Continued and concluded from yesterday;

7.

It's the fact that Thomas Blake has so successfully turned himself into a formidable super-powered mercenary while completely failing to attend to the root causes of his personal failings that makes the character such a beguiling one. No matter what he attempts, and no matter how hard he tries, he's always going to fail in the end, because, as we've discussed, his psychology is that of a dangerously obtuse, self-obsessed, self-pitying and irresponsible child. It's hard not to empathise a touch, and on occasion far more than just a touch, with a character that captures our most despicably childish qualities just as it's impossible to ever completely take his side. And so the fascination of watching him chase down one chimera after another is as strangely moving as it's often both amusing and, and on occasion, rather repellent. Catman's adventures are marked far less by the enigma of whether he's going to achieve his goals so much as how badly he's going to screw up along the way, and the more physically impressive he becomes, the more frustrating it is for him that all that strength and ferocity won't bring him the things that he's always wanted.


Everything that promises to liberate Catman simultaneously oppresses him. And so, although Thomas Blake might earn the respect of some of his once-fellow super-villains, and although he may occasionally achieve a substantial pay-day through craft and violence, he can't ever be generally respected for being a good man, because the costume he's using to try to earn that respect also marks his own mental flaws and ethical corruption.


8.

Ms Simone has been careful to constantly underline the fact that the identity of "Catman" constitutes an ideal for Thomas Blake of all that he could be if he just worked to make the most of himself. That costume, those powers, those compromised achievements, all serve as facets of an exemplar of the very best that Thomas Blake is capable to dreaming for himself. When discussing with Batman the state that Catman had allowed himself to degenerate into, prior to his rebirth in the hills of South Africa, Blake refers to a period "when I wasn't myself", implying that he's now very much himself. Fitting into that silly costume, with its soft blunt ears and its kitty-scratch emblem, fighting with some of the most dangerous characters on Earth-DC, living his wretched life on his own confused and compromised terms; all that constitutes for Blake the essential business of being himself. Catman is his better self, and without that, he seems to feel that he isn't a person at all, so much as waste of potential and life, an absolute loser. And the more he tries to live up to the ideal of being Catman, it seems, the more he assumes he'll one day perhaps become a better man, a more respected and admirable man. He confuses Catman with the whole of his potential, being ignorant of the things he might achieve if he could think in a clearer and more moral fashion. He assumes that the business of being Catman will polish and illuminate the true "Thomas Blake", so that he'll no longer have to be ashamed or confused or wretched, but shining up "Catman" just makes a better fighter out of an incompetent human being.


On occasion, Thomas Blake will sense that there's something exceptionally wrong with him that leads him into behaving in troubling ways. We see him trying to talk to Deadshot, for example, about his suspicion that there's some quality missing in the pair of them that causes them to do terrible things, but Blake's solution isn't to stop and identify that problem so much as to throw himself again into the business of being a better lion-themed super-mercenary. And in that, he's a recognisably late 20th century, early 21st century man; he unconsciously identifies his - shudder - inner self with virtue, and associates not being "myself" with betraying his own potential. If only he could be truer to himself, he seems to believe, everything would be far better than fine.

But, as we discussed yesterday, this identity of "Catman" is nothing more than the wet dream of a deeply flawed psychology. Thomas Blake's ambition to be an admirable force for good, while still being free to do whatever he wants, will always and inevitably be short-circuited by the fact that he's concentrating on his fighting skills and tracking abilities rather than his flawed cognitive processes. And his membership of the Secret Six of course only drags him further and further away from any possible moment of crisis when he might see himself for what he is. Being with the Six is as counter-productive a business for him as hanging out in "Cheers" would be for a chronic alcoholic, because living with his troop of vicious super-comrades reinforces all his delusions and provides him with the short-term pleasures and sense of purpose that obscures his inadequacies.


9.

Suffering as he does with a chronic inferiority complex and what looks like serious attachment issues, it's no surprise to note how quickly Blake decides that the Secret Six is his family and its members his precious friends. By his second adventure with the team, he's already decided that Deadshot might be the very best friend he's ever had, which is both a terribly sad and an absolutely insane judgment, no matter how bereft of decent company he's been. But Blake obviously needs to feel that he's loved by those around him, and so Deadshot is his worthy if worrying buddy. Similarly, it's noticeable how Catman declares himself willing to risk his life to rescue Scandal Savage from her insane and immortal father, despite his having fought with her for little but a few months, if that. These intense thoughts, feelings and actions are all way out of proportion with common sense, but Blake doesn't know how to contextualise his emotions or recognise his insecurities. And so, his need to belong over-rides whatever little common-sense he has. In truth, for all his taciturn nature and his appearance of being self-reliant, he's terribly needy. Deadshot's slaughter of Catman's precious South African pride, for example, is quickly swept under the carpet with a pathetic haste. And Deadshot's habit of, for example, driving cars into Blake and expressing a lack of concern for Catman's emotional and bodily well-being can't do more than faintly and passingly dent Catman's fondness for Lawton. It's a naivety about his colleagues that appears again when he declares that he can't believe that Ragdoll would ever betray them after that seems to have very much occurred. Any man who can't believe that Ragdoll might betray them has surely missed the point that Ragdoll, for all of his apparent loyalty and good humour, has very much got his own peculiar psychology too.


But Blake has a quietly desperate need to belong, and so Ragdoll must have absolute integrity and Deadshot must be a true comrade and mate. And so Catman lives in a state of constant denial, although occasionally troubled by thoughts which, for example, suggest that Deadshot and he might end up fighting to the death one day. It's a nightmare that most would regard as being worth remembering, but it never seems to inspire Catman to be any less trusting of Deadshot.

Indeed, such is Catman's neediness that he'll ignore the evidence of betrayals that anyone else might at the very least be lastingly upset by. The Huntress may stab him in the leg while seeming to flirt with him, but that can't affect his warm judgement of her. And even the loathsome Cheshire, who uses Catman as nothing but a walking sperm donor before betraying the Six to Luthor's Society, is defended by Blake when he's reminded that she triggered a nuclear bomb above the capital city of Quirac; "we don't know that she's blown up a country" he says, because he doesn't want to have to know that she's undeniably done so.


And so this drive to belong somewhere keeps him where he is, as part of a dysfunctional group that he chooses to regard as his pride even as they fail to achieve any so ordered and stable an existence. His observation that the Six don't talk to each other in the absence of the kidnapped Scandal Savage explains something of his fervour to rescue her. In her absence, his new family isn't just missing a member so much as it's missing a matriarch who constantly establishes and reestablishes social relations between otherwise alienated individuals, and the illusion of family means a great deal to Blake, even though the family he wants to believe in doesn't truly exist at all.

It's one of the aspects of Blake's personality that most endears him to us, of course. He may not be able to recognise, let alone articulate, his desperate need to belong, but everything he does is coloured by it. And at times it's almost as if he were an abused child that's moved home and school so many times that even standing at a bus-stop becomes a frightening process of hiding from anxiety and searching for reassurance among folks that must surely be his new best friends.


10.

