The Man Who Lost The Horizon: Gail Simone's Catman, The Secret Six & Revolutionary Character Change (Part 2 of 2)

Continued and concluded from yesterday;

7.

It's the fact that Thomas Blake has so successfully turned himself into a formidable super-powered mercenary while completely failing to attend to the root causes of his personal failings that makes the character such a beguiling one. No matter what he attempts, and no matter how hard he tries, he's always going to fail in the end, because, as we've discussed, his psychology is that of a dangerously obtuse, self-obsessed, self-pitying and irresponsible child. It's hard not to empathise a touch, and on occasion far more than just a touch, with a character that captures our most despicably childish qualities just as it's impossible to ever completely take his side. And so the fascination of watching him chase down one chimera after another is as strangely moving as it's often both amusing and, and on occasion, rather repellent. Catman's adventures are marked far less by the enigma of whether he's going to achieve his goals so much as how badly he's going to screw up along the way, and the more physically impressive he becomes, the more frustrating it is for him that all that strength and ferocity won't bring him the things that he's always wanted.


Everything that promises to liberate Catman simultaneously oppresses him. And so, although Thomas Blake might earn the respect of some of his once-fellow super-villains, and although he may occasionally achieve a substantial pay-day through craft and violence, he can't ever be generally respected for being a good man, because the costume he's using to try to earn that respect also marks his own mental flaws and ethical corruption.


8.

Ms Simone has been careful to constantly underline the fact that the identity of "Catman" constitutes an ideal for Thomas Blake of all that he could be if he just worked to make the most of himself. That costume, those powers, those compromised achievements, all serve as facets of an exemplar of the very best that Thomas Blake is capable to dreaming for himself. When discussing with Batman the state that Catman had allowed himself to degenerate into, prior to his rebirth in the hills of South Africa, Blake refers to a period "when I wasn't myself", implying that he's now very much himself. Fitting into that silly costume, with its soft blunt ears and its kitty-scratch emblem, fighting with some of the most dangerous characters on Earth-DC, living his wretched life on his own confused and compromised terms; all that constitutes for Blake the essential business of being himself. Catman is his better self, and without that, he seems to feel that he isn't a person at all, so much as waste of potential and life, an absolute loser. And the more he tries to live up to the ideal of being Catman, it seems, the more he assumes he'll one day perhaps become a better man, a more respected and admirable man. He confuses Catman with the whole of his potential, being ignorant of the things he might achieve if he could think in a clearer and more moral fashion. He assumes that the business of being Catman will polish and illuminate the true "Thomas Blake", so that he'll no longer have to be ashamed or confused or wretched, but shining up "Catman" just makes a better fighter out of an incompetent human being.


On occasion, Thomas Blake will sense that there's something exceptionally wrong with him that leads him into behaving in troubling ways. We see him trying to talk to Deadshot, for example, about his suspicion that there's some quality missing in the pair of them that causes them to do terrible things, but Blake's solution isn't to stop and identify that problem so much as to throw himself again into the business of being a better lion-themed super-mercenary. And in that, he's a recognisably late 20th century, early 21st century man; he unconsciously identifies his - shudder - inner self with virtue, and associates not being "myself" with betraying his own potential. If only he could be truer to himself, he seems to believe, everything would be far better than fine.

But, as we discussed yesterday, this identity of "Catman" is nothing more than the wet dream of a deeply flawed psychology. Thomas Blake's ambition to be an admirable force for good, while still being free to do whatever he wants, will always and inevitably be short-circuited by the fact that he's concentrating on his fighting skills and tracking abilities rather than his flawed cognitive processes. And his membership of the Secret Six of course only drags him further and further away from any possible moment of crisis when he might see himself for what he is. Being with the Six is as counter-productive a business for him as hanging out in "Cheers" would be for a chronic alcoholic, because living with his troop of vicious super-comrades reinforces all his delusions and provides him with the short-term pleasures and sense of purpose that obscures his inadequacies.


9.

Suffering as he does with a chronic inferiority complex and what looks like serious attachment issues, it's no surprise to note how quickly Blake decides that the Secret Six is his family and its members his precious friends. By his second adventure with the team, he's already decided that Deadshot might be the very best friend he's ever had, which is both a terribly sad and an absolutely insane judgment, no matter how bereft of decent company he's been. But Blake obviously needs to feel that he's loved by those around him, and so Deadshot is his worthy if worrying buddy. Similarly, it's noticeable how Catman declares himself willing to risk his life to rescue Scandal Savage from her insane and immortal father, despite his having fought with her for little but a few months, if that. These intense thoughts, feelings and actions are all way out of proportion with common sense, but Blake doesn't know how to contextualise his emotions or recognise his insecurities. And so, his need to belong over-rides whatever little common-sense he has. In truth, for all his taciturn nature and his appearance of being self-reliant, he's terribly needy. Deadshot's slaughter of Catman's precious South African pride, for example, is quickly swept under the carpet with a pathetic haste. And Deadshot's habit of, for example, driving cars into Blake and expressing a lack of concern for Catman's emotional and bodily well-being can't do more than faintly and passingly dent Catman's fondness for Lawton. It's a naivety about his colleagues that appears again when he declares that he can't believe that Ragdoll would ever betray them after that seems to have very much occurred. Any man who can't believe that Ragdoll might betray them has surely missed the point that Ragdoll, for all of his apparent loyalty and good humour, has very much got his own peculiar psychology too.


But Blake has a quietly desperate need to belong, and so Ragdoll must have absolute integrity and Deadshot must be a true comrade and mate. And so Catman lives in a state of constant denial, although occasionally troubled by thoughts which, for example, suggest that Deadshot and he might end up fighting to the death one day. It's a nightmare that most would regard as being worth remembering, but it never seems to inspire Catman to be any less trusting of Deadshot.

Indeed, such is Catman's neediness that he'll ignore the evidence of betrayals that anyone else might at the very least be lastingly upset by. The Huntress may stab him in the leg while seeming to flirt with him, but that can't affect his warm judgement of her. And even the loathsome Cheshire, who uses Catman as nothing but a walking sperm donor before betraying the Six to Luthor's Society, is defended by Blake when he's reminded that she triggered a nuclear bomb above the capital city of Quirac; "we don't know that she's blown up a country" he says, because he doesn't want to have to know that she's undeniably done so.


And so this drive to belong somewhere keeps him where he is, as part of a dysfunctional group that he chooses to regard as his pride even as they fail to achieve any so ordered and stable an existence. His observation that the Six don't talk to each other in the absence of the kidnapped Scandal Savage explains something of his fervour to rescue her. In her absence, his new family isn't just missing a member so much as it's missing a matriarch who constantly establishes and reestablishes social relations between otherwise alienated individuals, and the illusion of family means a great deal to Blake, even though the family he wants to believe in doesn't truly exist at all.

