The Miserable Annals Of The Earth

August 25, 2005, around an hour before Super-Girlfriend and the Super Kids get home

Which means, this blog page, which is almost certainly going to take me three or four hours to type, will not be up any time soon, and I will almost certainly be changing the date stamp up above when I post it… which will invalidate this opening paragraph, soooooo… see how difficult it is, working with me? No wonder Mike Norton doesn’t want to do it any more. Ah, if only I didn’t have to…

Super-Girlfriend is having a rotten day at work today, so I’m handling dinner, which means, I stopped off at the grocery store on the way over here and got some spare ribs, some mashed potatoes, some gravy, and some corn from the deli, and built a salad for her at the salad bar. Since I can only vaguely recall what she likes in her salads, there’s only a small chance she’ll actually like her dinner, but at least she won’t have to cook tonight.

Yeah, yeah… I can casually reel off a list of everyone who was in the JLA, Avengers, Defenders, Legion of Superheroes, Fantastic Four, or X-Men up through the mid 1980s, but despite having seen Super Girlfriend build salads or order salads or eat salads dozens if not hundreds of times by now, I cannot reliably recall what she likes in them, and I’m a very bad boyfriend, so let’s move on.

There were two slices of pepperoni pizza over at the deli, too, and I nearly bought them, because Super Adorable Toddler is more often than not balky about eating anything that Super Girlfriend doesn’t cook for her, but she’ll always eat pizza. But we just made homemade pizza last Sunday (it was yummy) and there was a lot of it left over in the fridge, so I figured there still had to be a few pieces, and, well, as we all know, when one assumes, one makes an ASS out of U and Mark Evanier. Or, to put it another way, when you are living with the Super Kids, it is never safe to figure that anything you saw in the fridge yesterday (or .87 picoseconds ago) is still there; it may well be on its way through some Super Kid’s super digestive tract, as the Super Kids could give lessons in devouring to swarming locusts, at a very high tuition.

So, Super Girlfriend and I got a few smidgens of good news over the past few days. One is that she is finally getting a raise, maybe. This is how it works at Super Girlfriend’s job: about a year ago, the guy they had doing the Project Manager job at $60,000 per annum left, for various reasons not least of which being his gross incompetence in performing his professional duties. Apparently unwilling to hire someone else at that salary to be similarly incompetent, the owners of the construction firm where S-G works decided they’d just dump all the inept former Project Manager’s work on the only really all around competent person they had in the office, which is to say, S-G. Now, S-G was technically an administrative assistant, which we know because she was being paid as an administrative assistant, which is to say, half of what nitwit Project Manager was undeservedly getting, and she’d been being paid that amount for the two years she’d been working there, without a raise, despite being promised one about a year after she first started working there.

So, for the last year, S-G has been doing a Project Manager’s job for her secretarial salary, and doing it so competently that, well, instead of the company declaring Chapter 11 six months ago due to spectacular bungling at every level on all three of the major projects dumped on S-G’s desk, they are, instead, about to finish all three projects while making a healthy profit (and I swear to God, if you knew what many extremely stupid, much richer than they deserve to be people are paying for tiny tiny condominium apartments in downtown Louisville in the one project S-G is ably managing, your head would whirl with incredulity).

So S-G’s one boss, who owns the company, has promised her solemnly she would get a raise, and in fact, she was supposed to see it in her last paycheck, but her other boss was apparently screaming bloody murder about the size of the raise that the first boss wanted to give her, and they had to sort that out, so S-G hasn’t seen a dime of said raise yet. Although we both kind of had hopes that, given that the second guy was so adamant against giving her such a large raise, perhaps she’d actually start being paid something, you know, only maybe 20 or 30% under what she should be making for doing a job well that someone else was completely screwing up, for far more money.

