Age & Sex In Unknown Soldier #5 & Black Hole

In the last issue of Dysart and Ponticello's Unknown Soldier (issue 6 comes out next week), Moses reunites with his wife Sera. It's one of those inevitables that a lot of other comics would hold-off as long as possible. Dysart's confidence in characterization and interest human drama though, trumps forever-teasing comic narrative and we're treated to an incredibly moving scene of husband and wife back together. Of course, it's under strained and rather ugly circumstances.

We've been right there with Moses since he damaged his face and went stalking the LRA, so we've grown used to his hastily bandaged face, but it's entirely new to Sera. Employing the kind of emotional realism and wise shifting of feelings within a few pages--and often on the same page--Dysart has Sera scared, horrified, and then moved by Moses. They embrace and then she removes the bandages out of medical concern ("These desperately need to be changed") and a loving wife's need to see her husband. Their interaction bounces between the pragmatic ("We're going to have to shoot you up with penicillin...") and the romantic ("My love"), followed by a lustful kiss; Sera and Moses both forgetting his wrecked face.



After their kiss, the narrative quickly shifts to a few years ago, when in the jungle, Moses proposes to Sera ("Will you grow old with me?") and then back to the present, where I could be wrong but they might be having sex, and then, the couple on a bed, Sera nursing his wound-of-a-face. As usual, Dysart's daring narrative choices and well-wrought realism magnify the feelings, and Ponticelli's art, a mix of precise line scratched-about ugly detail, makes the whole thing oddly cinematic in the flashy, over-the-top sense, and documentary-like real too (you can get lost staring into Moses' wounds).

And at the risk of drawing more ire from the #1 comics creep, who doesn't really want to accept that weird pulpy, eroticism's one of of comics' selling points, this scene's both oddly romantic and realistically lust-filled. This mix is one that comics do well and in a way it seems, only comics can do because literature does not have the visual element and films are rooted in real-life human beings and so, there's an odd distancing effect.

Maybe someone like Bertolucci's gotten there a few times, but that's about it. I'm struggling with something as I write it here on purpose, as sex and sexuality's got this weird, indescribable balance of idealized in-your-head-ness to it and very real, messy, fumbling-ness too. This is something I've struggled with before, when I talked about Pirates of Coney Island and a Paul Pope illustration and I think Dysart and Ponticelli's scene adds a deeper, more mature context to this. Less a scene of adolescent lust that can't be contained, this is two people, still in-love, still in-lust, after years of marriage and they cannot resist one another despite the context--be it Moses' meat-grinder face or the LRA's pervasive threat.


The scene above from Charles Burns' Black Hole immediately came to mind as a kind of partner sequence to Unknown. Partner in that both are about a kind of overwhelming sexuality, but in another way, Rob and Chris of Black Hole representing the same kind of lust but from a younger, less mature point of view. This scene's the highlight of Black Hole and encompasses Burns' themes and ideas brilliantly. It's comic books doing what comic books do best, taking something very real and relate-able and blowing-it-up into some oddball, sci-fi, horror, out-there conceit that actually makes the scene feel even more real and relate-able.

In just this one page, there's so many of the concerns, fears, joys, and dangers of adolescent sex. The infected functioning as so many things, from H.I.V and less STDS, to the simple change that happens when you're no longer a virgin, to a kind of weird fear/obsession one has with the opposite sex that's inconceivable until you're you know, doing it. Dicks and vaginas are weird and bizarre and like, not beautiful or anything, but there's this odd animal-brain reaction we have to them, that's certainly enhanced as a hormones-rushing adolescent. The fact that Rob has the mouth on his neck and in effect, has a kind of vagina which Chris kisses, also hints towards a very-real, sexual ambiguity, flexibility, and confusion that teens, "straight" or "gay" wrestle around with. Like that one Replacements joint "Sixteen Blue" goes: "...everything is sexually vague/Now you're wondering to yourself, if you might be gay...".

And so, Black Hole's scene is about the kind of youthful awkwardness and self-consciousness of sex, when you're like "Okay, this is weird, there's this weird sex organ in front of me" and Unknown's scene is about later in life, when you've grown at least kinda comfortable with this whole sex thing. What I love about the scene is that it addresses age and maturity indirectly, you're mainly viewing the characters as two lovers reunited, but behind it, is a kind of healthy desperation, a wise disinterest in what's "weird" that's trumped by the same lust Rob and Chris feel, but directed towards true, lasting, love and romance.

Powerful Panels: Pirates of Coney Island #1 by Vasilis Lolos

Pirates of Coney Island is a still-to-be-completed eight-issue series drawn by Vasilis Lolos and written by Rick Spears. Currently, it's stuck at issue six, although Mr. Spears assured myself and Karen (in separate conversations at SPX) that the final issues are indeed written and just need to be drawn and then you know, published.

The series is in part, an obvious homage to Walter Hill's The Warriors as it's about theme-based gangs in Coney Island, namely the uh, "Pirates" (dudes) and "The Cherries" (chicks), who like most gangs, are rivals and stuff. And like The Warriors, it's all happening in some strange, non-our world setting where everything's fun and unreal but not meaningless or disconnected from real-world emotions, even as it enthusiastically exists in a world where all of the Pirates sleep in hammocks right next to one another and the villain's a bad-ass caddy called "Cadillaculla".

