Teamworking Day: Marville, Part 2 (Patreon)

Welcome to Part 2 of our Marville Teamworking Day. In true Bill Jemas fashion, we’re going to give you a primer so you can understand all the jokes we’re about to make. Bill Jemas was a comic book writer who made a two-pronged bet: One, that Peter David sucks, and two, that Bill Jemas can string words together in a coherent way. He lost so hard he got fired by his employer, Marvel Comics. He was, at the time, the Vice President of Marvel Comics. That high up the chain? You're basically invincible. You are scandal proof. Executive VPs have literally eaten lesser employees and didn’t even lose their parking space. It is impossible to be hoisted on your own petard any harder than Bill Jemas -- your petard will break. Those things aren’t loadbearing, they can only support, max, 200 pounds of idiot.

Brockway: When we last left Bill Jemas’ Mary Sue hero, Al, he was fixing the entire world with basic common sense and the idea that maybe this PC stuff has gone too far. And also 100 million dollars that he earned the old fashioned way: by being white and present. Al wants to use his megafortune to make the world better, but jerks just keep getting in the way. One of those jerks? Not Rush Limbaugh! He just destroyed Black Panther with his magic microphone because the black icon agreed with Iron Man that it’s bullshit you can’t say Mexicans work like N-words without somebody getting mad at you. I know that sounds like 8chan playing a Team Story Game with the prompt ‘Republican Isekai,’ but this was considered a liberal comic back in 2002, by at least Bill Jemas.

Seanbaby: "Finish the line!" screamed the ghost of William Tiberius Alabastacles Jemas, the assistant slave owner who wrote that joke about Mexicans working like N-words. "Let the good people hear the whimsical natures by which the sub-human cultures are similar! Don't let my only memory, that amazing joke, die incomplete on the lips of a man robot! No! I'm fading! Faaaaa..."

Again, this man could have written anything. He could have explored the emotional trauma of a D-list villain losing his 50th straight fight to Spider-Man, or had every superhero get sucked into a TV to do a bikini Star Wars. Instead, he chose to make Iron Man racist so Tony Stark would tell the joke Bill ruined Thanksgiving with in order to tell kids they'd be having more fun if he, the Vice President of Marvel, was allowed to use hate speech. It's pure unpredictable madness, and I honestly can't wait to see how he builds on this premise.

Brockway: Oh, that’s too bad because we’re halfway through the second issue so it is, of course, time to abandon the plot entirely and start a new one. Now we’re fighting crime! Why? Because Bill Jemas thought of a hilarious bit! I can’t wait for you to get to this punchline. It involves a black icon getting his comeup- no, I’m getting ahead of myself. You know the rules: Policework means every female character dresses like a prostitute. Lucinda, the female cop, now joins the gang permanently as Bill Jemas liked writing about her tits.

Seanbaby: Let's ignore how Bill Jemas thinks police officers will take off their clothes and let you run a sting operation if you tell them you have the start of a cool idea. The part that really troubles me is how they joke about how she doesn't look like a prostitute in her prostitute costume. Why? Am I missing something? Is it taboo for escorts to wear spiked armlets? Does Bill think she's too hilariously clean and uninjured to be a sex worker? What does Bill Jemas think the children reading this comic book know about prostitutes that they would get this?

Brockway: I have this theory that every comic book writer secretly believes they could be Alan Moore. They’re just one truly unleashed title away from becoming a lauded literary genius and filthy sex wizard. They flirt with it, they hint at it, they eventually try it -- just a little bit -- to see if, hey, I might be the next boner-yogi of the con scene.

They are not. None of them are, except Warren Ellis, but for the wrong reasons.

I think Bill Jemas’ stab at grumpy old sex magick is the section where our heroes arrest a perp and put him into the justice system, only each step is played out like the remedial explorations of a Mormon’s sub/dom phase.

Brockway: So we’ve established that every writer, at some point, must test whether or not they are an Alan Moore-style literary genius/spunk magician. And we’ve established, without question, that Bill Jemas has just failed that test. If this were a multiple choice test, he would’ve traced his own dick in the bubbles and whispered “tell the grading computer I said you’re welcome” as he handed it in. If it were a driving test, he would’ve gotten his head stuck in the steering wheel. The instructor would have to call the fire department. After getting sawed out he’d totally have the gall to ask “so do we take the photo now?” We all know Bill Jemas failed the Funnypage Fuck Mage Finals. My question, no, my fear: Do you think Bill Jemas knows?