Or, in other words, she might go from making around half of $60K per year to making, oh, 2/3s of $60K a year, which would still be egregiously insulting, given that $60K a year is clearly the value the market has put on the job she’s doing, but, well, if it had come back that S-G was suddenly going to be making $40K to $50K per year, she and I and the SuperKids would all have been doing the Happy Dance.

As it turns out, she’s getting a $3,500 per year raise, which isn’t chicken feed, exactly, but, well, it’s still a slap in the face given the indisputable value of her work to the company. And, well, she hasn’t seen it yet, and tomorrow she’s been told the bosses want to ‘talk to her about her raise’.

So, we sort of got good news, and now, we’re waiting to see if it’s actually good news.

But, we did get REAL good news on another front: my landlords, who are old friends of S-G’s (which is how she wangled them into giving me my current tiny apartment in a very good neighborhood for a very cheap rent and no deposit or lease), have finally caved into her arm twisting and agreed to hold the absolutely gorgeous apartment across the hall from me for us until October, when S-G’s current lease is up. We’ve all seen the apartment, and we all love it, and S-G and the Super Kids especially love the idea of living in my current neighborhood, which is one of Louisville’s better residential areas. We’ve all been waiting with our fingers more or less desperately crossed all summer, hoping against hope that the apartment would still be available when October rolled around, because when S-G asked them to hold it for us back in July (the previous family living there moved out at the end of June) they told her they couldn’t do that. It’s been empty ever since, and the news that now, they will grudgingly acquiesce and keep it open for us for another six weeks, is a real load off all our minds. The older Super Kids are ecstatic at the prospect of living there, and, well, so am I. It’s a really nice apartment, and there are no words for how pleased I am at the prospect of moving S-G and her kids out of the small, not particularly pleasant apartment they currently reside in into a much roomier space in a much better neighborhood.

(I think SuperAdorable Toddler will also be very happy to be living there, as she loved the apartment when we all saw it back in July, and one of the things she loves to do mostis visiting the house, and my small apartment there, and the neighborhood, now. She loves the front yard and the front porch and the nearby shops and the nearby playground and the little room that will be hers and we know she’ll be thrilled to realize she’s now living there. However, Super Adorable Toddler does not have a ‘discretion’ setting; she will rat us out in a heartbeat to the Asshole Ex-Husband without realizing what a world of heartache that’s going to cause, and S-G and I are resigned and willing to put up with him going ballistic about us moving in together after we have actually moved in together, but we see no reason to put up with the crap before then if we can possibly avoid it. So Super Adorable Toddler will find out about the move when we get her back and bring her over to the apartment, with everyone’s stuff already moved in, for the first time.)

In addition to that, one of my agencies has a solid lead on a much better job for me. Well, actually, they had two solid leads, and I was forced to pick between them because they won’t put me up for two jobs at the same time, so I passed up what seemed like a sure thing, for less money that was a looooooong bus ride away, for a somewhat harder get, which would pay more money and let me work downtown, a few blocks from where S-G works. So we’re keeping our fingers crossed for that.

In the meantime, I’m trying to be much less pissy at my current job, because now that the move is definite, I need to have some kind of income. I’ve generally had the attitude on this job that if they fire me, they fire me; but now I need to be a little more conciliatory. Of course, I did call in sick last Sunday night, because Super Sensible Teen needed foot surgery early Monday morning and had asked me to accompany her, since Super-Girlfriend tends to faint at the sight of blood, and no job is anywhere near as important as being there for one of the girls. But I’m trying to suck it up and be a good corporate coolie now.

And in an absolutely unprecedented move, I actually talked my bank into taking $60 worth of charges off my account today. I didn’t expect them to, as in the past banks have shown absolutely no interest in being human to me at all when I’ve been clubbed over the head by their outrageous fees for minor negative charges. However, I get along reasonably well with the local branch manager, and I didn’t threaten or bluster, just explained to her very nicely that when I was making $150 a week and had rent due the following week, I simply couldn’t afford to make further deposits to an account that was $64.74 negative over a $4.74 overdraw. And while I’d expected that she would just apologize and say there was nothing she could do, and I’d be having S-G do my banking for me with her account from now on, the very pleasant branch manager smiled and said she would give me a one time ‘do over’ and take the charges off.

