Scandal, Gail Simone & "Secret Six: Six Degrees Of Devastation": The Magician's Idiot Assitant - Part 1 of 2, or perhaps, Part 2 of 3!

1. "Oh, Me, Oh, My. I'm Sad, Thereby."

I. I was a teacher of Social Science for almost 20 years. I know what a questionable research strategy looks like. And of course, the method I've been using to try to help me make sense of "Six Degrees Of Devastation" has been a dubious one. Mea culpa. A writer's intentions can't be mechanically deduced from their work, as if effect could be rewound directly back to cause and a straight line intuited, connecting words on a page to the author's design. I know that. At best, which isn't saying much, that premise functions like some hoary old Auteur theory, presumes that everything which appears on a comic book's pages is deliberate and controlled and entirely the product of a single creator's mind. It ignores the slips and and snips and serendipities of the editing process, the absolutely fundamental input of artistic teams, and it takes for granted that a text always operates in a closed and deterministic fashion. It leaves no room for the reader, for the synergy between the observer and the page, for that individual take which makes creators of a sort out of folks too commonly described as "consumers" when the business of the publishing industry is discussed.

And yet. There obviously is a huge degree of control wielded by Ms Simone over the meaning of "Six Degrees Of Devastation". The techniques at play in the narrative are too consistently applied, too regularly turned to effective use, for accident, chance or compromise to be the main creative hand at work. And even given that "Six Degrees Of Devastation" can't possibly be stretched out, pinned down and cut open to reveal the secrets of its' construction as if it were some poor rat in a 1970's school laboratory, there's still so much of interest going on within its' pages that, inappropriate methodology or not, it has to be worth digging around and trying to bring some gold back from them there golden hills. For if a method's not sound, then the results aren't trustworthy, yes, but this isn't science, this isn't a controlled experiment, and pretty much anywhere's a fair and fine place to start to kick some thinking off from. And for someone such as myself, who's got no pretensions beyond being a bloke fascinated to know "How was that done?", asking the wrong questions at least throws my typical thinking off a degree or two, until I can glimpse alternative ways of getting the business of storytelling done.

Or so I thought, until I sat down and tried to apply the same faux-logic that I'd used to approach how Deadshot had been represented in "Six Degrees Of Separation" to the character of Scandal. For I was trying to keep my eye sharply focused on that magician's misdirecting hand, which we discussed here last time, and I thought I was doing pretty well at concentrating on Scandal and not being tempted to look in the wrong direction while the tricks were being performed. And yet something kept happening anyway that I couldn't account for at all, something which was obviously being caused by the structure of "Six Degrees Of Devastation", or so I thought, but it was a rather mournful little something which I kept failing to find the cause of. There I was, enjoying analysing, after my own plodding fashion, this torture scene and that super-villain's board meeting, that super-team punch-up and this tender love scene,. And yet the result of it all wasn't simply that I was glimpsing a sense of how, for example, Ms Simone had so effectively counterpointed this character's depravity with that character's apparent kindness, and so on.

No. The problem was a constant sense of sadness that I couldn't shake whenever I was reading about Scandal in "SDOD", and which often hung around me even when I wasn't actually thinking about the book at all.

What was that sadness doing there? I've got a narrative theory of authorial causality to play around with here, and this damn comic book is making me sad. Where's that coming from?


II. Please don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about despair here. I'm not talking about anything more powerful than the wistful and quietly threatening edges of melancholy. This isn't going to be anything to do with personal loss or secret pain or any of that "oh-woe-is-me-ness" that's packed into those volumes of terrible-and-yet-common suffering racked on the misery-porn shelf of our local bookshops. ("How I Was Beaten By An Elephant Daily & Overcame It As You Can". "My Childhood With The Termites", and so on.) But even given that this downheartedness was of course no big deal, the shadow of the sadness wouldn't disappear. I'd be wandering around the Splendid garden with the Splendid Wife and it'd be as if my emotions thought I was half-remembering a dream of a lost friend from a long, long time ago, or that I'd caught sight without realising it of a photo of a favorite cat who hadn't made it out of the winter of '89 into the spring of '90.

