Mad Max Fury Road - Furiosa #1

[baihu]

12/37

The first issue of the Mad Max Fury Road comic, detailing the backstory of the Five Wives and Furiosa's involvement (though not much on her actual back story despite the title). If you've watched the movie, you know what to expect, but massive warning for rape as a subject matter. Also a warning of a semi-graphic attempted abortion scene.

Comments

[redmagpie]

I'm just gonna... http://www.themarysue.com/furiosa-comic-review/
Because if you haven't seen the film, you really, really shouldn't judge it based on this nasty thing. It's awesome. The comic was horrible. Go see it and ride eternal, shiny and chrome.

[captainbellman]

Thinking about it, all we ought to put in the comments is: "Mediocre".

[baihu]

The Five Wives were just plot devices in the movie as well though. They didn't even get allowed to be dirty throughout the film, somehow their clothes never get stained, barely torn, they barely get injured by just the roughness of the road and world, and don't even get tanned.

The movie didn't treat them any better than this comic does, to be honest. They were quite forgettable save for their hair colors and one-note character traits making them distinctive.

[captainbellman]

In all fairness, action movies aren't really great for developing character traits outside of the hero and villain (can you say anything memorable about the people being held hostage in "Die Hard", except that a good number of them die from not being Bruce Willis?).

I personally thought the actors portraying the Wives did a huge amount with some very subdued parts. You have Angharad putting herself in harm's way (and her child) to protect Furiosa; the Dag faking weakness when Max tries to get her to cut his chain so as to distract him; Cheedo using her well-known weakness to distract Immortan Joe in the final chase; Toast comforting Nux, demonstrating forgiveness and understanding; Capable generally being, well, capable (OK, you may have a point there). Still - they get an awful lot more than any of the non-protagonist female characters in most Marvel movies thus far.

Same applies to a lot of the male characters - all you need to know about the People Eater and the Bullet Farmer is in their names, appearances and gimmicks. Heck, Nux's character can just be boiled down to "hero-worshipping".

You can call it compression in character, the "less is more" approach, in that having a less fleshed-out backstory allows the audience to infer more of their own ideas into the characters. As an example, in the movie we're never given a huge hint of Furiosa's backstory, but audiences (or at least tumblr users) were able to infer a rich characterisation based on her kidnap, being raised as one of Joe's wives, escaping, reforging her identity and becoming his Imperator in order to play the long game towards freeing herself and his wives.

[damar148]

Couldn't get past the part of complaining about there being too many male faces in the crowd of the kids, which is easily explained most of these are the War Pups who would have a higher chance of survival than the kids outside the Citadel with a critical lack of water or food many wouldn't survive infancy.

[baihu]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that found the marysue article to be grating and grasping at straws. Especially since several appear to be topless female children as well.

There's an argument to be made against the comic, but that article is not much more than Tumblr-SJW quality for the most part.

[janegray]

I do think that the comic is horrible and should never have been published, but... yeah, I agree that MarySure articles tend to grasp at straws.

The movie makes it a big point that Immortal Joe wants a son. Not just a child, specifically A SON. He doesn't seem to give a shit about girls at all, unless he is raping them or they guard the women he is raping. And since he 100% controls the resources and is very willing to let his own people die of thirst just to prove a point, if anything I would have found it strange if there had been a bunch of girls amongs the War Pups that were allowed inside the Citadel.

[captainbellman]

You know - given that it was so artfully hinted at in the script and individual performances in the film - and given how clumsily it's done here - I really don't think this was a story that needed to be told.

Or, if it is, then it's one that ought to have been saved for flashback sequences in the next Mad Max film, where it can be portrayed by people who, well, know what the hell they're doing.

[baihu]

I just get pissed off with the false advertising that it was Furiosa's story. It isn't, we learned nothing about her past in the Land of Many Mothers or exactly what happened.

I can only guess because an official Furiosa prequel movie might be made (she's been slated to get her own spin-off), so they can't actually write that story now.

More appropriate had been calling it The Five Wives, or something. Showing who they were before being captured, or what tribes were they from, would have been better.

[captainbellman]

It's telling that these writers decided to go to the rape and abortion first, as opposed to developing these characters any further. For all its well-deserved praise, "Fury Road" is still only a stepping stone rather than a great feminist triumph. A feminist triumph would be a movie where the women get to be the main characters from the start rather than having to piggyback on a pre-existing franchise centred around a straight white guy.

See also: Mako Mori in "Pacific Rim". Also a stepping stone, but at least she is definitively a hero in her own right and has personal autonomy throughout.

[captainbellman]

Another aspect of this to consider is illustrated tangentially in the following article:

http://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2015/07/08/the-white-privilege-white-audacity-and-white-priorities-of-strange-fruit-1/

i.e.: who are the writers considering first in their narrative? In "Strange Fruit" you have a story which seems mostly concerned with white people (even up to that final page); here, from the very first page we're being told the story as it affects Immortan Joe, rather than having it told about or even by the Wives or Furiosa herself. Again, that's very telling.

[janegray]

I especially love the part where Furiosa beats and insults a rape survivor for wanting to abort the rape fetus because the rape pregnancy is a gift she should be happy and proud of. Slow clap.

Splendid in the movie did want to keep the baby, but silly me, I had assumed it was because she genuinely wanted to do it by her own free will, as an act of defiance against Joe ("you forced an horrible thing on me, but I'm going to turn it into a beautiful thing and keep it very far away from your evil paws"), not because Furiosa had shamed her into keeping it by screaming "ungrateful" at her.

For fuck's sake, the comic reveals that the wives didn't even write the defiant lines on the wall! Who thought it was a good idea to strip them of their "take that" against their abuser? And the movie had them persuade Furiosa to help them and the group of women came to an agreement together, while here it's the usual macho "don't ask questions, just come with me if you want to live!" bullshit. No agency at all.

