Concrete, vols. 4-7 (1994-2004) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick
Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1933-1935, vol. 2 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould
Den: Neverwhere, Muvovum, & Children of Fire (1978, 1983, & 1989, respectively) - written & illustrated by Richard Corben
Why even have notes, if I'm not gonna make notes on these?
Den's a weird comic. It first began life as a short film, which I've never seen, before today, but have felt indicated via the text. Repeatedly. Which is the first weird thing about Den: it's nodding to its own origins, outside comix. The second weird thing is it keeps asking: what the fuck IS this comic, really?
It's only a weird query, inasmuch as there's No Answer. The closest we can get is, "Den is Den." Whether you're talking the series proper, or its own satirical post-script, 'Denz', the series is Corben's instincts, at work & play.
And here's the weird-er, weird-est part-- Den's a queer text. It's a queer text by a hetero: a heterodox doc, if ya like... And me gusta, certainly. When the Corben library was announced, and I found out Jose Villarubia was in charge of the restoration, I was dubious. Because Villarubia, lovely as his work can be, is not the original colourist. I was suspicious. But Villarubia's not just maintained the faith, he's improved upon the original printings by presenting the cleanest, least censorious version of the work I've seen.
Sure, the colours. Everybody talks about Corben's colours. But I'm here for the full-frontal dudity. Den, the character, isn't attractive. Most of Corben's faces & bodies aren't sexually appealing-- to me. But in terms of actually presenting the body in motion, in action, under the influence of momentum & gravity? Unless it's Muybridge, you're not liable to see this degree of accuracy on paper. From tumescence to free-floating flaccidity, the constriction of cremaster muscles are observed, testicles descend & retreat, cocks roll lazily, and buttocks tense.
Hey, kids: comix.
And most of that doesn't happen during sex scenes. The sex scenes are relatively chaste, really. The only actual penetration committed to paper, in the majority of instances, is with either blade or claw. The biggest cock in the second volume, Muvovum, isn't Den's, it's his arch-enemy, Tarn. As in his enemy morphs into a giant purple people-eating cock. Spoilers!
If that scans as less-than-queer to you, then you're definitely not the audience for the third volume, 'Children of Fire', when Den basically disappears from the narrative and all the focus turns back onto The Red Queen, the power-mad & physically intimidating villainess of volume 1-- who had a HELL of a fight scene, in v2, where she breaks all the limbs of an old man, bites off one of his fingers, and kicks him out a window. Volume 3, which dials the Den Saga back to the year dot, doesn't really go out of its way to cater to the original fans. Den is a desiccated husk of an old man, and The Queen is re-cast as his caretaker & guardian, a spacefarer going by the name Kil. 'Children of Fire' tracks Kil's evolution into the Queen and suggests something deeply genderbent about everything we've seen heretofore.
None of this is explained elegantly. This is Corben, after all, and nobody can convincingly argue to me that he's a Writer. He's an ascended fanboy. He's one of the o.g. fanboys of my parents' generation, point of fact. His fan fixations aren't mine-- Corben read all of Robert E. Howard, attempted adaptations of almost every Poe or Lovecraft story you care to name, and he loved the John-Carter-of-Mars series. Madly. Corben was chasing his own fixations when he got hired on to colour the Warren reprints of The Spirit, and he rode that pack of fixations like baying hounds-- the same fixations which led him to film 'Neverwhere', over time, led him to be obsessed with the pop androgyny of the 80s, same as all were: Annie Lennox's buzzcut + Kathy Acker's bodybuilding were as culturally ubiquitous as Patrick Nagel prints.
Which is where I'm at, presently, in my reading: 1989. Year of the Twin Peaks pilot. Scene of the crime, as 'twere, for my generation to figure out what the crimes against women exactly were.
