This Sunday is Halloween. Halloween has acquired a lot of personal significance for me in recent years. I happen to have a niece and nephew (Hi, Taylor and David!) who both were born on Halloween. I also met my wife at a Halloween party. I arrived dressed as one of my favorite comic book characters: Clownface from Jason Pearson’s Body Bags. I had a machete on my hip, was wearing a black, spandex S&M mask with a bright yellow smiley-face on it, and she never saw my face that night. But that’s a story for another day. I’m here to talk about Body Bags.
Jason Pearson’s Body Bags is the big-fat-greasy-bacon-and-chili-cheeseburger-with-onion-rings-and-a-fried-egg-on-top of comic books. When you describe its contents, the whole thing sounds rather abhorrent to discerning palettes, but DAMN is it good! The less savory aspects of Body Bags include a man punching a woman in the face, casual use of the N-word, an eight-month pregnant woman snorting cocaine, and a protagonist who stabs said pregnant woman in her stomach with a giant Bowie knife. And this, my friends, is just in the first five pages!
Body Bags debuted in 1996 as a four-issue limited series published by Dark Horse Comics in a storyline entitled “Father’s Day.” ”Father’s Day” introduced readers to the knife-wielding Mack Delgado, aka “Clownface” and his older partner, Iran “Pops” Sekula. Clownface and Pops are two bounty hunter who operate out of the city of Terminus, a twisted, alternate, near-future version of Atlanta, GA where extreme cybernetic body modification is as common as botox treatments or Lasik surgery is in our world. The plot revolves around the complications that ensue when Clownface and Pops take a dangerous and questionable job to help pay for a surgery which Pops desperately needs, but the STORY centers around Mack’s unexpected reunion with his 14 year old daughter, Panda Carmenmarie Delgado and her baptism by firepower into the “body-bagging” business.
Panda is a precocious, foul-mouthed, teenager with a preternatural skill with firearms and a natural gift for extreme violence. In this regard, and in her relationship with her hulking, vigilante father, Panda is very much the predecessor to Hit-Girl from Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.’s comic book limited series, Kick-Ass. However, gets extra points for a) coming up with the concept first. Millar attempted to shock by juxtaposing the reader’s expectations of how a child should behave with Hit-Girl’s violent behavior and profane mouth. Pearson had already given that character to readers over a decade before and had upped the ante by daring to present his teenage girl as a decidedly busty girl in a black, leather cheerleader outfit. To quote title of a popular feature on The Bureau Chiefs, “This is a fetish for someone.” Actually, Panda probably encompasses a whole LOT of fetishes for a disturbing number of someones, which is among the reasons why Body Bags enjoys an apocryphal reputation on the Internet as ”the most controversial comic of the 1990s.”
Sorry, wrong picture. This was DC Comics in 2008...
Pearson’s subject matter in Body Bags is raw, but his art style is gloriously cartoony, yet naturalistic. His style embraces the best aspects of classic cartooning and storytelling. The action sequences flow violently, quickly and clearly and his characters move across the stage in broad, exaggerated movements, but still have a realistic weight and flow to them. Clownface is a giant, scowling mountain of a man. Pops’ face is wizened and inscrutable beneath a thick hedge of bushy, black eyebrows. The henchman, Black Angus, is a whirring, buzzing combination of gristly flesh and muscle.
As a writer, Pearson displays a knack for coarse, profane, and for lack of a better word, “urban,” dialogue. It feels natural, not like some middle-aged man’s idea of what kids on the street sound like. Each character projects an aura of aggression and toughness, but Peason also imbues each of them with a unique voice, personality and a surprising amount of emotional range, including humor and vulnerability. The characters don’t suffer from a universal snarkiness and too-cool-for-school detachment from every situation that seems to infest some current writers’ work. For instance, when Panda confronts the true cost of the “body-bagging” lifestyle for the first time, all the bravado and sass collapses and you see that she is experiencing the horror and sadness of the loss as any 14 year old girl would. Mack “Clownface” Delgado’s reluctance to let his daughter back into his life is not for a lack of concern for her, but is a product of how much he cares for her. He knows how terrible and violent his profession is, so he wants to keep her away from it. Pearson coldly establishes Clownface’s mindset in the aforementioned brutal opening sequence when he tells the his small-time gangster whose wife he just stabbed that he was doing him a favor, since “thugs like us shouldn’t’ have families.”
Like Howard Chaykin did with his seminal 80’s comic series, American Flagg!, Pearson is skilled at suggesting that the characters in Body Bags are part of a much bigger, complex world that exists between the panels or just outside the margins of the page. He does this by having the characters drop casual references to incidents or characters that we never see, or ever have to see, because the descriptions are so evocative that they fire up the readers imagination to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, Pearson’s labyrinthine plot is filled with double-dealings and side-dealings and becomes almost too complicated for its own good
Unlike a large chunk of comic books that came out in the 1990s, Body Bags has aged rather well in the 13 years since its release. Except for the inclusion of a Walkman, which features prominently in Panda’s introduction, and a tossed off reference to their versions of Beverly Hills 90210 or Baywatch, Body Bags: Father’s Day could have easily been released today. With it’’s violent themes and scandalous reputation, Body Bags is not for everyone, nor is it a perfect work, but it’s undeniably ballsy and fun.
LINKS:
- JEP