Now, "Secret Six" is hardly a barrel of laughs, though laughter there is in the pages of "SDOD". These twisted super-villains have barely got a happy memory to rub together, but, in the broadest sense, so what? Whyever would the Six's escapades be provoking a melancholy with me? For I can, for example, watch the most tear-provoking movies of all time without breaking too many strides. I can even sit and endure "Kes", cry my eyes out and move on more or less immediately. (And nothing's as heart-wrenching as the end of "Kes".) And, yes, I'll choke up while actively avoiding watching the last episode of "Wallender"'s first series again, because I don't think that I want to witness poor Stephan Lindman suffer so once more. But I was over his fate the first time round in just a few hours. And "Bambi"? Well, I'm never going there again. Traumatised at 4, in denial ever since, but my point is that we're all used to well-constructed examples of the storytelling craft touching us and knocking us out of our normal groove for a while. Of course. That's how we're made to feel things that we wouldn't otherwise. So, on the one hand, it shouldn't be surprising that "SDOD" moved me in some fashion, but on the other, it's a story in which all of the principals survive, if not prosper. Nobody's suffering their kestrel being throttled in "Six Degrees Of Separation", unless it's poor tortured Pistolera . No, "SDOD" is a thoroughly enjoyable collection of issues of "Secret Six", and it has its' intense and even disturbing sequences as well as splendidly kinetic pages of our maladjusted team knocking their maladjusted opponents all over the place.

But "sad"?

Where on earth was that "sad" stuff coming from?

2. "You'll Have To Forgive Any .... Clumsiness. I'm New At This"

I. Perhaps, I thought, when I realised how I was feeling, it's all because of that torture scene, which of course we discussed in some detail last time when considering Deadshot's character. And I will confess that I certainly haven't found it easy to shake off the details or the meaning of that disconcerting mixture of violence and moral disengagement, but that's as it should be. It's a torture scene. It's supposed to be upsetting. We all should carry a shade or two of disturbance with us after that. (For me, it's the horror of Scandal thrusting that great knife into her victim's shoulder. What did that sound like, I kept wondering, as if it was somehow disrespectful not to pay attention to even the absent information in the panel, because events as unacceptable as that should be completely engaged with or there's a risk they become just another story-beat rather than an expression of the very bleakest truths.) And it's not as if I didn't sign up my concern about that scene in the first part of this piece. For it'd be disingenuous for me to deny that any explicit representation of torture in mainstream "adventure" fiction worries me. I studied the Khmer Rouge at University and taught about the Third Reich for almost a decade. I can't shake off that reality when I'm presented, as the reader so often is, with the standard scenario of the captured hero who's endured torture before breaking out of captivity and nobly massacring their oppressors. Because in real life, of course, that doesn't happen. Nobody escaped Tuol Sleng, nobody came to rescue the poor souls there, until at last the Vietnamese Army arrived. And though I have no problem with women and men who can leap buildings with a single bound, I have real problems with anything which intimates that the endless victims of torture could have survived, prospered and wrecked havoc if they'd just been heroic enough.

But then, Pistolera didn't survive. She broke and then she was so cruelly put down. So whatever my concerns, there was none of the ugliness of any "indomitable hero" wish-fulfillment in "Six Degrees Of Desolation". Instead, we learnt through that violence that Scandal is a woman who will countenance and commit just about any act that can be conceived of when the fragile and yet so-intense bonds with her lover are shattered, when she's left alone after a violent assault with nothing but her disconnection from the world and her own ill-developed self-esteem. The torture scene had meaning, therefore, and it told no lies about what torture does to people. We don't resist, we get busted up and most of us get broken. That's what the 20th century taught us, and I was glad to see that knowledge so effectively presented here.

