Don't Worry About Countdown -- Focus Elsewhere

2008-07-20T18:55:00.002Z

I've decided to consolidate my online presence in order to effect synergy from my core competencies or something, so from now on all my blogging (comics and otherwise) will be at my new blog andrewhickey.info .

Rock Of Ages - Darkseid's New Clothes

2008-06-29T16:23:00.001Z

So, before my own verbosity got the better of me, what was I going to say about Rock Of Ages? (For those who are wondering, I'm writing this before getting to the comic shop this week. I'll be looking at Final Crisis 2 probably on Monday).

One of the descriptions I've read of Morrison's JLA run is that it's a 'Cliff Notes for the Invisibles', and nowhere is that more true than in Rock Of Ages. The connections between the present-day story and the Invisibles are obvious, of course, but it's the near-future dystopian story that covers a lot of the same themes. Fundamentally, Rock Of Ages is about the impossibility of totalitarianism.

Morrison is one of the few writers in comics who actually seems interested in science, and appears scientifically literate. While many comic writers use 'scientific' terms seemingly at random to handwave away problems (and to be fair Morrison does this to in New X-Men with the extinction gene, although there he was playing with a Marvel genetics that has been established as very different from real genetics) - see for example Byrne's 'Godwave' which was somehow able to cross the universe twice in 40,000 years - Morrison uses scientific ideas as jumping off points for new stories. Sometimes those ideas will be fringe ideas rather than mainstream (see his use of Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis in Animal Man) and quite often the interpretation he uses of (say) quantum physics will not be the most mainstream one, but he's clearly actually interested in science.

And one of the sciences he seems to be most interested in (although he doesn't namedrop it in the way he does 'cooler' ideas such as brane theory) is cybernetics - not computing, but cybernetics in its original meaning of regulating systems.

And cybernetics shows that totalitarianism - and indeed any attempt to control human beings - has some inbuilt flaws. Any system that doesn't allow for feedback will eventually go off the rails, and any authority relationship is one where accurate feedback is not possible - if someone has the power to sack you, or have you imprisoned, or have you killed, you're going to be very careful about what you tell them. Authority breeds lies - the cheque's in the post, the dog ate my homework, it's my grandmother's funeral - and then the person in authority has to make decisions based on those lies. Garbage in, garbage out. (This, incidentally, seems to explain the decisions made by a lot of political leaders, and may also explain the apparent paranoia often exhibited at the very top.)

Robert Anton Wilson - a big influence on Morrison - called this 'the burden of omniscience' and contrasted it with the 'burden of nescience' in the people who are being controlled. In any system where total control over people is attempted, the person doing the controlling has to be aware of every factor relevant to the decisions. Those being controlled, on the other hand, have to do what they're told even when it goes against their own experiences.

Darkseid, of course, wants absolute control of the universe. As he puts it, "I will remake the entire universe in the image of my soul, Desaad. And when at last I turn to look upon the eternal desolation I have wrought... I will see Darkseid, as in a mirror... and know what fear is."

The problem with this kind of ambition of course is that it depends on everyone else being deaf-blind-mute - or acting like it. The future portion of Rock Of Ages is ultimately a rewrite of The Emperor's New Clothes - as long as no-one tells the emperor what's going on, everything looks fine from his perspective, but as soon as one person tells the truth the whole edifice of control comes tumbling down.

This is, of course, why the 'zombies' in Rock of Ages, in possibly the most disturbing image Morrison has ever come up with, come out of the 'Wise Monkey' factory with their ears, eyes and mouths covered up by hands. And it's in this context that Darkseid's defeat is so interesting.

Firstly, because the efforts of the superpowered time-travellers are actually unimportant in his defeat - it's the literally powerless who bring him down. And secondly, he's defeated by Ray Palmer shrinking to the size of a photon and entering through his eyes and into his brain - in other words, he's defeated by information.

The whole of Rock Of Ages in fact is about control and information, and about attempts to reform the universe or part of it in the image of someone's mind - from the holograms controlled by the Joker, to Darkseid's plans, to the Philosopher's stone - and the defeat is always by people understanding those systems better than the controllers - J'Onn changing his brain to match the Joker's, Batman getting Desaad to put his mind into a reprogrammable computer, persuading Metron to become human.

It's also about disguise and replicas - Batman as Desaad, Plastic Man as the Joker, the duplicate Philosopher's Stone, the holograms of the League at the beginning, the hologram of Luthor at the end. J'onn making himself think like the Joker also plays into these ideas of identity.

In the end, the comic shows that attempting to control people by imposing your will on them with brute force is stupid - the way to get what you want is to attempt to understand your enemies, to walk in their shoes, and to understand the world around you. Luthor is shown as more intelligent than Darkseid, with his 'corporate takeover' plan and his way out of criminal charges, but Batman is shown to outthink both of them.

These themes turn up all the time in Morrison's work, and we'll definitely return to them as I continue looking at Final Crisis, the second issue of which I'll be getting to shortly.

Excuses, excuses...

2008-06-24T20:12:00.001Z

Yes, I know it's been a while...
Since I last posted, my life has been full of unpredictable events. I've had to travel to Wales, London, the Lake District and York, had my in-laws fly over from the US, had a friend die suddenly, seen Leonard Cohen, had a famous TV presenter pretend to know me, been threatened at gunpoint by a soldier... leaving me not in the most coherent state to post my thoughts on Batman. By the time I got any free time, the comics on which I wanted to comment were *so* yesterday to the rest of the blogosphere.

Equally important was the fact that I didn't want to comment on the Dan DiDio pecking party that was going on for much of the last few weeks. As many of you may have gathered I am not a wholehearted supporter of DiDio's editorial regime, but nor do I think it's been all bad. For every bad decision (letting Judd Winick write anything at all) there's been an excellent one (letting Grant Morrison essentially have free run of the DCU).

DiDio's job is pretty much guaranteed to make him one of the most hated men in comics, at least among the comic blogosphere, and there's been an undertone in many of the posts of "Well, Jimmy Palmiotti is the kind of person who'll recognise the genius of my proposed twelve-issue series about an alternate world where Zatanna and Barbara Gordon are lovers but they're both cats! Damn you DiDio for turning down Pussies Of Prey!"

Anyway, DiDio's job appears safe for the forseeable future, and I've not had a major shock to the nervous system in nearly four days, so I'm going to talk about comics.

Specifically, I'm going to talk about Grant Morrison's big epic story featuring the New Gods going up against the big guns of the DCU, where we see a world where evil has won, that doesn't tie in properly with the weekly comic it was meant to tie in with.

I'm referring of course to Rock Of Ages.

One of the big criticisms people have had of Final Crisis is the way it doesn't quite tie in with Countdown To Final Crisis, and it's true that that could have been handled better. However, the two comics are doing fundamentally different things. Final Crisis is an attempt (and, I believe, a largely successful one) to create art (pop art, but art nonetheless) - it's written to stand up to repeated readings, and the intention is presumably that it will remain in print indefinitely, outside of its context.

Countdown, on the other hand, was an attempt to create comics-like product that would keep people going to the comic shop. The Countdown trades will presumably go out of print within six months or a year or so. In those circumstances Morrison is absolutely right not to alter his work because of continuity issues created by others.

Rock Of Ages here provides a point of comparison. When it came out originally, it was contemporary with a four-week DC crossover called Genesis, which I reread last week in preparation for writing this post and have already forgotten - it was a John Byrne thing and DC might as well have just put out a circular saying "John Byrne desperately wants to be the next Kirby, but in fact he's a less-good Jim Starlin" as that would have had the same effect as actually publishing the story, and at less expense.

Anyway, both stories deal with the New Gods, and while Morrison's story pays lip-service to the crossover (mainly by putting in a few pages at the end of the first issue, not reprinted in the trade), reading the two stories back to back is a very confusing experience, as everyone in Morrison's story is being told who this 'Metron' fellow is directly after just spending four issues doing some ... stuff... involving godwaves or something with him.

The interesting thing here is how much light Rock Of Ages sheds on Morrison's writing methods, and on his take on superheroes and the New Gods, when compared to Genesis.

In Genesis, it's explained that all superheroes are in fact demigods, created by a Godwave that now threatens to destroy the universe for rather poorly-defined reasons. They have to team up with Darkseid and then against him, there are double-bluffs and stratagems and so on, and it's just like every other 'cosmic' crossover ever created.

But that reveal, that the superpowered people are demigods rather than humans, much like every other Roythomasism that's tried to tie all superheroes together (the meta-gene, homo magi, etc) is a profoundly dispiriting idea. Superheroes, in this view, are superheroes just because they were born special. You can never be as special as they are, in their special specialness - they're just *better* than you. You're disgusting, aren't you? Why don't you just die?

(To be fair, Byrne does make a half-hearted stab at having the non-powered heroes say things like "We mustn't be downhearted - we must fight on regardless!", but still the ideas that remain in the memory (to the extent that such an unmemorable story remains in the memory at all, and I feel here like the protagonist in Memento, trying to reconstruct a story that's slipping from my grasp even though I read it only this weekend - "I must have read a big cosmic crossover recently, because I have a profound feeling of ennui. If only I could recall what it was...") are the ones about how superheroes are really gods).

This message - that some people are just born special and better than everyone else - is at the core of Joseph Campbell's 'hero of a thousand faces', which thanks to George Lucas is now the accepted formula for every piece of mass entertainment (which in turn is why I go to the cinema maybe every couple of months, if that).

The formula can be used well - Neil Gaiman uses it passably, though the more you read of Gaiman's writing the more obvious his use of it and similar formulae becomes - after all, if it was incapable of being used well, it wouldn't have become a formula - but more often it gives us dreck like Superman Returns.

"But Andrew!" the three of you who've read this far are shouting "Doesn't Grant Morrison also have an unhealthy obsession with this misbegotten formula? He sometimes goes back to its Jungian roots, but All Star Superman, which you like so much, is a hero's journey if ever I saw one. Death of the father, journey through the underworld, death and rebirth motif, it's all there, isn't it?"

To which I can only respond by analogy.

The I-vi-ii(or IV)-V chord sequence has been the basis of innumerable terrible songs over the years, and one or two decent ones as well - it's the sequence used in every doo-wop song and bad ballad ever. That sequence or a slight variation is used in Duke Of Earl, Blue Moon, I Will Always Love You and a billion other songs you know. It's a cliche, and even though it's been used well in the past, I could perfectly happily go a lifetime without hearing it again.

But Brian Wilson, in the song The Warmth Of The Sun, managed to make something new. He started that progression in C, went through the first two chords, then *started it again*, a minor third up, going through the changes again before returning to the original key and finishing the progression. A twist as simple as that can turn something from the most obvious of cliches into something quite extraordinary.

In the same way, it's possible to use the hero's journey as something to build upon, to twist, to play with, and come out with something interesting. If you take it as a description of what other people have done (as, to be fair, Campbell appeared to intend it) rather than as a prescription of what you must do, you can get something interesting out of it. This is what Morrison does.

While sometimes, in Seven Soldiers for example, Morrison does fall into the trap of the hero just being born special (though in Seven Soldiers this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that there are *seven* 'unique' people, and actually many more playing important roles), more often he focuses on normal people, or on people who are special not because of any powers but because of their character. The occasions where he has most obviously written a hero's journey - things like The Invisibles - have been ones where the journey is clearly subordinate to other elements (few people would say that Jack Frost's growth as a character is anything like the most important element in The Invisibles).

And so in Rock Of Ages, straight after John Byrne has revealed that Wally West and Eel O'Brien were just born special and better than the rest of us, Morrison has Darkseid - as powerful and 'special' a being as exists in the DCU - destroyed by Green Arrow, Batman and the Atom, three people who have no powers other than their own intelligence (yes, yes, I know, Ray Palmer had the metagene and so on - it doesn't matter. He got his powers from his own scientific knowledge, he wasn't born with them).

And the way in which they defeat Darkseid is something I'm going to go into a lot more in my next post, because this one's grown into something of a monster already. I've got most of that post written (this was a much longer post that I've split up), and I *hope* to have it up tomorrow, but given my recent history I'll probably be kidnapped by sentient alligators or something, so no promises.

If anyone's still reading this, I recommend you go and read Andrew Rilstone's recent posts on Dave Sim - as always, Rilstone is writing some wonderful stuff over there.

Final Crisis 1 - It Goes Like This, The Fourth, The Fifth, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift

2008-06-02T16:23:00.003Z

Now that the terrible Countdown has concluded (our long national nightmare is finally over!) I'm hoping we'll start to see more comics of actual substance coming from DC, rather than endless tie-ins and continuity patches to make sense of bad comics which in turn introduce more continuity errors to be patched by more bad comics. Final Crisis is obviously infinitely better than that kind of thing, and Trinity, while (probably rightly) being promoted as totally separate from Final Crisis, looks to be dealing with some of the same multiversal hijinks I love, and by at least competent people. It also looks like it'll feature some of the Big Giant Hand stuff that's been going on at various levels in various comics.

Kurt Busiek has been very impressive recently with his work on the Superman titles. Those titles have been almost a perfect storm of editorial problems recently, with delays, last-minute rewrites, art problems, Countdown tie-ins and continuity changes meaning that not only has Busiek been writing his own title, he's had to write fill-ins for Action, he's had to write fill-ins for himself when there have been art delays, and he's had to write *replacement* fill-ins when fill-ins have been dropped. Despite all this, he's managed to produce work that is at worst decent and at best excellent. Although the strain has clearly shown at times, his work has been some of the best on the Superman title in decades. So I have enough faith in Busiek's reliability to have at least some enthusiasm for Trinity.

