Cute Shmoot

By Regie Rigby

The world is a sickeningly cute place to be sometimes, don’t you think?

I like to think of myself as a cynical, hard-bitten John Constantine type character. OK, so I can’t do magic, don’t have a trench coat and have never actually been to either Newcastle or Liverpool, but I personally don’t consider that to be the point. I have a leather jacket and a bad attitude, and I reckon I’ve earned my badass points.

Sorry. Who am I trying to kid? That wasn’t even the slightest bit convincing, was it? Hell, I don’t think I could successfully carry off Giles from Buffy, let alone Constantine. Look at me in that bow tie! You can look like one of two things in a suit like that – James Bond or a cocktail waiter.

Let’s just say that nobody ever expects my car to come equipped with rocket launchers and ejector seats.

But it’s not my fault! I’d like to be ice cold and macho. I try to present a frosty indifferent exterior to the world, I really do! But everywhere I turn I’m surrounded by cute!

Take my job. I’m an English Teacher. My school is in what you might call a “tough neighbourhood”. We have all the usual problems you’d associate with urban depravation, and we have to work damn hard to ensure that out kids get the best education possible. Sometimes it can be a little grim.

But then I go into the English Dept base and the first thing I see is the giant cut outs of fluffy bunnies a colleague has taped to her locker. Fluffy Bunnies! Another (senior!) colleague went to see the Lord of the Rings movie, and then spent weeks telling me how cute the Hobbits were! I left the theatre raving about the Balrog, and that really cool thing that Legolas does when he stabs an Orc in the eye with an arrow and then shoots another Orc with the same arrow. Did my colleagues think that was cool? No, they liked the bit where Merry and Pippin blew up the fireworks at the start.

Sigh.

And the kids are no better. I mean, they’re teenagers - they should be all sullen and rebellious shouldn’t they? I mean, that’s in the bloody job description for a teenager isn’t it? But no. Instead I spend my time surrounded by Power Puff Girls pencil cases and exercise books covered in pink hearts.

And yes – that includes some of the boys.

The world just loves cuteness. (Don’t even get me started on “Hello Kitty”…)

Why am I telling you this?

Well, first of all because it drives me nuts, and misery loves company. But also because this at least is one area of media experience where comics have out paced real life. In a world of cloyingly saccharin fluffiness comics stand up as a refreshingly sharp alternative, a tart lemon sorbet to clean the palette in between all the marsh mallow and meringue from other media. We should be proud.

Of course it wasn’t always like this. Not all that long ago even the grimmest, grittiest characters had to have their cute sidekick. Anyone out there old enough to remember the horror that was Batmite? The little munchkin from another dimension who’s attempts to get involved with Batman would always backfire with “hilarious” consequences. How about Superman’s dog? Krypto was it? Just what exactly was with that cape thingie?

It was a trend that lasted into the seventies and eighties, and was clearly reflected in the animation of the eighties. Most people my age will remember with fondness (or gut wrenching, palm sweating horror, depending on your point of view –I tend to the latter, natch) characters like Snarf from Thundercats or (and this is the worst offender) 7-Zark-7 and 1-Rover-1 from Battle of the Planets.

Battle of the Planets was the pinnacle of this phenomenon actually, since in was actually a hacked about re-edit of an excellent Japanese cartoon called Gatchaman. The original had far too much style to bother with R2D2 wannabes like 7-Zark-7, who was very badly drawn and inserted into the cartoon to serve as a continuity announcer by the Americans who needed to replace all of the sex and violence they cut out with something.

But all of that saccharin garbage has largely gone from comics now. Oh, we still have cute characters, of course we do. Bone springs to mind, as do the Little Happy Creatures from Sleaze Castle. But such characters are fully functioning entities, they belong not just to the story but also to themselves, and they don’t act cute just for cute’s sake. Indeed you could argue that there is very little that is cute about Bone’s world, it just happens that Jeff Smith’s art style has that look about it. Stan Saki’s Usagi Yojimbo will never be cute for the same reason. He might well be a big white rabbit, but he’s a deadly serious big white rabbit!

Besides, my main objection isn’t to cuteness, so much as gratuitous cuteness. Cuteness which has been shoehorned in to a story where no cuteness should exist just to catch another audience demographic. Like The Ewoks (fluffy fore runners to the loathsome Jar Jar Binks) or Godzuki from that godawful Godzilla cartoon, or indeed Bat Mite, Krypto and Ace the Bat-hound.

In fact, I’m not such an old misery really. The reason I fail to reach Wolverine levels of hardness is because I’m just a bit of a wuss. I like cute. I just don’t like inappropriate cuteness. Even Bat Mite can be an interesting character if he’s properly handled.

Let me take you back to Batman: Mitefall by long time Bat Scribe Alan Grant and the eminently spiky artist Kevin O’Neil. Demonstrating that even DC has a bit of a sense of humour, this was a brilliant parody of the lumbering Nightfall crossover “event” that ran through the bat books in the mid nineties employing Bat Mite, and a whole host of cuted up DC Universe “Mites”, including (and this was my personal favourite) a John Constantine: Hellblazer Mite!

It was a good story. Cute, yes. But also funny (and not in a “everyone laughs in a patronising manner at whatever fatuous thing Godzuki does at the end of the episode this wee” kind of way) and dark, and just a little bit sad. Heavily trailed at the time of publication as “Not a Dream! Not an imaginary Story!” and indeed it was neither of these things.

Instead it left the reader with the question – did that happen, or was it all a drug-induced hallucination?

And if you’re going to use “cute” characters, that’s the way to do it.

So after all that, what’s my point?

Well, I guess it’s this. Fluffy bunnies are all very well, but there are places they should never go. At the moment we are bombarded with gratuitously cute marshmallow nonsense from all sides. Every TV show or movie has the obligatory cute kid, or puppy or whatever. It’s annoying and intellectually numbing. Comics finished with this phase of their development nearly twenty years ago and have learned to use cute techniques in a meaningful and effective way.

It’s the only instance of comics being ahead of the zeitgeist in this way, and since this mature avoidance of marshmallow meringue is something I approve of, I just thought I’d mention it.