Originally published May 27, 1994, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1071
Before continuing last issue’s topic of “Homicidal Heroes,” there’s a couple of bits of past business on which I want to update folks.
First: The Mutant Maniacs song. Every single week, I proofread the typeset column to weed out typos. Every week. Except that particular week, because I was going out of town and didn’t have a chance.
My original column said “Tom Galloway” as the writer of the song.
The typeset copy said “Tom Gallow.”
You ask me, Tom Gallow is a snappier name. Good handle for a detective, or perhaps a judge during the Salem Witch Trials. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen to be the name of the guy who wrote the song. That is, in fact, Tom Galloway.
However, I can personally assure you that vigilance has been stepped up, and never again will a typo–particularly in a name–find its way into this column. I give that promise to all of you and, most particularly, to you, Tim.
* * *
Weirdness department. First, I get word that Sachs & Violens has not been distributed in New Zealand because the authorities consider it obscene. And that was just #1. I’m sure that the nudity in issue #3 endeared us to them no end.
In the meantime, there’s the nice, harmless J.J. Sachs statues. She’s fully clothed (at least, as clothed as she ever is.) The problems with the poseable whip have been worked out. We’ve got a delivery date of May 10, the statue arriving on the boat from its overseas manufacturer. We’re rockin’, we’re set to go.
And then I get a call from an utterly chagrined and frustrated Randy Bowen. Through absolutely no fault of Randy’s, we are nevertheless now looking at a June 1 delivery.
Why? You’ll love this.
The statues have been sitting on the dock in Thailand for over a week, without anyone there bothering to inform Randy of the delay. How come? Because the Thai customs officials refused to clear the statues through, on the grounds that we were exporting pornographic material. Apparently J.J.’s crouched, open-legged pose was upsetting them, and the acclaimed, near-legendary poseable whip put them into cardiac arrest.
So a couple of skids of J.J. Sachs statues languished on the docks for over a week, with appeals going all the way up to the magistrates. And the magistrates cracked out the Thai law books and compared the statues to statutes to discern whether or not they were, in fact, obscene. I mean, jeez, I thought Krause publications was obsessive about inappropriate material, but that’s nothing compared to the boys in Thailand.
I found myself imagining this magistrate and his officers, going over a sample with a magnifying glass, determining the statues’ obscenity quotient. (“Anyone see nipple? Nipple’s obscene. There’s a hint… no, but that might just be a paint speck. Get the ruler. See how much buttocks is hanging out.”) Nice work if you can get it.
In any event, the Thai officials finally realized that the statue was, in fact, not obscene, and they’d been sitting on the shipment for no reason. So they’re on their way.
Take heart, if you ordered one. She’s coming (so to speak). I don’t suggest, though, that you send one to friends either in New Zealand or Thailand. Why look for trouble, y’know?
* * *
Okay. Heroes killing villains, and how it seems to have become acceptable somehow.
The 1960s was the decade where death became more than footage in news reels, or reports on the radio, or news stories in the impersonal cold type of the daily paper. In the 1960s, death came into the living rooms of Mr. and Mrs. America.
The house was, once upon a time, a haven from such things. No longer. The decade started out with the single most repeated image of death in the history of this nation; the blowing away of the head of John F. Kennedy, followed by the up-close-and-personal slaying of Lee Harvey Oswald. These events became seared into the American consciousness, shown again and again and again, hour after hour, day after bloody day.
That introduced death. But death hadn’t become a casual visitor yet. That happened a few years later.
A particular event galvanized the American public against the Vietnam war. Oh, there had been resistance, protests, mounting criticism. But what brought the horror of war home to the masses was the simple, harsh reality of death, right in their living rooms.
Network news broadcasts started carrying actual footage of actual dead American soldiers. The footage was graphic, and very specific. Back then news coverage always began at 6 PM, which meant that many families watched young men dying while their own dinner was growing cold on the table.
Faced with the grim reality of death, Americans revolted. They had seen enough. They had seen too much. Americans were appalled by the taking of human life, by the sight of life wasted, trashed, treated like so much garbage. War, which had always seemed the ideal solution in the past, no longer functioned because the inescapable consequence of war was being paraded right in front of people’s faces.
It made us think.
It made us question.
The 1970s is generally considered something of a cultural wasteland of a decade. Still, some of that questioning continued. We as a country, fueled by two newspaper reporters, kept asking questions until a president was driven from office. The bicentennial, in theory at least, brought reexamination of the elements that got this country started. The 1960s had asked questions; the 1970s sought answers. And ultimately…
None were found.