So my plan, for now, is that this blog will go back to more-or-less weekly (or more) posts dealing with the various big DC events that interest me - so far this would be all Morrison's work, possibly the tie-ins to Final Crisis and Batman RIP, and at least the first few issues of Trinity and whatever the Wonder Woman Big Event is. This won't be annotations ( Douglas Wolk is doing a fine job of that at http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com ) but reviews and talking about the themes and so on. I'll also be looking back over the next few months at a variety of earlier comics that relate in some way to these titles. In the case of Final Crisis that will be 52, Seven Soldiers, The Filth, DC One Million, JLA: Earth 2, Morrison's JLA, The Kingdom, Marvel Boy and maybe some others. In the case of Trinity I'll look over JLA/Avengers and Syndicate Rules, both of which Busiek has said tie into the story. Those posts will mostly be in weeks when not much new is happening. I'll also continue to review any non-DCU stuff that seems interesting to me as and when it comes out.

This week was possibly the best week for new comics in years. Judenhass (which I've already reviewed a couple of months back) came out, and on top of that three comics by Grant Morrison. The reason it's taken me this long to post a review is because I've spent every second since Friday just running around saying "ohmygod flyingluthoranddeicideandalfredasbrucesdadandsupermandyingandthedeathofthefourthworldandkamandiandaaaa!!!" which I didn't think would live up even to my normal inarticulate level.

I'll be writing this as a couple of separate posts - this one about Final Crisis, and the next one tying it into All Star Superman and Batman, as well as the bigger picture links between Morrison's work at the moment.

Having read a number of reviews of Final Crisis before reading the comic itself, I was amazed to find it is actually one of the best single issues of a comic I've read this year. Most reviews, even those by people whose opinions I ususally respect, have said that it's too slow and that nothing happens. While it's not on the same scale as Crisis On Infinite Earths, and there's comparatively little Action (in the sense of things blowing up and people punching each other), the story is full of events and ideas.

(Some people, incidentally, have also complained that the events here don't match up well with/lose impact when placed alongside the execrable Countdown. That may be true, and is a fair criticism to lay against DC editorial, but not against the creators of this comic, which was apparently written before the terrible Countdown even started. Presumably whatever the events were in the egregious Countdown, it was what Morrison was talking about when he complained of the New Gods being 'passed around like herpes').

But really, seriously - 'nothing happens' is simply not a valid criticism here, in a story where huge swathes of the DC Universe come together in new combinations, bringing out thematic links that were never there before.

You've got a reworking/revisiting of the Kirbyesque New Gods as Eternals as Von Daniken Chariot Of The Gods stuff from Seven Soldiers with Metron as Prometheus, bringing The Human Flame (divine inspiration, as well as literal fire). Is the Prometheus angle going to tie in later with Frankenstein (who appears later in the series). The Human Flame is also the villain that kills Martian Manhunter, and fire is being linked throughout with both death and creation - fire representing chaos as well as inspiration (this ties in with a lot of the stuff in Seven Soldiers).

Death through fire always inspires thoughts of the phoenix, and rebirth, of course.

The Green Lanterns have a *code* for deicide! And note the death of Orion - the 'God of War', at the same time as the death of J'onn J'onzz, the last survivor of Mars, named after the God of War. And of course Mars is the Fourth World in our solar system, and this story is about the destruction of the Fourth World and its rebirth as the Fifth.

Incidentally, a lot of Morrison's previous work, especially The Invisibles, has referenced the idea that there will be a big change at the end of 2012, an idea that seems to come from lots of sources (pop-anthropological looks at Native American beliefs combined with now out-of-date predictions about information and technological growth). Part of that comes from what has been reported (in various new age sources whose credibility I haven't got the knowledge to verify - I'm talking in these bits not about what I believe to be true but about ideas Morrison has drawn on) as a Hopi belief that we are now living in a Fourth World that is about to change to a Fifth World.

Looking around for information on this (which Morrison may or may not be drawing upon, but I suspect he is) Hopi rituals relating to this change apparently include a 'new fire ceremony', and there is this rather interesting bit from Wikipedia:

"The coming Fifth World (where our present World is presented as the Fourth) is said to arrive following a cycle in Nature affecting our entire Solar System, where our Earth births an Egg (Mystery Egg, Hidden Egg) and then moves "up" within our system to reach its crowning place. All of the Earth's life is then said to be "raised" to its perfected-eternal form. Some tribes refer to this period of change as "Purification Time." During this period of Purification, Time is said to change where we must choose between the natural Time we have now upon our Earth (meant for us) and an unnatural Time structure which removes us from Nature and our opportunity to reach the Fifth World. It is told that everyone will have to choose between the two Time frames-- one leading to the Fifth World with our Earth, and the other (which will be very alluring, deceiving many) which will remove us from our Earth, taking us to oblivion."

I would be very surprised if these ideas didn't come into play as Final Crisis continues. It certainly *sounds* Crisis-like, doesn't it?

Some other notes on bits of the story:

I do not like Doctor Rapey McRapeRape, and never will, even with Morrison writing him. However, Jones' depiction of Mirror Master is absolutely wonderful. Looks like Terry Gilliam playing him.

The stuff with the secret society ties in with JLA:Earth 2, which I will look at soon. Also, Grodd's expressions are drawn perfectly.
"I am not averse to the taste of human flesh, sir!"
Damrung brand phone!

Orion appears to have 'infected' Terrible Turpin with a bit of his own essence.

That's no Monitor, that's Rhodes Boyson.

More on this tomorrow, as I have a LOT to say about this. I've not even really touched on the plot, or all the things that echo back and forth between this and Morrison's other works, or the art. But this issue is so densely packed with meaning and resonances without even getting into that that I'm having difficulty seeing how *anyone* could think 'nothing happened'. This is really what superhero comics *should* be.

This has still, of course, been incoherent - I hope that the later posts will be more organised, but this is the kind of comic that sets off my inner fanboy, with my thoughts racing in a million directions. It's exactly the kind of comic the industry needs right now, and I love it.

Ask Not What Your Comics Can Do For You...

2008-05-29T14:21:00.004Z

A warning here, before I start. This isn't a comics review. This week looks like one of the best in comics since I got back into them, and I will be looking over some of this week's comics over the next few days (except Judenhass, which I already reviewed a couple of months back). This is an incoherent rant.

In this rant I will be hypocritical - making exactly the same mistakes I accuse others of - and I will no doubt say some intensely stupid things. I will almost certainly delete this post, unless I don't, because I know going in that it's going to get nasty. Please read this with that in mind, or skip it. This isn't a well-reasoned piece of logic, it's a scream at the stupidity of the world, purely in immediate reaction to something I've read. I wrote this because I had to get this off my chest.

I was reading Newsarama today (I know... I have only myself to blame) and I read something that shocked me to the core. A statement so callous it bordered on the sociopathic, but one that seemed to go unnoticed by everyone reading it - so much so I had to triple-check if I'd actually read it correctly:

"Just think for a second about the pinch on the budgets of millions of Asians and fears of civil unrest that are being raised. In fact, food riots have erupted in recent months in Mexico, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Guinea.

What do all these mean for the comics industry as a whole?"

You read that right. I didn't cut out any context that would put this in a better light.

"People are starving - there are riots in six countries because the people there don't have enough to eat!"
"Really? That's terrible! Ultimate Hulk Vs Wolverine may never come out if this continues!"

Now, you might think this is just an isolated example of idiocy from Benjamin Ong Pang Kean - a man who, after all, less than a month ago thought the best response to being pulled up by Paul Cornell on his witless bigotry would be to try to make a joke about Cornell being British and then publish the whole thing. We're not talking here about someone competent, after all.

But to me this seems to fit a pattern of thought that's observable in a lot of comic readers - when the Siegel family won back their share of the copyright for Superman the other month, the response among the message board posters wasn't generally a discussion of whether justice had been done, or the intricacies of 'intellectual property' law and whether the decision made sense, but revolved around two questions - "Does this mean I won't get my comics?" and "Does justice being done in this case mean it might happen in other cases, thus denying me other comics?"

Now, I think the article that got me so infuriated had everything exactly backwards. When something terrible is happening in the world, the response of 'the comics community' should not be 'what will that do to my comics?' but rather 'what can we, as 'the comics community', do to help?'

(Please note, I'm only talking about what 'we' can do here qua 'comics community' - I'm assuming for the sake of argument that everyone who cares about the state of the world is doing all the other Good Citizen stuff like contacting your elected representatives, giving money to charity, and so on).

Now, this particular problem is, alas, not one that is wholly soluble by comics (unless we were to pool our collective resources into a gigantic magical ceremony led by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison to pull Superman into the real world from ideaspace and have him sort out the economic mess - a solution not noticeably less practical than those offered by many leading politicians) - the problems that are caused by having populations grow while resources shrink were pointed out quite effectively by Thomas Malthus 210 years ago - but other problems can be helped by comics.

That sounds like a grand claim - but remember that comics are an art form and medium of communication, and an effective one. Art can and does help find solutions to social, economic, political and even technological problems - by giving us new ways to think about them. Probing the limits of the possible allows us to try out ideas, and the impossible can be used as metaphor, allegory or analogy.

The problem is, I think, that a large number of comic readers now read little or nothing other than comics - or more precisely, other than superhero titles taking place in the shared 'universes' of the Big Two. And increasingly, those comics, when they're about anything at all, have become about nothing more than other comics. As Douglas Wolk puts it in his rather wonderful book Reading Comics, "More and more superhero series are readable really only as metacomics, because they're mostly about where their plots and characters are positioned in the matrices of the big superhero narratives".

The problem is, when a large majority of superhero comics are only about superhero comics (to the extent they're about anything) then... well, they're not about anything else, are they? And is it really surprising that a genre that has essentially turned into navel-gazing on an immense scale produces fans who wouldn't care if the whole population of Asia were to die so long as they got their comics (though they'd probably complain at the price increases because of the lack of that cheap (slave) labour that lamentably even the more 'ethical' indie companies use to print their comics).

(Art comics don't get a free pass here, either. They're not usually about other comics - not since they finally got over defining themselves by what they're not - but a staggering number essentially boil down to 'my life is the most fascinating thing in the world'. Save it for LiveJournal.)

I think in order for comics to actually matter, they have to start containing actual ideas, about things other than comics. Meta-commentary is fine as one element of a larger story, but when it's the only thing approaching an actual idea in the comic, then there's a serious problem. The ideas can be about anything - from a new formal idea about the medium (a different thing from the genre, note) to 'a superhero who only speaks in Irving Berlin lyrics' to an alternate universe in which the introduction of crop rotation never took off thanks to a new species of insect wiping out all turnips in the 15th century. So long as it's an idea. Start putting in ideas, and the readers will start to think. Get a few hundred thousand people thinking and who knows what will happen?

But pressure needs to be put on the comic companies to do this, in the same way feminist comic bloggers have over the last few years put pressure on them to moderate at least their worst excesses (so we still get Black Canary posing as if she's presenting to someone just off-panel on the front of her comic, but Spoiler is no longer dead). We've tolerated the lack of ideas in comics for too long. If you read a comic and come away thinking 'meh. Nothing happened. What was the point of that?' then that comic is contributing to the creation of morons, and needs to be held up as an example of everything that is wrong with the medium.

Because if we want to know what good comics can do, the single most important thing they can do is change the mentality of people who prioritise comics over starving human beings.

Black & White & Red All Over

2008-05-05T18:50:00.003Z

I've more or less avoided the Big Overarching Story in DC Comics over the last few months - since dropping the appaling Countdown with the tenth issue, I've made an effort not to read anything that tied itself in too strongly to that storyline. However, I've been looking forward intensely to Final Crisis, and I'll read anything by Grant Morrison, so I picked up DC Universe Zero with a reasonable amount of hope.

Written by Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns (who's shown signs recently in Action Comics and Booster Gold of actually being the decent, solid writer his admirers claim rather than the incompetent I thought of him as previously) and drawn by eight different artists, this is meant to be a fifty-cent preview of what's to come in DC's superhero titles for the next year or so, something you can hand to anyone and get them up to speed and interested in the titles.

On that score, it's a total failure. Because of the sheer number of different storylines it's teasing (along with a framing sequence), none of the previews could be comprehensible to anyone who isn't already reading those titles. It's a shame, because there's a clear attempt to give some unity to a fundamentally disjointed comic, but there's no way to tie all this information into a single narrative.

There's a framing 'story' here (Barry Allen is back... or is he? Or... is he? ) and some clear attempts to tie everything together thematically (the colours red and black appear a lot, and Morrison's recurring obsession with hands turns up again) - Douglas Wolk has provided a good set of annotations to this at http://savagecritic.com/2008/04/all-systems-intact-red-and-black.html - but it all seems forced.

The narration is on the level of "There is good, and there is bad. Bad and good. Dark and light. Shadows and some more light. Black and... red? (go with it) The dark and the light are in balance. Balance is important. It's in his hands now. He'll have to take it in hand. His left hand and his right hand. Two hands. For balance. Balance. Good Superman and bad Superman. Good me and bad me. Shadows. Black. Red. Like the suits in cards DO YOU SEE?"

Possibly not *quite* that subtle, but on that kind of level.

It's not really fair to judge this as a unified whole though - it's structured as a four-page intro plus a sequence of three-page previews (of stories in many cases not written or drawn by the people creating the comic) so it's probably best taken in that way.

Intro:

This manages to sum up quite effectively both previous Crises in a mere four pages, and assuming we need to know anything about that for Final Crisis it does a good job of bringing people up to speed. However, already I'm getting a sense that this has been put together with a lack of attention to detail. The image at the bottom of page three, of parallel earths exploding, probably looked fine as pencils. But someone's dropped a photo of the Earth in, repeatedly, with Photoshop, so now we have five earths breaking apart with giant cracks over their surface that manage also to be visible on the water, with no distortion whatsoever of the shape of the continents, and with giant plumes of flame shooting out as far as the moon while causing *no disturbance at all* to the atmospheric patterns from the previous panel.

Final Crisis: Legion Of Three Worlds
This preview has three pages, and two of them are taken up with a double-page spread of a fight scene. In the one page of narrative we get to see some Patent Geoff Johns Dismemberment and discover that Superman is in the 31st century, fighting what look like shadow demons with the Legion, and that's about it. It looks pretty, but gives no real reason to read the comic.

