Tor

And today we will be looking at the Tor: a Prehistoric Odyssey by a very very old Joe Kubert. Honestly, flipping a bit too quickly through the rather worshipful introduction I did get kind of confused as to when exactly this book came out. There was even a short period where I was really impressed at the modern art style, but then I looked inside the front cover at the publication date which turned out to be 2009. Not terribly recent but not ancient history yet either. I certainly didn't immediately hate the art style then, but it certainly explained the fact that it didn't look dated.
So, just to clarify, the writer and artist Joe Kubert was born in 1926 and died in 2012. He worked in the industry from 1942 until basically his death in 2012, founded the Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Arts, and has had several children and grandchildren who have followed in his footsteps. He contributed a lot to the birth and growth of the comic book and graphic novel industry, and this is probably a big part of the reason that I ended up not totally hating this book. Don't get me wrong, Tor: A Prehistoric Odyssey is not my cup of tea at all but it was also pretty tame in comparison to the work of much more hateful people.
For one thing, this book is incredibly American style libertarianism and as an anarchist, there is not much I hate more in life then libertarianism. That said, since one of the points towards Tor's internal amazing sauce is the fact that he gives himself a mullet for (to paraphrase) increased vision in the front and more protection in the back, I can't help but laugh - which is something I needed so bonus points? There is literally no character arch though, because learning things is not something libertarians do apparently, and instead the entire volume is Kubert slowly revealing Tor's innate abilities and how much more awesome they are then everything else on earth.
Moving on to the artwork, I was rather surprised to find the shirtless female character to be one of the least offensive parts of the comic (well her shirtlessness in and of itself anyway). Knowing what I know now about Kubert's life I guess this was perhaps just a habit of an older gentleman who perhaps can't get it up anymore but isn't particularly angry about it. His wife had apparently died just the year before. I had wondered if Kubert was perhaps bi or gay or something but who knows. Even if Tor's shirtlessness is much more socially acceptable, his primitive buckskins do hang suggestively from time to time over his well-muscled ass.
While it's not super obvious and in-my-face, like most flights of western fantasy, it does tend to come across as pretty supremacist, exotifying everything but our pale-skinned caveman hero. It certainly doesn't take a huge stretch of the imagination to see the hairy ape creatures as people of color, even if that makes no actual evolutionary sense. And the totally limp hair of the ebony skinned fuck interest reveals a pretty limited imagination at the very least. Flipping through to the final third of the story I did hold out some hope that the plotline would at least take the side of the not conventionally attractive underdog but, not to worry, all ugly things not Tor end up dead and/or evil by the end.
What this book is singularly a good example of is just how pro-white cishet straight dude everything really was not too long ago. I can only wish that I had been imbued with this much self-confidence once upon the time! This was perhaps the closest I have ever felt to being more than a little sorry for pore persecuted men folk, considering how shitty the real world actually is, but there's very little point to one set of people getting all the fun hile everyone else suffers so no thank you!