Whatever doubts Blake has about being Catman and belonging to the Secret Six, the distractions and pleasures of his costumed identity provide him with more than enough moments of intense activity and sensation to stave off any fundamental questions about his objective situation. Like all social groups, the Six have their shared rituals which bond them. They meet across the table while Scandal Savage discusses missions and outlines where their fees have been invested. They change costumes together, as in "Dead Of Winter", where the team can't bring themselves to rush off as is absolutely necessary into combat without pulling on their fighting togs. And of course they're completely reliant on each other in the field, whether they're being hunted down by Black Lanterns or ambushed by a force of 50 or so super-villains outside Gotham City, a gang of costumed killers rather poignantly described by Blake as "mostly d-listers and losers". In the self-interest of protecting each other during their missions lies the illusion of close relations based on common and fond values rather than self-interest and need.


And in those brief moments of adrenalin-rush and attention-focus encountered during the Secret Six's usually-disastrous missions, Thomas Blake can over-ride all his demons and fully concentrate on those things that he really can do well. Whether it's determining battlefield strategy or trying to survive against armies of human killers and battalions of super-powered ones, Catman can not only live in the moment, but gain credit for doing so. He's the one who flies his colleagues in, the one who advises them on how to stay alive, and the one they can probably most rely on when the punch- ups start. It's no wonder he associates the role of Catman within the context of the Secret Six with success and fulfilment, because compared to what Thomas calls "The old me", the fat loser whose "milk and cookies" would probably have been "whooped" by Batman every time, as he admits, his new self at his teammates side has at least some status, some purpose and some measure of achievement.


And in this way, his membership of the Six constantly delays the moment when he'll have to come to terms with himself. At the beginning of "Unhinged", for example, Blake rather futilely confides to Deadshot that he's "lost the horizon", that's he lost faith in what we might call the "Catman project", and that he's even "thinking" about going straight. He's grasped that there's a fundamental quality of restraint and regret missing from his thinking and his behaviour, and that it's not his conscience troubling him so much as the awareness that his conscience isn't doing any such thing. It could have been a fundamental turning point in his life, but it's one that's lost as soon as the Catman costume is pulled on again and mayhem indulged in. And by the end of that misadventure, Blake is so consumed by costumed identity and so lost in the moment of trying to survive that he's found his horizon again. He is, he declares to the Huntress, no more unworthy of being saved from hell than all the other super-villains around him, and the fact that it's actually his own flaws that he should be concerned with, rather than the possibility that other reprobates might share them, has quite escaped him again.


11.

But of course, the business of being Catman and fighting with the Secret Six isn't ever going to inspire the transformation of Thomas Blake into a self-aware, well-adjusted, benign member of society. Belonging to the Six is for Blake a process which functions somewhat like methadone to a heroin addict; the very worst of his problems are temporarily controlled, but the treatment's no cure while the programme's addictive in itself. And as a consequence, Thomas Blake can't ever quite delude himself enough to feel entirely secure in his own skin, no matter what the Six achieve or who Catman out-slashes. It's a fact that can be observed in how he behaves with his colleagues when the bullets aren't flying, for he's usually seen sitting quietly and looking on whenever there's no fighting or planning to be done. Like a shy guest at a party who takes on kitchen duties in order to mask their awkwardness, Blake flies planes and drives cars, establishes strategies and worries about coming disasters, but he never seems socially at ease. Indeed, placed in the midst of these people who're supposedly his nearest and dearest, he often seems unable to handle casual conversation with anyone beyond Deadshot at all. In the "road trip", during "Compound Fracture", for example, everyone else has something to discuss, but Blake's quite silent and focused on the road. No wonder he misses Scandal, the social nexus of the group, when she's absent in "Six Degrees Of Devastation".


And no matter how Thomas Blake transforms himself, it's never enough to ensure that he's as respected beyond the ranks of the Six as he longs to be. He's constantly insulted by the folks he meets as well as the people he fights beside. He's "Captain Cat" to Tarantula, an "imbecile" to Batman, "a perpetual bile-stained amateur" to Dr Psycho, and even Ragdoll unkindly laughs at the idea that Blake might be mistaken for the Dark Knight. To Bane, Catman is nothing more than Batman's "pale brown shadow". In fact, it often seems as if Blake has only to walk into the presence of another super-villain to find himself being referred to as "Kitty" and "Catface", just as he was once the "cowardly lion" to Green Arrow before he remade himself. Even so, the respect he gets these days is a far more substantial brew than he ever earned before. Folks may still on occasion laugh, but they mock less as time passes, and so the costume and the codename and the colleagues all combine to make his long-term problems more tolerable in the short-term.

Being Catman in the Secret Six is certainly a more effective palliative for his feelings of inadequacy than his previous strategy of dying his hair black because he hoped it'd make him look "tough", but at least that option had the virtue of doing less harm to others.


12.

Finally, it's well worth noting how Ms Simone shows us how Blake's mind working to protect itself from the truth of his rather squalid, rather wretched existence. For example, when he's faced with circumstances which are particularly disturbing to him, Blake untypically calls on God or refers to religious concepts. It's usually a sign that he's ashamed of his behaviour or deeply concerned for someone else, or, usually, a mixture of the two. When he stabs Scandal for the second time, for example, he declares that "I sincerely hope to God you can heal from this.", as if he's somehow showing goodwill of any substance despite just having seriously wounding her. (Not stabbing Scandal twice in two separate occasions would've been the more godly approach to take, of course.) And when he's driving away from a host of freed North Koreans prisoners and effectively dooming them to death in the snow, he grasps at Deadshot's declaration that "It's only five miles to China. They might make it" with a shamed reply of "Christ I hope so." Of course, Deadshot's pathetic attempt to not feel guilty works on no rational level at all; five miles to weakened prisoners in hostile country might as well be five hundred miles. But Blake's desperate to find something that will assuage his guilt that he's calling on Jesus to help him feel better, if not help the prisoners themselves. Finally, in one of the series most touching and yet most stomach-turning scene to date, Blake is moved to assure Scandal that she still has a "soul" even as she's horribly torturing Pistolera, displaying the fact that he associates the sacred with the people he cares about rather than the things they do. Scandal has a "soul" because Blake doesn't want the Six's matriach upset, although it's hard to see what's soul-strengthening in the act of cold-blooded and protracted torture.


There's no thought that Blake can't turn into a defence against self-knowledge. Cheshire mocks him for wanting to be respected by "men of virtue", but the truth is that he wants to be respected as being a virtuous without having to behave in any coherently virtuous fashion. He's got a string of excuses that kick into gear whenever he feels he's being called upon to defend the morality of his actions. It's a fact that's best expressed in the speech he gives to the Doom Patrol in order to distract them before a super-powered brawl. Why should you be trying to arrest us, he asks;

"For petty little robberies and for stealing people's hats? ... Do you guys really care if money goes from some rich people to us, only to be replaced by insurance ... Look ... you all and us, we're in the middle. On the far end of one side, there's the Justice League, all shiny and sweet. On the other far end, there's people like Joker and Darkseid, who'd kill everything and everyone if they could. Us, we're in the grey zone. Neither side approves of either of us."