It's one of the aspects of Blake's personality that most endears him to us, of course. He may not be able to recognise, let alone articulate, his desperate need to belong, but everything he does is coloured by it. And at times it's almost as if he were an abused child that's moved home and school so many times that even standing at a bus-stop becomes a frightening process of hiding from anxiety and searching for reassurance among folks that must surely be his new best friends.


10.

Whatever doubts Blake has about being Catman and belonging to the Secret Six, the distractions and pleasures of his costumed identity provide him with more than enough moments of intense activity and sensation to stave off any fundamental questions about his objective situation. Like all social groups, the Six have their shared rituals which bond them. They meet across the table while Scandal Savage discusses missions and outlines where their fees have been invested. They change costumes together, as in "Dead Of Winter", where the team can't bring themselves to rush off as is absolutely necessary into combat without pulling on their fighting togs. And of course they're completely reliant on each other in the field, whether they're being hunted down by Black Lanterns or ambushed by a force of 50 or so super-villains outside Gotham City, a gang of costumed killers rather poignantly described by Blake as "mostly d-listers and losers". In the self-interest of protecting each other during their missions lies the illusion of close relations based on common and fond values rather than self-interest and need.


And in those brief moments of adrenalin-rush and attention-focus encountered during the Secret Six's usually-disastrous missions, Thomas Blake can over-ride all his demons and fully concentrate on those things that he really can do well. Whether it's determining battlefield strategy or trying to survive against armies of human killers and battalions of super-powered ones, Catman can not only live in the moment, but gain credit for doing so. He's the one who flies his colleagues in, the one who advises them on how to stay alive, and the one they can probably most rely on when the punch- ups start. It's no wonder he associates the role of Catman within the context of the Secret Six with success and fulfilment, because compared to what Thomas calls "The old me", the fat loser whose "milk and cookies" would probably have been "whooped" by Batman every time, as he admits, his new self at his teammates side has at least some status, some purpose and some measure of achievement.


And in this way, his membership of the Six constantly delays the moment when he'll have to come to terms with himself. At the beginning of "Unhinged", for example, Blake rather futilely confides to Deadshot that he's "lost the horizon", that's he lost faith in what we might call the "Catman project", and that he's even "thinking" about going straight. He's grasped that there's a fundamental quality of restraint and regret missing from his thinking and his behaviour, and that it's not his conscience troubling him so much as the awareness that his conscience isn't doing any such thing. It could have been a fundamental turning point in his life, but it's one that's lost as soon as the Catman costume is pulled on again and mayhem indulged in. And by the end of that misadventure, Blake is so consumed by costumed identity and so lost in the moment of trying to survive that he's found his horizon again. He is, he declares to the Huntress, no more unworthy of being saved from hell than all the other super-villains around him, and the fact that it's actually his own flaws that he should be concerned with, rather than the possibility that other reprobates might share them, has quite escaped him again.


11.

But of course, the business of being Catman and fighting with the Secret Six isn't ever going to inspire the transformation of Thomas Blake into a self-aware, well-adjusted, benign member of society. Belonging to the Six is for Blake a process which functions somewhat like methadone to a heroin addict; the very worst of his problems are temporarily controlled, but the treatment's no cure while the programme's addictive in itself. And as a consequence, Thomas Blake can't ever quite delude himself enough to feel entirely secure in his own skin, no matter what the Six achieve or who Catman out-slashes. It's a fact that can be observed in how he behaves with his colleagues when the bullets aren't flying, for he's usually seen sitting quietly and looking on whenever there's no fighting or planning to be done. Like a shy guest at a party who takes on kitchen duties in order to mask their awkwardness, Blake flies planes and drives cars, establishes strategies and worries about coming disasters, but he never seems socially at ease. Indeed, placed in the midst of these people who're supposedly his nearest and dearest, he often seems unable to handle casual conversation with anyone beyond Deadshot at all. In the "road trip", during "Compound Fracture", for example, everyone else has something to discuss, but Blake's quite silent and focused on the road. No wonder he misses Scandal, the social nexus of the group, when she's absent in "Six Degrees Of Devastation".


And no matter how Thomas Blake transforms himself, it's never enough to ensure that he's as respected beyond the ranks of the Six as he longs to be. He's constantly insulted by the folks he meets as well as the people he fights beside. He's "Captain Cat" to Tarantula, an "imbecile" to Batman, "a perpetual bile-stained amateur" to Dr Psycho, and even Ragdoll unkindly laughs at the idea that Blake might be mistaken for the Dark Knight. To Bane, Catman is nothing more than Batman's "pale brown shadow". In fact, it often seems as if Blake has only to walk into the presence of another super-villain to find himself being referred to as "Kitty" and "Catface", just as he was once the "cowardly lion" to Green Arrow before he remade himself. Even so, the respect he gets these days is a far more substantial brew than he ever earned before. Folks may still on occasion laugh, but they mock less as time passes, and so the costume and the codename and the colleagues all combine to make his long-term problems more tolerable in the short-term.

Being Catman in the Secret Six is certainly a more effective palliative for his feelings of inadequacy than his previous strategy of dying his hair black because he hoped it'd make him look "tough", but at least that option had the virtue of doing less harm to others.


12.

Finally, it's well worth noting how Ms Simone shows us how Blake's mind working to protect itself from the truth of his rather squalid, rather wretched existence. For example, when he's faced with circumstances which are particularly disturbing to him, Blake untypically calls on God or refers to religious concepts. It's usually a sign that he's ashamed of his behaviour or deeply concerned for someone else, or, usually, a mixture of the two. When he stabs Scandal for the second time, for example, he declares that "I sincerely hope to God you can heal from this.", as if he's somehow showing goodwill of any substance despite just having seriously wounding her. (Not stabbing Scandal twice in two separate occasions would've been the more godly approach to take, of course.) And when he's driving away from a host of freed North Koreans prisoners and effectively dooming them to death in the snow, he grasps at Deadshot's declaration that "It's only five miles to China. They might make it" with a shamed reply of "Christ I hope so." Of course, Deadshot's pathetic attempt to not feel guilty works on no rational level at all; five miles to weakened prisoners in hostile country might as well be five hundred miles. But Blake's desperate to find something that will assuage his guilt that he's calling on Jesus to help him feel better, if not help the prisoners themselves. Finally, in one of the series most touching and yet most stomach-turning scene to date, Blake is moved to assure Scandal that she still has a "soul" even as she's horribly torturing Pistolera, displaying the fact that he associates the sacred with the people he cares about rather than the things they do. Scandal has a "soul" because Blake doesn't want the Six's matriach upset, although it's hard to see what's soul-strengthening in the act of cold-blooded and protracted torture.