Seanbaby: This seems like something a disgraced priest would draw in prison therapy. This is something a parent would hold up and say, "Not bad, right? He's only 8, and doesn't really get kink or religious imagery yet, but his father and I think he has the makings of a real pervert."

Brockway: Fucking imagine trying to break into the comic book kink scene with this Playskool fetish shit! This OshKosh B’ondage. If you showed those pages to the dick torture club that Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison host they’d laugh you right out of the Oink Hog Roast as a Cleanballs.

I’m too mad at this vanilla kink. No! It’s not even vanilla! This is Original Flavor fucking. This is the fingerpainting of fingerb- no, we need to move on. Let’s get back to the story: Our heroes meet up with Spider-Man who, thank god, doesn’t say anything racist (yet) and together they face down the Kingpin of crime himself. Only -- and here’s the punchline, you guys are gonna love this! You won’t believe you didn’t guess it! It’s Spike Lee!

Seanbaby: Did Bill Jemas invent the idea of attaching a bikini girl to the story whose only job is making sure she's right about who the new characters are? Because I love it. It reminds me of watching movies with my grandmother.

Brockway: Now, the eagle-eyed reader may recognize this as a huge fucking problem, but Lee only delivers a failing freshman thesis on the nature of minority crime. He does double-down and makes kind of a reverse joke about how affirmative action is bullshit, but come on -- this could’ve gone way worse. Bill Jemas was the perfect model of restraint here. He showed a black man in a 2000s comic and didn’t say anything about his huge unwarranted dong.

Seanbaby: Casual white supremacists, like Bill Jemas, all have this fear that any black person can get a social advantage over them by going, "Oh, so a black person can't something!?" Watching Bill work through this perceived unfairness using only superhero "comedy" is really something. It's like watching Kirk Cameron save Christmas, only racist. Hold on, wait, was there a point to any of this?

Brockway: Unquestionably no. That was it. That was the bit we abandoned our old plot to chase down. It went for 10 pages that felt like 80, and it is time once again to bail on a plot with no resolution to do something else even dumber and more self-indulgent. It’s going to be tough to beat “make fun of Spike Lee for being combative to the White Man” but let’s see what Bill Jemas can come up with...

Brockway: Oh shit, is this comic going to get fun all of a sud- no, of course it’s not. Because we have just arrived at the answer to the question I posed earlier: Did Bill Jemas learn that he’s an Alan Moore? Readers, editors, and ex-lovers sick of listening to Sting for slow-motion forty-minute missionary say “completely not,” but Bill Jemas says… “get in my hump yurt and open up your squirt chakra, it’s time to write a meta script over paintings about the origins of life, sex, and death.”

Seanbaby: He's earned this.

Seanbaby: I hope when they meet God, Mickey takes out her tits and goes, "Hey, aren't you God?" Or better yet, "Hey, aren't you star of Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan?"

Brockway: This is seriously issue 3 of Marville. The whole issue. It’s not a joke -- or, well, it’s not a joke that Bill Jemas knows he’s making. It’s all like this, with the script existing outside of but commenting on the events of the comic as our heroes meet God, who looks different to everyone that sees him. Because Lucinda the cop is a basic bitch, she sees the Judeo-Christian god in all his glory. Because Al is a fucking dork, he sees Superman.

Seanbaby: "Okay, Bill... this is it. You're explaining everything. The origins of the universe, the foundational elements of morality, the meaning of life. What would God say? They're all counting on you, Bill. What are God's first wo-- oh, I've got it! 'Welcome to Outer Space.' God damn it, this is your masterpiece, Bill. This is your Kirk Cameron Saves Christmas 4: Heavenly Presents."

Brockway: The ‘everything to everyone god’ is an old trope that could be explored with some interesting meta-twists, if one was an Alan Moore. Bill Jemas flunked out of The Alan Moore Mystikal Akademyy for Arkane Penetratynns, so God immediately decides this whole schtick was dumb and he’s actually a handsome black man named “Jack.”

