Trap: The Magazine About Drugs presents Frankie Teardrop

By Matt Seneca

Self-published 2016

Buy it here

Frankie Teardrop is a comic that asks a question of you as a reader, specifically what is it that draws you to superheroes: the sex or the violence? Posed in this way, allowing for no alternatives, the question forms the heart of the comic’s parodic intent by confronting the reader with the notion that, despite what they tell themselves, there may not in fact be a more complicated reason for their appreciation of the genre than these basic thrills. It’s not that superhero comics are concerned exclusively with these two broad themes but it’s certainly been the case, particularly since the darkening of the genre in the mid-80s, that this particular mode of comics has been guilty of devoting a considerable proportion of its page count to the glorification of violence and the over-sexualisation of the female form in the pursuit of a particular brand of male-fantasy wish-fulfilment. Seneca confronts this in Frankie Teardrop by appropriating the Marvel superhero characters of the Punisher and Dazzler and using them to tell a story replete with plenty of fucking and killing but depicted sans the celebratory verve these actions are usually presented with.

The broad premise of Frankie Teardrop can be summarised as an alternative take on the “vs” mode of superhero tale. It’s a Punisher vs Dazzler (and also the cocaine-powered DC super-villain Snowflame, although he’s more incidental) comic that doesn’t adhere to the superhero vernacular of “a misunderstanding leads to a physical confrontation and then an eventual team-up”; rather, the adversarial aspects of the comic are more thematic in nature: there’s Dazzler as the gregarious being made of prismatic light vs the Punisher as the estranged misanthrope draped in black and white; Dazzler’s casual life-affirming grace vs the Punisher’s nihilistic death-dealing, justified by his own twisted black-and-white morality; the fantasised hyper-violence of the comics vs the harsh reality of what this glorification represents; and female sexual agency vs the self-aggrandising, and arguably misogynistic, “I’m a nice guy, why won’t she love me?” attitude.

The plot is relatively straight-forward: the Punisher, in the course of trying to shut down a drug dealing operation run by Snowflame, finds himself following a lead to a nightclub where Dazzler happens to also be performing. Seneca poses Dazzler as a live performer whose comic-book powers of converting sound into bursts of light serve here the dual purposes of light-show and aphrodisiac, making the subtext of her character (and most female superhero characters from that era) explicit. Dazzler happens to hang out with Snowflame, sharing and dealing his blow, and is thus destined to face the Punisher’s brand of moralising violence.

Seneca is particularly critical of the Punisher’s behaviour, likening it to that of the selfish, emotionally unadjusted, teenage mass-shooter. This is achieved in the comic’s first violent sequence which borrows considerably from the lexicon of imagery associated with these types of killings. The Punisher’s entry into the nightclub is presented in one-point perspective as he marches to his perceived destiny, driven by his singular vision. In recounts of these shooting tragedies, survivors tend to isolate images in their memory that are subsequently taken to be representative of their moment fortune and, through repetition, become a vivid memory of the scenario. Seneca manages to create just such an image during this sequence in the form of a hauntingly composed panel where Dazzler leaves a room just as the Punisher enters; this being the precise moment of fortune where she avoids the ensuing massacre. In this panel the Punisher’s visage is half obscured by the glass door, his expression dead-ahead and vacant - the classic thousand-yard stare. It’s a moment frozen in time that has been carefully crafted to stick in the memory, serving as a marker for the time just prior to the massacre when the Punisher is yet to impose himself on Dazzler’s world.

Associating the Punisher’s actions with those of a mass-shooter deflates the violence that follows of its celebratory zeal. While choreographed in the ecstatic vain of an action comic, the violence doesn’t feel exciting - it feels nasty and unjustified. As a viewer you can revel in its performance aspects - the way that lighting strobes between panels to create a rhythm out of colour; the balletic leaps through the air; the puncturing of bodies by bullets - but this comes with a complicating feeling of guilt thanks to the obvious groundings of this violence in real world tragedies. This confrontation of the reader is part of the parodic aspect of the comic - by aligning the typical depiction of comic violence with the reality of a mass-shooting, a feeling of guilt and nihilism echoes back through the reader’s appreciation of similar scenes in the comics they’ve previously read, encouraging a more critical relationship with the material they’ve been consuming to this point.

