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Artifacts: Origins “The Darkness” #0, 1/2, 1-6

By | July 3rd, 2022
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This is Artifacts where I will be exploring the Artifacts line of TopCow Productions. This first batch of readings will be dealing with the beginnings of the nascent universe. After going through roughly the first 18 months of “Witchblade” it’s time to branch out, or more accurately look into the shadows those branches cast. In “Witchblade” #10 we met a certain hitman who just looked oh so cool. In a shocking coincidence just a little over a month later in December 1996 Jackie Estacado would be the lead of a new book “The Darkness”. In terms of segmenting this read through of “The Darkness” I’m still basing it off of the “Origin” line of reprints TopCow did a while ago, with slight modification. As with “Witchblade” it’s economically most efficient to read the “Complete Darkness” reprints that TopCow is currently producing – the third volume of “The Complete Darkness” is likely going to be on Kickstarter in the next 4-6 months. For this entry I will be looking at “The Darkness” #1/2, 0, and 1-6. Who said Marvel and DC were the only companies that could have convoluted numbering schemes?

For this chunk of “The Darkness” I’m using “The Complete Darkness” Vol. 1 as my base, it was just what was on my iPad at the time. Using this as my core text offers up a chance to think through some of the differences between the Witchblade and Darkness “Origins” collections and their ongoing “Complete” versions. This reprint collects “Darkness” #1-18, “Tales of the Darkness” #1-4 & 1/2, “Darkness: Prelude” #1 (also known as issue #0), “Witchblade” #10, #18-19. While “Complete Witchblade” also collets its respective “Tales of” series, the previously discussed collections are segmented by series in order of print publication. “The Complete Darkness” Vol. 1 features noticeable alterations to the temporal framework of these reprints. “Witchblade” #10 is at the very end of the collection, while “The Darkness” is vaguely serialized it is probably best read after “The Darkness” #8. The more interesting disruption comes from placing issue #1/2 and #0 at the start of the collection. These strips were originally published in July 1996 and October 1997 respectively in the pages of Wizard and serve as teasers for the series. This break in chronology is in some ways antithetical to the point of reprints. However, it does provide a useful starting place to think about the Ennis era of “Darkness” and how it satirizes the hyper gendered (hyper everything) of 90s Image Comics. The potential satire in “The Darkness” is the primary focus of this entry, I’ll leave to Jackie juggling his duties as a hitman and vessel for cosmic power later.

#1/2 is actually the first proper appearance of Jackie Estacado and The Darkness (“Witchblade” #10 wouldn’t be out until November 1996). Issue #0, however, is published a little under a year into publication – Issue #8 would come out that month. #1/2 was collected with the first volume of the “Origins” collection and as an efficient 4-page teaser for the series built around Jackie’s omniscient narration, scripted by Garth Ennis with a certain amount of ironic dark humor. The future events of the series unfold through Marc Silvestri’s pencils, with Matt Banning and Steve Firchow inking. It sets up the core of the series Jackie is a hitman for his adopted Uncle Frankie Franchetti and then one day this Darkness stuff started coming out of him, there’s Sonatine and The Angelus, it’s a good encapsulation of what would be the first 14 issues or so of “The Darkness”. It gets across what this book is under Ennis which is a bit of a reflexive take on the hyper gendered Image (anti)hero by emphasizing all the ways in which this man is unheroic, that’s the “punchline”. The “Prelude” strip that follows is less textually dense and more an art showcase for Silvestri, Banning and Firchow, with multiple back-to-back spreads that shift the tone of the series away from the satirizing of Image Comics too something straighter, like a 90s Image Comics. It’s not an effective summary of the strip, but perhaps a good tease. What it does though is show the tonality and potential of “The Darkness”. There is the Garth Ennis stuff that I find to be a surprisingly biting satire of common associations with Image Comics and Top Cow aesthetically and then there is the other stuff that just plays it like a 90s Image Comic. Working through those two tones is going to be interesting.

