, you were raised in Texas! And you’re nearly forty-nine, act like it!

Let  me put it in a way a leather-patches-on-the-elbows-intellectual-counterculturalist like you understands: go further. Get on Furthur, tell Neal the ball the jack and thrill us with your acumen of how Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) functions as, you know, a comic. Critique, my friend, critique.

Sing of Marra’s use of dialogue in this political football you want to punt around. Why does nearly every line describe its corresponding elements in the panel? Example: when O.M.W.O.T shoots the guns out of the hands of an assailant, said assailant says, “What? “You shot the guns out of my hands,” this panel of the disarmed assailant accompanies two “ptang” sound effects, one for each gun, don’t you know. Or when a bedroom door explodes into the room, O.M.W.O.T says, “The door exploded inward,” a big “Boom!” complements the action, natch. Or how about when our hero visits an “internet company” in “the business district, Des Moines,” in the disguise of an investor no less, he ends up having a conference room quickie with the company’s Vice President and says, “I’m just spraying your ass with semen.” The Vice-President responds, “Can you see my body shaking as I orgasm?” There are wavy lines around both the ass shaking and semen spraying to bolster the image in the panel of … well you get the picture. And why is such racy and redundant dialogue sans any exclamation points whatsoever? Why so serious?

So sell your weak tea political insights somewhere else, Elkin, we’re all stocked up here.                       

ELKIN: Everything is about politics, Silva. Even sandwiches.

Satire is as satire does, brother, and if it happens to be your sacred cow that is being skewered, you’re the bigger man by doubling down on your order of keeeeebobs. Marra is comic booking here so hamfistedly because that’s the only way to hold on to something so juicy. We live in knee-bent, post-ironic times that demand this type of ridiculously excessive creating in order for you to “get it,” brother.

Get it?

Perhaps your genteel, old-school, pinky-raised, musty, East coast, well-to-do sensibilities prohibit you from rolling in the mud to better understand the swine, Silva, but there’s a world out there that is grokking everything from a place of fear and unease, ganking up the herpetological synapses, and fight-or-flighting all of its reactionary decisions.

Just look at the latest gun sale statistics. I’ll show you the life of the mind.

But you’re right, let’s not limit ourselves to just politics as it will only leave us insatiate. For you, I’ll put on my brown corduroy smoking jacket, pour myself a thick snifter full of a tawny aperitif, and reflexively stroke my goatee (not a euphemism).  You want critique? I’ll give you critique.

Perhaps, and I think this is where you want to go, O.M.W.O.T. is also a comic book about comic books, reveling as it does in hypersexuality, coursing with a banal attitude towards gratuitous violence, and turning on bonkers plot points all while keeping its character development flat and one-dimensional.

You know, for kids!

I’ll admit to having taste when it comes to my comics. I prefer the books I choose to work in the gray areas between clear cut good and evil morality, featuring characters that embrace and examine the dilemmas they face without punching them in the throat. My snobbery even extends to fashion choices. The moment a character decides that the best way to deal with obstacles or predicaments is to put on a cape, I quickly lose interest.

But I get it. I get the appeal of superhero books in the same way I understand why the fairgrounds are packed when the monster trucks come to town, or why a 10 second video of someone getting hit in the balls with a hammer goes viral. Simple is easy and we like to take it easy. There is a clean pleasure in loosening our load and lightening up while we still can. Given the choice between a Twinkie™  and kale, we’ll err on the side of the sweet. But such a steady diet does destroy, so they say. Or, in the case of someone like Dan White for example, it makes us mean and homicidal.  

I’m going to be the bold one in this conversation and say that corporate comic book publishers are the Hostess Snack Cake factories of the entertainment industrial complex, producing sweet treats that are good to eat but which eventually will make you fat, lazy, and stupid. We all know it, yet we keep on buying them in armloads.

(“Bullshit! We do NOT make B pictures here at Capitol.”)