[captainbellman]

I haven't read it, but I assume the "History Woman" wrote the lines on the wall instead? Did she also write "our babies will not be warlords"? Why...would she do that when they could've?

[janegray]

That's the thing! THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO REASON WHY THE WIVES COULDN'T HAVE WRITTEN IT THEMSELVES, AS IT WAS BOTH IMPLIED IN THE MOVIE AND MADE SENSE PLOT-WISE SINCE THEY ARE THE PREGNANT ONES.

This comic literally went out of its way to strip the wives of any agency even when it openly contraddicted the movie and made zero sense plot-wise.

[filthysize]

One of the things I love about the movie is that it never showed any of the rape or abuse towards the women. We're thrown right into the escape, we're told that the men treated them bad, and we're just supposed to go with that. Because we don't need to see women being abused to believe it happened.

I feel that reading this prequel would ruin that goodwill. So Imma skip it and pretend it doesn't exist.

[mrstatham]

Ditto this. I watched the movie a bunch of times, got the art book and will buy the Blu-ray. This just feels like an entirely unnecessary add-on to characters who gave us enough information in the film to either like or hate them, or get them through their own personal arcs.

Actually, this is worse than unnecessary - it looks outright damaging.

[reveen]

Mangled thematic or no, there sure is a lot of talking about "I gotta do this, she's gonna do that" in a comic tying into a highly visual movie that managed to avoid using dialogue as a storytelling crutch.

[punisher007]

So basically take everything that people loved about the film and crap all over it. Great job here writers.

-It runs Furiosa's character.
-It takes one of the best things about the film (having a rape/sexual slavery in the background, but not feeling the need to SHOW it) and does the exact opposite.
-It makes The Wives look bad.
-It flat-out contradicts things that were established in the film.
-Etc.

UGH!!

[superboyprime]

It's worth pointing out that the two scripters credited for this comic are one of the film's co-writers and its lead storyboard artist, respectively. (And it kind of annoys me more people aren't aware. The way Hollywood treats the actual writers as interchangeable cogs is not a *good* thing, people!)

The film's other co-writer, the one not involved in this tie-in, is ironically the one with the most comic book cred and experience, Brendan McCarthy. Though he's the kind of guy who says things like (actual quote) "Certain stories involving race are picked up by the hipster left/pc brownshirts (like the Trayvon Martin/Pussy Riot ones, etc) and circulated for political reasons. I've seen this story appearing on social and other media. You will rarely or never see a story promoted by the left that highlights black gun crime on white victims. That doesn't fit the agenda." So, y'know, maybe it's for the best he wasn't involved in this.

Really, considering all this, you have to wonder if the film turning out the way it did wasn't a happy accident.

[janegray]

I don't think it was just an accident.

The thing that people were chasing was to be not an object, but the five wives. I needed a warrior. But it couldn't be a man taking five wives from another man. That's an entirely different story. So everything grew out of that. - Miller

The guy clearly put a lot of thought in the tropes.

[doodleboy]

George Miller also brought Eve Ensler of the Vagina Monologues onboard as a consultant on set.

[reveen]

Yeah, we're talking about one of the only filmmakers to bring a woman over 50 into an action role since... Helen Mirren in Red?

Seriously, where's my Vuvalini comic?

[reveen]

Eh, Mad Max is very much George Miller's baby, so I have doubts on how much influence the co-writers would have had over how the story turned out. And it's not like there isn't precedence for characters with feminist undertones in Mad Max already.

Like, what's McCarthy going to say to Miller? "Sorry, old bean, you may be the visionary director of this entire franchise. But I think leftists on the internet are poopyheads and your creative vision is too PC. VETO!"

[captainbellman]

One more thing I don't like about this is the demonisation of Immortan Joe. Which - OK, just hear me out.

In the movie, the entire point of Joe is that he's built up for himself the image of a God-on-Earth, like the tyrants before him - Stalin, the Pharaohs, etc. "I will never die, and it is only through me that you live at all." He's built an empire on this image of himself and added it to his own name ('Immortal Man').

But Miller also makes sure we, the audience, can plainly see how untrue that is. His armour is see-through and lets us know that he's horribly unhealthy; he's overweight, suffering from skin diseases and has barely enough strength to lift Angharad after her accident. We get to see him mourn, show sorrow and despair. Not to make us sympathise with him - after all, the child he mourns for is one he literally regarded as property, and he had its mother killed to get to it - but because the scariest thing about any tyrant, real or imagined, is that they're as human as the rest of us.

Which isn't *at all* reflected above. Immortan Joe in these scans is a rapacious ogre whose speech bubbles are given their own colouring. He's written as completely inhuman, almost as if this were by someone who'd once been one of his followers. They even give him those weird glowing pinpricks-in-blackness eyes, which are definitely not anything we saw in the film.

I feel as if I'm not expressing the point correctly here, so I'll put it this way: whether it's Darth Vader taking off his mask at the end of "Return of the Jedi", Hitler complimenting Eva Braun in her home videos or Walter White cradling his baby daughter, we *need* to understand that our enemies are human. Otherwise they're not really characters, and there's no interest.

[reveen]

Joe also gave off the impression that he feigns being "nice" when it suits him. He gives the wives a relatively nice place to stay, he tries to reason with Angharad when she shields Furiosa instead snarling at him, there's the scene where he promises to carry Nux to Valhalla if he does his dirty work for him (lasts about five seconds). I dunno whether it's to rationalize his actions or just to make it easier to manipulate people, but here he just acts like a snarling Evil McBadguy.