A bit ago I shared how I had an article published in the third issue of, "Undie Comix." I encouraged folks to go buy a copy of that issue and back their Patreon. Then I was in the fourth issue as well. All copies of the third and fourth issues are sold out nowadays, so I'll post those pieces on my blog with some minimal tweaks to fit better online. Oh, and if I could hint that I might just have a post in the upcoming fifth issue, keep that in mind too! Now then...
Examining What, “The Filth,” Says About Identity and Personality
If you have not read, “The Filth,” I would encourage you to do so. Written by Grant Morrison with stellar art by Chris Weston, it is a mindtrip of a comic about a lot of stuff, but one main plot point is a secretive agency known as, “The Hand,” that maintains, “Status Quorum,” through acquiring (by convincing them to join) or eliminating people who pose a threat to the stability of society in one way or another. These people include everyone from a scientist who created a miniature, “Bonsai,” Earth with robotic creatures to a dangerous and hyper-fertile porn star with amnesia. As I said, it is a wild read, but the biggest element that has stuck with me in all the years since I first read, “The Filth,” and have kept re-reading it would be how it tackles the idea of our own identity and personality—the main things that make us, us.
In, “The Filth,” a big part of the story is how you can be injected with a new personality. This results in one character (Spartacus Hughes) who seems to be killed by The Hand constantly appearing to come back as different people but wearing the same clothes, same aftershave, and sporting the same snarky personality. When asked at one point what it takes to be Spartacus Hughes, he responds with a double entendre, “A little prick.” It is both interesting and terrifying to think that with said change, we can become a whole different person. We could vacation in a different mindset, going from liberal to conservative, hating cats to loving them, feeling comfortable in our skin to suffering severe body dysphoria, the list goes on.
Grant Morrison themselves came out as non-binary some years ago, making the idea of identity—and gender identity in particular—being something they would have previously had and continue to have interest in discussing. Within, “The Filth,” however, it isn’t just one’s gender identity that can change, it is their whole sense of self. Perhaps the ability to temporarily take on the mindset of someone else could do many of us a bit of good—literally walking in someone else’s shoes. The idea of being, “Stuck,” as someone else permanently is a scary proposition, however, and something many people feel, be it via their gender identity, a different form of body dysphoria (anorexia, bulimia, extensive plastic surgery), and so forth. I, personally, generally like who I am and would hesitate to feel like I’ve become someone else for too extended a period of time. Others, however, might jump at such a chance to be someone else, even if it means a little prick—pun intended.
Avatar Press, Boundless Comics, and Sneaking the Underground into the Mainstream
As you’re already reading this issue of, “Undie Comix,” I’ll assume you’re familiar with the concept of those old, “Underground Comix,” from decades ago that pushed boundaries and were quite edgy. That era kind of gave way to the rise of independent publishers who could release relatively mature or outright, “Adult,” comics via big distributors as the Comic Code Authority faded away into obscurity and was eventually outright dissolved. If we’re being honest, however, a lot of indie comic books in the 1990s, and early-to-mid 2000s/2010s lacked the willingness to, “Go there,” that many underground comix did—concepts of, “Good taste,” be damned. There was one company that didn’t hesitate to push the envelope at that time, though. Avatar Press and later its imprint Boundless Comics.
Avatar Press was founded in 1996 by William A. Christensen. It initially put out decently action-packed and somewhat sexy, “Bad Girl,” comics that featured original characters like Pandora or licensed characters such as Brian Pulido’s Lady Death (that specific partnership ended with lawsuits some years ago, however). Eventually, the company started making their comics a bit raunchier, with some stories outright bordering-on-just-porn, which was fun, but unremarkable. After a handful of years, Avatar Press started becoming quite interesting, however.
A bunch of well-known creators were told they could make basically whatever they wanted at Avatar if they had a story idea, and this drew the attention of such big names as Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis (pre-controversy), Kieron Gillen, and even Alan Moore (yes, *the* Alan Moore). Now, Avatar Press was putting out comics about a superhero murdering the President of the United States (”Black Summer,”) or a world where the Antichrist lived among us but just wanted to chill-out and be best friends with the reincarnation of Jesus (”Chronicles of Wormwood”). Avatar Press had a surreal mix of putting out a comic one month featuring a, “Jungle Girl,” being penetrated in various holes by her fellow rainforest-dwellers, while the next month releasing Alan Moore’s take on HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos through a fourth-wall-breaking meta lens. This all, in a way, made Avatar Press a bit like DC’s famous Vertigo imprint, but for people who liked a hefty dash of sleaze with their literary comics. “Vertigo for Perverts,” if you will.
Into the mid-2010s, as Avatar started to get a bit more, “Respectable,” with all the big names and some other licensed comics (they put out a number of horror-related series linked to, “Friday the 13th” and, “A Nightmare on Elm Street), they didn’t stop doing the raunchy comics, but spun them off to a separate imprint known as, “Boundless.” You might wager that even with a separate imprint for the edgier stuff that Avatar/Boundless would try to tone things down a bit lest it impact the respectability of the main brand. You’d, thankfully, be wrong. Many of the Boundless-published comics took past Avatar Press properties and gave them a sexy modern sheen. We were presented with elaborations on old clever ideas that resulted in legitimately good stories, and which *also* contained insanely detailed illustrations of sex. I swear, this was some of the most explicit stuff you’d find in mainstream comics (close-up sketches of penetration were the order of the day), but it was also smart!
One series was titled, “Lookers,” and it focused on lady detectives where one was also an internet camgirl (an early iteration of what we now call OnlyFans, ask your Generation X/Millenial friends) and the other was the, “Muscle,” who hunted down, “Men’s Rights Activists,” that harassed or doxxed other women. They also have to help a female superhero known as Ember from having a sex tape leak. It sounds a little silly and a bit political, and it is. It’s also ingenious with the literal first lines of the series containing some complex media criticism remarking, “The Male gaze. As the saying goes, it's as old as the hills. And like the hills, it hasn’t been ground down so much as paved over. Civilization, democracy, freedom of choice…new forms, same sentiment. It’s 2016, and the male gaze is a webcam.” That’s insightful text worthy of a collegiate paper, and right beside it are illustrations of a woman flashing her perky breasts to an internet camera—Boundless basically having its cake and eating it too, but *damn,* it eats good.
Avatar Press and Boundless started putting out a lot less stuff in the late 2010s. There was a cool anthology of various fun comics spearheaded by Alan Moore (Avatar Press was maybe the one publisher he left comics on good terms with) called, “Cinema Purgatorio,” and a series by Kieron Gillen that reimagined World War II as being fought with superpowered Nazis and Americans was a hit (”Uber,) before that just sort of stopped being published. Oh, *then* we had COVID, and Avatar/Boundless quit doing much of anything. The companies still *exist,* and you can buy back issues of their comics on their websites or such, but there are zero rumblings of any future comics. Avatar Press actually owns the incredibly popular online comic-book tabloid, “Bleeding Cool,” so its legacy lives on there, I suppose. Still, I miss the old Avatar (and later, Boundless) that would put out a comic like, “Threshold,” where on one page you’d have Warren Ellis imagining a drug-induced crime-ridden city with a cop who can’t stop a ghostly murderer (”Dark Blue,”) and the next page you’d have a demon chick getting double penetrated in a fiery hellscape (a number of random, “Hellina,” comics contain such scenes, trust me). At least we have our memories and back issues.
