The World's Greatest Assholes



Is it possible to label an inanimate object as an asshole? Because, boy howdy, if you've ever played the above cartridge, you know what I'm talking about. You know just how possible it is that a few ounces of plastic circuits can seem like the living, breathing, pulsating embodiment of foetid evil.

I know less about the current state of the video game world than I do about quantum physics - ie, not a whole lot. But what I have heard about contemporary games like Ultimate Alliance or Arkham Asylum makes me envious. You see, back in the day, if you wanted to play a video game featuring your favorite four-color heroes in tales of derring-do, you were pretty much SOL. Sure, there were a few superhero games made for the NES and more for the SNES - and a few for the SNES were even pretty good (not Spider-Man and the X-Men: Arcade's Revenge, however, which is verifiable proof of the God's nonexistence). But in the beginning, despite the fact that the audiences for video games and comic books overlapped considerably, most comic book games were pretty poor. Movie tie-ins were generally dire (something I never really understood, but apparently it's pretty much CW at this point that movie games have always sucked across the board), but comic book tie-ins were worse. Who remembers the Silver Surfer game? That one actually looked pretty good, graphics-wise, but was almost impossible to win because it was impossible not to die. You know how in comics the Surfer is pretty much invincible, and can only be physically harmed by great cosmic power? In the game, he died when he was attacked by frogs. He died when he was hit by small weapons fire. He did when he flew into platforms. He just basically died, period.

But as bad as the Surfer was - and I should point out that I actually beat the Surfer's game, which at the time seemed an achievement on par with passing the oral defense for a PhD - it plays like Super Mario 3 next to LJN's X-Men. Calling this thing a game is stretching the point. First of all, you can't move - you just sort of wiggle. It's an overhead view, so you can't really see anything distinctive about your characters, other than they are vague lumpen dwarf things moving about in a surreal, ill-defined world of labyrinths and puzzles. In retrospect, it sort of plays like you imagine a Teratoid Heights game would - only, instead of the poor, unresponsive controls being a symbol of some kind of dysfunctional, existential reality-altered perception, the controls in X-Men just make it looks like the characters are wiggling when they should in face be running or dodging or doing something to avoid being hit by everything on the screen simultaneously. I don't think I ever made it past a few feet on the map for any level. It wasn't just hard, it actively worked against intelligibility.

This is, let's be frank, the worst video game I have ever played in my life. It gains added points in the field of soul-crushing despair due to the fact that it's based on a license that so many kids and pre-teens in the late 80s would have killed to see made into an awesome game. How many of these same kids rushed home from the store, unwrapped their copy of X-Men in a fevered rush, and proceeded to watch their fondest desires fade into the infinite abyss of gnarled purplish pixelated hell? There are few things that more define an asshole than arbitrarily crushing the hopes and dreams of children.

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The World's Greatest Assholes



You know this guy. This guy haunts your dreams.

Street Fighter II is the best fighting game ever made. In fact, I've never played another fighting game that was anywhere near as fun. Mortal Combat was too dark and dreary, and the skill level necessary to pull off the combos was too high. I played Tekken once and it was just boring. Most of the others I've seen were either way too complex for the casual gamer to enjoy, or built in such a way that any clod could pull off devastating moves simply by pushing down on all the buttons simultaneously (I'm looking at you, Marvel vs. Capcom arcade edition).

But Street Fighter Ii? It was fun: no "fatalities", no twenty-button combos. You could have fun games with two average-to-mediocre players just bashing around, you could have a lot of fun with more advanced players as well. The fighters were cartoon characters and the violence was exaggerated - people weren't pulling out other people's hearts. I'm not a fan of real-life bloodsports, so the closer the games get to an "uncanny valley" of bloody fisticuffs, the further from some kind of pseudo-comic book fantasy, the less fun it seems, the more vaguely disturbing.

But this guy, this guy is the thorn on the rose bush of one of the SNES' best titles. To put it bluntly, Guile was an asshole, and anyone who picked Guile was an asshole. Why? Because if you knew how to play Guile, you could effectively put down any other player. All you had to do was sit in the corner and keep doing that backwards sonic kick thing and you were untouchable. Which is really frustrating: you're sitting down to play a nice fun game with some pals, and then the guy next to you picks Guile and the game sort of comes to a standstill. He keeps pushing the same combination over and over again, Guile keeps kicking, and anytime you try to hit him you get hit in return.

Why are you sitting here playing video games? Seriously, it's a good question. If you don't really want to play video games, if all you want to do is play in a disinterested, odious manner that frustrates the people around you, what is the point? You're an asshole, that's who, and Guile is an asshole for facilitating your churlishness.