In the meantime, terrorists were doing whatever the hëll they wanted. The culmination, the crowning achievement of terrorist activity, was the taking of the American hostages in Iran. The Jimmy Carter presidency crashed and burned on the doorstep of the Ayatollah, and suddenly America was perceived as weak.
Weak. We didn’t like the sound of that.
If only Carter had gotten the hostages out. If only America had looked tough in the eyes of the world. Carter didn’t want to risk lives, because he remembered the 1960s. He remembered close-up shots of bodies, of wasted lives, of senseless slaughter, and he didn’t want to be a party to it.
And we looked like weaklings.
Suddenly… somehow…
Death didn’t seem so bad.
Not that we were looking to kill people, you understand. But here was this little pisher of a country pushing around the United States, even more overtly and contemptuously than Vietnam had. We tried to tell ourselves that we hadn’t lost Vietnam, but we were definitely losing on the global front when it came to Iran making us look foolish.
And wouldn’t it have been great to send in a commando team or something and just have them blow away those terrorist creeps. Recapture some of the glory of the United States, the good old U.S. of A. spirit. Not cower and tremble at the commands of some black-robed, white-bearded religious fanatic. I mean, we could have nuked Iran into the stone age. Bombed them into non-existence. Why were we sitting on our thumbs doing nothing?
Let’s kick some butt, fer cryin’ out loud!
We’d seen death close up. We’d seen American soldiers lying unmoving in the mud. We had let those images sway us into weakness, and look what we had to show for it. We were being dictated to by a nothing little country.
Death was preferable to dishonor, remember.
We had perceived death as a negative thing… and had suffered because of it.
There was only one alternative if we were to survive as a nation.
We had to embrace death. To celebrate death. To worship death as the easy answer, the best answer, the ultimate answer. As we moved from the disappointing 70s in the greedy 1980s, we realigned ourselves with our new philosophy.
Give us death! we cried. Death in the movies. Death in television. The more senseless, the better. It was like a massive inoculation, a national vaccine. A little exposure to death had weakened us, but a lot of death would strengthen us. Didn’t matter who did the dying.
Let it be the enemy by the carload, in the Rambo films that would have been miserable box office failures had they been released closer to Vietnam.
Let it be innocent teenagers at the hands of demented slasher killers.
Let it be anyone but us, and that was fine. We laughed at death, loved death, and death became the answer.
Which was nicely timed, because the collective attention span of the country was dwindling. News gathering came more from television than newspapers, and television specialized in sound bites. We lost interest in doing math the hard way; we had calculators. Speed dialing. Federal Express. Remote control zappers. Fast, faster, fastest. Sesame Street and MTV, as I’ve noted before, continued to crunch attention spans still more. Learning became time wasting and antithetical, and man became less a thinking animal, more of an instinctive, “Let’s just get it done already” creature. Instant gratification, as Carrie Fisher said, was too slow.
We had a national referendum on the question, don’t forget. It was called Operation Desert Storm, but the subtext, the subtitle of the operation, was: How We Shoulda Handled Vietnam and Iran. Got Bush a 97% approval rating. We tried it the peaceful way or the tentative way. And it hadn’t worked.
The only place where the spirit of Vietnam cautiousness remained was on Star Trek: The Next Generation. On the very first episode, Picard surrendered his ship rather than fight, and Trek fans had apoplexy.
So there are our comic book heroes, with all that national gestalt and baggage clinging to them.
They’re faced with a problem. A foe is trying to kill them.
Kill the foe.
That’s it. That’s all.
Nice. Neat. Simple.
That way, the foe knows you’re not weak. Knows that you don’t screw around. That you won’t let yourself be shoved or threatened or held up to ridicule.
No need for mercy. No need for thought or diplomacy.
Just kill the guy already. Kill him and move on.
I mean, it’s a no-brainer decision here. Anyone can see that. If you put the villain in jail, he’ll just get out eventually and try to kill you again. But if you kill him, that’ll stop him for good… at least in theory.
And the readers will support you, and want to see more, because mercy is for losers. The readers want to identify with their Heroes, and no one wants to identify with losers (if you don’t believe me, check out last year’s gate receipts at Shea Stadium.)