There's no thought that Blake can't turn into a defence against self-knowledge. Cheshire mocks him for wanting to be respected by "men of virtue", but the truth is that he wants to be respected as being a virtuous without having to behave in any coherently virtuous fashion. He's got a string of excuses that kick into gear whenever he feels he's being called upon to defend the morality of his actions. It's a fact that's best expressed in the speech he gives to the Doom Patrol in order to distract them before a super-powered brawl. Why should you be trying to arrest us, he asks;

"For petty little robberies and for stealing people's hats? ... Do you guys really care if money goes from some rich people to us, only to be replaced by insurance ... Look ... you all and us, we're in the middle. On the far end of one side, there's the Justice League, all shiny and sweet. On the other far end, there's people like Joker and Darkseid, who'd kill everything and everyone if they could. Us, we're in the grey zone. Neither side approves of either of us."


It's a speech full of what criminal psychologists have termed "techniques of neutralisation", or ways of convincing oneself that bad deeds haven't really been committed. And for all that the speech an attention-distracting ploy, the sentiments are too well-expressed and come too easily to Blake's mouth in stressful circumstances not to reflect his real thinking. Take a second glance at his speech and it's saturated with excuses such as;

• we only steal a few little things. We're not serious criminals. Crime is relative and not absolute. Stealing a few things isn't really bad, especially compared to what others do.
• the things we do don't financially harm our victims. They're always compensated, one way or another.
• our crimes don't really involve violence or threat and they don't inspire upset and trauma; we're just thieves, and so thieving is all I need discuss here
  
• other people want to kill everyone! We're not really bad when you compare us to them.
  
• you're not liked either, you know, and you ought to throw in with us because morality is really a popularity contest. The more of us who're disapproved of, the less questionable our actions must be.

And it's a subtly clever touch on Ms Simone's part that Blake's criticisms of the superheroes he meets are founded in exactly the opposite principles to those self-serving ones listed above. If, as he argues, he and the other members of the Six aren't really to be considered culpable because they're not truly as bad as they might be, super-heroes are expected to be absolutely morally perfect or they're worthy of nothing but contempt. Green Arrow, for example, is attacked by Catman for being morally compromised by the programme of mind-wipes revealed in "Identity Crisis";

"You were all great once. You can be that way again .. But you'd better hurry. Before the line between you and us gets too damn blurry to see."

Now, the JLA did indeed cross a significant moral Rubicon there, but the point is that Blake expects those who represent authority to be perfect or they're not worthy of his respect, let alone the right to sit in judgment over him. He can't grasp that the value of the law remains even if those who serve it are compromised. He only sees folks who might limit his freedom and his own good opinion of himself. In that, he's like a child who argues that if her mother can raise her voice, then she can too, and whenever she likes as well. Super-villains, according to Blake, shouldn't be judged by what they do, but by whether they're as bad as "Darkseid" or not. But superheroes have to be utterly spotless or they're worth little at all. It's one rule for Catman and another for those superheroes who might challenge his own view of himself, the "little dictators" he hates so.



Even when Blake faces down Batman, who wasn't involved in the brain-wiping programme, he still has to find a way to neutralise his opponents moral authortity. And so he argues that Batman's only pretending not to be tempted to harm his various opponents, as if it would matter a whit if that were true or not. Batman's only playing a role of being ethically perfect, implies Blake, and somehow that makes Catman his equal. But the point isn't whether Batman is tempted to do wrong or not, but the fact that he doesn't do so. Blake will be Batman's moral equal when he starts behaving ethically and not before. Whether Mr Wayne occasionally wants to kick the Penguin off of a roof is irrelevant; he doesn't, whereas Blake travels the world killing large groups of people and then arguing that the survivors should be allowed to escape execution, as if that makes him a good man.

"I know we're not the Justice League." Blake later declares, just as he states that the Six are a "team of A-Holes". But by that, he doesn't really mean to say that he and his colleagues are immoral recidivists committing a string of appalling crimes one after another. He just means that he's rather hard-done by, but that he tries, and that he's well-meaning, and that other folks are far worse than he is. And then he pulls on the costume and he hides his immorality behind noble-sounding slogans of "honour" such as "I like to face my enemy face on - like a man", and he manages all the time to ignore the fact that he's doing all he can not to face up to himself at all.


13.

It's disconcerting to think that one day a writer might be given responsibility for Catman who sees him as nothing more complex than a previously criminal individual learning how to be a superhero. There's already a huge number of characters whose progress might be taken as a template for such an approach, from Hawkeye to the newest take on Ant-Man, and the assumption of many writers seems to be that everyone loves a handsome rogue who's seen the light. But, as I've struggled to express in these pieces, the true appeal of Catman isn't in his bad-ass-ness, or in any supposed superheroic apprenticeship, but in his deeply flawed personality, and any attempt to make a superhero out of him would require the character to cease being Catman in the first place.

It's the great strength of Gail Simone's conception of the character of Catman that while he can't ever win what he wants to achieve, he's not the victim of his own story either. He's every bit to blame for the things he does even as he endearingly longs for family and friendship and respect.


Yet the sympathy he inspires does at times threaten to overwhelm the fact that he's not just a bloke who's gone slightly wrong so much as a major-league criminal who's ruined the lives of countless folks all over the world. For he can sound so terribly plausible and caring and worthy of our sympathy, such as when he points out that none of the Secret Six has had a parent who cared for them. And then, having absorbed what sounds like a touching declaration of vulnerability, the reader recalls that Blake's not done a thing to rescue his own child from Cheshire since the events of "Six Degrees Of Separation". In fact, I've struggled to find a single reference to Catman's child in the later stories, let alone a sustained campaign on his part to try to find and help his baby. It's exactly the kind of occluded, unempathetic thinking that permits Thomas Blake to self-pityingly discuss the fate of his soul while, as Deadshot points out, utterly ignoring the plight before him of "two defenceless potential witnesses with a gang of humiliated racist scumbags."


Thomas Blake is an awful man, but he's also a profoundly lonely and well-meaning one. That's why we're so interested in seeing what he does next. He can be used to perform the most extreme of heroic deeds as well as the most profane and disgusting of immoral ones, and yet still stay true to the psychological profile that Ms Simone has created for him, which means that he'll never become stale as a character.

