PrettyFakes

Teen Titans #37. I thought some of you might enjoy an update on the Monsieur Mallah/Brain romance first discussed on this site a few weeks ago. In this issue, the final chapter of the first One Year Later arc, Mallah and the rest of the Brotherhood of Evil have succeeded in cloning a body for The Brain—or so they believe until the temple of this particularly unholy ghost begins to collapse while in battle with the Titans and the Doom Patrol. I have to confess that, though I’m still bothered by the implications of DC’s only out gay male couple being a disembodied brain and a gorilla, writer Geoff Johns brings an odd, twisted sweetness to his depiction of their romance. I admired in particular a King Kong riff that manages to be both tender and funny, as Mallah climbs up the side of the Eiffel Tower clutching The Brain’s dying body. And hey, you know, even if the Brain doesn’t have a body anymore, at least their love is based on common interests:

 

    This issue also wraps up the introduction of the post-Infinite Crisis incarnation of the Doom Patrol, and ends with a surprising—but quite logical—shake-up in that team’s leadership. I don’t know if there’s a Doom Patrol ongoing in the works or if they’ll become permanent supporting players in Titans or what, but I like the screwed-up family vibe that Johns has established, as well as the contrast between the DP and the Brotherhood of Evil, who are also a family in their own way, after all, and one that is often more loving and functional than the DP, who are divided by The Chief’s intrigues and manipulations.One of my favorite scene in this storyline was from issue #36, when the Titans wander through a particularly Escher-esque segment of the DP’s mansion headquarters, a wing filled with trophies and portals and highly localized indoor precipitation. I recognized some of the adventures commemorated by these mementos—look, it’s a statue of The Quiz, the member of the Brotherhood of Dada who has every super-power you haven’t thought of!—and others I didn’t because I haven’t read those stories yet. I’ve written before a few times of my love for the persistently ramifying nature of comic book universes, the dense weave of history that animates and charges every story, that gives each panel a depth belied by the thinness of the paper it’s printed on. I’ve never given much thought to the origins of that affection, but something about the combination of the DP’s strange history (histories, more like it) and its weirdo family dynamic led be to consider that my love—heck, my hunger—for knowing everything about the history of a character, a team, their villains, their motivations and alter egos and alternate incarnations—has roots in my own biography.

Warning: self-indulgent navel-gazing begins here.   

As regular readers of this site know, I have a tendency to over-disclose. Most people who know me find out pretty quickly about my brother’s drug habit, my secret sister, and so on. I think I’ve developed this mechanism as a way of compensating for growing up in a home where, in the best southern gothic manner, no one really talked about the family’s history—or at least, not certain aspects of it. I don’t think my folks were conscious of trying to protect the family name or anything like that; it’s not as though we’re Lost-Cause-haunted plantation aristocrats with a secret shadow family. That I know of. Our house looked nothing like the ones routinely featured on the cover of House of Secrets, unless the proprietor of the HoS had taken up cross-stitching and decoupage to pass the time between child murders. It was probably a mix of much more mundane personality quirks and neuroses—my mom’s embarassment over giving up her daughter, my dad’s manic optimism.

But even as a young lad, I sensed that there were things that no one was telling me; there was always a kind of mystery about my parents’ nook-and-cranny-crammed house. I suppose we can get into a chicken-and-egg argument here: did my love of Secret Origins lead me to assume that there were secrets to be uncovered in my parents lives, or did that sense of secrecy lead me to love Secret Origins for its reliable monthy revelations? One of my favorite activities as a youngster was to snoop through the overstuffed drawers and cabinets of our house. It was like going on an archaeological dig to discover shards of pottery ambiguously illustrated with scenes from my family’s life, shards that I could never quite piece together into a coherent whole. There were photo albums full of people who looked familiar but who I couldn’t quite place, pictures of my much older sisters in unfamiliar houses or with strange men or seated on furniture I’d seen gathering dust and moth-holes in our barn or thrown down a sinkhole to keep it from washing out any worse. This was, in fact, how I found out that my mom had been married before: her first marriage license was buried under a pile of ribbon and buttons in a drawer in my parents’ bedroom.

In my town, I moved among the ghosts of my parents’ previous lives without ever seeing them. One of my high school friends and his family lived in the house that my father built for his first wife; I traced their footsteps a thousand times before I knew. I begged to look for toys in the five-and-dime that occupied the storefront where my dad had once owned the dress shop where my mother was a clerk. I remember seeing my oldest sister’s first husband’s picture in a newspaper article implicating him in a decades old murder. I still cringe when I think how my friends and I begged my dad for two or three years to let us hold a Haunted House in a tumbledown old home on the edge of our cattle-land—only to find out much, much later that it was in that house that his first wife took her own life. I found out a lot of things about my folks from the grocer who ran the video store where I worked, who could come over to watch baseball on the store television and would occasionally let drop something about dad’s first wife or mom’s first husband as though I knew their stories already.

I guess, then, to bring us back somewhere in the vicinity of where we started, that comic books gave me a weird kind of hope: the hope that if you read enough books and the right ones, that if you spent enough time rooting around in back issue bins and quarter boxes—or your dad’s sock drawer—that the answer will be there, in fact that there are answers, if not an answer, and that they are straightforward and legible once uncovered.

Maybe that was a good and helpful thing to believe, or maybe it was too simple. Maybe I spent too much time looking for documents and too little time asking people questions. But how would I have even known what questions to ask without those shreds and patches of story?

In conclusion, please consider this image of the classic Doom Patrol as rendered by the late, lamented Seth Fisher: 

 

 

That is one serious frog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Comixx, In Mississippi, In the South, Professor Fury. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.