All Time Comics: Bullwhip #1

Written/co-plotted by Josh Bayer

Pencilled/co-plotted by Benjamin Marra

Inked by Al Milgrom

Lettered by Rick Parker

Coloured by Matt Rota

Bullwhip #1 follows Crime Destroyer #1 as the second in the line of comics that fall under the All Time Comics banner (ATC being the project label for the new universe of throwback, trashy superhero concepts being spearheaded by series editor/writer Josh Bayer and his brother, the project financier and film director Sam Bayer). These comics present themselves as a riff on certain beloved trashy genre tropes of superhero comics, taking inspiration from the obsessions at play in popular comics from the dawn of the superhero in the late 30s through to the decadent excess of the 90s speculation boom: we get the idea of the superhero as the rambunctious, two-fisted brawler - a hangover from when the superhero genre was first formulated as a mash up of the pulpy adventure serial with the idea of the costumed hero who operates outside the bounds of law for the common good (see the very first offerings of Superman and Batman, both of whom behaved, in the late 30s, more like violent thugs than their present representations as the light and dark side of a common struggle for justice); we get allusions to the the overwrought psychodramas of the 60s where the outsider character of the superhero was introduced, making them vessels for an exploration of the weird and the outlandish (see Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s genre-altering run on Fantastic Four); we get some gestures towards the socially-conscious parables of the 70s when the cosmic, world-shaping concerns of superheroes were returned to a street-level attendance to the political needs of the common person (see Dennis O’Neill’s Green Lantern/Green Arrow series); and we get a degree of revelry in the cynical exploitation that became rife in the mainstream comics of the 90s with attention being paid to gratuitous violence, the objectification of women, and a now infamous brand of overworked, decorative comics illustration. This swirl of comics-historical influences gives the ATC project a throwback vibe that recalls an amorphously defined “old” type of comics that Bayer et. al. have packaged up with a marketing rhetoric and design strategy (the comics themselves are printed on pulpy news stock and are littered with mock advertisements that recall what would have been present in a comic from the 70s) that preaches an appreciation of period-specific production methods and aesthetics but which fails to cohere in an interesting reading experience or to even reflect the original, or current, appeal of the objects being fetishised.

Kim O’Connor wrote a comprehensive and scathing review of Crime Destroyer #1 that expressed a lot of the same issues that I had reading the comic: it wasn’t just the poorly conceived and executed writing or shoddy art on display that led to a negative reading, it was also a confusion around the intended tone of the book. The comic sat somewhere between an act of earnest pastiche and an ironic parody of the superhero comics genre, seemingly requiring an oscillation between serious, camp, and ironic modes of reading in order to find value in it - an onerous task that sees the book collapse into a straightforward expression of what is actually communicated in its pages: a bland mess of prolix writing, unexciting imagery, and a heavy-handed (and inarticulate) allegory for racial tensions that are presently manifesting themselves in the American popular conscience.

Bullwhip #1 is much less muddled in this regard. It drops the gesturing at making thinly-veiled allegorical statements in favour of pushing all of its ideas much closer to the surface, choosing, instead, to limit the degree of subtext present in the story and focus on the progression of a breezy plot about which the comic’s deliberately stilted visuals can hang as spectacle. I suspect that the lightness of the comic attends more to Benjamin Marra’s writing approach than the tendency towards verbiage that Bayer already demonstrated in Crime Destroyer #1. While Marra is only listed as a co-plotter in the credits to the comic, Bayer clarified the breakdown of writing duties in his interview on The Comics Alternative podcast:

“He basically wrote it and gave it to me and then I rephrased all the dialogue because he was doing it in the sort of intentionally stilted way that he wrote One Man War On Terror.” - Josh Bayer

So that at least explains why Bullwhip #1 reads entirely differently to Crime Destroyer #1. From my perspective, I actually think that this book would have benefited from Marra’s brand of writing, his unnatural dialogue helping to push the book over the edge into a camp appreciation (or, at the very least, a humorously droll reading). What remains of Marra’s style of writing (at least as far as I can detect) does occasionally ring with a suitable sense of the absurd that takes inanity and pushes it into the territory of “so stilted and ridiculous that it’s funny”.

As if to address my confusion over the intended tone of the ATC books, there’s an editorial included in the back of Bullwhip #1 from “Mr. Bayer and Dr. Miles” that offers some clarification:

“As is should be apparent by now, ALL TIME COMICS exploded out of the cave where our minds should be as a declaration of independence from the stupid comics of today and a commitment to the brilliant garbage comics of yesteryear.”

