Customer Reviews

Kill Your Boyfriend

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A lovely short story from Grant Morrison, the genius reinventor of Doom Patrol and the current chronicler of The Invisibles. A sulky schoolgirl somewhere in suburban Britain meets a cheeky delinquent boy on the bus one day, and before your jaw can drop they've gone on a killing spree, hooked up with a bunch of anarcho-hippies on a bus, experimented wildly with their respective sexualities and found themselves halway up Blackpool Tower with a live grenade while the Police shout threats at them through a bullhorn.

Love story, irresponsible celebration of violence and Dionysus myth, this is a highly cheeky piece of work from the irrepressible Mr. Morrison. Always a man to take the phrase "For Mature Readers" to the absolute limit, Morrison respects not a single taboo. I forget who the artist is and I'm not proud of having done so, as the art is appropriately wacky and witty, as befitting the, well, Dionysian tone of explosive release. Great fun, even if you're glad it didn't happen to anyone you know, and a slap in the face to boring journalists who claim that British fiction is dead. (Why don't those idiots read comics?)

A short (56 pages) Grant Morrison story that contains neither superheroes nor science fiction. The plot is similar to that of NATURAL BORN KILLERS, where 2 youngsters run off to take drugs and kill people. Like that film, this story is also a dark comedy, although this one takes a more aloof and antiseptic tone than the film did. The tale gets much of its energy from its complete and matter-of-fact disregard of any ethics or morality.

Philip Bond's colorful artwork contibutes a lot toward the dry humor in this story. He draws people's faces and their expressions quite well, which is particularly useful in the numerous asides to the reader, where the girl looks directly out of the page and talks to you. It reminds me of some movies that have used this device.

Although not the greatest Grant Morrison story ever written, it's a malignant little comic with a certain charm, and worth reading if you can find a copy somewhere.

Although I hated the art style, the mature comic has a great feel to it. The story is crazy and all over the place but ends in a psychotic-romantic way. Loved the story but the art has yet to grow on me.

The previous reviewer of this title appears to have taken it much too seriously. Ignore such sticks-in-the-mud and enjoy Grant Morrison's anarchic humour and Philip Bond's fantastic artwork for the disposable pop fun that it is.

As with all Morrison's work there is subtext to be gleaned here - the boy can be seen to represent Dionysus and the girl is one of the Maenads, and the subtle hints of a secret incestuous union also suggests Greek divinities.

Some previous reviewers seem appalled that the violence is portrayed as sexy and cool, and that the satire is directed at the victims and not at the killers. Ever heard of "wish fulfillment," darling?

So forget the mealy-mouthed moralists and grab this slice of teenage pop anarchy - if you can find it, that is; like most good comics, it's out of print.

Grant Morrison is a wildly inventive, wildly prolific, wildly inconsistent writer. He's produced a lot of comics over the last twenty years, some of them instant classics, some of them just very good genre pieces, and some of them ranging from the utterly forgettable to the simply wretched. "Kill Your Boyfriend" lies somewhere beneath the bottom of the pile.

Written shortly after the time of "Natural Born Killers" and "True Romance," "Kill Your Boyfriend" is probably best considered as a product of its era: yet another in a long line of "sexy teen killers on the run" stories. The plot is simple: Disaffected Girl meets Disaffected Boy and is attracted by his "bad boy" rebellious streak. Boy kills Girl's unlovable old boyfriend, Girl finds this outrageously sexy (breaking out the old chestnut that Sex Equals Death), and the two go on a killing spree which somehow manages to be far more glamorous than it would in real life. This plot, such as it is, meanders along explicitly as a love story, fetishizing the couple's various murders and repeatedly making the point that this cool, attractive young couple feels absolutely no remorse for killing their victims - who are all ugly and nasty anyway - but instead are brought closer together by the wild youthful abandon of breaking open a random passerby's head.

