Secret Six: Sort of a Review
Aug. 17th, 2011 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaI've been meaning to write this for like...a week by this point and I just don't know how to approach it. Secret Six is a comic series featuring a bunch of D-list and originally created villains from the DC universe, written by Gail Simone. It defied all my expectations and was heartbreakingly brilliant. I want to review it. I'm not even sure where to begin, but here goes. A general, unspoilery overview is available outside the cut-tag, a more character-focused and in-depth review is available beyond the cut-tag. In it, I try not to spoil any major plot twists, but there are light spoilers and the resolutions to a few subplots are discussed, but I'm never sure how to grade spoilers, so proceed at your own risk!
The first thing to say is, I didn't originally think this would be the comic for me. I mean, I didn't doubt it was good - it was written by a writer for whom I had a lot of respect - but what I knew of it, how people sold it, was with words like "dark" and "edgy" and "twisted humour" and I know why, because I'm here, now, fumbling for different words to describe it and failing because they all apply. But I think they can also give the wrong impression. It makes it sound like one of those books where dark things happen simply because they are shocking, where the main characters are villains so that fanboyz can talk about how kewl it is that people get beheaded and how it's so much more "mature" than Superman. And if there's one thing I hate it's the fandom meme that darker = better. That you can't tell a devastating story of moral dilemmas and subtle characterisation and complex emotion with Superman, you can only do it with Batman.
But now here I am. This book is dark. This book is edgy. This book is full of delightfully twisted humour. This book is really, really good.
It's hard to explain why it doesn't succumb to the pitfalls I described above. I mean, primarily, it's because of good writing, but it's also the type of story. It's a tragedy. Like, in the classic, dramatic sense. It's about lost opportunities and bad choices. Emotional complexity is an area in which this series excels, so of course, personal pain is an element of the tale, but the story is never about single, emo tears. It doesn't feel like any kind of moral statement - it feels like six people struggling, and failing to save each other, but continuing to try anyway.
I spoke previously here about Miller's Batgirl series and how it was wildly optimistic because Stephanie Brown just kept getting up. I think that Secret Six could be described as tragic and nihilistic for the exact same reason. They just won't stop getting up.
So maybe that's it. Its darkness and edginess and twistedness is part of the architecture, but not how I would describe it. It's more like...Thelma and Louise, if they'd landed that car, and had to keep on going, somehow, forever.
Six people whose only redeeming quality is their inability to surrender, their refusal to be owned. Not out of machismo or even personal pride in the conventional sense, but because it's pretty much the last thing they have left.
There are some truly beautiful and truly disturbing moments and character arcs to be found here. Perhaps my favourite is the unlikely, and ultimately devastating, story of Bane's attempts to be the father figure Scandal Savage never had. If I had to choose any one panel sequence to sum up that relationship, or perhaps even the entire series, and its precarious balance between nihilism and love, it would probably be this one:
The love is self-evident. The nihilism is that at this point in the conversation, they both know it can't happen, it would never work, it's not worth it.
As individual characters, they're both extremely interesting too - probably my two favourite characters in the series, which, for Bane, is an achievement given that before I read this I knew who he was - the man who broke Batman's back - but was basically completely disinterested in him. I'm trying avoid in-depth discussion of the largest arcs in the series here, which makes it difficult to talk too much about Bane because it's the final arc that really shows the depth and skill Gail Simone has as a character writer - a 180 shift that makes complete sense yet remains completely devastating. I will say, however, in Bane, we have a character who is completely ruthless and yet completely honourable, accidentally hilarious in one moment and hair-raisingly terrifying the next. Again, if I had to pick one moment to crystalise his character, it would be this one, upon being asked, with regards to his teammates, if they die, or if he dies. He makes the morally "correct" choice, for the sole reason of denying his enemies satisfaction and power.
