TeslaCorps

I don’t particularly like children.

Generally speaking when they begin talking (and start having ill informed opinions about things) I stop paying attention to them.
This is not particularly their fault, as even a good scotch takes at least 12 years before it’s even drinkable, and even WORSE than the ill informed children is the existent-only-in-fiction “Precocious Child”.

You know what I mean.
The Precocious Child is pervasive in cinema and television. It was the entire basis for the existence of “Full House” and it’s been the foundation of Dakota Fanning’s career. And don’t even get me started on the travesty that is “Two and A Half Men”. It’s really REALLY persistent in comic books which is even worse. I’ve frequently dropped a series because there’s just one too many Precocious Child zingers that a ten or eleven year old will throw at a grizzled, old, veteran hero who spent the majority of his life battling the criminal element in City X and watching his friends and family slowly die off. It’s ridiculous and terrible and 99% of the time the Precocious Child deserves a righteous smack in the mouth.

I’d like to note that I’m not advocating violence towards children, just violence towards fictional shitty children. Good? Good.

Judd Winnick writes Precocious Child all the time, even when he’s writing adults. Jason Todd continues to be a Precocious Child even having come back from the dead with a fist full of undeserved Snark. The beloved and occasionally frustrating Joss Whedon has a tendency to write acceptable Precocious Child, but even then he’s still writing Precocious Child.

Which brings me to a new trend I’m starting to see in comics these days, and that is the “Dead Baby”.
I suppose it started with The Walking Dead Issue #48. Spoilers for damn near anything follow from here on out (and if you hadn’t figured that out already when I said Dead Baby, get out.  Just go.)

Lori and Judith, the brand new non-zombiefied baby she had, were shot in the back as the group fled the prison. It was shocking and emotional and I made the mistake of reading that comic first out of my weekly haul. After finishing it I had to put it down and couldn’t read anything else. I just spent the next few hours trying to wrap my mind around what had happened and drinking whiskey. It was my favorite single issue of last year and still haunts me, because holy shit Kirkman just killed off Lori and Judith.

Then I read Rogues Revenge issue #3. A true spectacle to behold because Inertia (who is very much an asshole Precocious Child) kills Weather Wizard’s baby by exploding him with a snap of his fingers shortly before proclaiming himself Kid Zoom. He blew up a baby. On our very own podcast we proclaimed this to be amazing and one of the better parts of the series.

And then…

Well, then they ripped a baby in half, while eating it, in Crossed #1. Which isn’t surprising given the Avatar Press mandate of “YOU CAN WRITE ANYTHING. YES EVEN THAT”.

And then, in the Punisher Xmas Special a mercenary murders an entire room of newborn babies in a hospital. Which fit in very nicely as a parallel to the original christmas story of murdering the first borns and all that (From the bible, pre-crisis continuity) and worked even better because it gave Frank Castle a reason to kill said mercenaries in a brutal manner.

And then, in a recent X book that Peter David specifically asked me NOT to talk about on the internet something not-quite-but-close-enough-to-count-dead happens to something that may or may not be a baby.

And then in the last issue of Dark Tower: Treachery (Uh…also written by Peter David…hmm…) there is a full splash page of a dead fetus that they then describe as having been “Licked clean” in front of its Father.

And being a person who fixates on trends and genre shifts, I’m starting to wonder when and why the impetus to kill a baby became a recurring plot device.
I’d like to point out, I’m not against this per-se. I think that anything that tells the story the way the writer means to tell it is fair game, and if regular non-comic book literature has no restrictions, comics shouldn’t either.

But this is a bit odd. We’re talking about a storytelling trend that has been exhibited in DC, Marvel, Image, and Avatar, and those are only the one’s that I know about. So it isn’t limited by publisher or distribution. Also the spread of writers who’ve used this technique ranges from established vets like Garth Ennis and Peter David to relative newcomers like Jason Aaron and Robert Kirkman (although I really don’t know if it’s fair to put Kirkman in that slot anymore). So it isn’t as if this is a technique only used by a certain vintage of writer. Even more than that, this is a trend that’s crossed through the  fantasy, horror, superhero, and crime genres, so it isn’t even really genre specific.

Looking back I can’t recall older examples of Dead Baby. My rear view mirror with comics isn’t as extensive  as some, but I don’t particularly remember them killing off the spider baby on panel. I’m wondering where this comes from, is it something trending culturally where the only type of violence that can impact us anymore is that against children, and even more “innocent” than children: babies? And if that’s the case and this keeps happening will even this impact be lost eventually causing us to go full circle and come back to killing…I don’t know…Grannies?

Even in the above mentioned examples the act of the Dead Baby is always used to add gravitas and impact to specific scenes and isn’t something that’s thrown in lightly, so it isn’t a matter of gratuitous violence for violence sake, it is still a storytelling beat that delivers the intended effect. And I’ve yet to see it used comedically (although now that I mention it, I’m pretty sure Cerebus chucked a baby off a church roof in “Church and State” but…I mean that was Cerebus. Dave Sim is serious even when he’s kidding).

I’m not really sure what my point is, I’m not even sure if this is a trend or if I just so happen to have filled my longbox with infanticide through my own twisted tastes. I do know this: to date, nothing has hit me as hard as that issue of The Walking Dead.

-Stin.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.