Teamworking Day: Marville, Part 1

In 2002, comic book writers Bill Jemas and Peter David made a bet. The nature of that bet? You suck, Peter David. Peter David put his money on “nuh uh,” while Bill Jemas went all in on “yuh huh.” This resulted in the U-Decide contest - a run of three comics with the fans deciding which was best, and all others getting cancelled. Bill Jemas may not have been entirely wrong, since avid Hot Doggers already know Peter David as David Peters, author of the Photon novelizations. But Bill Jemas’ mistake was in the framing of the bet: Instead of merely betting that Peter David sucks -- decent odds -- he bet that he sucked less than Peter David. Bill Jemas would lose this bet. But not before seeing that things weren’t going his way, panicking, trying to change the stakes to “a pie in the face for charity” instead of cancellation, definitely getting cancelled anyway, and then fired. There have been less embarrassing sex farts than Bill Jemas’ bet. There have been less embarassing public sex farts. Less embarassing public sex farts in a church. At a funer- you get it. Let’s explore Bill Jemas’ public church funeral sex fart, Marville.

Brockway: Peter David, the man who fucked up a laser tag novelization so bad that it starred Space Hitler, absolutely dominated Bill Jemas in a writing competition. I actually don’t know how you fail as hard as Bill Jemas. One time in 5th grade I asked all the coolest kids in school to gather around and watch my sick swing jump, then I fell backwards off the swing, landed on my head so hard that I clocked myself in the face with my own dick, and cried so hard I passed out. And now I will repeat my previous claim: I actually don’t know how you fail as hard as Bill Jemas.

Seanbaby: If more people knew about this, we would use Bill Jemas as the yardstick for any failure that goes so far beyond the thinkable. Like if this was a world where everyone remembered Marville, and you died trying to suck ivermectin out of a horse's asshole, the rancher who found your body would say you "pulled a Bill Jemas." And the first cop on the scene would go, "Yeah, this is an open-and-shut Jemas. Call off the detectives."

Brockway: Yeah it really makes our job easier for future failures, but it means we’re gonna have to spend 5,000 words right now trying to describe how you write a comic book worse than horse asshole suicide. Let’s get started: Peter David’s entry in the U-Decide contest was straightforward and approachable enough for a basic popularity contest: A new Captain Marvel series. Bill Jemas’ entry was equally straightforward: Marville, an inside baseball parody of the comic book industry airing all of his complaints and petty grievances with the tangential figures of that medium. It starts, as all great parodies do, by first explaining all of the references you will need to get the upcoming jokes.

Brockway: Here’s what you’ll need to know to get my upcoming joke. Spaceballs was a parody movie based on the hit series, Star Wars. Star Wars was an epic fantasy/sci-fi trilogy about knights with magical powers in outer space, where they often met aliens speaking their own unique fictional languages. Spaceballs was directed by Mel Brooks, a comedian notorious for making references to and jokes about his own Jewish background, frequently using Hebrew terms.

And now, here is my joke written in response to image above:

“Hey sure, that’s why the opening crawl of Spaceballs recapped all of the Star Wars movies, and then the entire history of the Jews. It was sixteen hours long, only twenty minutes of it movie, but by the time we got to the jokes every single person knew that ‘

meshuggeneh’ was not how you said ‘space prince’ in Xorkese.”

I cannot tell you how difficult that was for me. I had to set up a joke comparing Marville to a successful parody, write a passable Mel Brooks joke, then set up a joke about that fictional Mel Brooks joke, and finally go back and ruin it all, on purpose, right up front. It was a Russian Stacking Doll of setups and the punchline was that I shoved it up my ass at the end and dared you to find it. This legitimately gave me a headache, trying to understand how badly Bill Jemas failed at comedy on page zero of his comedy book.

Seanbaby: Jesus, Brockway. I was just going to go, "Did that son of a bitch change Superman's name from Kal-El to KalAOL?" And then instead of a punchline, I was only going to add, "Fuck you." This shouldn't be possible. Did a thermometer break off inside Bill Jemas while he was developing a sense of humor?

Brockway: Sean! We have not technically started yet. Let’s see how badly he failed on page one. This is the second panel of the first issue.

Brockway: Good job. You have lost your entire audience at the second panel of the series. You needed a full page of text just to prime readers for your inside jokes, and the first panel is an inside joke you forgot to prime. Listen, I’m sure there are some hardcore comic nerds who think it’s hilarious that Ron Perelman was a terrible… accountant? Mail clerk with a truly hilarious story? I don’t know, my point is that maybe you don’t open the whole series -- the series that you bet your career would be a hit with the kids -- with a reference to financial filings and then follow it up with 40 panels sticking it to Ted Turner.

