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THE LAW IS A ASS for 10/19/1999
DOCKET ENTRY
"The Law is a Ass" Installment # 15
Originally published in The Comics Buyer's Guide # 531
January 20, 1984 issue
Disappointment rears its ugly head. At the end of this column, I casually mentioned plans that DC had to revive one of my all-time favorite comics Sugar and Spike. Turns out the "revival" consisted of taking some of the unpublished S&S stories that writer-artist Sheldon Mayer had done for the foreign market and printing them along with reprints in some digest-sized books. No revival of a monthly, or even bi-monthly comic. Just some stories printed in a far-too-small-to-see format. And even they didn't last long.
And now I have to relive this disappointment; just when my dentist and I though we had that annoying teeth-gritting problem solved.
"The Law is a Ass"
Installment # 15
by
Bob Ingersoll
You must have seen it.
The world simply cannot come to an end, without someone seeing it.
And yet that is what has happened, The world has come to an end. How else can I explain it? Either the world has ended or it is now very cold in a very low place.
You see, I liked an issue of The Vigilante.
Yes, him again. I know Vigilante # 4 is supposed to be the first of a two-parter, so I promised not to talk about it. But when have I ever kept my word, where Vigilante is concerned? And even if it is continued, issue 4 stands on its own quite well, so writing about it is fair. (Especially here. My column. My rules. My definition of fair.) Moreover, after being so quick to condemn the book in the past, I feel it is only ... well, fair ... that I praise it as quickly, when it deserves praise.
Rumor, plus a front-page story from Mary Wolfman in CBG # 527, promises that the Vigilante is about to undergo a change in both personality and origin, so as to soften the negative reception that the character has received. (A reception certainly shared by yours truly since the character's inception.) If Vigilante #4 is any indication of things to come, it is definitely a change for the better.
It is also a change I would like to see become permanent. I have no real desire to see Vigilante stay the way it was, even if it means that I will have one less column topic per month. I willingly trade the one for the other.
Reading Vigilante prior to #4 was a painful experience, which frequently found me running and screaming from the comfort of my recliner. I particularly remember one excruciating night, when I read Vigilante #2 while simultaneously watching the two-hour premier of Hardcastle and McCormick on TV. I went into acute Technicality Shock. I frothed at the mouth. I broke china--dinnerware not the country, but I was so far gone, only the country's inconvenient placement kept me from going after it. It was my wife's hastily placed call to the Cleveland Zoo for a tranquilizer dart gun which kept me from doing serious physical harm to one-third of the mid-west.
I have no real desire to read a comic calculated to apoplex me once a month. If I can help change it, I will. Toward that end, and because I have it on good authority that Marv Wolfman reads my column, namely Marv himself told me he does, I offer an explanation of why Vigilante #'s 1-3 deserved their negative reception and what issue #4 did to improve that situation. Hopefully, then, we can all keep the mistakes from coming back.
First of all, and despite what Marv said in CBG #527, it wasn't the name, at least not for me. They could have called him Ray. Or they could have called him Jay, Or they could have called him Ray Jay. They could even have called him Little Mary Sunshine, and Vigilante would still have received his deserved negative reaction. Because it was Vigilante's actions, not his name, which caused the problems.
Ours is a world populated by such fictitious characters creations as The Executioner, The Destroyer, The Hitman, The Butcher, The Assassin and The Terminator. (And can The:
Shoot-Em-Maim-Em-Disembowel-Em-And-Throw-Em-Into-The-Trash-Masher-Er be far behind?) With all those literary luminaries, who can get worked up over something as mundane as The Vigilante? And if it was just the name then why didn't anyone up to and including noted comic-book witch-hunter Frederic Wertham concern himself over Greg Sanders, the Prairie Troubadour, DC's Golden-Age costumed cowboy hero, who also went by the nom de guerre Vigilante?
It's not only the name. But the name is symbolic of the problem, The problem is, what is a vigilante? To answer that question, I must turn to my authority. And what is that authority, Don Pardo?
"Webster's Third New International Dictionary is the source authority for all definitions in this column, Bob. It's thick. It's heavy. It actually includes the word, "waqf." And it's the only dictionary which has more words in it, than even Daniel Webster, himself, knew existed. That's Webster's Third New International Dictionary. It's more that a dictionary. It's a complete reference library in one volume.
"And while you're picking up your Webster's Third New International Dictionary, why not pick up a box of Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat?"
Cool, it Don.
So what does Webster say about a vigilante? It says, "vigilante n: a member of a vigilance committee." There, now wasn't that helpful? (Don't you just hate definitions that define a word in terms of another form of the same word or in terms of another unfamiliar word, so you have to look that word up also? You know something like "homesteader n: see PIONEER." So you look up pioneer and get, "World's largest stereo manufacturer.")
Anyway, a vigilance committee is "a volunteer committee of citizens for the oversight and protection of an interest: esp: a committee organized to suppress and punish crime summarily (as when the processes of law appear inadequate)." So how, you may ask, does that definition apply to Adrian Chase? He isn't a member of any committee. He acts on his own. It has to do with the way the concept of vigilantism has changed over the years. In today's usage, isn't a member of a vigilance committee, it's anyone who embraces the philosophy of a vigilance committee and takes the law into his own hands.
