Anti-competence porn: Gargoyles (Vol. 3) #3

Publisher: Dynamite Entertainment

Story: Greg Weisman

Art: George Kambadais

Cover Artist for my copy: Jae Lee

Release Date (Physical): February 22, 2022

Gargoyles has a Xanatos problem. By which I mean Greg Weisman has a Xanatos problem, and arguably, that Gargoyles has a Greg Weisman problem.

Xanatos remains one of the most enduringly popular elements of the Gargoyles mythos. He’s quite fun. He felt competent the way his contemporaries in other children’s cartoons of the early nineties did not. Whole sections of TV Tropes were named after him and his strategies. He fucked, literally and figuratively.

I’ve noted, though, that there are indications that Xanatos may have begun becoming a liability to the narrative, which had increasingly seemed to have bought into the hype surrounding the character while ignoring the implications of his place within the story—especially after the gargoyles began living under his protection. While these fears hadn’t quite been borne out—he didn’t appear that much in the first revival comic—we now see it causing acting direct harm to the story.

The story that was being told in the first two issues doesn’t need David Xanatos. It was already incredibly thin, and rendered more so by having to feature a million characters.  All adding Xanatos does this issue is take away from the others and make everyone else seem incompetent, a collective who can only run around like lemmings until Daddy can solve their problem for them. It’s the opposite of competence porn: instead of showing us how this particular group of character figures things out and deals with the threat, allowing us to learn about them in the process, we have a single character effortlessly providing answers.

(Not that the questions are themselves interesting.  At this point, Thailog is inching incredibly close to just being the Shredder from the original Ninja Turtles cartoon, doing random evil because the episode needs a villain—and Shredder at least had fun characters to bounce off.)

So great is Weisman’s need to include Xanatos in this story that he has to actually warp everyone else to make it happen. This issue’s narration comes courtesy of Broadway, who at the start of the issue makes a half-hearted argument that hey, maybe Xanatos didn’t actually kidnap Maggie. He’s right, of course, and it makes sense for him, specifically, to make this argument, but the timing is all wrong. The time for him to argue was at the end of last issue, during that off-panel discussion where “a consensus was reached” that Xanatos had to be the guilty party. Where was Broadway during that discussion? Where was Goliath, who argues that he doesn’t believe Xanatos capable of kidnapping children? But no, we needed to have Xanatos feature in the story, Weisman could think of no other way of doing so, and so this issue is already working on subtly retconning the last one and making Broadway seem ineffectual.

(The issue also doesn’t actually have Broadway state what specifically made him think Xanatos wasn’t guilty, making this whole detail another example of the book telling instead of showing.)

It’s not just the gargoyles and their friends who are made to be idiotic here. Thailog himself also is also real dumb, completely losing all interest in the baby once he learns that he’s (apparently) 100% human—even though there’s plenty of reasons for wanting to keep him around (for one, there’s nothing actually stopping from mutating Michael the normal way). The issue also fails to really justify why he believes kidnapping Michael is worth the trouble of bringing down the ire of Goliath and company, aside from being a cartoon-bad-guy thing to do. Did he just believe they’d never find out? That they’d give up after seeing his force field? The book provides no answers.

There is, to be fair, a wisp of an actual theme developing this issue—one that actually even involves Xanatos. One could, if one were generous enough to do Weisman’s work for him, say this is a story about parenthood (and specifically fatherhood) something Xanatos would actually have something to say about. In order for that to have actually work, however, there would have needed to be actual focus.  Instead, Talon, who as the father-to-be is the obvious protagonist for such as story, gets no such character-building. He basically becomes a non-factor, after the encounter with Xanatos, with no payoff for his outburst earlier in the issue—his rage towards Xanatos is nowhere to be seen when the actual kidnapper is revealed.  The story similarly gives us no insight into how Thailog’s desire to kidnap Michael might tie into a desire to become a father, or interrogate where that desire might come from. Goliath’s own contribution to this theme is a single panel of him and Angela looking at each other. And the story would have needed actually say something, instead of just putting together these fathers and saying “I have established a theme.”

And then there’s Maggie. Maggie’s pregnancy was first established in issue #7 of volume two, eight issues and more than a decade ago. Since then, the narrative has shown no interest in her, despite the fact that she is previously homeless, estranged from her family, a mutate, and in a situation that she could not easily leave if she’d wanted to, all of which makes her one of the more fascinating characters through which to explore the ideas of parenthood, and one who should have some very specific things to say. Instead, she’s spent all her time since then a pregnant sexy lamp. Apparently, all we need to know is that she’s happy being a wife and mother, and has no concerns or thoughts about either of them. Weisman’s record writing women throughout the decades has been altogether mixed, with each success matched by decisions that could generally be described as eyebrow-raising; in his treatment of Maggie, he’s handed his detractors some prime new ammunition against him.

While this arc does not Greg Weisman’s worst work—Gargoyles would need to go through heroic lengths to match Young Justice season 3—it is a good example of all of that has infuriated me about his writing as of late, and perhaps always. First of all, there’s the belief that volume equals substance, which can be seen as early as the world tour, but really stood out as a Greg Weisman thing with Young Justice, with its ever-shifting lineup of characters, many whose lack of establishing character moment were supposed to have been mitigated by sheer familiarity—so what if Tim Drake does nothing to make him stand out from all the other characters? You remember him from the comics, don’t you? That should be enough. The same occurs here writ large. Aside from being a monsterfucker—which is, admittedly, very cool—what about Elisa is meant to make us like her? What about Goliath is meant to make us thing he’s brave, heroic, or competent? What is meant to make us think that Broadway is good at deductive reasoning or Thailog is a threat? Just about the one person who is actually given an opportunity to shine is…Xanatos.

It is this very thing that made me begin hating the one page we get here dedicated to the criminal underworld subplot, which introduces FIVE new crime characters, which we’re undoubtedly meant to think are going to be important—the book makes sure to give us their names by having them refer to each other in ways which would feel unnatural even if the characters in question weren’t CRIMINALS IN THE BUSINESS OF TALKING CRIME—but get nothing to make them stand out from the dozens of other characters we’ve been introduced to. They don’t even get to actually say anything new, merely repeating what we already learned last issue.  Sure, maybe they’ll all become my favorite new characters? But given how the familiar characters have been treated, I’m not at all confident that will be the case.