We, as a nation, have come through a firestorm. We have stared real death in the face at dinner time, and become immune to it. We have faced it down in darkened theaters, and learned to laugh at it, even cheer it.
Death makes us brave.
Death makes us strong.
Death makes us winners.
Losing is for weaklings… and the dead.
Choose your side, ladies and gentlemen… and while you’re at it…
…choose your weapons.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, hasn’t written a column focusing on Image Comics in months… and so is mildly surprised to learn that some Image personnel, in recent interviews, have started lambasting him. I can only assume my relative quiet has unnerved them. I haven’t bothered with them all this time for the same reason that I stopped sending letters to Wizard regarding McFarlane’s E.G.O. column: There’s only so many times I can write, “That was a stupid thing to say” before I start to feel stupid myself for repeatedly addressing it. Nevertheless, Larry, if you’re out there, please inform your associates that it would really, really, not be in their best interests to get my attention. I’m not looking forward to the results nor are, I’d wager, CBG readers. Just some cheerful advice.)
• 
Nah – i’d bet that at least some readers were looking forward to such a moment.
.
Lot of the same ones who like heroes that kill, likely.
PAD: You ask me, Tom Gallow is a snappier name. Good handle for a detective, or perhaps a judge during the Salem Witch Trials.
.
I don’t know, I kind of like Galloway. The hard boiled detective sees the criminal standing on the edge of the catwalk, tangled in wires that he tripped over trying to escape. The detective walks up to him and says, “We can do this the easy way, or the Galloway,” then kicks him off the catwalk. The perp strangles to death in the cords. Gack!
Believe it or not, that way of using my last name never occurred to me. I may have to start using it as a catchphrase.
(I did once play on an ad hoc for a one-shot special occasion College Bowl team called “King Geoffrey on the Gallows” using parts of the various team member names and with us entering to the part of Styx’s Renegade that goes “Hangman is coming down from the gallows and you don’t have very long”.)
There’s probably more truth to that, than I feel comfortable acknowledging. I’m sure it says something deeply disturbing about the psyche of America.
.
That said, I’m reminded of Craig Ferguson’s analysis of why Doctor Who (the British institution) is still going strong after almost 50 years. Because it is a program which shows “The triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism.”
In fairness — and I’m a huge Doctor Who fan, from the original to current series — on Doctor Who none of the Doctor’s enemies ever think of just shooting him (even the Daleks, who have laser weapons BUILT INTO THEIR BODIES!). Instead, they let him talk, escape and fiddle about, and inevitably stop them. In comic books I call this mental state supervillainitis : The more likely someone is to stop the villain, the less able the villain is to simply kill them.
“It’s called an uzi, chump.”
-Trick (BtVS)
.
Who completely forgot his own advice to his detriment.
I also remember a few times when a doctor had to kill a Dalek or a Cyberman (I think the fifth doctor used an energy gun for this at times.
“On the very first episode, Picard surrendered his ship rather than fight, and Trek fans had apoplexy.”
.
Some of them are still having it, apparently. I was in an argument last week where the other guys were saying, basically, that TNG sucked because Picard & Co. weren’t out there kicking ášš and taking names every week. Whereas I’ve always felt that, while TNG had its share of weaknesses, one of its strengths was the ability (and willingness) to do more than one kind of plot.
I think one of the big differences in TREKS is that TNG has characters who actually obey (or try their hardest) things like the Prime Directive and laws of other cultures, while the original series (TOS?) had Kirk charging in everywhere and doing what he wanted (and who he wanted) because he was so frickin’ awesome. (I also had the same problem with the new movie: Kirk was such a “wild rebel” he didn’t even wear a uniform for 98% of the movie — yet he was put in charge over and over.)