It's a speech full of what criminal psychologists have termed "techniques of neutralisation", or ways of convincing oneself that bad deeds haven't really been committed. And for all that the speech an attention-distracting ploy, the sentiments are too well-expressed and come too easily to Blake's mouth in stressful circumstances not to reflect his real thinking. Take a second glance at his speech and it's saturated with excuses such as;

• we only steal a few little things. We're not serious criminals. Crime is relative and not absolute. Stealing a few things isn't really bad, especially compared to what others do.
• the things we do don't financially harm our victims. They're always compensated, one way or another.
• our crimes don't really involve violence or threat and they don't inspire upset and trauma; we're just thieves, and so thieving is all I need discuss here
  
• other people want to kill everyone! We're not really bad when you compare us to them.
  
• you're not liked either, you know, and you ought to throw in with us because morality is really a popularity contest. The more of us who're disapproved of, the less questionable our actions must be.

And it's a subtly clever touch on Ms Simone's part that Blake's criticisms of the superheroes he meets are founded in exactly the opposite principles to those self-serving ones listed above. If, as he argues, he and the other members of the Six aren't really to be considered culpable because they're not truly as bad as they might be, super-heroes are expected to be absolutely morally perfect or they're worthy of nothing but contempt. Green Arrow, for example, is attacked by Catman for being morally compromised by the programme of mind-wipes revealed in "Identity Crisis";

"You were all great once. You can be that way again .. But you'd better hurry. Before the line between you and us gets too damn blurry to see."

Now, the JLA did indeed cross a significant moral Rubicon there, but the point is that Blake expects those who represent authority to be perfect or they're not worthy of his respect, let alone the right to sit in judgment over him. He can't grasp that the value of the law remains even if those who serve it are compromised. He only sees folks who might limit his freedom and his own good opinion of himself. In that, he's like a child who argues that if her mother can raise her voice, then she can too, and whenever she likes as well. Super-villains, according to Blake, shouldn't be judged by what they do, but by whether they're as bad as "Darkseid" or not. But superheroes have to be utterly spotless or they're worth little at all. It's one rule for Catman and another for those superheroes who might challenge his own view of himself, the "little dictators" he hates so.



Even when Blake faces down Batman, who wasn't involved in the brain-wiping programme, he still has to find a way to neutralise his opponents moral authortity. And so he argues that Batman's only pretending not to be tempted to harm his various opponents, as if it would matter a whit if that were true or not. Batman's only playing a role of being ethically perfect, implies Blake, and somehow that makes Catman his equal. But the point isn't whether Batman is tempted to do wrong or not, but the fact that he doesn't do so. Blake will be Batman's moral equal when he starts behaving ethically and not before. Whether Mr Wayne occasionally wants to kick the Penguin off of a roof is irrelevant; he doesn't, whereas Blake travels the world killing large groups of people and then arguing that the survivors should be allowed to escape execution, as if that makes him a good man.

"I know we're not the Justice League." Blake later declares, just as he states that the Six are a "team of A-Holes". But by that, he doesn't really mean to say that he and his colleagues are immoral recidivists committing a string of appalling crimes one after another. He just means that he's rather hard-done by, but that he tries, and that he's well-meaning, and that other folks are far worse than he is. And then he pulls on the costume and he hides his immorality behind noble-sounding slogans of "honour" such as "I like to face my enemy face on - like a man", and he manages all the time to ignore the fact that he's doing all he can not to face up to himself at all.


13.

It's disconcerting to think that one day a writer might be given responsibility for Catman who sees him as nothing more complex than a previously criminal individual learning how to be a superhero. There's already a huge number of characters whose progress might be taken as a template for such an approach, from Hawkeye to the newest take on Ant-Man, and the assumption of many writers seems to be that everyone loves a handsome rogue who's seen the light. But, as I've struggled to express in these pieces, the true appeal of Catman isn't in his bad-ass-ness, or in any supposed superheroic apprenticeship, but in his deeply flawed personality, and any attempt to make a superhero out of him would require the character to cease being Catman in the first place.

It's the great strength of Gail Simone's conception of the character of Catman that while he can't ever win what he wants to achieve, he's not the victim of his own story either. He's every bit to blame for the things he does even as he endearingly longs for family and friendship and respect.


Yet the sympathy he inspires does at times threaten to overwhelm the fact that he's not just a bloke who's gone slightly wrong so much as a major-league criminal who's ruined the lives of countless folks all over the world. For he can sound so terribly plausible and caring and worthy of our sympathy, such as when he points out that none of the Secret Six has had a parent who cared for them. And then, having absorbed what sounds like a touching declaration of vulnerability, the reader recalls that Blake's not done a thing to rescue his own child from Cheshire since the events of "Six Degrees Of Separation". In fact, I've struggled to find a single reference to Catman's child in the later stories, let alone a sustained campaign on his part to try to find and help his baby. It's exactly the kind of occluded, unempathetic thinking that permits Thomas Blake to self-pityingly discuss the fate of his soul while, as Deadshot points out, utterly ignoring the plight before him of "two defenceless potential witnesses with a gang of humiliated racist scumbags."


Thomas Blake is an awful man, but he's also a profoundly lonely and well-meaning one. That's why we're so interested in seeing what he does next. He can be used to perform the most extreme of heroic deeds as well as the most profane and disgusting of immoral ones, and yet still stay true to the psychological profile that Ms Simone has created for him, which means that he'll never become stale as a character.

Or: Miss Simone hasn't created a heroically tormented bad-ass. She's created a pathetic but lethal bad-ass who can be put to use as superhero or supervillain without ever losing the studied contradictions which make him so compelling. And so, where yesterday we discussed how making a character popular doesn't rely on making them violently able, so today we've chatted about how making a character interesting can be achieved by putting noble dreams before them while ensuring that they're too flawed to ever fulfil such ambitions.

Huzzah!

Now, why aren't more folks writing clever in such a way?



Well, I always end up feeling somewhat dim after writing about Ms Simone's work, so I hope you'll forgive the above if dim is what it's been. Coming next, a piece on Marvel's new Heroic Age compilation. A splendid day to you, dear kind reader, and my best wishes for your sticking together!

.

When we last discussed the Secret Six on this blog, back in the distant summer days of early August, we chatted about Deadshot and of how his disposition had been so artfully clarified and developed by Gail Simone. In particular, we talked of how Ms Simone had cleverly and subtly established her take on the personality of Floyd Lawton so that he might both evolve as a character in the Secret Six and yet remain fully recognisable as a familiar mainstay of the DCU (*1). In that piece, and I shan't repeat here the argument I made there in any detail, I promise, I contended that this was an achievement that had received far too little attention and praise, for all that the Secret Six is a comic book much loved both by professionals and fans, and for all that Deadshot is a popular supporting character in today's DCU. And it struck me then, and it still does today, that Ms Simone works in such a modest and unshowy fashion that the uniquely innovative way that she handles character in her books is all too-often taken for granted, or even quite unfairly overlooked.


2.