I was absolutely stunned, but, you know, in a nice way. Which doesn’t happen to me anywhere near enough.

And, beyond that, there’s drama brewing in the distance with both S-G’s family and mine, but I’ll spare you all that nonsense.

Over at Moon of Alabama, my 15 minutes of access seems to have expired. Bernhard, the barely literate editor there, invited me to submit material to him which he would post on the front page of the blog. So I submitted stuff to him, and he put up two of the things I submitted, and then has lapsed into surly, bitter silence. I assume, though, that as he’s been posting a lot of open threads lately where anyone can post their stuff (just not, you know, on the front page, with the distinction of a byline), he’s subtly but firmly pointing me back to the comments thread ghetto, where he assumes I belong.

It was nice while it lasted; the second of the articles he posted for me drew over 75 comments! SEVENTY FIVE COMMENTS! Give me a whoo, give me a hoo! All good things come to an end, though, and apparently the universe, or at least its editors, simply cannot bear it when I start getting a lot of attention, so it would seem I’m once more exclusively entertaining the nine or so of you who read this blog. And I thank you for the opportunity, although that number is going to drop to Mike Norton from this point on, on this page, at least.

IT’S THE LATEST ISSUE

I know, I used the same BB quote for my last post about comics, but, well, I have to. It’s the only reference in BB to comic books at all.

Steve Tice sent me a walloping big package of comic books, which I got on Tuesday and have been reading my way through ever since, in what little free time I have between working, sleeping, and hanging out with my girls. I finished most of them this afternoon, before coming over to S-G’s pad. So, let’s talk about it:

Steve tucked in some stuff I didn’t order, as free samples. At least, I hope they’re free; if he charged me for any of this crap, he and I are gonna have words. But at least I can now knowledgeably piss all over various comics I was already pretty sure were toxic horseshit, which is always fun, and sometimes even enlightening. But I’ll settle for fun, and god knows you should, too, given the limitations of the author whose work you are currently perusing.

The New Avengers - There are certain writers I have always had suspicions cannot actually write, like, to name two, Warren Ellis and Brian Michael Bendis. Until reading The New Avengers, I had no actual experience with BMB; I simply suspected he lacked anything remotely like talent based in no little part on the fact that his name was always attached to titles no sane person would ever want to even hold in their hands for any longer than it would take to toss them down a chute leading into the heart of a working incinerator, like, you know, various Ultimates books.

Now, I still suspect a profound lack of writing talent and/or skill in Warren Ellis, since Ellis only seems to write titles with moronic sounding names like GEOSYNCHONICITY and DESALINAZATION and AMORPHEUS POET-WARRIORS and what have you, which all feature characters bearing epithets like Hawkspittoon and Dreamcarpet and Every-Mango and Troll-flogger and Cabana-Verdict and Away In A Manger and I don’t know what the christ all else. Plus, his fans are for the most part emotionally retarded pinheads whose computer keyboards all have to be sealed under plastic to keep their constantly erupting bodily fluids from continuously shorting them out.

But, honestly, given that I have never in my life read more than a page of Warren Ellis’ work at any given time, where said page might be excerpted for review purposes in some bilious, sycophantic, subliterate trade magazine, (“Say,” says Mike Norton, “I believe he’s talking about Wizard right there”) I honestly have no real opinion on Warren Ellis’ talent. I’ve seen bulletin boards and blogs where people quote Ellis’ characters, dialogue, and the stuff he himself apparently writes on his own blog, in the context that apparently those doing the quoting think Ellis is some kind of singular, visionary voice for an entire generation, and those quotations seem for the most part to be pretentious, pedantic, and not particularly bright to me (overall, Warren Ellis seems to be the new Grant Morrison, except instead of being a whiney wank, he’s a snarling, pissy wank with ‘tude, which, you know, is always an improvement).

