Picking up graphic novels blindly, or relying on familiarity with author and illustrator names, publisher imprint and recognized titles has served me well so far. That is, until I decided to pick up and take home Si Spencer, Simon Gane and Cameron Stewart’s The Vinyl Underground: Volume One Watching the Detectives. It looked like a pop culturally aware, mod styled graphic novel but too much effort has gone into creating elaborate back stories for annoyingly quirky characters and not enough into creating engaging plot lines.
The Vinyl Underground is a team of misfits who work together to solve occult killings in London. Led by Morrison (Moz) Shepherd, the D-list celebrity son of an English football player and pornstar turned soap actress, a tabloid regular, drug addict and ex-con. See what I mean by elaborate backstory? Very little of this has anything to do with the plot of Watching the Detectives, the character histories are already set up and little is done with the story to develop them any further. Joining Moz in his hip converted underground station apartment is Perv – another ex-con whose seizures offer him psychic clues to the crimes they are tracing – and Leah, a forensic science graduate working in a mortuary and virgin online porn star. The keen-eyed among you will recognize that the two female characters mentioned in this overview are both porn actresses. More on that later. When a young African boy’s head is found washed up on the riverside, Moz and his team set out to find the occult connection and solve the murder. Enter Abi, African princess and Moz’s ex-fiancée, whose father has been wrongly accused and incarcerated for the crime.
Don’t give me that crap. You’re all in this Scooby Doo bullshit vigilante thing together.
The story, despite the promising premise, is murky and unengaging. A subplot about Moz’s missing mother and his father’s involvement with London gangsters is so intent on remaining mysterious that the direction is unclear. Rather than letting the story develop the characters (my sister has a great t-shirt that reads “Plot – it builds character.”) the writer has dumped a load of affectations and quirks upon them and the story drags under this weight. What insight is given to the characters’ past, Moz in particular, does nothing to connect me with them emotionally. I just didn’t care, about the story, the characters or the artwork.
I also take major issue that the main female characters are either princesses or pornstars. I know graphic novels aren’t particularly renowned for their anatomical realism but the women here are presented in such a cartoonish manner, looking most of the time like grown-up Bratz dolls. And don’t think for a moment that having a virgin pornstar is a comment on the bipolar view of female sexuality – again, the contradiction is supposed to be seen as a wacky impossibility. As for Leah, it is as though the writers thought that being restricted from showing her in explicitly sexual imagery (although there is plenty of this) they’d substitute that for her executing extreme violence wherever possible. In The Vinyl Underground Leah’s violence is unmotivated and largely pointless. When Moz is unable to get through to crooked criminals or protect himself, in jumps Leah to brandish her girl-styled violence – there is way too much use of a stilletto as weapon that is probably intended to be an empowering image.
The female relationships are fraught with jealousy and petty bitchiness, again, seemingly unmotivated. Leah’s not interested in Moz, yet takes every opportunity to belittle Abi’s contribution to the group. Abi is defined solely by her relationship with males: looking to help her wrongly jailed father she turns to ex-fiancé Moz. Sure, there are hints that she’s highly educated in the psychogeography of London, but does that come into play in the narrative? Of course not, and why should it when she has the handsomely troubled Moz to come to her aid?
The Vinyl Underground features flat characters and a dismal storyline that doesn’t resolve itself clearly. I’m going to go and read another volume of Transmetropolitan to cleanse my palate.
2008, book review, Cameron Stewart, graphic novel, July 2010, Si Spencer, Simon Gane, The Vinyl Underground, The Vinyl Underground: Volume One Watching the Detectives
I think I need that shirt.
The treatment of the female characters in this comic sounds absolutely disgusting, and I’m usually disappointed with how comic book artists draw female characters. (For instance, I’m always a bit taken aback when my beloved Harley Quinn is drawn by Guilliem March- she doesn’t look like herself, you know?)
It is disgusting, really distasteful. Sometimes I feel like maybe I’m just reading too much into it, or expecting too much from a typically hyper-masculine form but then I think – well, if I’m reading it then why shouldn’t I speak up about how it makes me feel? It just makes me sad/mad that so many comics seem to conform to the ideas people have about gender representations in comics, and I wish there were more out there that challenged these ideas. Maybe there is and I just have to dig a little deeper to find it.