We might say that Ms Simone's stewardship of Deadshot displays an evolutionary approach to character development. For it's obvious, of course, that Ms Simone had worked to identify a set of key and core psychological drives which might explain Floyd Lawton's behaviour in the DCU before she'd began to chronicle his misadventures, just as it's obvious that she's used that understanding to skillfully develop Deadshot ever since without ever irrevocably changing his established nature. And so, for all the subtle changes that Lawton has been subject to over the past five or so years, he'd still be immediately recognisable to anyone returning to read DC comics after a fair few years away. Indeed, our imaginary returnee might not at first even notice the slightest difference to Deadshot at all, which is of course the point. Ms Simone has made sure that Deadshot exists in a stable form that's always ready for duty elsewhere in DC's line of books, while at the same time ensuring that he exists as a distinctly three-dimensional character undergoing ingenious and self-consistent change in the pages of the Secret Six.

*1- That piece can be found in the August archive under the title of "Daddy Deadshot"


3.

But the attention that Ms Simone has given to Catman constitutes by contrast an undoubtedly revolutionary process, taking a profoundly unimpressive super-villain and transforming him into one of the most fascinating and popular of the second string characters in the DCU. In doing so, she's achieved the improbable transmutation of a contemptible and functionless Batman knock-off into something of a star, into a figure that could conceivably carry a mini-series or two on his own as well as maintaining his berth in the Secret Six. It's an almost unprecedented turn-about in popular appeal and critical acclaim, and it's one that would have been simply inconceivable, and in truth somewhat laughable, to anybody except Ms Simone just half a decade ago. This was, after all, Catman.

But most tellingly, what's made this radical take on the previously almost-utterly inconsequential Thomas Blake so compelling isn't the surface make-over that Ms Simone and her artistic collaborators have given him. After all, although Blake has had the range and depth and effectiveness of his powers and abilities greatly increased, and although he's now capable of believably holding his own against even the Batman for a moment or two, the increase in his value as a superpowered brawler can hardly explain why he's now such a prominent and engaging figure. Yes, Thomas Blake is, as Ms Simone has declared, now a "bad-ass", but then again, who isn't these days? The history of the post-Watchman


mainstream superhero can often seem to be little more than one example after another of previously unimpressive characters having their powers amped up and their fighting capacity increased. And time after time, such revamps usually succeed in doing little but destroying whatever limited appeal the characters involved previously had, while producing identi-kit grim'n'gritty also-rans in return. Another writer might, for example, choose to armour up the Signalman as a Wolverine-esque psychotic, and have Lex Luthor declare him to be a fearsome opponent, but that doesn't mean that the audience will either believe that this is true or feel pleasurably enticed into following the further adventures of Philip Cobb, Signalman, and certainly not as they're following the second life of Thomas Blake, the Catman.

So the fact that Catman is now a rather fearsome, claw-slashing fighter of whom even Talia al Ghul will speak highly of, and compare "for a moment" to the Batman, is in a very real way an almost irrelevant issue when assessing Thomas Blake's popularity. For Talia might indeed be temporarily seduced by Catman's appearance and bearing and find herself believing that he now possesses something of the substance of Bruce Wayne, but we readers will soon discover that that's not really true. Catman is, yes, a "bad-ass", but he's both a great deal more and considerably less than that term might usually imply, and there lies the reason for the character's appeal.


4.

"Mr Blake, it's clear that you've been through a transformative event." Talia declares when she and Dr Psycho first meet Ms Simone's thoroughly revised Catman, and those relatively-few readers who'd come across Blake before, and who'd succeeded in remembering him, could surely only agree with Ms al Ghul. Very muscular, considerably naked, surrounded and protected by five extremely intimidating lions, and a newly-minted master of jungle-king speak to boot -"Man has been in the business of attempting to make them extinct for decades." - Thomas Blake certainly doesn't seem anything like the "mere buffoon" that either the super-villains or the readers expected. And for awhile, it does seem as if the new Catman is a man transformed. He immediately establishes himself as the Secret Six's field leader, he defeats the incredibly-powerful Captain Nazi with little but a host of syringes inserted into the vile Abernathy's eyes, and he's even politically-engaged enough to denounce his opponent as a "dumb fascist Nazi"; it's hard not to be impressed by this Thomas Blake.


And yet, for all Blake's new physical abilities, and for all his undoubted bravery and determination, it soon becomes obvious that he's not a reformed character, although he is of course a transformed one. The self-loathing and shame that he's felt at his previous status as an obese, washed-up super-villain has indeed motivated him to change his life, but he's not changed nearly enough of the way in which he thinks and feels about the world at all. As the Huntress says of him, when he declares that he's as worthy as any other super-villain fighting for Neron's get-out-of-Hell card, he's not "repented" of the things he's done so much as regretted the failure that the pursuit of his previous goals brought him. He grasps that he's done some terrible things, or at least he does to a vague and ill-defined degree, but his solution is less to transform himself morally than reconstruct himself in terms of power, competence and focus. And in doing so, Thomas Blake has certainly turned himself in an impressive super-being, if not a super-hero, but he's still childish, egotistical, deficient in empathy and lacking the intellectual discipline to grasp the moral issues he thinks he's trying to fully engage with. He surrounds himself with comrades who are almost as morally compromised as can be imagined, engages with opponents who are even worse, and then judges his virtue in comparison to that of theirs.

It's as if Blake believes that, for example, arguing not to kill off the surviving guards of Vandal Savage's castle is in itself a definitively beneficient act despite the presence of all their slain and wounded brethern piled up on the ground around Catman and his colleagues.


And outside this closed circle of appalling super-villains and flawed superheroes exists the everyday world, wherein typical human beings attempt to live as best they can, and Blake rarely even notices them as they do so, unless it's to hurt them or keep them warily them at a distance.

For he just can't grasp, and he doesn't truly want to grasp, that being a good man isn't a question of doing a little better than some of those around him. Thomas Blake simply can't understand, because he's never learnt how to do so, that being somewhat less destructive than the worst of humanity isn't of itself a marker of the ethical life. At times, he sees glimmers of the fatal contradictions in his ideals and his behaviour, but he's too often locked into a myth of how he's doing the best that he can, despite the opinions of those judgemental and hypocritical superheroes he keeps running across. And so he stumbles along, an endless series of easily foreseeable and avoidable disasters before him, and he carries the best of intentions along with the most compromised of methods and every step forward he takes is immediately complimented with a traumatic step backwards. For he so often lets himself believe that he really is trying to be a better man, an admirable man, and an honourable man, but he's not, and so he's always going to fall short, because he doesn't truly understand what a good and honourable man might be.

Even if he were really trying to be good, he couldn't get there from here.


And that's what makes Thomas Blake such a fascinating character. He's marked by short-term strategies, a massive shortfall in empathy, sloppy and impulsive thinking, and a heart full of shame and self-pity. He exists in the stage of moral development that we might expect to find a typical if somewhat alienated pre-pubescent in, raging against authority for the inequity of its hypocrisies while longing for authority to respect the flawed and limited steps towards the good that he makes.

