The Pitiful Death of Monsieur Mallah
by Carol Borden
There’s a sickness in my stomach I’ve been carrying a while, an unpleasant acid feeling that bothers me when I’ve been reading or reading about comics lately. And I guess it’s time for me to cough it up and see what the hell is burning a hole inside.
People who are better
fans
than
I are troubled by the editorial and creative direction at DC and
Marvel, the two biggest comics publishers. You can read their pieces
and see what they think is wrong. I’ve kept my head down reading my
own preferred peripheral comics—comics outside the event horizon of
company-wide crossovers. I figured I could wait out the rash of
killings, rapes and general unpleasantness as I have waited out takes
on Batman I didn’t like. I thought it would stay contained. I thought
I was safe, that it was all part of the normal cycle of comics. But
somehow the unpleasantness reached me with the death of Monsieur
Mallah and the Brain.
I bought some issues of Salvation
Run, miniseries in which earth’s supervillains are exiled to
another planet. I like stories about supervillains all in it
together, but I stopped reading after one of my favorite villainous
duos, Monsieur Mallah, the superintelligent gay gorilla, and his
beloved Brain, a disembodied human brain, were murdered by Gorilla
Grodd.
I didn’t stop reading because they were
killed, though that would’ve annoyed me by itself. Death is an
overused plot device in comics and Monsieur Mallah and the Brain die
a storyline that has all the marks of reducing the number of gorilla
supervillains and displaying how hardcore villains really are. No,
this killing has a nasty resonance, what 
with
Grodd taunting a pleading Brain while using him to bludgeon a
pleading Mallah to death. Grodd might murder Monsieur Mallah for
being an “abomination”—meaning perhaps an ape who fraternizes
with humans or an ape who’s been experimented on by humans. But it
doesn’t matter all that much because there’s another reason someone
would shout “Abomination!” while killing lovers and it’s one that
knocks the narrative out of the world of fictional hates and
fictional prejudices into this one. Their murder looks like one kind
of hate crime badly disguised as another, and that resonance doesn’t
seem intentional, contained or under control at all.
Other superhero deaths have irritated
me. It might be absurd, and Monsieur Mallah and the Brain are on the
absurd side of comics, but Mallah’s death upset me, and not in the
good way I associate with comics like The Secret Six.
I didn’t write about it at the time because I wasn’t really sure how
I felt about my feelings, at least until I read an article by Chris
Sims at Comics Alliance.
Sims writes about superhero deaths,
event-driven comics and DC’s 2009 crossover, Blackest Night,
and its follow up, Brightest Day.
Blackest Night is supposed to
rectify a problem—that superhero deaths are rendered meaningless if
those superheroes return. DC’s solution is to resurrect almost
everyone. The dead come back and freak everyone out with their
nasty-minded, rotting selves, then there’s a big fight and the DC
universe starts over with the new line up in Brightest Day.
But, as Sims writes, there’s a bigger
problem beyond whether resurrection or injudicious killing undermines
a death’s impact. DC has a tradition of a superhero mantle passed
on to a disciple, protege or guy located by power ring. Many fans
love this sense of history in the DC universe. They love the
progression, for example, from Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick mentoring
Silver Age Flash Barry Allen, who sacrifices himself to save the
world and is replaced by former Kid Flash, Wally West. Except, the
dead keep coming back, including, for example, Barry Allen. And Sims
notes now DC is dropping newer characters in favor of older legacy
characters, who bore the title in an earlier era. Some “new”
heroes have been active for over 20
years and are being pushed aside in favor of their predecessors.
And many of the characters being displaced are capes of color because
DC attempted to diversify by having women and men of color take up
empty or emptied legacies. I agree with Sims that this means that,
in the end, this makes for
a very white, male, anglo and straight DC universe. And almost as if
to prove Sims’ point, shortly after the article was posted, the new
Atom, Ryan Choi was not only replaced by old Atom Ray Palmer, but, in
Brightest Day, he was
killed and his body returned in a matchbox. Yes, a matchbox.
There’s something wrong, a -fecta of
some sort (choose your own ordinal number) combining the vectors of
nostalgia, continuity, the demand for novelty as well as the market,
conflicts between creative teams, and the demographics of readers,
creators and editorial boards. In the past, creators would ignore
characters they have any interest in using. Now there’s a reckoning
going on in DC and it seems all the peripheral characters, who are
often the non-white, non-straight, non-male characters , are at risk.
The effects are unintentional, but that only makes it worse for me while they’re blindly making something ugly,
something that makes me feel a little sick.
~~~
Carol Borden is going to lie down for a while.
Tags: 2000s , apes , event comics , feminism , gender , Gorilla Grodd , gorillas , heroes , homophobia , LGBTQ , mad science , Monsieur Mallah , race , racism , sexism , superheroes , supervillainy
If that scene were depicted in a major motion picture release, what rating do you think the film would earn?
—Unreasonable Action
at least an R, i would hope. one of the things i didn't get to in the piece is my sense that a lot of things that used to be only in Vertigo have bled into regular dc titles. i've noticed it especially with The Secret Six, but also with Batwoman. but i also think that writers for Vertigo would've actually handled the resonances with/depiction of gaybashing better.
—Carol Borden
My constant struggles these days seem to be with the concept of "nostalgia" and the notion that everything has to be made "grim and gritty." I like to avoid nostalgia when I can, but the insistence on everything being turned increasingly glum and nasty -- not as any sort of statement, but purely for commercial or "that's what everyone's doing" reasons -- leaves me pining against my better judgment for a time when comics and science fiction still valued wonder and imagination over juvenile shock and brutality.
I agree that it's a shame that comics have come such a short distance in coming to terms with women, minorities, and homosexuality, and that even as those first awkward, often embarrassing steps were being taken, the whole thing proved far too intimidating, so we retreated back into the realm of square jawed white guys and women with giant breasts and stiletto heel boots. That writers are likely unconscious of the retreat makes it all the sadder.
—
KeithATC
A lot, maybe most, of my comic reading was done at a time when there was a comics code authority. I was young then and I really enjoyed them but there's no doubt that the comics of that time had a narrow scope and a naivete. I saw the trend to make comics that appeal to an older audience and I applauded the idea that comics could be an art form that told more mature stories. I haven't read comics on a regular basis for many years and I'm saddened that it seems a major company like DC thinks that violence and cruelty is all that's needed to have an adult comic.
—Willard
Let's say you're the newly-sentient internet. How would you decipher
the meaning of all the bits and bytes whizzing past you? And what about
the real world outside your electronic realm?
Former Comics Editor, Guy Leshinski
has very kindly given us permission to reprint a prophetic interview
with Bryan Lee O'Malley in 2005. Will Bryan Lee O'Malley attain the
Holy Grail of cartoonists? As Bryan says, "We'll see..."
Apparently,
once I get started on archetypes, I can’t stop. So having touched
on the archtypes found in