Even More Scandal, Gail Simone, "Secret Six: Six Degrees Of Devastation": The Magician's Idiot Assistant Part 2, or Part 3.

(continued from yesterday's part 1 Or was it part 2. Ah, well. Continued, and concluded too!)


4. "A Lice-Ridden Scrunt As Deadshot"

I. So, in the end, all the other candidates for "sadness-stimulating variable" shimmered away when I stared at them and tried to make sense of them. And perhaps there was a rather obvious clue already there for me to notice in the fact that I kept thinking that Scandal was the least significant, least interesting, least engaging of the characters, and this despite the torture, Pistolera's attack in Bangkok, and the whole arc concerning the manipulative vileness of Vandal Savage. I suppose that I didn't want to see, so I invented reasons not to look. And I think that I've found it hard to actually think about her. Oh, I've thought about the construction of her character, her role in events, the way in which her story appears and recedes in the narrative, almost as if the old Paul Levitz model of rotating characters in the Legion books was being followed by Ms Simone. And, look, I'm doing it again! Off thinking about ways in which writers organise the spotlighting of various members of their team-books, when it's Scandal that's the issue.

Scandal has lurked menacingly at the edges of my thoughts from the minute I considered, on what had seemed to be something of a whim, that she'd be interesting to write about. She's a blank slate to me, I thought, a different proposition to try to analyse when compared to Floyd Lawton, a different situation to try to learn different skills from.

But it wasn't supposed to end up with real, if by no means overwhelming, feelings getting kicked up and silting up my day.

II. Deadshot was no problem at all for me to engage with. He's such a familiar character to me. I first tripped over him in the Engelhart/Rogers/Austin "Detective Comics" in early '78, followed him right through John Ostrander's constantly involving "Suicide Squad", and I'm used to observing him with a touch of ironic distance. I can recognise Mr Ostrander's Deadshot as distinct in part from Ms Simone's, and so I inevitably juggle the two when I view one of them and think about how this take on the character compares to that one. In a sense, Deadshot becomes a series of characters, a set of possible informing characteristics, and as I read, I can pick and choose the qualities that I feel are most appropriate for "my" Deadshot. The rest, all the things he thinks and does and says that I feel hit a discordant note with my take on Lawton, I can disregard. I can watch a guest appearance by him elsewhere in the DCU and, at the same time as being involved in what I'm reading, take a distancing step back and ask myself whether I actually believe that that's Deadshot there at all. Which, is of course, a useful advantage of long-term comics-reading, because the reader gets to take their experience and become more active in making sense of the stories they're working through. Indeed, whole swathes of tales can be disregarded with a "That never happened because that never could happen.", and the only cost is a certain degree of immediacy which gets lost. Instead of a comic book showing the reader what definitely did happen, it gets to be that a book gives the reader an option to consider whether this comic or that comic actually are canon or not.

But Scandal? Scandal I knew nothing about beyond what I'd read in "Six Degrees Of Devastation". She has only the one voice that I can associate with her, just the one carefully and consistently and cleverly-constructed character, and so here Ms Simone is presenting me with a "Scandal" that's the "Scandal" as far as I'm concerned. And this Scandal is on first reading, as I've admitted, the least remarkable of the Secret Six. She's the least colourful with the most subdued and generic appearance, the least visually-distinctive where weaponry and fighting skills are concerned, the most usually-restrained and apparently rational of the characters, and the closest to a socially typically individual among all of these reprobate outcasts. She is, on first reading, comparatively unremarkable, for a mass-murdering super-villain with all the oddities and experiences that we would expect from a character "living" in the DCU.

But that's how wrong I was. I'd got caught up in the plot, and the action, and the characters, and what I thought I could grasp of Ms Simone's writerly techniques, and so while I believed that Scandal wasn't a rational character, I failed to spot that I wasn't, in some small part, a rational reader of her story either. Because somewhere between the careful balances and progressions of Ms Simone's design and my sense of the "meaning" of "Secret Six" lurked feelings that I hadn't even known were there, and they were getting in the way.