But I admit it frankly, I do not know for sure. Maybe Warren Ellis is brilliant. Maybe it’s possible to be brilliant, and still create a lot of derivative yet truly rotten characters with dreadful names going down on each other excessively in comic books whose titles are apparently chosen by putting on a blindfold and running one’s finger randomly down a page of text by Bruce Sterling or Walter Gibson. I couldn’t tell you. Honestly. I do indeed assume that Warren Ellis' writing sucks, but I confess it frankly, I could be wrong.

Now, prior to reading the godawful waste of pressed, bleached cellulose known as New Avengers #8, I admit that I also made similarly negative assumptions about Brian Michael Bendis' writing skills, because Brian Michael Bendis writes a whole lot of Ultimates swill, and writing Ultimates is like, I don’t know, being bitten by a vampire or something; it’s a horrible moral taint that you can never be cured of and eventually no matter how you struggle or how much liquefied garlic Kris Kristofferson injects into you, you’re going to utterly succumb to the darkness, surrender your soul, and start feasting on the blood of the living… which, actually, is pretty much what having anything to do with the creation of an Ultimates story is, anyway.

But, well, that would have been an assumption, just like my assumption that the Ultimate Avengers stories must necessarily lick every cobblestone of the mainstream Marvel Universe they so feebly parody by their very existence, based on the fact that Mark Millar’s JLA story for DC’s dreadful Silver Age project was violently and horrifyingly repugnant, and the various story details from these comics I’ve had breathlessly related to me by morons over the years are all revolting, and when I opened a TPB collection of the issues at random the other day at Great Escape, the first thing I saw was the Ultimates Captain America impaling some general he didn’t like very much on the nose spire of a military jet which he (Cap) was piloting, after which he made some idiotic wise crack about it.

So, from all this I simply assume that the Ultimates Avengers stories all pulsate and reverberate with vast and untold depths of suckiness. However, with assumptions, you can always be wrong. Perhaps (I admit it) the Ultimates Avengers stories are wonderful and brilliant, whenever Captain America isn’t impaling people and the Wasp isn’t flashing her boobs at the Hulk and Giant-Man isn’t slapping the Wasp around and Nick Fury isn’t, for some insane reason I cannot for the life of me even remotely imagine, being a black guy.

But, since Steve Tice was kind/foolish/sadistic enough to stick a (I pray to Horus) free copy of the absolutely appalling New Avengers #8 in with my latest pull, I am no longer forced to make similar assumptions about Brian Michael Bendis. Now I know he sucks. And soon, soon, you shall too.

First, there is apparently this guy called the Sentry. Now, I’d heard things about this Sentry twit, basically through not being able to entirely avoid all the ads for The New Avengers no matter how assiduously or desperately I tried to. I had, however reluctantly and unwillingly, gathered that the Sentry was some kind of amazingly powerful superhero who had played some indispensable part in past Marvel continuity, that, apparently, no one had ever heard of before, and we were all supposed to care, too. And, you know, there was the whole thing where the Sentry had long hair and a scruffy beard and looked kind of like Solarr, and apparently was locked up in prison somewhere, or living in a cave, or I don’t know what the hell all nonsense, while the New Avengers tried desperately to figure out who he was and where he came from and how in the name of God they could possibly talk him into putting a shirt on, because, you know, there aren’t any more important things happening anywhere in the entire Marvel Universe for the New Avengers to spend their time worrying about.

So, in this issue, we see the New Avengers and a lot of armed SHIELD agents (I guess) confronting The Sentry in a cave with a comic book that shows him in a really bad costume (albeit one that covers his manly nipples, which is a marked improvement over the costumes he is continually shown wearing on the covers, or what he is actually wearing in the actual issue), being drawn by Sal Buscema fighting some previously unheard of villain called the Void. And they are all saying things like “How are you in this comic book when we have never heard of you? And why do you insist you killed your wife when she’s right here? And for the love of God would you please put a shirt on?” Except for the last part, because if they’d actually said the last part, that would have been slightly cool, and we can’t have that.

