Webcomic Review
Mere Mortal
"Stone Cold To The Soul"

One thing about it- this comic is nothing if not cool.

It's a sort of role-reversal thing- read this in a Don LaFontaine movie trailer voice- in a world where everyone's a superhero, a kid with no powers is the only real badass. Watch as he kicks numerous ass, refuses police protection because he's so hard, and plays out his terrible, merciless vengeance on a team of superpowered criminals who... well, they're basically playing out their terrible, merciless vengeance on him. Really large amounts of ass-kicking ensue. Like, the entire wall of his apartment is blown off levels of ass-kicking.

Now, let's talk about your feelings.

Done laughing? Good. Because what interests me about this comic today is just how well it resonates with a certain type of entertainment, a certain mindset. It's really a type of porn all to itself, as many things are, and there are certain things that will place any work of art firmly in a particular context. On TV, you get the 'male gaze', where you know it's a TV show because the camera is checking out women's bodies to pander to male viewers. I've seen a 'furry gaze' described, where you're compelled to view cartoon animals or anthros in a sexualized context. In this case, it's like 'stone cold gaze'.

What's that? It's like a thousand-yard stare, by choice. It's like a gangster street-level gaze and actually owes a lot to the attitudes of early rap music- earlier gangster or criminal behavior didn't fetishize 'cold as ice' behavior to this extent. Italian gangsters were capable of it but had no special inclination to make up a big persona of stone cold detachment- they'd just shoot you if they didn't like you. But in black street culture, threat had special importance- there were rituals like the dozens where you'd fight with insult and verbal assault, the goal being to get through to the other party and get a reaction out of them. Part of it was how wickedly you could sling words, but the other part was to be immune- ice cold- untouchable.

And in a world that was said to be doing great, but which was actually tending to spin out of control and end up in the hands of those with the power- it became irresistible, intoxicating, box office Viagra to put out this attitude. People desperately wanted to vicariously identify with somebody who was so cool, air froze and fell off them- so tough, that nothing in the world could possibly sway them, not the most obvious dose of reality or the faintest hint of self-preservation.

Our hero would be full of quips to show how little of a shit he gave, and he would have a goal, something he wanted, and he would blindly accomplish this against all odds and with no concern at all for his own safety, for anyone else's opinion- nothing. He would be the hero because of all the characters in the story, he alone would get his way in the end, without compromise.

The brilliant thing about Mere Mortal's take on this is the way it's amplified. It's actually a step purer than action movies and such things. Normally, your hero is the one with super powers, or exceptional ability. But here, Joe hasn't got any powers. Sure, he's physically built and tough and has a neat hairdo and a facial scar, there's no question he's a badass by normal standards- as another character puts it, "Damn, you the man, Joe!"

But everyone else has psi powers, psychic talents. Joe hasn't got a one. He has absolutely nothing, except (cue LaFontaine voice) he's a MAN.

This one doesn't spend any time complaining. He talks in action movie quips. A girl psychic steals imagery of years of psychic torture he's undergone at the hands of his six archcriminal enemies when all of them were younger, and is stunned and tearful at the horror of it, and he shrugs it off and proceeds to take care of HER and her friend. After all, the reason those guys were in jail was because he apparently put them there- after going vigilante, and beating, mugging and electrocuting the lot of them, plus he stabs one of them in the eye. Now he's learning to be a chef, not the slightest bit troubled by the fact that rival chefs trying to get into the same cooking school have psychic flavoring abilities...

...I suppose he could ask all the rival chefs if they need both their eyes that much...

And when the bad guys come at him and blow the entire side off his apartment, he and his friends fight back and fight them off. In the aftermath, they take care of one of the super-powered buddies, wounded in the course of his badassery, and our hero Joe is asked again if he wants police protection. This does not please him- he has some pithy remarks about what this is about, which boil down to he's going to do it all his way without any sort of help or protection, as everyone who knew him could have predicted. But a friend of his is able to speak his language, saying basically "our guys got hurt in this attack so this is our fight too. We're going to fight, and you have to take your cooking test as if nothing had happened, never mind half your apartment is gone."

Badassery factor, ENGAGE: target, cooking test. "Game face back on?" "Hell yes."

This guy doesn't HAVE a not-game-face. He's nerveless, a robot- a fountain of ceaseless badassery and the main thing is pointing him in a useful direction, otherwise he'd walk through brick walls because he isn't going to let their existence tell him where he's gonna walk. He won't listen. It's about the willpower. Nothing has ever changed him and it's not gonna start now.

Here's why this is a type of porn.

