The Secret Service #3

[superboyprime]

Comments

[silverhammerman]

Well Dave Gibbon's art is really nice of course, but Millar's writing is predictably juvenile, and it really does look like he's pandering to teen boys with this whole thing. I'd like to say he was setting things up for a subversion, but Wanted also looked like it was going to subvert it's power fantasy elements right up until nope, it turned out to actually just be a weirdly insulting, misogynistic and juvenile power fantasy.
I guess Millar does deserve props for being successful with his creator owned work though, and Superior's apparently quite nice, so kudos on that stuff at least, I guess.

[sadoeuphemist]

Wanted was sort of subversive, in that the final page featured the protagonist telling all the readers to go fuck themselves. Having achieved his power fantasy, he became a total asshole filled with scorn for everybody else who isn't him.

That's Millar's MO, though, writing terrible things and then insulating them in a layer of irony, where you're supposed to appreciate them ironically and unironically simultaneously. I actually kind of appreciate that degree of commitment to being disingenuous, it's sort of an art form in itself.

[silverhammerman]

I think that the last page fails to deliver as a subversion. Wanted does have that element of irony, showing how that kind juvenile power fantasy is actually really horrible and disgusting, but the ending doesn't really go far enough I think, to properly deconstruct what's so wrong with that sort of power trip. It's literally just the main character insulting you, and it doesn't really explain what's so wrong with that sort of outlook.
I think it does have a hint of subversiveness, enough that when you hear about the story it sounds like it's going to really be interesting, but when you actually read the story it's far too easy for it to just come off as nihilistic and mean spirited.

[mrstatham]

If there was going to be any real weight to Wanted actively dismissing the power fantasy it was putting across, it would have had to have Wesley actively lose against Rictus and his faction of the supervillains, really. If Millar was interested in doing that, Wesley would've actively gotten his ass kicked with specific statements detailing exactly why this was the wrong lifestyle choice for him. Instead, he gets everything he wants - a final meeting with his old man, a hot girl, and all the money he could ever want with everyone who could possibly oppose him dead in the ground. As you say, it doesn't work, because the fourth-wall-style nature of those final pages literally comes out of nowhere in a 'HAHAHAHAHAHA you're a complete fucking idiot for wasting your money on this book' kind of way. There's just zero precedence throughout the rest of the book to justify, it really.

[mrstatham]

Ugh. This reads like Millar's usual juvenile trash only with a heap of the Tory party's current assault on the poorer lower-classes mixed in for good measure. I don't even want to begin thinking about what the idea of treating scoring with women as a points-based-game says about Millar.

[coldfury]

I don't know if it's fair to accuse the activity of assassin's in training as a reflection of the author. I mean, Millar isn't my favorite author, so please don't misunderstand me. It just strikes me as odd, these characters are training to be assassin's (so far as I can tell from the scans, anyway), of course their behavior in this sort of situation would be reprehensible. It'd be really odd if their behavior *wasn't* lined up this way.

[mrstatham]

But then Millar has chosen to write a sequence like this. He chose to write a sequence where getting to have sex with a woman is something that they're going to be scored on simply for doing it. And it's reflective of other scenes across Millar's career where it comes across like some sort of teenage boy's power fantasy involving women, frankly.

[icon_uk]

But is this something they're doing for their own amusement, or is this another test within their "spy game" training? As can be seen in many such stories, the ability to seduce may well be something they have to prove they are capable of.

That doesn't make the concept any reprehensible of course, but within the context of the story and their mission, it's par for the course.

[gamerguy]

Indeed, it's most likely simply their training. Spies are trained to use people as tools to get what they want: information to pass along to their government. Men are trained to seduce women and women are trained to seduce men because getting into someone's pants means you're much closer to 'moving their window' (getting them to see your point of view to the point that they're basically working for you). And if nothing else, you probably have a hold over them with blackmail material. More secrets have been stolen by pillow talk than all the codebreaking in the world.

[wizardru]

Exactly. The most common way to get access to confidential material is to get someone who legally has access to it to give it to you. Sneaking into the Pentagon is hard; seducing a secretary of the joint chiefs of staff and then asking her to get you some documents is considerably less so. Most of the major security leaks of the last century were achieved this way or by angry or disgruntled employees who offered up the information as a way to pay back some perceived injustice.

[sadoeuphemist]

Haven't you heard of PUA before? Millar didn't invent this stuff, it actually exists in the real world. The fact that they're dropping concepts like "neurolinguistics" and negging is a dead giveaway.

[mrstatham]

Well, no, I haven't particularly heard of the PUA idea before. I'm not the kind of person who would hang out with guys who would assign scoring with women points. And again, it's telling that Millar is the kind of writer who *does* put this stuff in his books, presumably to appeal to the twelve to sixteen year olds who actually find his stuff good, still. And it's still reflective of that classic Millar problem where he just has to bite the hand that feeds, given what they're saying about the lead in the training exercises. It's almost like Millar doesn't *want* people to read his books.

I'm happy to admit that I might just be reading too much into this, though, given I loathe Millar as a writer.

[sadoeuphemist]

PUA is totally hilarious and depressing, it's a bunch of dudes who think of dating as a real-life video game and have developed a bunch of movesets and cheat codes to exploit basic social routines and get laid as many times as possible.

Biting the hand that feeds is practically Millar's gimmick at this point. Like I said above, he wrote a comic where the final page had the protagonist announcing to the readers "this is my face while I"m fucking you in the ass."

[mrstatham]

Oh, no, definitely. I'm very familiar with Wanted's final page, really. The sad thing is I actually bought into the book and liked it to a degree before that last page, from what I remember.

[sadoeuphemist]

Really? Well, here's the thing. On one hand you're condemning Millar for pandering to teenage boys' power fantasies. On the other you're condemning him for biting the hand that feeds him. But surely it's a good thing that he ends up mocking and criticizing his audience, since they're all terrible to begin with?