The latter category to which they assign the work of creators like “Mark Gruenwald, Bill Mantlo, Steve Gerber, Don Perlin, Ann Nocenti, Bob Hall, Frank Springer, AND Robbins, among many others”.

There are a few things contained in this editorial statement that I think are worth noting. Firstly, it strikes me that the ATC crew must have read Dan Nadel’s review of Crime Destroyer #1 in which he made the following remarks:

“All the publicity that money can buy positions All Time Comics as daring and both somewhat new and somehow classic. It’s none of these things. […] This is just soulless and boring. I suppose some of this comes down to being unable to differentiate between good work and the work you liked as a kid. Or, rather, work with interesting qualities and the work you remember fondly.” - Dan Nadel

Harsh words from the editor of the online presence of The Comics Journal - the repository for comics reviews, interviews, and long-form articles, backed by Fantagraphics (the same publisher putting out All Time Comics) - and so I see Bayer and Little’s editorial as potentially an attempt to refute this backlash against it by staking a claim that ATC is not in fact trying to be anything more than the comics it’s referencing. It’s not satire, it’s not irony, it’s not a subversive critique of superheroes - ATC is just honest homage to the trashy comics of a bygone era and thus free to revel in the most puerile facets of the source material.

In Bayer’s interview on The Comics Alternative he goes further to clarify this point:

“I feel like it being on Fantagraphics, there is like a lot of expectation about them throwing open the door in a big way and making a statement about what a Fantagraphics superhero comic is going to be and I’m not so sure it’s going to fulfill whatever those expectations might be.” - Josh Bayer

I find this adamant distancing from the implications of being published under the “Fantagraphics” banner interesting, particularly in the light of this 20 year old quote from Fantagraphics head honcho Gary Groth:

“In Tarantino and the enthusiasms of his audience the architects of the Mind Industry see their most fabulous aspirations made concrete: he represents the audience with its critical guard down forever, sucking it all up without reservation, committing it to memory, building their lives around it. In Tarantino the titans of the Information Age see the world re-made in their terms, with their clichés, according to their formulas. He is pointing the way to a golden future in which there is no longer any difference between what people are told they want and what they think they want. In his frail, hyperactive body the industry sees the two great functions of ‘creative’ and 'marketing’ coalesce seamlessly and ooze with sincerity; making, selling, and living junk; the dream of perfect reception fulfilled.” - Gary Groth, The Baffler, No. 8 (1996), pp. 33-40

Groth, here, offers a biting critique of the interplay between Tarantino, as a cultural producer by way of appropriation and reiteration, and an audience who wholeheartedly desires the endless repetition and self-reflexivity offered by Tarantino’s brand of filmmaking (full disclosure: I like some of Tarantino’s films, mostly for the way he writes dialogue). I was reminded of this passage by the way that the editorial in Bullwhip #1 chooses to frame ATC as a “my trash is better than your trash” kind of battle, as that seems entirely antithetical to Groth’s ethos (admittedly one formulated and expressed over 20 years ago).

The editorial, despite being a rather disingenuous take on what is being attempted by the ATC project that attempts to give the comics a free pass for their unintended flaws and distract the reader from the obvious aspirations of Josh and Sam Bayer towards cross-media adaptations, seems oblivious to an important fact about the “brilliant garbage comics of yesteryear” that it holds in reverence: namely, it’s that these comics were produced with a degree of sincerity by their creators and that this authenticity was able to force its way through the sheath of corporate product that housed it to leave a lasting impact on its audience of readers. The best way I’ve read this put was by Sarah Horrocks in her review of Marra’s One Man War On Terror; she states:

“One of the issues with modern ventures into trash genre work is that the acute self-awareness required to dive deeply into these avenues is anathema to the raw energy needed to carry that same work to a sincere and authentic endpoint. The power of trash can’t be replicated by fetishizing its aesthetic, but instead is found in the imperfect rawness of its mutant truths and their resultant imagery.” - Sarah Horrocks

Bullwhip #1 is a comic that leans heavily on the fetishisation of the amorphous “old comics” aesthetic that Bayer et. al. are chasing and Marra’s characteristic sordid energy appears to have been reigned in by the ATC project’s parameters and self-awareness (to a point) so that a lot of the “raw energy” that Horrocks refers to is entirely absent.

So far I’ve been circling around my issues with Bullwhip #1 by speaking about the ATC project predominantly in general terms so let’s get into the details of the actual problems I had when reading the comic itself, starting with the story. As I mentioned earlier, this is a story that is almost entirely devoid of subtext, it’s all about observing the progression of plot and action without needing to pause to ponder over character motivations or feelings or to disentangle allegorical statements and map them back to the real world. This isn’t necessarily a criticism of this comic, though, because it means that we’re fortunately spared the clunky exposition and clumsy metaphorical allusions that weighed down Crime Destroyer #1, and the read proves far more breezy and unencumbered as a result. The problem with this comic’s lack of subtext though is that neither the actual events themselves nor the way they’re depicted are that interesting to observe in the first place.

