In one comic, a young woman is reminded of how far she’s come the past few years while living with bipolar disorder. She finds creative ways to take out supervillains and uses her power — and her Ph.D. — to handle a melting-down nuclear core.
In another comic, a giant monster emerges from the ocean and proceeds to shit radioactive fecal matter across San Francisco, then fuck the nearest tall building.
What if I told you these two comics were written by the same person?
These days, comics fans may know Gerry Duggan best as the writer of X-Men, a book starring the heroes of Krakoa that often makes those heroics secondary to intimate examinations of the heroes themselves. He also recently took over writing duties on The Invincible Iron Man, another of Marvel’s marquee heroes.
But when he’s not writing those work-for-hire comics, he’s getting together with his old Deadpool friends Brian Posehn and Scott Koblish and making comics like Image’s Secret History of the War on Weed (with both) and The Giant Kokju (with Koblish).
As someone who’s been actively reading both Duggan’s X-Men work and his Image projects, it’s fascinating to see these two sides of him run on parallel tracks, as if the deeper he goes into mainstream superheroics, the more he needs an outlet for comedy.
Kokju reads like a comic born from friends who feel comfortable enough with each other to cram it full of dick and fart jokes. It’s a kaiju story grassfed bits from late ’90s Farrelly brothers movies with a layer of climate alarmism sitting not too far under it. (“Nature had sent a simple message, very loud and very clear: We were going to eat shit and die,” the comic says as people are quite literally doing just that.)
And because it’s an Image comic, it can get as nasty as it wants. By Page 8 (and 9 — it’s a two-page spread), the monster is spraying a lime-green river of shit across San Francisco. Hundreds of people drown in E. coli-infused Ecto Cooler filled with the bones of past meals and smaller monsters swallowed whole, as the Kokju wipes its rear on the street like a dog on carpet. On Page 18, the monster grabs the nearest tall building and fulfills its sexual urges, slamming its mammoth member through glass and steel and cubicle walls. Upon completion, it pulls out to reveal a purple, barbed, pulsing proboscis with an orange tip and a matching set of testicles. Some people are hanging from it for dear life. Some are impaled on it. From the safety of an aircraft carrier out at sea, the military watches, horrified.
“If we don’t do our jobs,” an admiral says, “there are gonna be a lot more dick-smeared people.”
There’s no subtlety here. You can hear Duggan and Koblish laughing, perhaps over Zoom, perhaps in person, as they throw out ideas like, “OK, OK, but the thing is, there are smaller monsters in the shit, and they start attacking people, too!” “Oh, man that is so fucked up. Write it down, write it down.” There may or may not be a cloud of smoke involved.
For as joke-y and sophomoric as Kokju and its predecessor, the Scotch McTiernan trilogy (Secret History of the War on Weed, Scotch McTiernan’s Halloween Party, Scotch McTiernan’s Holiday Party) are, they are topical comics intended to address the issues of the day — climate change, unjust marijuana laws, mass shootings, etc. It’s a bit South Park, but without the “every side is stupid” emotional desensitization that became that show’s stock in trade over time.
But even when operating under layers upon layers of corporate oversight, Duggan can still deliver. X-Men Vol. 6 #5, cover date January 2022, features the team going up against a new version of the Reavers, technologically enhanced humans with a mad-on for mutants. But really it’s a story about Lorna Dane, aka Polaris, a character to whom time, continuity and certain writers have not been kind.
We follow Lorna, nonlinearly, through a typical week of X-manning. On Monday, she delivers a pile of radioactive material to the safety of space. As human scientists panic, she appears more preoccupied with why she needs to wear a hard hat when her power allows her to protect herself against debris.
On Tuesday, she watches a hybrid seal/pomeranian die by remote during a fight with the minions of Dr. Stasis. Wolverine blames Lorna for the dog-seal’s death, which Lorna appears to take personally.
On Wednesday, the X-Men open their Treehouse base in New York to the city’s residents, offering them food, clothing, counseling, legal advice and other acts of charity and brotherhood. Lorna works the food line alongside teammates Synch and Sunfire.
“Today” (presumably Thursday), she wipes the floor with the Reavers after initially being knocked out by them and waking up to realize they’d spilled her coffee and broken her sunglasses. She does this by magnetically controlling the body of an unconscious Wolverine and swinging her around like a violent ragdoll. When blinded in battle, Lorna relies on her vision of the electromagnetic spectrum (Think Daredevil’s radar sense, but green instead of red) to rip the fillings and other metals out of her opponents. In the end, she claims one of the Reavers’ sunglasses as a trophy, striking a confident pose similar to that which she struck while safeguarding the atomic pile. An eye covering for an eye covering.
Amid the action, we flash back to the Hellfire Gala, where we learn that Jean Grey manipulated Lorna’s thoughts so it appeared she was asking to be picked to join the X-Men.
After the Reaver battle, Lorna confronts Jean about that moment at the gala. Jean says she went with Lorna’s first impulse, the thought she had before she talked herself out of being picked. In a data page letter to her former X-Factor teammate Northstar, Polaris admits Jean was right.
