It's 2010.

I wanted to start the decade by talking about the future.



But, heck, I don't know anything about the future. This one is just about webcomics.

WARNING: this one is also particularly image intense. If that's a concern for your computer, you might want to skip this one.


If you google "overstimulated"-- the seventh link google finds, at the time of this essay, is for a webcomic.

The Webcomic List lists 15,075 comics at the time of this essay. That isn’t the total number of webcomics in existence; that’s just the number of webcomics that signed up for that particular website. So: more than 15,075. Maybe a little more, maybe significantly more-- either way, more.

Scott McCloud on March 20, 2009: "I expect webcomics to continue to grow in number and importance to the comics scene in coming years. [...] I was saying that I expected it to be a decade or two before webcomics 'slowed down' — i.e., stopped growing."

More and more and ever more.

How do you find the good one?

I wanted to write about the future. What does the future look like?



Like the goodly Mr. Hibbs, like maybe Erik Larsen, I was reading the Beat's Annual End of the Year survey-- the word tablet was used by the all-professional respondents 23 separate times. Tablets, tablets, tablets, tablets. The future is people reading comics on tablets.



Have these people noticed the numbers? It's never mentioned. But if you agree with their premise, if the future is even more demand for digital comics thanks to tablets that we'll all presumably be buying for... some reason(?), an increase in demand is likely to lead to an even further increase in supply. Which is to say: even more webcomics. More and more and more and more. What are people reading on those tablets?



When the number of comics available breaks six figures, which of the comics on the Webcomic List win? Do professional comic creators assume it'll be one of their comics? Why?



At the start of the last decade, there was a lot of talk about the “infinite canvas"-- the idea that webcomics would exploit the geographic freedoms of web-browsers in order to create an entirely new kind of comic. And I guess there are still experiments out there being done with how webcomics are presented-- this one, most famously. But I'm not aware of too many so either they're all getting by me (very possible) or they're in the minority. Infinite canvases didn’t turn out to be very good at selling ugly clothes, and ugly clothes seem to be the petrol that drive the whole webcomics engine. (Which-- comics relying on unfashionable people isn’t anything new, but I don’t know—do you ever feel like God is becoming less subtle with his metaphors?)

There’s Motion Comics, I guess…?



There are defense mechanisms slowly forming to that tidal wave of material. There are the "communities of cartoonists" sites like Act-i-vate, Transmission-X, Dumm Comics, cartoonist-curated sites featuring like-minded talent. Act-i-vate features about 71-ish comics, maybe; Transmission-X features about 13-ish, I think. If I get an urge to read a webcomic, I tend to stick to those sites. I try not to contemplate the 15,000 titles.



Why not, though, for a change of pace? Why not start the decade like that? Why not start by staring into the abyss?


At the moment, the “Most Visited” comic on the Webcomic List is COLLAR 6, “a comedy/quasi-drama with bondage and latex fetishism as the backdrop.”



Once we get past our initial Puritan knee-jerk reactions, that sex is dirty and Hester Prynne is a slut and… maize is delicious, COLLAR 6? It basically conforms to my most base prejudices of what to expect from webcomics visually. It kinda-sorta-almost-not-quite-not-really-okay-not-at-all looks like manga. It crudely imitates the surface elements of manga, but none of manga’s underlying intensity of craft. That seems to be the norm for a vast swath of webcomics; it’s to be expected: after all, manga won the battle for youth culture, for various reasons. (One reason: it showed up to the battle for youth culture, at all, in any way whatsoever.)

(A QUICK PARANTHETICAL DIGRESSION ABOUT PURITANS: After typing Puritan in the last sentence, I typed “Pilgrim porn” into Google Image—everybody needs a hobby. Of the 20 results, 7 were images of SCOTT PILGRIM comics, and 1 was an image of Deena Pilgrim from POWERS. None of the images were of Pilgrims celebrating a “Thanksgiving feast.” Conclusion: comics ruin everything.)

So, I don't think I'm in touch with my bondage/latex-fetishism fantasies enough to evaluate the story of COLLAR 6 in a helpful way...? Or maybe I need to start with a webcomic about necking or dry humping, and work my way up to COLLAR 6. I didn't find myself wanting to be handcuffed while reading COLLAR 6. I wouldn't mind a turkey sandwich...? Are there handcuffs made out of turkey sandwich? I want to be restrained by deliciousness.

What else is there to look at?



There’s a webcomic portal named Drunk Duck. Famous more for being run by shitty people, it nevertheless presently claims to be the home for 14,934 webcomics. 14,934 webcomics by creators left alone and ignored by "polite" comics society-- mostly kids, I think: high schoolers, college students, that sort of thing. Here is an excerpt from "How to Make Webcomics" Episode 5: on the subject of "Texting"--



So, the milk tastes a little funny at Drunk Duck, but it's a convenient microcosm. Drunk Duck categorizes its comics visually as follows: Cartoon, American, Manga, Realism, Sprite, Sketch, Experimental, Photographic, and Stick Figure.

What strikes me about that list is there’s a category marked “Experimental” that ISN'T supposed to include comics made of stick figures, photographs, or “sprites.” Think on that for a second. Any of those things being featured in print comics, me personally, I think would qualify as an experiment. Hell, I’ve read comics my whole life-- I don’t even think I know what a “sprite comic” is, actually. Sprite?



...am I close? Wikipedia says a sprite comic is a comic that uses computer sprites. Wikipedia defines a computer sprite as “a graphic image that can move within a larger graphic.” This raises a question: what time is Matlock on? Because I’m an old, old man, and I don’t understand any of you kids and your slang. A graphic image that -- ? Man, I just want to watch Andy Griffith solve crimes and/or have sex with the Mayflower. Something like Andy Griffith saying “I put the Magna in the Magna Carta, Aunt Bee.” Something like that. "Andy Griffith didn't penetrate Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock penetrated him!" Something with a story.



But imagine growing up taking that level of choice for granted. Imagine growing up and having equal access to COLLAR 6 and BOMBSHELL FIGHTS FOR AMERICA. BOMBSHELL jumped out at me the most of the "Featured" Drunk Duck comics-- it's paranoid science fiction, an alternate history thriller where upon killing herself, Marilyn Monroe is recruited across realities by a conspiracy run by Lyndon Johnson and Howard Hughes to battle a rival conspiracy lead by Richard Nixon.



All done with manipulated photographs of Nixon, Johnson, and Norma Jeane.

In print comics, colliding Phillip K. Dick and James Ellroy like that might generate some attention. If I heard someone at Vertigo had that in mind instead of ... instead of everything but SCALPED that they publish, I'd be pretty excited. But webcomics? It's one of tens of thousands.



It co-exists on the same site as PUTRID MEAT, another likable comic colored with what appear to be colored pencils(?). I don’t think I entirely understood the story—it appears to be about a garbage collector in a 2000AD-ish future, having what I think might be ultraviolent adventures. I didn't honestly comprehend what was going on exactly, but I liked it anyways-- I just like how the art looks like something I’d worry about finding in a locker, if I were a junior high school vice-principal.



Both on the same site as the apparently very popular (according to the Browse function of the site) I WAS KIDNAPPED BY LESBIAN PIRATES FROM OUTER SPACE-- that one with more traditional art taken and digitally "scratched up", chewed, manipulated to create the appearance of pages that had aged.



As the not-my-thing-at-all low-brow machinima comic CRU THE DWARF... As Hyperactive "manga"-style comics, funny animals in carefully shaded pencil, weird monster-looking stuff, etc. And that's just one site, one tiny corner of the internet I don't usually make it a point to visit. That's not counting Keenspot. That's not counting what happens when you go way off reservation.



Want to read German superhero photo-comics? Or would you prefer your superhero photo-comics to be by Americans? How many options do you WANT exactly? Want to read extremely Not-Safe-For-Work gag comics of Alan Moore ejaculating while having rough anal sex with his own doppelgänger? I don't either, but it's there if you want, need it, crave it.

It's there if you can find it.

And not just the sub-professional or the weird. Let's do a compare-contrast. Here is a page from BOXER HOCKEY.



And for comparison purposes, here is a page from COWBOY NINJA VIKING.



If you've never heard of either, can you tell me without looking which is available for free and which you have to pay for?

Answer: the previous page was free, on the internet; the latter page, Image Comics charged $3.50, for the pleasure.

How about art-comics? Here is a page of comic I strongly disliked recently, Danica Novgorodoff's SLOW STORM. That one costs about $18.00.



I googled "what is the strangest webcomic"-- what did I find? I found a bunch of photos of Myles Standish getting stuffed with cocks. What-?? How did--?? But eventually, I found my way to PERFECT STARS:



It wasn't my ideal comic experience, but whatever "odd and unique comic experience" itch I was hoping that SLOW STORM would scratch? It certainly did a better job of it.



Let alone the constant stream of classic material coming online everyday. Did you see those Winsor McCay drawings from Golden Age Comic Book Stories the other day? Holy shit.

In summary: have you guys heard that there's a lot of stuff on the internet? For serious-- stuff for days, guys! Maybe you hadn't heard.



If the future is digital comics, if the future is webcomics: how do people expect to cope with the deluge of material? How is anyone expected to find what they consider signal in that noise? Surfing through webcomics, past Achewood, past Kate Beaton, past "respectability," it's hard for me to stop and pay attention to any one comic. There's always some other comic to surf over to, you know? With that level of choice, how do you know when to stop and actually spend time on any one thing? How do you know there's not something just a little better a couple clicks away?

How do you find what you like? How do you find a needle in a haystack? How do you find a cliche to type into an essay? You ask me for one because you know how much I love them. You're welcome.