We are, of course, encouraged to feel less than no sympathy for the pair's victims. The girl's old boyfriend is conveniently a short, fat, ugly nerd with an acne-riddled face; the next man they kill is a balding, overweight transvestite who never gets so much as a line out before his head gets bashed in with a bottle. His death means so little that it's never brought up again. Other victims are turned into corpses so quickly we never have a chance to identify with them; they're just accessories for the protagonists' personal pursuit of pleasure. Most are killed off-panel, or have their bodies shown as briefly as possible, to allow the reader to focus on the pleasure our attractive young heroes are experiencing, instead of on the death they're dishing out. All of this amounts to a book that assumes that life has no inherent value and that atrocities are justified if they're sufficiently sexy. It's nihilism with lip gloss. If only Himmler had worn high heels and fishnets!

I suppose Morrison might say this is all meant in jest, perhaps as some comment on the glorification of violence in modern culture or some similar wankery, but that all sounds a bit crap, because while there certainly is humor employed in this book, none of it is targeting our killer-protagonists. Every joke is used to justify their actions, either by ridiculing and dehumanizing one of their targets, or by making light of the big bad authority figures who would stop them having their fun. By making the killers glamorous and sexy while making their victims and pursuers ridiculous, Morrison tries to make mass murder an exemplar of youthful rebellion. He even goes so far as to deride a bunch of art school students for being poseurs - for talking about destruction, but not having the purity of purpose to go out and actually kill people.

Morrison also has a deeply disturbing view of women tucked away in here, in that the girl happily realizes her entire life and identity has been subsumed in the boy's masochistic fantasy, and loves every minute of it. At no point is the option raised that maybe she can live her own life, much less one that doesn't involve randomly killing people for fun.

The book ends winkingly with yet another murder in progress, the sole purpose of which is to indicate that our heroine is still strong and vital and youthful (she MUST be staying true to herself, because she's killing someone). We know nothing of the victim, and never even see or hear him - he's just another corpse tossed on the pile to make Morrison's disaffected teenager archetype feel good.

If I could've given this zero stars, I would have. This is perhaps the ultimate example of all the worst elements of mainstream comic books together in one place: it's shallow, stupid, pointless, violent, derivative and dull.

"All the books I ever read had scenes where the girl has sex for the first time and it's a big disappointment. Why did they lie to me?". And why would they, indeed?, perhaps because teenage sex is as much as a taboo now as it was years ago, secluded in a murky territory underage sex has become anathema; and that may explain contemporary phenomena like super-famous pro-celibacy singers "The Jonas Brothers" or the search of eternal virginity (as a substitute for everlasting youth) as it's seen in the Twilight novels and movies.

So, what is it with youngsters and sex that we are so afraid of as a society? Adolescence is often seen as synonym to rebelliousness, and rightfully so. It's an age in which we define ourselves and we severe the ties that had previously defined us, id est, parental figures. It's only a natural process. In order to find out who we are, we must first step outside the shadows of our progenitors.

"Kill Your Boyfriend" doesn't deal directly with desire, but it does deal with the symbolic order, with the world at large if you wish. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan described desire in early childhood as a mere reflection of the desire of the mother. Then comes the irruption of the father, or rather the name of the father (nom de pére), which releases the child from ascribing to motherly desire. This is a necessary stage, as it inserts the individual into the symbolic order, id est, into society.

During our teenage years, though, we still have one last chance, one final moment to defy the authority, to rebut the "no of the father", the tautological negation, the rules of the world, in other words, the Law. And we do it, one way or another, we rebel against something, it doesn't matter what, not even how we proceed, the important thing is that we do it. And because of that we relinquish our allegiance to more traditional rewards. Most grownups seem to forget what they have done in recent years, however, even if they try to forget, the memories from the past are always there, and fewer can be more intense than those that come from our teen years.

Grant Morrison knows all that, but of course, to makes us react he takes it to the extreme. This extravagant one-shot starts with a high-school girl, a regular girl who gets bored in class and lives in a typical house, with her normal middle class family. She has a boyfriend, a nerdy boy obsessed with fantasy books, with an extremely moral upbringing that allows him to stay the hell away from the possibility of having sex with his girlfriend. Freud used to say that all neurosis were produced by sexual repression. And for this nerd kid the coitus rebuff has some very surreal consequences, namely the `dry-spell' when it comes to intellectually challenging moments.

