Sidekick vol. 1

When I first heard about this new series from J. Michael Straczynski, I was intrigued.  Charting the fall from grace of a superhero’s former sidekick in a way that makes it compelling, as opposed to depressing or boring, would be a tricky target to achieve.  Yet Straczynski has plenty of experience with the genre, and doing it with characters he created at Image spares him the trouble of corporate interference had he chose to do this kind of story at Marvel or DC.  So there’s reasons to be optimistic here — along with his previous creator-owned ventures — even if it turns out to be unfounded in the end.  The problem is that Straczynski completely misses the mark when detailing the circumstances behind his main character’s fall from grace.

The happiest times in Barry Chase’s life was when he was the sidekick known as Flyboy to the superhero known as the Red Cowl.  Not only did he have a wealthy guardian who trained him in how to use his superpowers to help fight crime, but he also had the admiration of everyone in Sol City as well.  At least, he thought that he did.  In the wake of the Red Cowl’s murder during a celebratory parade in his honor, Barry finds out that he was only tolerated as a sidekick and most people now openly mock the character for not measuring up to his mentor.  Things only get worse for him from there after he tries to make a go of being a proper superhero himself, until he finds out some things about the Red Cowl’s murder that make him question everything he knew about the man.

Straczynski sends us some mixed signals about the character right off the bat that muddle the message he’s trying to send.  The very first scene in the story is about Flyboy’s one real moment of glory as he saves Sol City from being blown up by a bomb, leading to the Red Cow making a public declaration that no one should call him a sidekick ever again.  In the very next scene, we see an older Flyboy leave his run-down apartment and make a show of arresting a prostitute as a front for getting free sex from her.  If you’re wondering how he got to here from there, the answers aren’t all that satisfying.

All we’re given to go on is that in the aftermath of the Red Cowl’s murder, no one wanted to step up and replace him as Sol City’s protector.  Well, why didn’t Barry take his mentor’s place?  All we’re given to go on is a news piece where the anchors openly mock the character as being a second-string hero and a “constant hostage” when he was a sidekick.  Not only does it seem unreasonably cruel for the newspersons to savage Flyboy like this in the wake, but it seems that Straczynski wants to give us the impression that everyone couldn’t stand the character and was just waiting for the Red Cowl to die before they could finally let the sidekick know what they really thought of him.

However, we’re given no indication of what Flyboy was like as a sidekick beyond his one shining moment of glory at the beginning.  If anything, that scene does more to show that he has the determination to be a real hero and leaves the reader wondering why the people of Sol City were so quick to turn on him.  It’s a matter of being told about the times when Flyboy was a “constant hostage” and apparently a general embarrassment to the Red Cowl and not shown any of those kinds of scenes in flashback here.  We can see from this that Straczynski really wants to tell the story of a lame sidekick’s descent into depravity, but he just hasn’t thought the execution through.

We do get plenty of scenes like the one with the hooker to reinforce the fact that Barry is currently lame, creepy and more than a little deluded about how to recapture his glory days.  Most of them are handled as gracefully as the newscaster heckling I mentioned above, with his Kickstarter-style efforts to fund a crimefighting career falling flat and a bungled effort to fake foiling a theft coming off as cheap shots more than anything else.  I did like Barry’s efforts to re-brand himself as a new superhero in another city only to be undone at the last moment by human error.  That particular story would’ve been more entertaining if it wasn’t obvious from the story that his attempt here was destined to end in failure.

There’s also a particularly disturbing moment in the second issue that actually does give us an idea of where Straczynski is coming from on the idea of sidekicks in general.  After going to see Professor Tannenbaum, the smartest man in Sol City, to find out if the Red Cowl might be alive in some alternate dimension or timeline, Flyboy has to relive the trauma of the day he saw his mentor get shot by subjecting himself to examination from one of the professor’s machines.  Immediately afterwards, Tannenbaum proceeds to troll his subject with the idea that the most of the city’s residents thought the two were involved in a relationship and that Flyboy was just the Red Cowl’s “butt-boy.”  

The scene is exactly as tasteful as it sounds, but it does let you know that Straczynski is operating from a cynical modern interpretation of why sidekicks are present in superhero comics.  Originally, superheroes had sidekicks to allow the kids who read about their adventures to identify with them and imagine going on adventures with their favorite characters.  As time went on the audience for superhero comics got older, you started hearing more jokes about why an older man would want to hang around a young, impressionable boy and writers had to work harder to justify the presence of these kids which were an integral part of the mythos of certain characters yet no longer served their original function.

It feels like Straczynski is indulging in the worst kind of speculation about a superhero and his sidekick here just because he can.  The scene in question also feels like gratuitous nastiness as there’s nothing about the Professor’s character that says this is a logical outgrowth from it.  No, it just comes off in a way that feels like the writer is going for shock value over reasoned storytelling.

I will admit that things do pick up once Flyboy finds out the truth about the death of the Red Cowl and it sends him right over the edge.  You can understand how that would do it to him, and the murderous results of it are actually decently set up in flashbacks from earlier in the volume.  There is the matter of whether or not his use of lipstick to give his image a bit of a makeover intended to make him creepy, or just another silly action from a guy who doesn’t quite get how things are supposed to work.  (It comes off better as the former than the latter, in case anyone was wondering.)  So I will confess that the volume does raise some morbid curiosity on my part to see how it all ends.  Though, that’s curiosity in equal parts about Barry’s final reckoning and whether or not Straczynski can make up for the mistakes he’s committed so far.

Tom Mandrake provides the art, and it’s a mixed bag.  The problem is that he’s an artist who has always been best suited towards stories involving horror and the supernatural and he feels a bit miscast on the parts involving straight-up superheroics here.  As for the moments which focus on Barry’s creepier side, Mandrake’s style proves to be a real asset particularly in the volume’s strongest visual moment when the character becomes unhinged over two pages in the fifth issue.

While I was reading “Sidekick,” I was reminded about another story involving a superpowered character who loses it and becomes a villain.  Mark Waid’s “Irredeemable” was uneven overall and probably went on for longer than it should’ve, but his story of a Superman-esque character who turns on the world felt much more thought out and demonstrated a better understanding of the genre tropes it was skewering than what we got with this title.  Even though this is only going to be a twelve-issue series, “Sidekick’s” relative brevity feels more like a relief than a promising title cut short.  At this point it feels like the most we can hope for in the second volume is that Straczynski doesn’t embarrass himself any more than his protagonist already has.