Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Savage Dragon, Dragon-Slayers and Consequences
by Travis Hedge Coke
You could teach a course on comics using Savage Dragon as your primary text and cover almost everything. Erik Larsen does the work.
One of my favorite aspects of Dragon, as a deep-roots comics head, though, is when it explicitly comments on other comics, their peccadillos and traditions. The anxiety a certain Hulk run (and its writer) had with the existence of Dragon and some other comics which preceded his solo books. Whether a “medieval” version of a trademarked character is a wholly original creation. And, as we’ll cover here, the tendency of characters like J Jonah Jameson to be absolutely horrific criminals and abusive villains and comfy fun comedy arch guy who we and the characters in the comic will forgive and permit to act out and forgive and allow to act out and… forever.
In the first few years of Savage Dragon, we had a handful of appearances by one R Richard Richards, a media publisher and rabble-rouser running a Chicago newspaper and going off on Dragon, then an amnesiac police newly adjusting to life, in his newspaper, on television, anywhere and anyhow he could. Typical light J Jonah stuff which escalates to the other typical J Jonah thing: hiring bad people to empower bad people including himself to cause physical damage and grievous bodily harm.
Launching, and eventually directly piloting what were called Dragon-Slayers, R Richard is directly riffing on J Jonah launching and piloting Spider-Slayer robots, starting in 1965’s Amazing Spider-Man #25. By the time of the Savage Dragon stories, Jameson had been pulling this stuff recurrently for almost thirty years.
In the Marvel Comics, like Amazing Spider-Man, because Jameson is a familiar face and an enjoyable character to have around, everyone has to forget and forgive these aggressions. J Jonah Jameson cannot go to jail or be permanently killed or just have everyone he has directly attacked refuse to work with him or for him any further.
In the case of Dragon’s world and his home title, however, their Jameson, Richards, can be arrested and he is, almost immediately, only eleven issues after his debut. He returns over one hundred issues later, and eventually dies.
Neither of those removals from the book, from the plot and immediate sphere of Dragon’s life are any kind of waste of a character or loss of a presence. They are the point.
No one would want this guy near their life. If one person would keep looking away, it remains unreasonable that everyone would always and perpetually choose to look that other way, to keep turning cheek after cheek.
It was smart. It was necessary. It is evergreen as commentary and entertainment. Because Marvel is not going to change their routine, Larsen and Savage Dragon never have to address it again to keep it relevant and funny.