Webcomics, for me, are a prime example of the Paradox of Choice. The paradox of choice (which I think Jeff alluded to previously) describes how greater consumer choices invariably lead to greater consumer anxiety. Consumers with fewer choices buy more, are happier with their choices. But "consumer hyperchoice"? That usually leads to "frustration, fatigue and regret." I know a lot of people are waiting for an iTunes for comics, but frustration, fatigue and regret? Dude, that sounds like a stone bummer.

I probably shouldn't worry. There's a lot of free music out there, and that hasn't stopped iTunes. I'm not the guy to ask about that-- between youtube and mp3 blogs, not counting concerts, I haven't paid more than $10 in a year for music in more than a decade. But I guess somebody out there is...? The internet didn't stop Lady Gaga. Neither did ears. Go figure.



You can say: "Oh, there should be critics who guide you to the good stuff. 95% of everything is shit, so we need critics to find that 5%." Who can possibly wade through tens of thousands of comics in a meaningful way? With the number & range of webcomics both predicted only to increase, what will a "knowledgeable opinion" even look like?

If you believe that 95% of everything is shit, and only 5% is good-stuff, if you accept "Sturgeon's Law", at 15,000 comics? That means there should be about, oh, 750 great webcomics in existence. I would bet that I can name maybe ... twenty...? And I like less than I can name.

Comixtalk did a year-end roundtable in December 2009, in which they spoke to not less than eight people. Between the eight of them, roughly five billion webcomics are mentioned over the course of the round-table. So: be sure to check those out...

I think the anxiety that the Paradox of Choice creates is... To find what you like, with that many choices available, boy, you probably need to have a very precise idea what it is that you like. Who has that? I sure don't. If hyperchoice creates an anxiety, isn't it ultimately an anxiety born of questions of self-knowledge?

What do you like? What are you looking for? Do you even know what you're looking for? What do you want OUT OF LIFE? WHO ARE YOU?

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK.



The other day, I watched a video by a 14-year old kid on youtube, this strangely affecting moment of him and his girlfriend in a convenience store set to music. It's going around the tumblr parts of the internet, I guess...?



The same day, I was looking for pictures of pretty girls on the internet—everybody needs a hobby—and I came across Look Book, a website of “fashion inspiration from real people”—regular ladies and gents, dressing up in their Sunday’s best, showing off looks they’d created, part-time models, pretty people celebrating looking fancy instead of, you know… consider the following example of the more official and “legitimate” industry of “Fashion”:



You guys know more about Batman than I do-- when did Joker decide to murder boners???



And then today, I started listening to this nerdcore mixtape, I AM JUST A RAPPER, by Donald Glover and DC Pierson of Derrick Comedy, Mystery Team and Community fame—you know, just comedy guys putting dopey, dorky rhymes over that Sleigh Bells song or Animal Collective songs.



Or, besides Jimmy Kimmel slaughtering Jay Leno on his own show, or that movie YOUTH IN REVOLT (which I thought was underrated), my favorite thing this week is Ask 60's Bob Dylan Anything. People send in questions, and “60’s Bob Dylan” answers them. It’s just started, but I don’t know—something about the idea of that website really makes me laugh…

The “democratization of media"-- I think that's the technical term for it all.



What I think unites the examples above, it isn’t just that the internet’s opened up an opportunity for more people to be in “show business”— it’s that it’s increased the total range of what’s "normal". These are all examples of things that really didn’t even exist when I was a kid, at least for all intents and purposes. Short films? Mixtapes? Man, I grew up in Cincinnati—we have good chili, but it’s not exactly the Sorbonne. Photos of pretty girls? A kid got in trouble for that sort of thing when I was growing up; well, he had a camera rig hidden in his closet, not 100% the same thing, maybe, but close.

What does normal even mean anymore?

With comics-- I grew up with “house styles”-- entire publishing companies, trying to recreate the styles of 2, maybe 3 artists. And I suppose if you asked me to picture a comic in my head, I’d picture something that existed in one of those house styles.

What would someone picture in their head after growing up with comics after this explosion of different styles and approaches?



What would it have been like to grow up with not just an explosion of comics, but amidst this entire cacophony of animated gifs, youtube videos, facebook status updates, blogs, twitters, texts, chaos? My attention span is swiss cheese-- I can't even do simple math anymore; that part of my brain is gone. And yet comics seem to have thrived in that environment, have thrived in that chaos, now even themselves reflect that chaos.

What does the future look like? Do you just picture one thing-- can you just picture a tablet? Or is it just a jumbled, writhing, shrieking mess? Did you know if you google "overstimulated"-- the seventh link google finds is for a webcomic?

Wait, wait-- did I say that already?

Labels: Abhay

Click Here to Read More...

Why elves? Why mecha? Why Trekkers? Why Browncoats?

Why mystery men? Why rocket men? Why invisible men? Why pulp? Why vampires, why werewolves, why creatures from the Black Lagoon? Why space opera, why slipstream, why sci-fi? Why splatterpunk, why steampunk, why cyberpunk, why mundane SF? Why Max Headroom? Why Mad Max? Why Sam & Max? Why Samwise Gamgee? Why cons? Why cosplay? Why LARP, why TMBG, why TARDIS? Why Felicia Day? Why Freddie, why Jason, why Eli Roth? Why kaiju, why Aeris, why 42? Why IDW, why BOOM!, why Oni? Why Marvel? Why DC?

Uchhhhh, why me...

Why do nerdy things work? I've got questions and no answers; you've apparently got free time. You're reading the Savage Critics blog, and welcome to the 5th and final part of our examination of the now long-cancelled DC Comics comic-book series BLUE BEETLE. Starring your all-star BLUE BEETLE creative team: John Rogers, Keith Giffen, Cully Hamner, Rafael Albuquerque, Guy Major, Phil Balsman & co., Rachel Gluckstern, and Joan Hilty!

***

The final arc of the John Rogers era of BLUE BEETLE will be spoiled! Oh fuck! Ohfuckohfuckohfuck! Run! Hide! SPOILER WARNING!

***

Over the course of the previous four essays (1234), we discussed the failures of the first 21 issues of the BLUE BEETLE series, a new comic book starring a brand new superhero launching out of a now distant crossover event entitled INFINITE CRISIS. As this series of essays comes finally to a conclusion, we will now discuss the final four issues of what we've been calling the "John Rogers era" of BLUE BEETLE-- the part I actually liked, the part that made me want to write this series of essays to begin with.

The plot: around issue #13, Blue Beetle had learned that an alien invasion of Earth was underway. So, the plot of the finale is that Blue Beetle, family & friends fight off the alien invasion. Good guys win; bad guys lose.

And ... well, that's it, really. That's all there is to it.

Usually, I just care about the art. I read BLUE BEETLE because I wanted to see Rafael Albuquerque’s work. I've read well-written issues of NEW AVENGERS (I thought two issues ago was particularly well balanced) and there have been issues I haven't been into (I didn't understand the end of the new one...?), but: Stuart Immonen, everybody. If Batwoman and her lame dad got shot in the head in the next issue, and vultures made love to the exit wounds, I wouldn't care in the slightest. I'd be a little turned-on, actually. But, until that happens: holy shit, J.H. Williams III. I made it all the way to the end of INCOGNITO-- partially because of Jess Nevins; mostly, Sean Phillips.

But those last four issues of BLUE BEETLE... suddenly, it worked. Whatever that thing is, where you start to care what happens next, where the “funny” parts are funny, where the big “let’s all cheer” moments make you want to cheer? That happened for me. I re-read those issues before writing this essay, and it worked again.

Why?

***

A Digression on “Why Do Nerds Exist"
--------------------------- OR
"Curtis Armstrong, Your Life's Work is Incomplete":

As part of my extensive research for this essay, I googled "Why do nerds exist?" I felt like that was where I needed to go to explain the fact I enjoyed BLUE BEETLE comics—to an existential meaning-of-life type level.

I thought it was interesting that despite the million blogs about Ewoks and Snorks and … shit, I don’t know what all people are into on the internet, the #1 response at the time of this essay was a thread on a weightlifting message board that's apparently a popular place to discuss how best to use anabolic steroids: "Over 8,294,865 posts of underground intelligence, and 214,998 members, make this the busiest and most controversial community on the Net."

How come they never made Revenge of the Nerds V: Nerds on Steroids? How does that movie not exist? I ask you.

***

There's a recurring thing to DC books-- taking part in The Great Argument with DC fans. Well: "Great Argument" is maybe too kind a term. It's not really an argument so much as a lecture, after all. DC books all tend to lecture that "The Way You Like Comics is Wrong" when no better theme presents itself.

You are Wrong to have liked Image Comics.


You are Wrong to want DC Comics to be Like They Were in the Old Days.


You are Wrong to Acknowledge You're a Fan of Our Comics Online. (?okay?)


You are Wrong for Wanting a Comic that Makes Any Fucking Sense, At All.

Taunts always seem to be the mark of a "significant" DC series.

Sure enough, BLUE BEETLE:

Blue Beetle's family is saved at the last minute by a superhero "calvary": Guy Gardner, Fire, and Ice. Ice hadn’t appeared in this series previously.

The climax of the comic-- the "And The Audience Goes Wild" moment: Blue Beetle is willing to give his life to save planet Earth, but is saved in the final seconds by Booster Gold. Booster Gold also hadn’t appeared in this series before.

So, you will agree that these characters show up not because they are needed to tell a coherent story, but for the Lecture. What do they signify? These third-party superheros were the best friends of the previous incarnation of Blue Beetle. The comic concludes with the following monologue: "As for me? I’m the third Blue Beetle. And I know there will be a fourth. And a fith. On and on. Some better, some worse. But the story, the name, the hero? That’ll go on forever. Past me. Past us all. And I think that’s kind of cool.”

The finale of BLUE BEETLE is a persuasive essay for fans, written in invisible ink for the hardcore, whose point is this: "You are wrong about Blue Beetle. Some of you may complain that we got rid of the old Blue Beetle but change is inherent to this character. You are wrong because the characters who should care the most-- the previous incarnation's closest friends-- accept this character as being the true Blue Beetle. And so, you should accept him, too."