As, of course, feelings are supposed to. And, of course, as good stories are supposed to, because without the fact that stories engage us in ways we can't predict or even perceive, let alone always understand, we might as well be given a plot summary and a selection of the most impressive panels before jumping onwards to read a summary of whatever comic book is waiting next for us to consume.

III. Oh, well. So Scandal wasn't going to just sit there and work as a player in a story. She was going to cause trouble too. OK. And I was going to have to get to know her as we do most of the people in our lives, by noticing how this person rather than all those other people has suddenly appeared in our attention in a significant way, and by asking why Scandal, rather than, say the more flamboyant and engaging Knockout or the Mad Hatter, was hanging around in my attention in the first place.

And at least here I knew a good starting point, even given my plodding abilities, because Ms Simone is always keen to show who her characters are by giving the reader the option of noticing how what get said and what actually happens aren't always quite the same thing. So, Scandal herself, after a fashion, lurks in the distance between how she describes the world and what she actually does in it, and so, for example;

• She's clever enough to notice the parallels between the North Korean prison camp and Dachau, but not perceptive enough to notice that the "liberators" she compares the Secret Six to were headed in the opposite direction to that of her comrades, namely, into the horror to rescue the suffering rather than racing away with the suffering marooned behind. And that means that, yes, Scandal is as ego-centric as so many damaged and lawless people are. And if she doesn't quite see herself as the absolute centre of the universe, as a psychopath would, then she certainly occupies at times a berth close to it, while not realising how that particular place in space is typically occupied by a super-massive black hole.

• Which possibly explains why she can see much of a Bangkok building go up in flames, with debris falling to the street in fireballs, but think only of her wounded lover. We'd all focus fiercely on our other halves in those circumstances, but to that exclusive degree? I suspect that Scandal never considered in the first place that her appearance in Bangkok might endanger others. She'll perceive her life as quite distinct from everyone else's, and believe that victims of her presence and actions are just collateral damage caused by the troubles unfairly afflicting her, rather than the truth that they're victims of her choices as a criminal. (In such a way do criminals hang onto the "we only kill each other" myths while the world around them explodes.)

• She's tender and loyal enough to engage completely with her lover, but so dependent on the maintenance of that intense relationship that her lack of what used to be known as "appropriate attachment" is obvious, as you'd expect a woman with an exploitative patriarch such as Vandal Savage to be. And so she responds in a way which belies her surface calm and competency. When she says that Knockout was "The only thing in the world that gave my life meaning.", she's not indulging in some show of talent-show power-ballad exaggerated sentimentality. She means it absolutely. Well, no wonder she thrust a foot long knife into Pistorela's shoulder. Nothing else matters when compared to the Knockout-shaped form that fitted so effectively into the empty-sized void inside her. And so, despite her being able to discuss with the Six the motives and reflections that she's had about Pistolera, that rational surface is quite belied by her irrational actions. And this can be seen again when she doesn't inform her comrades about Vandal Savage's intrusion into her mind. Oh, she has a plan, and it appears well-worked out, so that rational surface remains and seems at times to be her dominant characteristic, but flying off to face her father on her own was no rational act, despite the calculations she made concerning what she was going to do and what she was willing to sacrifice. The simple act of calculation isn't the same thing as a rational approach to thought, but it can of course seem like it.

• She's the mother, or at least the elder sister, of the dysfunctional family, maintaining those real-world affairs the Six are unable or unwilling to engage in, referring to her comrades as "My loyal tarnished knights.", and yet she's apparently so vulnerable to the depths of their brutal business that they fuss around her and kill her torture victims for her. She seems to be independent and strong, and often is, and yet she relies on the strange family she's so deliberately weaving around her. No wonder she was so shattered by Knockout's trist with Deadshot. It wasn't just that the principle and determining attachment in her existence was dallying with a man who she'd presumed to be a friend, a judgement which, given Deadshot's raving promiscuity, was hardly rational in itself. It was loss of the safe and predictable world she was knitting around her relationship with Knockout that hurt her so, it was the broken secondary line of defence which gave her extra security in what is obviously a fundamentally threatening and cold-to-the-touch world for her.