Or: Miss Simone hasn't created a heroically tormented bad-ass. She's created a pathetic but lethal bad-ass who can be put to use as superhero or supervillain without ever losing the studied contradictions which make him so compelling. And so, where yesterday we discussed how making a character popular doesn't rely on making them violently able, so today we've chatted about how making a character interesting can be achieved by putting noble dreams before them while ensuring that they're too flawed to ever fulfil such ambitions.

Huzzah!

Now, why aren't more folks writing clever in such a way?



Well, I always end up feeling somewhat dim after writing about Ms Simone's work, so I hope you'll forgive the above if dim is what it's been. Coming next, a piece on Marvel's new Heroic Age compilation. A splendid day to you, dear kind reader, and my best wishes for your sticking together!

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How To Be Good: Gail Simone's Catman, The Secret Six & Revolutionary Character Change

When we last discussed the Secret Six on this blog, back in the distant summer days of early August, we chatted about Deadshot and of how his disposition had been so artfully clarified and developed by Gail Simone. In particular, we talked of how Ms Simone had cleverly and subtly established her take on the personality of Floyd Lawton so that he might both evolve as a character in the Secret Six and yet remain fully recognisable as a familiar mainstay of the DCU (*1). In that piece, and I shan't repeat here the argument I made there in any detail, I promise, I contended that this was an achievement that had received far too little attention and praise, for all that the Secret Six is a comic book much loved both by professionals and fans, and for all that Deadshot is a popular supporting character in today's DCU. And it struck me then, and it still does today, that Ms Simone works in such a modest and unshowy fashion that the uniquely innovative way that she handles character in her books is all too-often taken for granted, or even quite unfairly overlooked.


2.

We might say that Ms Simone's stewardship of Deadshot displays an evolutionary approach to character development. For it's obvious, of course, that Ms Simone had worked to identify a set of key and core psychological drives which might explain Floyd Lawton's behaviour in the DCU before she'd began to chronicle his misadventures, just as it's obvious that she's used that understanding to skillfully develop Deadshot ever since without ever irrevocably changing his established nature. And so, for all the subtle changes that Lawton has been subject to over the past five or so years, he'd still be immediately recognisable to anyone returning to read DC comics after a fair few years away. Indeed, our imaginary returnee might not at first even notice the slightest difference to Deadshot at all, which is of course the point. Ms Simone has made sure that Deadshot exists in a stable form that's always ready for duty elsewhere in DC's line of books, while at the same time ensuring that he exists as a distinctly three-dimensional character undergoing ingenious and self-consistent change in the pages of the Secret Six.

*1- That piece can be found in the August archive under the title of "Daddy Deadshot"


3.

But the attention that Ms Simone has given to Catman constitutes by contrast an undoubtedly revolutionary process, taking a profoundly unimpressive super-villain and transforming him into one of the most fascinating and popular of the second string characters in the DCU. In doing so, she's achieved the improbable transmutation of a contemptible and functionless Batman knock-off into something of a star, into a figure that could conceivably carry a mini-series or two on his own as well as maintaining his berth in the Secret Six. It's an almost unprecedented turn-about in popular appeal and critical acclaim, and it's one that would have been simply inconceivable, and in truth somewhat laughable, to anybody except Ms Simone just half a decade ago. This was, after all, Catman.

But most tellingly, what's made this radical take on the previously almost-utterly inconsequential Thomas Blake so compelling isn't the surface make-over that Ms Simone and her artistic collaborators have given him. After all, although Blake has had the range and depth and effectiveness of his powers and abilities greatly increased, and although he's now capable of believably holding his own against even the Batman for a moment or two, the increase in his value as a superpowered brawler can hardly explain why he's now such a prominent and engaging figure. Yes, Thomas Blake is, as Ms Simone has declared, now a "bad-ass", but then again, who isn't these days? The history of the post-Watchman


mainstream superhero can often seem to be little more than one example after another of previously unimpressive characters having their powers amped up and their fighting capacity increased. And time after time, such revamps usually succeed in doing little but destroying whatever limited appeal the characters involved previously had, while producing identi-kit grim'n'gritty also-rans in return. Another writer might, for example, choose to armour up the Signalman as a Wolverine-esque psychotic, and have Lex Luthor declare him to be a fearsome opponent, but that doesn't mean that the audience will either believe that this is true or feel pleasurably enticed into following the further adventures of Philip Cobb, Signalman, and certainly not as they're following the second life of Thomas Blake, the Catman.

So the fact that Catman is now a rather fearsome, claw-slashing fighter of whom even Talia al Ghul will speak highly of, and compare "for a moment" to the Batman, is in a very real way an almost irrelevant issue when assessing Thomas Blake's popularity. For Talia might indeed be temporarily seduced by Catman's appearance and bearing and find herself believing that he now possesses something of the substance of Bruce Wayne, but we readers will soon discover that that's not really true. Catman is, yes, a "bad-ass", but he's both a great deal more and considerably less than that term might usually imply, and there lies the reason for the character's appeal.


4.

"Mr Blake, it's clear that you've been through a transformative event." Talia declares when she and Dr Psycho first meet Ms Simone's thoroughly revised Catman, and those relatively-few readers who'd come across Blake before, and who'd succeeded in remembering him, could surely only agree with Ms al Ghul. Very muscular, considerably naked, surrounded and protected by five extremely intimidating lions, and a newly-minted master of jungle-king speak to boot -"Man has been in the business of attempting to make them extinct for decades." - Thomas Blake certainly doesn't seem anything like the "mere buffoon" that either the super-villains or the readers expected. And for awhile, it does seem as if the new Catman is a man transformed. He immediately establishes himself as the Secret Six's field leader, he defeats the incredibly-powerful Captain Nazi with little but a host of syringes inserted into the vile Abernathy's eyes, and he's even politically-engaged enough to denounce his opponent as a "dumb fascist Nazi"; it's hard not to be impressed by this Thomas Blake.


And yet, for all Blake's new physical abilities, and for all his undoubted bravery and determination, it soon becomes obvious that he's not a reformed character, although he is of course a transformed one. The self-loathing and shame that he's felt at his previous status as an obese, washed-up super-villain has indeed motivated him to change his life, but he's not changed nearly enough of the way in which he thinks and feels about the world at all. As the Huntress says of him, when he declares that he's as worthy as any other super-villain fighting for Neron's get-out-of-Hell card, he's not "repented" of the things he's done so much as regretted the failure that the pursuit of his previous goals brought him. He grasps that he's done some terrible things, or at least he does to a vague and ill-defined degree, but his solution is less to transform himself morally than reconstruct himself in terms of power, competence and focus. And in doing so, Thomas Blake has certainly turned himself in an impressive super-being, if not a super-hero, but he's still childish, egotistical, deficient in empathy and lacking the intellectual discipline to grasp the moral issues he thinks he's trying to fully engage with. He surrounds himself with comrades who are almost as morally compromised as can be imagined, engages with opponents who are even worse, and then judges his virtue in comparison to that of theirs.