I think why I’m okay with BLUE BEETLE's lecture is that at least a message I’m sympathetic towards—a message celebrating new characters, celebrating DC’s legacy heroes (obviously, the best feature of the DC universe)—without feeling like… I don’t know, like I was being yelled at for no reason, by angry hacks.

A lecture about accepting change seems contrary to the status quo at DC right now: DC seems to be in a mode of ever appeasing its most vocal fans' whims-- "You want Barry back? You want Hal back? You want jewelry? We'll give you jewelry! Jewelry and wine and roses. You want me to come with you and your mom to go see IT'S COMPLICATED? I'll fix your mom's answering machine, and we'll make a day of it. Yeah, no, I don't like any of my friends either. Just please don't ever leave me."

I like that BLUE BEETLE's lecture, a lecture about transience, is inherently a DC lecture. The DC universe's very foundation has now become its complete lack of foundation. The Marvel universe makes a certain amount of sense: it has a geography that can be mapped, an atlas. The "DC Universe" is chaos, distant successes drowning in decades of confusion. "Superman is an electric blue superhero who works for a TV station on multiple earths-- wait, make that a single New Earth-- wait, make that 52 earths-- wait, wait, just make me into a woman, I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body."

(Why am I workshopping my DC impression in this one??? "Here's my impression of what it'd be like... if Jack Nicholson was an editor at DC." Cue: hilarity).

Also: I think the BLUE BEETLE finale at least delivers its lecture in such a way that the finale can enjoyed even if you don’t pick up on what it’s about. Aliens, explosions, one-liners, action, etc. I don’t think that was as true of any of the DC series I mentioned above—I understood the themes of INFINITE CRISIS and FINAL CRISIS, but god help us all if I was ever asked to explain the plots of either to you. God help me if I was asked to remember the plots of either. Which one had autoerotic asphyxiation in it? That one was my favorite.

Is it "good", comics written in secret code for the No-Outsiders Club? Well: no. It's not. But I'd be lying to say that it's written in a language I don't sometimes understand; I'd be lying if I said that there isn't a weird, dopey pleasure to it when it's well done. If honesty is what's required here, this time around, I kind of dug it. If honesty isn't what's required here, I am competent at lovemaking.

***

A Digression on "Superhero Decadence"
--------------------------- OR
"The Broad who Wrote the Article is a Psychotic Coont":

How about shocking twists? How about unexpected violence? How about girls getting murdered so that a hero can rise? BLUE BEETLE lacks all of those things.

The last thing I wrote for this blog was about a comic whose content maybe raised an eyebrow, from a certain perspective; this piece is about an comic whose content falls within a toothless "all-ages" designation a certain type of fan on the internet is given to proclaim should be the whole of the genre. I'm praising the latter more than the former, and it occurs to me this might be mistaken as some kind of "political statement", a prescriptive "this is what we need more of" piece divorced from market realities, sales figures, numerically-measurable audience preferences.

Yeah, no: that's not really what I'm trying to say.

Of course, can I imagine having enjoyed the finale of BLUE BEETLE if it had been stuffed with what Malcolm Tucker would describe as "an awful lot of what we would call violent sexual imagery?" No. Me personally, not really. But I didn't enjoy the vast majority of how this creative team handled "Blue Beetle's adventures through the DC universe". The idea I'm going to enjoy it if DC raised the bar on it and asked the same team to create "Blue Beetle's gritty psychosexual action-drama"... well: of course not. (Which is not to diminish the good taste and discernment of the BLUE BEETLE creative team for not going to that place, as there is evidence to suggest that many retailers, the DC audience and DC editorial would all have been supportive if they had. You know: good for them).

What always strikes me about the term "superhero decadence", and why I ultimately have to reject it, is how kind an explanation it is to the creators, how generous, benevolent. Doesn't it inherently say "it's not you, why this comic sucks-- it's something inherent to the genre?"

So, yeah, no: I don't think it's the genre; I think it's them.

***

Here's my favorite part of the finale. Blue Beetle is trapped and surrounded by homicidal aliens as the penultimate issue draws to a close. How will he get out of this dilemma?

He shouts Magic Words. Rogers doesn't just have him shout magic words at random-- the magic words were carefully planted in earlier issues; the magic words are explained, buttressed. But, still: magic words. I mean that in a good way.

Khaji Da. Shazam. Avengers Assemble. It's Clobbering Time. The Green Lantern oath. Lab accidents. Masks that just cover the eyes. Power rings. A walking stick that turns broken men into gods. A sanctum sanctorum in Greenwich Village. Trophy rooms. Mystery islands. Negative zones. Phantom zones. Microverses. All the savage lands that time forgot. And signal watches-- oh, those are my all-time favorite, the signal watches.

Part of the pleasure of any kind of fantasy is obviously its transformative quality. Blah is turned into blah-blah. The ordinary is invested with meaning. And people like to leave it there: "it's a game of what-if." But: why? Why play that game? To what end? I'm more prepared at this point to survive a zombie apocalypse than to cope with aging, taxes, retirement, etc. Isn't constant war-gaming of the never-going-to-happen inherently at the expense of thinking about the definitely-will happen?

But it’s not just magic words, in isolation. BLUE BEETLE reminded me how DC combines the most ridiculous fantasies with these straight-laced nards; how much I liked that. Marvel characters are hippies, dopers; what Mamma Carlson would refer to as dungarees. The DC characters are ludicrous children’s fantasies grafted onto squares, fuddy-duddies, buzz-cuts. Total nards-- it's great.

There’s a moment in the last issue where Guy Gardner appears—it was the first time in such a long while that I was really happy reading about DC characters. The entire book wasn’t “Here is why Guy Gardner is important; he’s like Jesus; is your blankey comfy?” ala Grant Morrison's All Star Guy Gardner. It was nice and simple: I like Guy Gardner; Guy Gardner's promising me violence; violence is my favoritest!

They're accountants with magic rings and fairy dust wands; I like that. The DC characters never seemed broke to me, but DC has certainly been very busy trying to fix them anyways.

***

A Digression on "Why Do Nerdy Things Work?"
--------------------------- OR
"A Creep In The Deep Or Will Success Spoil Boris Badenov?"


But: let’s step back—who cares why BLUE BEETLE works? Lots of things “work”. Why even write about it at all?

I don’t know—after reading the finale, I had this twinge of "Oh great, you're not a dork about enough nerdy shit-- you needed one more thing?" It was a special moment.

Looking back, the list of nerdy crap that I have been a dorky spazz-wad for is very, very long-- but why does that stuff work on me? What does all that dopey shit have in common? Is there a grand unified field theory of dorkism that can explain why certain ideas, images, idiocies, why they're capable of burrowing under the skins of sloppy nerds such as myself? And can that theory explain why that material consumes not just my attention, but more and more attention globally at a time when attention is such a precious commodity?

Why do nerdy things work? In addition to everything else: Why alien invasions? Why superheroes? Why BLUE BEETLE?

I don't like most of the obvious explanations. "Nerdy things let ordinary people fantasize about being the hero." First of all, blech, that's condescending. Secondly, also untrue: zombie movies aren't fun because you fantasize about being a hero; they're fun because you fantasize about what you'd do if your neighbors wanted to eat your brains.

Or there's themes: "Nerdy things work because they create an alternate and heightened context in which to examine relevant themes from a fresh perspective." Obvious example: your Buffy's of the world, create a fantasy universe where high school is a battle between good and evil, and let us see its themes of growing into an adult from a different angle.

This isn't a bad theory but I'm pretty dismissive of it anyways because of the horrible results it leads to. Comics about how "the X-Men are a metaphor"? Batman comics about the effect of his parent's death on his psyche, or some shit? That's my least favorite stuff. I underwent five teeth-grinding hours of James Cameron's liberal white guilt so I could watch robots fight dinosaurs for a half-hour. Not the other way around. I don't know that watching robots fight dinosaurs gave me a fresh perspective on anything; I don't think I asked it to.

Also, if my recent experience is any indication, comic fans: by and large, not so psyched about metaphors. People love to say the X-Men are metaphors for nice things, things that flatter them, but if you say that an X-Men comic works as a metaphor for something that doesn't conform to their sensitivities? Fans not going to throw a pep rally for you, it turns out.

BLUE BEETLE doesn't really support any of the foregoing hypotheses. For me, the crucial thing about BLUE BEETLE is that the first 21 issues didn't do anything for me, that I hated them, but that the last last 4 succeeded-- succeeded regardless of my having hated what preceded them, succeeded despite those previous 21 issues.

None of the above can explain that to me.

And as time passes-- more than a year and a half has passed since this series of essays started, longer since most of BLUE BEETLE's ardent fans have read the series. If you read it, what do you remember of it? Comic fans so often get accused of trying to recreate the past, but what do any of us really remember of the comics we grew up on? For me, the bad of BLUE BEETLE dropped away a long time ago; what's left? Just fragments, smoke really, just of the good parts, just of the best parts. Not even memories; just... a half-memory of a feeling. That's what fans are trying to recreate? Does any of the above explain that? Does anything?

You could try to fashion an argument out of "escapism", of course. When something "works", I get to take a vacation from my incessant internal monologue of worries, anticipations, whatever. But nerdy things hardly have a monopoly on that. I spent five horrible hours with myself sitting through AVATAR; I took a vacation from myself watching THE HURT LOCKER. I found escape equally in STAR TREK, and in A SERIOUS MAN-- escapism alone isn't enough of an answer.

Maybe this question, maybe the answer is unknowable, inherently unknowable. According to the Wikipedia page on Cool (Aesthetic), which I consult before getting dressed every morning, there is the dilemma of "Cool as Elusive Essence," that what is "cool" is a real but unknowable property, something that exists but can only be sought after, something that can only be observed but ceases to exist upon observation. Bruce Lee: "Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot." Carl Weathers: "There's still plenty of meat on that bone. Now you take this home, throw it in a pot, add some broth, a potato. Baby, you've got a stew going."

