On the "Crossed" Comic and Why My Hands May Never Be Clean

I wandered across a Metafilter thread on World War Z and one of the commentors mentioned the "Crossed" comics, with the original written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Jacen Burrows. I then made the serious mistake of going to look at it.

What follows is going to be unpleasant because the Crossed series is awful. Don't even look at the covers if you have a problem with gore. I am going to suggest that there is no reason to read Crossed because it is hopeless and bleak torture porn with no narrative reward. If that's enough for you, please stop reading now.

By now, you probably know that I like a lot of books and films, but that I have some serious problems with what I would probably refer to as relentless bleakness in the absence of strong narrative purpose. I don't expect everything to be sweetness and light, by any stretch of the imagination, but I do expect the unpleasantness in any medium to serve some sort of purpose. Does it make me think? Does it educate me? Does it force me to reassess other aspects of the story? Is it actually realistic and hence adds narrative weight?

We see a clear separation in the presentation of the naked form and sexual acts in the worlds of pornography and erotica. Porn is portrayal for sexual gratification, for quick and intense involvement. Erotica focuses on developing the feelings around the forms and acts, with an eye to engaging an emotional response. I'm not placing a value judgement on this - I'm just separating them into rapid sensual engagement and a more developed emotional response. It's normally pretty obvious when you find one or the other in a book - porn sex in a book is often added and designed purely to titillate, where more crafted displays of erotic fiction add dimension to characters and situations.

With "Crossed", there is a vast array of gruesome, graphic and evil violence perpetrated by the infected, who miraculously develop a cross rash on their face as the same time as they apparently turn into demons from hell, obsessed with carrying out every possible sado-masochistic act they can, normally with a low mumbled commentary on what they're going to do, in a bleeding red type face.

And it is, without a shadow of doubt in my mind, torture porn. I don't think that we can use a porn/erotica separation for violence but we can use thriller-sensationlist/narrative as a valid distinction here. Between the rape, the cannibalism, the infanticide, the coprophilia, the necrophilia, the bestiality, the rape, the murder, the scarification, the ... you get the picture ... is the big shock of the series: the infected aren't zombies - they maintain human organisation and language, but they're just evil. And, apparently, no-one is immune to the effects if they get fluid contact. A toddler becomes an evil toddler.

So, when we are being shown scenes of dolphin murder-rape, the hanging disembowelment and rape gardens of London, and a mother eating her own child... that's in all of us, if the world of the Crossed is to be believed.

And it serves absolutely no narrative purpose whatsoever. Every single Crossed story can be distilled down to "A group of people try to survive and are murdered by the Crossed, with vast amounts of rape thrown in." There is no hope and we're told that quite explicitly. There is no place safe from the mystery infection, these are near-functioning humans so they're much harder to deal with than the standard zombie, even the people who are on your side are often rapists, murderers and cannibals. There is no cure. There is no hope.

I waded through an amount of this, looking for something that would justify what I was seeing, and found nothing to suggest why there is a good reason to actually read this series. There's a free webcomic, which I won't link to, where you can see dolphin rape, underage sex, the effective rape of a semi-comatose woman, a child become evil so that his father has to kill him, graphic head shots. What you won't see very much of at all is hope, a reason to continue. Much as I commented on "The Road", the rational act here is not continuing to live.

As always, the infected make very little sense once we try to combine the horror of an eeeevil lust-driven human with the realities of surviving and using machines. One farcical scene in the free comic has a power boat being driven around by the infected at night, while one of them has sex with the corpses they strapped to the sides. So they stopped with the murder, the skin eating and the corpse sex to refuel the boat and service the engine? They're navigating at night around some coastlines because... that's meeting their quota for evil night navigation? Is that an evil Scout badge now? Later series have experimented with semi-rational monsters but this is always going to be a problem. It's exactly the same nonsense we had to deal with in Firefly with the Reavers - rage monsters can't fly complicated machines, even without the shielding.

"Crossed" was a nasty idea that would have made an ugly little horror story that, if handled properly, would have left everything in the reader's imagination and been able to walk away from some of the obvious problems. As it stands, Ennis' work is being extended by other writers who are taking it into darker and darker places - and while there is perhaps some hope that, one day, a new writer might actually drag something out of this that might constitute a reason to persevere, I doubt I'll be reading it. The art work is stomach turning and nightmarish. It's as if someone saw the Hell cut aways in "Event Horizon" and thought "You know, I've always wanted to do an entire comic of that, but more gruesome and with no heroes."

Blecch. Now I have to go and try to forgot about this, as well as wash my hands a few more times.