Between the two

When it comes to Goth cartoonists on the Internet, I feel that while Kai Decadence is one of the first that I got really interested in, it’s Arden Wachowski who’s the more talented of the two. Generally better sense of anatomy and while their comics aren’t always so polished, there’s something of an interesting story and angle not commonly found in Anglophone North American comics. As they’re Canadian, Cold Hard Teeth is more interesting than say Captain Canuck.

The latter’s a Canadian superhero as conceived by actual Canadians, but while the stories he appears in are serviceable, Cold Hard Teeth blows the waters off of it because it’s not only more readable but also has a more interesting premise. It’s about two musicians who go Goth upon realising that they’re monsters, also they’re into bands like Bauhaus and Sisters of Mercy which makes the Goth angle all the more authentic and sincere. In ways those written by non-Goths don’t get immediately.

There’s a gulf of difference between something like DC’s Black Alice and the characters at Cold Hard Teeth, or for another matter Courtney Gripling’s Goth makeover. Courtney being this character from As Told By Ginger, but like I said earlier Gordon’s and Tanner’s Goth makeover is sincere as their author actually got into Goth punk music at some point and stuck to it. For all its faults, it’s really well-written and it’s refreshing in a sea of bland superhero stories.

Kai Decadence’s stuff tends to be more sexualised, in the sense that he fetishises not only muscular men, but also bodybuilders and it shows in the way he draws cartoon characters. The less is said about his fursona, the better. While Kai Decadence is one of the earliest I got into, Arden Wachowski’s better even if their art’s not always polished but is at least interesting.

Goth characters

It’s not necessarily wrong to have a Goth character, however in theory and to some extent in practise, if because it seems it’s the female Goth that gets fetishised and objectified a lot. Like when it comes to some men, they want an unconventional woman this badly. So they go for alternative women and especially Goth women at that, I actually know somebody who seemed to be sympathetic to the Goth scene but objectified the one Goth girl he created. Especially when she showed up in another story as a love interest to his self-insert, that’s to put things very politely because it’s actually graphic, that it seems when a non-Goth writes a Goth girl she’ll risk becoming a sex object.

So I propose to you the character of Rose Marie Gaultier, a woman with the power to talk to the dead. But she’s not what you expect her to be because I don’t want her to be objectified by men who fetishise Goth and alternative women a lot, so she’s really more Kate Bush than Siouxsie Sioux right down to the long dark hair with bangs and the romantic dresses she wore in both versions of the music video for the song ‘Wuthering Heights’. At this point in time it would be real hard coming up with a Goth girl character without having her get sexualised by horny men, that you might as well not make her Goth to avoid the creepy sexualisation. It wouldn’t entire curb this to be honest.

But at least it wouldn’t be to a big extent as this befell the likes of DC Comics’s Death or any other Goth girl character in fiction, since it’s kind of common that though they’re Goth they rarely have Goth boyfriends. This same writer I brought up before did create a Goth guy character but he was a rival to another self-insert of his, instead of being somebody who gets the Goth girl himself. The objectification of Goth girls is this bad whenever they wound up as the lovers of some non-Goth guy, seldom do they ever date and marry Goth guys themselves. You could say it happens in reality too.

However I wouldn’t want it to happen to Rose to a disgusting extent, so she’s not going to be Goth and she’ll look more like a younger Kate Bush instead of Siouxsie Sioux in her 1980s prime. Not that I despise Siouxsie and the Banshees, but the sexualisation of Goth women is pretty unsettling. As for who gets to be the resident Goth of the group, this goes to a guy and he’s a part-time musician. Since there’s not a lot of people who’re sexually attracted to Goth guys, this fellow (John Zelensky) wouldn’t have the same sexualised baggage as it befell many of his female counterparts. For the record, he plays covers of Goth songs like ‘More’ by Sisters of Mercy.

He even manipulates electricity but that’s kind of unheard of, especially when it comes to creating Goth characters at all in fiction. So he belongs to a painfully rare breed of Goth character whose powers have nothing to do with Goth stereotypes, the only other one in his class would be Scrap/Supervision. So that’s just them against the other Goths whose powers play into stereotypes about Goths as a whole, it’s bad enough that not only are Goth girls sexualised but that they play into other stereotypes about them. It’s also really rare for a Goth character to be actually into Goth music, even if it’s a stronger marker of their tie to the Goth scene this way. Admittedly it’s possible to listen to Goth bands without being part of the Goth subculture, but that’s one way of knowing how oddly specific Goth actually is in ways outsiders miss and misunderstand.

I kind of had something of a Goth phase but one where I actually listened to real Goth bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sisters of Mercy and Bauhaus, the character of John Zelensky homages this by playing covers of songs by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sisters of Mercy and Ausgang (another Goth band that I listened to before). If Goth is really all about music then it should make a lot of sense that what John Zelensky isn’t just his habit of dressing in black, but also his habit of listening to and playing Goth music a lot. That’s a little nuance that most non-Goth writers don’t get when it comes to writing Goth characters at all.

So when it comes to creating Goth characters, the risks are always there if somebody’s not Goth themselves. So there are going to be misconceptions, sexualisation and half-truths that somebody who’s into Goth would rarely stumble into, if because they personally know the ins and outs of the Goth scene well. I feel somebody like Kai Decadence might be a more trustworthy arbiter of what makes a character Goth because he’s this deeply intimated with the Goth subculture, so he’s a good judge of what makes a character Goth (or sometimes what doesn’t). I kind of agree with him here that a number of characters deemed Goth aren’t really Goth at all, especially when it comes to music.

At best they are outsiders’ idea of Goth, not so much Goth as cooked up by actual Goths. So it becomes easier to tell that a certain character isn’t Goth if they don’t have a tendency to or history of listening to actual Goth music, as in songs by those considered to be part of the Goth music canon like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sisters of Mercy, Bauhaus and The Cure. Like their connection to the Goth scene is highly superficial if they’ve never listened to Goth music in any capacity, so it’s better to have the lived experience of being into actual Goth music and ins and outs of Gothdom than relying on cliches and ideas about Goth.

At least you could really tell what makes something Goth, but it’s easy to go by first impressions rather than a deeper understanding of it.