Brockway: That’s the kind of savage parody you can expect from Bill Jemas -- Ted Turner really likes AOL! If Bill Jemas were alive today, and he is, he’d say “how about that Trump guy? He sure-- I’m sorry, Trump refers to Donald Trump, a former American president and avid drinker of Diet Coke. Let me start again: How about that Trump guy? He sure loves his Diet Coke and pissplay! I’m sorry, let me start again-”

Seanbaby: When I saw the first AOL pun(?), I wrote in my notes, "I don't know if anyone has ever demonstrated a lack of comedic sensibilities so instantly and completely." And here he is doing it two more times. The hollow desperation in Bill's writing is amazing. A real pro would set this reference up with a page-long explanation of the clumsy racial jokes on the sitcom Scrubs, but this must have been what it was like in the Scrubs writer's room the day Zach Braff told everyone, "Good news, whites! Donald gave us permission to do black stereotype references!"

Brockway: Well, we do get lots of digs at PC culture from Jemas, because time is a flat circle and we have always been on this wheel. This time it’s in defense of the Tomahawk Chop, back in the bad old days when all sixteen Braves fans got together and pretended to swing tomahawks around while wooing “Indian chants.” Bill Jemas had to look up subtlety in the dictionary and it said ‘to furnish or aid with a subsidy,’ so every smug asshole who objects to mocking Native Americans gets hit by a meteor. This was 2002. Everything was like this all the time. But trust me, the guy who’s like “what? It’s just the Tomahawk Chop, it’s just for fun!” is always seven Bud Lights from “everybody uses the N-word! It’s just impolite to admit to it!”

Seanbaby: Bill could have written anything, and he chose to take both sides in an argument about whether or not racism was racist. I think I speak bad art enough to decode his message as, "You fools waste your time arguing about small things when there are, um, actually big things?" This is like if everyone at MAD Magazine died and their grandmothers decided to finish the last issue in their honor.

Brockway: Bill better be grateful his straw yuppie interrupted that scene, otherwise he’d be stuck writing a short story about Ted Turner saving the world with the Tomahawk Chop, and that wouldn’t even get you four upcucks on Parler. This is all to set up a basic Superman origin story parody, which you may recognize as having been done, and better, by every single other comic book parody in history. Starting a comic book parody off with a wacky Superman origin story riff is how you tell your readers to expect an ‘underwear on the outside’ joke in two pages, a ‘man of steel’ dick joke in six, and a weirdly out of place racist diatribe in issue 2. None of them devoted several panels to making expository digs at personal rivals, though -- that’s pure Jemas!

Brockway: That’s our hero. As Sean has sworn to never forgive, his name is Kal-AOL, a joke so bad that even Bill Jemas knew he couldn’t repeat it 800 times an issue. So he’s just called “Al.” To escape his doomed society, Al is thrown backwards to the present day where, as an inadequate entitled dipshit with nothing going for him but a middle school bully’s haircut, he immediately gets a hot girl sidekick and 100 million dollars. I don’t think he meant to make that particular joke, but it’s the only one that lands.

Seanbaby: The time travel element betrays how this is more of a "re-imagining" than a parody. This motherfucker is hiding a sincere Superman reboot inside this mean-spirited inside joke. This is like adding an elaborate backstory to explain why your character Fartfield, The Cat Who's Never Funny likes spaghetti. You see, his owner, Jim DAOLvis, had a wife who loved spaghetti before Jimmy Carter's weak immigration policies led her to being killed by their landscaper. "I'll never heal from this and fuck the cartoon cat Garfield (an orange cat who famously loves lasagna, a food similar to lasagna)," he told Fartfield. Brockway, I need some help getting out of this bit.

Brockway: Time to mock some early ‘00s pop culture! Nobody is safe from the wicked barbs of Bill Jemas, who uses his lethal pen to skewer everyone from Ticketmaster to Alan Greenspan! Reminder: Bill Jemas lost this contest! Somehow!

Seanbaby: If Bill Jemas asked me, "Do you have any ideas on how I could sound incomprehensibly elderly to the children reading my comic book?" I might suggest an Alan Greenspan reference. And if he asked, "Oh, what if the main character got a free toaster when he opened a bank account?" I'd say oh my god, Bill, that's so much better.

Brockway: After just one issue of spitting hot fire to the teens about toaster promises and CFOs, it’s apparent that Marville is in trouble. So Jemas divides his talent by zero and comes up with the lowest common denominator.

Brockway: Just a naked woman holding beer, sports, dumb movies, and video games, because that’s what you idiots want instead of high-minded parody about comic book executives! God, the bitter, impotent anger in this image. Bill Jemas desperately wanted to lash out at the world for rejecting him, but all he could do was call it “Belly Beer” and label a VHS ‘smut.’ It’s like killing a family of chimps and giving the last surviving baby a gun for a funny TikTok. Just laughing while he points it at you and slaps the barrel, bites the handle, tries everything to understand and use the weapon that took his family away but he’ll never get there. All to the “Berries and Cream” song. That’s what Bill Jemas’ comedy is like: the look in the eye of a baby chimp as his revenge is thwarted set to a 2000s Starburst commercial. I’ll stand by that.

Seanbaby: If this was a film about an alien pretending to be a human in art school, let's call it Pluto Picasso 2: Back in Class, they would cut from this painting to the movie's antagonist looking suspiciously at it. "It is what our wet meat loves, yes? Unclothed arrivals dropping a balled foot and one copy: SUPER VIOLENT GORY ANIME, on VHS! Now let's party time!"

