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One of my friends suggested I read Bedlam. Thanks a lot, Todd; now I have just one more comic series that I have to read every single issue of. I have actual work to do, you know. All these comics are too good and they’re preventing me from being productive!

At least, that’s my excuse. As it stands, I read volume one of Bedlam today and discovered that I really like Fillmore Press, and I think that might mean I’m going to hell. Seriously.

Bedlam

Fillmore’s evil, right? He massacres women and children with no remorse and he doesn’t appear to have any ability to discern between right and wrong. That makes him a sociopath at the very least. He’s not a very likable character.

Then why do I like him so much? Why does he make so much sense to me? Let me back up here and assure you that I have no intention of committing mass murder, and the very thought appalls me. I’m not queasy or anything, but I have nightmares just like anyone else, and every time I hear of another mass shooting/killing spree/bombing/terrorist attack, I have a hard time sleeping. Because people, you know, they’re not supposed to do those things.

But as Fillmore is being questioned by the police after his massacre as Madder Red, he argues that humanity is the monster, not Fillmore himself. That we’re all media-hungry, selfish, arrogant capitalists who do these things to ourselves. We first create villains, then we punish them, because that’s what makes us feel better about the world we’ve created for ourselves. Competition is what we live for, and when someone or something undermines our authority (whether that authority is moral, legal, or philosophical), we get angry and we take them down.

After 10 years of very mysterious “therapy,” Fillmore is deemed corrected enough to return to mainstream society slowly and ends up helping the police solve a number of murders and find the serial killer responsible. Through it all, Fillmore knows there’s something wrong with him, but he’s absolutely brilliant and his experience of being a serial killer helps him to get into the minds of other serial killers. He decides to do good.

It’s rather fitting that the name of the town is Bedlam and I’m assuming that it has that name for a very good reason. Maybe the entire story takes place solely in Fillmore’s mind. Or maybe I’m just getting super-meta.

Regardless. Nick Spencer posits the very question of the Problem of Evil with Bedlam, and the story goes so far as to include a priest, a man of God, in the storyline as the puppeteer behind the strings. I’m shocked and excited to find something so deeply philosophical and truly unsettling in a comic book. I’ve read good vs. evil and hero vs. villain and so on and so forth. But Bedlam raises all sorts of uncomfortable questions, the most important one being the tagline of the entire series:

Is evil just something you are or something you do?