The Girl is angry at the world, as all teenagers -male or female- are, but she's also desperately suffocating in a world ruled by society's hypocrisy and adults' indifference . Frustrated by her boyfriend's irrevocable chastity, she starts looking at a black-haired, tattooed, bad boy. The (bad) Boy quickly starts corrupting her in a way, but also liberating her from the restrictions of collectivity and societal pressure. He gets her drunk, he shares with her his hooliganism, his violent outbursts, his uncontrollable need for chaos, disorder and craziness. And that's how they soon reach a conclusion... no wonder this comic book is titled the way it is.

When the Girl and the Boy visit the nerdy, soon-to-be ex-boyfriend, more than one reveal occurs. The nerdy boyfriend had lied to the Girl, telling her that he couldn't see her because he had to study so much, when in reality, he's merely masturbating while watching a porn movie. As he hears the door bell ringing, he gets up infuriated, zips up his pants and confronts the Girl, angrily accusing her of being an idiot... which is delightfully ironic if we remember one of Lacan's most criticized phrases: `masturbation is the joy of the idiot'. Now, this phrase has been interpreted ad infinitum, but in this case, it clearly qualifies the nerdy boyfriend as the one and only idiot in the scene... and for that he pays the ultimate price.

Now the Girl and the Boy are free to do as they wish, and while hitchhiking they run into a motley crew of artist wannabes; a group of individuals that refuse to turn into adults. Part of adulthood perhaps would consist in inserting ourselves more deeply into the symbolic order, ruling out disconformity, idealism or irrational dreams. This, of course, contravenes the definition of the artist, as elucidated in the era of Romanticism; to be an artist would mean, according to 18th century ideals, to refrain from fully entering into the engrains of society, to look for more, always, to experiment, to remember that not all has already been said.

Of course, we're no longer in the 18th century, and contemporary art as it begun with Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades (Marcel Duchamp: 1887-1968; Art as Anti-Art (Basic Art)) requires a different understanding of what can be constituted as art. These guys talk all the time about the actions they must take, about the supreme importance of being `art terrorists', which is a very postmodern view on how art can be understood in today's world. It's surrounded by this juvenile crowd that the Girl and the Boy give into an even wilder experimentation phase, widening not only their intellectual horizons but also engaging in `forbidden' acts. Lacan always labeled homosexuality as the `interdict' in his sexuation graphics. But because it's so forbidden and so rejected, vilified and repudiated, it becomes an insatiable libidinal target. That's why the Boy allows himself to be penetrated by one of the male members of the group. The Girl, simultaneously, continues to dress up as transvestite, thus breaking social rules and again summoning the `forbidden'.

Morrison commented that the Boy is of a Dionysian nature, but here the untamed fierceness of the original Greek ceremonies is balanced by a fantastic sense of humor that owes much to the plays of British homosexual dramaturge Joe Orton (The Complete Plays: The Ruffian on the Stair, Entertaining Mr. Sloan, the Good and Faithful Servant, Loot, the Erpingham Camp, Funeral Games, What the Butler Saw). When Nietzsche talked about Dionysus and Apollo he talked about an essential difference. Apollo is part of the dreaming, while Dionysius cannot be separated from drunkenness. So in my opinion it's only fitting to analyze first this Dionysian character and then move on to a man of more Apollonian nature: (Sebastian O).

The trip, of course, goes on, until the couple faces a deathly situation. Should the Girl and the Boy choose to actually commit an act of `art terrorism' one of them could very well die. What is it going to be, then? To yield before the moral imperatives of the world or to keep on fighting, together, as lovers out of an epic tragedy? And what could be worse than death? Morrison comes up with an answer, perhaps, the most horrifying ending is to get old, get married, and frown upon these disturbing memories ten years later, while a son or a daughter keeps gawking at us with inquisitive eyes.