It's as if Blake believes that, for example, arguing not to kill off the surviving guards of Vandal Savage's castle is in itself a definitively beneficient act despite the presence of all their slain and wounded brethern piled up on the ground around Catman and his colleagues.


And outside this closed circle of appalling super-villains and flawed superheroes exists the everyday world, wherein typical human beings attempt to live as best they can, and Blake rarely even notices them as they do so, unless it's to hurt them or keep them warily them at a distance.

For he just can't grasp, and he doesn't truly want to grasp, that being a good man isn't a question of doing a little better than some of those around him. Thomas Blake simply can't understand, because he's never learnt how to do so, that being somewhat less destructive than the worst of humanity isn't of itself a marker of the ethical life. At times, he sees glimmers of the fatal contradictions in his ideals and his behaviour, but he's too often locked into a myth of how he's doing the best that he can, despite the opinions of those judgemental and hypocritical superheroes he keeps running across. And so he stumbles along, an endless series of easily foreseeable and avoidable disasters before him, and he carries the best of intentions along with the most compromised of methods and every step forward he takes is immediately complimented with a traumatic step backwards. For he so often lets himself believe that he really is trying to be a better man, an admirable man, and an honourable man, but he's not, and so he's always going to fall short, because he doesn't truly understand what a good and honourable man might be.

Even if he were really trying to be good, he couldn't get there from here.


And that's what makes Thomas Blake such a fascinating character. He's marked by short-term strategies, a massive shortfall in empathy, sloppy and impulsive thinking, and a heart full of shame and self-pity. He exists in the stage of moral development that we might expect to find a typical if somewhat alienated pre-pubescent in, raging against authority for the inequity of its hypocrisies while longing for authority to respect the flawed and limited steps towards the good that he makes.

He wants to do well, he really does, except for the times when he wants very much to do terrible things instead, and so there's always a sense that Thomas Blake is just one second away from committing the most shameful, unforgivable sins, no matter how many times he manages to throw a punch or two on the side of the angels.


5.

To take but two moments which sum up the fact that Catman's emotional and intellectual development hasn't proceeded a pace with his physical capacity to, for example, down a superhero as competent as the Bronze Tiger, or his ability to charm and excite a super-heroine such as the Huntress, who rather improbably declares that she only likes "nice boys" while swooning in his presence;

a. He knowingly delivers up the unconscious body of Wonder Woman into the hands of Smyth, a creature so morally repellent that even Ragdoll refers to him as "not a nice man" before murdering him. And Blake does so despite knowing that Smyth will undoubtedly kill Diana, and in a particularly gruesome fashion too. That Blake later has a change of heart isn't a badge of honour or redemption; any man whose conscience only kicks in after it's had a great deal of time to consider whether letting the monstrous Grendal murder Wonder Woman is a good idea is in no way morally competent. The fact that the reader is left suspecting that Catman was at the very least willing to see Princess Diana suffer simply because Blake resents how certain superheroes, or rather "little dictators", "sneer" and show "contempt" for him merely cleverly underscores how egotistical his ethical calculations are.


That those superheroes are often right, if somewhat uncharitable, to sneer and show contempt for a mass murderer, thief and mercenary such as Blake completely passes him by. "One saves a terrorist, one kills a terrorist. Who did more in for the world, in the end?" he asks of Ragdoll and Bane, and the very question, as well as the audience it's addressed to, damns Catman without any other word needing to be said.


b. Blake's inability to grasp that asking Deadshot, of all people, to help him with his moral quandaries is an utterly futile business which brilliantly shows how ethically deluded he is. It's not so much that Floyd's advice is as practically useless as it's morally compromised, but rather the fact that Blake could even think of asking Deadshot questions about whether their murderous natures are the result of nature or nurture. It's a scene that's as chilling as it's hilarious; Floyd Lawton is a repugnant if at-times roguish killer whose emotions are so suppressed that he's effectively sociopathic. No-one with the slightest concept of what "evil" might be would ask Deadshot to define its causes and cures.

But it's also a mark of how terribly confused and touchingly lonely Catman is, that all he's got is Deadshot to turn to, and that's an unhappy truth that helps endear us to the character even as Catman is thinking and behaving in a quite repellent fashion. No matter how hard he tries, no matter how much he achieves, Catman can never reach a point where he can rest and feel satisfied, because he doesn't grasp, again, what that might involve. And in that contradiction, between his muscles and his mind, between his desire to do the right thing and his ability and willingness to do so, lies, I believe, the particular and considerable appeal of Gail Simone's revolutionary reinvention of Catman. We just can't help but care for this lost and lonely boy, just as we ought to never forget that he's a profundly deluded and dangerous man.


6.

Having sat down and re-read the various Secret Six collections again in the past few days, including the newly-released "Danse Macabre", I'm at a loss to know if there's a more piteous moment in the whole run than Catman's first appearance in "Villain's United". Of course, there are scenes concerning other members of the Six which immediately arouse the reader's sympathy, such as those showing Scandal's despair at the loss of Knockout, or even that of Ragdoll betraying the unsuspecting and terribly vulnerable Mad Hatter, but there's nothing to match the melancholy that's inspired by a reacquaintance with what appears to be Thomas Blake's finest hour. There he suddenly is, an unexpectedly impressive presence standing half-naked in the wilds of the north-west of South Africa, all defiance and threat, a man who has, as Talia says, "remade himself", become "Admirable", commanding a pride of beasts and facing down the frankly terrifying Dr Psycho and, through him, the might of Lex Luthor's "Society". It appears to be one of those defining moments which marks the point at which a reborn, newly-heroic figure reappears from a season in the wilderness and takes his place as a force for justice in the world.


But of course, that's all an illusion, and, within days, even the lions who stand so loyally and ferociously by Catman will be slaughtered by Deadshot. The opinion of Talia al Ghul may seem to count for something, when it's her power and intelligence that's being positioned straight in front of the reader's eye, but then, Talia isn't a woman known for her empathy or moral perception either; she's not a trustworthy source for the reader to use to assess the success of Catman's remaking of himself. If we trust her first impressions, and those lent to us by Dale Eaglesham's art, which celebrates a supremely self-confident and steamingly sexual Catman, we might indeed think that Blake has made himself into a man of some "stature" even beyond that indicated by those considerable muscles and that knee-melting stare.

