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 spending a couple weeks looking at “Tales of” the Darkness and Witchblade, we are returning back to “The Darkness” for issues #11-14 ‘Heart of Darkness’. ‘Heart of Darkness’ would mark the end of Garth Ennis run on the book, replaced by “Tales of the Darkness” writer Malachy Coney in the next issue. In a surprising turn ‘Heart of Darkness’ was eventually collected, along with issues #7-8, as its own trade in 2000. The cover for that collection is somewhat interesting with an almost family portrait between Jackie and Sara Pezzini (who isn’t in any of those collected issues). The family portrait is interesting to consider what eventually happens to those characters. It being an Image comic coming out of the 90s though Pezzni is drawn in a not totally spine breaking pinup pose that exists for no other reason than to have pointless T&A on the cover. I continue to use the first volume of “The Complete Darkness”.
In the first volume of the “Artifacts” series there’s a brief forward by Marc Silvestri talking about the creation of this line of books and how it offered the world different kinds of superheroes. Which is fairly accurate given their contemporaries. Spawn is excessive but a clear riff on Ghost Rider-esque magical anti-hero characters. Youngblood has the celebrity angle but is otherwise a continuation of Liefeld’s sensibilities in “New Mutants”. “Savage Dragon” was the most straightforwardly superhero book of the lot. “Witchblade” and “The Darkness” as I’ve pointed out in previous posts have a genre hybridity to them. They use Superhero as an aesthetic not as a narrative genre. From a genre perspective they’re closer to crime procedural, with a supernatural twist, and crime series. That pendulum swings the other direction in ‘Heart of Darkness’ as Ennis writes a four-part story that feels much closer to a traditional superhero narrative even as it exists in the trappings of a crime family melodrama. The central dramatic tension of the story is the fraying of Jackie’s identity and his inability to keep his otherself, The Darkness, a secret from his family. How no one recognizes him after the whole ‘Family Ties’ event is beyond me, but ya know it was the 90s and the Surveillance State was only limited to the actual State at that point. For as disconnected that story was from the core “Darkness” book a story like this fits the emotional continuity of the series well. The emphasis on the superheroic bifurcated identity would be comes a central …
The return of Apolonia, Jackie’s adoptive sister, dredges up old memories and clarifies the present hatreds that runs through the Franchetti crime family. Hatreds and feuds that are perfect for Sonatine to manipulate and make yet another appearance and try to take The Darkness from Jackie. The continual presences of Sonatine helps to give the series some longer term narrative structure, but it has become very repetitive that someone just is always trying to take The Darkness from Jackie. A plot that will be used yet again in issue #19-20, ironically with yet another familiar connection. Here at least the team up of Jackie’s two greatest antagonists, his bratty sister and Sonatine, makes a great deal of sense and where there is some potential nuance to a character that is on the surface yet another misogynistic portrayal of a woman as a castrating Vagina dentata. An alluring, pleasing, and objectified woman that is none the less a threat and source of anxiety for the Jackie as male reader surrogate.
Now on the surface the character design of Apolonia is yet another cheesecake femme design, an alluring exterior that is contrasted by her seething hatred for Jackie, her Father, the world in general. Where the nuance comes in is Ennis and the art teams dedication to both several pages that show how her father’s corrosive and violent view of “love” (read: domination and control) for her mother affected her. Jackie and Apolonia are each victim of the toxic gender stereotypes they are forced to live up to. Consciously Jackie wouldn’t frame it that way, he’s too much of a macho man for those kinds of feelings, but his acute homophobia and misogyny demonstrate an anxiety over his inability to live up to those ideals. Apolonia is very conscious of how calcified gender norms keep her at arm’s length to the family business, a business that is built on an aristocratic view of blood and family. In flashbacks, from her perspective, Apolonia is shown playing with dolls enacting the kind of toxic violence that is being instilled in Jackie stating “you gotta beat that smelly orphan boy or else he won’t know he’s no good …” Cartoonish as it is there is an element of play and fantasy involved that demonstrates the ways ideology way of masking the true meaning of words and actions through play and distance. The true meaning of what enacting that kind of violence entails is shown in the next page as a young Apolonia sees her father roast the lips off of her mother’s lover as she begged for mercy and received none “the child in me died that day. Love died in me that day.” Apolonia’s designs might fit a certain point of view and a historical narrative trend, but to the creative team’s credit they spend the time and make a space to show her reasons. The treatment of Apolonia reminds me of the Jessica Rabbit quote from Who Framed Roger Rabbit “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.” Which is why it’s a bummer that Apolonia isn’t more of a recurring antagonist for Jackie over the run of “The Darkness”, it’s the kind of thing that would be changed in a reboot though.
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The distance between fantasy and reality in one instance is captured by the recurring motif of torture throughout these four issues. Not an issue goes by without someone getting tortured from Wenders, Vespasian, Jackie, the Lover, etc. It’s only in the traumatic memories of Apolonia that an instance of torture isn’t played for laughs in order to create distance.
Jackie Estacado is a misogynistic, homophobic, bastard; he refers to himself as such with pride several times. He is not the only one like that in this series Don Franchetti is who taught him all of this. In particular Jackie’s ire is aimed towards Wenders the ever-loyal member of the Brotherhood of Darkness. Who in return for his loyalty is beaten, castrated, and the object of homophobic mockery by just about everyone. It reveals the true lack of loyalty and comradery by everyone else in the book, made men and family members who have sworn blood oaths to protect one another. For Jackie in particular looking back it just reveals a character internalized homophobia and self-hatred as part of a perceived failure to live up the toxic masculinity that has been instilled in him. Through mockery and domineering behavior, he attempts to prove himself, but all it does is give shape to the lack at the center of his life. That lack reveals a further lack of a nuanced view of the spectrum sexual activity available to him or basic conceptions of what love and companionship look like. He pines for Jenny, the safe idealized girl who got away, but she is as much a fantasy as everything else that he uses to construct his identity. Once Ennis is out, however, this sort of ironic juxtaposition leaves the title and Estacado becomes that cady bastard readers are supposed to “love” because of how transgressive they are.
The art in this collection of issues is a little rough in spots. Marc Silvestri provides some pencils for issue #11, but the story is otherwise drawn primarily by Joe Benitez and a host of inkers. Silvestri does have a really good page in #11 however where he mirrors Jackie and Apolonia off one another, it’s the best use of his very thing an angular hashing technique so far. It makes both Jackie and Apolonia seem gaunt and already defeated. The rest of the issue and some of the second is a bit of a rollercoaster as everyone tries to keep pages speaking the same visual language for what is clearly an all-hands-on deck set of issues. There’s also either strange printer error or notable experiment in inking as figures around the dinner table in #12 just all get these dots where the shading is supposed to be. Except it’s not shading via coloring it’s ink work, it just looks weird. The arrival of the Angelus, who in a fit of irony choose to inhabit Lauren Franchetti, gives Joe Beitez a chance to draw some like plainly good pinups. Now if he could’ve stuck to a character model for the Angelus is another matter with the character design becoming noticeably simplified between issues #13 and #14.
‘Heart of Darkness’ takes a core element of superhero narratives, the drama of the bifurcated identity and brings it home to the Franchetti family to dramatize a family melodrama. Jackie is able to partially stay in the closet to his Uncle, for now but that won’t last for long. It’s the end of an era for “Darkness” with a new solo writer coming in after co-writing some of the past couple of issues. We’ll see where we go from here I want to keep digging through the archive and “The Darkness” would soon introduce a third artifact, the Spear of Destiny wielded by the Magdalena. I’ll have to do some organizing to figure out what’s the best reading order for things going forward.
