Nutted By Fate, Terror Of All; What Happens To Alex Merkel When The Reader Isn't Watching in Gail Simone & Nicola Scott's "Secret Six: Unhinged"

1. "You Asking Me To Believe You Care?"

This piece is going to be about what happens to a single character during the climactic punch-up of Gail Simone and Nicola Scott's "Secret Six: Unhinged". Or rather, it's going to be concerned with what happens to one particular character when they're quite absent from the reader's attention for a considerable number of very intense pages during the climax of "Unhinged". And the reason why I'm sure it's worthwhile discussing what doesn't happen on the page, and what isn't detailed in the story, is that I've just come to realise that what's going on "off-panel" of Gail Simone's "Secret Six" is on occasion just as interesting, and even equally amusing, as what's been printed and presented on paper for the reader.

I think that's a remarkable trick, to create a world so well-constructed that the characters behave themselves according to the narrative and fulfil what the story requires of them even when they can't be seen or heard by the reader. And I believe that it's a clever trick too, because it wasn't until I read the end of "Unhinged" for the second time that I realised how one of the funniest parts of the story had actually occurred off-page, unexplained and never to be shown to the reader. Yet, it had happened, I'm sure of it, and as soon as those unshown events became clear, everything else became clearer too.

2. "What's Going On, Here?"

If I'm honest, I'd never realised how important the business of what happens to characters off-page is to a well-written and effective story. Oh, I fully understood that you couldn't, for example, show a character off to Paris being waved goodbye to by Dick Grayson, and then, some seven hours later, have Grayson welcome the same figure into Charles De Gualle airport without some kind of explanation being offered. But beyond the simple business of making sure that character "A" was where the script required them to be when the action began, I never thought too much about the choreography of characters while they're not in the reader's view.

I took the whole business for granted, I'll admit.

3. "And Only The Devil Is Laughing."

The funniest scene in any comic book of any genre that I've read in quite literally months occurs, or perhaps more correctly doesn't occur, during "Revelations", the last chapter of "Secret Six: Unhinged". Sadly, there's no way in which I can make you laugh as hard as I have simply by describing the events from page 153 to 163 of the book, especially since, as I'll soon explain, I'd have to tell you what doesn't happen there too. I obviously never could evoke in a summary here what Ms Simone and Ms Scott spent 11 pages illuminating, and it'd be hubristic to try to do so. For if, as Frank Zappa once remarked, writing about music is like dancing about architecture, what would painstaking describing in prose what's already been so wittily created with words and pictures on the page be? (It strikes me that dancing about architecture would at least have the virtue of the dancer getting some exercise.) So, though I'm obviously going to refer in some detail to "Unhinged", I'll be making no pretence at all at doing anything other than adding the slightest of commentaries to the events therein, meaning that the only way you can know how funny or not the book is for sure will be to rush off and buy it, if you've not read the story already.

But I do think that it's worthwhile discussing one of many successfully farcical scenes in the book, even if it isn't technically actually in the book at all.

4. "Huntin' Season, Boys"

The conclusions to many of Ms Simone's superhero tales are typically crowded, complex and characterised by anything up to a dozen leads and supports having their character arcs touched upon and informed if not actually closed. There's often a sense that nobody in the first few ranks of the cast is going to get shortchanged and relegated entirely to the background in these denouements, and there's always the fact that a great deal of Kirby-krackle and hyper-bemuscled punching is going to occur too. (In the 11 page sequence of "Revelations" that I'll discuss here, for example, there are 37 separate characters appearing, including 35 super-villains, and 14 of them have speaking parts too!) Consequently, the reader who's racing to keep up with the fierce pace of the tale and the intensity and content of the cast-juggling can find themselves quite swept along by the story without wondering too much about what the reader might not be being shown. There is, after all, well enough to be focusing on that's actually there on the page without becoming distracted by what may not be. (In such a way can certain pertinent questions, such as where the GCPD was during all this trouble on a Gotham bridge, quite pass the reader by without weakening the fictional reality of the tale.)