To move on to Scandal, she's the team's sometime leader (at times it is Bane), and as such is in a position of a fair amount of power, both in terms of hierarchy but also in terms of the way she functions as a central point between the various team members. It's hard to say this without it making her sound weak or easily influenced, neither of which is true in the slightest, but Scandal really does come into her own in the way she responds to the other human influences in her life, as opposed to Bane, who attempts to eschew them. Obviously one of her key relationships is with Bane and its counterpoint to her relationship with her real father, Vandal Savage. But the other major interpersonal thread for her character is romantic. Again, I suppose a litmus test for the entire series and it's nihilistic, poignant humour, would be that moment in the first issue of the ongoing series (following a few mini series) when Scandal's friends attempt to pull her from her depressive alcoholism by hiring a stripper to dress as her dead girlfriend and jump out of her birthday cake.
But tragicomedy aside, her relationships do what any good relationship will do for a fictional character - show more sides to her character and get you emotionally invested. But it also ties into the wider picture of the Six's world and their place within it and their moral standing. We come to love these characters and in a vacuum, it becomes increasingly easy to rationalise what they're doing, because every one of them is doing the best he or she can. Liana - the stripper Scandal starts dating - is a really interesting way to puncture that reader-safety. She's adorable, open, honest, and fundamentally decent. She loves Scandal and Scandal loves her back, and this is never in question. And then, when Liana gets kidnapped and tortured and asks Scandal not to kill the man, but to hand him over to the police for justice, Scandal lies to her and promises to do as she asks, and bundles her into Jeanette's arms, to be lullabyed away to a safer world, and gores the man through his own eyes.
A terrible thing for a kind reason. The very definition of love as I understand it.
Talking about Knockout (the dead girlfriend) is a little more tricky without truly huge spoilers, but suffice to say, whether Knockout is in hell or not, and how, if she is, to retrieve her forms another one of the key, later arcs that basically propels the series into its final act. So I'll skirt the issue, but instead leave you with this exchange between Scandal and Ragdoll -
To move on from Scandal and Bane, Catman is another character who has an extremely interesting overall trajectory. I know that he's one of the more popular characters, and I will try not to be cynical and assume it's because of a differing reading of his arc to mine, but what I find interesting about him is that he almost inverts the journey you'd expect of him. At the start, he is almost a good man - too violent and brutal to really run with the heroes, but secretly wanting to be one, to save people and do good stuff, and resentful of the capes for what he feels is their moral hypocrisy and judgement of him. How dare Nightwing dismiss him after he saved a child, simply because he killed the would-be kidnappers? Nevermind that he only did it after accepting the kidnapping contract himself, then reneging on it in a misguided attempt to play at - to quote Ragdoll - being a "supervillain in drag" for the evening. His protoromance with Huntress is likewise predicated on her ability to see in him elements of herself - a man who just needs to make better choices to switch sides.
But Simone ultimately steers clear of the idea of redeeming Catman either by making him a hero, or, perhaps the more likely route in the age of post-millennial angst, turning him into a "dark avenger" - a kind of antihero figure like The Punisher, who dispenses lethal retribution under the excuse of moral relativism.
What actually happens to him is tragic; while he doesn't end up as the most messed up member of the team, he probably falls further than any of them. He takes the "dark avenger" trope to its unavoidable conclusion and it's not a heroic one. His criticisms of caped heroes and their self-determined right to police the world isn't the voice of the comic book, it's the voice of an angry, broken, jealous man.
There's a recurring theme in the series, about the times when you don't, or can't, save someone. About how they fail to save each other. Catman can't save himself. He chooses not to.
Plus he looks like this - it's not often you get deliberately objectifying images of men in comics, but with Catman you do, and it's completely intentional.
Jeanette is a character I wish that Simone had had more time to work with - I always felt that we were just waiting to get to her story, the way we got Catman's and Scandal's. It took me until really near the end of the series to truly appreciate her. I always enjoyed her well enough - she was often hilarious and also often facilitated the more honest moments between team members as she - at least to surface appearances - is possibly the most mentally healthy.
