This is one of my favorite panels from my single favorite comic book ever made. It’s a comic about loving life, and being young, and taking thrills before you’re too old and soft and boring to forget how. It’s about how the world is stupid and silly and needs a kick sometimes, but how both the world and the kick are amazing nonetheless. I can’t keep writing this. Just click onward, you.
I’m warning you now: objectivity is sailing out the fucking window. I can’t talk about this comic without fawning over it, and I can’t properly critique it because any flaws would likely further endear it to me. This is a celebration, a gushing wet one that will leave my knees weak and my ankles twitching. It’s as much personal history as recommendation, because I can’t extricate the reading experience (and re-reading experience, and re-re-reading experience, and on and on) from my own life. Or: Grant Morrison and Philip Bond’s Kill Your Boyfriend is my favorite comic book ever created.
The protagonist of Kill Your Boyfriend is the Girl. She has a sleazy nerd boyfriend who, if this book had been written in 2011, would be playing a female draenei in World of Warcraft so he could touch himself to the animations that make her ass shake. Her parents don’t understand her. School is a bore, and what else is there? She’s sinking. Then she meets a charming young thug, the Boy, who gets her drunk and introduces her to the allure of crime. First, vandalism and swear words. Next, he empties a gun into her boyfriend’s chest. From there, the two embark on a frantic spree of crime, sex, and drugs, and the Girl’s mind is further and further opened up to the marvel of the world as she runs around helping to destroy it piece by piece.
Kill Your Boyfriend is a comedy. Like Seaguy, it operates in the disguise of the ridiculous — the Boy and Girl meet up with a troupe of terrorists who are using an art grant to simulate criminal activity as a postmodern commentary on something or other — and uses that off-the-wall tone to smuggle in lucid commentary on what it means to grow up and engage with the world around you. That the Girl’s catalyst is her boyfriend being filled with bullets isn’t the point. The point is that she frees herself and joins meaningful human society, by rejecting the oppressive culture around her and experimenting with abandon. Drugs and transgressive sex and marvelous wigs may not work for everyone, but how would anyone know unless they tried?
I first read Kill Your Boyfriend when I was 12 years old, in 1997 sometime. This would have been the book’s second printing, since the first (rare) one had a totally different trade dress than the current version. I think I first read about it in, of all places, the price guide of Wizard. At the time, comics were full of things like Operation: Zero Tolerance and The Final Night, and other things that I just couldn’t force myself to care about. I was in the midst of puberty, I’d started listening to music that didn’t belong to my parents, noticing breasts, et cetera. Kill Your Boyfriend seemed kind of cool, so I grabbed it, probably out of a discount bin. I read it, and then more or less stopped reading comics for a couple years.
How could anything else compete? At 12 years old, I wasn’t up on the comics underground, and I barely read Image stuff, let alone Vertigo. Still, the entirety of the comics spectrum seemed to turn grey and wilt in front of me, now that I’d found something that captured exactly how I felt and, in many ways, provided a blueprint for living. (Not the specific course of the plot, of course. The mindset. The feeling.) I knew that nothing else would top it, so I walked away. Eventually, I walked back, when the industry’s reek of desperation bred amazing stuff like Morrison’s New X-Men, Milligan’s X-Force, etc. I’ve been keeping up since, but I still call Kill Your Boyfriend my favorite, 50 pages of id-celebration from comics’ most slyly fierce writer and most effortlessly stylish artist.
Years ago, I bought the page of the boyfriend being killed from the artist, Philip Bond. It remains the best $150 I ever spent. I still have the stylish business card he sent with it, somewhere. Before that, I’d once sent a letter to his wife, Vertigo Group Editor Shelly Bond, asking her to put the book back into print (my copies, plural, were getting dog-eared) and included a $1 bill with the letter. I told her that there was more where that came from — it is, to date, the only time I have attempted to bribe an editor. While at film school in Glasgow, I all but begged one of my professors, who knew Grant Morrison’s wife Kristan, to put me in touch with them to make my case for turning the book into a screenplay. I sent a couple barely-coherent e-mails of my own to that end, and never received a response. I’d still do it in a heartbeat. I think about it weekly, if not more. I’ve all but composed the entire thing in my head. When I go to sleep at night, the frame gazing down at me holds that page, with its taped-up word-balloon patch from where the letterer accidentally went too far into the margins.
It’s hard for me to say why, exactly, you should go find a copy of Kill Your Boyfriend. It changed my life — actually, genuinely changed my life — in a way that few creative works of any stripe have ever managed. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve only seen deeper and deeper into it, and it’s always had something new to say back to me about where I am and how I should handle it. Everyone has something like that in their life: a song, a movie, a novel, a whatever. This is mine. It might be yours, too, but you’ll have to read it to find out.