He wants to do well, he really does, except for the times when he wants very much to do terrible things instead, and so there's always a sense that Thomas Blake is just one second away from committing the most shameful, unforgivable sins, no matter how many times he manages to throw a punch or two on the side of the angels.


5.

To take but two moments which sum up the fact that Catman's emotional and intellectual development hasn't proceeded a pace with his physical capacity to, for example, down a superhero as competent as the Bronze Tiger, or his ability to charm and excite a super-heroine such as the Huntress, who rather improbably declares that she only likes "nice boys" while swooning in his presence;

a. He knowingly delivers up the unconscious body of Wonder Woman into the hands of Smyth, a creature so morally repellent that even Ragdoll refers to him as "not a nice man" before murdering him. And Blake does so despite knowing that Smyth will undoubtedly kill Diana, and in a particularly gruesome fashion too. That Blake later has a change of heart isn't a badge of honour or redemption; any man whose conscience only kicks in after it's had a great deal of time to consider whether letting the monstrous Grendal murder Wonder Woman is a good idea is in no way morally competent. The fact that the reader is left suspecting that Catman was at the very least willing to see Princess Diana suffer simply because Blake resents how certain superheroes, or rather "little dictators", "sneer" and show "contempt" for him merely cleverly underscores how egotistical his ethical calculations are.


That those superheroes are often right, if somewhat uncharitable, to sneer and show contempt for a mass murderer, thief and mercenary such as Blake completely passes him by. "One saves a terrorist, one kills a terrorist. Who did more in for the world, in the end?" he asks of Ragdoll and Bane, and the very question, as well as the audience it's addressed to, damns Catman without any other word needing to be said.


b. Blake's inability to grasp that asking Deadshot, of all people, to help him with his moral quandaries is an utterly futile business which brilliantly shows how ethically deluded he is. It's not so much that Floyd's advice is as practically useless as it's morally compromised, but rather the fact that Blake could even think of asking Deadshot questions about whether their murderous natures are the result of nature or nurture. It's a scene that's as chilling as it's hilarious; Floyd Lawton is a repugnant if at-times roguish killer whose emotions are so suppressed that he's effectively sociopathic. No-one with the slightest concept of what "evil" might be would ask Deadshot to define its causes and cures.

But it's also a mark of how terribly confused and touchingly lonely Catman is, that all he's got is Deadshot to turn to, and that's an unhappy truth that helps endear us to the character even as Catman is thinking and behaving in a quite repellent fashion. No matter how hard he tries, no matter how much he achieves, Catman can never reach a point where he can rest and feel satisfied, because he doesn't grasp, again, what that might involve. And in that contradiction, between his muscles and his mind, between his desire to do the right thing and his ability and willingness to do so, lies, I believe, the particular and considerable appeal of Gail Simone's revolutionary reinvention of Catman. We just can't help but care for this lost and lonely boy, just as we ought to never forget that he's a profundly deluded and dangerous man.


6.

Having sat down and re-read the various Secret Six collections again in the past few days, including the newly-released "Danse Macabre", I'm at a loss to know if there's a more piteous moment in the whole run than Catman's first appearance in "Villain's United". Of course, there are scenes concerning other members of the Six which immediately arouse the reader's sympathy, such as those showing Scandal's despair at the loss of Knockout, or even that of Ragdoll betraying the unsuspecting and terribly vulnerable Mad Hatter, but there's nothing to match the melancholy that's inspired by a reacquaintance with what appears to be Thomas Blake's finest hour. There he suddenly is, an unexpectedly impressive presence standing half-naked in the wilds of the north-west of South Africa, all defiance and threat, a man who has, as Talia says, "remade himself", become "Admirable", commanding a pride of beasts and facing down the frankly terrifying Dr Psycho and, through him, the might of Lex Luthor's "Society". It appears to be one of those defining moments which marks the point at which a reborn, newly-heroic figure reappears from a season in the wilderness and takes his place as a force for justice in the world.


But of course, that's all an illusion, and, within days, even the lions who stand so loyally and ferociously by Catman will be slaughtered by Deadshot. The opinion of Talia al Ghul may seem to count for something, when it's her power and intelligence that's being positioned straight in front of the reader's eye, but then, Talia isn't a woman known for her empathy or moral perception either; she's not a trustworthy source for the reader to use to assess the success of Catman's remaking of himself. If we trust her first impressions, and those lent to us by Dale Eaglesham's art, which celebrates a supremely self-confident and steamingly sexual Catman, we might indeed think that Blake has made himself into a man of some "stature" even beyond that indicated by those considerable muscles and that knee-melting stare.

But Thomas Blake has remade himself in the only way he can conceive of, which is, somewhat counter-productively, to turn himself into a well-functioning leader of a society of lions rather than a better human being. Within the fundamental and relatively simple social structures of his pride, he has indeed earned himself a place of authority and worth. He's recreated himself, focused himself, made himself something of a different and far more impressive creature, and he's no longer the overweight loser who even other underachieving supervillains laughed at. But for all that he's changed, he's only changed by becoming a beast. He wanted to be relied upon and respected rather than mocked, and he's achieved that, but not in the context of a life with other, typical human beings. He's not mastered the complexities of human decision making or developed his empathic understanding of other people. He's not learned to grasp how morality exists separate to his own individual desires, and even his communication skills remain somewhat basic, as the simple and chuckle-inducing example of his licking of the Huntress's neck during their first dance might testify.


Human society is of course infinitely more complex and demanding than that of a small community of lions in the South African hills, and heading a pride is of course no preparation for becoming a productive and socially engaged member of a modern nation-state. And so whatever impressive changes Catman has achieved for himself physically, the root causes of his consistently dysfunctional behaviour remain unrecognised, let alone untreated. Thomas Blake might have better saved himself all the sacrifices he made during his African sojourn and invested in a demanding programme of cognitive and emotional development in a therapeutic community instead. That might have taught Blake how to be a human being rather than giving him a better understanding of what it means to be a highly competent lion.

But no, being a lion has brought him a measure of the respect and purpose that he's never known, just as it's trapped him in a role that dooms every enterprise he embarks upon beyond the occasional punch-up.


"That bastard is part of my pride." says Catman to a man he's stabbing to death in retaliation for an assault on Bane, "He dies when I say.", and it all sounds rather commanding and noble until the reader disconnects from the sentimentality of the scene and asks themselves whether the basis for practical, let alone ethical, action is to think like a dominant lioness would.

No wonder poor Thomas Blake is such a mess, and no wonder he causes such great harm. If only he'd aspired to be a more rounded person rather than a more perfect beast, he and a great many more folks might have lived far less wounded and unhappy lives.

To be continued and concluded tomorrow;


I hope the reader will forgive the fact that this waiting-for-the-trade reader has even avoided as best he might the basic content-descriptions of the Secret Six's adventures beyond Danse Macabre. This piece therefore only covers the 6 collections up to and including Danse Macabre. And I also hope, as always, that your day is splendid, that you're sticking together, and that you might be back for the second and final piece of this look at Catman, and then, beyond that, for a chatter about Marvel's new Heroic Age compilation.