Jeanette is always in control. She's sarcastic, pretty emotionally detached, stubborn and at least a thousand years old. But her most powerful asset, since she's a Banshee, is her scream which reduces pretty much everyone to dead or babbling idiot, and in taking time to really think about it and also observe the effect it has on Jeanette, it's totally heartbreaking. It requires her to relive her own death (it's implied, perhaps, one of many deaths), and it requires her to basically lose her shit. She's back in that moment, she's vulnerable, she's terrified, she's screaming.
Only one thing terrifies Jeanette - captivity: prisons and eventually, executions. Loss of the control she so rigorously enforces in her life, when she is not insane and screaming. The prisons she's been held in - well, it's implied it's been a lot. This is a series of stories about failures to save people. No one ever comes to save Jeanette. All that's left is for her to try and avenge herself after the fact. How do you ever reconcile yourself with your own (repeated) murder?
It's not really a picture of her losing her shit, which tend to be longer sequences, but it's a fucking awesome line.
Ragdoll is another character worth talking about. His depraved-yet-wacky hijincks are often a source of darker humour and Ragdoll himself, on several occasions, comments on the tendency people have to dismiss him as harmlessly eccentric, which in turn contrasts with his vicious methods of protecting his position as the only "dandy freak" the team has space for. He's just excessively ridiculously insane to the point of adopting a group of monkeys and dressing them like his teammates, and having the body of his only friend stuffed when he dies and then arguing with him about fashion. He's so ridiculous it's when the narrative suddenly pulls back and shows you either a moment of quiet, vulnerable near-sanity, or more devastatingly, a moment of genuine, petty vengeance, that he is most powerful. Tragedy is often more effective when juxtaposed with comedy, and it's often on Ragdoll that these moments pivot.
I haven't really touched much on Deadshot, or Black Alice (he wasn't around for most of the run and I never quite got to grips with her, though I did think the stuff with her and Ragdoll was surprisingly touching in its entirety, given I didn't quite buy it to start with). I feel bad about not talking about Deadshot, since he's been in the group since the very beginning and he does fine in his role, but I mostly enjoyed him for his interactions with the others. I don't mean it as an insult, but he's a very straightforward character, and not the sort that I think requires deep dissection here for his role in things. I should note that John Ostrander, on his guest spot doing that issue about Deadshot, did do a really good job of telling his story and adding a sense of psychological realism to his backstory and internal workings without changing the fact that this guy is pretty much what-you-see-is-what-you-get.
It probably says something both about my own tastes and the nature of the corporate world that of all the Secret Six, it's Deadshot and the hilarious but basically one-note comedy device of King Shark, who get incorporated into the new Suicide Squad title in September.
Still, King Shark was often hilarious. Have an example -
And, for a freebie -
So, yes. Secret Six. Epic talking. I'm done now. I'm really, really going to miss this series, but, as Jeanette says, as her Dublin lullaby says;
Recommended Reading Order
Secret Six showed up in a few mini series and crossover arcs before their got their own ongoing series.
Chronologically, it goes:
Villains United (6 issues, collected as a graphic novel)
Secret Six: Six Degrees of Separation (6 issues, collected as a graphic novel)
Birds of Prey #104 - #109 (frustratingly, #104 - #108 are in one novel - "Birds of Prey: Dead of Winter" while #109 is in "Birds of Prey: Club Kids" but it's worth tracking down #109 if you can because something fairly...major happens to one of the Six).
Then we finally get the ongoing series, all of which have been collected in trade paperbacks, with the exception of the very recent issues, which I'm sure will get collected shortly, and if not are still easy to track down since the series literally only ended this month.
I do think that the mini series are worth reading and have some great stuff in them, but Secret Six #1 is also a good jumping on point and honestly I think the writing gets better as it continues, and it's really in the ongoing series that it hits its stride.