Batman: RIP
This is much more like it. The symbolism is actually at its most overt here, and the dialogue is frankly ludicrous (Batman actually getting lines like "Red and black. Life and death. The joke and the punch line.") but it works for Batman in a way it doesn't for other characters.

There is more in this three-page sequence than anything else in the comic. It's almost a textbook in how to construct a talking-head sequence in a superhero comic. It contains allusions to other comics, but in such a way that anyone who hasn't read them won't be missing anything, it stays with the established characterisation, and it makes great use of the page.

Sticking with the duality theme, Morrison has Batman on a checkerboard floor seen through red-tinted glass by the Joker, who's in the dark with only spot lighting. The panels are done as powers of two (first two panels with a four panel inset, then eight panels on the next page, then sixteen on the page after).

Hands are used here as a means of expression - the Joker's body language reminding me in some ways of William Hartnell, who always used to keep his hands close to his face because the TV camera could then pick up both. The Joker barely speaks, gesturing to make most of his points, a creature of the body rather than the mind. Batman on the other hand only has his hands shown in two panels - the first panel in the sequence and one close-up panel of clenched fists when he gets angry and his emotionless facade breaks down. Instead we see only his mostly-covered face, or his body in silhouette. We know Batman only by his words, but the Joker only by his actions.Close-ups on Batman's eyes (another recurring feature of this comic) show nothing, of course, while the Joker's eyes are cracked, red and bloodshot.

The increasing number of panels, and decreasing number of words as the Joker appears more and more in control of the situation, ratchet up the tension, while allowing Morrison to homage several different comics (the situation is clearly referencing The Killing Joke, the last panel is meant to make us think of Watchmen, while the 16-panel last page is laid out in the same manner as The Dark Knight Returns).

This makes me want to read more of this story, and is by far the best thing in the comic.

Wonder Woman: Whom The Gods Fail
"She is peace and she is war" apparently. This seems like it could actually be teasing quite a good story (or a terrible one - tying real-world genocides into a superhero story could be a very tasteless decision) but the single-panel bits will only make sense to people who've been reading a lot of other comics. It might make people who read 52 want to read Wonder Woman but it won't bring in any *new* readers. And the last panel just says to me that someone wants some of that 300 money for themselves.

Green Lantern: Blackest Night Prelude
I have no idea what is going on here at all, having not been reading Green Lantern, except that I would be very surprised if the Black Hand (mentioned here, an old Green Lantern villain) and the Black Glove (the behind-the-scenes villain of parts of Morrison's Batman run, mentioned earlier) were either unconnected or the same character. The two-page spread of 'refracted light' is more-or-less incomprehensible, except that someone (or someones) are going to be followed. Given that Final Crisis is meant to tie into Seven Soldiers the colours-of-the-rainbow thing here might be interesting later on. This seems actually to tie in to some of the other stuff, but I'm left confused.

Final Crisis: Revelations
Nigel Blackwell said it best:
If you're gonna quote from the Book of Revelation
Don't go calling it the Book of Revelations
There's no 's', it's the Book of Revelation
As revealed to St John the Divine
See also Mary Hopkin
She must despair

Final Crisis
This, along with the Batman section, is one of the more comprehensible sections, and actually gives me a sense of anticipation. It appears to follow on from events and concepts from 52, with Darkseid being equated with Lady Styx in some way and with Libra trying to get the Secret Society of Super Villains to join the Crime religion. The foreshadowing suggesting that Libra is Barry Allen is so obvious that it must be a bluff.

As for that last page 'reveal', Mark Waid, the only one of the four 52 writers not involved in some way with this latest crossover, said just before this came out, about The Flash

"Tom will make that book shine. And he’ll do it on the strength of Wally, not on some creatively bankrupt, desperate stunt like bringing Barry Allen back to life or something."

While there appears to be no love lost between Waid and DC editorial right now, he still appears to be friendly with Morrison (and presumably Johns), and I don't see him using terms like that about an idea that would have come from those writers. So either the 'return' is no return at all (most likely as far as I can see) or it's been forced by editorial edict against the writers' will, or I'm completely misreading the situation. We'll see.

I intend to buy Final Crisis and possibly several of the other comics trailed here, so you can expect more regular posts from here on in. I think, though, that this comic would have been infinitely more successful had they cut out the Revelations and Wonder Woman sections, and maybe the framing material, and concentrated on the Legion, Batman, Green Lantern and Final Crisis sections. They all seem to fit together, and a little more work could have fit those four sections into a 22-page narrative with some actual point to it, rather than this collection of sketchy trailers.

Shame...

2008-04-16T20:07:00.002Z

I thought for a while we'd have a contender for what Fred at Slacktivist describes as The World's Worst Books - the Left Behind series. Rob Liefeld's Armageddon Now: Word War III deals with many of the same things and, you know, it's by Rob Liefeld. I thought we could look forward to all the same clunky dialogue, perverted interpretations of Biblical passages (anyone who tells you there's anything about a 'Rapture' in the Bible has either actually never read the thing or is deliberately trying to mislead you in service of another agenda), unintentional homoeroticism and total disengagement with reality, but turned up to eleven.

Essentially, what I was hoping for was a Chick Tract, but with Liefeld art. As someone with a strange fascination with the outer realms of religious belief, the opportunity to see premillenial dispensationalism illustrated with one-eyed cyborgs with no feet exerted an almost unbearable pull. It seemed like it could be a perfect storm of awfulness, possibly even being a new contender for the title of Worst Cultural Product In The History Of The Human Race (previous title holders Mike Love, 1981-2000, for Lookin' Back With Love, John Travolta, 2000-present, for Battlefield Earth).

But instead, looking at the previews on Newsarama, it just looks depressing. It's horrible, of course, but the kind of horrible that fills up the pages of a hundred mid-list superhero titles a month - all pseudo-photorealism, bad photoshop and big chunks of the page with no line art, all the detail being in the colouring - rather than truly Liefeldian awfulness. A team of artists 'digitally painted' this over Liefeld's layouts, and in the process appear to have removed all the preposterous incompetence for which he's so well known, replacing it with the bland, lazy semi-competence which we can find anywhere.

It appears Liefeld is incapable of meeting even low expectations...

This Is Going To Change Everything

2008-03-30T23:25:00.003Z

Before I start this rather long post, some of you might like to know that I've written another post about Brian Wilson over on my music blog.

DC comics have not really served Superman very well. In fact, they've been positively negligent. Given that he's 'iconic', the most recognised comic character on earth, that everyone knows the character and his supporting cast, how many good comics have there been about him in the last twenty years or so?

People go on about the 'triangle number' era, and when I was eleven or twelve I must admit Dan Jurgens' overwrought melodrama had a powerful effect, but those comics don't stand up at all to rereading. Other than that, how many good - not even great, just good - comics have there been about Superman in that time?

Oh, he's been a character in a few good comics - Morrison's JLA, for example - but as far as his own titles go the pickings have been very slim indeed. I would be very surprised if out of the hundreds upon hundreds of comics worth of 'product' that have been turned out during that time more than at most twenty or thirty are actually any good. That's a horrible hit rate.

Recently DC have been doing better about this. Kurt Busiek must have written or co-written close to fifty Superman comics in the last two years, thanks to delays, fill-ins and covering for other writers, and he's a decent choice. He knows what makes Superman tick, and at least his first (co-written with Geoff Johns) story was actually very good. The rest have been variable, but they've been decent. Now he's moving on to Trinity, he's being replaced by James Robinson. I'm sure Robinson will be very good too. Superman comics are currently the best they've been in decades.

But it's hard to write a Superman story. After all, he's seventy. He's getting old.

Back when he was a youthful forty (and when his good friend Mickey was fifty, and I was busy being conceived), US copyright law changed. It still took thirty years before Jerry Siegel's rights reverted to him. That's a long time. Twelve years more than Siegel lived, in fact. Still, he got well-paid when he was alive - $35,000 a year is hardly peanuts, is it? Why, that's even more than I make, if I don't work overtime.

As is the nature of these things, the debate around this on the internet has pierced right to the crucial points, with people falling roughly into two camps. On one side there are those who think that using the courts to enforce your legal rights against a multi-billion-dollar corporation is un-American, while on the other side there are those who think it's fine so long as they get their comics.

Me, I'm wondering if Ub Iwerks has any family.

Because, really, does it matter if we don't get any more Superman comics? After all, what more stories can there be to tell about him? After seventy years, what's left to say? Superman's grown old. He's a relic of a previous time. Better to just put him out of his misery.

Because fighting over the ownership of an idea as powerful as Superman is both important (for the money for Siegel's family, and the money Time Warner stand to lose) and utterly unimportant. DC Comics no more control Superman than they control Hamlet. Superman is surviving not on the quality of the comics, but on his 'mindshare'. Even though nobody's reading the comics, everyone knows who Superman, Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Lex Luthor are, what Krypton and Kryptonite are. Despite what many comics fans think, he's independent of context and certainly of 'continuity'. He's a myth, in the category of Robin Hood or King Arthur rather than of Green Lantern or Firestorm. He's Christopher Reeve, a Curt Swan drawing, a Max Fleischer cartoon, John Williams' theme, "Look, up in the sky!"

Apparently in the 1990s Ted Turner wanted to move ownership of Superman and Batman away from DC Comics and to Cartoon Network, on the grounds that they'd look after the characters better.

The logo of All-Star Superman has changed over its ten issues. The Superman has got bigger, the 'All Star' smaller. The implications are clear - this is the real Superman, not that impostor in those other comics.

Van-Zee, Superman's Kandorian double, says "In Krypton's second Golden Age, men and women lived five hundred years and performed mighty feats of great renown. I found another gray hair today" as Superman's compassionate eyes look on from the sky.

Meanwhile, in Metropolis, "the true man of Steel! The authentic man of tomorrow!" is chasing Luthor. He has to drive a giant robot, of course, because he's only an old man with Alzheimer's.

Is it only me who thinks that Kandor on Mars looks like Dr Manhattan's structure from Watchmen 9? Possibly a stretch, but both men do decide to create life. (Edit - Marc Singer thinks so too) .

Do people really name their daughters Regan? That's just asking for trouble.

We've already seen Earth-Q, of course, in Morrison's JLA Classified prequel to Seven Soldiers. And we knew Superman had entered our world to try to prevent the evil seed that had entered there from spreading. And Superman has been presented throughout the series as a solar deity, more Mithraic than Apollonian in nature, descending from the sun into the darkest depths of the underworld before slowly rising back up. At this point in the series, he has returned to the level of normal humans (though as with the 'as above, so below' nature of the whole story, events affect and are affected by events on many other scales), and this is the issue in which he creates the world (in only one day - he doesn't have time to spend six days on it, and certainly can't afford a day of rest) and in which he dies for us.

And the last we see of him, he's stretching out his hand to us. But unlike Zatanna, he isn't reaching out for our help, but even when he knows he's dying he's reaching out to help - to cure sick children, because that's what Superman does.

Yet ten minutes after his death is reported, but a page before, a young man sketches an image. It's an image of a muscular man with a friendly smile, in a tight-fitting costume, with a shield on his chest and a cape on his back. He looks strong, but utterly relaxed, confident but with no arrogance at all. He's a man who can take on the world, and he's being born again.

The legend under this birth reads 'Neverending', but this series only has two more issues to go. You see, it's not the 'real' Superman - even as Morrison obviously thinks of this story as belonging in the same world as his JLA and Seven Soldiers stories - it's 'out-of-continuity'. An imaginary story.

Of course, Grant Morrison did once ask to write the 'real' Superman comics. He submitted a detailed proposal with Mark Waid, Mark Millar and Tom Peyer, but they were turned down flat. DC decided instead to do stories like President Luthor and later Infinite Crisis, in which Siegel & Shuster's original Superman is beaten to death by Superboy. But they told Morrison, Waid, Millar and Peyer that they would never be allowed to write the 'real' Superman comics. They'd have shaken things up, been too daring.

And after all, they had to protect the copyright.

Judenhass

2008-03-15T11:01:00.004Z

Yesterday, for the second month in a row, my local comic shop gave me their free preview edition of a new Dave Sim comic, this time Judenhass which comes out in April.

While Judenhass shares with Glamourpuss some elements of style (both are done in black-and-white line art that aspires to the quality of photographs, neither are narrative as such, being more an illustrated essay), it couldn't be more different in tone and subject matter, being a look at possibly the most serious subject it is possible to deal with, the Holocaust.

Of course, any comic dealing with the Holocaust must be compared to Art Spiegelman's Maus, the Great Untouchable Classic that one must not criticise , but this probably owes more to Will Eisner's not-terribly-good The Plot, being as it is an attempt to trace the historical roots of the Holocaust in the anti-semitism that pervaded much of Western culture prior to World War II.

In terms of Sim's other work, this is most similar to Melmoth, being made up as it is of drawings of real
people along with text from primary sources, but unlike Melmoth (still my favourite of Sim's works) this doesn't even attempt to be a narrative.
Rather, Sim lays out his reasons for doing the comic at the beginning (he thinks all artists, especially non-Jews, have a responsibility to deal with the Holocaust, and that this is especially true of comic creators because so much of the industry is based on the work of Jewish creators) and then places images of the terrible suffering in the camps next to pictures of the 'great and the good' (Martin Luther, Mark Twain, Mencken, Pius XI and so on) and quotes from them about 'the Jews'.

Sim places the Holocaust firmly in a historical context, not as an isolated event but as the culmination of centuries of active persecution and, more perniciously, of people saying that the Jews' persecution is not right but still somehow brought on by their own actions somehow. Of course, there is one quote that is conspicuously absent when Sim attacks people for saying the Jews brought their persecution on their own heads:

How many of these off-limits cattle do you suppose your people mutilated and burned trying to please the living thing, the big light and the big fire in the middle of the earth?