But Thomas Blake has remade himself in the only way he can conceive of, which is, somewhat counter-productively, to turn himself into a well-functioning leader of a society of lions rather than a better human being. Within the fundamental and relatively simple social structures of his pride, he has indeed earned himself a place of authority and worth. He's recreated himself, focused himself, made himself something of a different and far more impressive creature, and he's no longer the overweight loser who even other underachieving supervillains laughed at. But for all that he's changed, he's only changed by becoming a beast. He wanted to be relied upon and respected rather than mocked, and he's achieved that, but not in the context of a life with other, typical human beings. He's not mastered the complexities of human decision making or developed his empathic understanding of other people. He's not learned to grasp how morality exists separate to his own individual desires, and even his communication skills remain somewhat basic, as the simple and chuckle-inducing example of his licking of the Huntress's neck during their first dance might testify.


Human society is of course infinitely more complex and demanding than that of a small community of lions in the South African hills, and heading a pride is of course no preparation for becoming a productive and socially engaged member of a modern nation-state. And so whatever impressive changes Catman has achieved for himself physically, the root causes of his consistently dysfunctional behaviour remain unrecognised, let alone untreated. Thomas Blake might have better saved himself all the sacrifices he made during his African sojourn and invested in a demanding programme of cognitive and emotional development in a therapeutic community instead. That might have taught Blake how to be a human being rather than giving him a better understanding of what it means to be a highly competent lion.

But no, being a lion has brought him a measure of the respect and purpose that he's never known, just as it's trapped him in a role that dooms every enterprise he embarks upon beyond the occasional punch-up.


"That bastard is part of my pride." says Catman to a man he's stabbing to death in retaliation for an assault on Bane, "He dies when I say.", and it all sounds rather commanding and noble until the reader disconnects from the sentimentality of the scene and asks themselves whether the basis for practical, let alone ethical, action is to think like a dominant lioness would.

No wonder poor Thomas Blake is such a mess, and no wonder he causes such great harm. If only he'd aspired to be a more rounded person rather than a more perfect beast, he and a great many more folks might have lived far less wounded and unhappy lives.

To be continued and concluded tomorrow;


I hope the reader will forgive the fact that this waiting-for-the-trade reader has even avoided as best he might the basic content-descriptions of the Secret Six's adventures beyond Danse Macabre. This piece therefore only covers the 6 collections up to and including Danse Macabre. And I also hope, as always, that your day is splendid, that you're sticking together, and that you might be back for the second and final piece of this look at Catman, and then, beyond that, for a chatter about Marvel's new Heroic Age compilation.

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Gail Simone & "Secret Six: Six Degrees Of Devastation": The Misdirection Of The Magician's Hand Part 1 - Deadshot

1. "If She'd Wanted You Dead ... "

I. If our recent discussions about Captain America have been, in part, about how to portray a villain as a hero, or a traitor as a martyr, then it's instructive to turn to Gail Simone's work on the "Secret Six" and note a similar if more deliberate process at work. Because, of course, Ms Simone has to portray her cast of largely irredeemable and frankly mostly monstrous n'er do wells as sympathetic and engaging to a greater or lesser degree, or few readers would be motivated to pick up the "Secret Six" at all. And, so, where some creators have by accident, or perhaps even by carelessness and lack of forethought, ended up having Captain America undermining the Constitution while eliciting our support for his endeavours, Ms Simone must month after month achieve the same end of making the unconscionable congenial without having the sympathetic and patriotic cloth that Captain America is cut from to play with.

And I think that even though most every reader is aware of the trick that Ms Simone is performing with such unpromising and super-villainous material, the degree of bold cleverness and sheer story-telling dishonesty in "Secret Six" is at times perhaps under-recognised. Or perhaps I should say, it's at times been under-recognised by me. For, until I read "Six Degrees Of Devastation" recently, the library book rescued from the back of my car while I was waiting for a blown tire to be repaired, I hadn't noticed how incredibly studied and, yes, how cold-blooded was the trickery involved in writing that's on show in most every page and nearly every panel of the "Secret Six". For it isn't that Ms Simone doesn't openly declare that her characters are, at best, rather dense and impulsive, and at worse, frankly flat-out bloodcurdling monsters. She does indeed openly and regularly declare this to all and sundry, but she does it with such a cunning misdirection that the reader's eye, and heart, is usually simultaneously caught by a far more endearing and attractive piece of information, a declaration of love, perhaps, or an escape predicated upon uncommon bravery. And so the mind is distracted and the heart is deceived and the reader carries on engaged with the fate of a pack of monsters who, almost to a super-villain, shouldn't trouble our feelings other than to cause us to hope that they're all soon safely locked away from the good people of the DCU for an exceptionally long time.

And so, in preparation for the soon-to-come "Secret Six: Depths" trade paperback, which is released next month and which I'm looking forward to reviewing (*1) , I thought I'd put that not-too-unpleasant few hours spent reading and re-reading "Six Degrees Of Devastation", while waiting for that tire to be fixed, to some good use here, and to try to examine how the appalling characters of, in particular, Deadshot and Scandal have been made into something both more shiny and yet still utterly grubby in "Secret Six".

*1 - The Splendid Wife has offered to fund this, er, "research" as an early birthday present! What an unexpected and yet typically Splendid gesture from the Splendid Wife.

II. Now, are you ready? Please notice. There is nothing in Ms Simone's hands .....

2. "You have to admire her fortitude ... "

It's the most obvious and commented upon - and perhaps the least interesting - of Ms Simone's narrative strategies with the "Secret Six", that she engages our sympathies for her reprobates by having them in conflict and combat with characters who are considerably more despicable than even they are. In such a fashion can pretty much any recidivist from psychopath to petty thief be made sympathetic, and, in "Six Degrees Of Devastation", Deadshot is placed in such dire situations against such appalling antagonists that the reader instinctively sides with him. So, whether it's the torturing beasts murdering their prey in North Korean concentration camps, sword-wielding and shapely female assassins who attack him while he's walking with his family through a park, the killer monks of the deadly super-villain Cheshire, or the armies of the psychotic Immortal Man Vandal Savage, we're never allowed to take anybody's side except for Lawton's. We readers, after all, tend strongly towards the taking the part of the powerless against the powerful, and Deadshot in "Six Degrees ... " is often both staring at his imminent doom while still appearing capable of mustering a damn good fight. We can share in his power, cleverly, while being moved by his powerlessness.


