While obviously a market-driven thing-- like, Image owned those properties because Liefeld didn't, any longer, and what good's an I.P. when it's left in the bottom of the toychest? --it made me super nostalgic for all the other shit Image used to have and didn't do all that much with. Like, Prophet, Glory & Supreme were all capeshit. Then there's a whole other tier, purely military-adjacent; all those Jim Lee / Brandon Choi / Whilce Portacio / Chuck Dixon riffs: Deathblow! Wetworks! Team 07!
I am not saying my favourite decade for trash entertainment was the 90s. But when it comes to quality, smoothbrained idiocy, you could do worse than Wetworks. It's a Delta Force level military unit that gets dipped in T-1000 sauce and recruited into a blood feud between vampires & werewolves. Sometimes you don't need smart comix: you only need visually exciting stuff. Which is why I read them. Deathblow, at the outset, was Jim Lee flexing his skills & amusing himself. Nothing more, nothing less. It's a project he abandoned because Frank Miller threatened to sue, for biting Sin City's style. And Team 07-- that book introduced me to Aaron Wiesenfeld, a strange & exciting talent for excess. God bless excess.
Of course none of it's aged well. DC apparently owns it all, now, because Jim Lee gave it to 'em as a kind of wedding dowry. The company hasn't figured out what to do with any of it, effectively. DC doesn't need any of it, so it's all just kind of packed into the hinges of the casement, where Black Label World is ported onto earth-52 or what the hell ever. It's accessible whenever Kwyzz bounces off the orbit of Wonderworld and caroms against earth-34 and the bumper lights spell out TILT.
Highly technical trick, doesn't happen all that often, but ever since I was a young kid I've played the silver ball. Anyhow:
The Xtinction Agenda had a contest, two-and-a-half years ago, and somehow I entered it. Also somehow, I won. Probably had to do with the paucity of contestants. But the prize: the prize was 'The Wild Storm', a big dumb comic that doesn't need much explaining. It was I.P. maintenance, farmed out to Warren Ellis, meant to re-engineer all those leftovers & re-invigorate them. Then Warren Ellis was exposed for having his dick out online and the whole thing got shelved.
What that meant, what that SIGNIFIED, was that people who loved 90s excess were still craving it. The project wouldn't have gotten greenlit any other way. Everybody in comix knows that American Audiences are Trash Humpers and always will be.
So I went on a quest, and started re-reading. Now, let's be clear: Team 07 is as dumb as any offbrand rip-off of any movie you like. Nothing is as good as the original Predator. But there's some interesting stuff, deep in the mix, and it takes a brain less brutalized by physics than mine to point out the useful conceits. Doc James over at the X-A did some heavy (unpaid!) lifting on Deathblow, and what scuttled from underneath those corpses were some weird-ass phages, fer shure. Like, Chuck Dixon & Brandon Choi & Jim Lee & Warren Ellis all together were grafting Ancient Aliens, Genetics & Spiritual Warfare onto Toxic Masculinity, and the results did not rock any stadiums or collect any stage panties.
But they COULD have. They could have. So that's where I'm at, today. Figuring out how to arrange all these leftovers into something cogent & compelling without losing the weird inchoate broken-ness which continues to charm my ass. Because I do not want an internally consistent, logical comic book about alien angels using Delta Force rejects to save makind. That shit is why I remember these comix: these comix were never planned to be consistent, these stories were never built to be Whole. It's all vapour.
I've been very fixated on the concept of Vaporwave, because as a critique [of capitalist detritus], vaporwave makes aesthetic concerns the organizing principle behind the re-configuration of found materials. I'm a huuuuuge fan of found materials. All my favourite art-- art I've made --has emerged out of found materials. Please, let's put this business of Originality to bed. All I want is to make lines on paper. It's the pleasing arrangement of things that charms me. I build little sculptures & scenes out of scrap, all the time. It's what my mind does, generating & configuring component parts into patterns. I'm good at pattern recognition; I'm good at sorting & filing. Everything is Systems, I like to tell myself. It makes living with OCD bearable. In fact it puts my OCD to work, making art.
And the conclusion I've come to is, Deathblow should have been gay. Or at least queer for Jackson Dane. Because Delta Force is packed with toxic males, some of whom find it funny to perform night raids in drag. All that Seal Team 6 worship that came out of Jim Lee & Brandon Choi, all those Special Operations military-industrial handjobs Chuck Dixon loved to script, that stuff would have hit different if Michael Cray were knocking boots with Jackson Dane.
Further down that road-to-nowhere-good: if Team o7's goodoleboys were woke enough to recognize that they just wanted to fuck each other, why, they might decide fragging the chain of command would be a laugh. And, well, there's no way that story ends anywhere satisfying anybody. How can it?
It's all vapour. It's ALL vapour.
So that's what THE KILL HOUSE is. Me, playing with toys that aren't mine to play with, putting Barbie dresses on my GI Joes and generally Making Shit Up, with no intent to tie it off or put a fancy Alan Moore-style, purple, flowery bow on it. It's that scene where Dutch's Green Berets are all emptying their mags at absolutely nothing, chopping green hell into bagged salad, and at the end all you can hear is the high plaintive whine of Blain's overheated m134 minigun, spinning down. That's what the whole of THE KILL HOUSE is: confusion, heartbreak, and doom, peppered with Shane Black style quippery. That's the intent.
I'm finishing off the last of my Research, ironing out a final chapter, now, and will start drawing it sometime. There's more pressing material on deck right now. But the fun thing is, this book IS vapour.
Because I haven't mentioned maybe the best bit:
I literally do not remember writing 9/10s of it. I found almost an entire script for this thing, filed away, that must have happened sometime in the last year. I must have begun writing it before moving to Chicago! But when...?
Not remembering things, as any reader of this blog will know, worries me. But in this case it's perfectly suited to the project. Where did it come from? Out of my brain fog. Where is it going? nowhere, fast! If THE KILL HOUSE ain't Vapour Comix, then I dunno what could be.
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