Maybe this would be easier if we could all meditate on BLUE BEETLE until our chakras were good and we could get our third eye to open up. Maybe this would all be easier if we were Carl Weathers.

***

Some of the pleasure of the finale is watching the math being done. "That story set up this, this story set up that, etc." An earlier story about Blue Beetle investigating his origins set-up the magic words. An earlier story about Guy Gardner set-up his appearance in the finale. There's a panel early on where they jam all their math in, so you don't miss it ...

The sentiment is dull, the dialogue is nothing special, the Spectre story referenced therein was a skippable inventory issue, but... I just get this little buzz from seeing the math. It's a signal. It signals that this is the story that the BLUE BEETLE team had been working towards the entire run, from the outset.

Which: is not a small thing for me. I don’t like the finale because it's an important story in the arc of Blue Beetle; I could give a fuck; that character is a douche. It's that it's the first arc where I felt like something was at stake for the creators. The early issues have a desparation to them; the finale is the only place where I felt like they had a chip on their shoulders. Something to prove. Some energy to share.

98% of a magic act, the magician makes my skin crawl. That is one creepy fucking profession; magicians? Creepy people. But that bit at the end where they go "Is this your card?" I love that bit because underneath that, there's always that little energy from the magician of "Fuck you, suckers.” Love that part.

***

A Digression on "DC Comics in the 00’s"
--------------------------- OR
"The Hobgoblin of Small Minds"

DC Executive Editor Dan Didio, February 2006, Promoting Infinite Crisis: Didio explained that one of their more knowledgeable writers had been hired to "build a bible of all the characters for the other writers" to use. "Consistency in characters is what we're shooting for."

Dan Didio, February 2006, Promoting the Launch of 52 and Brave New World: “One of the things that is going to be accomplished in 52 and in the year that the story will be told, is that it reestablishes the tonality and the vision of the DC Universe, and what Brave New World does is it gives a sense of that new direction also, but in smaller bites."

Dan Didio, March 2007, Promoting the Conclusion of 52 and the Launch of Countdown: The next question led to DiDio talking about how while Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's Batman was coming out at the same time as Ed Brubaker and Cameron Stewart's Catwoman, he saw a need for more consistency and cohesion in the DC Universe since those books were so different.

Dan Didio, March 2008, Promoting Final Crisis: "My hope is that [after Final Crisis] what we’ll see is a very exciting direction and tonality for our universe, and more importantly a very clear interpretation of who our characters are and what they represent, so that people who’ve jumped on board with Final Crisis have a real idea of the style and tone of the DCU."

Dan Didio, December 2009, Promoting Blackest Night: "It's one of the things I've wanted to do ever since I got here, and it never seemed right. But now it seems right. One of the things we're looking at, post-'Blackest Night,' is a very locked down sense of the rules and sensibilities and interpretations of our characters, and we don't plan to be reworking them as sporadically as we've done in the past."

"But now it seems right"...

***

I guess what strikes me the most about the finale is how Booster Gold had never appeared in the series until that final, climactic moment. As I alluded to above, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle had been the “buddy team” of the DC Universe for years. But in this series, Booster Gold is only mentioned briefly in the first issue-- he names the title character, but is then missing from his life. Anytime anyone said "Blue Beetle" he was there, his ghost-- just not actually around.

Like some deadbeat dad, only giving his approval at last once Blue Beetle has fully entered the World of Men, DC Universe style. The finale ends with Blue Beetle being made whole, with the absence at the heart of that character being filled.

There is that theory, of course-- that nerdy things work because we are in some way, all broken, with our own... holes that need filling (eeew!).


Damaged people, in need for whatever reason of stories about surrogate families like the X-Men or super-powered dads like Superman.


Arrested adolescents who went to neverland, and never quite made it all the way back.


The finale of BLUE BEETLE ends with an image I'm always a sucker for-- a hero surrounded by his family, the one he was born with, the one he obtained through his adventures. Oh man, I always love that type of imagery. I don't think too much about why that is.


Wedding porn movies probably work for the same reason, whatever it is.

Do racist child molestors exclusively rape kids of their same race, or do they exclusively rape kids of other races? I would guess it'd be one or the other, but: which? Maybe that’s why the only people wondering why nerds exist are steroid cases: there are answers but we wouldn't want to do what it takes to find out what those are. Not unless we were all seriously roid-raging.

On the other hand: aaah, fuck that theory. Maybe there's something wrong with the rest of you. Or probably. Or ... okay, near certainly, there's something wrong with the rest of you, but: not me, buddy, not me. I don't like Doctor Who or The Master because I'm some kind of tragedy case, ‘cause this shit's a Lifetime movie. I like them because the Master is basically the best villain ever. Basically. And sometimes a guy has to take a break from living it to the limit, people. So, yeah, I don't actually think I need Blue Beetle's fucking pity...? Well: I don't think I need Blue Beetle's fucking pity YET. Cue: heroin.

***

LONG WAY DOWN
(ONE LAST THING):

And it's the end of the decade. What one might very reasonably argue has been the greatest decade in comics history.

This year, there were books I liked; books I loved. There was ASTERIOS POLYP; there was GOGO MONSTER. I read Tezuka; I read Tardi; I revisited STRANGE DAYS; I reread Feiffer (again). I read manga and minicomics; I read art comics and webcomics; I bought art books. I liked the first issues of UNDERGROUND, DAYTRIPPER and FORGETLESS. I thought that comic the AVIATRIX was hilarious. I liked a couple superhero stories-- I liked Kelly Link's short story "Secret Identity;" I liked that UMBRELLA ACADEMY sequel some. I related to that new issue of PHONOGRAM, which would be wildly embarrassing if it weren’t so obviously the case. People I know released some well-received comics into the world; I made some comics, even.

I wasn't very happy in 2009 anyways.

Apparently, I’m not completely alone: Messrs. Tim Callahan ("something's missing"), Chad Nevett ("I think people are just tired... I can't really defend things."), David Brothers ("I’m bored to death"), Dr. Geoff Klock("It's diminishing returns... it is time to stop showing up on Wednesdays..."), Alan David Doane ("I have to admit that I have not been reading a lot of comic books lately"), and well... me in my last essay, according to some of you ("I'm pretty sure whoever wrote this comic is the Green River Killer, guys. I've been spending time in the crime lab, and I think I just cracked this mother wide open.").

Steven Grant tried writing about this a year ago: "Dreariness. 2008 was one dreary year for comics." Internet kind of yelled at him; you know: internet. Internet is welcome to yell at me, too. I don’t dispute that I’ve read great books this year. I have a very long list of books I want to write more about; should have written more about. I don’t dispute that this decade has been unbelievable in terms of how much has changed, how much has improved. There are many, many great books I still haven't read yet.

But something bummed me out anyways. 2009 was a colossal fucking bummer, for my comic nerdery at least.

Setting aside art comics and foreign reprint material, where my complaints are comparatively few, where the bulk of my pleasure has been this year... what can we say? It’d be an obvious mistake to read too much into nebulous complaints, but the sentiment that struck me the most was from Dr. Klock: "Marvel needs to find a writer for Chris Bachalo and DC needs one for JH Williams. Someone NEW. Or someone from another medium."

A new wave of comic creators to come and sweep out all that's wrong in mainstream comics? Creators from different mediums? That happened already. That was the story of the aughts in mainstream comics. That is what we just lived through. (BLUE BEETLE is arguably an instantiation of those very trends).

And what do mainstream comics look like in the aftermath?


Mainstream comics in 2009, from the viewpoint of a 1999 mainstream comic fan, is almost unrecognizable. Except for gimmick crossovers. Except for gimmick "events". Except for gimmick covers. Except for late books. Except for “scheduling mishaps”. Except for excuses.

Except for everything that is shoddy and shabby and refuses to die.

But I'm a big fan of the comics your favorite mainstream creators used to make… (Stage directions to assist you in reading this sentence: sighing while shrugging while doing that move with hands that suggests masturbation of the male genitalia, preferably with both hands held slightly above eye level so as to suggest an altogether unwholesome scenario for no real reason other than my own perverse amusement; filling your belly button with dip and then dipping baby carrots into your belly-dip; divulging things you shouldn't on the internet; regretting).

Is it just we've all gotten too old, too jaded? That's the answer others are settling on, but I don't think that's it for me. I'm the target audience for movies about robots; Transformers 2 was partially my fault. I played a video game this year because it had the Ghostbusters in it. Besides MAD MEN and the fucking amazing 3rd season of THE THICK OF IT (holy shit!), my favorite TV show right now is LOST. I am a giant nerd, and my nerdy enthusiasms are still all the way to 11. I don't think it's me; fuck, I wish it were me; why can't it be me??

I have my theories, none very good, and I could go around and around in circles on this, but we've digressed enough already and I can't promise we'd end up anywhere interesting. Why do nerdy things work? Why do they stop working? Maybe only Bruce Lee and Carl Weathers know for sure.

Anyways: who could have guessed what this decade would be like 10 years ago? Who could have guessed what a roller coaster it'd be? I didn’t like 21 issues of BLUE BEETLE; but those last 4 issues were pretty good. So, there's at least reason to hope.

Labels: Abhay, Blue Beetle

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This one is not a review, really, so much as just a description of a Marvel comic book that was released in September 2009 called DARK REIGN: THE LIST -- X-MEN #1. Spoiler warning!

Here is my first attempt to explain the context of this comic:

Marvel's comics have been contributing to an ongoing "Event" storyline entitled DARK REIGN. Within that larger event, THE LIST was a smaller sub-event, marketed as follows: Marvel would combine its top writing and art talent (and also, some other people) on a series of one-shots that would feature pivotal moments in the ongoing DARK REIGN storyline. Specifically, it would feature the Green Goblin, the lead antagonist of the DARK REIGN event, attacking various key heroes of the Marvel Universe-- those whose names he apparently kept on some kind of list.