• And when she's hard-pushed by her demons, she can't distinguish her own fears and desires from moral principles, though she can discuss complicated real-world business with the accuracy and assurance of a top-level business executive. What she perceives as a clear and necessary goals are often rather the desperate solutions of a frightened woman trying to claw her away from the things she so fears. So she sets out to assassinate the utterly repugnant Vandal Savage, but she didn't need to. She saw it as, in part, a moral duty of sorts that would protect her friends as well as secure her freedom, if not her life, from Savage's intolerable intrusion into her autonomy. But that's her skewed irrational thinking swallowing her up again, producing an irrational concoction of determination and bravery. It's a desperate measure intensified by her lover's infidelity, an apparently thought-through response which is instead far more determined by the knowledge of her abandonment and the prospect of a life, no life, as her father's daughter. She could have relied upon the Six, she could have, again, called in any number of DCU strike organisations and super-teams, but instead she couldn't even see that her life was both worth saving, and possible to save. Everything seems to come down to one fundamental need with Scandal, the desperate, overwhelming longing to be safe and secure in a world which she believes is not only out to destroy her freedom, but her very identity as well. And so, when the options for blind flight are taken from her, and when her independence of action and thought is so threatened, she has to either wipe the cause of her fears off the face of the world, or wipe herself from it. Or both.
  

And, ah. There's that sadness again. Hello, unexpected sadness. I think I know what you are now. I think I got your complete 12-digit number and your area code too, the details of the picture if you will, when I wrote that last bullet-point above in my notes. How are you?

5. " ... I Can't Believe I'm Considering This"


I. I do think that this specific technique of building character is, in the degree of its' precision, unique to Ms Simone in comics today, as I'm sure a zillion bloggers, critics and board posters have noted before. (I know I'm not discovering anything new here, just finding out things that are new to me.) For ever since Stan Lee and his revelation in the early '60s that super-heroes function better when they're not perfect human beings without individual ticks and sadness's, most writers have created characters, or portrayed them, as if they were "typical" human beings with a few specific problems. If you like, we might call this the "top-down" model of character development. For the character is assumed to be fundamentally well, structurally normal and recognisably an "ordinary" type, and then a few limitations or problems are added. So, Storm is claustrophobic, to take but one random example, but if she can learn to deal with those fears, then Storm is, within the context of her past, a typically-functioning human being. And Reed Richards, in his original form, was overly-obsessed with his work, but with Sue's help, he'll be like us. It was an interesting and revolutionary model in it's time, but it hasn't worked for a long period, or we wouldn't have so many characters with so many problems being layered one on top of the other in the hope of generating that original "flawed-but-interesting" appeal that Mr Lee pioneered. Because it isn't the number of problems, or the depth of the problems, that are hitched to a character that counts, that generates interest. Of course it isn't. For if the premise is that there's a more or less typical human being carrying all the weight of despair and disadvantage that we currently load onto superheroes, then the reader must surely quickly reach a point where they sense that the situation isn't believable anymore. The psychology becomes obviously, if not consciously, wrong. The premise that "our" super-hero will, if she or he perseveres, return to a balanced and happy existence is torpedoed by the fact that (a) we know the creators won't let that happen, and (b) we know that all these problems will surely have caused lasting and burdensome mental problems to develop. The typical existence which serves an a enticing equilibrium for readers to hope their characters can return to has long since become a chimera, an emotional untruth.

And so it's hard not to feel that comic book writers might be facing something of a dilemma these days. For the simple '60s model of a typical hero with a problem or two doesn't hold any great appeal for today's audience. And yet the model of a vaguely typical character weighed down with strata of complex problems is an obviously ersatz portrayal even of a fictional human being. The "top-down" model doesn't work. Following it, we get the Scarlet Witch, for example, destroying reality, becoming a character whose actions can be justified in terms of this appearance and rejected because of that slice of canon. Little feels real in comic-book land because characters can be made to do anything - step up, poor Henry Pym, old hero of mine - for the psychological foundations of them are so nebulous that any action is, to over-state the point to make the point, possible and justifiable.