Quite frankly, there's so much going on, and so much of substance too, that the first time through one of Ms Simone's conclusions is usually a matter of disconnecting any petty critical faculties and willfully acquiescing in the story's own forceful momentum. So it is here, where a fractious Secret Six whinge and punch each other while a small army of mercenary super-villains assault them in search of that most wonderful of plot devices, a genuine "Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free" card, fashioned by the DCU's own devil in order to provoke exactly this kind of despair and disorder.

And in all this complex quarrelling and fisty-cuffing, there's such a frantic and fascinating amount of detail, of sheer stuff, to engage with that the obvious question never occurred to me at all first time through, though it probably did to you, namely: given that "Revelations" is the end of this particular arc, and given that Ms Simone tends to make sure that her main plot-threads are at the very least well attended at such moments, where is the big bad of "Unhinged" during most of the final showdown?

Where is Alex Merkel, the most remarkable and the most appalling "super-antagonist" in some decades? (*1) For though the events I'll be discussing here exist on the cusp of the ending of "Unhinged", with only 10 pages still to go before the final curtain of this seven issue epic, and though all the other members of the various species of super-villain in the book's cast can be seen desperately going at it with jaw-dislocating ferocity, Alex is nowhere to be seen fpr most of "Revelations".

And I didn't notice that first time through. There was so much else to see and keep track of.

*1 - I'm being serious about Merkel's brilliance as a comic book nemesis, by the way. She's the first new bad lass or lad I've come across in years and years that I've found so repellent and so fascinating. She should no more be allowed to be disposed of than the Joker or Lex Luthor. I'm serious. Protagonists this disgustingly appalling need to preserved so they can be used again, to disgust and appall us again.

5. "You'll Get Your Turn."

In retrospect, the profoundly psychotic Alex Merkel simply couldn't be introduced into the climax of "Secret Six: Unhinged" too early, because she possesses the money and reputation and force of will to stop the wild fighting and have the Six done away with long before page 22 could arrive. And there's far too much else for Ms Simone to deal with before any such situation can be allowed to rear its story-closing head, so Merkel needs to be kept away for a good long while. In fact, her appearance must be delayed until the fighting has degenerated into such a desperate state of affairs that even Merkel can't control it and turn it to her interest. And anyway, traditionally the climax of an adventure melodrama needs to be delayed to as late a point in the narrative as possible, to raise the stakes and tension as high as can be achieved, before the business of the end is delivered in an intense and cathartic burst of story-closing action. Introduce Alex Merkel, whose role it is to help close the story, too early in the last chapter, and the force of the ending becomes progressively defused. Finally, for all that she's such a shiver-causing, rotten-souled monster, Alex Merkel isn't physically powerful. Throw her for too long into the midst of an army of super-persons and the reader will soon start to wonder why somebody more forceful than her isn't trying to take her out. (If she's hiring all those wicked sorts to get the card for her, why doesn't one of them do away with her and take the card for themselves?) The truth is, therefore, that the satisfying and expected excess of violence in "Secret Six: Revelations" needs to be allowed to play itself out before Alex Merkel arrives, and the conditions for her downfall need to be created and placed in the scene prior to her emerging stage-centre too. And so Alex Merkel can only appear for her final bows when everybody else's concerns have been dealt with and Alex's death has been carefully set-up and hidden in plain sight.

So, the absence of Alex Merkel from most of "Revelations" is quite understandable, and in fact necessary for the story to be effective. And it's how Ms Simone apparently responded to this need to keep her major protagonist away from the action for most of the chapter which led to me laughing so during a second reading of "Unhinged"'s final chapter. For while Ms Simone needed to keep Merkel away from the action, she couldn't afford to isolate her from the readers entirely; readers need to know what players are going to appear on the board. What's more, reiterating how Alex Merkel is as impressive and intimidating in her own way as the superbad people are in theirs helps to increase the anticipation as regards the prospect of her eventual emergence into the fray.