The Two Jakes

I didn't forget about the X-Men. I've actually been thinking about them for a while now, ever since I started writing about them infrequently. More than anything else I would like to thank everyone who had commented on the subject. I began the subject with a simple question - why are the X-Men no longer as popular, when for almost the entirety of the 1990s they were the industry's dominant franchise, and even more, one of the most dominant franchises in the medium's history? I had a few ideas about the subject which I spent some time exploring, but also a number of misapprehensions and suppositions which were subsequently refined or corrected by the comments.

My first mistake - and it's a common mistake, really, so I can't feel too bad about making it - is presuming some kind of continuity between the initial, long 17-year Claremont run and the subsequent years. It's obvious on the face of it that the books changed overnight once the adjectiveless X-Men began and Claremont left the ostensible flagship Uncanny. But the mistake I made was in asking why exactly the books continued to be popular after Claremont left, assuming that the dip in quality would have been obvious to anyone reading at the time - it was to me, certainly, and many others who enjoyed the Claremont run but had little to do with the franchise throughout the following years. The real question is not why people stuck with the franchise when it got "bad". The real question is why Marvel was stupid enough to screw over the franchise in the late 90s and early 00s.

Before 1991, the X-franchise was, while overwhelmingly popular, still not dominant to the degree it would be. There were only three main titles - Uncanny, X-Factor and New Mutants - with two peripheral titles, Wolverine and Excalibur. These last two were very obviously peripheral for one reason: they were printed on better paper and cost fifty cents more than the regular newsprint books. This meant that the books didn't get directly involved in crossovers. I don't know really why this was, but Baxter paper books (was it still called Baxter paper?), because of their price, were never vital components of crossovers or promotions. Perhaps this was one last holdover of the idea that the company's mainline titles should be readily accessible and affordable to the youngest readers. It would be interesting to know why this perception existed, but I know as a reader at the time I could discern a definite difference between the regular $1 Punisher book and the $1.50 Punisher War Journal - they were both Code titles, but the $1.50 books seemed to get away with a bit more than the newsprint line, and existed at a slight remove from month-to-month continuity.

In any event, this distinction disappeared altogether in the early 90s - printing standards rose dramatically, for one. They were already rising before Image started - Marvel had just recently dropped the universally reviled Flexographic process and even the mainline books looked dramatically better. But when the Image guys took charge of their new books and made $1.95 the standard intro price for the company's regular books, it was really only a matter of time before everyone else followed suit.

In the early 1990s, Marvel decided, with good reason, that since nothing sold as well as the X-Men, they would start making as many X-Men books as possible. I can't say how much of an influence Claremont's presence had on the line's relatively conservative growth up to then, but I have always suspected that he exerted a stronger presence than not. Consider that of the four ongoing spinoffs released up to 1991, he had personally launched three of them, and his displeasure over X-Factor created continuity problems that eventually resulted in the line's biggest-to-that-point X-over, 1988's Inferno. But whether or not correlation was causation in this instance, nevertheless, once he left the floodgates opened.

And the funny thing is, once the line started to explode in the early 90s, the fanbase did as well. It was popular before, sure, but the fans who came in with Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld and the Saturday morning cartoon didn't care who the hell Chris Claremont was. (It didn't help that in the years immediately preceding 1991, Uncanny had been entrenched on a years-long "X-Men disassembled" storyline that featured the team dismantled, and whole months passed with only third-raters like Forge and Banshee as placeholders.*) Or maybe they knew who he was, but Wolverine as a character was more important than Claremont or even Lee & Liefeld as creators. This was the moment when the line really exploded, and oddly enough it also coincided with the moment when the line consciously pared away amount of influence any individual creator could exert on the line. Suddenly, things became interchangeable. There were a half-dozen top-shelf artists moving between the top titles, but none of them were ever in any danger of becoming marquee names. There were any number of competent writers, but no single writer could be allowed to develop any kind of long-term proprietary interest over the books.

The number one draw was the characters. From Marvel's perspective, the Claremont years were probably no less and aberration than the early 90s pre-Image explosion. Marvel didn't own Chris Claremont, but they did own Wolverine, and you don't get any credit for guessing which property they're more concerned with keeping safe and happy.