Polaris has been a member of the X-Men before, not to mention four of the various permutations of X-Factor. She even led one or two of them. But there’s something different about being “the heroes of Krakoa,” the official public-facing superhero team of the mutant nation. It’s not just about protecting a world that hates and fears them. It’s not just about fighting animal people and posthuman mercenaries. It’s about inspiring hope and being the last mutants to seemingly give a crap about the dream of coexistence. It’s hard, but it makes her happy.
But that doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dory for Dr. Dane. Living with bipolar disorder means there are still down moments. Consider that immediately after manipulating the nuclear core to the safety of space — a feat of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace-ian proportions — the narration says, “Polaris saved countless lives by containing the accident, but some days, nothing could pull her from melancholy’s grip.” Javier Pina draws Lorna staring pensively out the window of the team plane. It’s a reminder that mental health issues aren’t erased, they’re managed, the best any of us can.
Big Two comics aren’t known for their sensitive portrayals of mental health. Polaris is probably one of the best examples of that, having been underplayed at best during Peter David’s multiple turns with her and putting the “arch” in archvillain during Chuck Austen’s run on Uncanny. Here, though, Duggan is going out of his way to portray Lorna as, for lack of a better term, human. We see when she is happy and when she is sad, we see that it is not always rational, but more than that, we’re meant to see ourselves. Minus the seal-dogs and radiation, of course.
Duggan has been writing comics for Marvel for more than a decade, including many of the publisher’s major franchises, such as Uncanny Avengers, Nova, Hulk, Guardians of the Galaxy, Savage Avengers, Marauders and Cable, not to mention some Star Wars stuff. He’s become a pillar of the X-office (known lovingly as “Uncle Gerry”), and for a time even took the helm of Marvel’s cosmic sector, in the 2018 crossover Infinity Wars.
Much of that can be traced back to Deadpool, a series he wrote from 2012 to 2018, partly with Posehn. This is the point where our two Gerrys — the one who writes mainstream superhero stories with a surprising emotional core and the one who writes stories with dick and fart jokes — intersect. Did Deadpool start the series by chasing down the ghosts of dead presidents and befriending the ghost of Benjamin Franklin? Yes. Did he also put himself in the good graces of no less than Captain America by being vulnerable about his tortured past and the ways in which he’s been exploited for the gain of governments and mad scientists? Also yes.
“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” — co-written by Posehn with art by Declan Shalvey — is inarguably one of the best Deadpool stories, one of the best Duggan stories and sets the trajectory for both going forward. In it, we learn that a scientist named Butler with ties to the Weapon Plus program has been experimenting on Deadpool for years, wiping his memory and using pieces of him in a North Korean super soldier program. Among those held in the program’s prison camp are a former lover of Wade’s and the daughter he never knew he had. Because it’s connected to Weapon Plus, Deadpool seeks help from Cap and Wolverine, but they reject him at first. They, too, end up getting kidnapped by Butler, and in seeing the horrors of the North Korean program firsthand, realize they have no choice but to help Deadpool.
The story reaches its emotional high point when Deadpool finds the body of Carmelita Camacho, his former lover, in a mass grave of North Korean prisoners. A splash page shows Wade holding Carmelita’s body, blaming himself for her death, as Cap and Wolverine stand over and behind him in shadow.
The jokes stop. The tears flow as Wade’s grief turns to rage. There is nothing left to do but get revenge.
Here, two of Marvel’s most popular heroes stop seeing Wade Wilson the joke-y pain in the ass who sometimes tries to kill them and start seeing Wade Wilson the man. His loss matters. His mission is their mission. By the end, Cap is shaking his hand and Logan is offering to buy him a beer.
Cut to 2015, and Cap is inviting Deadpool to join his Unity Squad in the pages of Duggan’s Uncanny Avengers, putting Wade on equal footing with characters like Rogue, the Human Torch and Quicksilver. It’s not Wade’s first time on a superhero team — he was a key player in Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force — but it is his first time mixing it up with a brightly colored, no-kill spandex squad. It’s also Duggan’s first team book at Marvel, and arguably another of the books that put him on the path toward writing X-Men more than five years later.
Naturally, the duality of the Duggan we present here is a false binary that strips some nuance to craft a purposeful narrative. The best Duggan stories inject the stupid in the serious and the serious in the stupid. Hence Deadpool doing a Downton Abbey riff while attempting to convince Wolverine to team up against Butler, Polaris fighting bad guys by magnetically controlling the body of her passed-out teammate, and the Giant Kokju being a large-penised metaphor for climate change.
And then there’s the stuff that has nothing to do with either. For example, there’s a third Duggan who’s an amateur photographer who recently published Timing/Luck, a book documenting his interactions with celebrities like Stan Lee, Mark Hamill, Patton Oswalt and Weird Al Yankovic, in addition to fellow comics pros and some street photography. Maybe one day we’ll explore this Duggan and see where the dick jokes fit.
The Giant Kokju #1 is in stores now. Issue #2 comes out May 17 from Image Comics. X-Men is on sale monthly from Marvel.
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts WMQ&A: The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