Marra is deliberately playing to the expectation game with O.M.W.O.T. -- there’s a preconceived notion of what comics “are” --  that’s what this dialogue describing “its corresponding image and sound effect” kerfuffle is fluffing. That’s what every twist and turn of his style, layout, and pacing is pinging off of. There is a deliberateness to the dumbness; it’s in service of excacerbating our mastebatory urge to gorge ourselves on that which will soften us.

Sometimes you gotta shine the light in people’s eyes in order to get them to see.

So call O.M.W.O.T. political satire or social satire or even some kind of Wallace Beery wrestling picture, but it’s critique all the way through in both style and substance and every breakdown I make of this book  is only going to have me dancing to that boogaloo and shing-a-ling, pal.

Show me how I’m wrong and I’ll buy you a truckload of Ding Dongs™ and Ho Hos™.

SILVA: Wrong? No. What we are both circling around here, like two alley cats with too much damn education, is familiar ground: risk. The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Risk. Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) is not safe for work, it’s not safe for Starbucks™ and it’s certainly not something you want to leave lying around the house for your partner to find unless you consider comics foreplay in which case this fits the bill.

A playful streak runs through Marra’s work like Route 66 cuts across the fable of America. Seriously, this is a cartoonist who did a U.S. Agent story for the teacher-has-left-the-classroom-indie-cartoonists-run -Marvel Comics jam, Strange Tales. Marra’s comics are always a kick. And as is always the case with great art they are as subversive as fuck. The joy -- or dumbness to circle back around to the beginning -- with a comic like this is how the reader chooses to engage with it. Read at one level it’s a bonkers story with gobs and gobs of gratuitous sex and violence. Read another way it turns into a parody of the most vapid 80s action movies and hardcore porn. Or it’s a political/social satire and on and on. And yes, for nerds like me, it’s a statement on how too many comics are grossly overwritten and pay zero respect to the motherfucking point of Comics in the first place.

Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War On Terror) is a John 3:16 kind of comic. Marra loves comics and so he sent O.M.W.O.T. Here’s hoping we don’t fuck it up. Seriously, what could happen?

***

Terror Assaulter: O.M.W.O.T (One Man War On Terror) is available from Fantagraphics. For all other dumb Marra stuff visit www.benjaminmarra.com.

Daniel Elkin is Your Chicken Enemy. And there's always @DanielElkin for more dumb ideas about sandwiches, leftwing political drivel and comics.    

 

 

Vital, Vicious and Visceral: Starve #1 (a review)

W: Brian Wood A: Danijel Žeželj C: Dave Stewart

How do you like your dog?

For those familiar with (or hungry for) Brian Wood’s agitprop storytelling there is much to feast upon in Starve: a near-apocalyptic NYC, the populist rhetoric of ‘Us vs. Them,’ the cultural bankruptcy of celebrity, gross consumerism and, a near-fetishistic environmentalism—call it, Wood du jour. Yes, in much of its ‘stuff’ Starve dovetails Wood’s oeuvre from as far back as Channel Zero, Supermarket and DMZ to more recent work like Mara and The Massive.

Nearly two decades into Wood’s career as a comic book creator, when his peers have either split or are content to act as slaves to their own machinery, Starve proves Wood remains, yes, hungry. Each of those Wood-isms (see above) receives a check in its respective box and yet there is also a further brashness, an attitude, an urgency—Starve snarls, a vital, vicious and visceral beast.

The main ingredient here is Gavin Cruikshank, a (former) celebrity chef—number one with a bullet on 2015’s list for best new characters—who is estranged from his wife, Greer, and his daughter, Angie. For the last three years Cruikshank has been on a drunk of debauchery and local cuisine. A compelling and complex character, Cruikshank is world weary and cheeky with a pinch of pretentiousness that's more charming than obnoxious.  

Wood’s one misstep is to mention Cruikshank is gay or as he calls himself, “a queer dad.” His ex-wife says she was “twenty-two when we were married and when you came out of the closet? I was forty.” Wood never goes further with how or if Cruikshank’s sexuality [1] either informed his choice to go on his self-imposed exile or to return. Cruikshank contains multitudes, for sure, but why introduce his sexuality and then do nothing to develop it? Here's hoping Wood goes further with this aspect of Cruikshank's character.