Porn is any sort of pandering that goes beyond what you're expecting out of the context. It's a comic with human beings in it? We expect them to act in certain ways. They're superheroes? That changes things. There are police? We expect those to act in certain ways as well- but if we're pandering to try and establish a sense of ultimate badassery and unquestionable heroism, it leads us in funny directions.

In this comic, if one of the villains beat up people with a lead pipe, then electrocuted them, then stabbed their fucking eye out permanently, they would be considered villains! But when the hero does it as vengeance for years of torturing (or 'bullying' if you like), THE POLICE go 'wow, he da man'.

And that's the bottom line with Mere Mortal: it's a great distilled essence of a certain kind of storytelling. To anyone who really needs to identify with a hero who doesn't ever compromise, who doesn't fear or give up or bend, who doesn't have feelings, who beats his tormentors up with savagery (usually, stabbing people in the eye is seen as a villainous thing to do) and does not question his rightness for a moment- to such a reader, this is a terrific comic.

The great thing about it is the way it's boiled down to its most concentrated form. The guy is the one non-psychic in a world of outrageous, teleporting, energy-bolt-zapping superheroes who depend so greatly on their powers for self-esteem that they're unmanned just thinking about not having any powers. But our Joe doesn't even bat an eyelash, he goes out there and kicks ass in spite of what in this world is an unthinkable handicap. And nobody refers to his handicap or scorns him but villains- everybody else is completely besotted with what a badass Joe is, in particular his courage and determination.

That boxes this comic in, and limits it to an audience that really wants their heroes to be Stone Cold Badass. There are other sorts of stories, and other sorts of heroes- for instance, the homosexual bank robbers in "Dog Day Afternoon" who have lots of vulnerabilities and in fact lose in the end, or Dustin Hoffman in "Straw Dogs" who starts out as a wuss and grows to become a savage Badass. The thing about Joe is that he doesn't change. All that can ever happen is that villains try to hurt him, and he fights them off and wins. Even if he loses, we know he's not going to give up. He's incredibly well defined but nothing happens other than he's a badass, from A to Z, from beginning to end.

The audience for this is huge.

Why? Because there are a lot of people who want to be cool. You have to keep your game face on if you're cool. You're gaining ground or losing it- anything that happens might cause you not to be cool, and you can never really relax, for fear you'll screw up or someone will take advantage of you. So you stay cool, you detach, no feelings, and the only art you like is stuff that's either as cool as you, or stuff that sucks so much that it's obvious the creator is so cool he doesn't care what you think, or stuff that is brilliant but so detached from what you might consider an agenda of the creator that it's like it just exists in its own right- it's so original that it's as if the creator is just allowing it to come out, without trying to make it be anything other than what it obviously is.

How cool is that?

By contrast, anything that you can tie to the creator's desires can be attacked by rejecting those desires. If you care about something, you can be reduced by having that thing be rejected, and your feelings can be hurt, proving you have them.

But if you won't admit you have feelings, or desires, you can turn to ice and be invincible. Your game face is on. You need never take it off- and you can read Mere Mortal, and you'll talk about how badass the fights are (or one-up by pointing out that the staging of the fight scenes can still be improved) but you won't talk about how Joe is everything you want, how he has no feelings and will never cry or care about anything except as a joke way of one-upping girls.

Fish are not aware of water.

And there are many reasons to believe that people need to learn to get used to their feelings and desires, work to make those desires mesh smoothly with the desires of others- in the real world, you really can't be Joe. He's a crap role model and requires a lot of effort on the part of a benevolent writer to keep him alive, out of jail, and to keep people reacting positively to him. Joe doesn't translate to a world where a smiling girl reacting to his quip with 'you asshole!' doesn't secretly love and want him totally. Real world Joe's too mortal to taunt six real-live enemies fresh out of the joint.

But that's a lousy way to criticise a superhero comic. It's tantamount to demanding, "Hey, stop being a superhero comic. You're appealing to people who are turning themselves into emotionless jerks." It's like saying, "I knew about 'with great power comes great responsibility' but I didn't get the memo on 'with great badassery comes stabbing a guy's eye out with a fucking spork'".

And, not being Joe, I have no spork, no lead pipe, and no claim to being the final arbiter of what's right and wrong- so who knows, maybe it's just me being frail and easily offended by that strangely fine line between vigilante hero and stubborn criminal.

In the end, you, the reader of Mere Mortal will decide- and you'll be deciding on a level almost below thought, where you wear Joe like a coat to see how well he fits who you secretly want to be. And if he fits you just right- in a small way you will be like him.

If not- you've got to at least admire the purity and intensity of the exercise.