And I don't care so much about Wanda or Henry anymore, though I don't mean to disparage the creators on their titles. Their solid craftmanship and hard work is undeniable, and it isn't their fault that the characters come to them carrying so many options, so many contradictory experiences, such a considerable weight of baggage.

It's just that so many character's don't seem so fundamentally real anymore. When they were solely and unpretentiously two-dimensional, at least those two-dimensions were sturdy. But now? We don't have three-dimensional characters, we have some insane version of character super-string theory, where even the experienced reader might struggle to keep all the calculations relevant to a character in their head in order to come to an emotional conclusion about whether what they're seeing feels real or not.

I'm sad about what's happened to Wanda, and Henry, and Oliver and so many of my old friends and acquaintances from the four-colour world. But their adventures don't often move me enough to, for example, make me feel sad anymore.

But Scandal makes me feel sad.

II. The rise to market-prominence of the Batman since the '60s, and since him of the Punisher, and Wolverine, and all of their line, has often been ascribed to these character's propensity to behave in a more aggressive, violent manner, and to their ability to function as an outlet for the adolescent power fantasies of much of their audience. And I've no doubt that's true, to a degree. But I think, just as I'm sure that so many people have thought the same before, that that may be mistaking effect for cause. Because what is most interesting about those characters is that they aren't perfect human beings, or rather "typical" human beings, with a few problems bolted-on. Rather, they have a simple, emotionally-engaging flaw running right through their character which means that being "typical", returning to an imaginary normal state of balance where everything is alright, isn't conceivable. They're individually marked by specific limitations concerning what they can think and what they can feel, and consequently, their actions are prescribed by their fundamental psychology. They're extreme examples of how real people function, and so they're often more convincing as characters even as they are ridiculous in the excesses of their behaviour.


Batman is, of course, so compelling not because he's "a normal human" who we might become if we work hard enough, because that's nonsense, both in real terms and metaphorical terms. No, we engage with Batman because we know that he will never entirely be able to outrun the thinking patterns which determine his view of the world, his uncontrollable belief that human society is a snake-pit where at any moment a child may have their parents murdered before their eyes. And if the fundamental and necessary power of that deeply-suppressed fear and consequent fury is ignored, or layered with more and more complications and traumas, then we don't suddenly have a more nuanced and complex Batman. In many ways, we have no Batman at all. For his trauma doesn't make Batman psychotic, or psychopathic, or violently disturbed, as so many creators have assumed. It makes him determined-if-not-desperate to hold back Joe Chill, to protect his mother and stand before his father, and to save little Bruce himself. That's all that's needed, that's the motor that powers the cape and the Bat-symbol. Bruce Wayne isn't "typical", of course, but neither is he a confused comic-book version of an almost-psychotic avenger. He's a shattered little boy who has become a highly competent and controlled adult, and his world looks fascinatingly different because he's fundamentally different. Not in terms of his costume, or his skill-set, but because of his mind, his psychology.

And yet where decades of trial and error have perhaps at last given us a Batman where the creators seem to grasp that he neither needs to be maddened by horror or a typical Gothamite in a double-pointy hat, Scandal as far as I know has been deliberately created to be psychologically convincing over a small number of appearances. And Ms Simone, it seems to me, doesn't begin her character designs with that "typical" person template and then add problems as if they were seasoning. She seems instead to have a "bottom-up" approach, in that she assumes that typical people aren't so typical at all, and that therefore, the writer needs to have a clear picture of what their character's unique psychology will and won't allow them to think, say and do. This seems like the typical approach on the surface, adding psychological problems to that comic book character template. But, and here I'm ready to be shot down completely, I don't think that's what's happening, because the Six seem far more individually fixed and real to me. There's no assumption in these pages that her characters are all the same, with a few cracks and chips added to make them different. They're all made from separate, if interconnected threads, because that's how human beings are made too. And consequently it's eay to see how the "Secret Six" won't ever be whole and "typical" as people, because firstly they're mostly too damaged, and secondly, there is no typical person outside of the realms of the statistical mean anyway.