In essence, though Alex Merkel can't be allowed near the ground-zero of "Revelations" until close to the end of the tale, she does still need to be shown and re-established as a monstrous force in herself to foreshadow her own re-emergence and death. And even more than that, for all that it was necessary for Ms Simone to write Alex into the story while keeping her somewhat away from the action, it must have also been an almost irresistible pleasure to do so too anyway. It must have been because it can only ever have been so much fun to write a character that twisted, and not writing her into every scene was surely something of a test of will and self-discipline.

6. "Have Sinned So Often. Know It Is Bad."

I. I think it's safe to say that no other mainstream superfolks writer has informed their work with so much of what the self-proclaimed moral majority would have us understand to be "deviant sexuality" as Ms Simone. And making sure that her characters, with the exception of the oddly happily self-mutilated Rag Doll, have as much going on below their belts as they have six-packs above them, allows Ms Simone to draw on those continents of human motivation which the more straight-laced creator might counter-productively choose to ignore. But Alex Merkel is surely the most challenging of all the perverse characters Ms Simone has designed, or re-designed in the case of so many of the DCU properties she's added some extra life to, because Alex is both utterly, utterly depraved and quite completely irredeemable. Of all of Ms Simone's characters that I have read, only Alex Merkel shows not the slightest trace of that mark that Ms Simone places in her stories to show us that an individual has some slither of a soul left. Put in its simplest terms, Ms Simone bestows the promise of some measure of salvation upon her characters by showing them to one degree or another trying to do their best for someone else within the limits of their own unique pathologies. In some cases, that may be nothing more than a misjudged but sincere procurement of a prostitute for a distraught team leader. In others, it might be the willingness to die for another's welfare. Yet Alex Merkel is so beyond-the-pale and appalling that she makes Graham Greene's Pinkie look like the most benign choirboy of the Lord, and her sins are so transgressive, so intrusive and unforgivable that there was surely a risk that she would fail to register as a character of substance with the readership at all. For an antagonist that's fundamentally, pathologically cruel and quite lacking in ordinary human qualities runs the risk of being so repellent that contempt and disinterest is the audience's only rational response. We are, after all, a society well-familiar with the serial killer and their many depraved arts. Why should we care about a beast such as Alex Merkel, and how should a writer make us want to care about the behaviour of such a character?

II. The solution to this quandary designed by Ms Simone is quite brilliantly counter-intuitive, for she makes sure that Alex Merkel is as absurd as she is appalling. It's not that the character is by turns funny and horrific, as the Joker has for example often been portrayed, all charm and then a swift turnleft into becoming a cold-blooded shark-like killer. Rather, Alex Merkel is always ridiculous and always terrifying simultaneously. She slaughters in such a way that we shiver and laugh at the same time, and the laughter makes us pay attention where the behaviour and its results might make us look away in disgust or even boredom. Yet the same laughter is never allowed to obscure the horror of what Merkel's compulsions drive her to do. Her victims, such as Shelton and the Catholic priest and the phone-demanding prostitute, and even Bane, are shown in a sympathetic light so that we never forget that their fate is no laughing matter at all. Alex Merkel is made amusing, therefore, and sometimes even laugh-out-loud hilarious, but she's not knowingly humorous as a character, and we don't mistake laughing at her for condoning her behaviour.

And since Merkel's behaviour is so unimaginably extreme and depraved, only the absurdity of a surreal humour is appropriate to her situation. Stare at her actions for just a second longer than normal and it's hard not to hear the voices of the likes of Milligan, Cleese and even Atkinson speaking her lines. Whether obsessively counting off the number of bricks that have been heaved at the helpless Bane - "Five hundred eight bricks total. Five hundred seven." - or demanding that her victims either allow themselves to die or nominate their nearest to be killed instead, there's no clear dividing line between the humour and the horror in her story. There's just that absurd mixture of the two qualities. And so the reader stays engaged, though as an appalled spectator rather than a fond and chuckling collaborator.

