Incorruptible #7: Max Damage & Jailbait are cute and illegal

[octopedingenue]

I have mixed feelings about teenage sidekick Jailbait and her relationship with Incorruptible's villain-turned-hero protagonist, Max Damage. It's unclear yet whether she'll be more than a source of Maxangst, and her sexual relationship with Max is explicitly statutory rape: Max's age is 28-30; Jailbait is sixteen and was fifteen when they met. (In a brothel!)

But I nonetheless enjoy Jailbait as a character, in a series with a surprisingly large percentage of female characters in its small cast. And I still find Max/Jailbait oddly adorable, in large part due to the scans below.

Half a page from Incorruptible #4 (art by Jean Diaz) and 4 pages from Incorruptible #7 (art by Horacio Domingues) below cut. Mark Waid is the writer.



Without telling her first, Max tries in Incorruptible #4 to teleport Jailbait to another dimension, away from the crazy superhero trying to kill everyone. Jailbait does not take this news well.

I'm amused by Max's :( faces on this page.



Because it's just one of those weeks for Jailbait, running away from Max finds her kidnapped and held hostage against Max by a villain. Max rescues her, but not before Jailbait (real name Terri) gets one of her fingers cut off.

Max has her taken to the emergency room incognito, so his presence won't draw further attention to her. In issue #7, Terri wakes up in the hospital.



Max, were you lurking in that closet expecting her to come out or were you lurking there just to LURK?


This is an amazingly gutsy and/or insane thing for Terri to say after she's just had a finger cut off. (Although if you count the fingers on the bandaged hand in the third panel, there's 1-2-3-4-5. Whoops! Did she get it sewn back on or can she regenerate like a starfish?)

In the first panel below, Terri squishing herself to Max's chest is painfully cute.






When he wakes up, she's gone. (D'awwww, sleepcute!)


Kinda-sorta-related, I really like the idea behind Max's powers, superstrength and invulnerability that increase the longer he's awake. It's a very simple premise that gives him incredibly dangerous potential, but has the equally dangerous drawbacks of numbing most of his senses and making him increasingly careless from sleep deprivation.

Buuuut yeah, I'm mostly posting this for the sleepcute.
 

Comments

[misterbug]

...And now that I know Max has that powerset, my mind instantly sidetracks into 'Waking Dreams Mini In Which Max Visits The Dreaming And Becomes Drinking Buds With Abel'.

You can have that one, DC and Boom!. Yummy.

[octopedingenue]

Nice! Dream would have opinions about a superbeing with powers so incidentally dependent on him.

Now that reminds me of Alex Burgess, the guy who kept Morpheus prisoner and who Morpheus cursed to always dream he was waking up. And of fatal familial insomnia.

[thehefner]

Boom!. Yummy

Heeeee, Shore Leave.

[misterbug]

Somehow I knew you'd catch that one.

[thehefner]

I say that line far too often in my daily life. My girlfriend isn't sick of it just yet.

[misterbug]

I have vague urges to whisper 'Sphinx!' occasionally in daily life, but I've held back...thusfar.

[thehefner]

Really, you must actually hear the word "Sphinx" mention so rarely in your daily life that it seems perfectly reasonable to allow the echo when appropriate!

[misterbug]

Ah, if only I'd taken that Egyptology Is The Career For Your Lifetime To Be Wasted On pamphlet...

[stolisomancer]

Incorruptible is so much better than Irredeemable that it's really kind of surreal, and this is a big part of it.

[pyrotwilight]

I don't know about that. They're both very good but even I'll admit all of the action is going on in Irredeemable so far. Meanwhile Incorruptible is less about the entire world but at the psyche of a guy like Max trying to become a hero and accepted. Macro vs micro and all that.

I think it's just that in Irredeemable we keep seeing dark secrets coming out of the wazoo but we see genuinely happy moments and fun in this one that'd make it seem better.

[stolisomancer]

Mostly it's that Irredeemable has more characters, so it of necessity moves much more slowly. It has its satisfying moments, but Incorruptible is a better month-to-month read.