Seanbaby: A good writer makes you experience so much more than what they put on the page. And you can absolutely experience the rush of heroism Bill Jemas felt when he decided to make God a handsome black man. Not in sports sneakers, mind you, but "a sharp business suit."

Brockway: At least he didn’t say anything about his di-

Seanbaby: I thought it was weird how all of Bill Jemas' female characters have been finding excuses to take their clothes off since the moment they appeared up to and including the moment they met God, but after I read, "I don't want wet panties through eternity," I knew this was a man who truly understood women.

Brockway: Look, nobody hops into the mudhut of a cum sorcerer without some priming first. What Bill Jemas has to do here is infuse sex with some pseudo-spiritual bullshit so that teenagers will think it’s deep to give an old man a handy by a river. That’s why our heroes strip naked to journey through the origins of life. I’m sorry I keep hitting the same point, but it really is Alan Moore that did specifically this to comic books. I love Alan Moore, he did some great work. He’s the Tim and Eric of comic books. Tim and Eric ruined comedy for years, because every asshole who wasn’t funny saw how not being funny could be funny and figured they could pull off the same trick. Alan Moore did the same to comic books: He made every writer afterward think they could break all the rules of conventional storytelling to explore high school philosophy and also how horny they are all the time. The two must be related!

Seanbaby: This is sort of frustrating to me because if you told me to imagine a dumb person explaining the meaning of life, I might start with a joke about them looking up "cells" in an encyclopedia and reading it out loud. But that's what this fucking goddamn real actual person did. This can't be the whole issue can it?

Brockway: No no, this is it. This is the entire issue -- it’s skinny dipping with Hung Yahweh talking basic science and wondering “what if also god?” If you smoked your first joint at 14 and asked a Chili Cheese Frito bag “okay, but who made the big bang?” You are now the Vice President of Marvel Comics.

Seanbaby: "Lucy whips off her shirt." - Bill Jemas writing a female character in a scene where everyone was fully naked already

Brockway: At every revelation Al and his elite squad of hot lady morons get progressively madder at “Jack” for not making biology better. The sex magick is broken and all the teens put their panties right back on when one of them realizes that stuff dies in nature. They pantslessly yell about how a loving god would have made carbon dioxide without killing single cell organisms. You can see it on the Dong of Dongs’ face that no pussy is worth this shit, not even Unstuck In Time Pussy. The best kind!

Seanbaby: So if I'm understanding this, the white girl in the wet panties, who just learned about molecules, is lecturing Hot Black God about how to make cruelty-free carbon dioxide, as written by a man who thinks carbon dioxide is capitalized. This guy really set out to write a comic book about all things and it went One True Christian God, c(C)arbon, I'm out of ideas.

Brockway: Not true, there was also that really sexy and wild finger-licking scene. F-fuck you, Bill Jemas! You are the unsalted butter of fucking. You’re the sultry adjusting of Mormon temple underwear. You lights-off, no-no zone having, masturbating to a mobile game ad basic sex bitch. I was strangling myself with my own panties while you were st-

Sorry. Sorry! I’m cool. It’s cool. Cool.

Bill Jemas finally seems to realize he has to do a bit more reading on yoni before tricking interns into his tantric sweat Volvo. So we ditch the whole meta-comic origin of life story and Jack suggests the next issue be about dinosaurs. Fuckin’ best idea you’ve had since murder dioxide, Hogfather! I do think it’s notable that the final panel of Bill Jemas’ cosmic philosophy issue -- the one so worth breaking all the rules that he did it in the middle of a popularity contest with his very career on the line -- is of Al the moderate white guy quietly fist pumping his own magnificence.

Brockway: Nope! I lied! The final panels of this issue are a teaser for a Chuck Austen joint!

Seanbaby: Gasp

Brockway: It ends how it must, where it began and where it always was - time is a flat circlejerk. Chuck Austen is Bill Jemas is not Alan Moore is Chuck Austen, and the dick in your hand? It is your own, the dick of tomorrow. The hand on your dick? It is your own, the hand of the past. You have always been here jerking yourself off, as you always will be, and so it is. This is my shot. I am an Alan Moore Jizz Wizard, please take off your pants, I have saged a yurt.

Seanbaby whips off his shirt.

...

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