On "Knight And Squire", or, "...Magna So-Called Bleedin' Carta!" (Part 2)

In which the blogger continues the chat about Knight And Squire which was begun here. I've done my best to avoid spoilers, but it's an effort which hasn't proven either easy, or, to my shame, successful. So please be warned; there be spoilers in what follows;

  

"Things are complicated", as the duo of wonderfully camp French super-villains who travel under the nom de plume of "Double Entendre" declare at the conclusion of Paul Cornell's Knight And Squire. It's a point of view which just about everything in the book would seem to have been designed to confirm. On the one hand, Knight And Squire is an entirely reader-friendly and - at least at first - innocent-hearted graphic novel, carrying with it none of the audience-excluding indulgence and excess which so marks the storytelling and content of a great deal of 2011's comics. And yet, scratch what at first seems to be an innocuous and nostalgic surface and some exceptionally sharp and bleak and, yes, mournful things begin to snare the reader's attention too. Neither a comedy or a tragedy, then, but quite clearly both at the very same time, as Jarvis Poker the British Joker helps to emphasise when he reflects on how he'd had to learn that  "... the horrific and whimsical are mixed together".

            
If that's so, then the very fact of writing a comicbook to illustrate such a theme inevitably means that it stands, as we've already touched upon, as a critique of so much of the modern-era superhero book. Because if there's one thing that the sub-genre has tended to acknowledge less and less as the decades have passed, it's the fact that despair and depression and the nihilism which that inspires aren't in themselves the default settings of human existence. As a consequences, there's such a terrible bleakness is so many of the sub-genre's books, such a sense that life itself is essentially nothing but one appalling and practically unwinnable crisis after another. Knight And Squire is having none of that, though there's no doubt that there are a whole series of "horrific" moments to be found in its pages. There are despairingly lonely deaths, and appallingly unexpected and violent deaths, and deaths which can't be resisted and which seem to reduce life to nothing but a state of loss and meaninglessness. Life is all these terrible things, argues the script of Knight And Square, and yet it's so much more, and if a body is given to believing in little but the bleakness, then the bleakest of solutions become not just acceptable, but rational and laudable.

            
But Cornell's is an argument in favour of a far less constricted and ultimately joyous view of  life, and it's perhaps best represented in Knight And Squire by the Joker's complete failure not simply to terrify and "exterminate" Britain's "pathetic superheroes and villains", but to even provoke them into a traditionally violent showdown. It's a unmistakably deliberate comment on the way in which viciousness matched with a despicable lack of self-control on the part of too many heroic characters is often framed in terms of restraint and moderation. Given how tempting and even necessary the business of murdering the likes of the Joker is so often made to seem, the administering of nothing but a through beating can seem by comparison a mark of a grimmly heroic, and even unimaginably inhuman, self-control. Similarly, the very temptation to end an antagonist's life is regularly portrayed as an entirely understandable process of necessary venting combined with respect for the cardinal traditions of frontier justice. Who but the noblest of vigilantes could ever resist such an intense and apparently legitimate desire?

            
And as the beatings and the body-count have become more and more ubiquitous, the superhero who won't even consider extending their responsibilities to that of self-appointed brutaliser and executioner can often seem as if they're nothing more than a weak-willed and even cowardly self-emasculated do-gooder. In such a tradition, the Knights declaration to the jailbound Cornwall Boy that he doesn't need "power" but "moderation" would seem ironic rather than admirable. Thankfully, Knight And Squire is a superhero book which quite deliberately avoids associating itself with any such a world-view, and so the Knight seems not to be pathetically breaking the superhero code so much as admirably challenging and redefining it. In that, the arc of Faceoff's character development, from atomised and hang-'em-all vigilante to ego-sacrificing team-player and mensch, describes the ideal of heroic behaviour in Knight And Squire. Only the Joker lacks the possibly of redemption, because the Joker quite literally can't take his place in any wider community at all. The empathy circuits in his mind are irreparably fried, and as Jarvis Poker says, his American's counterpart's "curse" is to "stand alone, with nothing in all directions". Yet that word "curse" is meant quite literally, and the superheroes who surround him in the Time And The Bottle are well aware that he's as blameless as his actions are baleful. Vengeance very much isn't on the agenda.

             
Yet it's hard not to believe that Cornell intended his clash of comic-book cultures to represent a far broader matter than just that of how moderate and humane the super-human narrative ought to be free to be. At its heart, Knight And Squire seems concerned to discuss the relationship between culture and politics, between art and ethical consequences, in a far broader and more general sense. In fact, Knight And Squire appears to be a playful and smart-minded broadside directed against the relationship that's presumed to exist between fiction and real-world values by the politically and culturally correct of all stripes, from cape'n'chest-insignia fundamentalists to the ethical reductionists of the various thought police. In the context of that much wider debate, Knight And Squire appears to be the creation of a writer who despairs of the all-too-widely-held conviction that a community can only be acceptably represented by fictions which contain unambiguously virtuous and culturally relevant role models as protagonists.

      
There is, according to the (ill)logic of such a literal-minded world view, a direct and casual relationship between the fictions which we consume and the values which we develop. Accordingly, the worth of the entertainment which we choose to enjoy is all too often defined according to how it appears to reflect this manifesto or that one, this litany of social worth and that catechism of cultural relevance. But just as Knight And Squire is a rejection of a great deal of the current norms of the superhero tale, it's also a quite different take on how politics are supposed to be presented in the fiction in our culture. For the superhero community of Knight And Squire is neither a quota-system vision of contemporary urban Britain or a group of types whose worth has been rebooted in terms of any of the modern-era's supposed zeitgeists. In fact, Cornell's cast of super-people might seem on first skim to have been quite deliberately designed to ignore any such concerns, although quite the opposite is obviously true.

          
There's no immediate and unproblematical candidate for the role of "outstandingly-admirable" representative of a minority or class or whatever, it's true. There's no Red Flag-waving Captain Clydeside, but there is the Professional Scotsman, and, with the exception of Squire, there's no potential feminist icon though there is the perpetually naked and statuesque Birthday Girl. And yet, of course, Knight And Squire very much isn't, despite what a few commentators have suggested, a conservative and comfily nostalgic vision of Britain in any way at all. There's an exceptionally clear and carefully drawn line in Knight And Squire between the cultures which the book's super-heroic cast initially sprang from and an enthusiastically positive vision of a modern multicultural Britain which the likes of Cyril and Beryl strive to inform and defend. These super-people from a host of different and distant and even often disreputable sources, from radio comedy to comic books, from novelty 45's to cultural stereotypes, aren't being used to serve the most regressive and enervating of the agendas of yesterday at all. Of course they're not. Rather, Cornell's using them to suggest that the culture of the past is, regardless of the PC mentality, constantly open to being used in an unexpected, humane, entertaining, and, even, as much of it was in its own time, radical manner.

And that's what I'd like to discuss next time. 

To be continued;