But this is, of course, a well known, if no less laudable, narrative trick, though it does become a rather obvious sympathy-generating strategy over a collection of 6 issues, with the dice being so constantly loaded against "our" super-villains. And yet, there's a lovely and telling quote on Wikipedia that illustrates how we readers know we're being played by Ms Simone in this fashion while, despite ourselves, being subject to the terribly insidious effect of what's being done to us by this trick;

"Although the current incarnation of the Secret Six are technically villains, several members of the team are treated sympathetically and come across as heroic, if only on the virtue of the team encountering individuals who are even more bloodthirsty and villainous."

Accurately said, of course, except that the Secret Six aren't "technically villains". They are villains. That word "technically" is a reflection of the doubt and emotional misdirection that Ms Simone's technique causes. There's not a member of the "Secret Six" on show in these pages who doesn't commit herein a string of incredibly serious crimes, against both American and International Law. Even Catman, who seems to be positioned in "Six Degrees Of Devastation" as a man on the road to redemption, is constantly invading the sovereign territory of other nations and wounding and murdering substantial number of opponents.

And that's for me one of the most amusing and effective methods used by Ms Simone to make us sympathetic to the Six. For it's not just that the enemies of the Six are portrayed as being worst beasts than "our" heroes-not-heroes, but that the crimes that the Six commit rarely seem to be actually that; crimes. So, in these 143 pages, Deadshot engages in the following mayhem:

• trespassing on the sovereign soil of North Korea. (But North Korea's in the Axis Of Evil!)
  
• effecting the murder of "The Commandant". (But that Commandant was horrible!)
• takes part in a massacre of North Korean prison guards (But they're horrible too and it's all in self-defence anyway.)
  
• fails to take responsibility for the fate of the prisoners themselves after the massacre.
  
• stands by as Scandal undertakes the appalling and protracted torture of one "Pistolera" (Oh! But Pistolera set Savage's girl-friend on fire!)

• murders Pistolera in stone-cold blood in order to "save" Scandal from the "feeling bad" which might result if she finished off the woman she'd just been torturing for such a long time in such a horrendous fashion. (What a nice man, to save his friend from such guilt!)
• slaughters large number of knife-waving monks protecting their home from assault. (He couldn't just avoid the fight! He had to help get the woman who tried to assassinate his team-mates!)
• sleeps with the lover of his team-mate Scandal. (It's not a crime! There was no compulsion! And she was so hot! She was naked!)
• helps, or at least stands by, as the Mad Hatter commands Elasti-Girl to eat Beast Boy. (Er ... well, Deadshot didn't actually order her to eat him, and it was a neat scene! And there wasn't any eating in the end, was there, so no harm done! And it's only the Doom Patrol.)
• massacres a huge number of Vandal Savage's guards, during his third trespass on foreign shores in 143 pages. (But they were bad! Vandal Savage is bad! They deserved to die! And our baddies are good baddies! And they HAD to do it!)

And it can't be said that Ms Simone ever hides any of these appalling acts from us, except in the sense that she does so in plain sight. She does pick crimes which many of her audience aren't particularly concerned with. If a squad of Taliban soldiers were to appear in American territory to, for example, hunt down Allied soldiers who'd been involved in shipping Afghan citizens to Guantanamo Bay circa 2004, then perhaps the concept of inviolable national territory might engage the reader. But "all" the Secret Six are doing here is invading other territories, and killing bad people. So we're not upset. In fact, we're cheering on our heroes, who have of course been provoked into being so appalling, who have no choice but to defend themselves, against their awful, awful, awful opponents.

And in such a way, as we know, the awful Deadshot becomes something of the heroic Deadshot. Huzzah!

3. "You're A Good Friend, Floyd ... "

I. I'm particularly impressed by how the reader is constantly being informed of how Deadshot is a great guy while at the same time being shown how his behaviour is often utterly unethical, to say the least. We should be overwhelmingly appalled and disgusted by his murder of the tortured Pistolera, if we have the slightest degree of engagement with the concept of human rights and, indeed, normative standards of empathy, but in nips Ms Simone, who with one hand shows us something terrible and then;

• makes us laugh with Deadshot's laconic wisecrack following the murder: "Who wants Cake?"
• has Deadshot portray his actions as self-sacrificing and noble: "I knew you'd feel bad if you pulled the stopper and let the water drain out, so I did it for you. No big deal"
• shows Scandal kiss Lawson tenderly on the head after the murder while saying: "I think, this once, a kiss, Lawton."

And it's not as if Ms Simone hides any of this misdirection; it's all there. These are the most dreadful people. They are absolutely depraved. But the man with the guns and the red tights is made to play the part of the old, worn-out and yet compassionate cowboy, full of what seems like empathy and self-depreciating humour. Yet the truth is, he referred to Pistolete's life as "water" to drain out of a bath once the "stopper" had been removed. He saw that woman, that human being, as a thing, as an object, as a problem to be tidied away rather than a life to be preserved. The idea that Pistolete didn't need to die, that she might have been allowed to live, that she might even have been rescued or permitted to go free; these ideas are kept quite outside of the narrative, so that the reader doesn't question that any opposition to torture and murder was even worthy of consideration by the actors involved. We're actually directed into a situation where we're so engaged with the pace and intensity of the story that we fail to step outside it and ask whether what's being portrayed as inevitable and even good is anything of the sort. And, let's be honest, our emotions are finally quite derailed from any disengagement from this rotten business when Scandal marks her gratitude with that supreme and sweet reinforcer of a kiss on Deadshot's head. It's a desperately sad business that the reader should be touched by the twisted notions of fondness and appreciation batted around between the members of this tawdry gang of killers.

Yet, we are touched.

II. Ms Simone laces these pages with similarly exploitative and effective tricks, as indeed she should, for it's of course the business of the writer to manipulate the reader until the job at hand is achieved. When Deadshot is ambushed in Star City's park while walking with his daughter's mother and their child, he is represented as nobly unconcerned about his own fate (*2), as we'd expect from a man with a death-wish, but deeply concerned with the fact of his families' survival. How do you make an evil mass murderer sympathetic? Why, have him offer to lay down a life that he cares little for anyway while making sure that his daughter doesn't suffer, in body or mind;

"Get out of here, Susan. Make sure ... Don't let the kid look back, hear?"

What a top bloke! Look he's saving a stereotypically attractive young woman and her innocent cute child. What else can we feel, faced with these traditional markers of virtue, except "What a top bloke!"