And so Scandal feels real not because she is, as the Penguin always was, consistently drawn to shiny things to steal or any such character trait. Scandal isn't a recognisable character rather than a type because of what she does, but because of who she is, and how that uniquely drives what she does. The world often seems to make sense to Scandal, for example, but that's the sense of a frog in a slowly-boiling can of water who thinks that here is a quiet place to take a rest. She's a highly competent woman skating over a pit of despair which can be effectively, if not completely, kept out of her own sight through a small number of intense relationships and a single all-enveloping monogamous love-affair. Fracture those defences, however, and, whether you're a mercenary like Pistolera or an immortal warlord like Vandal Savage, Scandal will feel driven to wipe you out. And yet her problems won't ever be solved by such action, her ego-centricism will never be entirely broken down, the promised land of a fearless sleep with no great loving anchor next to her will never be achieved. She has her own mind, her own limitations, her own life on the printed page separate from the demands of the plot or the traditions of the genre. And so, the reader has a clear picture of who Scandal is, and where her problems lie, and why her actions take the form they do, and even when we're not thinking about it all, Scandal makes sense.

Which means that where many writers must take character "a" and character "b" and wonder what the hell those two folks think about each other and how they'll inter-react, Ms Simone must pretty much know her starting point for describing such relationships. I suspect that it may be at times all she can do to stop the characters wandering off in their own directions, creating their own individual whirlpools of experiences, and the act of will necessary in harnessing them all to a plot may account for some of the tension between story and character I sometimes sense in "Six Degrees Of Devastation". For there is in places a feeling that the characters are always being carried away by the story when their own natures would take them in quite different directions if only other folks, and of course Ms Simone, would stop interfering. Which, when you think about it, is rather like you and I in real life, isn't it?

And that goes for Scandal too. She's not a figure that stands for us in the narrative, or a metaphor for some aspect of the human condition. She's a person.

IV: And that's where the penny really dropped about that damn sad feeling.

6. "Most Of Us Already Need Serious Medical Attention."

I. Of course, as we discussed last time, Ms Simone constantly works the trick of placing her audience into the sympathetic position of partially rooting for Scandal when our rational selves should be simply appalled by her actions. And one of the magician's other tricks to achieve is to keep more rational and ethical voices and options out of the text. So, those Federal Agents beaten to a pulp in the hospital, who weren't given distinct faces or individual voices? Well, they weren't being fair, were they, on an emotional level, trying to arrest the Six when Catman was only there because he was worried about poor Ragdoll in his hospital bed? Or so it feels. Scandal was right to beat those Feds into a silent pulp because they were trying to stop "our" point of view characters expressing their feelings for each other. And then, or perhaps a little later, the reader needs to remember that those Feds are the heroes of this book. They barely appear, because they're barely a part of the mind-view of the Secret Six, but they're the ones who're protecting us, the likes of you and I, from the monsters we're being on the one hand encouraged to support.
I wonder how many of us flinched and wished for those Federal Agents to get themselves to their feet and arrest those damn criminals, regardless of all the plot details still needing to be worked out? (I didn't notice them at first, so please don't think that I'm being judgemental at all.) After all, there's not a criminal alive who doesn't have their dreams and ambitions stretching out before them waiting to be fulfilled when they're arrested. It's not the future ambitions of Scandal and Catman that should count for us when the agents of the law are closing in on them. Instead, it's the fact that even when the Six are thinking they're trying to keep out of trouble, hotels are blown up in Bangkok and innocent police are badly beaten and left on hospital floors, where, presumably, at least they'll receive fast and competent treatment, that should concern us.