Now, what I hate about this whole Sentry thing is that it bears not the slightest resemblance to good writing, in that, well, there is actually not the tiniest particle of hope that however BMB resolves this idiotic plotline, it will in any way come even remotely close to surprising anyone who has ever read more than ten superhero comic books in their life, as long as three of those ten were written by Alan Moore.

See, when you have this massively superpowerful being who was once, apparently, a significant part of the history of your fictional superhero universe, but he’s never appeared in any comic book before this and no one inside or outside the universe has ever heard of him, you have two choices: either (a) He Isn’t What He Seems, he’s a figment of a dream or a Skrull impersonator or something like that, or (b) He’s Exactly What He Seems, an enormously important guy who has astounding powers and For Some Reason Insidious Entities Have Conspired To Make Everyone Forget His Existence.

Now, while it’s undeniable that some good writers are vastly egotistical, it is a physical law of the universe that all really bad writers are, especially ones who made their bones writing Ultimates stories. So option (a), whereby the Sentry might actually be something remotely interesting, like a very clever Dire Wraith trying to infiltrate the Avengers by making them think he’s someone extremely significant whose entire existence has been wiped from the recollections of all living humans (something which happens about every other week in the Marvel Universe, and the Avengers all know it), is right out. Because in the end, that would make the Sentry a cool story idea with no lasting implications, and Bad Writers With Giant Egos never create characters/story devices like that.

So, we are stuck with the inevitable realization that the Sentry is Very Very Important, So Important That The Entire Universe Has Been Forced To Forget Him. And eventually, he will get over himself, cut his hair, get a shave, put a shirt on, and join the New Avengers, and Brian Michael Bendis will have put his indelible stamp on the mainstream Marvel Universe, at least, until someone with sense takes over writing the Avengers and reveals that all the horrible crap that Bendis has inflicted on the team is nothing more than about a year’s worth of really really wretched ‘authorized comics’ that exist only in the Marvel Universe itself and never really happened to the actual Avengers.

And this needs to happen soon, to get the taste of what I’m about to describe to you out of my brain:

On page 7, we begin three pages of Tony “Iron Man” Stark begging… nay, True Believer, beseeching, very nearly on bended knee, like the biggest whiniest prison bitch in the known metaverse… for Wolverine (WOLVERINE, for the love of jebus) to please please pleeeeeease, I’ll do anything, I’ll be your friend, I’ll wash your car, I’ll let you date my cute sister, pleeeeeeease Logan please, officially join the Avengers.

YAAAAAAH AUUGGGHHHHHH YEEEARRGHHHHH GAHHHHHH HELP ME HELP ME HELP MEEEEEEEEEE!

Other than the above primal screams of anguish, there are no words for how this makes me feel. Well, there are, but they are mostly obscene, and the ones that aren’t obscene are very likely illegal under various pieces of hate speech legislation, and would probably allow Brian Michael Bendis to successfully file restraining orders against me, and I’ve already got one insanely egotistical comics writer looking into that, so I will content myself with saying the following:

There have been a few bad choices for the Avengers, over the years. D-Man, Triathlon, U.S.Agent, all the different members of the Fantastic Four, Dr. Druid, Gilgamesh, the female Captain Marvel… and of course (Mike Norton is just tapping his fingers, waiting for me to spit it out, so I will) the most dreadful and appalling invasion of the Avengers line up ever: She Hulk. And, well, one of the problems with appalling additions to the Avengers line up is we tend to be stuck with them forever. Every time some new writer comes along and does a big “everyone who has ever been an Avenger has to show up and fight trolls” story arc, well, there’s D-Man, crawling out of the sewer with a fishbone in his beard, there’s U.S. Agent adjusting his trunks to hide his boner as he struts forth from the nudie bar closest to Avengers mansion, and here comes She-Hulk in a thong bikini made out of dental floss with her nipples and pudenda bulging through the nearly entirely hypothetical fabric with a compact car over one shoulder and Wyatt Wingfoot tucked snugly under her other arm, and from now on, I suspect, we’ll have to put up with the Sentry rubbing baby oil into his closely shaved and barrel like chest while flexing his manly bicep in the nearest reflective surface during such stories, too.

