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Friday, July 29, 2005
Super F*ckers #1
There’s a character in James Kochalka new superhero book Super F*ckers that owns a glass case, inside of which is a time pocket that perfectly preserves a moment in time of that character’s younger days. When there’s a danger of the glass shell protecting that moment in time breaking the character, a lad by the name of Vortex, warns that “the past will collide with the present and we’ll all be destroyed!” The past colliding with the present, and perhaps the following destruction of such a collision, seems to be what Super F*ckers is all about. Kochalka has sculpted a team of super powered teenagers that is a rude and hilarious parody of superhero comics as well as a love letter to the superhero comics that inspired it.
Super F*ckers features the wonderfully simple and deceptively juvenile artwork of James Kochalka in full color this time around. This is a superhero book, albeit one that doesn’t look like any superhero book of today or yesterday, so you’ve got to have bright colors for all the kids flying around in their spiffy costumes and shooting lightning bolts at each other. Except the Super Fuckers (the team themselves doesn’t censor their own name) don’t really get to fighting as many intergalactic space battles as the super teams before them did. Instead, the teens live in their own little headquarters where they proceed to annoy the shit out of each other. Excuse my language but upon reading Super F*ckers you’d understand my choice of words. As you’ve probably judged by the title, this is a comic book that takes a distinct delight in the poetry of profanity. The X-Men might have Wolverine with his claws but the Super Fuckers have Jack Krak and his never ending potty mouth. Phrases, spoken by Krak and others, like “son of a cunt,” “that reeks like rotten pussy” and the ever-lovely “get ready for a cum explosion of hate and pain” give the dialogue of this comic dynamism all its own. There’s a confident glee taken in the immaturity of these teenagers, spoiled by their powers and status of celebrities, that nevertheless still paints them as the dysfunctional group they are. All this behavior combined with the clear and uncomplicated artwork makes this book feel like an adult went back to the comics he or she drew as a child, perhaps the most honest comics done in the genre of fantastic fiction, and recreated them with the cynical outlook of a grown-up. I can’t think of any other comic that gives this impression but it’s a welcome one.
Lest this book becomes another superhero comic of many that takes that position that “superheroes in the real world would be horrible people,” Kochalka does hit all the right beats in making this story a fun and entertaining read. There are creators like Chris Claremont or Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen that crafted tales of teenage superheroes that were long-running soap operas and amassed cult followings for being so. Kochalka celebrates this style of telling ensemble tales with Super F*ckers. With the teenage years every event is heightened to full-on drama and this team is filled with enough characters, especially the kids outside the headquarters trying to join the team a la Legion of Super-Heroes, with their individual peculiarities that the book becomes an absorbing and comfortable superhero story all on its own. In fact, the poisonous dysfunction that the team has to deal with is the logical extrapolation of what Claremont started with Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants. While the superhero comics of today seem like they are in perpetuate reruns by recycling the feel of those books in the ’80s, Super F*ckers take that traditional and processes it through one artist’s singular style. Super F*ckers is a book I hope that lasts for a very long time.
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