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1. "Long As My Ammo Holds, Anyway"

I. Reverse-engineering a comic book in order to discern the writers intention when creating it is, as we've discussed here before, a dubious proposition. (*1) But in the absence of the opportunity to grill key writers for a day or three on the minutiae of their working methods, and with few interviews at hand that cover the topic on discussion, reverse-engineering is the only method a curious blogger can employ. Of course, the advantage of such a method is that it nearly always arrives at an answer, even if it isn't the one that the author concerned would actually have given themselves. (Stare hard enough at a comic book and ask "how was that done?" for long few minutes or so and a solution of some kind will come to mind, which is better than none at all, I suppose, even if it bears no relation to any real-world knowledge ever applied.) And so, for the curious, there's no avoiding the interrogating of the comic book's pages in order to wring from them just a few of their secrets.

II. It's a terrible shame that so many of the key aspects of writing for mainstream comics aren't covered by the various text books and articles which have become so ubiquitous in the past ten years or so. For, yes, the curious amateur writer certainly needs to know again about character, script formats and the virtues of the three and five act structures in comparison with each other, but there remain so many problems specific to the superhero


comic which no-one ever seems to talk about. For example, how can a writer maintain interest in a character when they can't fundamentally change her or his nature or situation? And what can be done month-in and month-out with a super-villain such as Deadshot, to take but one example, who at any moment might be called away from the Secret Six in order to star as a familiar villain-of-the-month in the pages of Batman or the Justice League?

How, if those toys have to go back into the common toy-box in the shape that they were found in, can anything be done with them that matters?

*1 - As in "Scandal, Gail Simone & The Secret Six", to be found in the June Archive


2. "But Somethin' Tells Me You're Yankin' My Chain"

I. There's a much-discussed editorial meeting held, or perhaps not held, by Stan Lee in the early 1970s at Marvel, where he allegedly stated that his companies superheroes must no longer be permitted to change in fundamental ways. We might not have realised that these superheroes were going to be such big business when I invented them, said Mr Lee, or so the legend is printed, but we know it now, and we mustn't ruin our heroes by messing with the successful formula that's made them what they are. From now on, he's reported to have said, and has denied ever saying, we'll permit the illusion of change for the characters in our books, but not change itself. Peter Parker might, as an example, discuss graduating from University, and even slave over an exam or two, but come next issue, he'll still be living off a thin grant and learning hyper-physics from a super-villain or two disguised as science professors.

Perhaps that meeting happened, and perhaps it didn't. Opinions are divided. But the issue that it was allegedly concerned with is one which has remained central to the business of writing superheroes ever since. How is it possible to retain an audience's interest in a book and a character which is purposefully locked into a particular status quo? And yet how is it possible for a superhero publisher to allow its properties to be radically changed over the years without running the risk of distorting and even destroying the very characters upon which its wealth is founded?

II. And how can it be done? How is it possible to manage change so that it doesn't undermine a character's longterm appeal, or to even create an illusion of change which will still engage an audience that's seen everything before, and probably at least twice?

And are either of those approaches options which Gail Simone is taking, for example, with characters such as Deadshot in "Secret Six"?


3. "I Make It A Point To Never Laugh At An Expert Knife Man With His Hands Full"

Well, what is Gail Simone doing by taking the approach she has with writing the character of Deadshot?

Well, I don't know.

But I can reverse-engineer what might be a spurious answer, and then we can work forwards again from there.

4. "Just Get Us To Vegas 'Fore My Ass Gives Out"

I. Deadshot may not be a front-line, book-headlining character on today's comic-book shop shelves, but he's definitely been established as one of the most popular super-villains in the DCU by the fine work of creators such as Steve Engelhart and Marshal Rogers, John Ostrander and Kim Yale, and Gail Simone, along with a host of other gifted artists and writers. And no doubt a


substantial part of the character's appeal to many of the creators who've so ably developed him over the past 35 years or so has been the fact that he's not a marquee lead, that he's had but two mini-series of his own, and that he's rarely going to be starring in any other book beyond the one they're writing this month. More secure from the homogenising effects of great success than many of his fellow super-villains, Deadshot has developed as an idiosyncratic and rather disturbing figure, his personality defined in greater depth than many of his fellows while his fundamental role remains constant; Deadshot is the psychologically damaged super-assassin for hire who'll pursue his quarry to the very end in order to fulfil any contract he's taken.

And that's how Deadshot presumably needs to remain after any appearance in a particular creator's book, for chances are that somebody else will have a need for such a super-villain next month, and they may not have time to scrape off the ticks and twists that have been "artistically" added to him. For exorcising his demons and convincingly showing him taking up a new life in a Franciscan Monastery may produce a truly touching individual story, but it won't help the editor of the Justice League line when he needs a fearsome bad guy to accept a contract to kill off the Atom, or whoever.

But if very little can change with Deadshot, why should anybody care about his appearances in "Secret Six", or anywhere else for that matter? Who could be concerned with a super-villain who's exactly the same at the end of a string of comic-book appearances as he was at the beginning?


5. "That's Why I Have A Personal Policy Not To Give A Crap About Anything Or Anyone"

I. Yet it seems obvious to me that Ms Simone has managed the trick of both fundamentally changing Deadshot while staying true to the established parameters that the character has always existed in. As a consequence, Deadshot has developed in unexpected and innovative ways, but he still remains quite recognisable as the individual, and as the super-villain, that he was before. In terms of the character's utility, therefore, he can be used in pretty much the same context as he always was in the past, and yet he's a noticeably different man by degree if not in kind.

He's still a killer. He still wears that costume and fires off those guns. He's still mostly, if not exclusively, true to his word where a contract is concerned, and he's certainly not reformed or become transformed by some moral or spiritual enlightenment.

But he's different all the same, and the way that that's been achieved, if our reverse-engineering is at all to be trusted, is well-worth examining, because it's a trick that's rarely carried off well, and all such skillful tricks deserve a second look, and more.


II. As we've regularly discussed on this blog before, the business of "stewardship"(*2) , the importance of not carelessly changing a franchise character so completely that they become something quite different to what was originally successful, is of vital concern. (Where franchises are concerned, why change a existing and established character without an exceptionally good reason when a new one can be created?) And if, as we began to discuss above, Ms Simone is perhaps pulling off the trick of both changing and yet not-changing Deadshot, then shouldn't this be a skill that others are paying a more formal attention and respect to?

Well, obviously I think so.

And perhaps they all are, and I've just missed the fact.

*2 - See "Leave It Alone: Jack Kirby's New Gods" in the April 2010 folder.


6. "Odds Are He's Dead Already, Sis. I Say We Get Gone"

I. The arc of Deadshot's development over the three consecutive "Secret Six" TPBs that I've acquired (*3) reads as a deliberate and substantial one. Any myth of an illusion of change where the results of that arc are concerned can certainly be discredited, for Floyd Lawton has undergone a major if not fundamental change between the beginning of "Six Degrees Of Devastation" and and the closure of "Depths". And perhaps the fact that this change is indeed considerable but not mold-breaking is the first clue we might discern about how to make a franchise character bend and adapt without breaking. For Deadshot's basic psychological make-up remains constant through these three collections, and his development occurs strictly within the bounds of what his established character could be legitimately expected to do. In essence, Ms Simone doesn't provide her readers with a "new" Deadshot, but with the same "old" Deadshot who's adapted and changed in response to the events that he's experienced.