(I will say this, and if you think I’m gloating a tiny little bit you have completely overestimated my stage of emotional enlightenment while entirely underestimating the amount of gloating I am doing -- at the very least, no Avengers scribe following my old buddy Slappy has shown the slightest interest in doing anything whatsoever with Slappy’s original additions to the Avengers line up, Triathlon and Silverclaw. Which may be unfair, as I have every intention of bringing Triathlon and Silverclaw back the very second I take over writing the Avengers, if only to see them sucked into the turbines of a quinjet engine and reduced to superheated plasma while all the real Avengers stand around saying things like “Careful of the turbine, there, Triathlon” and “Look out, you’re just about to die horribly there, Silverclaw” and “Mind you don’t cut yourself in all that glass, Mordecai” and “Oh darn, they’re both dead, how dreadful” and possibly even “Which one of them was Mordecai again?” followed up by “It’s a reference to RAISING ARIZONA, you ignorant spaz” .)

But grotesque and abominable although all such entries into the Avengers membership rolls indisputably are, they pale, they dwindle, they shrink to subatomic size, compared to the travesty and obscenity and abomination that is the idea of Wolverine… WOLVERINE FOR THE LOVE OF SWEET CRYING BABY JESUS!!!!... swaggering around the Marvel Universe with a valid Avengers ID tucked into his moronic looking leather hatband.

I mean… YEEE-AUUUGGGHHH AGHHHHH NOOOOO NOOOOO NOOOOOOO IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT’S HOLY JUST LET ME DIE!!!!!

Okay, so, you’re thinking, this is all just subjective, and clearly I am totally unhinged on the subject of Wolverine, and there’s something badly wrong with me on some fundamental emotional level, because, you know, billions of comics fans just looooooove Wolverine, and Hugh Jackman made him look so cool in the X-Men movies, so I’m totally overreacting and maybe New Avengers is actually a brilliant comic like Mike Norton thinks and we should all utterly disregard what the crazy fat guy with the little Ultron fig hovering behind his head is saying.

So let me explain a little bit of why I despise, hate, loathe, and otherwise feel the utmost depths of the most unbridled contempt for Wolverine and everyone who has ever had anything to do with him.

Wolverine is, essentially, the harbinger and embodiment of the Modern Age of Comics. The first appearance of Wolverine was, in fact, the initial stigmata of the death wound that would lead to the termination of the Marvel Silver Age. Wolverine was the forerunner of every insanely awful character that Image would every create, he was the inspiration for every horrifying character revision that would ever be inflicted on beloved Silver Age superheroes at both Marvel and DC, he was the living embodiment of the hideous grisly overwhelming tide of darkness, amorality, grunge, and general crap that was about to wash over superhero comics en toto like a vast polluted tsunami of glowing toxic slime whose deep psychic stains could and would never be erased from the escutcheon of iconic fantasy fiction in general.

Without the example of Wolverine, and the monstrous, hypnotic, Svengali like influence his big Dave Cockrum haired head has had on generations of salivating socially disfunctional fanboys, Frank Miller would never have been allowed to turn either Daredevil or Batman into raving psychotics, Tim Truman would never have transformed Hawkman into a patricidal crackhead, Keith Giffen would never have rendered DC’s 30th Century down into large piles of greasy excrement, nobody would have ever thought the Punisher should have his own series, the Image Comics universe would never have existed as such, and most likely, George W. Bush could never in a million years have come close enough to winning an election to be able to somehow jigger the keys to the Oval Office out of Al Gore’s sweaty hands.