(*2), Yet it's really not so noble, is it? In this scene, it feels as if Lawton has assumed the qualities of Gary Cooper as High Noon approaches, but Deadshot's a man with a death-wish, so self-sacrifice hardly carries the weight for him that it would for Diana Prince, or Barry Allen, or you and I. Again, a really clever narrative trick. The appearance of a hero, but the absence of heroic virtues.

III. So, let's take a look at the many virtues of Deadshot in the pages of "Six Degrees Of Devastation". He's a family man, a lsupportive ex-lover and father,working at a difficult trade in order to put his daughter through " ... Harvard a hundred times with the money you've saved for her education." He's a loyal friend, willing to murder tortured women in order to spare a team-mates' conscience. He stands beside his friends and comrades, facing down overwhelming odds, though while he looks so heroic firing off all those bullets, and even as he seems so tragic as Knockout announces that he "has the deathlust", the truth of it is that because of his lack of desire to stay alive, he's a liability to them all.

Still, that isn't obvious on the surface, as little is in "Secret Six". On the face of the story, he's that walking arsenal that you'd appreciate having beside you as those fiendish North Koreans charge towards you. And as a convivial team-member, in addition to a hard-fighting one, he even seems to like Ragdoll enough to not murder him when he has a clear shot at his mind-controlled team-mate. (He's also the reader's point-of-view character when he gently mocks the strangeness of Ragdoll and the Mad Hatter too. He seems to see these characters as we do, and yet his response to their oddness isn't excessively cruel while it is quietly amusing, so we warm to him.) Why, even when Deadshot argues against going after Scandal when she returns to her father's house, he does so from what appears to be a respectful perspective, mindful of his team-mate's right to choose her own destiny. It is as if he's a tarnished gun-slinging Western hero, down to his wise-cracks and his nimble, supple trigger-fingers. And whether that role is played by John Wayne in "The Searchers" or Gene Wilder in "Blazing Saddles", that's an ornery stereotype we've become accustomed to opening our hearts to.

It's an brilliantly effective role which is particularly evoked for deceptive purposes in the book's opening scene set in a North Korean concentration camp, where a fellow prisoner declares that Deadshot is "Like a savior ... ", tellingly just before being shot dead. And at that murder, Deadshot declares "All right, you bastards." and shots down the guard who killed his prison acquaintance. And our hearts jump at that action, as Deadshot apparently takes up the death-dealing six guns of the aroused Eastwoodian hero, and look how noble Floyd Lawson seems. Or at least, he does until we notice how, after a firefight, he and his friends race off to their own escape while leaving the prisoners behind. Some saviour, that Deadshot. Saviours, after all, tend to get crucified while facing down impossible odds in order to save the powerless, but the "Secret Six" are off and looking after themselves while Deadshot intones;

"It's only five miles to China. They might make it."

Ah, he seemed like a saviour, made us thrill as if he were the saviour, and then he saved himself.


IV. And Deadshot's vices? Well, he engagingly spoils his daughter, and he finds it hard to keep it in his pants, though even that's with Knockout, who's quite unfortunately disengaged from conventional notions of monogamy. (It is very hard not to feel considerable sympathy with Knockout when the issue of her creation and abuse, and the effect of those tragedies on her behaviour, is considered, but Deadshot had, as Catman put it, "... screwed all of us this time.") Oh, and he cares not a whit for any moral or legal notion that doesn't grab his inadequate powers of attention, which leads him down to endless crimes of murder and indeed mass-murder and, oh, yes, yet more mass-murder, and so on.

Deadshot may appear to be a sad man worthy of our sympathy, and since every human being is worthy of our consideration, perhaps that may be true. He's certainly a man with a troubled past. It would take a cold heart and a callous mind not to pity the boy who was fated to become Deadshot. But our first and only thought should be; "When is somebody going to protect humanity by taking this monster, one way or another, off of the board?"

And yet that isn't even our last thought. Good writing, ah?


4. "I Got The Shot! I Got The Shot!"

Quite this reader's favourite moment in "Six Degrees Of Devastation" involves Catman's narration during the assault on Cheshire's home, wherein he asks himself;

"You're a good friend, Floyd. Maybe the best I've had. So why am I so sure I'll have to rip your throat out someday?"

With Catman being the closest to a truly heroic figure in "Secret Six", his fondness for Deadshot obviously carries a great deal of weight with the reader, particularly those who know of Floyd Lawton's fondness for surrogate brothers. Yet it isn't the warmth of Catman's feelings for Deadshot that I so enjoyed, but rather the stupidity of his question; "So why am I so sure I'll have to rip your throat out someday?". It's so rare to have a character in comic books who is quite so lacking in either self-awareness or common sense, and I like having a comic-book lead who is neither hyper-engaged or utterly ignorant in a mainstream book. (Even given how unrealistic superhero "realism" is, Catman seems far more human than the four-colour norm.) But, honestly, hasn't Catman got the nous to figure out that the reason he'll one day have to rip out Lawton's throat is that Deadshot is a seriously damaged, not-to-be-trusted mass-murderer? And that one of Deadshot various loyalties and afflictions, if not an interacting set of them, may well result in Deadshot turning on Catman one day, even despite Lawton's faux-filial fondness for him.

How brilliantly Ms Simone plays her cards here. We like Catman, Catman likes Deadshot, we like Deadshot. It's so manipulative that it deserves applause. Misdirection, if not outright lying, is what good writers do, after all.

End Of Part 1: Coming Next: Scandal!

nb 1: My thanks to Josh Reynolds for help with the identity of Deadshot's ex-lover. Cheers, Mr J!

nb 2: "Secret Six: Six Degrees Of Devastation" by Gail Simone, Brad Walker and Jimy Palmiotti, is published by DC Comics, and available bookshops and in Norfolk Library stock too. I feel guilty that I didn't discuss the involving work by artists Mr Walker and Mr Palmiotti in this piece, but the object of concern here was Ms Simone's script. Any reader who hasn't already picked up the book should do so, and there they'll see that the art is very certainly worthy of attention on its' own, with in particular a full page splash of a naked Mad Hatter which once seen will be very hard to forget. I'm only saying .....

I'd like to try to take a look at how Ms Simone gets us on-side with Scandal in the next post on TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics in a few days time. Scandal is a character quite previously unknown to me, so my response to her is a touch different to that of the familiar Deadshot. I hope my admiration for Ms Simone's craft and purpose shone through here, and that the piece didn't seem in any way snipy or sarcy. I do have concerns about this business of presenting obvious villains as heroes, but that's for another day, and this was about respect and not carping. I hope to see you soon, and please do feel free to torpedo these musings! That ol'comment box is just below.

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