And yet we run out of the hospital with Scandal and her colleagues and feel like we've escaped, because they've escaped, and "escaped" is exactly what they've done.

II. The absence of the normal world in a text in order to emphasise the abnormality of the characters within it is something that Conrad of course executes to perfection in "The Secret Agent", where terrorists and police spies constantly discuss "the people" and "the revolution" without ever having much to do with anything as inconvenient as other people at all. And since Conrad has the luxury of a ending for his work, he has the opportunity, even the obligation, to polish off a number of his characters and leave a trail of insanity and treachery by his stories' end. But with "Secret Six", such a closed ending isn't possible, and so there's a sense that since Ms Simone can't polish off her cast in a terrorist explosion or whatever, it's the reader's obligation to constantly keep in mind an appropriate end for these dangerous super-villains.

But I shamefully find myself being too sentimentally attached to Scandal to want to imagine her end. I keep remembering Cohen's line about ".. a mighty judgement blowing, but it won't be long ... ", and I think that despite myself I'd rather she didn't end up trapped in some awful place, a prison cell or whatever. and certainly not anywhere with the disgusting Dr Psycho framed against the light behind him stomping towards her, chuckling, stinking of fried tuna.

III. But I can't believe that Scandal's story will end well. It's not just the terrible accumulation of devastation that she's both knowingly and unknowingly caused. It's the fact that she just can't perceive the world as clearly and consistently as she needs to. And I'd like to believe in the hope promised in the sequence shown on page 137, where at 137.1 we see Scandal holding on with her fingertips while her father drags her down to her death, and at 137.5 watch as she lets Vandal Savage falls to his end. I've no doubt that she's going to feel a great deal more secure for awhile after that, or at least until the beast is reborn again, and she's certainly aware enough of her own psychological problems to be able to say; "Well ... I won't say ... there's no irony ... here...". But that's a moment of catharsis, not redemption, and certainly not "cure", for the terrible truth of trauma is that it doesn't disappear when the cause of it does.

7. "I Will Not"

I. In the end, the penny dropped during a walk this Bank Holiday Monday with the Splendid Wife through the morning rain. "I know it's daft,", I told her, "But there's this sadness that I can't shift about this bloody comic book." And she, being a Solutions Focus educational advisor, looked at me and asked me one of those Solutions Focus questions, one of those apparently innocuous queries that slowly open the mind to itself. If I remember rightly, it was something akin to "What would I need to discover before I could work out why I was sad?", or some-such quiet cleverness, but it did work.

And with the Splendid Wife nudging me in her best professional fashion as we walked on, it dawned on me that I was of course looking in the wrong place for this silly sadness of mine. The Splendid Wife was making me narrow and narrow down the range of my thinking and there it was, suddenly, or rather, it wasn't. For it wasn't the Scandal on the page that was upsetting me. It wasn't the binary oppositions, the precise conception of flawed character, the placement on the page of others in the Six to accentuate Scandal's own world-view, the terrible Vandal Savage, and whatever else, that had snared me. It was actually all of the above combining to create a woman who, regardless of her appalling qualities and actions, stood so solidly in the narrative that I recognised her without realising it as an extreme example of people I'd met before, out here, in that "real world".

For it was all the young women and men that I'd known when I was a teacher who shared one or more of the flaws which so afflict Scandal in "Six Degrees Of Devastation" which were, in that inefficient way of memories, triggering my sadness. All those fine and gifted young women and men who could appear ferociously competent and able and then suddenly, when the wrong stimuli was applied to the wrong place at the wrong time, start to unexpectedly and dramatically splinter and shatter in painful and disturbing and dangerous ways. In almost 20 years, every teacher of long-service will have known and valued far too many examples of "Scandals". These young folks may not have had immortal fathers, but they'd usually been damned with immoral ones, and cold and careless mothers, broken capricious homes, and so on, and on. And every lucky teacher gets told, with some force, when they start off, that it isn't the classroom teacher's job to fix these problems. Because these problems don't get fixed in that sense. They get managed, they get informed, they get approached in concert with highly trained professionals, and we classroom bods, whatever else our talents, can't even identify the subtle causes of the troubles, let alone treat them. Our job was to be a consistent fixed point, a friendly adult and a competent teacher, a man or woman who knew when to put the ego aside and call in the folks who did know what they were doing. Because we didn't. And they did.