Which all means that a very strange tension exists in "Unhinged" when Alex is on-panel, for the more we laugh at her, the more we fear her. Laughter doesn't endear her to us, but it does help to inspire the reader to care about events which might otherwise repell or even, through over-familiarity, seem tedious and banal to us. And so, when preparing the reader for Alex's reappearance at the end of the tale, it's necessary to make us laugh again and again at this most disgusting of people, this woman so awful that even Gail Simone can't seem to leave the slightest trace of good within, because the laughter is how we retain our interest in such a tawdry creature. Similarly, it's also important for the coming finale to reinforce Alex's credentials as a woman to whom any measure of mercy is quite alien, so that we'll shudder a touch when she emerges into the story's conclusion, even though she'll be surrounded by a phalanx of capes'n'coloured bootied characters far stronger than she'll ever be.

And so fathers are swept into rivers by "rotten garbage can head" Alex Merkel.

7. "Absolve. Now."

I. Alex Merkel first appears in "Revelations" only after 6 pages of carefully observed bloodshedding by various and sundry super-people. She's quite on her own, having murdered her only surviving and somewhat-trusted employee, parking the car she's been driving herself in at the opposite end of the Gotham City bridge to where the Kirby krackles and the big shark punches are being thrown. As the snow gathers on the ground, a father who's observing the fight from this safe distance warns Alex against getting any closer to the conflict. Being Alex Merkel, she responds to this neighbourliness by sweeping the father off the bridge while relieving him of his binoculars, offering an utterly unconvincing and grammatically incorrect "Thank" as he disappears to his death. It's like nothing so much as "Monty Python", the utter lack of the tiniest degree of human feeling on her part matched with her ridiculous declarations, her crutches and the fact that her entire body is swathed in fabric of one kind or another; this could be the hammiest of ham characters if she hadn't been established as such a fearsome antagonist. (We've seen blameless bystanders murdered all the time in every medium of modern "entertainment", but making us laugh while we watch the father's murder reminds us that pathetic Alex Merkel, hobbling across the snow-covered steel, is as dangerous as she is pathetic.)

"You killed my Dad." shouts the distraught son of the victim.

"Yes." replies Alex, who has thrown the binoculars to one side as she did the boy's father. "You're welcome."

And at that moment, she's nothing so much as the unlikely fusion of Edmund Blackadder, pretending to be the already-executed Lord Farrow, and Ed Gains, and we all surely want to know where she's going and what she's going to do.


8. "It's A Hell Of A Spectacle."

But it's here that Alex Merkel quite disappears from the narrative for another 4 pages, and these pages of her absence have become for me, as I said before, the funniest in the whole of "Unhinged", which in itself is a very funny as well as a very serious book indeed. For it's perfectly possible to forget in those four pages of her absence that Alex exists in the story at all, so extreme a pitch has the action at the other end of the bridge been raised to. A vengeful Mad Hatter has been reintroduced to the mix, the Six are facing their inevitable end while divided from each other, Bane has felt compelled to ingest the baleful venom drug again, and as the process of confrontation continues and re-intensifies, each panel is full of compelling detail, such as that of a giant shark, with one tiny arm and a dislocated jaw, beating up a banshee while declaring "Fill oo fam fuppif fifff."

Time is running out, there are just 6 pages to go, and Alex Merkel is again nowhere to be seen at all.

9. "Or Maybe It's Simply Some Random Lunatic."

Finally, after 4 more pages and 19 incident-heavy panels since her previous appearance, Alex does appear again, largely unheralded, smack-dab in the middle of the fighting, saying "Want girl and card. Some will live. Offer ends soon", as if she'd spent her formative years locked in a cupboard with only a TV permanently tuned to a shopping channel for comfort. And though the very presence of this be-draped, crippled, and psychotically insane woman momentarily brings the brawling to a halt, such is the force and momentum of the plot set-ups that've been laid in place during the previous 10 or so pages of fighting that her story will be forcibly closed against her substantial will in just another 18 panels. (I've given away so much, but I am trying to keep as many details as I can quiet here.) This climax will be, as most of the best story-climaxes are, brief and intense, and in order to make the end as forceful as possible, the extremes of the humour which has been attached to Alex's character and actions up until now will be largely laid aside by Ms Simone. The bleak, black-comedic laughs, in truth, have quite disappeared from the tale now Bane has broken the Cavaliers back over his knee, and the reader is free to unreservedly loathe Alex Merkel in the sudden absence of the bizarre humour which had previously accompanied her corruption. In fact, the final pages of "Unhinged" seem to take place in something close to silence and despair, with events swiftly and satisfyingly closing and little but anomie on show, except for the cruel pleasure of watching Ragdoll tormenting the Mad Hatter one more time.