The first thing to say is, I didn't originally think this would be the comic for me. I mean, I didn't doubt it was good - it was written by a writer for whom I had a lot of respect - but what I knew of it, how people sold it, was with words like "dark" and "edgy" and "twisted humour" and I know why, because I'm here, now, fumbling for different words to describe it and failing because they all apply. But I think they can also give the wrong impression. It makes it sound like one of those books where dark things happen simply because they are shocking, where the main characters are villains so that fanboyz can talk about how kewl it is that people get beheaded and how it's so much more "mature" than Superman. And if there's one thing I hate it's the fandom meme that darker = better. That you can't tell a devastating story of moral dilemmas and subtle characterisation and complex emotion with Superman, you can only do it with Batman.
But now here I am. This book is dark. This book is edgy. This book is full of delightfully twisted humour. This book is really, really good.
It's hard to explain why it doesn't succumb to the pitfalls I described above. I mean, primarily, it's because of good writing, but it's also the type of story. It's a tragedy. Like, in the classic, dramatic sense. It's about lost opportunities and bad choices. Emotional complexity is an area in which this series excels, so of course, personal pain is an element of the tale, but the story is never about single, emo tears. It doesn't feel like any kind of moral statement - it feels like six people struggling, and failing to save each other, but continuing to try anyway.
I spoke previously here about Miller's Batgirl series and how it was wildly optimistic because Stephanie Brown just kept getting up. I think that Secret Six could be described as tragic and nihilistic for the exact same reason. They just won't stop getting up.
So maybe that's it. Its darkness and edginess and twistedness is part of the architecture, but not how I would describe it. It's more like...Thelma and Louise, if they'd landed that car, and had to keep on going, somehow, forever.
Six people whose only redeeming quality is their inability to surrender, their refusal to be owned. Not out of machismo or even personal pride in the conventional sense, but because it's pretty much the last thing they have left.
There are some truly beautiful and truly disturbing moments and character arcs to be found here. Perhaps my favourite is the unlikely, and ultimately devastating, story of Bane's attempts to be the father figure Scandal Savage never had. If I had to choose any one panel sequence to sum up that relationship, or perhaps even the entire series, and its precarious balance between nihilism and love, it would probably be this one:
The love is self-evident. The nihilism is that at this point in the conversation, they both know it can't happen, it would never work, it's not worth it.
As individual characters, they're both extremely interesting too - probably my two favourite characters in the series, which, for Bane, is an achievement given that before I read this I knew who he was - the man who broke Batman's back - but was basically completely disinterested in him. I'm trying avoid in-depth discussion of the largest arcs in the series here, which makes it difficult to talk too much about Bane because it's the final arc that really shows the depth and skill Gail Simone has as a character writer - a 180 shift that makes complete sense yet remains completely devastating. I will say, however, in Bane, we have a character who is completely ruthless and yet completely honourable, accidentally hilarious in one moment and hair-raisingly terrifying the next. Again, if I had to pick one moment to crystalise his character, it would be this one, upon being asked, with regards to his teammates, if they die, or if he dies. He makes the morally "correct" choice, for the sole reason of denying his enemies satisfaction and power.
To move on to Scandal, she's the team's sometime leader (at times it is Bane), and as such is in a position of a fair amount of power, both in terms of hierarchy but also in terms of the way she functions as a central point between the various team members. It's hard to say this without it making her sound weak or easily influenced, neither of which is true in the slightest, but Scandal really does come into her own in the way she responds to the other human influences in her life, as opposed to Bane, who attempts to eschew them. Obviously one of her key relationships is with Bane and its counterpoint to her relationship with her real father, Vandal Savage. But the other major interpersonal thread for her character is romantic. Again, I suppose a litmus test for the entire series and it's nihilistic, poignant humour, would be that moment in the first issue of the ongoing series (following a few mini series) when Scandal's friends attempt to pull her from her depressive alcoholism by hiring a stripper to dress as her dead girlfriend and jump out of her birthday cake.
