The Paybacks #1 (Plus a rant about the general state of contemporary comic books)

Writers: Donny Cates & Eliot Rahal
Art: Geoff Shaw
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: 16th September 2015



I had a big list of new comic books to check out this week, but that’s going to have to wait now. Post office delivery issues mean that my weekly supply of comics is going to be a day late,  and as I’m not going to go into any comic book store without buying at least one book, I now have a copy of’ The Paybacks #1’ to review.

The Paybacks #1 follows a team of superhero debt collectors as they repossess super-powered gadgets from broke superheroes. The team are daft, their target (A character ripped off from Grant Morrisson’s Batman & Robin arc) is ridiculous, and the narrative proceeds with knowing ‘geek’ jokes and lots of silliness. The art is very cute, cuddly and colourful. It suits the tone of the narrative, that tone is ‘Let’s all have a laugh at the absurdity that is the comic book superhero genre.’

I read the previews, so I knew what I would be getting. I expected a daft superhero mickey-take, something inconsequential, but fun, and that’s exactly what I got.

Here are the questions:

- Was it riotously funny?
- Should I have picked it up when it first came out?
- Does it contain anything within the narrative that resonates with real world concerns?
- And lastly, will I be purchasing issue #2?

And the answers to those questions:

- It’s funny, not riotously so, but it’s trying to be silly, and it achieves that.
- No, I don’t regret not picking it up when it first came out.
- There is nothing in the book that has any relevance to the real world of 2015.
- No, I won’t be purchasing issue #2.

I picked up ‘The Paybacks #1’ after looking at lots of comic books on the shelves and coming to the sad realisation that I had zero interest in any of them. That’s a depressing situation. I’m a long time comic book reader, in a comic book store, and I’m struggling to find ANYTHING that I’m interested in. What happened? I used to have lists of the books that I wanted to read, but today that list has dwindled away to nothing.

Here’s what I found on the shelves during my long search for a book that I could read whilst having a sandwich and cup of coffee.

I started off by flicking through the ‘independent’ section, and noticed that a lot of the writers were mainstream names such as Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker. These writers have been producing unit shifter superhero books for as long as I can remember. I’ve read their work before, and I no longer have any faith in their ability, or willingness to connect with, or reflect the world as it is today. They might write ‘clever’ stories with competent structures, but are they actually going to say anything? They haven’t said anything before, so why should I expect them to say something now?

Having rejected the ‘independent’ books I moved on to the DC and Marvel sections, only to find book after book that was coming from a ‘progressive’ point of view and dealing with issues related to identity politics and political correctness. Oh look, a young girl protagonist, oh another one, and another one, and another one.

Look, I’m a bloke in his forties, so why the hell would I want to read about state agent teenage girls in daft costumes? Answer, I don’t. I find this comic book obsession with young girl protagonists to be creepy and weird, and I don’t want to read about their daft adventures in PC never-never land.

This agenda of ‘empowering’ women is getting ridiculous. Women in the west don’t need any more empowerment. Our entire western society has been structured around the needs and demands of women for over fifty years now. The Muslim world is where you want to go if you are advocating for women’s rights, not the west, but no, comic books won’t mention that, will they?

This pushing of so-called ‘progressive’ identity politics bull**** is corporate and cowardly and it backs up the status quo of human enslavement to a combination of state and corporate power elites. I find it to be insulting and dumb, and targeting the young. The sad thing about it is that this relentless onslaught of third wave feminism is telling young men that there’s something wrong with them, just because they are men.

What are they trying to do here? They do realise that there are inherent genetic differences between men and women, don’t they? They do realise that men and women have had clearly defined roles for thousands of years, and that these roles have helped humanity survive and prosper for all of human history, don’t they? Oh God, I don’t think that they do. They think that there’s no such thing as gender, don’t they? They are insane, they really are, and they don’t even know it. They are writing about imaginary crazy villains, but the craziest people are the writers themselves. They are real world crazy. The kind of crazy where you don’t even realise that you are crazy in the first place.

These crazy comic book writers obsess over race, gender and sexuality, thinking that having a young girl kicking somebody in the face is an empowering thing to write, and they do this whilst ignoring all of the real issues that dominate the every day lives of their readers. Issues like unrepresentative democracy, the violent coercion that is statism, media manipulation, wars based on lies, fought by the poor, and keeping the 1% in their positions of power where they dominate the world like a comic book villain on reality steroids.

It’s 2015 and I don’t need race, gender and sexuality politics shoved down my throat like it’s 1982 and I’m in a student dormitory with a big bloody picture of Che Guevara on the wall. Comic books need to get with the times, as at the moment they are doing an absolutely terrible job of it.

The US comic book industry of today reminds me of the UK Labour party with their ‘new’ grey-haired leader straight out of the 1970’s. Unable to deal with anything that’s happening now, they go back to the past in the hope that they’ll find something useful that will reconnect them with the issues and concerns of the neo-liberal consensus world of today.

Here’s a spoiler, it won’t.

If comic books keep down this progressive path of wilful ignorance they’ll end up in the same rubbish bin of history that is currently reserved for Jeremy Corbyn and his completely out of touch Labour party.

All I am saying is wake up, look at the calendar, and start talking about the world as it is today. Is it really that difficult? It isn’t 1926. Women have all of the rights of men. There is no 'Patriarchy' there is no 'rape culture,’ nobody cares if you are gay and nobody cares if you are a black or white, or a girl or a boy.

Comic book writers need to get with reality and pull their thumbs out of their regressive progressive, communist collective a*** holes. They need to do it now, because at the moment they are becoming an absolute joke with this identity politics nonsense.

Okay, rant over, I feel better now. Back to the book that I’m supposed to be writing about…

I purchased ‘The Paybacks #1’ not because I thought that it would be any different to the neo-liberal ‘progressive’ norm, but because I knew that if nothing else, it would be a bit of a laugh.

I did laugh, a bit, but there’s nothing of substance here. It’s a one joke book. Superheroes go broke, and it takes other superheroes to repossess their stuff. That’s all there is to this one, and even though the final panel recognises that weakness, hinting at a ‘darker’ tone as the series progresses, there’s not enough here to make me want to stick around to see if it has anything more to offer than occasionally amusing, but really quite tame, superhero genre jokes. It doesn’t get too bogged down in the identity politics quicksand of the Marvel and DC universes, but you have to offer me more than an occasional chuckle if you want to have me coming back for more.


Rating: 5/10 (Offers the occasionally laugh, but it’s not particularly clever or insightful)