I should sit down and see if Irredeemable reads better in TPB. I suspect it probably does.

[octopedingenue]

It's interesting on the micro level that while Max was a bad guy, he wasn't Plutonian's special obsessive particular nemesis (that love/hate role is filled!) or anything so personal to be inspired by Plutonian's dramatic shift. Max was more like a general rogue's gallery semi-regular who went "Well, damn, somebody's gotta step up;" he doesn't seem too obsessed with Plutonian in particular.

Re: Redemption story > Superdickery

[stolisomancer]

I think the best equivalent to Max is someone like the Rhino to Spider-Man: a decidedly second-tier but significant member of the rogues' gallery.

I wish I knew Superman's villains well enough at the moment to make that comparison, but I'm a few years out of date on that. Maybe the Parasite?

Re: Redemption story > Superdickery

[octopedingenue]

I couldn't think of the right Superman villain to namecheck either! I think Rhino is a good comparison, very strong and very bad news, not deranged or in it for the evilz. They're both more the "rob the Treasury and dropkick guards if they get in the way" type than "turn New Yorkers into lizard people and reign over them as king just to piss off Batman" villains.

I am curious about how if at all Max is going to tie into Plutonian's takedown, and if not what the reason for pairing the two titles is. I feel all protective of their little squad now; I don't Max&Co. getting squashed in a crossover event. D: Or could be Incorruptible should be a diverging story all along: maybe Waid's running a Reconstruction simultaneous with the Deconstruction of his new 'Verse, and Max's story will continue.

Re: Redemption story > Superdickery

[arbre_rieur]

Waid has said the stuff in INCORRUPTIBLE was originally supposed to be part of IRREDEEMABLE. Not the character of Max Damage specifically, but the whole exploration of how the Plutonian's actions are affecting the little people and the rest of the world. He spun it off into its own book because the Paradigm ended up being much more prominent characters than he originally planned, leaving no room.

Redemption story > Superdickery

[octopedingenue]

It is kind of surreal, and the inevitable future crossover battle is going to feel weird. I don't mind Incorruptible going off on its own thing, but if(?) Max turns out to be Plutonian's nemesis/whatever but the stories aren't brought together more, he'll be like Deus Ex Maxina showing up out of nowhere for the final beatdown. Or Plutonian will appear from thin air, zap Max's lungs until they explode, and then zip away again, The End.

I've skipped around the first two trades of Irredeemable and just haven't really connected with anything so far, beyond the inherent lulz of Magnificent Bastard Superdickery. Plutonian trolls the planet until he gets bored with it and then...rocks fall, everyone dies? Hooray, dramatic tension?

It also helps on a narrative level that while they both start in media res, Incorruptible has a small cast largely befriending each other for the first time and centered around Max. Irredeemable has a sprawling ensemble with lots of shared history, so every time they have a conversation we have to have an expository flashback.

To my mind, Irredeemable is playing more like standard superhero La Resistance trying to regroup and plan against evil, when makes more sense as survival horror / disaster movie, in which the evil is merely that God / the planet / Jurassic Park T-Rex hates you. Rocks fall, everyone tries not to die.

Re: Redemption story > Superdickery

[stolisomancer]

Yeah, it's really just a question of one book having a stronger immediate concept than the other. Irredeemable by necessity has to build an entire superhero universe from the ground up while it's being destroyed, and while it's done a very good job of that, there does not seem to be a good way of doing so without it being somewhat clumsy.

Part of it's the characters, though. About the only characters I like in Irredeemable are Volt and sometimes Kaidan. Incorruptible doesn't have a dud in the bunch.

Re: Redemption story > Superdickery

[octopedingenue]

there does not seem to be a good way of doing so without it being somewhat clumsy

Yes. The only one I can think of offhand that really did it successfully was Watchmen, which I need to re-re-read for that reason, and which Irredeemable is definitely riffing off. IIRC a lot of the exposition Moore slipped in via framestories, news articles, and text pieces (which is cleverly meta but still HELLO EXPOSITION), and flashbacks tend to be full-length pieces, like Rorschach telling the psychiatrist about the Roche kidnapping. And it was set up as a mystery story with clues to uncover, while Irredeemable is set up as "AAAHHH T-REX RUN." But again, need to re-read Watchmen.