DARK REIGN: THE LIST-- X-MEN #1 was one of those one-shots, one dedicated to the popular X-MEN comic franchise. This particular one-shot was a success: it sold out at Diamond, went to a second printing, and was favorably reviewed on various internet websites including this very blog.

When the DARK REIGN event began, the character of Namor the Sub-Mariner had been revealed to be a part of the new Masters of Evil assembled by the Green Goblin. Thereafter, Namor quit the Masters of Evil and joined the X-Men during a crossover between the DARK AVENGERS and X-MEN that took place in a previous DARK REIGN sub-event called UTOPIA.

Here is the premise of DARK REIGN: THE LIST-- X-MEN #1:

The comic opens with the Green Goblin angry that Namor has quit the Masters of Evil, and has instead joined the X-Men. As retaliation, the Green Goblin has decided to weaponize the horniness of Namor's ex-wife.

Here is the dialogue explaining his weaponize-the-horniness plan: "She's part human and part Plodex-- the Plodex are some kind of alien race apparently-- and when you mix'em up you get this. We've modified her to keep her perpetually in estrus which explains her rotten attitude... but the result is a genetic W.M.D."

Estrus is defined as follows: "A regularly recurrent state of sexual excitability during which the female of most mammals will accept the male and is capable of conceiving."

Here is a drawing of Namor's Ex-Wife:

The monster is a canal with teeth, plainly invoking the classic image of the "vagina dentata"-- the vagina with teeth. Wikipedia: "Various cultures have folk tales about women with toothed vaginas, frequently told as cautionary tales warning of the dangers of sex with strange women and to discourage the act of rape. The concept is also of importance in classical psychoanalysis, where it is held to relate to the unconscious fears associated with castration anxiety."

In the monster genre, the origin of the monster frequently contains a warning to the reader. The Frankenstein Monster is a folly of science. Godzilla is awoken by the atom bomb. The Host is created by pollution the United States forces Korea to inflict upon itself. The origin of a monster is the part that speaks to the audience's true fears.

The origin of our vagina monster? It's a woman wanting sex. Sex makes women crazy and dangerous. The result of female sexual excitability is a "genetic W.M.D."

(As the New York Times Magazine pointed out last week, the true facts are that the opposite is true: women whose sex drives diminish over time report suffering from a profound despair. Here's psychologist Lori Brotto from that article: "I want to have sex where I feel like I’m craving it,” Brotto quoted from yet another file, giving voice to a desperation shared by many of her patients. “I want to feel horny. I want to want.”).

The obvious conclusion to draw from DARK REIGN: THE LIST-- X-MEN #1 is that at the close of 2009, a woman with an appetite for sex is apparently the very definition of fear and horror for Marvel comic creators and their audience.

I would diagnose such a belief as gynophobia.

This is not a metaphor; this is not sub-text. This is the explicit text of the comic: "We've modified her to keep her perpetually in estrus which explains her rotten attitude... but the result is a genetic W.M.D." This is page one. This is the establishing shot. Here's a line of dialogue from page 2: "Her gonadotropic hormones make her so hungry she's been driven insane."

Later in the comic, the arrival of the giant vagina is heralded as follows: "There's nothing to her but hunger and rage and... and hate." Here is the punchline:


So, to be more specific: DARK REIGN: THE LIST-- X-MEN #1 isn't just about castration anxiety and gynophobia, but very specifically, the castration anxieties and gynophobia of a middle-aged man.

Here is a second attempt at explaining the context of this comic:

"Man Versus Castration Anxiety" has been a recurring theme for this generation of Marvel Comics "events". The first major "Event" CIVIL WAR began when Captain America was asked to submit to the authority of a woman named Maria Hill.

Captain America then initiates an all-out superhero civil war rather than take orders from a woman. At the conclusion of the comic, Iron Man has won that contest; however, the comic goes bizarrely out of its way to assure the reader that the patriarchal order has been restored: the comic's celebratory final three pages feature Iron Man forcing Maria Hill to get him coffee.

The CIVIL WAR can only truly end once a woman is put back in her "place". CIVIL WAR was then followed by a comic called-- oh God, here I go again-- SECRET INVASION, in which an alien Queen attempts to institute a matriarchy on Earth. In response, the Earth's superheros murder the Queen, specificially by repeatedly destroying the Queen's head. In issue 7 of the series, her head is shot through with arrows. In issue 8, it is revealed that she's survived the arrows, but then her head is blown off by the Green Goblin. In the same panel as her head being blown off is a drawing of Wolverine, poised to slice into her head with his adamantium claws.

The comic takes a perverse glee in damaging this woman's head, basically. Freud often suggested that the head was a symbol of the repressed desires of the lower body, that is to say, he often associated the female head with a vagina. As David D. Gilmore explained in "Misogyny: the Male Malady": "Freud wrote a paper specificially on this subject, 'The Medusa's Head' published posthumously in 1940. [...] Freud argues that Medusa's head represents the vagina in general and the mother's vagina in particular, the archetypal 'hairy maternal vulva'. Here is the Oedipal terror displaced to the head: Medusa embodies both mother and woman, and the hairy vulva typifies incestuous temptation." The SECRET INVASION can only end when the offending vagina has been destroyed.

As DARK REIGN's primary antagonist the Green Goblin was a male, one might have worried that the theme would not continue into present event. Luckily for Marvel Comics: DARK REIGN: THE LIST- X-MEN #1. The Green Goblin is not only an evil man with evil man plans, but he also literally has his own vagina. He was just waiting for the right moment to unleash it onto the Marvel Universe, apparently.

DARK REIGN: THE LIST-- X-MEN #1 transforms the DARK REIGN event into a battle between the patriarchy of the Marvel Universe and an evil hermaphrodite.

Here is how the comic concludes:

Namor the Sub-Mariner's ex-wife is seen on various pages munching men to death. Accordingly, Namor the Sub-Mariner murders his ex-wife, rips off her head, and throws her severed head through a window at the Green Goblin.

Vagina dentata myths typically end with the teeth being destroyed, and the vagina made safe at last for penis. That seems to be what's happened here: Namor has apparently kept the bottom half of his wife's vagina-body, presumably to have sex with it at his leisure. Note that Alan Davis has reinforced the Green Goblin's hermaphorditic nature by his positioning of the severed head: Green Goblin is all man for the top half; all woman for the bottom half.

(Unfortunately, the reader doesn't get to see how Namor leaves the scene after throwing his ex-wife's severed head through a window, but-- whatever the reader devises in their head about how that scenes goes would probably be too hilarious to top).

Here is a Third Attempt at Context:

This is the second time that Namor has apparently murdered his ex-wife; and to be clear, not A ex-wife, but this specific ex-wife. From Wikipedia: "When [Marrina] became pregnant, the Plodex DNA reacted to her condition by turning her into a savage beast in the North Atlantic Ocean, a Leviathan. Namor was forced to slay her, impaling her with the Black Knight's enchanted Ebony Blade."

Namor being forced to kill Marinna, his ex-wife who has involuntarily become a savage sea-monster...?

That's been done before.

Dude: motherfucker's a re-run.

What the what now?

Obvious caveat: a wikipedia summary isn't the same thing as reading the Walt Simonson comics from 1988 referred to in the Wikipedia footnotes. There may be some quite rational explanation for why the motherfucker would seem to be a re-rerun, and a Wikipedia page isn't enough to draw any hard conclusions from. And hell: being reminded of the Simonson-Buscema-Palmer AVENGERS run isn't the worst thing that can happen to your day. The Kang/Dr.Druid shit in that run was fucking crazy-ass, says me, age 12.

Here are Two Digressions about Television and Movies:

Digression #1: No physical confrontation ensues after Namor throws his wife's head through a window. There's no conflict for a physical confrontation to resolve; the story has attained an equilibrium: the comic has begun with Green Goblin threatening to castrate Namor; it ends with Namor threatening to castrate the Green Goblin. What's interesting to me here is that the Green Goblin has a "witty comeback" to having his own ruined vagina thrown at him:

Green Goblin does not actually respond in any meaningful way, but only quotes the catchphrase regularly repeated by the bad guys of telvision's the PRISONER. Green Goblin is evil, inter alia, because he says dialogue that evil people on television say.

Digression #2: The story of DARK REIGN: THE LIST-- X-MEN #1 is also basically a story about a strange foreign man (Namor) who teaches his nebbish American cousins (the X-Men) how to tame the fairer sex (vagina monster).


This is essentially the story of YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN, Adam Sandler's hit 2008 film about a Israeli super-agent (Zohan) who teaches nebbish American Jews (Nick Swardson) how to tame the fairer sex (Emmanuelle Chriqui). At the conclusion of UTOPIA, Namor joined the X-Men to live on an island nation that X-Men fans appear to be taking to be a metaphor for ... the state of Israel. Coincidence... or Zohan?

...

Well, okay, that one's probably coincidence.

Here is My Favorite Dialogue from the Comic:



The next panel is a giant monster head flying through a window.

Here is a Fourth and Final Attempt at Context:

The comic was created by Matt Fraction, writer of the independent comic CASANOVA (which was not published in this calendar year), a comic often described as "psychedelic."

Also published this year: various mediocre Batman comics written by Grant Morrison, writer of the psychedelic comic classic THE INVISIBLES.

J.H. Williams, prior to 2009: PROMETHEA. J.H. Williams in 2009: BATWOMAN.

Paul Pope prior to 2009: HEAVY LIQUID, say. Paul Pope in 2009: ADAM STRANGE comics.