I mean, as a whole, his body of work is still terribly disingenuous, and he's trying to eat his cake and have it too. But it's still a positive, no matter how small, that those "fuck yous" to his audience exist at all.

[mrstatham]

I suppose in some ways it's Millar's having his cake and eating it too that aggravates me the most, really. I think that this is treading into similar territory that had me subjected to abuse here (not by yourself or anyone still at S_D, of course) a few months back for talking about Waid and what I think he should be doing with his writing, now, but I just think that someone who does command the attention of an audience as Millar seems to - to the point he can apparently keep his CLiNT magazine afloat - should be trying to do more, really. And if he chooses to pursue the idea of critiquing his audience, it's not even mockery and criticism on a grand scale, because Millar seems afraid of losing his audience, so that makes what he's doing appear suitably limp-wristed, so to speak.

[sadoeuphemist]

Ok, I just thought it was weird that you'd like Wanted up until the last page, given everything else you said.

What's wrong with Waid's writing, incidentally?

[mrstatham]

I think in the time since I actually liked Wanted, my tastes have developed a little bit more. I suppose in some way, I was part of that audience he panders to. But starting to understand some of the issues in the comics industry, with the portrayal of female characters and the like... It makes it something of an eye-opener to see a writer like Millar positively wallowing in stuff like that.

As for Waid - zero problems with his writing for comics in general. I'm ordering his first volume of Daredevil soon, and his other stuff at least interests me, but I think it was a few months back, and someone had posted a page or two from a webcomic Waid had contributed to, identifying what he perceived as some of the 'top problems in comics'. I wasn't impressed with the statements Waid was trying to make in said webcomic, and simply said that I felt Waid was making a more effective statement about trying to change comics within the pages of Daredevil itself, amongst other books. Which was just my perspective - I think if you are in a position to change the industry (and the response to Waid's Daredevil shows that he can), then actually making a comic to try to change things is more effective than just mocking the issues in a webcomic. Needless to say, someone tried to make out I was preaching my perspective as gospel.

[leoboiko]

Yeah, if by hilarious you mean depressing. Depressing and depressing.

[espanolbot]

Basically the Secret Service is meant to say how a James Bond-type spy would come to being, and what would happen if a modern working class type was to get put into the same programme.

This apparently was inspired by the makers of the James Bond films in the beginning having to coach the very working class Sean Connery to be a more convincing gentleman when he eventually came to play the lead in Dr No.

It is sexist, and it is ridiculous... but so is the source material that they're trying to homage.

Though I'd personally say that James Bond just ended up like how he is due to his upbringing, training and personality makes more sense than people assuming that there's a specific formula for being a successful secret agent, making them try and duplicate Bond's personality onto trainees.

Kind of why I prefer the Daniel Criag version of Bond to the previous versions these days, personally. He acts more like a person than the previous ones, who were largely varying levels of sociopath.

As an example, the reason given as to why Bond sleeps around in the rebooted post-Casino Royale franchise is that Bond feels that staying with one woman causes unnecessary attachments to be formed. After he DOES form attachments to a woman, who semi-betrays him and dies, he returns to his old ways eventually, but with a kind of determination that he wouldn't repeat the Vesper Lynn situation again.

He does get over this somewhat over the course of Quantum of Solace, which is entirely about him avenging Vesper's death and getting back at the people who forced her into the situation that killed her in the first place (Quantum hired people to get close to intelligence agents, seduce them, and then blackmail them into doing what Quantum says by faking the seducer's kidnapping and saying that they'll kill them if the spies don't do what they say). By the end of QoS he's at least capable of just being friends with women as opposed to just trying to sleep with them because they're there.

What I'm basically saying is, Bond ended up how he is because he's a fundementally broken person. Assuming that making people like him on purpose, while thinking that creating people like him is a positive, is kind of screwed up.

[sadoeuphemist]

James Bond isn't a real person, though.

I mean, the reason James Bond achieved such longevity and success as a fictional character isn't because he's really competent at solving our problems, he doesn't exist. It's specifically his womanizing, suave, secret agent persona that made him popular as a literary figure, because that sort of persona appeals to already-existing beliefs and ideals in our culture. Part of what this comic does is applying Bond's values to a government group as a whole, and showing, as you said, how kind of screwed up they are.

[starwolf_oakley]

Maybe Miller is trying "Hey, here's how a James Bond-type got so screwed up."

There isn't much in the movies that say "Hey, here's what the other Double-Os are like compared to Bond." So we don't know if they are as broken as he is.

[icon_uk]

006 in Goldeneye isn't exactly the sort you'd take home to introduce to mother... for more than one reason I suspect.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

"He doesn't know video games or reality TV and it's a bad thing!"

...did I really just read that?

[bruinsfan]

My read is that the speaker is saying it's a bad thing that his ONLY cultural knowledge comes from videogames and reality TV.

[icon_uk]

Ummm.... no I don't think so. The sentence was -"It's like he exists in a cultural vacuum with no real knowledge beyond video games and reality television"

Which basically means he has NO awareness beyond those things, and that IS a bad thing, or at least a desperately limiting one.

[glprime]

Yeah, it's all pretty much been said above, but this seems a very low-hanging fruit if it's commentating on anything.

I'll just say I'm mentally twelve and the French Connection UK logo always gets a smile from me. And yet the rest of this is just sad, like a mentally twelve-year-old is trying to write a deconstruction of the traditional spy stereotype (witnessed from TV and video games) along with pervasive class warfare (that's less a theme and more a veneer).

Remember when we created stories about things we liked and not just to tear things down that were popular? How did I start the last decade so cynical and now end up damned near optimistic compared to others?