Konigsberg:
Once again, I decline to answer on the basis of feeling even more nauseous than I did a few minutes ago. [thinks] Millions, probably

Cerebus:
There's the sad part. Someday, Yoohwhoo is going to demand that that "debt" be paid. And... millions, you said? Millions of your people are going to... um. [Long pause] [clears throat] [another long pause]

Maybe Sim really does think that literally no-one read 'all those pages of tiny little text'...

Having said that, here at least Sim reigns in his madness and his strange views and produces a powerful look at the end result of bigotry. It's a shame that Sim appears not to see that many of his own views lead down the path to Auschwitz just as easily as the quotes from Voltaire or Mohammed he uses, but in this book at least he is on the side of the angels.

Judenhaas is intended primarily as an educational tool for schools, so in some ways it's a little dry, just presenting facts and images of what happened, but that makes it all the more effective. When I first heard that Sim was tackling the Holocaust, given that he's primarily a humorous creator I had a horrible vision of something akin to Life Is Beautiful or (given his recent turn towards the borscht belt) The Day The Clown Died, all mawkish sentimentality and ill-advised humour. In fact the dry, simple presentation, combining the views of Very Important People who had Very Important Lives and pontificated about The Jewish Question with images of the people who suffered and died because of this, is far more effective than any dramatisation could ever be.

Artistically, this is far and away the best thing Sim has ever done. I was expecting to feel the loss of his 20+ year collaborator Gerhard, whose backgrounds were gorgeous even when the comic was at its worst in the last half of Latter Days, but Sim's work here is every bit as good and detailed as Gerhard's was. Sim also makes great use of the potential of computers for reproduction (assisted by Digital Production and Research Assistant Lou Copeland and scanner Sandeep Atwal), having pages be made up of dozens of panels zooming in and pulling out of aspects of the same image, so an almost abstract pattern of lines becomes part of the face of someone who has died in horrible agony.

My only real quibble with this book is a tiny one - in the endnotes Sim dismisses a quote he'd apparently found from Bernard Shaw as a fabrication (he doesn't give the quote) saying Shaw was no anti-semite. Sadly (given that Shaw is a hero of mine) that is not the case - one of the last things he wrote, in fact, was an attempted defence of the holocaust in the explanatory matter for the book version of his play Geneva.

Dave Sim is entirely right that a work of this nature is needed now. Rather worryingly, even some on the progressive left have been showing signs of anti-semitism recently. It is all too easy to go from 'the current Israeli government is in the wrong' to 'Israel is in the wrong' to 'the Jews are evil'. The first statement is defensible and probably right, the last is utterly wrong. Along with this has come a wave of holocaust denial.

The proper response to odious fraudulent scum like David Irving, who deliberately pollute the historical record in an attempt to lend some legitimacy to their repugnant bigotry, is not to lock them up like the Austrian government did but to get the truth out as widely as possible.

For me, the bits that hit home the hardest are the parts where Sim quotes people who refused to allow refugees into their countries - the Canadian government saying "none is too many", the US government saying they should "put every obstacle in their way".

Yesterday I listened to a Doctor Who audio play in which a group of blind, slug-like aliens take over a planet and subjugate the ~~white people~~ humans by claiming refugee status and demanding special treatment as a minority, including banning Christmas, and used 'positive discrimination' to take over. The reviews I read of this online didn't seem to find anything disturbing in this, although a couple of people did find it a cutting satire of what happens when 'political correctness goes too far'.

Today, right after reading Judenhass, I had a look at Andrew Rilstone's blog, to see if he'd read this yet (Rilstone is the most perceptive writer I've read on Sim, seeing his strengths and flaws more clearly than almost anyone). He hadn't, but he had posted about Mehdi Kazemi, a 19-year-old from Iran who the British government, to our eternal shame, want to deport to Iran where he will be executed for his homosexuality as his boyfriend already has been. One of the commenters on that post stated that 'we' can't afford to allow in as many asylum seekers as 'we' do, and so while it's obviously a terrible shame to see a teenager strangled to death for the 'crime' of having a boyfriend it's better to wash our hands of the whole nasty business.

I have now done something I meant to do many years ago. I've joined Amnesty International.

Judenhass is 48 pages, black and white with a colour cover, on glossy stock, and costs $4. It is published in April, but your local comic shop will have a preview copy as of this week unless, like mine, they gave it to their 'Dave Sim customer'. It's published by Aardvark-Vanaheim and will remain in print indefinitely.

Holly Reads Glamourpuss So You Don't Have To

2008-02-20T22:30:00.002Z

Given that Glamourpuss is supposed to be aimed at non-comics readers, and that it appears to be aimed at women at least in the promotional material on the website, I thought it would be interesting to see what my long-suffering wife had to say...

Hello, it's Andrew's imaginary wife here again. (I'm sure the rest of you have long forgotten that someone accused Andrew of making me up, the last time I did Holly Reads the Comics, but I am still amused by it.)

Andrew has insisted that I not read his entry about Glamourpuss until I've written my own (apparently so his geeky reactions don't sully my clumsy-layperson ones, but how likely is that anyway? much of what he says in this blog is gibberish to me, and that's just how I want to keep it!). So all I know about this comic is that he's told me it's like "twenty pages of Understanding Comics sandwiched between five pages of Mad magazine" and he's also compared it to Fate of the Artist and Alice in Sunderland. All of which makes me very dubious, as he knows what a sucker I am for things like that, and I think he's trying to trick me into playing along.

But there's always the chance that he might be right... So here we go.

I probably shouldn't be surprised, with all these allusions to other never-mind-that-fourth-wall comics, but I still wasn't expecting something that started off so chattily.

For context: I have read some of Cerebus (um, Church and State through Melmoth I think, though Andrew will correct me if I'm mistaken there... and I read all that in completely backwards order anyway and about four years ago, before I'd read any other comics, so it probably left a weird impression on me and certainly a vague one) but I didn't really know anything about its author at the time. So all I know about Dave Sim is sort of like those scenes in plays where they just have a messenger come in and tell you of a huge battle that's conveniently happened offstage so they don't have to choreograph it. (The battle is of course the one over whether he is worth anything as an artist or whether his personal ideas mar all of his achievements, and the messenger of course is Andrew, who's definitely on a particular side of this battle.) But the subject of the debate matters less than that the nebulous, wildly unfair, and possibly completely wrong impression I have gotten of Sim as a sinister baddie with big, pointy, nasty ideas that hide under your bed and watch you while you sleep. To find that the bogeymen have artistic heroes and preoccupations (even obvious ones like "cute teenage girls") is remarkable but a relief; it's something I can relate to, something refreshingly normal.

At least for the kinds of comics I read. I'm not a normal comic reader; I just want for Andrew to insist for months or years that I should read something and then occasionally give in (and then often complain that he let me go so long without reading it, as was the case with things like Promethea). I'm especially susceptible to the kind of discursive-essay sort of things, that give you some idea of the actual person writing and/or drawing this that Andrew compared this to. I'm pleased to say that it is indeed enough of that kind of thing to keep me happy all the way through reading it. It takes me an enormously long time to read a comic, and I have very little patience with them, so this was quite a big thing for me.

Of course there were lots of words too, but I never find that as disheartening as I suppose it is expected to be. Especially with a subject like this; if you get too close to filling every place with pictures of fashion models, you pretty much are drawing a fashion magazine. I shudder to think.

That's another thing. I'm sure that Andrew is asking my opinion not just because I am a convenient target, living in his house and all, but because I am a lady. But I'm the kind whose wardrobe mostly consists of things other people get her for Christmas presents, the kind who truly feels sorry for him for all the fashion magazines he would've had to actually read in order to find all those pictures (until I remember that he, of course, chose to do so! maybe he actually is crazy) and that familiarity with the top designers. I've only heard of any of these brand names thanks to my cheerfully shallow sister-in-law.

If Sim's being misogynistic (the subject that both the subject and his reputation make unavoidable) I wouldn't say I'd be the last to know but I don't think I'm terribly sensitive to that sort of thing either. Though I feel I should say something harumphing that starts, As a woman... in the way that so many complaining letters to editors and suchlike seem to start As a parent, I'm deeply offended by the idea that my children might be forced to learn about evolution, or whatever. But I have no particular reaction to this "as a woman." I'm not terribly good at that sort of thing (which is perhaps just as well; as a reader I tend to yawn at and ignore such sentences). I'm afraid I am a poor litmus test for the feminine experience.

But from what Andrew tells me, there are people — even people who aren't rabid feminists — who are not going to touch Glamourpuss with a ten-foot pole because Dave Sim is such a misogynistic misogynist ... and I think that's kind of a shame. Because it seems kind of fun, so far, blessedly unusual and kind of promising, and it'd be a shame to shun it for something that I don't think is really present in it. Especially if that judgment is made sight-unseen. Oh well; their loss. Except, well, the comic industry is so warped that if enough other people don't want to read it then I won't get to read it either... but it's too late (at night) and too early (in the grand scheme of things; there won't be another issue of Glamourpuss for me to read until, what, July or something) for me to worry about that too much.

Men reading fashion magazines, oh what a world we live in

2008-02-16T22:14:00.004Z

Thanks to the people at Friendly Neighbourhood Comic Store, I was given a copy of the 'Exclusive Comics Industry Preview Edition' of Dave Sim's Glamourpuss on Thursday (how 'exclusive' 4500 copies is of a new self-published title in today's market I don't know - I can't help but worry that such an extensive giveaway will essentially kill the chances of selling any copies of the 'normal' edition).

It's really not what I was expecting, and it's rather interesting. For those of you who haven't followed Dave Sim's post-Cerebus career, he's been working on a magazine, Following Cerebus, which is irregularly published and even more irregularly distributed but which, when it arrives (I still don't have the copy of issue 9 I paid for from the publisher in September last year, after it never turned up in the comic shop, although 10 arrived on schedule) has been one of the most fascinating comics-related magazines there is, filling the notional 'gap between Wizard and The Comics Journal'. While Sim's views on politics, religion and gender are so idiosyncratic as to bear no relation to the real world, his writing on comics, and his understanding of the tiny technical points, is absolutely enthralling - he seems to have a deeper understanding of the minutiae of the craft than anyone else writing about the medium, and the ability to convey this understanding.

The bulk of Glamourpuss 1 could very easily be a Following Cerebus essay, possibly entitled 'How To Ink Comics The Alex Raymond Way'. While it's layed out to look like fairly conventional 'sequential art' , the text in the speech bubbles, captions and so forth throughout the main portion of the book is for the most part a rather freeform essay on the inking techniques of the photorealistic comic strip school, and in particular Raymond.

Sim has decided to teach himself to draw like Alex Raymond (and given that these pages were done more or less in order, it's interesting to see the progression in his ability to do this, from the early pages where he sometimes ends up looking more like Patrick Nagel than Raymond, to the later pages where he's much more assured in his command of this style) and the art in the comic is split almost 50/50 between Sim's attempts to render photos from fashion magazines in Raymond's style (sometimes with the text veering into the same weird attempts at psychoanalysis/telepathy as the Dave Sim's Favourite Buffy Picture Of The Month section in FC) and his tracing of old Rip Kirby panels.

The tracings are actually a lot more interesting than they sound. In the backmatter of the comic, Sim compares a panel shot from Alex Raymond's original artwork with one from a typical modern reprint of Rip Kirby, showing that the shoddy copies from which modern printings are taken lose almost all the fine linework that was originally put in there. Sim attempts in his tracings to restore that linework, resulting in a curious mixture of artistic styles (Dave-Sim photorealism, Alex Raymond-as-inked-by-Dave-Sim, John-Prentice(Raymond's assistant/successor)-doing-Raymond-as-inked-by-Sim and occasionally Sim-possibly-unconsciously-doing-Gerhard). Some of this is gorgeous to look at (and I'm amazed by how good Sim is without Gerhard's help - Gerhard was the best line-art/photorealist draughtsman in comics, and Sim copes without him remarkably well) but what's really fascinating to me is the text.

I've always been interested in the combination of photorealism with non-fiction in comics (my own attempt at doing a webcomic, pretty much defunct due to lack of time, Dumb Angel, was in something of the same area) but reading someone on the top of his game explaining how to get the techniques he's using is absolutely riveting. At one point the comic actually turns into something approaching narrative - Sim tries to show the difficulty in creating narrative using photo reference by creating a six-page story using shots of the same model, with bizarre results - but for the most part it's a freewheeling semi-structured lecture on inking techniques.

Those who have been worried about Sim dealing with the fashion industry bringing out his misogynist tendencies have little need to worry, incidentally. While calling Glamourpuss' evil twin 'Skanko' is not exactly in the best possible taste, and his comment about wanting to do Alex Raymond style drawings of teenage girls is a little disturbing, there is nothing in here that would make me think "this is the work of an evil misogynist" were I not primed to look for that, and little that does even when I've got my misogynist-hunter glasses on.

(I admit, however, that it is difficult for me, a heterosexual white male, to judge what others might find offensive. This is one of the reasons I will get my wife to repeat her "Holly reads the comics so you don't have to " experiments with this issue - I will post the result of that tomorrow or Monday).

Around the edges of the sequential material, we have a few pages of fashion magazine parody. I've found Sim's humour in recent years to be much less effective than it had been earlier, which I think is partly a function of his increasing detatchment from 'normal' society (it's hard to be an effective satirist of the current culture when you never watch TV, listen to the radio or go on the internet) and partly due to his increased admiration for borscht-belt comedians, a genre I've never been a fan of. To my mind, the humour portions of Glamourpuss have the same sense of trying too hard and not quite getting it that I've found from some of Sim's other recent humour stuff, but I'll give it a pass because I'm not at all familiar with fashion magazines, and it may be that some of the text in them really is as horrible as this (I did once look at Cosmopolitan's website for half an hour, and came out with terrible psychic scars I still bear four years later, so it's entirely possible). There are also one or two bits that really are laugh-out-loud funny - usually obvious jokes, but still good ones.