So doesn't that make Superman, Batman, Captain America or Spider-Man vigilantes? They take the law into their own hands and arrest super villains or, if the story needs an early fight scene, the occasional mugger.
Yes. And no.
"Yes and no." Sorry, it's a lawyer thing.
Under a literal interpretation of taking the law into your own hands, anyone who isn't a policeman who arrests someone, is a vigilante. But they're not called that. What these people are doing is making a citizen's arrest, which is a good thing, even when it's Gomer popping Barney Fife. As the term vigilante has bad connotations, and as no one wants to discourage citizen's arrests, no one refers to someone making a citizen's arrest with the pejorative term, "vigilante." And no one bothers to harass or arrest them either.
(Aside to Don Thompson: No, that doesn't completely answer your question in CBG #527 about Badger #2, where the police wrong in arresting Badger after he stopped a purse snatcher. Felons don't generally give up, just because some citizen says, "Give up, felon." To effect the usual citizen's arrest, it may become necessary to use some force on the felon. Such force, were it not part of a citizen's arrest, would constitute an assault. But, again, because no one wants to discourage citizen's arrests, the police tend not to proceed with assault charges, provided the force applied was no more force than was necessary to effect the arrest.
(It's like self-defense. You can use only as much force as is necessary to make the arrest. You cannot, however, use excessive force. That is assault and is illegal. In Badger # 2, Badger stopped a purse snatcher by elbowing him in the eye, then kicking him in the head. The two blows on Page 5 were quite enough to stop the purse snatcher. On Page 6 Badger continues to beat the man mercilessly, a beating sufficient to put the man, "in traction far months." That was excessive force and an illegal assault. The Madison police had every right to arrest Badger.
(On the other hand, I doubt if the police in the real world would have arrested Badger. Could anyone find twelve citizens, who would convict Badger for assault on a purse snatcher? And if the jury's says it's just, why bother to bust?
(So, Don, to answer your question, arresting Badger was fine from a legal point of view. It was flawed from a realistic point of view, but was, I'm sure, included for dramatic effect. I didn't mind it. I thought it showed Badger's character very well.)
Now that the aside's over, where was I? Oh yes,citizen's arrests. When a super hero sees someone breaking the law, arrests him--usually after several pages of fight scenes--then leaves him for the local constabulary, the hero's only making a citizen's arrest. No one's going to complain about that. Except, of course, for the now almost cliched cop who, "just doesn't like vigilantes." Just once I'd like to see some super hero turn on one of those whining, superior jackasses and say, "Fine, Lieutenant, you don't like vigilantes, next time you can catch Galactus all by yourself." Adrian Chase went a little beyond citizen's arrests, but only if by your system of measurements, the mother in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" got a little black and blue.
Adrian's problem was that he believed and acted like he knew better than anyone else what the law should be. He knew who was guilty of what crimes, despite the fact that the person had never been convicted in a court. The innocence was only because of a "technicality" anyway. The fact that Adrian was fallible and was, in fact, flat out wrong about Leonard Kord's guilt in issue #2 didn't matter to him. He knew what was best, so he acted on his concept of what was best. After all being wrong is just a technicality too.
Adrian also knew what punishment a person should receive. He condemned Stryker to death in issue #3, even though Stryker had never been convicted of murder or any other crime punishable by death. Adrian knew what Stryker had done, so he had the right to kill Stryker, He also had the right to kill anyone who helped Stryker, like Cyborg,
In these actions Adrian Chase behaved exactly like the worst conception of a vigilante. He took the law into his own hands, decided a person's guilt without a trial, and proceeded to mete out the punishment he felt was appropriate. Such "necktie party" actions are not permissible. They violate the law. They violate the Constitution. Oh, and they aren't nice either.
It was because of these actions that I was so vocal in my criticism of the Vigilante. Not his name, his actions. Of course, the fact that the Vigilante continually espoused a philosophy with which I have violent disagreement and never gave the other side of the question a chance to express itself didn't help much. But it was still his actions which made me hate him so.
Now we see the same character in issue #4. But it isn't the same character. He loaded sleep darts in his gun, so he couldn't kill. He didn't decide who was guilty of what, then punish. In fact, he even admitted his being wrong for what he did in the past. And instead of his former fare of seeking out the people he thought got away with something so he could kill them, Adrian Chase stopped witnesses in a murder trial from being killed; an actual good thing. He even did it with a minimum of philosophizing; an actual better thing. Keep that up, Adrain, and I'll be able to read your adventures without resorting to primal scream therapy.
Vigilante #4 wasn't without flaws from a legal point of view, but the flaws were all procedural. They all had to do with inaccurate perceptions of how a murder trial is conducted. Almost anyone could make these mistakes. In fact, from what I've seen in comic books, almost everyone does.
But trying to correct the mistaken impressions of how a trial proceeds, is another column for another day. Vigilante #4 was so pleasant, that I don't want to ruin it now. And I just found out that DC is going to revive Sugar and Spike in its own monthly comic. After news like that, I couldn't say anything bad about anyone. (You have your favorites, and I have mine.)
BOB INGERSOLL
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