And so, given that the torture scene was so well worked out and morally closed, despite what I'd thought my first impressions were telling me, it obviously wasn't that torture which was kicking up my little cloud of sad, though I was affected by it, by what is probably the single most deliberately disturbing scene in any mainstream comic book ever. No, I had learnt in that scene far more about Scandal, the plot had been furthered, the moral developed, and yet from somewhere, that sliver of feeling blue had sneaked into the picture, and into me.

II. I don't want to keep returning to the torture scene, for I know it's such well-trodden sequence, and I'm sure many folks have discussed it at productive and prodigious length many years ago. But there was a moment there where I thought I saw something about Scandal that helped me grasp how she sees the world, how this character who's often the most apparently normal and typically capable of the Six is, of course, in some ways just as twisted and damaged as Ragdoll. For on one level, Scandal is quite rational. As she says to Pistolera during the torture;

"It's true if our positions were reversed, you would be the one orchestrating the screams."

And this seems to show that Scandal is, despite what she's doing with that knife, still in some measure of possession of her faculties. She's not associating the Secret Six with the forces of "good", she's not justifying Pistolera's torture as being something which only Scandal Savage has the right to do because poor Scandal's been hurt so by Pistolera's actions. The "Rightness" of her actions doesn't seem to come into Scandal's calculations at all, and even her rage at Knockout's fate seems to be ebbing. No, she perceives herself to be simply doing what she has to. She's not the deluded psychopath, with thinking processes so askew that she conceives of herself as the Master Of The Universe, the moral centre of everything, where whatever she wants to do is equivalent to "good" and necessary". Scandal has enough distance from her own demons, it seems, to realise that even if what she's doing is necessary, torture isn't a business that she's uniquely qualified to undertake.

But then, the problem is that the torture she sees as necessary isn't so, and that shows how although Scandal appears more rational than many of her comrades, it doesn't mean that she actually is. She isn't. She seems to be, when she talks to the Six about how she had to work herself up to spend an hour lacerating and puncturing Pistolera; the implication of that to a typical mind would be to conclude that Pistolera's torture wasn't a business engaged in by Scandal without forethought or while possessed by blind rage. (Which, to a degree, it wasn't, of course.) There's almost the sense that Scandal didn't want to undertake the mutilation of Pistolero, which seems like a marker of some moral restraint on her part. Or at least it does until the reader notices that Scandal shows not a twitch of sorrow or regret towards her victim. Indeed, Scandal evaluates the whole unpleasant experience solely in terms of her own feelings, of her own desires. There's an awful silence that frames her comments, where the ideas, for example, that the Mad Hatter might have been able to get Pistolera to talk, or that drugs or less invasive methods of interrogation might have been used, or even that the Secret Six might have called in the Justice League and accepted the consequences of their actions while bringing down their enemies, or perhaps just that not torturing people is a good idea, ought to be. But, no, Scandal is more concerned with how she'd discovered that;

" ... seeing (Pistolera) like this ... It doesn't feel like I'd thought it would."

And that shows how she's not emotionally engaged with her victim at all. She's concerned about what Pistolera's torture and murder says about Scandal's precious and utterly selfish feelings about herself. Which we'd expect from somebody with such attachment issues, with such low self-esteem and a ferocious fear of ceding her autonomy to anybody but a single significant other. But evaluating the experience of torturing somebody else as emotionally unsatisfying is not evidence, as the splendidly well-meaning but rather dense Catman declares, that the bloody-handed Scandal Savage has "a soul" in the moral sense. Because she doesn't, not in any ethical context. She has the egocentric world-view of a badly damaged and profoundly selfish and dangerous young woman. She's not broken and befuddled in the same way that her comrades in the Secret Six are, but that doesn't mean that she's not broken and befuddled.

And it only does becomes obvious in "SDOD" how twisted Scandal is when she's thrown forcibly out of the placating stability of her secure relationship with Knockout, which is the most fundamental part of her existence where keeping her demons at bay is concerned. Before Knockout's apparent assassination, Scandal seems terribly competent. After it, she's wracked with despair and rage and kicked into a process of violence and vengeance without apparent consideration of any other options. It's this horror of being alone and abandoned and abused that drives Scandal to commit horrors herself, and this over-riding fear of loneliness and servitude drives her even as she seems to be, in her very worst moments, capable of making reasoned and rational decisions. And, in keeping with what we discussed last time, Ms Simone's splendidly balanced script allows us to experience the sentimentality of the Six in their positive judgement of Scandal, as well as the utterly despicable nature of her actions in truth.

