Lessons from comic books: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys

With Killjoys, the comic is part of a much bigger package, including songs that sent me on a long journey starting almost three years ago. So if there are things that were not necessarily in the book, but the ideas coalesced for me while reading and thinking about the book, it's not really that surprising. There's a lot here. I'll probably ramble.

I believe it started to focus when reading Shaun Simon's note at the end of the special edition:

"We wanted the new Killjoys to look at the old ones - like kids nowadays who wear Ramones T-shirts without ever hearing a song - never understanding what the original Killjoys stood for and ultimately failing because of it."

There is a story here that I initially wasn't going to tell because I thought it was pointless, and then I realized that it wasn't.

My sister Maria used to want a Ramones T-shirt. She doesn't have anything against them, but she doesn't really listen to them either. I told her she could start listening more to the Ramones, which I will always support, but that it probably just made more sense for her to get a Metallica T-shirt. She listens to them all the time, and it sends a similar message: I do not like or accept what is currently popular, and don't think that I do.

I get that, even if I've never felt a need to put it on a T-shirt. As I have been observing the world around me, it has become clear that there is a strong division between establishment and anti-establishment, and a common need to declare allegiance. On the establishment side it may be a declaration of solidarity, and affirmation of the security it is supposed to bring. On the anti-establishment side, it may be a rebel yell, defying the forces that feel like they will consume you. On both sides it is often an expression of contempt.

There are funny and sad parts to this. For one thing, there are multiple little subdivisions. You think people have your back, and you belong, and it can be really traumatic finding out you're wrong. You can also find so much variety in people on both sides that divisions don't make any sense, but it seems to be a natural instinct.

What works well with Killjoys is that they do not take the easy road. It would be easy to see Better Living Industries as a total villain, and their opposition as heroes, but the new Killjoys are not heroic. Val is downright sadistic (and narcissistic and paranoid). There are moments of sympathy for people on the BLInd side, but not for the monolith itself.

As the most sympathetic characters are killed off, the most you can do is hope for the girl, and her success comes from choosing liberation instead of revenge, with better rewards than she could have possibly imagined.

Let me bring in something from Marco Pirroni:

"I was completely done with punk by the end of '77. It became an excuse to be stupid. It lost style; it lost subversiveness; it got really conformist. I thought the early punk thing was that old Oscar Wilde thing: 'We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.' Well, the second generation was basically just 'We're all in the gutter.' They never moved on. A lot of them still haven't."

(from Mad World: An Oral History of the New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s, Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein, p. 20)

Rebellion can be necessary, but you have to know what you're rebelling against. Defining yourself by rebellion, and opposition, gets stupid and ugly.

So I guess one of the things that worked for me Killjoys is that even though some characters really were not looking for the stars, they still found them. That can be true to life, and it is fabulous.