Webcomic Review
Hitmen For Destiny
"Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothin' Left To Lose"

Sometimes there aren't redeeming features. What then?

Perhaps, then, one looks at the context, to try to find something worth knowing when the comic itself isn't giving you anything but determination and refusal to go away.

Thus, we come to Hitmen For Destiny, which has celebrated not one but two milestones: it has run for 200 strips. These are vertical strips, and they are not one-panel gags- they go on and on and on. It's 200 very very long strips with lots of monsters. As the protagonist says-

"Normal, schmormal. Let's go kill ourselves a monster!"

She's 'bound to a sword' which can find lost objects and kill monsters, but damn if I know what it means. You learn useful details like "often whole worlds gets filled with belly monsters", but there isn't really a lot of coherency.

The comic is very much like a serious, deadpan version of 'The Far Side' but too incoherent to be really funny- when some really random thing, like the throat inflation fetishist fanservice strip, turns up, it's played straight, in the curious, childish style of the comic.

If you're into deadpan unfunniness to rival Andy Kaufman, you could find lots of things in this comic that are exactly that style of funny, but with the same disturbing ambiguity about whether the creator is joking or serious. There's a lot of inventiveness but it's incredibly shallow- nobody here is anything like real, they're a dazzling array of horribly-drawn puppets spouting unpredictable lines.

If you think that's putting it a bit strong-

"As the stomachs get their prey off-world, they keep reproducing without running out of food, eventually covering the earth. As the layer of stomachs around the globe grows thicker, earth's gravity grows stronger. Eventually the gravity kills even the stomachs, but by then they have spread to many other earths."

Believe me, the context isn't much help either. (It's possible that for whatever reason you can't imagine anything as wonderful as an eye-searing epic MS Paint comic which makes this little sense- in which case you're welcome)

We're going to leave this comic, then, and talk about the point it makes- which is this- freedom.

People producing some sort of artwork start from a position of total freedom, and zero ability. We begin doing our thing, and try to find something to compare it to, find a reference outside ourselves, a critical eye, all to try and establish an objective value for our own work. Everyone does this. It's not a comfortable process but it's a largely social process in which you allow your audience (real or potential) to shape what you're trying to achieve. If you know you're doing a zombie comic, for instance, you'll know there are some expectations from zombie comics and movies you have liked in turn, and you steer your artwork in the direction of what you can identify as 'good'.

However, the interesting thing about the web is that this willingness to learn and adapt is superfluous. You can get by without it. You probably can't achieve 'success' in any normal sense by skipping it, but you may discover something else...

The thing is, a mass audience is a trap. The broader an audience you seek, the more restrictive their subjective desires become, because you lose all your common ground and are left with very limited options. Some people who successfully avoid this, like Scott Kurtz, do it by aiming for the broader audience but being eternally dragged in the direction of edgier, more dangerous stuff that can't possibly work with the broader audience. It's that tension that makes a strip like PVP work. Scott Kurtz killed a child in a joke. It was a hell-child that everyone wanted to see offed, but even so he only got away with it by depicting a tidy little coffin and on top of that throwing in a Calvin and Hobbes reference which he ruthlessly subverted- all because Scott desperately wants that broader audience but cannot resist torturing it.

Hitmen for Destiny is something very, very different, almost unrecognizably so. It's not just that it's awful, or not funny, or terribly drawn: it goes deeper than that. Hitmen for Destiny makes not the slightest effort to pander to normalcy or any other point of view but its own. It's as if it exists in a vacuum, with no new information ever coming in- just the endless burgeoning of peculiar ideas in the strange, childlike style the strip develops.

Freedom.

The thing is, as soon as you care, you've given up a certain amount of your freedom, in exchange for love or respect or whatever you're shooting for. The degree to which you care will dictate how much you'll give up for that respect. If you care nothing, you won't get any normal sort of love and respect but you may end up going places that you couldn't possibly have gone if you were busy caring what people thought.

In any mall or dentist's office you can hear examples of music that cares greatly about not being objectively horrible. In no mall or dentist's office I'm aware of do you find the music of Captain Beefheart. (unfortunately. I want to go to that dentist)

The video I've linked to is "Captain Beefheart - Bat Chain Puller" in case it goes wrong somehow. It's hard to imagine anything that cares less about appeasing the tastes of normal music listeners- but if you know Beefheart's work, you know things about this song- for instance, the bit in the middle where the guitar and bass go spastic and fall off the song in a heap is painstakingly rehearsed and must be performed that way every time. Why? Beefheart wrote it that way.

Hitmen For Destiny is like this. It's a level of creative freedom few people really want to achieve- because most people want to please somebody. If you want to annoy somebody, you're restricted by the mirror image of what you'd do to please them- you're still playing off the same thing, you're trapped in the context of your understanding of what people want.

Some people either are oblivious to this, or on such a different wavelength that they can't be bothered to expend a single thought in that direction. Either they want to please and are strangely incapable of understanding people, or they don't really give a rat's ass on such a deep level that they manage to avoid even acknowledging normalcy...

I really couldn't tell you which one describes Hitmen for Destiny. And I can't read all of it, unlike my usual custom- I've got about halfway through (about 100 comics) and my brain is trying to crawl out of my ears in self-defense. After all, this isn't a 'good' comic in any normal sense. It's eyestrain to look at, and it will make your brain cry and want to leave you.

But it still, for all that, exemplifies a sort of freedom that's worth noting. And, just like with Captain Beefheart, if you're prone to be won over by total madness, you might find this one strangely addictive. You'll hate yourself for it, maybe, but you'll still keep looking at one more comic.

Oh look, a Dharma paradox implosion.

Oh look, tattoos of a monster where the tentacles of the tattoo move about, but too slowly to see.

Yum, the tasty green powder that comes from drying the slime of the giant space trout that rules South America!

If it's all the same to you, I AM going to stop, and resist that urge to look at one more brain-rotting, eye-mangling comic. But. DAMN.