One of the best aspects is the tension between Spears' fantasy Coney Island world and Lolos' angular, uglified art work. Everyone in Lolos' world is squat and wrinkled, with their eyes too far apart. Because the work's consistently "ugly", you forget about that aspect and get used to how strange everyone looks. It's hard to describe, but Lolos' work shares the weird but makes sense, iconic feeling of stuff like The Simpsons or something. You know, where you're like, "Okay, everyone's yellow and their eyes are stuck together, got it." This sends you further into the story and the just-outside-of-this-world feeling that Pirates has and maintains as the story gets more serious.

At the center of Pirates is the budding love affair between Pirate "Patch" and Cherry, "Trish". Again, playing with well-worn but effective sub-genre rules, their romance has to be kept secret, is sort of denied by Patch and Trish themselves, and could cause the dissolution of the rival gangs or at least, some serious shit's gonna go down. The romance is especially a surprise because in the first issue--which brilliantly, focus only on the Cherries, we never even see the Pirates--it's Trish and her fellow Cherries that find Patch wandering the beach and it's Trish that slices his eye out.


In the panels leading up to the removal of his eye, Trish and (soon-to-be) Patch talk shit to one another and are kind of doubled, with Patch putting up his fists ready to fight. The next panel is a close-up of Trish's stomach and crotch, and the panel after that, her flicking out her switchblade. In the stomach/crotch panel, Lolos makes the weird choice of sketching out some light pubic hair sticking out of the top of Trish's low shorts. It's just ten or so thin dashes of ink, but it's jarring because we don't expect it (and it's not necessary) and because in some ways, it's a funny way of it seems, showing Trish's bad-assness. Dunno if there's some actual precedent, but it just makes sense that in this 80s cult movie homage comic, the bad-ass chick would have her pubes sticking out, no?


There's also something just sort of voyeuristic and like, viscerally exciting about the image. At the risk of reading like some comics pervo, it's inexplicably erotic precisely because it's sort of fucked-up and realistic and not supposed to be attractive. Because it's drawn with the same uglification as the rest of the comic and Lolos' art has sort of lulled you into Spears' comic world, it has the same sort of exciting effect that seeing this in real-life might have. Unlike most comic books, especially Marvel/DC books, the vague sexuality of it isn't made a big deal or anything and that's exactly what makes it sort of is a big deal here. It's ugly and real and is more appealing because of it.

In Issue #4, there's a big fight scene between the Pirates and the Cherries and in the struggle, one of the Cherries' breasts falls out of her shirt. This is the Roger Corman 70s-era exploitation trick of sticking in some gratuitious nudity--fight scene=titties popping out--that's also made it's way into a lot of comics in less overtly sexual ways. So many of those X-books I read as a kid were full of fight scenes between busty girls or even a guy and girl fighting and rolling around, which was a corny and (I now see) obvious way to make the comics appeal to my third-grade, almost new-to-boners brain. Here again though, it's not made overtly sexual or idealized, it looks pretty much what a boob looks like when it's half-way out of a shirt.

Once again, that's actually what makes the image appealing. It looks and is rendered in a realistic way and in effect, bypasses the idealized part of our brains and connects to real sexual memories we have. It's all real obvious, but in an air-brushed, photo-shopped, plasticine culture and blah blah blah, these little glimpses that resemble the reality we live become extra appealing. This is presumably, the reason for the increased popularity of "amateur" or faked to look amateur pornography and all that...


Lolos' casual use of sexuality reminded me of this rather overt image by Paul Pope from his book PulpHope. When pretty much everyone I know opens this book, they quickly end up on this image and it's often commented upon and discussed. Sure, there's the whole thing of it being a pretty explicit drawing of a vagina that moves eyes toward it, but I think it's the blase' way that Pope illustrates it--hyper realistic within the confines of his style--that grabs people too. What makes anything interesting, be it intellectually, emotionally, or sexually, is the details and well...Pope doesn't spare the details in this image.


The focus on these vague bits of "real" sexuality in Pirates is not to simply be kind of creepy, but to highlight the way these comic book-y images foreshadow and build-up to something meaningful in the comic. That too, makes them more appealing than another Marc Silvestri "Witchblade" pin-up. That first scene, where Trish cuts-out Patch's eye really is about sex, not only because you can see her pubes but because Patch sees it too. In Issue #5, Patch finds Trish in order to enact revenge and they essentially have an all-out knife-fight that ends with the two making out in a pool of blood! It's not some weird S & M thing or anything--it's supposed to be weirder and funnier than that--and it goes more along with Lolos' dirty but attractive aesthetic. Their fight-scene turned make-out has the same messiness and weird, inexplicable, un-idealized excitement as Trish's pubes sticking out.

This panel, from Issue #6, is Trish in the hospital, concerned about Patch and in her own, half-joking way, admitting she really fucking likes, maybe loves, the dude. This adds one more dimension to their relationship and makes all of the sort of vague sexuality and tension of the Trish/Patch sub-plot (turned main plot) mean something: they just might love each other! It's beyond glimpses of naked bodies and sexuality, but that's where it started (just like all relationships).

The point of these panels posts is generally to focus on the way the artists conveys something in a single panels or group of panels, but in this case, Rick Spears' name should be in the title of this entry because Spears and Lolos perfectly complement one another here. Spears crafts a typically outsider, "forbidden" love plot with just the right degree of fun and idiosyncrasy to make it feel new and Lolos illustrates it with the same degree of raw energy and familiarity. What begins as a kind of loosely "dirty" voyeuristic image of pubes is really the first hint of the weird, scrappy love affair that one Pirate and one Cherry experience.