December's not over, but I'm going to go ahead and declare 2009 a victory for my fellow squares. Poindexters, and materialists. For those keeping track at home, that's squares: 1,000,000 billion. Heads: zilch.

Here is a Link to the Crusher:

This doesn't really have anything to do with DARK REIGN: THE LIST-- X-MEN #1, but I just love the Crusher.

Here's the part where I just throw my hands up and says "Marvel Comics are TOO good":

Namor the Sub-Mariner's ex-wife Marrina didn't take his last name, at least on her Wikipedia page. She's not referred to as Marrina the Sub-Mariner. Her last name?

Smallwood.

Marrina Smallwood.

Oh, God.

So an argument can be made that Namor must kill his ex-wife, repeatedly, not only to resolve his and the audience's castration anxiety, but because the Marrina character is an embodiment of Namor and the audience's insecurities over the size of their manhoods. Marrina mocks the audience, by her very existence, and so that existence must be ended through loving male violence. TWICE.

True believers, we will agree: Marvel Comics are TOO good.

Here are two quotes I saw today that I want to conclude this one:

"I always believe in following the advice of the playwright (Victorien) Sardou. He said, 'Torture the women!' The trouble today is that we don't torture women enough." -- Alfred Hitchcock

"As for suffering: I believe that there are fewer people than ever who escape major suffering in this life. In fact I'm fairly convinced that the Kingdom of God is for the broken-hearted." -- Mr. Rogers

Labels: Abhay

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DAR: A SUPER GIRLY TOP SECRET COMIC DIARY, VOLUME ONE by Erika Moen—

I read a collection of Erika Moen’s journal webcomic DAR. I don’t know if it’s available in stores; it was an impulse buy from the internet. I was trying to find something the Savage Critic website’s own Mr. Douglas Wolk had written, and instead found his appearance on something called the Erika Moen Show.

The Erika Moen Show is a video-podcast where Ms. Moen sits on a dimly-lit couch with various comic/webcomic luminaries, and proceeds to ask said luminaries a variety of questions, with the help of the disembodied voice of Ms. Moen’s off-screen husband. If you’re interested in how the internet is rewriting the cartoonist-audience relationship, “video-podcasts set on couches of female cartoonist plus a disembodied husband voice” might be kind-of a mind-blowing window into the future for you.

The book is a collection of one-page journal comics. I could probably end this right there, and 100% of you would be just about 100% right on whether or not you would like this comic, based solely on that description. Me? I tend to avoid that sort of thing, journal comics. For the obvious reason: I’m fanatically self-centered. I don’t read blogs by acquaintances; I don’t read twitters from friends; I’ve got a mirror, and I’m looking at it, and guess what? Handsome’s looking back. <Wink>. In conclusion: Me. Catch the fever. Have extra long pleasure.

I hadn’t read a journal comic in a while, years maybe, so I enjoyed DAR enough just as a change of diet. I’m entirely disqualified to criticize it in any knowledgeable way, to compare it against other journal comics, the James Kolchaka thing, or Jason Marcy or what have you. I can compare it to numbing comics where Namor the Sub-Mariner throws his wife’s severed head through a window at a bad guy— is that helpful for anyone? In a different mood, I’d have thrown DAR in a corner and forced myself to swear on a Bible that I would never again drink and internet-stalk Douglas Wolk. But that didn’t happen, so hello, bottle of Maker’s Mark and Google Image—our time is now.

The webcomic seems primarily to be about how Ms. Moen formerly self-identified as a lesbian or queer or what have you, a lady what has sex with other ladies, but then ended up marrying and having sex with the disembodied voice. It’s a set of strips from that transition from lesbian to married-to-a-dude lesbian (or whatever the proper terminology is there…?). Am- Am I supposed to review that part? Now, the Savage Critic website will review a human life for your amusement! All will be judged, all will be found wanting! Mwah-ha-ha! Spin the wheel of fate! Hurrah: everybody loves parties!

The good episodes of DAR are about sex. Moen employs the same circular-headed cartoon characters with dot eyes, the same cute-driven style that Jeff Brown or Dave Heatley use— all of them softening their sex comics with a certain amount of adorable. Which sounds like a good idea, unless you start dwelling on Stephen Jay Gould too much.

Stephen Jay Gould was a popular science writer in the field of evolutionary biology. And as a bit of popular science writing, Gould posited in an essay entitled “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse” that the reason cartoon characters were popular was due to neoteny.

As explained by the International Cognition and Culture Institute:

“Gould … proposes that the reason why we find Mickey Mouse attractive is due to our innate attraction for all things baby-like. Gould dwells on Konrad Lorenz's theory of neoteny. Neoteny is the set of facial characteristics peculiar to babies. The theory states that, in the course of evolution, our species (and many others besides) have evolved neotenic features for our youngsters, in order to tap this innate mechanism that attaches us to round faces, big eyes and soft features - what so many languages have a word for: the cute, the kawaii, the mignon, the moutik. Gould spectacularly illustrated his point with the ontogeny of Mickey Mouse, who evolved, in a somewhat spooky trajectory … from a real character with features and peculiarities to a big simplified balloon of niceness.”

So, if you dwell on that paragraph too much, there is something just wrong and creepy about autobiographical sex-comics, wronger and creepier than your garden variety hentai even. Hentai’s typically about, what, a teenage schoolgirl having sex with a softball team, and the softball team is her brother-dad. Which is gross. But autobiographical sex-comics? Maybe they’re basically about babies getting sexy with other babies. Eew! If Stephen Jay Gould is to be believed anyways. I’m just the messenger here...

Sure, it doesn’t gross out everybody. There’s a fetish called paraphilic infantilism, and that fetish is about primarily heterosexual men characterized by their sexual desire to wear diapers and be treated as infants / toddlers. And to be careful about this topic, Wikipedia says paraphilic infantilism is NOT the same thing as pedophilia, so if you were worried about that—you know, you can sleep well at night knowing that the diaper people usually just want to have sex with you, and not your children. Good night and sweet dreams. In fact, Wikipedia says a whole mess of things about paraphilic infantilism that I’d like to unscrub from my brain—where do I sign up for that? Is there a Wikipedia page that explains how to do that? I don’t want to know about the diaper people anymore.

But notwithanding Wikipedia, at the end of the day, I’d still rather see Moen’s baby-people have sex than a Greg Land photo-person have sex. Does that make me a diaper-man, internet? I hope not. I’d really rather not be a diaper-man. Really: not cool, Greg Land.

The more bothersome thing about DAR is the lack of editing (is it okay for me to complain about lack of editing?). Or what appears to be a lack of editing. One that particularly stands out: a comic advising web-cartoonist Dylan Meconis to check her Flickr Favorites because Moen and an unidentified woman in a cowboy hat played a no-doubt hilarious prank on Meconis’s Flickr account that Meconis hadn’t actually noticed-- a comic with no noticeable conclusion whatsoever. I wonder why this or a number of other comics (con reports, comics explicitly about the challenges of doing autobiographical webcomics, etc.) needed to be preserved in print, but I suspect there exists fans of the webcomic who would have been more put-out had it not been collected than passer-by’s such as myself. Hell, editing lessens pages.

Moen's website seems somewhat frustrating-- is there a table of contents or a quick way of navigating through the strips that I can't seem to find? Is there a reason that "clicking on a strip takes me to the next strip" isn't a standard feature of webcomics yet as of 2009-- was there a debate on how webcomics should be navigated that "clicking on a strip takes me to the next strip" somehow lost? For the book, Moen’s craft isn’t quite as polished as it appears to be now—her line only becomes remotely pleasing sometime in mid-2008, late in the book. Looking at the webcomic now, the backgrounds-- a problem spot in the book-- have thankfully improved since then: at least, there’s hints a ruler might have been purchased at some point. Or maybe Moen’s further along whatever learning curve needed to take place with a brush; or maybe Moen purchased Manga Studio; maybe the first letter of every word in the last sentence of the previous paragraph spells out the word “Help”; maybe every essay I write has hidden pleas for help that you’ve all just been ignoring; oh god...

Anyways: Horror-dildos. Anal sex. Shrunken balls. Strippers. Tits. Vibrators. Most of all, Queefing. Unfortunately, the comic is not always in this vein, but these are all honorable and worthwhile topics for comics-- DAR's not long on ambition, and your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for "harmless cute". But: wouldn't anything more than "harmless cute" for a comic about queefing be the wrong way to go? I think they’re topics that work best in comics for that very reason. A short story would be too profound. Richard Ford would write about some unemployed single father holding a horror-dildo in a motel parking lot; the horror-dildo would symbolize middle-age disappointment. And a movie, a horror-dildo just isn’t enough to build a movie around. The horror-dildo would need a character arc. Or there’d be a scene where Shia LeBouf went to Dildo-Heaven to meet the God-Dildos. The horror-dildo would dildo in super-slow-mo for no reason. I don’t want to watch that.

But comics? A horror-dildo is just right. So, that’s (1) your mom’s butt, and (2) comics. Congratulations, comics. Let’s have cupcakes! The cupcakes symbolize middle-age disappointment.

However, eating lowers pessimism. <Wink>

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COMICS: All blow.

Instead, I've been reading CRIME NOVELS.


I turned my attention to the girl beside me. She was a reasonably sized, well-proportioned, dark-haired, basically sound specimen of human female, but she was doing her best to hide the fact, at least the female fact. She had a boy’s haircut, or what used to be a boy’s haircut before they all started letting it grow. She also had a boy’s pants on, complete with fly—pretty soon nothing will be safe from women’s lib, not even our jock-straps.
-- from MATT HELM: THE INTRIGUERS, by Donald Hamilton.

SEVERANCE PACKAGE by Duane Swiercynski:

The back cover promised action: a group of office drones show up for a meeting at corporate headquarters, and their boss tells them (1) they’ve been working for a front organization for the CIA, (2) the CIA’s shutting down the operation, (3) they all know too much, and (4) they either immediately agree to take poison or they will be shot to death.