Seneca achieves a further critique of the genre through the particular formal storytelling devices he uses to flesh out the internal realities of his borrowed characters. The Punisher receives characterisation through first-person narrative captions which read like clipped, staccato, noir-ish text a la the work of Frank Miller. This is interestingly contrasted with the way that Dazzler’s internal world is expressed: her thoughts are presented as excerpts from her social media channels - Twitter posts and Instagram images. So while Dazzler’s thoughts take the form of self-affirming projections that open herself up to the world around her, the Punisher remains hermetically sealed within his own consciousness, ensuring that his cultivated worldview remains unchallenged. The wilful disconnection from society, required by the Punisher to maintain the justification for his behaviour, is shown to be the obscene flip side of the typically lauded spirit of vigilante antinomianism that fuels violent superheroics. The assumption, when one of these heroes decides to take the law in their own hands, is that they are ethically and morally pure in some way, but under Seneca’s approach the Punisher comes off as resolutely ignorant of the social implications of his actions. The Punisher’s internal dialogue, while capturing the tone of stylised noir (“A phosphorescent being. Common in plankton, unheard of in girls”), is shown to be manifestly incapable of supporting a mature social consciousness. This forms yet another component of Seneca’s critique of the superhero genre: how stylised dialogue can disguise a lack of substance or consideration, and how it can glorify not only violence but also the toxic masculine ideal.

So far I’ve focussed mainly on the violence of the comic but, as I alluded to earlier, sex is also a big part of its satire. In fact, the most formally audacious sequence of the comic is a fuck scene between the Punisher and Dazzler where the eye is encouraged to follow the trail of limbs and other body parts through a series of panels which blend moments together and show a shifting of the sexual power dynamic from one character to the other. It’s a sad fact, but particularly since the 80s, superhero comics have maintained a strange fascination with the rape of its female characters as an expression of male dominance and female subservience. In this scene, despite initially being physically bound, Dazzler reclaims ownership of the sexual act, making it about the fulfilment of her personal desire (marked by a climaxing explosion of overwhelming light) rather than the satiation of a male fantasy.

Dazzler’s sexuality is presented by Seneca as liberated and entirely devoid of the moralising guilt that is so often applied within popular superhero comics. Promiscuity as a moral deficiency, the satiation of desire taken as a weakness of character, rape as an act of damage requiring male salvation - these notions all regularly feature in the superhero genre as a means of rejecting female sexual agency in favour of alleviating male anxieties stemming from the fear of ceding power to the Other. These anxieties are subtly exhibited by the Punisher post the sexual act. He resolves to kill Dazzler on the grounds of her drug dealings but it’s clear that this is really just an expression of his frustrations at the feeling of having been used for sex and summarily dumped. His stalkerish behaviour mimics that of the emotionally volatile teenager: unable to comprehend that a woman would spurn his sexual advances he becomes determined to lash out violently in response. This completes Seneca’s critique of the superhero genre by tying together the concepts of covertly misogynistic sexual frustration and irrational violence, forcing the reader to reflect on whether these are the true, unacknowledged motivators of their appreciation of the superhero genre.

Despite offering up a story revolving around two of the tenets of contemporary superheroics - sex and violence - Frankie Teardrop manages to make both of these elements feel strange. Violence is stripped of its appeal by representing it as the immature lashing out of a socially dislocated, angst-ridden individual and sex is returned to its primal roots as an expression, and fulfillment, of desire rather than a misogynistic weapon. Seneca has described his comic as something that “makes the medium feel dangerous again” and I would definitely agree. A lot of what gets labelled as parody and satire leans on the crutch of exaggeration for humorous effect but Seneca goes much further with his comic, highlighting the absurdity of genre conventions while simultaneously subverting them. Frankie Teardrop is a trenchant critique of the medium that wears its target’s clothes while committing transformative violence on the reader’s preconceptions.