So here's what the X-Books were in the 1990s: one big giant ongoing soap-opera, of which no component was more important than the larger franchise. If you bought one, you were practically committed to buying most or all. Even when the titles floundered, even when the stories were ill-conceived, poorly drawn, badly written and even nonsensical, there were so many of the things being produced that momentum was never lost. Being a fan of the X-books was like being a fan of a sports franchise: you liked the X-Men like a Chicago fan likes the the Cubs. Sure, the Cubs never quite make it, but you enjoy the show all season anyway. Sure, some fair-weather fans may come and go as the home team waxes and wanes, but there's still a huge amount of people who stay committed through thick and thin. Sometimes, and this is something that is occasionally hard to comprehend for many, the franchise thrives despite the low quality of many of its constituent books. The reason for this is simple: people get loyal, and this loyalty takes buying X-Men books above the level of a simple capitalistic exchange of money for a good or bad comic and places it instead on the plane of loyalty to an idea. Ask any Red Sox fan circa 2004: there is nothing sweeter than a long-delayed victory, made even sweeter because of the turmoil wrought on the long-suffering fanbase.

In the early 1990s the X-Books were popular enough that even when they started to shed readers at a precipitate rate in the late 90s, the books were still popular enough to almost single-handedly keep Marvel afloat in its darkest hours. (People remembered the Age of Apocalypse, and the memory of how well-received that event was kept the books warm even through Onslaught and Operation: Zero Tolerence.) Seriously, the only possible reason why Marvel still insists on publishing so many X-books despite the general antipathy towards many of the secondary and tertiary titles is long-standing institutional memory - these books sold well during some very dark times, so it stands to reason they should always be remembered with pride by the company.

But if we can return for one second to the sports metaphor: when the fin de siecle hit, things changed. Even when the franchise was at its lowest nadir of quality, the perception of an ongoing, uninterrupted soap-opera narrative continuing without pause since roughly 1991 (or even 1975) remained intact. But then - well. Sports fans will stay with a team through even the most ignoble defeats and embarrassing scandals. They will forgive anything. But the fact is, with the notable exception of the Green Bay Packers, the fans don't own the teams. The owners take the fans for granted ,and with good reason. But there is one thing the owners can do too demolish this fanbase, one breach of absolute trust, one surefire method to demarcate the the end of one era and the beginning of a new, a clear and violent jumping-off point for even the most hardcore.

The owners can always move the team. It's their prerogative.

So, when Marvel decided to push the X-books back to prominence after a rather disastrous few years (despite Alan Davis' generally well-received run, it still culminated in The Shattering, the Twelve and Claremont's disastrous return), they didn't just revamp the line by putting better creators on the books and getting back to first principles. Or, er, they might have thought that was what they were doing, but it wasn't quite the same thing. They decided to do the equivalent of moving the franchise to another city: they set down a line in the sand between the "old" X-Men - you know, the books that regardless of any other considerations had been the company's lifeblood for the previous decade - and the New X-Men.

They could not have made their wishes more explicit: this weren't yer father's X-Men, this was something different. Whether or not Morrison's X-Men were any good is totally besides the point. It was a good book, but it wouldn't have been any less good if it had been a new series a la Astonishing or, contemporaneously, X-Treme. The point is that the "New" X-Men provided a convenient jumping off point for as many readers as it may have attracted. And the new readers jumping aboard with Morrison weren't the type of readers who were going to become fanatically attached to the franchise properties above all other considerations. Marvel's bread and butter in the 1990s was a solid core of fandom who had been trained to disregard creators and individual styles - which is not to say that these were ignored, just of secondary importance, even in the case of monstrously popular artists such as Joe Madureira. Suddenly, all the fans who had suffered through the worst of the 90s were being told that the stories they liked, the characters they loved, weren't going to be the backbone of the franchise anymore. Suddenly, the X-Men weren't the X-Men - the team had been moved. It didn't matter if the new owners pointed out how much better the team was doing in its new stadium across the country - for the fans, it just wasn't their team anymore.

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* I have decided that Forge is my second-least-favorite Marvel character, behind only Morbius the Living Vampire. Why Claremont though this character was interesting at all is beyond me, and why he decided to devote a solid year of the book in the 80s to The Adventures of Forge and his Paddy** Sidekick Banshee is simply beyond me.

** I can say "Paddy", my name is O'Neil.

Happy Trails

I just read the last Scary Go Round ever. I'm sad about that. It has been one of my favorite comics for a long time.

John Allison showed up in the comments when I spoke about Achewood the other day, rightfully pointing out that comparing any living cartoonist to Charles Schulz is something of a canard. Well, yes, that it is, just like comparing modern superhero artists to Kirby doesn't do a lot for advancing that conversation either. I knew it was a red herring when I wrote it, but I still did it for a very specific reason.