I love Max's little nakama. He collects people like cats. I like Kaidan most of the time, but overall the only character in Irredeemable I have strong feelings for is Qubit, who I want to punch in the smarmy nose all the time.

Re: Redemption story > Superdickery

[stolisomancer]

Watchmen is a good comparison. It's weird, but I wouldn't have made it on my own, maybe because it's such an omnipresent influence in cape books. Any superhero/villain with a neurosis or dysfunction has got the Watchmen stamp on there.

[jaybee3]

I agree. I'm so over the Plutonian and all the angst of his former buddies already. It's like a mini-series that's gone on too long (like the Twin Peaks of comics). Max's story however is interesting and just keeps getting better, the idea of a B-List super-vilian becoming an A-List super-hero and how that plays out is really interesting.

[arbre_rieur]

I really like both series, but vastly preferring one over the other doesn't strike me as that odd. Besides being set in the same world, the two really have very little in common when you get down to it.

[octopedingenue]

True. It's rather a nice feeling to have a new little burgeoning shared comicverse putting out tendrils and roots of very different stories. Grow, little Boomverse, grow!

[pyrotwilight]

"This is an amazingly gutsy and/or insane thing for Terri to say after she's just had a finger cut off. (Although if you count the fingers on the bandaged hand in the third panel, there's 1-2-3-4-5. Whoops! Did she get it sewn back on or can she regenerate like a starfish?)"

Before looking for her and her recovery here the villain sent Max her finger as a sign he had her, presumably they sewed it back on.

[octopedingenue]

Did they same-day FedEx the finger on ice to Max, to make it still viable? I'm not sure how long severed appendages stay "fresh."

Despite the sleepcute, the last panel of Jailbait with her injured hand wedged under Max's arm makes me wince. She must be on some awesome painkillers.

[djt2445.livejournal.com]

An earlier panel showed she -was- missing the little finger on her bandaged hand; it's a stump, basically, just hard to tell from that distance, but if you look closer in the other panels, you'll see the stump.

[shadeedge]

Can't say i'm a fan of that panel looking straight down the cleavage of an explicitly underage girl. But I suppose it could have been worse.

[octopedingenue]

See post RE: mixed feelings. :/

[proteus_lives]

I do enjoy this series.

Max's face turn is one of the most convincing I've seen in years.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Am I the only one who wants to suggest to Max that he and Jailbait move to the UK? 16 is the age of consent there; their relationship might still be seen as skeevy by some, but not as illegal or immoral.
Also, what happened to Headcase, the replacement/fill-in Jailbait? Is she still around?

[octopedingenue]

Headcase is still around, last seen carted off very drunk by Max, who's still keeping an eye on her in the #13 preview. I assume Headcase is going to stick around; Max seems to think she's just going through a grief phase but she's got the RRREEEVENGE! motivation for heroism now if she decides to use it. I do hope Jailbait original flavor returns eventually, as Max appears to genuinely care for her.

I am totally amused that in less than 15 issues, Max has worked his way through two (female!) sidekicks, with minimal dead people.

[psychopathicus_rex]

I hope Headcase does stick around - I like her.
My theory is that eventually they'll BOTH be his sidekicks at the same time. Wouldn't that be interesting?

[bradhanon]

UK hell; if she's 16, their relationship is legal in 38 of 50 states, according to the site I just checked.

I've never quite understood why 18 is considered the magic number by Americans when that's actually not true a majority of the time.

[psychopathicus_rex]

It's possible that it's a result of Hollywoodization - a lot of legal details in American movies and TV are based on California laws, because most of them are produced in LA and a good deal of writers for such things are evidently too lazy to research the law beyond their own state. (There's also the fact that it's illegal in twelve states, which makes traveling around risky. It's like prostitution being legal in Nevada - you can officially list your profession as 'hooker' if you live there, but it'll get you in trouble if you go out-of-state.)