Satire/Sincerity: The Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot (1995)

Rusty trying vainly to stop an A-bomb sponsored by McDonald's,
Mercedes, "H&R Blockbuster," and others.

I'm a big fan of comics, if not exactly a die-hard one. I have a comics collection that I guess could be described as wide-ranging rather than extensive. I didn't really have much interest in "Comics" growing up, preferring "comics" - Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Mutts, and thanks to a coffee table book of my dad's, Krazy Kat. I read a lot as a kid, but I didn't read a lot of humor; I usually read adventure fiction like Jules Verne, the Hardy Boys, etc., or nonfiction books about World War II. Eventually I discovered Dave Barry, who I thought was endlessly hilarious (and I still think his best pieces are), but for a long time when I read and laughed, it was because I was reading comics.

I also ended up somehow with Little Lit, a collection of fairy tale comics edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. I think I was excited about Little Lit, and I certainly spent a lot of time looking at the drawings, but I didn't end up connecting with many of the actual stories. I realized that Little Lit was closer to Maus, another book that was on my parents' bookshelf and that I'd looked at but hadn't really been able to read, or the book of work by Seth that my dad had at one point - that is, it didn't make me laugh. In fact, some of the work in Little Lit - Chris Ware, creator of another Rusty, springs to mind - actually made me sad. Today, beautifully drawn and emotionally deep comics draw me in as deeply as Calvin and Hobbes flying down the hill in their wagon.

There is a third category of comics - the classic comic book. If the great newspaper strips are seen as the Chaplin or Laurel & Hardy shorts of comics, and "graphic narratives" by artists like Seth, Chris Ware, David Mazzucchelli, Alison Bechdel, et al., are the "films" (with all the accompanying, and completely unintended by the artists themselves, snootiness that word implies), then the superhero comic book is the summer blockbuster, or the 1950s B movie. And just as arguments have been made for the stylistic and artistic merits of blockbusters and B movies, which often work within the confines of their genres to create really amazing things, it's pretty widely acknowledged that superhero comics have more going on than just muscled guys punching each other. One of my favorite comic books, The Death of Captain Marvel by Jim Starlin, actually does have a lot of muscled guys punching each other, while also dealing with pretty intense themes about mortality, friendship and loss.

The Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot is in this third category of comics. It's a comic book that is intentionally retro in the story it tells. Its blurb on Amazon says, "Everything you remember about being eight years old and watching monster movies is right here, but with all the magnified detail that you always wanted to see." Big Guy is the kind of thing Calvin's mom would take away from him, and it's proud of it (no surprise, as it was written by professional nutcase Frank Miller). I hadn't read the comic before, but I saw it mentioned a few times as I researched artists and publishers and other comic books, so I picked up the Dark Horse edition published in 2015 and expected to be wowed.

The basic plot: Japanese scientists create a huge, sentient monster out of primordial ooze. The monster destroys buildings and eats innocent Japanese citizens in an orgy of violence and destruction that takes up the majority of the first volume. The monster, like everyone in the comic, speaks perfect English; his goal is to destroy all evidence of humanity and human consciousness from the world.

The monster's main tool to accomplish this goal is more slime, which, when it covers the people on the ground, turns them from humans into smaller monsters. The Japanese air force and army are completely powerless in the face of the monster, but luckily the government has a trick up their sleeve: "Rusty, the boy robot," a Jimmy Neutron-looking metal kid with "nucleo-protonic powers" who is also very lonely. The monster taps into Rusty's fears and insecurities, however, and disarms him almost immediately.

This is the end of the first book - almost. All the carnage, death and destruction thus far, as well as Rusty's introduction and defeat, are only a prelude to the real point of the book. As summed up by an Amazon reviewer:

The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot series is a satire of Japanese Chogokin (giant robot) stories in which a robot made by humans and piloted by one or more humans is sent to fight off an invasion of giant monsters. In those stories, western nations are often forced to rely on Japanese technology to save the day. In Big Guy and Rusty, the opposite occurs. [...] If you like giant robots, giant monsters and satire, this series is for you!

The issue with seeing The Big Guy as a satire of this Japanese genre is that it flips the usual motivation for satire - the underdog fighting against the powerful - on its head. Satire has, from Jonathan Swift to Monty Python, been used as a vehicle for the little guy to expose the big guy. When the satire is from the big guy and directed at the little guy, things get more complicated.

See, once Rusty is defeated, Japan's government, with its last ounce of life, presses the button to call... America. To my mind, there's something twisted about this, and not satirically so. Since 1945, America has cast itself as Japan's savior, giving the country a new constitution and the foundation for a new economy, reinstating its emperor, building military bases on its islands "for its own protection," and giving it a love of baseball, jazz and commercialism. All of this despite dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bombs which much historical scholarship has disputed the need for. Little Boy and Fat Man. Or, perhaps, the Boy Robot and the Big Guy.

The Big Guy seems less a satire of a Japanese monster movie genre - which in its original form was a reliving of atomic destruction but with an ending where Japan, not the United States, saves the day - and more a nostalgia for a certain kind of American nationalism - an uncomplicated view of America as freedom fighter whose last true moment came in World War II.

The history of comics has plenty of these attitudes, of course (Nick Fury's original incarnation, for example). The Big Guy is different in its nostalgia. It sets out to be a cultural anachronism. That is, The Big Guy is at its essence a certain kind of conservative comic, a comic that could have been read by Reagan or George W. Bush, or perhaps by our current culturally anachronistic Commander in Chief. It does hearken back to American attitudes from the 1940s and 1950s, but it applies no critical lens, gives us no new view of these attitudes; instead, it glorifies them.

In the end of the comic, Japan offers Rusty the Boy Robot to The Big Buy - to America - as a gift. But The Big Guy doesn't want Rusty; he works alone. It's telling that, while The Big Guy takes place almost completely in Japan, it was ultimately turned into an animated TV show that moved the setting to another thinly-disguised New York City. The Big Guy isn't about Japan, or even about satirizing or reexamining an element of Japanese culture. In this comic book world, it's all about America first.