Last weekend I gave myself over to an unwholesome taste I rarely indulge and can’t quite
recommend: I read a comic I thought I’d hate because I knew I’d take pleasure
in trashing it. I guess some gals—well, at least the protagonist of Charles
Forsman’s Slasher—are pedophiliac
serial killers who get their rocks off at the sight of “knife play,” while girls like me are content to sit on a couch and quietly explore the depths of
their contempt. One difference to note is that I was born this way, whereas Slasher’s Christine Sobotka, in her
latex suit and gimp mask, is the product of one man’s imagination.
“Jesus,
why?” is one question that might be asked of a comic book that consists of a
25-year-old woman masturbating her way through a murder spree. Over at the
Comics Journal, Leonard Pierce entertained it with less than half a heart. “She [Slasher’s protagonist] can only get off sexually at the sight of
blood,” he writes. “Why? It’s not really important.”
Oh,
okay! He continues:
“The quest for an irreducible meaning behind mass violence
is, in life, largely futile and easily confused effort, and in art, almost
never more than a narrative crutch. Forsman wisely doesn’t spend more than a
token line or two on the origin of her mania, instead plunging us directly into
its expanding consequences.”
Pierce imbues the cartoonist’s dubious narrative choices with the sort of
sweeping philosophical import one might find in the work of Cormac
McCarthy; failing to find fault with the idea of a woman who takes sexual pleasure in her own
evisceration, Pierce concludes that here’s a comic that really makes u think. Mmm, does it, though? Because when I ask why this young woman finds sexual
satisfaction in a 14-year-old boy drawing a knife across his concave chest,
say, or why she doesn’t mind when
some other pervert saws off her hand, my spirit isn’t quite so equivocal. In fact, I
can say with some confidence that the answer to Why is Charles Forsman’s protagonist turned on by these unspeakable
things? is: because the cartoonist decided to make her that way.
To
catfish is to pretend to be something you’re not to lure people in - a lie told
to another person in service of your own satisfaction. Catfishing is central to
the plot of Slasher, but it is also,
if you think about it, part of the packaging of Post-Dumb comics, the genre to
which this comic book belongs. The Post-Dumbs, you may recall, are artists like Johnny Ryan and
Benjamin Marra whose shtick is to take loaded, politically incorrect imagery
and empty it of meaning. These artists play with plausible deniability, mostly
through the haphazard deployment of irony, a recognizable aesthetic, and a modern
point of view, but at the end of the day they’re trafficking in old
stereotypes. Scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find there’s nothing there.
Forsman
is a millennial who has been to comics college, so Slasher is the Post-Dumb genre with a socially aware twist: he
casts the gender of his serial killer against expectation. James Sturm is proud, I’m sure, but much like “The Sponsor,” the
problem here is that Slasher’s gender
commentary can’t quite obscure its misogynistic attitude. The feminist swell I’m
meant to feel when Forsman shows me Christine’s sleazy boss hitting on her
isn’t enough to make me overlook the cartoonist’s stereotypical representations
of (just for instance) mothers as overbearing and mentally unstable. Some
images, like an unhinged woman giving herself an empowering haircut in a
bathroom mirror, will be familiar to readers from the language of cinema.
Others, like a lady in a gimp mask chowing down on a fistful of raw ground beef
in the supermarket, are newer, if somehow more tired. The effect, either way,
is the same.
Roughly
a thousand years ago I read a book of writing advice by Stephen King. One of
the exercises he recommended (at least as I remember it) was to write a short
story about a cat burglar who was...wait for it...a woman. Wild and crazy
stuff. That’s basically the plot of Slasher,
except with violent perverts. Christine Sobotka is a seemingly
mild-mannered data entry clerk who’s secretly in love with Chester Brown’s
grandchild, who she met via fax on the Internet.
Her
father dies, so she decides to start doing sex murder? Then a road trip to
see Chester Brown Jr. Jr. doesn’t quite go as planned. Gosh, I really don’t want
to spoil things for you, but hopefully you’re getting the sense that this is
not so much a story that hangs together as an undercooked thought experiment.
As
with all Dumbs and Post-Dumbs, Forsman exhibits a certain level of craft and
competence. He can draw a hell of a cover.
He’s
more or less proficient at the level of the sentence, of the panel, of the
page. Where he struggles in Slasher
is in fleshing out the idea of a nightmare person necrophilia comic beyond a
shallow elevator pitch. (Hey, does Bret Easton Ellis meets Juno sound good to
you? I guess it sounded good to Netflix.) There is often something quite
commercial about “edgy” work, is there not? I believe the line between offensive and appealing is more porous than these men care to admit.
Post-Dumb
comics are part of the legacy of Robert Crumb (the ur-Dumb, if you will), who’s
celebrated for his use of politically incorrect imagery. The key difference
between Dumb and Post-Dumb is that with Crumb, that imagery meant something, even if it meant different
things to different eyes. Now we have post-race racism instead of regular racism, post-gender sexism instead of plain misogyny, so on/so forth. I was pondering this lineage a few nights ago as I
was writing a thread venting about old Crumb,
when I noticed something interesting: One of the authors of an old AV Club piece that named a panel in which Crumb raped a woman as its #1 “unflattering moment from autobiographical comics” was Leonard Pierce, the same critic who gave Slasher that glowing review.
Which
comics artists do we - the “comics community” - interrogate, and which ones get
a pass? I found myself thinking about Pierce’s praise for how Slasher challenges its audience to “look
at a lot of our assumptions about the nature of violence in both life and art”
(lol), and also Tucker Stone’s more compelling, if somewhat antagonistic, interview with Aleš Kot,
which hit on many of the same topics in a different register. I don’t wish to
say those pieces fail to attend to the issues at hand so much as that,
taken together, they express a larger cultural force, a skewed perspective we
might endeavor to correct. The ur-Dumb set a double standard in which a
provocative indie comic, no matter how incoherent or appalling an expression of
the id, is presumed to have worth and intellectual integrity, whereas anything with mass
market spit-and-shine is automatically an object of suspicion. Too often there's something fundamentally dishonest about the way in which violence against women in indie comics is drawn and discussed.
But here I’ll admit to one of my own limitations: sometimes it’s hard to tell the
difference between finally seeing into the matrix and viewing everything
through the lens of my own irritation. It was the possibility that I was
mistaken about Slasher - maybe even more so
than the prospect of a delicious hate read - that convinced me to give it a
shot. After all, Forsman’s Revenger series is published by Bergen Street Comics
Press, home to Michel Fiffe’s Copra trade paperbacks, one of this world’s few
perfect things. Plus, of course, Forsman recently became a mainstream success,
with The End of the Fucking World
having broken the salon barrier (meaning the woman who cuts my hair enthusiastically recommended
it). I was curious.
Alas,
there was no need to look past my assumptions, which were met and exceeded; Slasher is just another exercise in
empty titillation from a bad boy with a brand (albeit a brand that’s
more capacious and flexible than most). Like its Post-Dumb brethren, Forsman’s
comic falls somewhere between aimless, listless satire and absolutely
thoughtless entertainment, a combination doomed to fail. If we’re digging for
meaning—that pesky why—the Post-Dumb
genre is like a joke that’s not a joke in that it expresses something true
without the courage of conviction. I find it lazy, despicable, and bloodless.
Writing this post, I’m reminded of the time I taught a writing class, where
sometimes I wondered if I spent more time commenting on papers than the
students had spent writing the papers themselves. In my fantasy, in lieu of
this review, I’m handing Charles Forsman a copy of Slasher with a single comment scrawled in red pen: Suck my dick.
No
offense, gentle reader. “No offense.”