But all in all, Glamourpuss is intriguing because it's nothing like anything out there. The closest comparison I can find in terms of content is if you took twenty pages of Understanding Comics or the comics-history sections of Alice In Sunderland and wrapped them in five pages of Mad magazine. The formal experimentation reminds me a little of Alice but also of The Fate Of The Artist or even The Black Dossier (about which I do have more to say and will shortly).

It's also, sadly, utterly unsuited to the serialised format - I get the feeling that , when it's released as a trade, this will be something to be studied repeatedly, and will be very rewarding. But this sort of freewheeling lecture/narrative/experiment thing works far better in large doses than in twenty-five pages at a time, and I'm going to withhold judgement on its quality until I've read at least the next three issues. But there's enough of interest (and it's cheap enough - $3 ) for me to recommend without hesitation that you at least try the first issue.

It might not be for everyone - it's unlikely to have a huge crossover fanbase with Booster Gold (although I like Booster Gold actually) - but I have a feeling this could be surprisingly successful among those who like the quirkier mainstream/more accessible indie titles (a category I usually fall into) like Action Philosophers or Rick Veitch's dream comics (something else I must write about soon) as well as the other titles I've mentioned.

Dave Sim post

2008-01-11T00:11:00.000Z

For some reason this backdated itself to last Sunday, but I only just posted it - http://dccountdown.blogspot.com/2007/12/dave-sim-song-not-singer.html . It's about why Dave Sim is better than you might think.

Last Week

2008-01-08T17:04:00.000Z

Jetlag, work, migraine, work, novovirus
Update Thursday.

Dave Sim - The Song, Not The Singer

2007-12-30T20:21:00.000Z

A few days ago I had the most exciting comics-related news of the year - Dave Sim has announced his new project, Glamourpuss. Given that in the four years since Cerebus ended, his only comic work has been a couple of jam pages with Chet Brown, a few pages of webcomic about the life of an obscure actress, and a co-authored script for an issue of Gun Fu, I'm excited to finally read some new work from the person I consider the single greatest comic creator ever.

Others are not so enthusiastic. Pretty much every reaction I've seen online to this has been along the lines of "Who cares about David Simms? He's a misogynistic misogynist. His comics must be like Chick tracts or something."

Now this irritates me. Not because of the people reacting that way - had I only read Sim's interviews, blog or text pieces I would have absolutely no desire to listen to anything he had to say. Even the most cursory reader of any prose he's written after about the early 1990s would come to the conclusion that he's both severely mentally ill (not in itself a reason to ignore someone - my day job is on a psychiatric ward in a hospital and I know that mental illness does not preclude someone from being intelligent, witty or perceptive, and may even give people perspectives others don't have, perspectives that are worth having) and also a rather unpleasant person (something that's apparently not true in person, but seems to be the case with his writing persona). Pulling my copy of his Collected Letters 2004 vol 1 from the shelf and opening it at random I find:

Satan, like Lucifer, was an ill-advised escalation of hostilities on the part of YHWH, like Leviathan. I think God was happy to keep it on the level of "an adversary" which is what opposing spirits were called. As in the way that Samuel's mother was childless for years because of "her adversary". YHWH was aware of God and God was saying that there is no question that there is only one God. Let's be patient and see how the whole thing hatches out.

And so on. Sim as he comes across in print is dogmatic, rude, paranoid, believes women to be subhuman and evil, and holds political and religious views which, to the extent that they're comprehensible at all, are totally incompatible with humanity. He's read the Bible as a struggle between Good and Evil and thought that Evil sounded like a good idea.

Which is what infuriates me, because he's destroying the reputation of the finest creative mind of his generation, and I'm sick of trying to defend someone who I find (as an essayist - again, no judgement of him as a human being implied) utterly repellent and inimical to everything I hold dear. But I have to, because he's that good.

Even was Sim's comic writing as bad as his prose would imply, I would still want to read anything the man did just because of his technical skill. Sim is one of the best artists working in comics today, a master mimic who can 'do' any style - a Sim page will often contain an Alex Raymond photorealistic character next to a Mort Drucker caricature next to a perfect Eddie Campbell figure - as well as having his own distinctive style, and do it in such a way that they inhabit the same world - the different shapes, inking styles and degrees of realism complement each other rather than appearing incongruous. (This is of course aided in Cerebus by Gerhard's wonderful backgrounds, by far the most detailed black & white line art I've seen in comics, but with that detail all being there for a deliberate aesthetic effect. I can't even imagine how much effort it must have taken for Gerhard to produce work of that quality day after day for nearly twenty years, and hitting pretty much every deadline).

Sim's layouts have also always been hugely inventive, from the early "Mind Games" issue (which prefigured the last issue of Promethea by more than twenty years) through the dream sequences in Guys and the hallucinatory sequences in Rick's Story to the Citizen Kane establishing shot in The Last Day. On every single page in at least the last 220 or so issues of Cerebus , just looking at the page you can see that it is the creation of people who are working full out to make the best comic possible - every single element is very obviously the result of a conscious creative choice, never falling back on cliche except for parodic effect.

And even Sim's detractors praise his lettering. While he's not as versatile as a Todd Klein (he tends to stick to one look for his hand-lettering, a blocky but very readable look that can be traced ultimately to Spirit letterer Abe Kanegson, and is limited enough that he had to get Rick Veitch to letter 'his' dialogue parts when Veitch appeared as a character in Guys and Going Home) he's almost unique in his ability to integrate the lettering with the page, having it become a physical object with which his characters can interact. And in a medium where random words are often emphasised with no regard for the natural stresses of the English language, Sim's use of different sizes and shapes of letters to accentuate the different speech patterns of his characters opens up huge areas that have been almost completely unexplored otherwise. The Mrs Thatcher scenes in Jaka's Story (some of the best comics work I've ever seen) gain much of their intensity through the lettering, which evokes perfectly the mix of harsh menace and soothing insincere gentility that were so recognisable in the real Thatcher.

But despite this, and amazingly considering his prose work, it is as a writer that Sim most excels. While those who only know him for his prose might expect him to turn out Chick tracts, but possibly with less subtlety and more outlandish opinions, he's possibly second only to Alan Moore in writing ability in the comics medium. I've written before about the work I consider his best (and quite possibly the best graphic novel ever created - certainly the best I've ever read by quite a margin), Jaka's Story, but that one more than any other sums up just how different Sim's comic writing is from his essay persona.

In Cerebus we're time and again shown unreliable narratives - be it Oscar's book in Jaka's Story, Cerebus' misunderstanding and drunken recounting of his time on 'Juno' in Guys, the narrative by 'Suenteus Po' in High Society, the Judge's monologue in Church & State, 'Dave's description of what Jaka is doing in Minds, Rick's book in Rick's Story, Cerebus' own account of his life story in Latter Days - the more authoritative someone is presented as being, the more their account of events is thrown into question by later revelations. This appears to have originally been inspired by Robert Anton Wilson (a huge influence on the early volumes of Cerebus, though from comments he's made since Sim seems not to have fully understood his writing) but Sim carries it on throughout the story, even up to the very last pages of the comic.

If Cerebus is 'about' anything, it's about how we can never know the truth about anything, only a biased and inaccurate viewpoint which is missing crucial elements of the big picture. In a sense it is lucky for Sim that the story ends where it does, because the only logical place to go from the revelations in Latter Days is to undercut them, just as he does with every other Big Truth revealed throughout the story, and of course the religious ideas in Latter Days are in fact those Sim currently holds.

Although maybe that accounts for his current dogmatism - Cerebus is also, at least in part, a record of Sim's search for capital-T Truth, and the fact that it ends before he could undercut his current worldview maybe helped set those views in his mind. Maybe if Cerebus had continued Sim would be just as loudly proclaiming a Gospel According To Andrea Dworkin and calling for all men to be castrated.

Because one of the things that makes Cerebus - and Sim as a comic writer - work is that it is true. Not literally true, but artistically true. Throughout the years he did the comic, Sim tried to present the world as he saw it as accurately as he could (within the confines of a humorous fantasy story). And that it is the world as he saw it is the saving grace of Cerebus, and why Sim can write comics when he appears to be almost incapable at this point of rational thought.

If you read Sim's prose work (don't - it's badly written, mean spirited and generally unpleasant, except when he's talking about neutral subjects like comic creation) the problems with his thinking generally boil down to two. The first, common to autodidacts, is that he will try to make authoritative statements on subjects that he knows very little about, and ends up looking a fool to anyone who's studied those subjects in any depth (which is why he can write so cogently about comic creation or creators - he knows what he's talking about there).

The second, related, one is to look for patterns where none exist. What Sim does is take one observation ("That reporter from The Onion seemed unusually competent") and then build on it a huge superstructure that the observation just can't support ("The reporter was probably so competent because YooHWHoo wanted me to be impressed, so I'd fall in love with her and marry her and renounce anti-feminism and become a feminist-Marxist-homosexualist-atheist member of the conspiracy"). This usually involves imputing motives to people that they simply don't have. But crucially the actual original observation is accurate. In fact, because he's looking for details to support his hypothesis, the observation might be more detailed than anyone else could make.

So while Sim doesn't appear to understand how other people think, he's a keen observer of how those people behave. While the motives he gives in interviews for Jaka's behaviour make no sense when compared to real human beings, at the same time you know that the character as portrayed thus far would show her ringless hand when reaching Sand Hill Creek. And while Sim appears to regard Bear in Guys as a largely admirable figure, while I think of him as a revolting boor, both of us would, I think, agree on how the character would behave in a given situation, because he's drawn accurately. I may not like it that many groups of men, placed together in a bar without women, would behave like the men in Guys, but I don't deny that that is the way many men do behave.

Sim would make a terrible novelist, because the novel depends in large part on showing characters' thought processes, and Sim just doesn't get how people think. But comics show rather than tell, and Sim uses almost no thought bubbles. The only time we're treated to anyone's thought processes, it's either Cerebus himself (who has almost no inner life and who is, anyway, an anthropomorphic aardvark), Rick (who is clearly presented as extremely mentally ill) or for too short a time to make any judgement. If we were shown Jaka's thought processes they would be along the lines of "Ha ha! I will do this because I am a spoiled brat bitch who is controlled by the devil and I will destroy Cerebus' Male Light with my evil female void!", but seeing her act we can form our own opinions - we're just being shown the facts, not the author's interpretation of them.

In fact in some ways Sim's assigning of importance to details no-one else would notice, while a limitation for him as a thinker, adds veracity to the comic. There are times when a tiny detail ( like 'something fell') takes on an importance in the comic out of all proportion to its importance to the story itself, but they all feel right artistically, because Sim's thought out a huge superstructure which goes unsaid in the comic itself but informs every detail of it.

So I'm eagerly counting the days to the release of Glamourpuss 1, and expect it to be among the best comics I read this year.

Now if only that arsehole Dave Sim would stop promoting it, I might not feel ashamed to walk into the shop and ask for it.

At Last The 1984 Show

2007-12-27T00:47:00.000Z

Well, long time no see. Before we start, I would like to apologise for my extended absence. I have, in fact, been working on a book (non-comic-related) which is taking up much more of my time than I had thought, and have not even had a chance to check the comic blogs, let alone update my own.

In order to prevent this from happening again, I have actually written four posts for this blog, which I will post at weekly intervals, by which time I will hopefully have written more, so I hope to keep a backlog. Thank you to those who have expressed concern about my absence.

Anyway, on to The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen – The Black Dossier. What little I've seen of the critical reaction to this has been muted, to say the least, which has surprised me – in a disappointing year for comics after the rather excellent 2006, when only Alice In Sunderland has achieved masterpiece status , The Black Dossier is clearly a contender for best comics work of the year.

The Black Dossier actually owes a great deal to Alan Moore's great work of last year, Lost Girls. Moore has already spoken, often, of the way that working on Lost Girls inspired the ideas about 'ideaspace' and a shared fictional universe that led to the previous two League volumes, but in The Black Dossier the link is far more obvious, from the increased sexual content (parts of the book are only just less explicit than Lost Girls, and there is a lot of sex in the book) through to the pastiches of various literary and pop-culture forms that form the bulk of the book (Moore gets the tone of lesser writers like Shakespeare or Kerouac perfectly, but unfortunately even he isn't up to the task of recreating P.G. Wodehouse's prose style).

But as with the two previous League volumes, The Black Dossier is dominated by the spirit of one writer. Where the first volume was the London of Conan Doyle and the second was that of H.G. Wells, this one is George Orwell through and through, and in ways that surprisingly few people seem to have picked up on (although, again, I haven't read many of my favourite comic bloggers in recent weeks, and I can't wait to see what Marc Singer, or Steve at Gad Sir! Comics!, for example, have had to say about this – I'm currently staying with my in-laws, who only have dial-up, but I'll be reading through them when I get home).

Everyone has, of course, noticed the influence of Orwell's novels on the book – that could hardly be helped. It is, after all, set in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Ingsoc government from 1984 (relocated to 1948 to coincide with its original publication). The references to 'Manor Farm' (the original name of the farm in Animal Farm ) and background details from Keep The Aspidistra Flying have also been picked up on.

But what seems to have gone unnoticed is the debt the book owes to Orwell's non-fiction. This is perhaps understandable – other than 1984 and Animal Farm Orwell is barely read these days. But Orwell's essays were where he excelled as a writer and social commentator, and I would urge anyone interested in the culture and politics of mid-20th century Britain, or just those interested in good writing, to get hold of his Collected Essays. I may, incidentally, get the titles of some essays wrong in this – I'm 5000 miles from my copy at the moment.

The comparison early on in The Black Dossier between 'Jimmy' and Alan Quatermain, showing the deterioration of the British adventure hero between their eras, dramatises the thesis of Orwell's classic essay "Raffles And Miss Blandish", which compared the brutal sadism of the then-bestseller No Orchids For Miss Blandish with the more moral sensibility of the earlier Raffles books (Raffles, of course, becomes a character in the League).

