Posted in: Comics | Tagged: ales kot, Comics, entertainment, image, marvel, micael walsh, secret avengers, zero

Sex, Violence And Ales Kot – This Week's Zero And Secret Avengers

Published Fri, 30 Jan 2015 20:00:26 -0600

Ales Kot wrote a couple of books out this week. Both wonderfully special in their own way. Secret Avengers drawn by Michael Walsh and Zero, drawn by Marek Oleksicki.

And they are both song and dance numbers. With Jay Z…

…and The Smiths.

Is this the violence inherent in Morrissey?

No, no, that's just silly. But at the heart of each book is violence and reaction to that violence. We have a MODOK talking about his reasons for being an Avenger. It's all in the name…

Ales Kot told me that when he writes MODOK, he remembers the part of him that was bullied when younger and if he had never managed to get over it. And that is MODOK. And in a story where the Big Bad is more or a Small Nerd, himself dealing with the fear of bullies forever… whether that be MODOK, or Maria Hill.

… and Gordon Ramsay.

So we have the bullied becoming bullies and neither seeing it on the other's terms. It is both adolescent power fantasy, but also a deflation of that fantasy by showing how empty it is.

Zero gives you a song and dance number too. And gives us a fight scene that shows extreme violence committed reciprocally by one person against another, in repeated detail for pages and pages upon end. A real anatomy of a killing.

With Miracleman #15 being issued again next week, this couldn't be more timely. That comic from the eighties shocked and delighted many, showing what an actual superhero fight in a populated city might actually look like, in extreme detail.

Zero takes a similar approach to just one hand-to-hand fight. It screams "Is this what you want? Is this what you want? Well here it is, motherfudgers. Do you like it? Do you?" This is just one page. The care and attention on "how to take out a leg" is ridiculous. I hope no one sees this as a "How To" manual.

It is nasty, it is bloody, you can feel the pain off each panel. But amidst it all, it feels strangely, impossibly, like a dance, choreographed to its ultimate end, two bodies, drenched, in embrace, in orgasm even…