Continued below

When I was writing about “Witchblade” #10 last week I kept mentioning how “cool” the art team made Jackie Estacado look. They gave him every cool action pose possible, because he was going to be a new character and they needed to make sure people wanted to read more about him. This initial run by Garth Ennis (#1-6, #11-14) places cool in quotation marks and uses it to satirize the toxic hypermasculinity and excess of Image Comics. There is a hint of this sort of potential in the “Prelude” issue as it centers around sentient creatures born from The Darkness planning vengeance on Jackie Estacado. (That this same basic scene occurs with The Angelus in the early issues of this run is mildly confusing). In this argument a very female presenting character, modeled after the Angelus, scolds one of the Darklings for not bowing to their Queen in the capital D domineering way female characters who aren’t totally damseled tended to be written. The Darkling counters with calling her a “Drag Queen”. Now it must be recognized that this retort is easily understood with a heavy undercurrent of cheap homophobia, because it was the mid-90s and that was the culture. The undercurrent of homophobia is present throughout these early issues and series as a whole. However, a potentially more generative reading is to emphasize the use of “Drag Queen” in how it calls attention to gender being a performance. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity came out at the start of the decade and would be getting a second edition in a couple of years after the “Prelude” chapter was released. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity helps to explain some of the ways Ennis’ script shifts the signifiers around Marc Silvestri’s linework to puncture the masculinity cool guy Jackie Estacado performs and ultimately render him an impotent comedic figure.

Jackie Estacado is a cool guy. He looks good. Drives a fancy car. Constantly picking up various beautiful women. Gets to kill people and not even be a cop! All of these things would make him a fuck boy in contemporary parlance, but in the 90s that was the male nerd ideal having grown up on too many 80s action movies. And then things get even better for him, it turns out he is the host to a long line of men who carry within them the primordial Darkness. An entity of extreme power able to create tentacles, illusions, it’s essentially the ultra-phallic Green Lantern powerset. There’s just one catch, in this iteration of the Top Cow Universe (there’s been a few hard and soft reboots) life begins at the moment of conception and The Darkness plays by bogus biologically essentialist rules because the moment his sperm impregnates an egg and it’s “destined” to be a boy Jackie Estacado dies!

So, for all the performance of a very specific kind of supposed to be virile masculinity and aesthetic support Jackie Estacado for all his “chad” tendencies is hilariously rendered an incel. It’s the Genie from Aladdin (the animated one) paradox “Phenomenal cosmic powers! Itty bitty living space!” This moment of realization is beautifully and comedically captured in issue #3.

This satiric lens changes the aesthetic excesses of the series into something more or, at least, make some of the more banal sexist art feel less banal. Suddenly the hyperviolence, Jackie performs a fatality in issue #4, becomes all that more comedic. The only release this man has for his urges now that he at best must become the master of the pull out technique.

As a collection of issues, wonky temporality of the first two strips aside, these first 6 issues work plainly better compared to “Witchblade”. “Darkness” continues the Weird Crime genre approach of “Witchblade” but from the other side of the criminal coin, trading in homages to The Godfather when Uncle Frankie is part of a botched hit. Unlike Sara, Jackie isn’t a detective and thus inherently inquisitive. He is ironically partly damseled in several cases so that Sonatine and his Brotherhood of the Darkness can exposit to him. With Jackie’s involuntary celibacy it is perhaps too easy and reductive, to read Jackie as narratively feminized as was the scholarly mode for decades. Instead it does force up a consideration of what different kind of masculinity could be enacted, something to think about. The integration of genres isn’t nearly as clean, there is a strong bifurcation between Jackie’s mafia side and his anti-heroic side. This turns “The Darkness” into something more like a classic superhero book with Jackie trying to keep his bifurcated identity separate. As a block of issues, the serialized narrative they present is stronger, though ending at #6 compared to #7 is a poor choice.

TopCow didn’t wait long to setup a crossover between two of their trinity of books with ‘Family Ties’. This will largely push Garth Ennis and what he was doing to the side and give us a glimpse of what a less satiric iteration of Jackie and the Darkness could look like.


//TAGS | 2022 Summer Comics Binge

Michael Mazzacane

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