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

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


4. "A Lice-Ridden Scrunt As Deadshot"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

But Scandal makes me feel sad.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. "I Will Not"

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

But "sad"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is frightening, but perhaps not exactly sad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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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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