It’s a great deal to lay at Wolverine’s high heeled, pointy toed feet, but I’m perfectly comfortable doing it, so let’s move on.

See, in the Silver Age, superheroes not only did not kill, but they didn’t shed blood, either. An invariable axiom of the admittedly rampant violence in superhero comics was that it was gore-free. Superhumans thumped each other vigorously, yes, especially in Marvel comics, where they frequently punched each other through buildings and into outer space and backwards through time. However, this was all, as my old buddy Slappy once commented back in college, ‘potato sack violence’, and none of the participants so much as showed a bruise, much less displayed any visible bleeding or broken bones. The most extreme result of even the most enthusiastic exchanges of ‘potato sack violence’ was one or both or all of those involved being rendered unconscious, after which they would wake up a few minutes later, perhaps a little bit groggy, but otherwise completely unharmed.

Few comic book superhumans, heroic or villainous, had ever, prior to the debut of Wolverine, sported edged weapons of any sort, and those few that did (the Valkyrie, the Swordsman, maybe a few others packing similar medieval themed props) were careful to specify that when they fought real people, they only ever used the flats of their blades on them. Ridiculous though this, and the general bloodlessness of comic book battles between characters powerful enough to hit each other over the head with the Chrysler Building, may well have been, it has to be noted that by keeping comic book fights essentially bloodless and without realistic and lasting after effect, all this violence was pretty clearly shown to be, well, fantasy. Just like when Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam or Daffy Duck or Wile E. Coyote inadvertently lights a match in the middle of an ammo dump, precipitating a huge explosion that results in Elmer or whoever getting all black on the outside before falling over unconscious. This, again, clearly demonstrates to a young target audience that all this violence isn’t real, and none of them should expect the results of actual, real world violence to be anything like this.

And, you know, despite all the harping, screeching, and bellowing otherwise by various church and PTA groups in the early 80s as to the corruptive influence of all this cartoon/fantasy violence on kids, I cannot recall a single instance of any kid anywhere either blowing himself up with real dynamite because of something he saw on a Warner Brothers cartoon, or breaking some other kid’s nose throwing a super-haymaker because of something he read in a Hulk comic.

Now, I don’t know if any kids out there have hurt themselves by fighting each other with homemade simulations of Wolverine’s claws or those giant forks Elektra likes to toss around, but I’d be willing to bet the odds are a lot better of that happening there than when someone tries to smack his little brother in a manner reminiscent of the Silver Age Sub-Mariner.

Wolverine was also the first superhero with a ‘bad attitude’, yet another thematic abomination that has corrupted the entire superheroic sub genre like some unusually toxic tailored virus. Prior to Wolverine’s debut, all superheroes were, essentially, fairly nice people. Spider-man might have a smart mouth (and once that proved popular, so did Daredevil, and the Beast, and Hawkeye, and a lot of other characters) but you never doubted that for all his brashness, his heart was in the right place, and he’d happily help an old lady cross the street, or save a kid from a burning building, and feel privileged to be of service, too. And superheroes might be irascible on the surface, and give various of their teammates a hard time on occasion, but underneath, you knew everyone was friends with everyone else.

All of which is to say, superheroes used to be admirable and likable characters who modeled socially positive behavior for the impressionable kids/young adults in their audience. They didn’t kill people, they didn’t shed people’s blood in combat, and they weren’t mean or selfish or snarky or nasty or insulting to each other. They were, as a general rule, laudable and heroic folks, and kids, like me, could aspire to their behavioral ideal, even if we knew we’d never have super speed or a power ring or an uru hammer of our own.