And so, rather than the re-set button being pushed after every climax, something more subtle and interesting has occurred.


II. The psychological limitations of Deadshot's character were in substantial part laid down before Ms Simone was commissioned to write the Secret Six. Floyd Lawton was, in brief, a man traumatised by his youth and as a consequence unable to believe that his life was worth engaging with. Carrying not a whit if he lived or died, Deadshot evolved an essentially passive personality where his life's direction was concerned. A contract to murder, for example, was adopted with absolute fidelity to its terms, because it gave his life both boundaries and meaning. And since the everyday business of living had proven so utterly unlikely to reward good intentions and efforts with anything other than horror, Deadshot's existence was marked by immediate gratifications and a purposeless drift between murderous assignments. Into this grimmest of existential crisis occasionally drifted an odd kind of attachment felt for alpha males who emotionally evoked memories of his dead brother, but beyond that, Floyd Lawton was a dead man walking, waiting for the hour of his own end with neither anticipation or horror.

And that, as much as the more obvious and showy features of his villainous modus operandi such as his costumes and weapons, was surely such a productive premise for a super-assassin that it was not to be significantly messed with. Whatever change that a creator might consider applying to Deadshot would by necessity have to operate within the limits of the above, or run the risk of being soon discarded as unnecessary and counterproductive by a metaphorical stroke of the editor's mythical red pen.

Which means that one more constraint applies to the freedom of the writer such as Ms Simone who takes on the responsibility of shepherding a character such as Deadshot. Not only does the surface, the flash and powder, of the figure have to be maintained, the sharp uniform, the sharp-shooting. But the good work of previous writers in creating a personality and a psyche needs to respected too.

And so it's a wonder that anything but a constant repetition of previous adventures ever occurs where a well-defined character like Deadshot is concerned. There's a lot to loose by well-meaning and careless innovation, and the degree to which change can occur is limited anyhow.

Some creators must consider that the whole business is hardly worth the bother.

*3 - "Six Degrees Of Devastation", "Unhinged", and "Depths", one of which I had to buy twice because of my own carelessness in losing my first copy, and one which I had to buy twice because the first book dealer did a runner with my dosh, and his prices were unreasonably high too! I mean, honestly! This piece of reverse-engineering has cost me a fortune a relative fortune!


III. Yet, in a subtle and persistent way, Ms Simone can indeed be seen to have been innovating with Deadshot from the very first of the issues that I've read, and presumably the process began long before. For beneath his recognisably laconic and sarcastic exterior, Deadshot is soon to be seen behaving in subtly affectionate, if often unobtrusive, ways in "Six Degrees Of Devastation", breaking with the traditions of long years where the expression of his feelings are concerned. And the fondness and consideration for his allies in the Six that he begins to express there eventually reaches a point where it threatens to destabilise his own personality, rooted as it is in disaffection and distance. If there is a more obvious example of Ms Simone choosing to develop a character which others might have been happy to re-cycle over and over again, I've not seen it yet.

This slow and affecting process of change is often quietly expressed in apparently throw-away lines. Deadshot's "freak" companion Ragdoll's endless wittering concerning his unique sexual perversity is consistently met, for example, not with aggressive put-downs, but with quiet pleas to take such distracting nastiness elsewhere. It's as if Deadshot can't bring himself to engage with the unhinged Ragdoll, but he doesn't want to think badly of him, or even offend him, either. And by the pages of "Unhinged", Deadshot has grown in fondness for Ragdoll to the point at which he actively apologises for considering whether or not to shoot the latter's sister, an act which under the circumstances would have been utterly defensible. This is hardly the dismissive and contemptuous Floyd Lawton that his readers were used to seeing. Indeed, if Deadshot's tenure on the "Suicide Squad" before had been marked by a mixture of compulsion and his compulsive commitment to a given task, then his membership of the Secret Six seems to have been consistently characterised by a baffled and bemused warmth and kindness. (He even gives his team-mates pool-hall affectionate nicknames: "Sis" for Scandal Savage, for example, and "Furballs" for Cat-Man.)

And given that Lawton's life was no longer immediately in danger from the end of "Six Degrees Of Devastation" onwards, and given that it'd been established that his earnings had already assured his daughter entrance to Harvard "a hundred times over", why is he in the Six at all?

After all, it isn't as if Deadshot can't make his way alone as an assasin-for-hire. What is he doing with these people?


IV: On those occasions in these collections when Deadshot appears to be behaving as the Lawton from "Suicide Squad" would, it's because his basic drives and compulsions have been delieberately and carefully kept intact by Ms Simone. And so though he may be seen to be developing a long-fallow capacity for tolerating, and even appreciating, a measure of intimacy, he still possesses a lack of interest in his own welfare, and places himself without apparent concern into the likes of, for example, Korean death camps. Yet despite that pitiful ostrasicism from his own life, he stills acts to kill Pistolera, noticeably without contract or pressing need, because of his concern for Scandal Savage's welfare, and his act of stealing Neron's get-out-of-hell card after so unconvincingly declaring to himself that "Caring is for idiots" was, as Tarantula recognised, motivated largely if not solely by his concern for his team-mates.

Deadshot has become, without seeming to, something of a team-player.

In fact, Lawton's development while a member of the Six has involved a gradual and yet on-reflection shocking assumption of responsibility for the well-being of his colleagues. (At times he almost seems to fighting adopting the role of Daddy Deadshot, protecting his teamates from themselves and the world.) When Scandal and Savage come to blows, for example, it's rather strangely Deadshot who separates them, declaring to her that "...Sis. He didn't mean it.", while demanding of him that "And what the hell is wrong with you, Blake? Not cool, sport." Surely such peacemaking in such circumstances would have been impossible to believe of the Deasdshot on Amanda Waller's watch? And, similarly, what is Deadshot doing organising a prostitute for the broken-hearted Scandal Savage? Emptionally illiterate the act might have been, but it was still motivated by concern and kindness for "Sis".

This is Deadshot?


V: And finally, when faced with the choice of shooting dead his lover Jeanette and breaking his contract with his Slaver employers in "Depths", Deadshot chooses to violate the one meaningful and constant principle in his deeply-wounded "adult" existence, namely the sanctity of his killer's oath. Though the act of abandoning his word itself was accompanied by nothing more than a deadpan "Oh, screw it!", the immensity of the act is hard to conceive and consequently exceptionally difficult to describe. To not kill when hired to do so must have been to Lawton on some unconscious level the mental equivalent of Batman taking a .357 Magnum to the heads of the inmates of Arkham. (*4) There has been no more fundamental and yet well-prepared-for act of transformation in any major comic-book character of substance for as long as I can remember. (*5)

And so, when asking how Gail Simone has kept her characters so interesting, and successful in a market so unwelcoming to second-string costumed players, the answer might be that she has changed them in unexpected, significant, and yet quite-consistent ways.