Brockway: You’ve cracked it. This is an idiot alien trying to understand comedy using only mistranslated drive-time radio. In issue 2, Jemas continues explaining all of his references up front, so that children will know to laugh at his Rush Limbaugh jokes. Speaking of: If you’ve never heard of Rush Limbaugh, that’s fine! You just need to know that he is a popular man on the radio. That’s it! Now you’ll get all the jokes, and laugh!

Brockway: This is a comic aimed solely at nerds so invested in the Marvel offices that they’re CC’d on snarky memos about the dirty coffeepot, and it still stops up front to explain who Batman is. Bill Jemas has so little faith in his audience that he’ll suck one back in just to explain what shit is before shitting in your mouth.

Seanbaby: If Bill Jemas wrote an alphabet book, it would take him 22 pages before he thought his readers were ready for the letter C. And he would explain it by having Charles Krauthammer make a collect call to a coal mine which he would explain is a type of thing.

Brockway: As promised, Rush Limbaugh features prominently in this issue. A homeless man asks Al for money and Rush Limbaugh, hanging out in the park in a lawn chair, as he is wont to do, tells him it’s not worth it. Bill Jemas has... complicated opinions on Rush Limbaugh. As a reluctant democrat, Jemas knows he’s supposed to hate Rush, but he’s drawn as a slightly overweight yet well-muscled and baby-faced man of 20. Gorgeous hardbodies hang on his every word, and while his opinions are supposed to be wrong, and certainly most of his fans are idiots, Rush Limbaugh himself is only ever portrayed in a glowing light. Also the homeless man is Peter David. You probably assumed that. You should probably go on to assume that he’s gonna do something stupid like say “not all Asians know kung-fu, Bill Jemas” and fall into a sinkhole for it.

Seanbaby: There's a bikini girl following the main character around and explaining all the references. Rush Limbaugh is surrounded by half-naked babes literally cheering for his farts. The author made his rival a homeless drunk and someone gave him a little dollar. Any one of these things alone would be embarrassing. All of them together is a purposeful career suicide attempt. This is the comic writer's equivalent of climbing to the top of your boat in a lightning storm and daring God to kill you.

Brockway: Oh, then this is inspiring. Because it couldn’t have worked any harder. Anyway, Al is still trying to help the needy with his Unearned Dipshit money when Batman and Iron Man parodies show up as oblivious, entitled billionaires out to fuck the lower class. Also Black Panther is there. Hey does one of those not seem quite like the other? If you guessed Bill Jemas is seven Bud Lights into this series-

Seanbaby: Let me see if I understand this. Iron Man said, "You can pay Mexicans a dollar an hour and they still work like--" Then he started to say the n-word with a capital N, which seems worse than normal to me, and he was stopped by Black Panther because the PC police wouldn't get his awesome joke. I'm not even sure if the joke was how that race of people is very hardworking or very lazy, but for the second time in two issues, Bill Jemas has taken the stance that racism isn't racist. Honestly, "racism isn't racist" is a good way to sum up Rush Limbaugh's life's work. It's probably what his corpse would burp if you filled its rotting lungs with air and jumped on its chest.

Brockway: Not this Rush Limbaugh, the one who only lives in the head and slash-fiction folder of Bill Jemas. This Rush Limbaugh has grown godlike in power and stature, and shows up to blast the superheroes with the power of his magic microphone. No jokes here: Rush Limbaugh just kicks ass now. In the few pages between this scene and his last appearance, Bill Jemas decided how he feels about Rush Limbaugh, and that is with his mouth.

Brockway: Here are the big takeaways from the first couple issues of Marville:

1. Every non-Bill Jemas who works in comics is an idiot, but especially Peter David. And especially Paul Levitz. And double especially people who read comic books.

2. Our society is way too politically correct, and you shouldn’t read so much into everything. Some things are just for fun! Like the Tomahawk Chop and saying the N-word in private.

3. Actually every non-Bill Jemas who works in anything is an idiot, except for Rush Limbaugh, who has a complicated relationship with his fans and can say some pretty oblivious things but overall is the hottest fucking man who ever lived and so raw and powerful that you just want to deepthroat his microphone until your gag reflex shuts off your airway and you pass out.

Seanbaby: It's important to remember that children reading this had the backstory explained to them. A writer with access to every Marvel character, and sort of every DC character, set out to write the best, most popular comic book he could. And he chose this fan fiction of a right wing talk radio host advocating for more racial insensitivity? You can certainly tell a kid, "some day your dreams will die too," but Bill Jemas proved it to them. He made them feel what it was like to look into an endless universe with no joy left in your soul. You can't train to do what Marville did. The world's greatest artist together with the industry's leading puppy murderer couldn't create this kind of bleak misery on purpose.

Brockway: This will be a two-part Teamworking Day, both because Bill Jemas fucked up so hard and in so many directions it makes for an unwieldy article, and to honor the number of issues Bill Jemas went before disappearing completely up his own asshole, vanishing from our universe into a quantum state of existence and non-existence depending on whether or not Rush Limbaugh sticks his head up there to check.

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