With the cry going up in Michigan, 'Won't somebody think of the children?', Andrew Wheeler looks at a greater obscenity than nudie pictures, as he explores the world of real grown adults dressing up in superhero long johns.
14 November 2003

UNDERWEAR EVERYWHERE

Alex Ross had a good Halloween. It was in the New York Times, as you may have read. The article is here, if you haven't, but you'll need to sign up to read it, and really, it's not that interesting. Ross had a party, blah blah blah, everyone dressed up as superheroes, blah blah blah, Chip Kidd hailed Ross as a "comic book artist as rock star".

I read a few comments from people who were shocked and appalled that Ross would drag the good name of comics through the mud like this. Now, I'm no fan of Ross's art, since I think he makes everyone look like a fat man in a leotard, including Wonder Woman, but I don't really begrudge him having a costume party at Halloween. I was far more appalled when the article compared his work with that of Norman Rockwell, which did rather make me choke on my pumpkin pie.

The mention that he has a "closetful of superhero costumes upstairs" also gave me pause, until you realise he uses them for his art. Presumably he has fat men come over to model them. Still, he's popular, good luck to him, and I encourage him to spend his money on as much kinky dress-up stuff as he likes.

Everyone at Ross's party was dressed as a superhero, judging by the article. Ross himself wore the purple body condom of the Phantom. I once wore a Shadow costume to a Halloween party, and no one had a clue who I was, so perhaps I only gripe at the man because I'm jealous.

'I don't begrudge Alex Ross for having a costume party at Halloween.' But Ross and his party guests haven't been the only ones dressing up in the satin tights recently. Type the phrase 'real life superhero' into Google and you'll uncover quite a few freaky modern-day vigilantes.

September brought us the notorious Angle-Grinder Man, a wheel clamp vigilante who uses, yes, an angle-grinder, whatever that is, to free clamped cars in London and Kent. He even has his own website and hotline.

Then this month we had David Chick, who dressed up as Spider-Man and stood on a 100 foot crane over London's Tower Bridge for six days to protest against fathers being refused access to their children.

This two-man Justice League of Britain is only the tip of the iceberg. CNN tells the story back in 1997 of Superbarrio, an overweight 'folk hero' in a Mexican wrestling mask (Alex Ross would be so proud) who concerns himself with the plight of Mexico City's poor. Superbarrio is credited to the imagination of journalist-turned-politician Marco Rascon, though it wasn't Rascon himself behind the mask, and inspired a number of copycat heroes who took on such causes as animal rights and the environment.

There's also Polarman, the local hero of Nunavut's capital city of Iqualit who defends children from bullies and shovels snow off walkways, and Bradford allegedly plays host to a milkman who uses his early morning milk route to patrol the local streets, and who calls himself, yes, Milkman.

Then, of course, there's the legend that is Terrifica, the New York City singleton who makes it her mission in life to protect other single girls on the club and bar scene. Terrifica claims she went through a break-up back home in Pittsburgh that had the same effect on her that the murder of Mr and Mrs Wayne had on young Bruce. She even has an archenemy, Fantastico, a sexual predator in a velvet suit.

'This two-man Justice League of Britain is only the tip of the iceberg.' One presumes that Terrifica and Fantastico are not actually delusional, but are in fact in it together, and in common with many of the above mentioned 'superheroes', are using their theatrics to draw attention to serious issues - in their case, the potential dangers of the dating scene. (Angle-Grinder Man's agenda may arguably seem a little less weighty than the rest, but then, he's a costumed vigilante, not a superhero.)

Of course, it may not do these causes any good for them to be linked to these costumed nuts, in the same way that some comic fans responded with horror to Alex Ross prancing around in his purple pyjamas. While some of them certainly earn publicity for their causes, they can so readily and plausibly be dismissed as cranks that their impact is likely to have been negligible. I'll be surprised if David Chick has garnered himself anything more than a prison sentence for causing a public nuisance. (Some of them aren't out for publicity, of course, and both Milkman and Polarman should be applauded for their sense of civic pride, if not their sense of personal style.)

The message seems to be that superheroes are seriously damaging to your credibility. Spandex detractors certainly like to echo that sentiment when talking about comics, and I as a professed lover of superheroes am willing to echo it too. Superheroes are meant to be incredible. Fashions come and fashions go, in which creators try to reinvent superheroes as something a bit more weighty and real, but it never sticks. It always looks absurd. No one wants too much reality in a superhero comic.

Superheroes are bad for issues. But great for a Halloween party.

BUT NOT IN MICHIGAN

Todd VerBeek, in a recent post to his excellent comics 'n law weblog, Briefs On The Outside, draws our attention to a law just passed in Michigan - 'the Militia State', I believe it says on the license plates - that will come into effect at the start of next year.

The law aims to keep porn away from children. Now, when I was a child, porn was found in the bins behind the church, in the gorse bushes up on Fairlight Glen, and under the bed of one friend's psychotherapist parents, but the good people of Michigan have chosen not to legislate against any of these things. Rather, they want the covers of sexually explicit materials kept out of sight of the wee tykes in stores.

'If the child actually looks beyond the cover, the fine climbs to £10,000.' In itself, it's not really an outrageous suggestion. Even factoring in the extent to which parents should naturally take responsibility for protecting their children from exposure to things that they don't want them to see, there is that random chance that a child will spy a slightly-too-explicit picture in a store, be traumatised for life, and turn to a life of bank robbery or terrorism.

Unfortunately, the definition of "sexually explicit material" is ludicrously broad, and the punishments are rather severe. For example, a store owner or manager could face a fine of $5,000 and a 93-day jail sentence for allowing a child to look at the full cover of a "pamphlet" containing "drawings" that "depict nudity" (terms in quote marks taken from the letter of the law). So, just about any comic Alan Davis ever drew with Wolverine in it, then. (Or is that just in my slightly fevered recollection?)

If the child actually looks beyond the cover, the fine climbs to £10,000, and the jail sentence climbs to two years. I suspect if the child shows the comic to a friend, the store owner is executed and his family's assets are liquidated, while the child is taken to Guantanamo Bay for reprogramming.

It's an ass-backwards law, and as VerBeek points out, its emphasis on interiors over covers serves only to place restrictions on content, rather than on what the child can actually see. To avoid falling foul of the law, Michigan comics retailers will need to know exactly what is in every panel of every page of every book they sell, and stack the comics accordingly, placing them in either an adult section of the store or obscuring the lower two-thirds of the cover (regardless of what's on the cover, remember) if they do indeed contain displays of flesh.

You might imagine that the intent of the law so clearly doesn't require the censorship of, say, UNCANNY X-MEN ANNUAL #11 (in which a cosmic crystal regenerates Wolverine from a single drop of blood, but fails to regenerate his clothes. Drawn by Alan Davis. Come along, keep up), that it's not worth worrying about.

But of course, Jesus Castillo was fined $4,000 and given a 180 day suspended sentence for breaking Texas obscenity laws by selling an adult comic to an adult, because the prosecuting lawyer successfully argued that comics were specifically designed to appeal to children. Laws like this can't be taken lightly. Such indiscriminate attempts to contain the media must be regarded as a very real threat to the industry.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.




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