And some of those young men and women got better, and some did for awhile, and lots of them moved on and mostly not a trace of a tale of resolution would reach back to us, and why should it? We weren't the story and our desire to know how the plot-threads closed was curiosity, not necessity.

And then there were a few folks who weren't going to get better, and they didn't.


So, that was what Scandal was to me. She's every student that I couldn't help, and shouldn't even have wanted to help, because it wasn't my business and it wasn't my story. I'd be teaching the psychology of child abuse and therapeutic approaches to criminal recidivism and wanting the ground to swallow me up because Ms X or Mr B in the class knew this stuff far better than I did and shouldn't have had to hear me lecturing about it.

All I could do at the worst of times was stand on the lip of the event horizon of a black hole and try to wave in an undramatic and unthreatening and no doubt unhelpful fashion. After all, light doesn't get out of a black hole, and it doesn't get into one either.

And so, I'd been thinking about other "Scandals", far more real and far more complex, but still recognisably "Scandals", and hoping that they'd never felt that they had to turn on the monsters they believed were persecuting them and reach for that hefty knife, and I'd been hoping that everything has turned out OK.

II. Which, of course, means that I probably, or best say "certainly", haven't "got" Scandal at all. I'll have misinterpreted the clues, twisted the meaning, and pulled everything round so that it informs my own experiences and my own feelings. The so-called researcher has quite thoroughly contaminated his own pseudo-experiment. And now I look back through "Six Degrees Of Devastation" and I think how a quite more rational interpretation of Scandal's behaviour is not only possible, but probable. In fact, at this point, I can't say what anything means to anybody ever where "Six Degrees Of Devastation" is concerned! The Magician's idiot apprentice has suddenly realised that he's wandered on stage during the climax of the act and pointed in quite the wrong direction at entirely the wrong moment.

Oh, well.
III. Now this would be an even-more stupid piece if it was just about the bloke who forgot that reader's bought meaning to comics as much as comics bring meaning to readers. I mean, I did forget that, for awhile, because I'd been so involved in studying how the Swiss watch of Ms Simone's "Secret Six" worked. I was so enjoying reading the comic that I forgot that the comic book might be helping me read myself a little better too.

And so what I've been trying to write about is, I suppose, something which lies at the heart of the finely-honed skills of the writer's craft which are so well-marked in "Six Degrees Of Devastation". For I think, on reflection, that this piece has ultimately been about how, if there is future for these super-people which we so love, it's going to benefit from being one in which the psychological roots of the characters are far more carefully considered, as they are here. Not to create stereotypes, but to mirror the fact that human beings do belong, in their own unique fashions, to a set of distinct classes, groups defined by rationality, and engagement, by attention-span and empathy and compulsion and obsession and sorrow, and so on. All those costumes and all that punching is of course splendid good fun. We all know that's so, and yet we all know the limitations to the endless re-heating of the Heroes' Journey narrative lavishly garnished with Kirby Krackles. But in what I know was a stupid and unimportant way, as far as the relevance of my own experience is concerned, I was engaged by the "Secret Six" because I saw there characters who weren't just a metaphor for power-conflicts, or general moral principles or whatever; what I saw was people.

And I think it's appropriate to applaud that. And to ask for more, please, if that would be alright.


Thank you, any dear readers, who even considered making it down to this far point. I hope you can take something from the above beyond a statement of your own perseverance. The "Secret Six" work discussed here of course comes highly recommended. I would like to imagine at least 2 extra copines of "Six Degrees" being shifted as a result of this, though one of them will be mine! And have a splendid day.

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