Ayre Force
Adam Slutsky, Joseph Phillip Illidge and Shawn Martinbrough.
Bodog Entertainment.
My chief reaction to Ayre Force (which probably says much more about what else I have been reading and my reaction to that) is ‘Baudrillard would choke reading this. He would choke and he would die and that is awesome.’
Ayre Force is, more or less, the tale of a disparate group of people recruited to fight Mad Scientist founded environmental and animal abuses with grenades by savvy entreprenur/genius commander Calvin Ayre. The kicker is, Calvin Ayre is a real life person, who (at the time the comic was released) was the owner of real life company Bodog Entertainment. The rest of the cast of butt-kicking heroes are all Bodog employees real life poker players, musicians and mixed martial artists. According to the comic, these are their secret identities. REALLY they are eco-guerilla-fighters.
Hot DAMN you guys it’s so fucking hyperreal it hurts. Also, Bif Naked who-sings-that-song-I-like-from-the-Buffy-soundtrack shoots the hell out of things!
Ayre Force is obviously an attempt to get people to pay for one’s marketing, but having yourself written as a total badass has to be a lot of fun. If I had the money and opportunity to produce a comic where my friends and colleagues ran around blowing shit up and fighting supervillains*, I would totally do it, especially if part of the proceeds went to fighting the revolting trade in bear bile.
The plot doesn’t really matter there’s good science and bad science and the bad guy and his kids have the bad science and they! Must! Be! Stopped! With explosions! It is, however, endearingly representative almost exactly half the ‘characters’ are women, there are multiple ‘characters’ of colour (both good guys and bad) and multiple women of colour. It’s something so rare in most comics that it’s sadly remarkable in this one. Although a number of the women’s outfits are missing the protective fabric that I would really want to be there in the event of an armed infiltration, they aren’t posed in seductive fashion, and they are just as adept at kicking down doors and firing from speeding motorcycles as their male counterparts.
Sadly, not every non-sexist work is necessarily particularly good. Ayre Force isn’t terrible, but it’s an excellent example of how a book can be mediocre in script and artwork, yet still not offend one’s feminist sensibilities. For the latter I commend it! In addition to the aforementioned celebrity appeal, it also includes gunfights, gloriously bad dialogue (‘You want… some science? Here’s your damn science!!!’) and a man’s heart exploding out of his mouth, all things I appreciate.
Ayre Force is good, stupid fun and its stance on gender and race inclusion is a lot better than most things that fall into that category. It’s nowhere close to groundbreaking, but you could do much, much worse.
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- In Girl Wonder: Alpha Q, Rachel would be Editrix, wielder of the fastest red pen in the west. Betty would be WebWatcher, utilizing the power of her cybernetic brain to monitor evildoers. Nenena would be Smackdown, able to disable an enemy with a single well-crafted modhat. And I would be Anger Management, using bolts of fury to destroy hegemonic structures.
It pays to plan these things in advance.