Except the back cover’s a bit of a bait-n-switch. That entire elaborate premise is pretty much resolved in the first 50 pages. The next 200 pages devolve rapidly into a one-joke slasher movie. It’s not BATTLE ROYALE in an office, like I hoped; it’s more JASON TAKES MANHATTAN, just set in the Nakatomi Plaza.

The SEVERANCE PACKAGE characters are all obnoxious slasher-movie characters, just an office variety instead of a teen variety: boss, secretary, dragon lady, a completely random “heroic writer” character for no reason, etc. There’s the slightest hint of a gender-based critique of corporate life, but that mostly gets drowned out in explosions.

Swiercynski almost gets by on style: single-page illustrations, text messages, layout hijinks. Simple sentences; fast-pace; everything fast, fast, fast. He almost makes up for story with verve. The giddiness is likable. If it’s not quite a book, you know, it’s at least not the worst popcorn movie. Sometimes, being able to turn pages rapidly is enough for me. Sometimes, I’m on airplane.

I suppose I wasn’t a very receptive audience because this book had the misfortune of following Will Beall’s L.A. REX. Beall’s a LAPD Homicide detective stationed in South Central; maybe I gave his splattergore more credit for that reason. Here’s a sample: They’d also jammed a tin funnel into the man’s right ear and poured drain cleaner down his ear canal. The open bottle of Draino stood on the counter next to the sink. Blood and yellowish matter had leaked from that ear down the side of his face. Packed into the guy’s eye sockets, nose and slack mouth, thousands of pale maggots, each no larger than a grain of rice, wriggled and moiled.

SEVERANCE PACKAGE was wire fu, by comparison. More action than violence.


Swiercynski writes comics, too: IRON FIST and CABLE for Marvel. That’s been a thing with Marvel lately— collecting crime novelists. Hurwitz and Gishler and Huston and whoever else. I hadn’t read any of Swiercynski’s comic work, so I looked at a random issue of CABLE after I read his novel. If I’m remembering this right: Cable was on a farm in the future, wearing overalls; he fought bugs. If you want a comic about cyborgs fighting bugs on a farm—that happened. Ariel Olivetti drew it, so if you want the farmer to have muscles painted top of his other muscles, that issue may have just gone from an A-plus to an A-plus-plus for you.

They got themselves a novelist to write that comic, though. There’s a sort of inherent perversity to hiring suspense writers to write mainstream comics; is anything less suspenseful on this Earth than a mainstream comic book?

1) The main characters all live.

2) The dead characters come back to life.

3) Every plot is announced ahead of time.

4) The plots are thoroughly debated online prior to the book being offered for sale—people argue whether or not something SHOULD be the plot of a comic they haven’t read yet.

Swiercynski the novelist tries to find graphic ways to spice up the action, to distinguish his paperback action thriller from other paperback action thrillers: Let’s put a single sentence on a page. Let’s use a page to show a piece of evidence directly to the reader rather than describe it. Let’s put speed lines in a novel. Here’s one sentence from the book, formatted as it is in the book:

“She felt like she would
be
falling
forever.”

Not a spectacular innovation, nothing craaaaazy. But: Swiercynski the novelist came to play. Swiercynski the comic book writer? He just wrote a paper movie, same as everyone else at Marvel writes right now. (And again, I haven’t read his IRON FIST; maybe I’m wrong). Marvel’s hired novelists, independent comic writers, screenwriters, playwrights, whoever, and all to them are writing comics that look and feel identical. Can you tell a Marvel comic written by an independent comic creator apart from a Marvel comic written by a cook-book author from a Marvel comic written by a jingle writer? I don’t think I can tell the difference. Is that sad? Well, maybe that’s just the commercially best way to write comics, the best way to write comics for a mass audience. Is that sad? I don’t know; what do I care. If it weren’t like that, I’d just find something else about Marvel to complain about; I’m a guy on the internet—complaining about Marvel is how we do. Is that sad?

(I figured it’d be unfair not to read a more recent issue so I went with issue #18 of CABLE. Cable is in prison in outer space, and the X-Men character Bishop is trying to kill him for some reason. Here are two panels in sequence:



That’s two different people talking. The caption boxes in panel 1 is dialogue being spoken out loud, but the caption boxes in panel 2 is narration depicting a character’s internal monologue. And then check out this panel later in the issue:


So: caption boxes used where there’s “off-screen” dialogue, caption boxes with first-person internal-monologue, and then caption boxes with third-person exposition. In just 22 pages of comics? Really? On the other hand: people sometimes call Bishop the Archbishop and that’s pretty funny, maybe intentionally).


I made a face. “God, aren’t we mysterious! Lorna. She’s a tough one, I’ve heard. Won’t take orders from any man. Except Mac.”

“Why should she? Why should a woman have to work under a man if she’s as good as a man?”

I said, “Well, it’s the customary reproductive position, but I understand there are others.”

-- from MATT HELM: THE INTRIGUERS, by Donald Hamilton.

THE OUTFIT by DONALD WESTALKE:

I’d read Donald Westlake books when I was young, probably too young to understand his books. My favorite was his comedic murder mystery set in the world of tabloids, TRUST ME ON THIS. But: I’d never read Parker. I obviously knew about Parker, but I knew Parker had inspired some pretty terrible imitators: I’ve had the misfortune of sitting through an Andy Vachss book, say. Vachss alone was enough to scare me away from ever reading Parker.

Then, Westlake passed away. So: THE OUTFIT.

THE OUTFIT doesn’t waste your time; the first sentence is “When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed.” It’s a nice sign you’re in good hands. This is the third of the Parker novels, re-released in 2008. I’ll try not to spoil the plot, but: bad guys screw with Parker; they find out that’s a bad idea. (Okay, actually, I think I just spoiled the plot. Sorry.)

Anyways, the bad guys lose because they’re soft, and Parker wins because he’s hard. And getting harder—it appears that a regular part of Parker’s schtick, I think maybe left out of the movies, is that Parker’s violent adventures sexually arouse Parker. You know those video games where the more you hit people, the more your character’s “rage meter” fills up? It’s like that. Except instead of an empty rage meter, imagine Lee Marvin’s flaccid penis.

What I liked about the OUTFIT was it felt like just the good parts: Parker murders someone, Parker solves a logistical problem of living outside of the law, there are a series of heists, and then Parker murders some more, and the end; go home. Just the good parts-- Donald Westlake’s Boner-Jamz, if you will. It’s not entirely perfect: one of the book’s subplots is left to a later book to resolve. Plus, if you like heists like I do, the book basically peaks in the middle with the heists; the book’s final action scene isn’t much fun by comparison.

But I probably prefer Westlake to “Richard Stark”; Westlake had wit. The “tough loners in suits” genre—at a certain point, it just seems like schtick. I don’t think I read crime novels for the cartoon characters—the knight errant detective, the femme fatale, the corpulent mobsters, any of that. Oh, it’s fun. But it sort of makes crime and greed and vice seem distant and remote, the sport of a different breed of cat, instead of pervasive, constant, a force of nature, a foundation stone. Parker seems apart from the world because the rest of the world is slow and dim and bovine; which has a truth to it, certainly at the time the OUTFIT was written. But: characters who are “apart from the world” are basically romantic fantasies, whether it’s Parker or Phillip Marlowe or what have you. They’re entertaining, but a more honest diagnosis would probably be grimmer.


Other nerds are likely to be flocking to this book in coming days—it’s the next book Darwyn Cooke intends to adapt as part of the 4-book adaptation series he’s created, published by IDW. The OUTFIT promises that we’ll get to see Cooke facing an interesting challenge—Parker disappears entirely for at least half of the book, the book’s best half. All of the heists? Parker ain’t there; he’s not the one pulling the heists in the OUTFIT. How will Cooke approach those heists?

There might be differing opinions how to answer that question after THE HUNTER, which has gotten a wide range of reactions. There’s bound to be—the underlying fantasy of this type of loner character is of total detachment from the world, being able to dispense with violence and sex without the messy business of the soul being involved. That sort of theme’s no problem for prose. Comics, though? “Here’s a character who doesn’t care about anything in the world except for his money and his women. I spent 5 hours drawing him by carefully dipping a Windsor-Newton brush into a well of India ink and moving the brush along a sheet of Bristol Board.” There’s a disconnect there.

Cooke’s solution seems to have rankled, though it’s actually what I liked about his adaptation more than anything: some panels are lavishly executed, but for the most part, the pages don’t feel too careful. Some of the long-shots especially nears stick-figure theatre. The line weights are inconsistent. He’s given critics plenty of ammunition.

But I think that’s what I liked about it: with Cooke laying on the book’s blue-color by hand, the pages just seem still... wet. Fresh from his drawing board. Many artists complain that some energy or power gets lost moving from thumbnails to finished pages—the HUNTER pages feel like they’re focused on retaining that thumbnail energy. Cooke doesn’t try to just adapt the surface story, but to match Westlake’s spare prose. To me, that was fun. Can I imagine a prettier comic? Sure. Would a prettier comic have better served the material? I don’t know if I necessarily agree with that.

Which isn’t to say Cooke doesn’t make some terrible choices along the way: He blows the revenge pages—the gestures hardly have any violence to them, at all. His character designs for women are deadly dull, pretty-girls from animation, Sketchbook Session jerk-off girls. Bruce Wayne: Parker isn’t too thrilling to watch. And if ever a book didn’t need Blam Krak Pow sound effects…

(I can’t say I was too persuaded by the argument that Cooke’s vision of the past was too focused on “cool” iconography. The movie POINT BLANK has a 10-minute long bongo-jam in it; there’s at least 10 minutes of a guy on the bongos with another guy going “YEAH” periodically, at least 10 minutes. Cool seems like kind of the point of the entire exercise for everyone who’s ever touched this material. You can have Dortmunder with Robert Redford in the 70’s, or you can have Dortmunder with Martin Lawrence, you know? But maybe I misunderstood the argument.).

