Love Handles

By Regie Rigby

Hello there my foolish friends! How the devil are you all?

It’s Valentine’s Day, and here at FoolCentral we’re all feeling warm and fuzzy inside. There is candlelight. There is soft music. There are hearts everywhere, and frankly, if that bloody Cupid doesn’t stop with the arrows he’s going to have somebody’s eye out.

Of course the little guy may have a point. Love isn’t all candy hearts and sweet nothings. The “shot through the heart” metaphor can sometimes be all too accurate, (although I accept that illustrating it with a bow wielding winged baby is a little odd, now I come to think about it…) anyone who reads comics can tell you that.

Love doesn’t really get such a good press in comics, does it? There aren’t really that many characters in modern comics who can boast secure and happy romantic relationships – and those that do have functioning love lives often find themselves in danger because of it. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s look at Spider-Man, just for a start.

Poor old Peter Parker. I mean, where do you begin? His first real girlfriend, the saintly Gwen Stacey gets chucked off’ve a bridge by the Green Goblin simply because Gobby knows he can use her to get to the Web-Head. Worse, it turns out that Spider-Man broke her neck when he webbed her to break her fall! If that weren’t enough to send any sane man into a monastery for the rest of his life we discovered recently that their relationship had been ret-conned so that in addition to all of the baggage he already had, Parker had to cope with the fact that Gwen had given birth to twins fathered by Norman “Green Goblin” Osbourne.

Oh, and they wanted to kill him.

Oh, and then they died.

Sheesh. And I thought I’d had some bad experiences with girls as a teenager…

Not that it’s ever gotten any better for him. OK, so he eventually manages to get it together with one of the most beautiful women on the planet, and they’re crazy about each other and all that. But the superhero thing does keep getting in the way rather, and they ended up spending all that time apart, and then she’s constantly getting captured or threatened. In fact, didn’t she actually die at one point? It’s tough, it really is.

While we’re in the Marvel Universe, take a look at what’s going on with Reed and Sue Richards! They seemed to have it all. A close loving relationship, their own business (of a sort – they worked together, is what I mean), a hyper intelligent super-powered son. They had it made. Then it turns out he’s designing super prisons to illegally incarcerate people in the negative zone and suddenly she’s moving out. Man, if even they can develop relationship difficulties overnight I guess we’ve all gotta worry!

Love in comics isn’t all doom and gloom though. Superman and Lois Lane have done alright over the years. OK, so Lois has proven herself to be unbelievably thick, and incapable of spotting that Superman looks exactly like Clark does when he takes off his glasses. And of course she has spent rather a lot of time needing to be rescued over the years, although who knows? Maybe she just has a thing for being tied up and rescued by muscular men in tight underwear.

Speaking of muscular men in tight underwear, surely the poster boy for disastrous romances in comics has to be Bruce Wayne. Bruce has in the past been accused of being gay (most notably by Dr Wertham in the nineteen fifties) and given his success with women over the years he probably wishes this were true. I mean what is it with him?

His longest standing relationship seems to be with Catwoman, who is after all technically a member of his rouges gallery. That’s just a bit odd, wouldn’t you say? There’s something so utterly dysfunctional about a relationship based on trying to get your woman locked behind bars I don’t think any amount of counselling is going to help.

When he’s out of costume (stop sniggering at the back – that’s not what I meant…) things get even worse! He occasionally romances ace news reporter Vicki Vale, a character who, like Lois Lane and Lana Lang hails from a time when heroes’ girlfriends were apparently required to have alliterative initials.

Then there was the lovely Silver St. Cloud, who left Bruce nearly thirty years ago because she couldn’t reconcile his two identities. There was a brief flirtation with a crusading talk radio star which could have gone somewhere interesting too, but Brucie got cold feet and she faded from the scene so completely I can’t even remember her name offhand. Not to mention his severely dysfunctional relationship with Ra’s Al Ghul’s wayward daughter Talia – to whom he is technically married and with whom he has a son called Damien (always a bad sign) who may well want to kill him.

It really doesn’t sound that attractive, does it?

It’s not just the superheroes either.

John Constantine found the love of his life in Kit, and then lost her because of his life. That was a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions right there. The word smith behind that little slice of pain, Garth Ennis, pulled off a similar trick in Preacher with the relationship between Jesse and Tulip, although on that occasion he chose to give us a happy ending.

And that, I think has to be our valentine’s ray of hope.

Because of course relationships in comics are fraught and full of problems. These are fictional, dramatic relationships after all. They are designed to provoke a reaction from the reader, and I’m afraid folks, that we don’t react all that well to “everything’s ticking along fine here” type stories. We’re quite happy with a positive ending, but so long as the story continues we want to see our heroes dealing with suffering and loss.

This is true of all literature of course, but comics are, somewhat different in that as a rule they don’t end. Unless you’re dealing with a story like Preacher, Sandman or Transmetropolitan, stories intended to run long enough to draw readers into their world but with pre defined and clearly planned end points, you’re never going to get that Hollywood “riding into the sunset” moment. Everything might well resolve at the end of an arc, but they still have to be back next month, and then? Then we need more conflict. More angst. More pain.

Why are relationships so difficult in comics?

Because we demand that it be so.

Maybe, this Valentine’s day, we should give our heroes a bit of a break. Love is a fragile precious thing – especially in fiction – so just for today, let us let Peter and MJ be together undisturbed by Civil Wars. Let’s let Bruce Wayne spend an evening with a woman who doesn’t either try to kill him or get killed.

I think we’d all feel better for it.

You’d all feel better if you entered the contest too. There’s still time! For those of you not paying attention over the last few weeks, the rules are as follows:

To enter you must e-mail a picture of yourself holding something connected to UK comics anthology 2000AD outside your favourite comics store. For the sake of this contest "comics store" will be taken to mean "store where you buy your comics" and need not be a store soley dedicated to the sale of comics.

No purchase necessary. You could be pictured with the actual comic, a related publication, such as a graphic novel, or a poster. They need not be yours, but please get the permission of the person who does own them before entering. A picture of a 2000AD character downloaded from the 'net, or even a hand written sign saying "I love 200AD" would also be acceptable.

All entries must include the entrant’s name and contact address. Addresses will be kept confidential, but I can’t send you a prize without it.

Only one entry per person. If you want the chance to win two shirts, you’re going to have to clone yourself, but if two different people at the same address want to have a go, that’s fine.

Please don’t pretend to be two people at the same address if there’s only one of you. That’s cheating, and I’ll know. And even if I don’t , you’ll feel guilty. If you want a shirt that badly, you can buy one here.

It will be assumed that you are happy for your picture and comments to be published in this column unless you expressly state otherwise. If you state otherwise your privacy will be respected, but we reserve the right to describe what your picture was of. Anything that is published here will be credited appropriately.

It will be assumed that you retain all other copyright on your pictures, and do not give permission for the pictures to be reproduced anywhere other than the FoolBritannia column.

FoolBritannia, SBC and all associates accept no responsibility for persons using pictures published in this column without permission.

Entries should be sent by e-mail to regie@silverbulletcomicbooks.com.

The judges’ decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into. Except, you know, to say hello and stuff.

Please state T Shirt size when entering.

Prize shirt designs will be assigned more or less at random depending on availability of sizes, but if you have a preference please feel free to state it and we’ll see what we can do.

Oh, and don’t forget to put “2000AD Contest”, or something similar in the subject header of your e-mail.

Have a lovely Valentines. I’ll see you next week.