2015 is the year I stopped watching football. Thinking about it now, all that really comes to mind is, “what the fuck took you so long?” Years ago I got one of those giant Fathead stickers of Brett Favre and put it above my bed. He made me fall in love with the sport as a kid and I’ve been a Packers fan ever since, the only sports team I felt any real attachment to until giving the Mets a shot last year. After making a mockery of his retirement and then his penis, I left the Fathead (however aptly named, I never looked at the pictures of his dick) up because it reminds me of something I once enjoyed very much.
Honestly, as someone with a frustrating Kantian streak, self-effacing actions bug the absolute shit out of me. Case in point: top NFL executives aided the New England Patriots—and I mean, physically fucking aided, as in, helped them stomp on things—in destroying evidence of cheating. This defeats the purpose of anybody playing or caring about the game. Seriously. If the people in charge of the game itself are willing to cover up instances of rampant rule-breaking and then lie about it, then the entire game is bull shit, especially if none of the parties are properly held accountable, including those executives and all people involved in the cover-up.
Nobody has received any penalty for any of that. Yeah the Patriots lost some draft picks, but jesus christ all those people are still executives and I haven’t heard the useless talking heads say more than two words about any of it all season long. It’s disgusting.
Of course, I should have had enough when they lied about seeing Ray Rice hadouken his wife straight out of an elevator. I’m a hypocrite for berating anybody for supporting a league that supports Greg Hardy when I was more than willing to tune in each week to a league that was already actively peddling high-profile abusers of women and children.
Ultimately, the fact that I stopped watching after the Deflategate fallout points less to me having some kind of praiseworthy moral standards and more to the fact that I can be a self-righteous prick who fixates on facts more than people. My way of watching the NFL had me ignoring everything that everyone else was ignoring--including but not limited to graphic pictures of battered women--but only me and a small handful of others were smug enough to decide that the line needed to be drawn past that point.
Throughout everything I took it as a given that not everybody in the league was a complete piece of shit. Still, it was hard to frame anyone's complacency with the situation, viewers or players, in a charitable manner.
Enter Matt Seneca’s newest issue of Trap Magazine: #Lionblood. Seneca is a man after my own heart: my two favorite things in the world are probably comics and rap music, with football, at least historically, figuring in a very close third. I love the cerebral aspect of the game (that is, the strategy, not the damage to the cerebellum). People shit all over football for the lack of actual time in action, but just like your dorky baseball friends insist there is more going on than some 6’5” freak of nature hurling some canvas at his crouching buddy’s nutsack, it’s far more clear in football that way more is happening before the snap than a guy preparing to give himself an indian burn with another man’s taint.
#Lionblood seizes on yet another immoral aspect of the football world: the fact that many college football programs pull in millions and millions of dollars and outside of scholarships the players don’t receive a single cent. I’ve been in rooms with college athletes where they were buying plane tickets and couldn’t even accept money from their parents in order to do so. The NCAA watches the flow of money like a successful drug lord in order to keep bought favors to an absolute minimum, and it’s comical watching them do so when everybody else is profiting from such a popular industrial complex. These players, most of them from high school or younger, essentially have to give themselves over to indentured servitude with no promise of remuneration down the line. Many will not even make it to the NFL. And many of the ones that do will be lucky to stay there for more than a few weeks or years.
At the center of this tale are the eponymous Detroit Lions players Calvin Johnson and Matt Stafford as they navigate the Trap (with the help of Johnny Football) in order to get by in their broke college days. To be frank, if you appreciate how real the struggle is for these kids, then you also can appreciate what Seneca is doing with this comic. Yes, it’s a commentary on what many young (and old) people have to do in this country just to get by, but it’s especially poignant when hinged on the fates of men who we know eventually go on to make millions of dollars.
What is guaranteed by hindsight in our real world is a torturous and singular motivation for the two young men in #Lionblood. Their fame is a historical and ontological fact of our world: in the fiction, it is an as-yet-to-happen unknown, thrown further into question by the circumstances of the tale within.
And yet with the tale Seneca constructs, he illustrates that even if these dudes weren’t out there putting their lives on the line in the Trap, the normal day-to-day grind puts the heads of these young men on the guillotine any goddamn way. Tear your ACL in the middle of your career and you miss a year. But miss a year when it’s time for the scouts to see you in your prime? Say goodbye to your career.
I cannot fathom having something mean as much to me as football means to most if not all professionals. Nothing has ever had that much of my blood, my sweat, my time.
Seneca’s work isn’t loaded with formalisms, and he spends most of his time trying to make each panel sing. The pictured panel is one of my absolute favorites, and a formalist flourish that really pays off at a critical story moment. Calvin Johnson is a fast motherfucker. Later on in the page, one of the cops will explicitly say so: but, this is just in order to shore up the action in this panel. See, it’s easy to depict speed in comics, but in this panel, Seneca juxtaposes speeds.
Johnson gets over the fence before the agent finishes what he’s saying. The little formal fuckery here is especially effective because Seneca doesn’t pull out tricks too often. Also, the moment really just sort of explodes out of Seneca’s otherwise tight rhythm, making the narrative acceleration go hand-in-hand with Megatron’s literal acceleration across the page.
The wisdom of #Lionblood isn’t earth-shattering, but it bears repeating: anything you’re doing simply in order to survive involves you selling off pieces of yourself brick by brick. It could be neurons from brain damage that get sold off. It could be your chances at making something of yourself. It could be hours spent fucking about as a waiter, taking up smoking (and more) just to deal with the soul-crushing boredom of having a couple of useless degrees and no prospects.
What was I saying?
#Lionblood reads sharp, quick, and contemporary. But once you’ve finished and you sit back thinking about how college football isn’t really that bad, it hits you how literally epic these stories are. Men who must survive by destroying others in order to have a mere prayer at someday being paid millions to probably destroy themselves for an organization that is amoral for this and other unrelated reasons. Antigone doesn’t have shit on this horror show.
How beautiful is that?
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