The comic opens in media-res with Bullwhip defending a scantily-clad female frontwoman of a band from the Misogynist: an overweight man stuffed into an unflattering costume who sports wrist-mounted energy-blasters that are fuelled by the sexist slurs that he spews into his neck-mounted microphone and who secretly enjoys being physically abused by the women he assaults. The intended joke is obvious and vapid - he’s a woman hater who says he fears being overwhelmed by women but secretly wants to be dominated by them.

Bullwhip beats the Misogynist into submission, punching, choking, and whipping him. The Misogynist receives some sexual excitement from this encounter that fortifies a desire to repeat his sexist behaviour in the hopes that he will receive further beatings in the future, this being the extent of the comic’s commentary on the mentality of women haters. During this initial encounter we’re also introduced to a time travelling vampire from the future - the drolly titled “Time Vampire” - who arrives at the concert to transform a specific woman into a vampire in order to guarantee a future where his vampire brethren rule the Earth. The Time Vampire mistakenly kills the wrong woman and escapes to the future to plan his eventual return to complete his mission. Bullwhip is able to deduce the Time Vampire’s intentions and the rest of the issue becomes about her trying to thwart his plan by protecting his intended target (who is naturally a woman in this comic’s logic of female solidarity being performed by enacting violence on the raft of predatory men waiting to exploit them - even the police are lumped into the category of sexual predators).

While addressing the Time Vampire’s assault Bullwhip also has to defend herself against the annoying return of the Misogynist who is freed from gaol by a behind-the-scenes nemesis of Bullwhip called “Rain God” (the Rain God character being an egregious Native American stereotype with a cybernetic arm and undisclosed weather-based powers). The comic resolves with Bullwhip defeating the Time Vampire, trapping him partway through his own time portal so that his body is cleaved in two when the portal closes.

Bullwhip is never shown out of costume and so she’s positioned as a pure agent of female liberation through violent, coercive force - a throwback to an outdated attitude that suggested that improving gender diversity in comics was about introducing “strong female characters”, where “strong” was taken to mean literal physical strength and force of will and little care was given to mapping out a complex, psychologically-informed characterisation. The overt BDSM aspects of Bullwhip’s persona read to me as a siphoning of the ethos that lied at the heart of William Moulton Marsten’s original conception of Wonder Woman, draining it of all its specific ideological content so that what’s left is pure aesthetic. This aestheticisation of bondage, coupled with the “strong female character” trope, represents a retrograde attitude that recalls the 90s-era of “bad girl” comics (see Lady Death, Purgatori, Hellina etc.) where (to overly simplify the specifics of the trend) a raft of scantily-clad female anti-heroes were introduced by male comics creators as a pushback against the aesthetics and moral values of “good girl” art (i.e. work that treated females as innocent and inherently virtuous - a reductive stereotype in and of itself). These bad girl comics were taboo-breaking in their pushback against certain tropes involved in the depiction of females in mainstream comics but, really, in their over-sexualisation of the female form, they represented an extension of an already extant tendency in the male-dominated comics industry (who were themselves attending to the demands of a male-dominated direct market readership) to fetishise the female form. The 90s bad girl comics represented a group of artists working through a set of obsessions that necessarily centred around the objectification of women.

To be generous to Bullwhip #1, there is a way to read it as a work that straddles the line between an earnest return to the abject trends of bad girl comics and a commentary on the excesses of the genre itself. The mental contortion you need to undergo in order to reach such a reading is to see that, in the Misogynist character, it is being posited that the real motivation for the objectification that was at play during the 90s was a subconscious desire on the part of male creators to sublimate themselves to the desires of a dominant female persona (however, it does this even as it displays the characteristically suggestive and exploitative imagery of the genre - trying to have its cake and eat it too). On the one hand, the blatant objectification of the Bullwhip lead, as well as the other female characters in the book, vitiates any hope that the book’s central joke could be read as legitimately incisive commentary; on the other hand, the obvious self-conscious debasement of the Misogynist character prevents the book’s trashy elements from being appreciated on the level of authentic garbage (and thus potentially open to an ironic or campy appreciation) or as a calculated assault on presently held notions of “good taste”.