One of the best things about cartooning is that, as an artform, it really offers a unique format with which to observe an artist's talent grow and mature. Sure, you can make these sort of observations with just about any kind of artist or medium - Pitchfork just did a whole week on the new Beatles' remasters, a series of reviews that drew specific attention to the ways in which the Beatles' sound and approach to musicmaking changed over the course of seven extremely busy and fraught years. This is an old story but still fascinating, not just because of the music itself, but because the frequency with which the music was made contributed to a fuller picture of the music and the musicians. They released so much music in such a short amount of time that it feels, at least in retrospect, like every moment of their creative maturation is recorded for posterity.

But really, no matter how much the most prolific musician might release, they've got nothin' on a strip cartoonist*. Day-in, day-out, they've got to produce a strip. If there is one thing the last few years of excellent strip reprint projects has taught me, is that there are few more edifying experiences in all of comics than sitting down with a two-year chunk of, say, Terry & the Pirates or Dick Tracy and swallowing it whole. Incremental change flies by in the time it takes you to turn the page, and before your very eyes you witness an artist mutating, growing and bettering himself, using the pressure of daily deadlines as a kind of crucible to constantly improve themselves. It's not just broad strokes but every little detail - little things like the kind of brushstroke Caniff used to draw people's cheekbones, minuscule details that might not have stood out when observed daily over the course of the decade but which, when seen together, add up to vast differences. A cartoonist who releases artwork on a regular basis gets to grow up in public in a manner not really analogous to any other kind of art**. Sure, a touring band will improve daily, but most people don't get the change to follow a young rock band on the road for the first two or three years of their existence in order to register the gradual change from scrappy young naifs to grizzled pros. In comics, you get to do that, and I have really sincerely come to believe that this sort of intimate experience is one of the true pleasures of comics as an artform, unique among others. It's not just that an artist improves, but that they leave concrete, verifiable traces of every step of the process, from the very beginnings to the present moment.

Look at the first episode of Scary Go Round, here. It could have been drawn by an entirely different artist that today's strip. Look at the first Bobbins, here. Pretty amazing, no? From an almost total cipher to one of the most influential webcartoonists extant - just ask Jeph Jaques or Kate Beaton - that's an amazing arc for just eleven years. He's not retiring anytime soon - he promises a new start with a new strip (with some of the same characters) in a week or so, but still. Every new chapter is preceded by the closing of the previous chapter.

So, thank you, John Allison. Thank you for providing one of my favorite strips for seven years running; thank you for having the stamina and perseverance to make yourself a better cartoonist and giving us all the opportunity to watch every step of the way; thank you for your funny characters and your willingness to follow every joke to its logical conclusion regardless of how preposterous it may have seemed; thank you for answering my fan letters about why Tessa and Rachel disappeared from the strip. No thank yous for setting them on fire, however, that was just mean.

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* I wouldn't put it past Robert Pollard to start releasing a song a day, but it's not really the same thing.

** Perhaps in the 18th and 19th centuries, when prose fiction was released primarily in serial form, it might have been possible to observe similar effects - but since fiction is no longer received that way, that is an experience most modern readers will never have (some internet experiments notwithstanding).

The World's Greatest Assholes

An asshole is less than a villain - not usually a schemer or a manipulator, no great personality and even with even less motivation. An asshole is someone who manages to get by simply by being a tremendous dick, sometimes for no reason, sometimes just because he's getting paid to be a dick by someone else. Assholes are quite simply obnoxious and indefatigably nasty.

So it should come as no surprise that the biggest asshole of the day is none other than:



Anyone who ever played Super Mario Brothers knows this asshole well. How frustrating: you're cruising along, stomping on mushroom things and kicking green turtles, and suddenly some dick on a flying cloud starts raining spiny death down from the sky. At least the King Koopa has some motivation: he wants to ravish Princess Peach, steal a kingdom, amass some flying gold coins. He's greedy for some reason, and even though he's a giant turtle dinosaur thing he wants a (moderately) human bride. Fair enough. But Lakitu is just a straight-up punk, pulling down a paycheck from the boss to drop exotic munitions on some fat Italian plumbers.

You know, if Lakitu had been around in the 60s he would probably have been delighted to drop thousands of gallons of napalm on the Viet-Cong. If he had been working for the Allied Command in World War II, he would have flown the inaugural bombing run on Dresden. As horrifying as war in general - and Mushroom Kingdom skirmishes in particular - may be, there is a special kind of terror involved in the act of dropping heavy ordinance from the skies onto hapless victims. Lakitu is, quite simply, an asshole and a dick of the highest magnitude: if there are ever war crimes tribunals in the Mushroom Kingdom, he'll be first on the docket.