Hell’s Kitchen Movie Club #2: Silent Running
This was just supposed to be a dumb strip about bad action movies, obscure band t-shirts, and the peculiar rhythms of male friendship. Then as I wrote it, these two assholes starting having emotional arcs and longer, interconnected storylines about loss and PTSD, and *throws up hands* why can’t I just make stupid things?
Then the Last Vegas shootings happened. Dave and his wife did a lot of the graphic design for that concert; they had many friends in the audience. And suddenly a lot of the casual conversations in bars we’d been having about these characters and their larger presence in the American cultural landscape got very real.
Look, I’ll go to my grave swearing that artists have a duty to be irresponsible. You try for responsibility in art – giving the audience what they expect – and you end up with Soviet Realism, or WPA murals. They’re pleasant enough in their way, but they don’t really make you feel anything, do they?
The act of creation is, at heart, wildly irresponsible. So, sure. Be daring. Tweak noses. Astonish and anger your audience. But remember there is first a far more fundamental rule, the numero uno, the bedrock law of existence in civilised society:
Don’t be evil.
And don’t enable the use of your creations for evil by others.
This is true from your very first story. It’s even more true when you are the brief caretaker of a multi-million-dollar corporate character, especially one that represents disenfranchised white male working-class rage, or a yellow-haired man wrapped up in red, white and blue who represents “America”, whatever that is.
Because make no mistake: evil is abroad in this land. It visits itself daily in violence on innocent bodies based on the color of their skin or the name they call God. And nobody does anything. It visited itself on hundreds of innocent music fans in Las Vegas. And nobody’s doing much of anything to stop it happening again.
I’m not saying you have to do anything. You don’t have to be a hero.
Just don’t be evil.
And if you’re lucky enough to write heroes, don’t do it in a way which allows the hateful to use them as symbols for evil.
If you want to do something, consider giving a little money to the Las Vegas victims’ fund (Team Frank) or Stop Soldier Suicide (Team Bucky). Or, y’know, maybe both.
Yours always (or at least until the inevitable Cease & Desist),
Alex
PS love to my volunteer co-creators, @dave-acosta (line art) and @deecunniffe (colour art), please follow them. We’ll be releasing a colour version of HKMC #1 tomorrow.