So the events of the story - which present like they’re meant to be read as partially absurd and thus humorous but which are actually too bland to be either - come across as lacklustre and uninspired under whatever mode of reading you try to apply to them. This is exacerbated by visuals that lack much in the way of dynamism. Benjamin Marra is renowned for a way of drawing that presents male characters with exaggerated muscular physiques and females with overtly sexualised bodies, his figures appearing to be posed with a degree of stiffness that recalls the physicality of an only partially articulated action figure. In his own comics Marra uses this drawing approach to create a sense of the comically absurd in the way his characters move stiffly, pose awkwardly, and emote excessively. Admittedly, some of that’s on display here in Bullwhip #1. For example, a sequence where a man has his arms and head ripped off by the Time Vampire reads as true to the Marra aesthetic of awkward figure work, strained expressions, and gratuitous behaviour, and is charged with campy humour as a result.

The construction of imagery in this way is a fine line to tread, it needs to capture some kind of surreal (highly subjective) quality in its delivery that rescues it from being purely bad and transforms it into what I can only describe as “bad-good”. Part of Marra’s ability to hit the bad-good mark so consistently in his personal work has been greatly assisted by the determined commitment he’s shown in lavishing his drawings with lush inks that add an added dimension of visual excitement by recalling all the renowned excesses of the worst comics of the 90s while also incorporating lessons in craft and visual impact gleaned from the sordid comics output of the 50s (I’m thinking of the ink-drenched crime and horror genre comics published by the likes of EC). The attention that Marra is willing to put into his rendering of scenes of vapid excess goes a long way to selling these moments, part of the appeal lying in the fact that he’s obviously committing considerable time to illustrating scenes of trashy exces and is thus emotionally invested in the images he’s creating. The problem found in Bullwhip #1 is that Al Milgrom’s inks are far too cold and uniform in style to affect the appended idea of illustrative excess that gives Marra’s imagery a lot of its buzz. What we’re left with is Marra’s characteristically static imagery but sans the energising quality of his decadent inks. The difference that the inking styles makes is readily apparent in the preview pages that have been posted for the upcoming All Time Comics: Atlas #1. Marra provides inks over his own pencils on those pages and there is a frenzied energy that radiates off them.

Where the art on the Bullwhip comic completely falls apart is in the colouring, specifically in the way that it doesn’t appear as if the printing process has been factored into how the colours will translate from the colourist’s computer screen to the printed page. When viewed on a digital device, the colours on Bullwhip #1 are easy to read as purposefully obnoxious; they glow with lurid hues of green, orange and purple so that the overwhelming tone of the comic is noxious - a deliberate gesture at the “trash” it’s attempting to replicate. The paper comic, however, is printed on an uncoated newsprint style of paper (a gesture at the amorphously defined “old” comics that this thing is meant to be a throwback to) so that Matt Rota’s colours are absorbed into the pulpy stock, bleeding into each other and becoming muddied in their details and muted in their intended garish vibrancy. Further to the muddy colours, an artificial misregistration effect is applied far too liberally to the comic so that, when combined with the muddy colours, the line work itself becomes difficult to parse (a problem that has never been this severe in the 60s/70s-era comics I’ve dug out of back-issue bins to date). The end result is that, when read in print form (the medium that Bayer insists on fetishising in his editorials), the comic comes across as a visual mess, ironically suggesting that a better experience would be found by reading the comic on a digital device.

Bullwhip #1 is an overwhelmingly disappointing comic that fails to deliver a satisfying reading experience along any of the lines that one may be inclined to approach it. It’s not executed with enough craft to be treated on its own merits, it’s too self-conscious to be camp, it lacks the raw energy to be good as trash, there’s very little in the way of personal expression identifiable within it, and it’s not cogent enough in its direction towards a specific period or type of comics to be considered satire via excess. The best metaphor that I can think of to describe this comic is that it’s like the loner teen who thinks that wearing the right clothes is enough to be part of a scene but who invariably ends up remaining on the outer due to their ignorance of the underlying motivations for the surface level fashions they’re appropriating. Bullwhip #1 reads like a comic trying to dress as a type of fetishised comic object but which wears its aesthetic surface like a chump, failing to disguise that there’s nothing to be found underneath.

(Addendum #1: I’m going to take the bait offered by this comic’s editorial and say that claiming that what’s being done here is on par with the likes of the work of Gerber, Gruenwald, Nocenti, and Mantlo is an affront to the names of all those creators.)

(Addendum #2: I really shouldn’t have spent so much time thinking about this. I should have just posted a link to Simon Hanselmann’s Truth Zone comic which is a thing of beauty that summarises everything that’s wrong with the ATC project in just two pages of comics.)

