Been mulling over Tyranny Rex something fierce. Like, I have not been puzzled by a character this profoundly since Deathblow. Because we are talking empty vessel here. John Smith can write women, and comedy, capably, but he does neither of those with Tyranny Rex. He can't decide what the character is: Tyranny changes skin tone the way she changes her outfit, or profession, or personality template.
Like that is a huge problem, problem number one, because the cranial jack is basically a plot appliance. Anytime Tyranny needs to completely change up her behavior or modus operandi she jacks in at the base of her spine and voila, Tyranny is whatever the plot needs her to be. That may involve radical retcons of persona or self-awareness.
I don't mind swipes & collage: Smith loves collage, clearly, because many of his most celebrated comix characters are collaged together from his reading & general influences; it's the sort of notation toward character you encounter in Morrison. Finding the musical riff that makes it memorable, that gives it a voice & personality in as few words as can be managed. The cranial jack is a swipe, broadly, from science fiction generally & the cyberpunx specifically: delany, cadigan, gibson, as well as probably also Masamune Shirow, the #1 abuser / tropesource of how brainjacks look & work in the comix medium. It's a useful tool, but it's also a bullshit tool, because once you've opened a brain up to the internet, what the fuck. Most of the time it's used as an excuse for reality-bending or the main character going godmode. (See also: a tiny movie called The Matrix.)
Anyway, my problem with brainjacks is when writers use them as a shortcut for plotting & more generally as an excuse for fanciful illustrations that tend to bust my bullshit tolerance barrier. Around the time Tyranny-- on this Serious Quest to save a bunch of nuns who've been dying for about two years, in publishing terms --is having a virtual conversation with a "priest" who's depicted as having an avatar with an anthropomorphized Cog for a face, I'm checked out. They're talking to a kid with glowing eyes who claims to be the Deus Ex Machina. I mean, SMITH. Please. This all hurts way more than it oughta.
The story started with Mark Buckingham on art and it was glorious. It had the Tone down. Bucky can do shit like having a cog for a head. He can sell that. But Paul Marshall can't. He just can't. He's too cartoony. And yet he's not cartoony enough: because the remake / restylying of Tyranny Rex, complete with TR logo on the back of her purple fucking trenchcoat that matches her purple fucking doc martens, wishes it could be Tank Girl, but Marshall has *none* of Hewlett's energy or personality. There's a yin-yang BELT BUCKLE accompanying her hip-hugging holsters for chrissakes.
Bucky maybe could have done something with whatever the hell that re-tooling of TR was for, but I don't know what point of the rant I was on, there. I got lost in just dogging the wardrobe. Because there's NOTHING going on in Tyranny Rex as a character. From her inception as a Smith / Dillon creation, she was doing this psychotic Bugs Bunny prankster thing where she pretended to be an artist but really she was just creating genetically engineered abominations and horrifying meat puppets, for the lulz... And then she started taking Serious Gigs as a merc, tracking down underworld figures, etc... but apparently all that was a misdirect, on Smith's part, because he just wanted an excuse to team her up with Indigo Prime, this other thing he was trying to launch (until he lost interest), et-cet-er-a.
Then she up and converts into a devout, I mean, sincerely devout, nun. Like she's killed a LOT of people, like caused Mega-city levels of carnage, many of them kids because dead kids are comedy gold. Now I'm in it if Mark Buckingham is drawing Tyranny in a habit, because he can sell me on shit like a bunch of anatomically alien nuns in customized habits, all on stilts, walking in formation and firing ray guns. I am IN, for that. But that's not Paul Marshall, no matter how many art assistants get tacked on to finish this endless thing. And like I said, there's the brainjacking.
The nuns all turn on Tyranny and rewrite her and send her off on a nonsense sidequest that takes years in print time, and for what? So Tyranny can be decapitated but live on... in the internet? What the actual christ, Smith. This is so hack it's painful. It's all super tryhard. It's a thing that's a non-starter.
Like even the thing with the scales. Like a scaled humanoid, that's a choice. But it's never played well in the art, most artists either don't know how to draw scales or can't be bothered, because everyone just wants to draw a green titty monster, and I blame Steve Dillon as much as anybody. Whose choice was that god-damned two-tone mullet, anyfuckingway? What was THAT trash?
Gawd. Not a character. Not a woman. Not an alien. Not funny. Argh. Total misfire, man.
Educational. Mainly as a case study in what not to do.
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