At one point Allan and Mina are seen looking at a humorous postcard of the Donald McGill type – Orwell was the first writer to suggest that these were worth studying, in "The Art Of Donald McGill", one of the first essays in the field we now call cultural studies.

There are several pages of Wodehouse pastiche – Orwell wrote the eloquent "In Defence Of P.G. Wodehouse" at a time when Wodehouse was vilified in the British press as a traitor, helping to restore his reputation.

Lemuel Gulliver is a minor character – Swift was Orwell's favourite author, and he wrote about him on many occasions.

But most suggestive is the pervasive influence of Greyfriars and its alumni, which seems to have been suggested by Orwell's classic essay on "Boys Weeklies", which is still the best analysis of the Greyfriars and St Jim's stories ever written.

But even more than all that, the book just reeks of Orwell. His obsession with Britishness (and this is the most British comic you'll read this year – it's particularly cruel that the one country where this could be understood without recourse to Jess Nevins' excellent annotations is also the one where it's not available), hope in the face of adversity, people struggling through essentially grey, dull lives… even when Moore is 'doing' Ian Fleming, or Eagle comics, or Gerry Anderson, or Kerouac, it feels like Orwell. In one section Mina talks about "These precious, stupid little English jokes and catchphrases when they've been pulling the bit of their neighbours and their relatives out from beneath the bricks and burning beams only the night before" – a more Orwellian phrase and sentiment you couldn't hope to find.

There's much more to The Black Dossier, which I'll look at over the coming weeks (and don't believe me if you don't want to – I know I don't have a great track record with this) but if you've been avoiding buying it because of the negative reaction, you're missing out on some of Moore's best, cleverest writing. No, it's not a narrative in the conventional sense, but there's not a page that didn't make me laugh or drop my jaw in awe.

Moore And Moor(cock)

2007-11-02T22:18:00.000Z

Last Friday my wife and I went to see Alan Moore, Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock have a discussion about London (along with a reading by poet Brian Catling, who seemed rather uneasy in front of an audience and a performance by a singer called Kirsten Norrie, who sounds like Enya would if she had talent). I want to give a quick overview of it here because it's started me thinking about things I want to talk about, but this post is going to be more personal-journal type writing than the more analytical stuff I usually write here. The analytical stuff will come tomorrow night or Sunday.

I wanted to write a short review of it closer to the time, but it's taken this long to stop myself unconsciously imitating the shared rhythms of Moore, Sinclair and Catling. All have very similar writing styles - loping, rambling, looping adjectival torrents of words, flowing through the sentence like the Acheron through the abyss of the underworld, a tunnel with no end in sight, til the brightness of a new metaphor appears, classical references and pop culture intertwining, Ariachne and Peter Parker meeting mid-sentence in a web of language and reference. Then a short sentence. Hanging there, portentous. Another longer sentence then, the construction vaguely archaic, the language flowery... I'm sorry.

But easy as it is to imitate Moore's rhythms (even more so in speech - his inflection is almost as distinctive as his language) , his spoken work is crucial to understanding his comics, so after talking for a little while about the event itself, I'd like to go on to talk about Moore's spoken-word work and (to tie into the themes of my more recent posts) how his magical practice differs from that of Grant Morrison, the other major comic writer/'magician'.

The event was held at the Bishopsgate Institute (or Foundation, or Library, depending on which sign you believe, making the venue rather difficult for us non-Londoners to find), and it seemed like half of the 200 or so people there were important in the British comics/literary world. Holly and I were sat directly behind Moore himself (pre-show) with Melinda Gebbie, Oscar Zarate and Hayley Campbell all in a row next to him, which led to me spending a large chunk of the evening embarassed, as I couldn't help saying "But that's Oscar Zarate (or whoever)" and then having to explain to Holly who Zarate is with him in clear earshot.

(For those who don't know, Zarate is an incredible artist, who collaborated with Moore on the comparatively little-known graphic novel A Small Killing, but who I know best for his work with Alexei Sayle on Geoffrey The Tube Train And The Fat Comedian).

I also got to briefly meet Roz Kaveney (who I've known for several years as a vague acquaintance online) for the first time, but not for very long as she was busy talking to Important People about Weighty Subjects. I'd really have been rather disappointed if she hadn't been...

I was intermittently distracted during the first half (with Moore and Moorcock reading their pieces from the Sinclair-edited anthology London, City Of Disappearances , and Sinclair reading a rather wonderful piece about Jayne Mansfield opening a parrot-fanciers' meeting) because Melinda Gebbie was busily sketching away little ballpoint sketches of the principals on lined paper as they talked. In many ways I was more impressed by this than by the readings - while I'm not a writer on the level of those reading, I know how to put words together, but being able to create visual art that quickly (and the sketches were good), looks like magic to me.

And magic is a subject that came up in the discussion half of the event. The discussion was in some ways rather frustrating. Sinclair didn't speak much (although he got in a wonderful line about how as a result of him and Moore there is now a block of flats and restaurants for yuppies called Hawksmoor Mews, which is probably not a result they intended for their work), but essentially moderated between Moore and Moorcock.

Moore and Moorcock are both very articulate, but also tend to build up an argument, speaking in paragraphs rather than sentences. They'll often appear to have thought three paragraphs ahead, and be saying something in order to get to something else more interesting. The problem is that the 'something' is often in itself quite interesting, and since by this point the speaker has been talking for a good couple of minutes, Sinclair would cut them off mid-flow to ask the other one.

As a result, we got a sort of ping-pong of half-finished sentences, trains of thought brutally derailed, as each man's half-ideas would send the other careening off in a completely different direction. (This actually reminded me of the game in I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, a recording of which we also attended this week, in which contestants build sentences one word at a time in turn and you end up with phrases like "Paraguay is the largest badger-wearing country in Poland".) Often the two would visibly cut short something they were saying that was becoming too discursive, to go for the cheap laugh instead (Moore referring to himself as being on first-name terms with Gilbert and George springs to mind).

But however maddening this kind of thing can be, it was also exhilarating. In particular, the subject got on to the topic of writing as magic.

Moorcock was fascinating on this subject, and I'd like to hear him talk more about it - he was essentially riffing on Shelley's line about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of humanity, talking about how "we can't get real change, and the only way to get actual change is to change the rhetoric", as well as talking about how other people had often come up to him and described remembering events from his fiction.

Moore's thoughts were broadly similar, but subtly different. While Moorcock spoke about the need to change rhetoric as a stepping-stone to real change, Moore says "we are living in text - we live by manipulating language". Moorcock talks about writing himself a new London when the old one was blitzed, but still finds it funny that someone told him about a portal to other worlds underneath a nearby building, and said he should include it in one of his novels (Moorcock had invented the portal in an earlier book, which the person talking to him hadn't read).

Moore, on the other hand, would probably (though I don't want to put words in his mouth) say that Moorcock inventing the portal had made it slightly more real - "I made it all up, and it came true anyway". The distinction Moorcock makes between 'real' change and change in rhetoric is one Moore would not make and possibly doesn't believe in. For Moore, a change in rhetoric is a real change, and may well actually change the physical world. Certainly he seems to see the borderline between the physical world and our brain software as being more permeable than most do.

Tomorrow I'm going to look at how this belief affects his writing.

Did You Miss Me (Yeah!) While I Was Away? Did You Hang My Picture On Your Wall?

2007-10-31T22:11:00.000Z

Well, it seems some people actually read this thing...
This is just a very brief post to say sorry for not saying anything for a couple of weeks. Some problems at work coupled with a very uninspiring bunch of comics coming out, and some semblance of a social life have left me with less time than normal for writing.

I will post properly tomorrow, on a semi-comic related topic (the Alan Moore/Iain Sinclair/Michael Moorcock reading I went to last week) but wanted to gather my thoughts on it a bit. Expect it about this time tomorrow. This should lead to a discussion of 'ideaspace', possibly comparing and contrasting the use of magic(k) in Moore with Morrison. I hope to post the first of those posts on Sunday.

If you can't wait til tomorrow for my writing and are willing to accept a non-comics related piece, I have an article up on the culture 'zine The High Hat about Brian Wilson which is a lot less clever now than when I wrote it (it's quite galling to spend a couple of thousand words teasing out the previously-overlooked goddess symbolism in someone's songs only to have them then start a song with "Summer of 61/A goddess became my song". Other critics never have these problems. Shakespeare never wrote a sequel to Hamlet called "No, he definitely was mad, no really"...). It does mention Jack Kirby, so that might be enough for you.

Thanks for the concern, normal service will be resumed shortly. No refunds will be given.

I shall return

2007-10-14T23:35:00.000Z

Just letting people know I *will* update this again, soon - I've just had two separate bouts of the 'flu in the last fortnight (the kind that gets passed round everyone at work). I got rid of them easily enough, but I've not had the energy to write. (I'll delete this when there's some actual content).

Quick Question

2007-10-01T22:34:00.000Z

I'm no fan of Diamond and their monopolistic practices, but... I'm probably being dense, but I just don't get the latest controversy at all.
As I understand it, Diamond are asking all publishers to put a bar code on their comics. This is being interpreted as a way to force small publishers out. There's a huge leap there that I'm just not getting.
My band's CDs have bar codes on them. I can guarantee the profit margin on them is lower than any comic in Previews, by quite some way, yet the cost of the bar codes is minimal.
Yes, it can cost a lot to get registered to produce your own bar codes, but you don't need to do that - bar codes can be purchased from resellers for approximately £20.
I really, really don't see how this decision harms anyone. Could someone explain?

I Don't Know Who He Is Behind That Mask, But We Need Him And We Need Him Now... Morrison (and others) on Batman Part 1

2007-10-01T00:32:00.001Z

After that slightly-longer-than-expected hiatus, it's time for us to continue our look at the DC Morrisonverse. Today, I want to start looking at Grant Morrison's work on Batman.

One of the complaints a lot of the more intelligent comic-bloggers make is that most online comics criticism seems to take comics as a branch of literature rather than as a medium in its own right (the pedant in me cringes at that sentence and its mixture of singular and plural - the one real reason I can see for wanting to get rid of 'comics' as the name for the medium). They're right of course, but to a large extent they're beside the point.

Disregarding for the moment the regrettably large number of internet 'reviewers' who in fact are just preparing book reports, listing the events in the story rather than dealing with it as a piece of art (and I know I've done capsule 'reviews' like that myself, but I hope my longer posts do contain something approximating analysis) , one would at first thought assume that most comics reviewers would have at least as much to say about the art in comics as the writing.

The problem is, while comics as a whole have room for as many different types of art as there are people in the world, superhero comics, which are the bread and butter of most comic blogs, have traditionally allowed only a small fraction of those styles to be used. With some exceptions, almost every artist working for Marvel or DC (or the other companies feeding on the crumbs from under their table) would fit into the bottom left corner of Scott McCloud's "Big Triangle" .

In fact, for superhero comic artists, rather than a 'big triangle', almost all fit into a 'little square', defined on one axis by the number of tiny little lines and on the other by how distorted the anatomy is. Roughly the four corners of this square would be Jack Kirby (no little lines, ultra-distorted anatomy), Darwyn Cooke (very few little lines, relatively accurate anatomy), George Perez (millions of little lines, relatively accurate anatomy) and Rob Liefeld (millions of little lines all over the place, wrong number of knees).

Anything outside this box would not get published by the mainstream companies, and despite the obvious differences in ability between those four gentlemen, there's really not a huge stylistic difference between them when compared to the full range of possibilities out there. Korn don't sound much like the Beatles, but both sound more like each other than like Edgard Varese.

Comic art also has a relatively low entry threshold. Given its low rate of pay compared to commercial art, and given that every fan thinks they could write the perfect Green Lantern story and submits it to DC, but most have a more realistic assessment of their drawing skills, the talent pool on which the big companies are drawing is relatively small, and mostly made up of amateurs, be that in the true sense (working in comics for love when they could earn more in other fields) or in the pejorative (barely competent).

Most superhero artists, therefore, are concentrating firstly on making the thing they're drawing look something like it's meant to, and secondly on their panel-to-panel storytelling, ensuring the reader can follow the story. It's actually only exceptional artists (two examples off the top of my head are Frank Quitely and J.H. Williams III, but there are others) who go further than serving the story and actually try to create something that has an aesthetic value in and of itself, something capable of producing an emotional reaction independent of its context within the story - something, in other words, worth criticising on its own merits.

This means that even the more visually literate comics reviewers will often treat a comic as if it were essentially a prose work, because they have nothing really to say about the art. However, this results in reviews that are unintentionally dishonest.

The treatment of the recent Club Of Heroes storyline in Batman is a perfect example. Most reviewers have praised this story to the skies, and (either explicitly or implicitly) compared it with the earlier Morrison-written issues of the title, with the latter suffering in comparison.

And this is a good assessment of them as comics, but that's not the fault of either Morrison or of Andy Kubert, the artist on the earlier issues, but rather of their pairing. Grant Morrison is a writer who, more than any other non-drawing writer I can think of in comics, takes advantage of the visual aspect of the medium by making details matter.

Generally speaking, comics writers working in full script have one thing happen per panel. Sometimes there'll be a background detail or two for world-building or as a joke, but even Alan Moore, who's known for his incredibly detailed panel descriptions, tends to work in foreground/background terms. Watchmen is made infinitely richer by the background detail, by the way panels echo and reflect each other, but only rarely (the scenes by the newsstand in issue 11, for example, when all the plot threads come together) does the background detail or figure placement convey information about the main plot itself.

Compare and contrast this with, for example, Morrison & Quitely's All Star Superman #1. In this, there's a whole series of intricately choreographed moments which require paying attention to every detail. Most superhero comic readers have been trained to see the figures of the major characters as foreground and everything else as background. You can't do this with Morrison & Quitely's work and have any hope of following what's going on.