All of which is quite appropriate. The laughter carried Alex Merkel through the narrative just as the horror did, but her end couldn't be as amusing as her sick little life had seemed, because otherwise how could we be so pleased that the monster was gone?


10. "So I Guess It's A Road-Trip After All"

I. But the end of the story isn't what's stayed with me most, for all that it was effective and engaging. Instead, what's persisted with me after a second, and - yes - a third, reading is what Alex Merkel was doing in between her five panels spent killing the father on page 159 and her re-emergence 4 pages later in the penultimate panel of page 163. Because while the "camera" of the tale focused on the height of the fighting, so that the reader might quite forget that anything else of importance was going on, Alex Merkel was hauling her body on determined solitude across the length of the Gotham City road bridge. While we were watching Bane taken by the drug-induced hallucination that everyone around him was a member of the Bat-family, Merkel was dragging herself closer and closer to the colourful and often insane figures trying to take other out at the bridge's end. As Bane broke Komodo's fingers, Merkel was striding as best she she could, perhaps muttering, utterly possessed by her all-consuming determination to attain the get-out-of-Hell-card. Scandal thinks she's going to have an eye gauged out? Merkel's still covering that distance with the most incredibly single-minded perseverance. Catman's warning everyone, including the mercenaries after his blood, away from Bane? One step more is following one more step from Merkel, and so on.

Until, in a strange way, the events we were being shown appeared to me to be less important than those we weren't being shown, and all that fighting became just the backdrop for Alex Merkel's halting progress towards her one ambition.

II. Now, I'm sure I must be the only person who's read that scene that way, but I still feel that the fact I can do so points to how carefully constructed that final showdown in "Revelations" is.
Because it's obvious that Ms Simone and Ms Scott never forget about Alex Merkel's whereabouts in their tale, no matter how she's allowed to disappear from the story for pages at a time, and neither did they randomly assign her reappearance to a point where she could be fitted easily into the story. Instead, the whole chapter was in small part deliberately constructed to give the reader the illusion of the passage of the amount of time needed for Alex to get from one end of the bridge to another. (In truth, I suspect she'd need a lot more time than she seemed to have been given, but even so, the conceit of the construction is impressive.) And all of a sudden, when it dawned on me what Alex Merkel had been doing while I was focused on 4 pages of aggressive ne'er-do-wells, it became absolutely obvious that this world of Ms Simone's Secret Six existed off-panel as much as on, that action was happening way off the fringes of what we could see just as it was dominating each panel placed directly before us. And it was no longer as if the various combatants were actors hired to break each others back and rake each other's eyes, posing within a single set which would be revealed as a temporary conceit if Ms Scott made the mistake of showing us just a few feet to one side of the action, where no doubt the off-screen super-villains might be cadging a sip of a warm mug of cuppa-soup before re-entering the frey. Instead, there was, in a sense, 360 degrees of action occurring in planet Simone-&-Scott-DC, and all the time those folks had been punching each other in plain sight, that woman had been walking towards them, and her own demise.

11. "Nutted By Fate, Terror Of All"

That's all well and good, of course, but I've not forgotten that I started off by stating that this unseen action, this dragging by Alex Merkel of herself across the bridge, is the funniest scene I've seen/not seen in years. And that's because I can now picture Alex undertaking the crossing of that bridge in a way Ithat 've never been able to imagine another characters "off-page" activities before. For I know what the bridge looks like, for example, thanks to Ms Scott and inker Mr Hazlewood's fine work, as they never shirked or faked the responsibility of setting an entire issue's conflict on such a challenging stage set. And I know that it's night-time and that it's snowing, and that by the time Alex is moving forwards, the snow has started to set. I know that in the distance, coming ever closer as Alex pushes herself forward, will be the pirouetting and pouting and prancing superbaddies, their cries and powers echoing across the snow-dampened silence of the Gotham night. I know the broad outline of the events of that fight too, so I can imagine what Alex perceives of the distant fighting during her journey towards it. In fact, I've everything I need to see the scene from Alex Merkel's perspective, except for a measure of her own psychosis of course. More than all of that, the story has been so clear about where all the principal characters are during the action that I can shift my own viewing perspective and see everything clearly from the other side of the bridge too.