The 1960s are frequently treated as a loss of innocence for Americans – as if we didn’t really understand the relationship between sending troops to foreign wars and receiving their bodies in pine boxes somewhat later. I’m not certain it is so simple as that. Americans have been losing sons, brothers and fathers for a long time, oftentimes expended more profligately than is currently acceptable. The American Revolution is long ago, perhaps fought by people much different from ourselves (it might be argued. The technology and literary tastes were inadequate to reproduce the actual toll of battle for general consumption. The War of 1812 was limited in scope; The Mexican-American War and Indian Wars consisted far more of killing brown men than being killed by them; and The Spanish-American War cost far more in capital and foreign lives than it did in American casualties. In none of these was the true nature of battle revealed in popular entertainment. What does this leave out? The Civil War afflicted a large part of the population – more even than the huge losses of World Wars I and II: The average person knew many who had died or been terribly maimed. This was less in some Northern areas than elsewhere, but there was no way of pretending war was not a bloody business. In the World Wars, popular entertainment was very happy to depict the exciting death of Huns, Turks, Nazis and Japs – dehumanized to the point of making it quite acceptable to depict the incineration or dismemberment of these sub-humans in four colors. The Korean War was given as little attention as was practicable, although comics did good business with thrilling war stories (Shooting down faceless aviators or putting the bayonet to a grinning worm of a Chinese or North Korean). In the Vietnam War, our government sent young men to a harsh fate, as it had in previous wars. The numbers of these troops and the disproportionate part of them drawn from the lower socioeconomic range of citizenry, made the personal toll of warfare on the average family much less than it had been in the Civil War or World War II. Relatively few families lost their boys in combat – but they saw it on TV, every evening on the news. What changed during Vietnam were the technical ability to show and the willingness to view in technicolor the deaths of Americans rather than propagandistically-diminished others.
The deaths of American servicewomen in combat, when it was previously more weighted toward servicemen, touches the hearts of many. How nice that must be for young men – It’s all right that THEY die, but we wouldn’t want it to happen to a GIRL.
Recently, I’ve had the idea pop into my head: What if Ford, for some reason, hadn’t run for a term of his own? Instead, Reagan gets the nomination and wins four years earlier? Would he have sent in a team to free the hostages, and would it have been successful? Would he have bombed Tehran? Or would he have suffered the same problems Carter did, and found himself out of a job after four years?
Then again, if Reagan had been president when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, we might now all be glowing in the dark.
I don’t think there’s any reason to believe Reagan would have handled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan any differently than he did the Soviet occupation of it. He would have condemned it strongly while financially supporting the guerrillas fighting against it.
.
One of the things that made Reagan such a great president was his ability to know when to throw down and when to hold his fire.
So many people seem to forget that Carter tried it the “tough, macho way” by sending a rescue team that crashed and burned. Kevin Pollock’s “The Persian Puzzle” shows how much the hostage situation backfired for the Iranian regime and they wanted desperately to end it, but wouldn’t hand the hostages over to Carter because they hated him so much.
There is a Reagan-myth movement that wants to portray him as a never surrender, never retreat, never negotiated from fear, always tough president, but he was plenty willing to “cut and run” from situations when soldiers died (Beirut) and he was terrified of nuclear apocalypse. It’s the same thing that people love to excoriate Clinton for when it comes to his actions over Somalia.
Am I the only one who remembers that Carter did send in a team to rescue the hostages? They crashed in the Saudi desert– never even made it to Iran.
I know some people insisted that that was what finally ruined Carter’s chances for re-election.
The sin of Operation Eagle Claw wasn’t that it failed, it was that it took place over five months after the hostages were taken and still failed. It reinforced the general feeling that the man was incompetent. And then add the rabbit debacle on top of that…
.
Carter also issued press releases falsely declaring that deals for release were close on the days of important primaries. Sure, politicians play politics with these situations all the time, but getting caught at it is unforgivable in an election cycle.
.
As for Beirut, Reagan viewed the deployment of troops to Lebanon as the greatest mistake of his Presidency. When he left the white House, he turned to an aide and said something to the effect of, “My only real regret is sending those boys to Beirut.”
.
Another thing to consider about that situation is that we essentially lost our mid-east intel division in that bombing. Leaving American troops there would essentially leave us reliant on foreign intelligence for their safety. As I said, Reagan knew when to hold his fire.
You’re not the only one. One episode of JAG had a general commenting that, if they’d had the Osprey back then, the rescue mission might not have failed.
Kim, the fall of Iran would have gone down differently — we would likely have stuck to the Shah longer, and we certainly wouldn’t have encouraged and enabled the return of Khomeini so readily as Carter did.
.
Here’s a thought I’ve had about what made Viet Nam different: I believe it was the first time we brought the dead home for burial en masse. As Colin Powell once noted, when we send our forces abroad, all we ask for is a place to bury our dead — and now we don’t even do that. There are American cemeteries wherever we have fought — but not recently. (I’m not sure about Korea.) But it was in Viet Nam that we brought the bodies home and held funerals here in the US.
.
I can’t help but think that might be relevant.
.
J.