For it's so instructive that in the end Knockout is restored to what seems to be full physical health within the space of a few issues. Yet the reason why the others of the Six were complicit in the torture, through commission and omission, was because of the awful loss of Knockout, in addition to the need to acquire the name of the individual hunting down the Six. And yet, when Knockout returns, does anybody think or say "You know, we didn't need to torture and kill Pistolero after all?" Well, of course they don't. Short attention spans and self-obsessed thinking and impulsive natures mean that Pistolero is yesterday's business, as unimportant as a memory as she was as a person to them. Poor Pistolero, already consigned to, at best, the vague memory of when she participated in how Scandal learnt that she didn't enjoy the physical experience of vengeance, or at worst, a list of "they deserved to die" enemies. It's a telling example of how the Six's askew and wretched world view leads them constantly away from rational action and towards impulsively masked as strategy.

Which is frightening, but perhaps not exactly sad.

(*1) We discussed this from the perspective of Deadshot in the first part of this, of course

3. "Scandal, Is There Something You're Not Telling Us"

But there's one final component of the torture scene which I didn't notice until my fourth or fifth pass over it, and that's how Scandal deliberately keeps her mask on during the violence itself. The moment that she can close a door between her victim and her comrades in the Six, the mask comes off. And I don't know what that means. I'm aware that it feels so right, but no amount of reverse causality is going to tell me why that happened.

Is Scandal so ashamed when she's slicing into Pistolera's skin that she needs to hide her face, or is it that the wearing of her costume frees her up ritually to act in such an awful way? Is it actually a conscious or meaningful act at all, this removal of the mask, or is she just used to associating costume with conflict, and removing the mask with the presence of her friends? Is there a thrill in the formal anonymity of the "uniform" which allows competent Scandal to relax and deliberately violent Scandal to emerge?

And here was the point where I realised that the text was somewhat getting away from me. No matter how carefully I was trying to track "x" and "y", and any relationship between the two, the comic book version of real life kept muddying the waters, kept adding ambiguity to the carefully managed precision of events. Which is of course also part of the Magician's hand, leaving space for the reader to look around and ask questions which even the tightest analysis of text and sub-text won't answer, or perhaps, shouldn't answer because readers need to be free to experience their own version of events. Too absolute a control of a tale and it becomes a lecture, not a story, a dialectical machine rather than a living and breathing world. Not everything needs to be explained, and not everything ought to be explained. I do know that.

But when you're trying to find the root of a sadness so as to get rid of the damn thing, all this business of creativity and design is less pertinent than the desire to find a big clear road map which says "Here marks the sadness-triggering spot."

Although, if I'd have been thinking more clearly, I'd have seen that such a sign had already been in a sense placed in the text, though not by Ms Simone and her compatriots, and that sign was Scandal herself. For it wasn't just that I was studying Scandal in a comic book to try and scrape an understanding of how Ms Simone creates her beguiling and disturbing characters. Scandal Savage was, in turn, starting to affect me out here in what we call the real world.


(End of Part 2. Part 3, the final part, I promise, the already-completed final part, is ready to be posted in the very-near future indeed. And there the identity of the Magician idiot assistant from the title of this will be revealed, though I suspect that's already rather obvious.)

The completed piece on Scandal was just too long to post in one go, so I've cut it in half, or sort-of-half. I don't mean to give the impression that I think anybody, not even my Mum, would be wondering why there aren't even more WORDS here, but this is of course incomplete and an explanation is due. The final part of this is, however, all written and ready to be posted, so if you should be at all interested in that mysterious sadness and the Secret Six, then you'd be very welcome back hereabouts in the very near future. Thank you!

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