The rest of the ingredients are these: world markets are crashing and global warming (isn’t it ‘climate change’ now?) has caused Jamaica Bay to rise twelve inches and swamp Queens and JFK. Fortunately, broadcast television has fared much better in the encroaching biblical reckoning. The number one show is ‘Starve.’ Created by Cruikshank as an Anthony Bourdain-like ‘No Reservations.’ In his absence, however, his creation has put on weight to become a cutthroat reality TV cooking competition. During Cruikshank’s truancy, Greer has had him declared dead and has taken full control of all the show’s assets and fiduciary concerns i.e. Angie. In order to (maybe) recoup some of his filthy lucre, Cruikshank must compete in (and win) an eight episode season of Starve.

This is Wood drawing from a deeper well. Starve is more than its bespoke urban rot and populist politics. Wood collaborates with artist Danijel Žeželj and colorist Dave Stewart, all three are listed as co-owners on the title. To nitpick Stewart’s approach to color on Starve sounds hypocritical like arguing hitting with Ted Williams or tugging on Superman’s cape, caveat dumbass. It’s all well and good to draw from the Crayola box of Armageddon shades and tones, but perhaps there’s more to this world than sepia and ocher, gunmetal and sage. Is it too much to ask any artist, let alone an undisputed authority like Stewart, to imagine (rethink) a pre-apocalypse and therefore break from the accepted language of the genre? Perhaps. Stewart knows blood and so when it’s time for this cooking competition to get on to the real ‘meat work,’ Stewart will surely bring his trademark bloody and sinuous reds.

Few illustrators or cartoonists equal Žeželj for style, emotion or amount of ink per page. His art occupies some liminal space between woodcuts and stenciled graffiti as if Albrecht Dürer and Banksy had a baby. In those viscous lines Žeželj wrings out exhaustion, ennui and joy in equal measure in the faces and frames of his characters with an unmatched poignancy. As he does in stories set in derelict urban settings -- Luna Park comes to mind -- Žeželj’s printmaker’s precision for background details in Starve creates images so suffuse with girders, illegal wiring and bodies, bodies, bodies it feels the opposite of industrial, organic and not manufactured. So fastidious is Žeželj’s line even tiny minutiae like tattoos and logos pop in all that ink. And when it comes to tousled hair, Žeželj’s tangles are matched only by other Wood collaborators like Becky Cloonan and Ryan Kelly.

Žeželj is not a nine panel kind of artist. Almost all of the pages in Starve are composed so panels act as satellites around a central image. Žeželj often layers panels to create a kind of consistent present rather than the sense events take place moment to moment or frame to frame like in a movie. Not only is this technique ‘pure comics’ it acts like the needle of a compass pointing the way through the chaos to tell the story where everything happens all at once. With apologies to Wood and to letterer Steve Wands, Starve doesn’t need narration or dialogue, everything the reader needs to know comes across in Žeželj’s art and that is something too many readers are starved for.

As to the dog in this first issue … it’s going to be a bridge too far for many readers. It’s dark, unsettling and daring … which is the point. Exploitation works to shock, to demand the audience pay attention, the meaning is self-evident and not to be dismissed as purposelessness. The point is to be insulting without insult and to challenge conventions. There is an (over) abundance of testosterone in Starve—which would fit with male-centric reality TV cooking competitions. It’s perhaps an overreach, but Starve (almost) feels like what David Mamet would do in a similar situation and the dog is symbolic of delivering on this chest-thumping male bravado.

The machismo on display fits with Cruikshank’s character -- the wildest of the wild bunch, the cagiest of vets in for one more job, one more score, the old dog brought back to show the young pups what for -- and it fits for Wood as well. Starve is a statement about men, fatherhood and most importantly, redemption. Cruikshank is looking for redemption and not to put too fine a point on it, so is Brian Wood.