But tragicomedy aside, her relationships do what any good relationship will do for a fictional character - show more sides to her character and get you emotionally invested. But it also ties into the wider picture of the Six's world and their place within it and their moral standing. We come to love these characters and in a vacuum, it becomes increasingly easy to rationalise what they're doing, because every one of them is doing the best he or she can. Liana - the stripper Scandal starts dating - is a really interesting way to puncture that reader-safety. She's adorable, open, honest, and fundamentally decent. She loves Scandal and Scandal loves her back, and this is never in question. And then, when Liana gets kidnapped and tortured and asks Scandal not to kill the man, but to hand him over to the police for justice, Scandal lies to her and promises to do as she asks, and bundles her into Jeanette's arms, to be lullabyed away to a safer world, and gores the man through his own eyes.
A terrible thing for a kind reason. The very definition of love as I understand it.
Talking about Knockout (the dead girlfriend) is a little more tricky without truly huge spoilers, but suffice to say, whether Knockout is in hell or not, and how, if she is, to retrieve her forms another one of the key, later arcs that basically propels the series into its final act. So I'll skirt the issue, but instead leave you with this exchange between Scandal and Ragdoll -
To move on from Scandal and Bane, Catman is another character who has an extremely interesting overall trajectory. I know that he's one of the more popular characters, and I will try not to be cynical and assume it's because of a differing reading of his arc to mine, but what I find interesting about him is that he almost inverts the journey you'd expect of him. At the start, he is almost a good man - too violent and brutal to really run with the heroes, but secretly wanting to be one, to save people and do good stuff, and resentful of the capes for what he feels is their moral hypocrisy and judgement of him. How dare Nightwing dismiss him after he saved a child, simply because he killed the would-be kidnappers? Nevermind that he only did it after accepting the kidnapping contract himself, then reneging on it in a misguided attempt to play at - to quote Ragdoll - being a "supervillain in drag" for the evening. His protoromance with Huntress is likewise predicated on her ability to see in him elements of herself - a man who just needs to make better choices to switch sides.
But Simone ultimately steers clear of the idea of redeeming Catman either by making him a hero, or, perhaps the more likely route in the age of post-millennial angst, turning him into a "dark avenger" - a kind of antihero figure like The Punisher, who dispenses lethal retribution under the excuse of moral relativism.
What actually happens to him is tragic; while he doesn't end up as the most messed up member of the team, he probably falls further than any of them. He takes the "dark avenger" trope to its unavoidable conclusion and it's not a heroic one. His criticisms of caped heroes and their self-determined right to police the world isn't the voice of the comic book, it's the voice of an angry, broken, jealous man.
There's a recurring theme in the series, about the times when you don't, or can't, save someone. About how they fail to save each other. Catman can't save himself. He chooses not to.
Plus he looks like this - it's not often you get deliberately objectifying images of men in comics, but with Catman you do, and it's completely intentional.
Jeanette is a character I wish that Simone had had more time to work with - I always felt that we were just waiting to get to her story, the way we got Catman's and Scandal's. It took me until really near the end of the series to truly appreciate her. I always enjoyed her well enough - she was often hilarious and also often facilitated the more honest moments between team members as she - at least to surface appearances - is possibly the most mentally healthy.
Jeanette is always in control. She's sarcastic, pretty emotionally detached, stubborn and at least a thousand years old. But her most powerful asset, since she's a Banshee, is her scream which reduces pretty much everyone to dead or babbling idiot, and in taking time to really think about it and also observe the effect it has on Jeanette, it's totally heartbreaking. It requires her to relive her own death (it's implied, perhaps, one of many deaths), and it requires her to basically lose her shit. She's back in that moment, she's vulnerable, she's terrified, she's screaming.
Only one thing terrifies Jeanette - captivity: prisons and eventually, executions. Loss of the control she so rigorously enforces in her life, when she is not insane and screaming. The prisons she's been held in - well, it's implied it's been a lot. This is a series of stories about failures to save people. No one ever comes to save Jeanette. All that's left is for her to try and avenge herself after the fact. How do you ever reconcile yourself with your own (repeated) murder?
It's not really a picture of her losing her shit, which tend to be longer sequences, but it's a fucking awesome line.