And that's where the laughter comes in, because while the reader may not be able to empathectically imagine what it feels like to be as completely insane as Alex must be, she or he does know that Alex's business is inevitably accompanied until her end by surreal humour and grim self-obsession. Which means that each step Alex Merkel takes is funny, because we can "hear" her curses and clipped statements of intent, and we can see her forcing herself forwards with what in someone else would be an admirable determination to overcome her handicaps. But no matter how Merkel conceives of her own efforts, the reader knows that all that effort and will is concerned with a futile attempt to avoid her own damnation, that every swing of her hips and wrench of her arms is leading her closer to a well-deserved end rather than away from it. And so, in the last account, all this reader can see is mad and self-damned Alex Merkel closing in on those 37 or so supervillains with some greater measure of the vengeancefullness felt by a malevolent old teacher moving with savage purpose towards unsuspecting student miscreants misbehaving at the far end of a long school field.

All that superpeople activity, all that fearsome city, all that weight of weather, and yet all there is in the world to Alex Merkel is her purpose and her hatred and her self-disgust. And that seems to me to be funny, just as it is a mark of her terrible sense of purpose, and that that should have been going on while I was looking elsewhere at the capes punching each other makes Merkel's unseen progress to her own doom seem all the more funny still.


And all of this exists because Ms Simone sat down and thought through her tale to such a degree of precision that Alex Merkels actions while she was necessarily off-panel for four pages became as clear and apparently real and moving and funny as anything the reader could see on-panel during that time. And once I grasped the fact of that off-panel action, Merkel's reappearance into the story after crossing the bridge carried so much more power. How breathless and impatiently furious she must have been at the moment she arrived to face down the Mad Hatter. How much more full of a dead-hearted loathing her "Want card and girl" reads now to me. And how much funnier it is now to note her deliberate act of cutting off her brothers fingertips, for that unseen walk across the bridge has shown in even greater depth how single minded and focused on Neron's card she truly is, and yet she's cruel and indeed sadistic enough to turn away from that purpose and snip off the top of his digits. (She doesn't even stab him, or slash him; she deliberately cuts off the finger-tops, which shows how serious she is about hurting but not killing him. She's measured out her contempt for him and delivered it with a dismissive if painful assault. It's as if Hitler had turned from the final shelling of the bunker to carefully insert a needle between his dog's paw because it had woken him the night before. It's so petty it's hilarious)

In the end, Alex Merkel hauling herself across that bridge is actually a more impressive business than all the superpowered shenanagans in the world. And it's much, much funnier too.

And it's all because a writer thought about what the audience couldn't see in addition to what she was going to show them in some detail.

12. "It Was All For Nothing. But What A Glorious Night To Be Alive."

I'd never considered that taking such care with what isn't, and indeed structurally shouldn't, be shown on a comic book's page could make such a difference to how the climax of a story might be read, to how what can be seen might be enriched by a careful attention to what can't be. Yet, in a market where the illusion of fully-functioning and immersive fictional realities seems high on the priorities of each of the big two companies, whether in gameplaying or through endless crossovers and obsessive continuity, as we've discussed here before, it might be considered that another way of creating the illusion of depth in a fictional reality is just to think a little more carefully about what's going on off-page as well as on it.


There'll be a piece about Deadshot in "Secret Six: Unhinged" on Sunday, so I hope you might consider joining me then. And beyond that, I have a feeling that there might be a JMS post or two on the way. Thanks for reading, kind reader, and I hope your day is a splendid one.
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