On the final page of Starve #1, Cruikshank narrates, Wood writes, “But I won’t play the game they want me to play. This is my fucking show. I’m going to do my eight episodes and burn this whole place to the ground. Watch.” These words nest within full page image of Cruikshank from the chest up. Žeželj draws a skein of raw meat as it curls out from below Cruikshank’s top teeth and bottom lip like a serpent’s forked tongue. Blood drips from the meat onto his chef’s whites, he looks vampiric … he looks awesome. Wood’s words are a promise, tenacious and immediate, Gavin Cruikshank like Brian Wood means to reclaim his vigor and prove his worth. Watch.

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[1] In a later issue, Angie mentions her father’s workaholic nature which may explain why he lacks a partner or the time for to pursue a sexual or romantic relationship.

God Hates Astronauts #1

Now, Albert Einstein was a fuck-up as a cartoonist, that said which by the way is redundant in both writing and speech because, you know, you just said what you said and therefore never mind but he did manage to say something very smart and Einstein-ey-ish about starry-eyed dopes like God Hates Astronauts writer/artist Ryan Browne. No less of an authority than the internet says Einstein (supposedly) said: ''Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.'' Pro-tip: using overused clichés (talk about redundancy) like this one from Einstein (allegedly) in one's writing is like using the phrase 'that said' in everyday speech. That said … few piss into the wind or shovel shit against the tide better than Browne. God bless you and your tortured need for acceptance.

This is Browne's third (maybe fourth) attempt to (throat-clearing noise) launch this pet franchise of his into the hands of indifferent comics readers. First, GHA was a web comic, than a successful Kickstarter (backers even received what they ordered) and then a trade paperback published by Image Comics and now an on-going. Insanity. Pity colorist Jordan Boyd and letterer Crank for hitching their wagon Browne's star.

God Hates Astronauts #1 defines the word 'mistake' and (for once?) is a total miscalculation on the part of Image Comics. There can be little doubt Browne has Image Comics Publisher Eric Stephenson's dirty pictures. Perhaps GHA #1 is a 'mercy-publication' and somewhere out there in some sub-sub-sub-library of some Northern California court an intrepid soul would find a sealed presentment or some out of court settlement … the case of Browne vs. the board of Image Comics shareholders. Who knows. Who cares.

Honestly, why pay the $3.50 cover price for God Hates Astronauts #1 when in six months even the variant cover, by no less than Geof Darrow, will crowd out other has-beens and never-weres in the quarter bin or stuffed into grab bags at Free Comic Book Days for decades to come? Future generations will mistakenly stumble upon this paragon of defiance against good taste -- especially when there are so many post-apocalyptic zombie noir comics, crossover events and other original sins -- and ask wha?

Wow.

Why the ire for the plucky upstart Mr. Browne and his (albeit) feeble attempt to slice off his own piece of the creator-owned pie? Simple … satire. See, satire doesn't sell. Satire is the creeper in the corner who shows up uninvited, you know, like educational programming on corporately-owned TV stations. Best to air such dreck at 5 AM when the drunks finally pass out. That's the audience for God Hates Astronauts, blackout drunks, maybe masochists. Absurdity is an outlier, horses shouldn't drink beer from the bottle and the foibles of comics shouldn't be tweaked, whether playfully or not. Browne's a tweaker. His jokes depend on gratuitous visual gags, silly sound effects, bestiality and a deep knowledge of Billy Bob Thorton's filmography, four things no one asked for, ever. With, perhaps, the exception of 3-D Cowboy and The Impossible, God Hates Astronauts #1 is a comic best described as not for everyone.

Yes, Browne is an über-talented cartoonist and writer. And yes because of GHA he's more than likely going to end up having to pimp himself out as an über-talented cartoonist Uber driver when he's inevitably pantsed for defrauding comic book speculators who were (innocently) buying God Hates Astronauts #1 not to read (where the fuck have you been?!?) but because it was published by Image Comics, so money. Caveat Emptor dumbasses.

The good news is God Hates Astronauts will run eight issues, ten, at best, an adulterated un-fucked-around-with distillation of why we can't have nice things. Embrace the insanity, embrace the stupidity: God Hates Astronauts #1.

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Keith Silva knows satire and sarcasm are fool's errands so he started a twitter account: @keithpmsilva