Unfortunately, this kind of work requires a particular type of collaborator in order to succeed. It was revelatory, for example, to see Morrison's script and thumbnails for Arkham Asylum in the 15th anniversary trade a few years back. Dave McKean's art, while gorgeous, was utterly unsuited to the story as written. Important plot points in the script were simply not drawn, resulting in the finished work being incoherent and coming across as a lot more pretentious than the script would suggest.

It is entirely probable that the comparative lack of response to Morrison & Kubert's Batman has a related cause. I'm not suggesting that Kubert didn't follow Morrison's script to the letter, and nor do I think he's a bad artist (while his style isn't to my taste, he's one of the best of that type of artist out there), but his style is fundamentally unsuited to Morrison's work.

Andy Kubert is in the ultra-distorted, millions of little lines corner of our hypothetical square, and that style isn't suited to the type of subtlety Morrison's scripts require. To parse the action correctly, we need to take in a minimum of visual information. The extraneous detail that Kubert adds actually detracts from our ability to process the image at a glance. I can't speak for anyone else, but to me those little lines paradoxically make me gloss over the image - everything in the picture is of about equal importance, and thus equal unimportance. A lot of detail in Morrison's stories also comes from characters' body language and facial expression, and Kubert simply isn't a nuanced enough artist to show these things. He's great on action (which is why the most impressive sequence in his run on the title is the fight in the museum), but his 'actors' are all scenery-chewing hams.

I suspect that further down the line, we will discover that (much as in his runs on Animal Man, Doom Patrol and especially New X-Men) Morrison has planted a number of time-bombs in his scripts, subtle details that will make us look at these early issues in a new light. And they will be there when we go back and look at the issues, but the art style will have stopped them registering with us.

So Morrison's pre-Club Of Heroes issues are, overall, at best qualified successes as comics. But that's not the fault of the writer, or of the artist, but of the system by which mainstream superhero comics are produced. While the production-line system exist, there will be occasions on which talented people, doing their best to produce good material, end up working partly at cross purposes.

But they are still better than the vast majority of superhero comics being produced at the moment, and they've provided an intriguing basis for the work that's followed. I'll look at them (and the Clown At Midnight issue and Club Of Heroes) in more detail in my next few posts.

50th post - Capsule reviews for the last two weeks

2007-09-27T17:22:00.000Z

Apologies for the extended delay here in posting, but life sometimes gets in the way... tomorrow, I'll start a series of posts about Morrison's Batman (and post-IC Batman generally), but for now here's a quick look over the last couple of weeks' comics.

Before that, though, just to quickly weigh in on a topic I've seen mentioned a couple of times recently, I can't wait for the day Diamond's monopoly ends. Part of the reason my comics purchases are so weighted towards superheroes (although not as much as you might think - I'm more likely to buy indie stuff in trades and superhero stuff as floppies) is the fact that I can actually buy those comics. The comics shop I go to is helpful and will generally try to order stuff I want, but even stuff they try to get shelf copies of just doesn't arrive sometimes. For example, I've been looking forward to the latest Apocalypse Nerd for months, but it didn't arrive in the shop. This month's Comics Journal didn't turn up either. I'm missing one issue (5, I think) of the D&Q serialised version of Ed The Happy Clown, I still don't have issue 10 of Following Cerebus...

I'm absolutely convinced that plenty of people out there would buy a wider variety of material if they could actually find it in the shops, but if people don't see it on the shelves they won't buy it, and if the stock doesn't arrive in the shop they can't put it on the shelves. Diamond are obviously uninterested in the vast majority of the titles they stock, because their business is built around selling Batman and the X-Men to the exclusion of everything else. While I accept that those things will always sell better than Action Philosophers, we are in a relatively brief sliver of time between the internet becoming popular and Peak Oil hitting hard, where those of us lucky enough to live in the West have become accustomed to whatever we want being instantly available. In the age of the Long Tail it is annoying to see the only distributor used by most comic shops stuck in a bestseller mentality.

(As an aside - reminder to myself. Go back to the shop tomorrow and get Astro City, which was missed out of the pull list for some reason.)

Anyway, on with the reviews.

I'll deal with Batman 669 (by Grant Morrison, J.H. Williams III and Dave Stewart, DC) tomorrow. For now, I'll just say wow...

Flash 232 (by Mark Waid and Daniel Acuna, DC) continues last review post's theme of decent Mark Waid comics with slightly-disturbing, unintentional subtexts. In most ways, this is a classic Flash storyline - tentacled monsters defeated by Science. However, the giant tentacled monsters have huge vaginas dentata for faces (the first page is a splash page of one of them being punched on the clitoris) and are killing people by sapping their precious bodily fluids... still a decent comic, but weird...

Speak of The Devil 2 (by Gilbert Hernandez, Dark Horse) is very odd. I didn't read issue 1 (see earlier rant for why) but this is very unlike Hernandez' usual work. It appears to be playing with some of the cliches of the teen slasher genre, with the mild titillation (but without the violence) and bad dialogue that goes along with that. It's surprisingly accessible for the second issue of a miniseries, but not really up to the standard of his usual work... unless this is deliberate. I sort of get a Grindhouse feel from this, if you see what I mean. I'll probably pick up the trade...

JLA/Hitman 1 (by Garth Ennis & John McCrea, DC) was originally intended as a storyline for JLA Classified (and was obviously meant to be four issues rather than two double-sized ones. The break between issues comes with "that would be fine" on the page after the staples). It's a little disappointing, because it's more a JLA story than a Hitman one, so we only get a couple of pages of the gang at Noonan's, which is what I was looking forward to from this, but any Hitman is better than none, and with luck this will bring DC to reissue (and finish) the trades. It's still better than most JLA stories of recent years, though Ennis' Wally West is nastier than I'd like (not totally out of character, just being crueller to Kyle than he was portrayed as during this era).
While Ennis doesn't like superheroes, he gets Superman in a way few other writers do - Hitman 34, which this refers back to, was the best single Superman story of the 1990s, and while this doesn't reach those heights, his characterisation of him is spot-on. I'm probably alone in this, but I'd love to see Ennis as regular writer on one of the Super-titles - I think he'd be a breath of fresh air for them, and I also think the constraint of writing Superman might stop Ennis falling into his increasingly noticeable writing tics.
Also, Natt The Hat's new girlfriend is wonderful.

Countdown To Adventure #2 (DC) is another comic of two halves. The first story, featuring the space heroes from 52 is fun enough. Eddy Barrows' art sometimes strays into early-Image territory, and is wildly inconsistent, but the story by Adam Beechen, while clichéd (*sob* ! Adam Strange has been replaced by a new, more violent hero so the people on Rann don't love him any more!) is entertaining enough. However, the less said about the backup Forerunner story the better. Apparently Nazis are not very nice people. Sadly, as terrible a pile of tedious, unnecessary toss as this 'story' is, more happened in this backup feature than in the whole ten issues I read of the title it spins out of...

Shadowpact 17 (by Matt Sturges, Doug Braithwaite and Mike Atiyer) is the debut of a new creative team, and I'm not very impressed as yet. Matt Sturges is a protege of Bill Willingham, the previous writer, and he seems to be taking a more serious tone which I'm not sure suits the series. Combined with Braithwaite and Atiyer's art (which is essentially identical to Braithwaite's work on Justice, stiff and undynamic, looking like traced fumetti rather than freehand drawing) , the total effect is like reading one of those early-90s 'fully painted' comics from around the time the Vertigo line first formed, when people were trying to be Neil Gaiman within the DCU. Not a bad comic as such, and I'm going to at least read the rest of this storyline, but I miss the lighter touch the comic used to have. It is nice, though, to see Detective Chimp drawn as an actual chimpanzee.

The Order 2 (by Matt Fraction & Barry Kitson, Marvel) is the kind of comic about which it's hard to find much to say. It's a good superhero team book of the kind that used to be the bread and butter of the industry, you can read it in about five minutes, Kitson's layouts are very impressive, and there's not much else to say here. If you like decent superhero team books, you'll like it.

Countdown To Mystery 1 (DC) is the better of the two spin-off anthology titles. The Doctor Fate story by Steve Gerber with Justiniano and Wong is excellent. It actually feels more like Shadowpact than this month's issue of that title does, featuring as it does that team in minor roles (flashing back to Day Of Vengeance) and being drawn by the art team who co-created them. The art is surprisingly good - most of it is in Justiniano's normal style, which is fine as far as it goes, but in some of the flashback sequences the colouring is fainter, and there's an almost ligne claire look to the inking. Those pages show a definite J.H. Williams III influence (specifically his work with Mick Gray - it almost looks like Gray inking at points) and are among the comparatively few pages of recent superhero comics to be actually pleasing aesthetically.
The story itself is mostly setup, but it's Gerber so it's well done and makes me want to read the next issue. And is that Ne-Bu-Loh on the last page?!

The backup story, by Mathew Sturges and Stephen Segovia, featuring the Spectre, Eclipso, Darkseid and Plastic Man, is actually pretty much exactly my kind of thing, but it unfortunately sets off one of my pet peeves. The first few pages are set in Manchester, which happens to be the city in which I live, and it doesn't look like that. Real-world cities have their own character and it's easy enough to do some quick photo-reference. Either set this stuff in a made-up city or use Google images. The Mancunian character (who I think is Sturges wanting his own Dane-from-the-Invisibles/John Constantine character, but more violent) also doesn't look like he's from Manchester either, but the look of people in a city is more indefinable and mutable than the architecture, so that can be given a pass.

What can't, though, is the dialect. This is something I've brought up several times, in relation to, for example, Mirror Master and Captain Boomerang, and it grates on me, but especially so when it's meant to represent my home city. I do not know of one single American comic writer who can accurately capture the way non-American English speakers talk. It's really best not to try. If British, Australian, Irish or whatever characters are written in the same voice as the Americans, it works well enough. But a failed attempt at dialect just makes me think of Jack Lemmon imitating Tony Curtis imitating Cary Grant - "Nobody talks like that!"

Sturges at least avoids one elementary mistake - he's noticed that people who substitute the word 'me' for 'my' do not do so all the time, and sometimes still use 'my'. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to know what the rules are for such substitutions (which are hard to explain, but have to do with the rhythm of the sentence, the amount of stress placed on the word itself, the amount of stress placed on the sentence as a whole, and other things) and gets them consistently wrong.

Seriously - and this rule goes for writers of all types, in any genre, but only in comics have I come across people repeatedly breaking this rule - if you haven't lived somewhere for at least five years, don't try writing in that place's accent, just write standard English.

Other than that, though, the story seems to set up something that might be very interesting.

The Spirit 10 (by Darwyn Cooke & J. Bone, DC) is magnificent. It's galling that Cooke is about to leave just as he's hitting his stride on this book. He's finally stopped doing stories that feel like he's paying tribute to Eisner, and started doing playful things with the medium, silly inventive stuff that lives up to the expectations everyone had for the title. This one, though, might be almost impenetrable for some non-US readers, being as it is a rather heavy-handed satire of US cable TV news/opinion, featuring obvious versions of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rosie O'Donnell, Stephen Colbert and others.

Four Horsemen 2 (by Keith Giffen and Pat Oliffe) is a very good piece of superhero entertainment. It has zombies building Apokolips on Earth, Batman being a sarcastic bastard, Morrisonesque technobabble and the return of Snapper Carr. You can't really ask more from a superhero comic than that.

Justice League of America 13 (by Dwayne McDuffie & Joe Benitez, DC) on the other hand, is frustrating. McDuffie's script is fine - he's one of the better superhero writers in the business, and he knows the characters well - but the art is some of the most ugly I've seen in years. The storytelling is confused, the women all have porn-pouts and impossible anatomy, John Stewart and Black Lightning have the same face, there are next to no backgrounds, characters change physiques, characters change relative sizes (on Grodd's first appearance he's about 9 or 10 feet tall, but by the time he's dangling Black Canary from his hand he's maybe 20 or 25), characters change their position relative to each other seemingly at random from panel to panel, the female characters who don't wear high heels spend the entire comic standing on tip-toe anyway... it's just ugly. I'm far more verbally/aurally oriented than visually, so as long as I can tell what's going on bad art is far less of a problem than bad writing, but this is really terrible.

As for Blue Beetle 19 (by John Rogers, Keith Giffen and David Baldeon), it's yet another fun, funny issue which manages to be a satisfying story on its own while advancing ongoing subplots and tying in elements of what's going on in the wider DCU, while remaining entirely accessible to a reader who's only reading this. It's the most consistently enjoyable superhero title DC is putting out not written by Grant Morrison, and yet nobody is buying it. This is also the best of the three comics with Detective Chimp in them I've reviewed this week.
This is only an average issue of this title - maybe even a below-average one - but this is one comic that I always know I will enjoy going in, and I've not been wrong yet.

2007-09-23T20:39:00.000Z

Just a quick post to let you all know I'm not dead. My wife's away visiting her parents, my father's fiftieth birthday was today, I've got problems at work and I've been ill. Between all those, I've not had time to write anything more than a sentence long. With luck, I'll have a post about last week's comics up tomorrow, and some more posts on Morrison later in the week.

Reviews For This Week - Countdown Contamination

2007-09-16T16:52:00.000Z

While it may not be readily apparent from my recent posts, this blog is still intended to be focussed on the countdown to Final Crisis (as opposed to Countdown To Final Crisis), and there has been quite a lot to talk about on that front recently. This week DC started three new titles, as well as debuting a new writer on Justice League.