And there's still two volumes to go. Den has only begun to warp. The Big Story will fold-- like origami produced by some blind seer --into itself, in suggestive shapes, inchoate. Corben kept returning to Neverwhere and asking, "Well, what was that about?" only to produce another, stranger, more gnomic variant on the initial work. Not because he was huffing Borges & reading french po-mo homos. Because the entire time he was handcrafting this art, Corben was bluffing his way to market, making & selling these books through his vanity press imprint, Fantagor.
I cannot underline enough: these are some strange-ass books. Especially to emerge from '89. Because 'Children of Fire' was when Corben was serializing Den as a newsstand comic. Den!?! A title most famous for being unafraid to depict the male form, re-formatted with a female (but never effeminate) protagonist who wears clothes, like some beachgoing normie! Of course it's Corben, so the dimensions & proportions of the fantasy are, as ever, fantastical, and consequently threats of sexualized violence are never far away-- but the threats are never given a chance to land, because Kil, not yet the Queen, is definitely more violent & dangerous than Den had ever been.
O, my trash friends & friends of trash, there are fight scenes. These are fight scenes to buy a graphic novel by Richard Corben for. Action like you like it!
Is Kil likeable? Not as such. Den's hardly likeable himself. He's literally a Masculine Fantasy. But this revised Queen is interesting, in all the ways Den is not. She's in tune with, in ownership & in control of her body, her sexuality, & her identity-- in all the ways David Ellis Norman is not. (Have I mentioned how often our acronymic, titular character is sexually assaulted? Have I mentioned how many times he's been raped? Nobody ever seems to. Perhaps I should. At least the end of v1, which ends with our novice, blundering hero being both raped- and rescued -by women; v2 gives Den close to the full hentai treatment, whereas the worst thing to happen to a female character-- Muuta, disney princess of v2 --is being swallowed whole by a massive parasitic cock. (Pause for emphasis. Throat-clearing sfx.) I wonder why more peeps don't get into the weeds about this stuff...) Corben, never the most subtle of creators, works harder than most Accredited, Acclaimed, Award-brandishing Writers of Comix to show us, not tell us, who the Queen is. What's revealed is Kil: a survivor, a striver, an otherworldly-- chthonic, even --figure of myth. Corben doesn't tell us much of any of that with dialogue. Yes, he typesets a lot of text. His best characterization is, inevitably, illustrative.
A woman arising from the ocean, powerful and athletic, cradling a body so wizened it's virtually a cadaver.
That's the cover: that's the story.
You can quibble with my Big Queer Reading. Because obviously there's a lot of eggy symbolism, and squicky talk about "genetics" from an implicitly matriarchal, eugenicist, spaceclone race, etc. Which Kil defies, throughout-- matriarchy isn't her destiny.
Now, conquest, maybe...
Den doesn't exist in 'Children of Fire'. In his stead there's Mal, a frighteningly skeletal figure who eventually cakes up enough-- courtesy of "radiation" and a Neverwhere diet --to become Den's ringer, in this sci-fi ancestor to a fantasy t&a, beans'n'frank comic that's essentially inexplicable & scripted by the creator's id. The plotting is on some Dave Sim shit, in terms of a career arc where a creator is tethered to an Ikonic Comic Character: retroactive justification heaped upon retroactive justification, all for making a Carter of Mars fan film in his youth... Resulting in some very un-Sim self-examination, perhaps.
It's obvious to me that as time did its work on Corben, and Corben did work on himself-- along the way he became a bodybuilder, his own model for Den --he discovered the Queen to be more compelling & capable than his naive boy-in-barbarian-drag, and so re-configured the Entire Work to focus on her, and her role in redefining Den. The books all still have Den's name on them, but taken as a whole, it's not about him. It's about Neverwhere, and why Neverwhere was never quite where he left it, before he returned.
Because, like his Queen, like Den, Corben always returned. Always in different skin.
Marvel Super Special #33: Buckaroo Banzai (1984) - scripted / adapted by Bill Mantlo, illustrated by Mark Texeria & Armando Gil
