The Social Justice League #1 (A Free Webcomic about 'Progressive' Superheroes)

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)

Comic review: JL- Gods and Monsters- Batman #1- Dangerously Stupid

Writers: J.M DeMatteis & Bruce Timm
Artist: Matthew Dow Smith
Colours: Jordie Bellaire
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 22nd July 2015



Justice League- Gods and Monsters- Batman #1 is a very dangerous comic book.

Why is it dangerous?

It’s dangerous because of the following assumptions that it makes:

1- Villains are those who break the law.
2- Following the law makes you a moral person.
3- Breaking the law makes you an immoral person.
4- Villains are those who operate outside of the corporate/state control system.
5- Villains carry out their immoral actions within ‘organised crime.’
6- Murder is justified, along as you are murdering the ‘villains’ who operate within organised crime.

These assumptions give the woefully ignorant and anachronistic impression that there are two sides to society:

A- The respectable, law and order side, with morally decent people working within the system to make the world a better place for everybody.
B- The criminal underworld, down the docks, where immoral gangsters operate their criminal empires, working outside of the system, and making the world a worse place for everybody.

The superhero (Batman) in this contemporary comic book targets group B. Of course he does, why wouldn’t he?

Do you see the problem here?

After all that has happened over the past ten years, with the illegal wars, surveillance, banker bailouts, and government authorised criminality, you’d think that comic books would start to point out that the real big-shot criminals of our era operate within the law, not outside of it, wouldn’t you?

Real world criminal gangsters don’t hang out down the docks, they operate within corporate and banking boardrooms, doing perfectly legal business, not breaking any laws, because they made the laws in the first place.

Nice colours, bad art.

JL- Gods and Monsters #1 gives readers the impression that criminal masterminds work outside of the structures that have been erected to accommodate rampant corporate criminality. What kind of an idiot would do that?

What kind of an idiot criminal would work outside the law and allow himself to be arrested like a common, petty criminal? It doesn’t happen. The top criminals of our era are the most respected men in town. They operate within government, within banks, within corporations, and the entire neoliberal consensus structure is designed to let them get away with their criminality, and to be rewarded and lauded whilst doing so. That’s how it works, and we all know it by now.

The narrative in this book doesn’t really care about all of that pesky real world reality stuff. Instead it features a vampire (bat) who needs to drink blood to live, and because he’s a nice vampire (bat) he hangs around the docks looking for old movie villains (Circa Humphrey Bogart) to have a nibble on.

This hero/villain bat/vampire-thing has a temper tantrum in a restaurant, and finds a new best friend through talking to a stranger in a public art gallery. Yeah, that’s how you meet best new friends, by hanging out in art galleries. I should try that one out myself.

The book features a ‘twist’ at the end that’s not very surprising, and does nothing but further empathise the comedic stupidity of the main protagonist. All of the dialogue is heavy laden with exposition, and none of it reads like real people talking to each other. The art is very loosely pencilled, and the heavy inking and colouring attempts to disguise the lack of detail throughout. It’s a one shot story that you will have read many times before, and this time next week you’ll have completely forgotten about the entire book. If that’s what you are after, get the book. Have fun with it, if you can.

What I am reading here is a deliberately stupid comic. It reads like something designed for children, in the 1930’s. There are no mobile devices, no izombies walking down the street, head down, oblivious to those around them, no references to the Internet and no references to anything contemporary actually.

The protagonist is a laughable Cartman-esque clown who tells his story first person, loading every sentence with a bucket load of exposition as he plods through his ridiculously inconsequential adventures.

The entire book is completely laughable, even more so because it’s written with a pofaced seriousness and inability to recognise just how babyish and stupid it all is.

The art looks rushed, the facials are lacking in expression or movement and it’s all washed in a thick pallet of heavy colouring in an attempt to put some life into the dead and rushed pencil work.

It’s the seriousness of the book that really kills it. If it was scripted with a wink, nod and a sense of irony, then it could have been fun, it could have been a laugh, and it could have been worthwhile. But no, it’s as serious as cancer, and about as much fun as staying up all night and watching the latest suicide inducing election results.

This is a really, really stupid book, and the underlying assumptions that it makes about criminality and morality make it a very dangerous book as well. I wouldn’t want a young kid to read something as dangerously stupid as this comic book. It’s going to do nothing for a delicate young mind other than to lead him into a slave job working within the corporate system, thinking that he’s a good person just because he is following orders and obeying corporate laws.

That’s not good, all it’s doing is preparing the next generation of compliant worker slave drones for the corporate/banking ‘elites’ prison camps.

JL- Gods and Monsters #1 won’t be read by many kids. The majority of it’s readers are going to be adult statists, stuck in the matrix, hiding from reality, not because they are unable to look at reality, but because they don’t want to look at reality.

It’s a comic book for people who want to forget the world and read something stupid that will distract them from the mundane horrors of the everyday, uneventful lives. If stupid and ignorant is what the writers were going for then they’ve succeeded with this one. Well done lads, you’ve done it again. Poop out the story, extract the money, poop into the minds, poop into the landfill. Hey man, it’s the American way.


Rating: 2/10 (For the colours. Nothing else about the book has any merit)