Wonder Girl #1 and Countdown Presents: The Search For Ray Palmer : Wildstorm (50) #1 are of absolutely no interest as comics whatsoever, and are merely secondary tumours that have metastasised from the crossover. In the case of Wonder Girl there appears to be a pleasant superhero-fights-plus-teen-romance comic aimed at teenage girls in there somewhere, but it's choked to death in the tangle of unresolved plotlines from (as far as I can tell) four separate comics - Countdown, Wonder Woman, Amazons Attack and Teen Titans. Given that none of those comics have exactly lit their way up the charts, it's amazing that something like this was even considered. DC editorial are obviously having no truck with the idea of not putting all your eggs in one basket. Instead, they're trying to fit them into one extremely small basket that's clearly not big enough for a single egg, and one with holes in the size of the holes in this metaphor.
All-Colon 1 on the other hand, which spins out of (again, as far as I can tell, I may be missing something) Ion, Atom, Countdown, Amazons Attack, Sinestro Corps War, The Authority and, for all I know, Sugar and Spike and Famous Funnies, is just a fight scene in which we learn that the Authority's methods would be met with disapproval by DCU superheroes. There is no possible reason for anyone to buy either of these comics. If World War III was, as Jog put it so well 'gonzo continuity porn' ("there’s only forty-five seconds of repartee, if that, before those discrepancies start resolving"), these comics are the hotel room porn Bill Hicks spoke about, continuity porn but with no 'money shot' at all, just the promise that if you pay another $3 you might get to the good bit.

Suicide Squad 1 (by John Ostrander, Javed Pina and Robin Riggs, DC) is bad in a different, far more forgiveable way. If you're just after action and thrills, this comic has them - in the first four pages alone we have a secret mission behind enemy lines, an atomic explosion, an attempted prison break and a half-man half-cat creature whose head explodes. The rest of the comic continues at much the same pace, ending with a dinosaur about to attack our unconscious hero.
The problem is that Ostrander's writing hasn't really changed since he was writing this title in the 1980s. He still can't do plausibility, or dialogue, and has still never heard an actual Australian speak. This would have been a very acceptable issue of the series in 1988, but seems curiously pointless now.

Another comic that feels like a late-80s DC midlist title, but this time in a moderately decent rather than a moderately bad way, is Booster Gold 2 (by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund). Less accessible (and less funny) than issue 1, because our hero has now started time-travelling and continuity-patching, it still manages to tell a more-or-less complete in itself story, while setting up future stories in what looks like it will be a regular variant on the old Levitz ABC plotline formula - one page is 'the origin of the Dan Garret Blue Beetle', one is 'something ominous in the timestream' (with a quick feature from Team 13 having a rather unnecessary dig at Brian Azarello) , half a page is 'who is evil Supernova?' and the last page sets up next issue.
The rest of the issue is deliberately patterned after Quantum Leap (with a dash of Back To The Future thrown in) - Booster goes back in time to try to prevent a catastrophe without letting anyone know of his involvement. He succeeds, but another problem comes along. It's all very formulaic, but the way in which Booster resolves the conflict with Sinestro is quite fun.
I don't want to give the impression that this series is great or anything - for a start, it's very reliant on at least a passing knowledge of the DC Universe - but for what it is, it's surprisingly decent. The premise allows Johns and Katz to tell single-issue stories while advancing a larger plotline, to make use of pretty much any DCU character, and to not take it too seriously.
The current comic this reminds me of most is The Brave And The Bold, and I suspect anyone who enjoys one will get at least some enjoyment out of the other. Booster Gold isn't as good as Brave & Bold, but it's solid, fun superhero entertainment, and that's sadly lacking at the moment.

Poor Kurt Busiek has got the short straw with the Superman assignment. The Camelot Falls story which continues in Superman 667 (by Busiek, Carlos Pacheco and Jesus Merino) was obviously meant to be a relatively short storyline, but with the various inventory stories that have been dropped in, plus the scheduling problems and Busiek working double duty on Action for much of the time, the storyline has been running for thirteen issues with no hint of resolution. What looked to be a brief darker story in the mold of Must There Be A Superman? in the middle of an otherwise light-hearted run has now become a long dark epic with brief incongruous light moments, simply because of the order in which the issues have come out.
It's a tribute to how well Busiek gets Superman that the story is still readable, but I can't wait for this plot to be over. This storyline finally wraps up next issue, and will probably read much better when it's collected.

The JLA Wedding Special (by Dwayne McDuffie, Mike McKone and Andy Lanning) is McDuffie's debut on the title. This is mostly setup for future storylines - the inclusion of Firestorm and John Stewart (who didn't see them coming?) and the formation of a new Injustice League. It's nothing special, but it's infinitely better than Meltzer's recent run (which McDuffie takes a few potshots at) - McDuffie juggles a large cast well, and manages to get in a few choice lines (the Joker stealing one of my favourite Mel Brooks lines, and Lex Luthor's "If you don't want your enemies to neutralize your powers, refrain from publishing scientific papers explaining them"). It's a competent Justice League comic - something I thought I'd never see again. Now if they can only stop getting Ed Benes to draw those horrendous T&A covers (or failing that at least show him what a real woman looks like)...

The Groo 25th Anniversary Special (by Sergio Aragones & Mark Evanier , Dark Horse), shows all these newcomers how it's done. I've always had a soft spot for Groo, which is in many ways the comic that people must have expected from Dave Sim when he first announced his plan to go to 300 issues, and this special is exactly what you'd expect from Groo. The main story is about how there's a disease going round, originally caught from a monkey, which is spread by kissing and can only be prevented by wearing something over your mouth, but the priests don't approve... Groo has never been about subtlety. There are some delightful pot-shots taken at the priesthood and the medical profession (who provide palliatives that don't work, then medication for the side-effects, then medication for the side-effects of the side-effect medication) which as an advocate of orthomolecular medicine I love (but I have enough of a sense of humour to appreciate the shot at alternative medicine too).
There's also a back-up tale of Young Groo, a rhyming glossary of the main characters, and a text piece by Evanier. There's no such thing as continuity when it comes to Groo, so if you've never read it before, you can start with this issue. Aragones and Evanier have just been announced as the new writers of The Spirit - I can't wait to see their take on it.

Finally this week I bought Potter's Field 1 (by Mark Waid and Paul Azaceta, Boom!), a comic about which I have very serious reservations.
Other people have pointed out most of the interesting things about this, but to recap - this is Waid doing Ellis, specifically Fell (but the panel layouts owe more to the widescreen Transmetropolitan than to Fell's 9-panel grid). It's 'high concept' - an investigator wants to find names for all the dead people buried in unmarked graves in the city - and reads a lot like a pitch for a TV series.
This first issue is actually very like Paul Dini's Detective Comics - a decent, atmospheric done-in-one story with a plot that doesn't quite work as a fair-play mystery but comes close enough, and the concept can generate a potentially infinite number of stories.
My one problem with this is simple - the reveal that the bald, black, burly working-class man kidnapped, raped and murdered an upper-middle-class white girl.
I am absolutely certain, beyond all doubt, that neither Waid nor Azaceta have a racist bone in their body, and that the very nasty subtext here was totally unintentional, but this sort of thing shouldn't get through editorial. Someone should have said "Hang on, we've got an apelike black man raping and murdering a young white girl here - maybe this could be seen as being a little bit dodgy".
I don't mean to sound too critical here - it's even possible there will be a reveal in a later issue that it was someone else all along (though I think it's unlikely, the series doesn't seem set up that way), and this is, other than Groo, the best comic in an otherwise lacklustre week - and I certainly don't want to suggest that no comic should ever have a black villain. But there are certain cultural resonances one shouldn't play with without a great deal more thought than Waid and Azaceta seem to have put into this. I'm sure both men would be mortified at the thought that they could even inadvertantly give the slightest ammunition to bigots, but the subtext is there...
I'm going to buy the second issue, and it is a genuinely good comic, but I wish someone had pointed this out before it went to press. It's the kind of thing that could be changed without upsetting the story, and I wish it had been...

The DC Morrisonverse 5: They Fuck You Up...

2007-09-14T13:33:00.000Z

Most of the things I've posted so far in the look back over Seven Soldiers have been about fairly obscure elements in the series, things that have in large part been ignored by other writers on the subject (possibly, I accept, because they're not as interesting as those subjects they have focussed on).

However, to move on to Morrison's other DC work (and, eventually, to Final Crisis) I think I need to cover one of the most covered aspects of Seven Soldiers, (and in this post I'll draw a lot on the posts of both Jog and Marc Singer ), fatherhood and influence.

If we look through the seven soldiers and their fathers, we see a pattern in those where they're mentioned:

Shining Knight - no mention is made of Ystin's parents, but Ystin has to kill the undead King Arthur, the most important authority figure in the young knight's life.
Guardian - No mention of his parents, but has to let his father-in-law, who is also his mentor, die.
Zatanna - Goes on a quest to find her dead father('s bequest) , ends up killing people in a recreation of his death, meets an evil counterpart of her father and finally has to come to terms with his death.
Klarion - Goes in search of his father and discovers him to be evil. Kills him. The only one of the seven whose mother plays a role in the story, but her role is minor. Ends up taking the place of his evil ancestor Melmoth (who introduces himself to the puritans with "Daddy's home!") after Melmoth dies.
Frankenstein - Had two fathers, both evil, and killed them both.
Bulleteer - No mention made of her parents, but her oldest ancestor, Aurakles, is portrayed as a once-great god who's now an accidental destroyer who needs to be killed.

Now the interesting thing about this is that Aurakles is also drawn as looking exactly like Alan Moore.
Morrison's relationship with Alan Moore is a tricky one, and he knows it. Morrison has said in interviews that he was inspired to start writing comics by Moore's work in Warrior, and his early work shows Moore's influence very heavily (for example the Watchmen visual references in Animal Man, and the striking similarity between The Coyote Gospel and Pog) but has also on a number of occasions been absolutely scathing about Moore's magical practices and later work. In fact much of Morrison's career can be seen as a reaction to Moore's work (for example his championing of Robert Mayer's horrible novel Superfolks makes sense when you consider it a stick to beat Moore with - Moore 'borrowed' more than a bit from the novel).

Much of Seven Soldiers can be seen as a reaction to Moore, or as homage, depending on the part of the work in question. Zatanna #1, for example (which I just typed as Promethea in a Freudian typo), contains the famous cutting parody of Promethea and the line about Zatanna's writing about magic being 'non-preachy', but it also contains an almost exact recreation of Zatarra's death-scene from Moore's Swamp Thing run. In fact a lot of Swamp Thing makes its way into the series - not only is Frankenstein very much in the same vein, but Zor is reborn as Solomon Grundy in much the same way that Alec Holland becomes Swamp Thing (in, of course, the origin story by Len Wein, who Morrison also claims as an influence) and Alix Harrower's job is working with autistic children, as Abby Holland (note the initials) did in Moore's Swamp Thing run.

But the aspect that has had most people talking is what has been interpreted as the inclusion of several avatars of Moore within the story, usually in negative roles. While the similarity in appearance of Aurakles to Moore might be charitably viewed as coincidental (and the similarity of Melmoth that some have pointed out extends only to him having a beard), and even the rivalry between pirates All-Beard (with his huge bushy beard and big hair) and No-Beard (bald like Morrison) can be seen as people reading too much into it, Zor is another matter.

Zor (rhymes with Moore) is one of the major villains of the piece (and in fact is also the person directly addressed by Morrison's avatar in the last issue), a magician who was one of the Seven Unknown Men ( who are all DC writers) but went renegade, who is responsible for much of the darkening of the DCU, and who has a beard of which he is comically proud. I wonder who that could be?

From The Comics Journal 176 (as quoted in a post on Barbelith):

Actually, at one point there was a sense that we were all marching into the future together waving the same flag, then I realized that we weren't, which is probably why I criticized Alan quite a lot, which is why he doesn't speak to me anymore. But I really felt the need to get out from under his shadow, because it had become so oppressive, and we were all being expected to do as he did.

This need to get out from Moore's shadow characterises huge chunks of Seven Soldiers, but another creator is equally present - Jack Kirby.

At first sight Kirby appears to be treated better than Moore - three of the minis ( Guardian, Klarion and Mister Miracle) are updatings of Kirby's concepts, and Kirby's avatar in the story, Ed Stargard, is one of the heroes - he has behind the scenes put together the seven soldiers who will defeat the Sheeda.

However, Ed is also trapped in the body of a child, grown wrinkled and decayed, but still a baby - a pretty potent metaphor for the US comics industry that has largely been built on the back of Kirby. He is also revealed as possibly having contributed to the death of an old friend, and is generally a far more ambiguous figure than he at first seems.

Kirby and Moore could be seen as the 'fathers' of Morrison-the-writer, and Seven Soldiers as a whole says that 'fathers' are to be distrusted - as is all authority. The work undercuts authority figures at every turn (the Submissionaries are tools of the Sheeda, Stargard isn't the imposing man he presents himself as, Shilo Norman's psychiatrist is a minion of Darkseid, Melmoth is a slaver, the expert on the past in Shining Knight turns out to be the Sheeda Queen) and over and over the message that's hammered home appears to be 'don't trust anyone over thirty'.

Remember, as well, that in Morrison's evolution, Seven Soldiers comes after Seaguy (which it resembles in many ways), with its apocalyptic conflict with 'the Anti-Dad'. This ties in with the big themes of the series - to live we must change. We must outgrow the influences that formed us, and become ourselves. Zatanna is the books her father wrote, but she is not her father. Frankenstein is immortal because of Melmoth, but he still kills Melmoth. And Grant Morrison has been shaped by Alan Moore and Jack Kirby, but he has to move beyond them (whether he does or not is a different matter).

Oh see ye not that narrow road so thick beset with thorns and briars?
That is the path of righteousness
And see ye not that broad broad road, that is the path of wickedness
... though some call it the road to heaven.

But don't forget... there's a third road.

(Next in this series - 52).

Brief note

2007-09-12T23:45:00.000Z

Sorry for those of you waiting to hear the last part of my 7 Soldiers stuff - the review of the Brian Wilson gig I wrote yesterday took longer than I was expecting, and I've been ill today. Tomorrow expect a post about fathers and influence in Seven Soldiers...