Wolverine changed all this. He not only sported edged weapons, he used them with vicious glee… or at least, he would have, if he’d been fighting someone a little less durable than the Hulk, as was amply proven once John Byrne took over the art as well as the co-plotting of the X-Men. Where Silver Age heroes didn’t kill or shed blood, Wolverine pretty gratuitously did both, starting with his unnecessary slaughter of a guard in the Savage Land. Admittedly, this psychotic act took place off panel, because back then, no matter how much John Byrne wished otherwise, you couldn’t show graphic gore in a comic book. But we knew what was happening, and sicko fanboys all over the world rejoiced and exulted, too.

(Nowadays, of course, you can show a lot more graphic gore even in a mainstream title. And you can depict positively Romero-esque levels of carnage, swear until you’re blue in the face, show boobies and depict your hero’s captured girlfriend and/or teenage male sidekick being forcibly sodomized by the Kingpin, or your hero himself, for that matter, in a ‘mature’ title. And a large part of that devolution in the superhero art form has come about due to Wolverine’s influence.)

The fact that Wolverine was always ready, willing and able to create some graphic carnage was a large part of his appeal for the slavering adolescent hordes who made him a circulation legend. There have always been a very vocal faction of fantasy fanboys who love really disgusting levels of graphic gore, who revel in spurting blood and dangling innards and who flock to George Romero movies for no other reason than to enjoy the visceral special effects. I’ve always found such people tiresome, but I’m very aware they are out there, and certainly, these perpetual emotional infants embraced Wolverine with the avid, salivating enthusiasm of Charlie Sheen for a Hollywood hooker.

Yet even more of Wolverine’s near universal appeal across the length of breadth of modern comics fandom came from his pissy attitude. In an age when all superheroes were reasonably nice guys, Wolverine was a prick. In a time when we knew that underneath Hawkeye’s constant bickering with Captain America and Green Arrow’s similarly continual bitching at Batman there lurked genuine affection and camaraderie, Wolverine genuinely loathed everyone in the X-Men except for Jean Grey (whom he pretty clearly didn’t love, regardless of what he told himself; he just had the hots for her). In an era where all superheroes were essentially selfless, Wolverine was a self absorbed dickhead. Where all other superheroes were at most cheerfully sarcastic, Wolverine was surly and bitter. In a fantasy continuum where Hawkeye would bluster threats of all manner of mayhem at Captain America, yet defend him to the death against any insults from outsiders, Wolverine was pretty clearly sincere when he offered to gut Cyclops like a trout.

In short, in a sub genre full of superheroic characters modeling good behavior and positive socialization that was effortful and often tedious to attempt to emulate, Wolverine, who is now apparently supposed to be over 100 years old or some such horseshit, utterly validated the worst extremes of self centered infantile adolescent tantrum throwing. And the self centered infantile adolescents out there ate it up by the 55 gallon barrel, too, making Wolverine into one of Marvel Comics most enduringly popular and consistently profitable marketing commodities.

Now, I have no illusions. Any comics fan in the world who stumbles across this page at any point in the future is going to think I’m completely unhinged, because every comics fan in the world besides me loves Wolverine, and anyway, every Modern Age character has a pissy attitude these days, and most of them sport claws or carry swords or pack great big gigantic halberds with ionic auras or some damn thing, so what’s the big deal? And holy mother of God, if they’ll let D-Man and the She Hulk into the Avengers, how can I get aggravated when they give a gold plated men’s room key to one of the most popular characters in the history of the genre? I mean, it’s not like being an Avenger really means anything anyway. Didn’t they let that Patsy Walker bimbo in? So what’s the big deal?

Well, if I had a scanner I would reproduce the panels that make this a big deal, panels that anyone but the most moronically braindead of Brian Michael Bendis fans would instantly have to agree are horrible and demented and completely intolerably obscene. Since I do not have a scanner, though, you will have to settle for this reproduction of the dialogue that has driven me into a near homicidal frenzy of rage at the sheer unrelenting horror that is Brian Michael Bendis’ hideous abuse of the Avengers: