The Scumbag #1
Writer: Rick Remender, Artist: Lewis LaRosa, Colorist: Moreno DiNisio, Letterer: Rus Wooton, Publisher: Image
There was definite power on the debate stage in Nashville Thursday night.
Say what you will about Donald J. Trump (Really, say anything aside from cracks about his weight — it’s all earned) or Joe Biden (Jesus lord, Joe, please finish this thing), they’re both famous men invested with wealth, fame and real, measurable power. One of those men will be the next president of the United States of America, a position that serves as the country’s envoy to the world and a moral leader at home. (Again, we could use you here, Joe.)
Those men represent the epitome of power. No matter the outcome of the election, they will want for nothing, hunger for nothing (save, perhaps, the loser’s unextinguished desire for the office of the presidency) and have no worries — at least no worries that us plebes could relate to — for the rest of their septuagenarian days.
So make fun of ’em — especially the shithead in enough fake tan to blend into a Florida orange grove. (Maybe that’s where he’s going when he loses?) We’ve always made fun of the rich and the powerful, especially those in political life — from 2,400 years ago when the ancient Greeks were complaining about Athenian leaders fuckin’ up the Peloponnesian War to British political cartoons in the 1780s depicting generals as drunks and failures when they didn’t kick America’s ass fast or hard enough to one Theodore S. Geisel dressing up Hilter in mermaid drag in the 1940s to ripping on culture warrior the Rev. Jerry Falwell in the 1980s by suggesting he lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse.
We do this to further the aims and goals of democracy, of course, but we also do it to cut these powerful leaders down to a size that we can comprehend. To see, as one famous resident of Gotham once said, if gods can bleed. But the rhetorical violence should only flow one way: from the powerless to the powerful. To reverse that direction — to engage, as the comedians amongst us would say, in punching down — misses the point and serves only to bathe in the mean glow of cruelty.
Writer Rick Remender either doesn’t subscribe to this philosophy or doesn’t understand it — the particularities likely don’t matter since his famous mandate to critics to “drown in hobo piss” suggests a classist bent anyhow. And even without that colorful zinger, his views of the world are fairly clear in “The Scumbag,” a new series that takes the “worst person on the planet” — an illiterate, drug-addicted misogynist — and turns him into a secret agent. In the hands of someone like Garth Ennis, the book would have been beyond vile, graphic and irredeemable. To his credit, Remender doesn’t go that far, but it does result in a mean-spirited thing I can’t even get fully angry about.
We meet Ernie Ray Clementine in a bar where he’s trying to find his drug dealer for a score. To get the bread for said score, he robs a Salvation Army kettle, then buys heroin and, because the bathroom is out of order, takes it out to the street to shoot up, where he promptly has diarrhea in full view of the public. Hilarious! From there, he chases his heroin needle as it tumbles down the street, only for it to get mixed up with a Super Secret Special Serum and…well, it’s not hard to figure out from there.
Stories about louts are fine — writer W. Maxwell Prince just wrapped a great one in “King of Nowhere” — but they’re usually written with some measure of sympathy and an eye on a path to redemption. Here, there’s nothing but scorn for Ernie, and it feels like more of a comedy of manners (“Oh dear goodness, there goes Agent Scumbag again. Whatever will we do, Johnson?”) than any sort of story that might see Ernie grow and change — almost like if “King Ralph” was 90 minutes of English nobles laughing at John Goodman’s character while he ate hot dogs and farted except that sounds much less mean and way more entertaining.
“I love stories about scumbags,” Remender writes in a letter that closes the first issue. “Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski, Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Walter White…look at a list of the best shows and movies of all time and you’ll see this theme runs through a mess of ’em.”
…
My man, do you not even get the thing you just wrote? Ernie is the lowest of the low, an addict who can’t read and can barely direct shit from his ass to not his pants. How does that make him a Walter White or a Tony Soprano? Or even The Dude, who very much had agency in his life? Those guys are rogues or anti-heroes or assholes or whatever else you want to call them. But they had power. Ernie doesn’t have that. Ernie doesn’t even have dignity.
The presidential debate Thursday did not get as nasty or as stupid as the first one, thankfully, because we didn’t need another round of that disservice to democracy. But while the two men shared a similar great abundance of power, they differed in their goals during the debate: One wanted to articulate a vision for a different, better America, while the other wanted to stab at conspiratorial shadows of his own creation.
I don’t really care about the things Hunter Biden may or may not have done in his life; after all, he’s not on the ballot. But if Rudy Giuliani tells me he did things, I am inclined to believe he didn’t. The thing that matters about him in this election is that his father has shown him love and patience through a series of alcohol and drug addiction relapses.
Not using power spitefully.
Not punching down.
But the thing we need more of, the thing “The Scumbag” doesn’t have:
Grace.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