*4 - Or at least it can be read so in the light of his past. Just because he's not been shown immediately fracturing doesn't mean that there'll be no consequences of his breaking that oath. Whatever, the key point is that some aspect of "family" got between Lawton and his oath.
*5 - I can of course think of lots of surprising developments which marked a crossing of the Rubicon for a host of comic-book characters, but none as convincing or well-prepared for as this.


7. "But You Go Ahead And Keep Running Your Mouth If It Makes You Happy"

I. One of the most considerate advantages to how Ms Simone has developed Deadshot is that the changes he's been put through can be explained far more in situational than dispositional terms. Or, to put it another way, Deadshot has been changing in response to the specific individuals within the Secret Six rather than altering his opinions concerning the people of the wider world "outside". His empathy isn't stirring in such a way as he feels a kinship with the folks he drives past in the street, but he's certainly drawn fondly to his comrades. And if that's so, then one way to convincingly "re-set" his character back to where it stood before Ms Simone placed him within the Six is to either remove the team from his life, or perhaps have them betray him. For the fact that Lawton hasn't warmed to his responsibilities to the common man and woman is a constant throughout these tales. He's happy in himself to leave "two defenceless potential witnesses with a gang of humiliated scumbags" behind in an off-license, to take but one example, although he cares enough for Catman's conscience to warn him that somebodies going to get hurt if he doesn't act. And he happily votes to leave Bane behind to his death, explaining that he's only known him for "An hour and a half". For where Deadshot's affections are concerned, it's not a common humanity he's aligned to, or even membership of the Six. Instead, he's only fond of his team-mates who fought together with him against the Secret Society Of Super-Villains, for reasons which we may discuss in the future.

Remove those survivors from the first Secret Six that Deadshot belonged to, or have them abandon their loyalty to him, and it'd be easy to convincingly return him to his role as a cold and nearly-entirely twisted super-villain. Which means, obviously I know, that Ms Simone has provided her fellow creators at DC with a simple means for re-setting Deadshot back to what he was before she undertook to change him.

And if there was a text-book on these matters, surely that'd be worth a paragraph or four in it?


II. And yet it's noticeable that Ms Simone is continuing to push the envelope where Deadshot's affections are concerned in "Depths", the latest TPB to appear. For there Deadshot displays affection and regret for Jeanette, a woman, or rather a banshee, he's known for just a while. Admittedly, most typical people would feel affection for a lover, and feel regret for shooting her too, but Floyd Lawton isn't typical in any way at all, and though the degree of emotional intimacy he's beginning to display may be stunted in the context of most folk's life, for him his feelings are threatening in their force and potentially life-changing.

8. "Just Bein' The Scorpion, Sis"

If Deadshot's transformation into an only-mostly emotionally crippled human being can be easily reversed by turning the Six against him, or he against them, then there's also a second strategy which could be used if and when necessary to restore Floyd Lawton's previous status quo. For Ms Simone is always careful to avoid the tradition of Chris Claremont-like declarations of emotional self-knowledge in her stories, leaving her character's motivations open to the reader's interpretation. (*6) (Indeed, the reader is rarely even lent a glimpse of her character's thoughts, and the rare and relatively-extended narration by Deadshot in "Twilight Of Sorrow" exists only because of the need to set the context for his coming-apparent betrayal of his team-mates.)

Allied to that is her apparent habit of leaving the possibility of a second or even third explanation for her character's behaviour hanging in her stories. Does Deadshot beat up his comrades and steal Neron's card to save them or because he's gripped by a desire to die a spectacular death? Does he abandon his contract with Smyth because he's reluctant to kill his colleagues or because he's been abandoned even by Ragdoll, leaving him alone to pragmatically choose the better part of valour? Does he help purchase Liana's time because he's concerned for Scandal's wellbeing or because he needs her to set him missions and organise the distribution of his earnings?

Abandoning Deadshot's development under Ms Simone would therefore be a simple matter of having the character confirm the very worst interpretations of his actions. A writer who wants his readers to believe that the polar ice cap inside Lawton had never begun to melt could call on the character to lend weight to the most regressive interpretations available for his actions across Ms Simone's reign. While that might not entirely convince the reader who'd carefully followed Ms Simone's "Secret Six" scripts from the beginning, it would have the virtue of a measure of an internal consistency with previous tales, and as an explanation of why a character might not have been all as they appeared, it would certainly beat team-travel, the transfer of brains between clones or assassin-affecting red Kryptonite.

*6 - I in no way mean to imply that Ms Simone lacks respect for Mr Claremont and his work. I merely state that her methods are rather different.


9. "I Answer That Question With A Question, Dollface"

I. So, in a sense, if reverse-engineering these stories has been of any use to us at all, the solution to the "change vs no-change" debate which is provided by Ms Simone's work is to do the first while providing for the possibility that the second might be necessary at some time in the future. For Deadshot has undergone considerable, and indeed touching, development during Ms Simone's stewardship, and yet his evolution could be convincingly reversed by;

1. his estrangement from the Six, or;
2. a declaration that the basest explanations for his actions are the correct ones, meaning that he never really changed at all
   

Or, to put it into more general terms; a writer who wishes to develop a character who might in the future have to be returned to their previous state need only make their changes situational in their nature, or reliant upon a particular set of reversible circumstances. Similarly, leaving competing explanations for a character's development in the narrative can ensure that material is available to draw upon when the signal for a sizable retreat is given.


10. "If There's One Thing I Hate, It's A Guy Who Ain't Got Any Commitment"

What's the worth of all this pseudo-reverse-engineering? Do I really think that Ms Simone has constructed her scripts to allow the possibility that the changes that she's undertaken might be more easily reversed when she's gone?

Well, to be honest and hang myself, I will say that I do suspect that Ms Simone has provided "reversible situational changes" in her work as a deliberate policy. It would make sense, since it'd be a method that would allow her the freedom to play with the companies' toys while ensuring that they get returned intact at the end of her tenure on the book.

But I don't know. And I'm not claiming to. I'm just suggesting that it's all well-worth thinking about, and so I tried to do so.


nb: added 3/8/10 - Josh Reynolds has written extremely well about Deadshot's passivity as a character on his "It's Clobberin' Time" time, and I'd highly recommend getting there via the "USA Comic Book Blog Of Honour" list to the right of this piece. I say this not because he's said kind things about the above blog entry, but because it's really is a fascinating article he's written. In truth, I had to wrestle to not let the whole business of Deadshot's "passivity" take over the above, but Josh has written about it in a far better fashion than I could, so everything's worked out for the best. And if you do pop over, as Stan used to say, tell him who sent you! (Or, don't. It's your choice.)

My traditional and sincere thanks are offered to all who've made it down to the foot of the page here. I'm sure you've noticed great black holes in this piece, so please do help me put my thinking right by lobbing in an idea or two into the comments box. And I hope you're having a splendid day as well, another traditional sentiment on this blog, but another one sincerely meant too.


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