Ragdoll is another character worth talking about. His depraved-yet-wacky hijincks are often a source of darker humour and Ragdoll himself, on several occasions, comments on the tendency people have to dismiss him as harmlessly eccentric, which in turn contrasts with his vicious methods of protecting his position as the only "dandy freak" the team has space for. He's just excessively ridiculously insane to the point of adopting a group of monkeys and dressing them like his teammates, and having the body of his only friend stuffed when he dies and then arguing with him about fashion. He's so ridiculous it's when the narrative suddenly pulls back and shows you either a moment of quiet, vulnerable near-sanity, or more devastatingly, a moment of genuine, petty vengeance, that he is most powerful. Tragedy is often more effective when juxtaposed with comedy, and it's often on Ragdoll that these moments pivot.
I haven't really touched much on Deadshot, or Black Alice (he wasn't around for most of the run and I never quite got to grips with her, though I did think the stuff with her and Ragdoll was surprisingly touching in its entirety, given I didn't quite buy it to start with). I feel bad about not talking about Deadshot, since he's been in the group since the very beginning and he does fine in his role, but I mostly enjoyed him for his interactions with the others. I don't mean it as an insult, but he's a very straightforward character, and not the sort that I think requires deep dissection here for his role in things. I should note that John Ostrander, on his guest spot doing that issue about Deadshot, did do a really good job of telling his story and adding a sense of psychological realism to his backstory and internal workings without changing the fact that this guy is pretty much what-you-see-is-what-you-get.
It probably says something both about my own tastes and the nature of the corporate world that of all the Secret Six, it's Deadshot and the hilarious but basically one-note comedy device of King Shark, who get incorporated into the new Suicide Squad title in September.
Still, King Shark was often hilarious. Have an example -
And, for a freebie -
So, yes. Secret Six. Epic talking. I'm done now. I'm really, really going to miss this series, but, as Jeanette says, as her Dublin lullaby says;
Recommended Reading Order
Secret Six showed up in a few mini series and crossover arcs before their got their own ongoing series.
Chronologically, it goes:
Villains United (6 issues, collected as a graphic novel)
Secret Six: Six Degrees of Separation (6 issues, collected as a graphic novel)
Birds of Prey #104 - #109 (frustratingly, #104 - #108 are in one novel - "Birds of Prey: Dead of Winter" while #109 is in "Birds of Prey: Club Kids" but it's worth tracking down #109 if you can because something fairly...major happens to one of the Six).
Then we finally get the ongoing series, all of which have been collected in trade paperbacks, with the exception of the very recent issues, which I'm sure will get collected shortly, and if not are still easy to track down since the series literally only ended this month.
I do think that the mini series are worth reading and have some great stuff in them, but Secret Six #1 is also a good jumping on point and honestly I think the writing gets better as it continues, and it's really in the ongoing series that it hits its stride.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-22 10:09 pm (UTC)I really like stories that focus on lesser known characters especially villians. Theres something special about what drives these sad and twisted individuals. Ive read a few of the more recent issues (torturing the penguin, shark attack and a lot of chatting) and really hate that the new 52 is probably gonna wipe the team from existence.
Of the line up im only really familiar with Bane. I love how he has always been just as much a strategist as he is a fighter. By the time he has put Batman throught his original masterplan even Alfred could of broke his back let alone a venom pumped up behemoth.
Marvel has a similar kind of comic with the Thunderbolts (rotating rosta villain team) but DC seems to be miles ahead when it comes to depth with its characters.
Hope September brings some equally good comics.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-23 07:35 pm (UTC)The focusing on lesser known characters is another thing that breaks the mold for me with this. It's not that I have anything against the concept it's just that it's not something that immediately convinces me it's worth a shot whereas I know for some people it's a real conceptual draw. So you know, again, this plays against type for me.
Of the lineup I was also only originally familiar with Bane but I totally agree about the way his dual skills are interesting. Because he looks so physical, it's nice that his real skill is strategy and he uses the venom very tactically. There are several really nice plot points that revolve around that difference throughout the comic - it's definitely worth picking up the trades if you can find them and if you liked the more recent issues.
Here's hoping September will be awesome! :D