If I had a problem with the HUNTER, though: I think any adaptation invites the question of Why this, why now? Parker’s about the lone, rugged individual facing down the organization. But: I guess I associate “rugged individualism” as the theme of, well, douche-bags. Rugged individualism sounds cute when Glen Beck’s crying about it, crying his crazy little eyes out, but you put enough rugged individualism into your coffee, next thing you know: you’re the crazy-fuck hick screaming that the President’s a liar in the middle of a speech to Congress. The rugged individual out for his own greedy advantage destroying the work of many people organized for their mutual good? We have that: it’s called Wall Street; how’s that working out for everybody? Yeah, the HUNTER is anti-corporate, but Parker’s hardly a hippie WTO-protestor; he’s just a different breed of capitalist.

So: I couldn’t really tell you why this adaptation exists other than for Cooke to wallow in that aesthetic universe. Is that enough? Is that anything?


I grinned. “There you sit, wearing a man’s zip-up-the-front pants and a man’s hairdo, giving me that poor-downtrodden-women line. Just what do you think would happen to me if I started wandering around the countryside in a woman’s skirt with my hair clear down my back? What would happen to any man who tried it? You know damn well we’d be locked up as transvestite perverts so fast it would make your head swim. Hell, we poor men can’t let our hair grow even a little without half the cops in the country trying to bash in our heads, but you ladies can cut it all off and nobody bats an eye. Which sex was it you said was being discriminated against?” She gave me another scorching look, obviously unimpressed by my argument. Well, maybe it wasn’t much of an argument.

-- from MATT HELM: THE INTRIGUERS, by Donald Hamilton.

The final book was Ian Rankin’s HIDE AND SEEK. Which…

There’s one kind of crime novel I avoid, the most common type: the recurring detective series. I think it’s all the jazz music. The serial detective novel will invariably have some detective in it that’s way into jazz. There’ll always be a scene of them, feeling lonely, putting on Miles Davis because, hey, man, they’re not modern guys, they don’t listen to rock-n-roll. Detectives in lonely-man detective novels don’t listen to Jay-Z.

Rankin from HIDE AND SEEK: “John Rebus’s flat was his castle. Once through the door, he would pull up the drawbridge and let his mind go blank, emptying himself of the world for as long as he could. He would pour himself a drink, put some tenor sax music on the cassette machine, and pick up a book.”

Tenor sax music. Because the alto sax is for communists and panty-sniffers! To be fair, the book was published in 1990. In 1990, I thought Color Me Badd was the best band of all time. And by “1990”, I mean last year. But the whole “lonely man” theme—you know, going from superhero comics to that kind of crime book, is it just exchanging one kind of No Girlz Allowed club for another? I don’t know.

This is probably the most like a “real novel” than any of the three. The characters are vivid and their actions are unpredictable; the details of subplots have themes that resonate with the main plotline’s themes; moments seem dictated by character more than plot. The mystery isn’t the focus; the mystery is an excuse to spend time exploring procedure and characters and setting. The mystery is a window into Edinburgh in the 1990’s, grappling with the early days of gentrification.

(From the perspective of a severe recession, though, the whole gentrification thing sort of loses its teeth. People used to get mad that their neighborhoods were getting TOO RICH. Oh noes! Good thing we don’t have to worry about that anymore.)

The biggest problem being: the mystery, once solved, is nothing much at all. The solution to the mystery, the dark secret that threatens to topple polite Edinburgh society? You can buy it now legally; you can find it for free on the internet. What might have become shocking in 1990 has become a consumer product by 2009. It’s 272 pages, but it builds towards nothing that sticks. Subplots, character, prose, themes—that’s all nice, but a mystery novel that doesn’t have much of a solution? Can you still call that a success? I loved the story in that porn movie.

Rankin’s mystery is “who killed a junkie”, the pathos supposedly being no one cares. Except: I don’t know that I cared either. Does that make me a bad person? Probably.


DC’s published Ian Rankin’s name across 4/5ths of the cover of DARK ENTRIES, one of the launch titles of their new Vertigo Anal-Sex line. Strike that, supposedly DARK ENTRIES is launching the Vertigo Crime line.

Funny thing: the launch book for Vertigo Crime? NOT A CRIME NOVEL. It’s a horror comic. There’s hardly any crime in it even. It’s a haunted house story, starring John Constantine. They launched Vertigo Crime with a Vertigo horror comic! Exclamation mark!

So: a year from now, if we’re unlucky and Vertigo Crime no longer exists, and some so-and-so is screeching that “None of youse fools on the internet people could have done better because we are geniuses who thought of EVERYTHING” … I would suggest that maybe one thing they could have done differently is launched their crime line with crime fiction…? Just a silly thought.

I mean, I’m rooting for Vertigo Crime because—I’m the audience for crime comics, 100%; the editors and creators announced for this line are all people I usually expect to always at least be interesting, if not always successful. And launching with DARK ENTRIES is not the worst idea: Rankin’s a name in crime fiction, so launching with the biggest name they could get makes a certain sense, even if he didn’t actually in point of fact write anything resembling a crime novel. There’s even a quote from Brian Vaughan on the back that mentions “haunted house” story, if you’re especially attentive. There’s also crime on the cover, and not in the book, though, so…

Is the book any good as a horror comic? Not really. I enjoyed Werther Dell’edra’s art, truly I did—lots of blacks, very much my kind of style. Except: he’s drawing a haunted house comic, so setting it in a very definite place with very definite background drawings has an increased importance. Dell’edra seems better with mood and suggestion than drawing definite surroundings. The geography of the house is just never precisely delineated enough to be scary.

Rankin’s story is a one-gag story about reality television. The gag didn’t make me laugh; might do something for you. Reality television is shit, but: who cares? Caring about how shitty reality television is, that’s nearly as boring as reality television. There are some fun details; the “solution” to the book’s “mystery” is at least a little clever. The ending works; the ending is a good, classic John Constantine ending (as far as I know, having not read much Constantine).

But: Rankin probably hasn’t read much Junji Ito. The DARK ENTRIES team tries to do monsters-popping-out-of-the-dark scares. Those are movie-scares, not comic-scares. The “Oh, I’m surprised and I will jump out of my movie seat because I’m surprised” scares. Those don’t work. It’s obvious those don’t work. They don’t work in books; god knows why a novelist would think they’d work in comics.

Junji Ito’s comics are scary. NIJIGAHARA HOLOGRAPH was scary. Scary because they’re comics. Comics take fucking forever to make. A comic where you’re forced to imagine a person spending fucking forever to create something where the images don't add up, something that’s wrong, that's diseased, something that doesn’t satisfy the “rules”? That can be scary. But: that’s not DARK ENTRIES. DARK ENTRIES is just another installment in the commercially successful adventures of John Constantine. What’s supposed to be scary about that?

I got angry after I read DARK ENTRIES. (I was happy how angry I got, that a comic could still get me angry, that I’m not completely apathetic about them. Ooh: I got so angry.) Monsters, spooky-creatures, everything DARK ENTRIES trucks in is bullshit. Rankin, as a crime novelist, seems to know that; as a novelist. HIDE AND SEEK doesn’t have monsters; it doesn’t need them—it has people. HIDE AND SEEK, if it has a theme—no, if crime fiction has a theme, it’s that there are no demons or devils out there causing the evils of the world, that blaming the wrongs of life on monsters from religious myths is what children do, that the evils of the world are the result of people, people being greedy, needy, evil, or, hell, just bored.

There’s a book I read a few years ago, Bernard Lefkowitz’s OUR GUYS-- it got made into an Eric Stoltz Movie of the Week. The book is about how a suburban high school football team gang-raped a retarded girl with a broom handle, and how they basically got away with it. But that’s not the bad part. Here’s the bad part: there’s a classmate of the football team named Mari, and when the football team gets charged with raping a retarded girl with a broom handle, Mari gets an idea. She befriends the retarded girl—she becomes maybe the first friend that retarded girl ever has. And she wears a wire and tape records their conversations and convinces the retarded girl to talk about how much she enjoyed having sex with the broom handle, so she can help the football team avoid prosecution.

Satan is bullshit. Satan doesn’t need to exist; Mari already does.

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So, “3 Jacks”—pretty much the best Marvel comic of the year so far, right? Tim O’Neil agrees; I agree; I don’t know who else has weighed in.

“3 Jacks” is a 13-page back-up feature in DAREDEVIL #500, created by Ann Nocenti, David Aja, Matt Hollingsworth and Chris Eliopoulos. The rest of the comic is inert; not worth anyone’s time. But: “3 Jacks,” everybody!

Where do we start? Well, let’s start with the first page.



The opening panel: buildings in silhouette, with the Coney Island Parachute Jump tower above the skyline. I don’t know much about the Parachute Jump tower, but: at the angle chosen, the way Aja draws it, does it resembles a cross to you?

Our metal-crucifix is located dead center on the page, not off to the side, not one detail of many—dead center. Flanking it, we have two panels: one, a woman praying in silhouette; the other, a man yelling “Keep ‘Im Close, Damn It” to the heavens. Both characters point in direct lines towards the cross; both are talking to God in their own way.

(Maybe that's something representative of Nocenti’s run on DAREDEVIL in general-- an absurdly straight-faced religious image on one end of a teeter-totter, with an almost-corny image straight out of Will Eisner keeping it in balance? Maybe; not for me to say: a handful of issues of her DAREDEVIL run made an impression on me, but I don’t think I’ve ever read that entire run tip-to-toe. I have no claims to being an expert on the Nocenti run, and this essay will unfortunately be limited as such).

The other panels? A small set of visual jokes: (i) a panel of a bullseye but with no way of telling if it's from the villain's mask or the poster with “Live Human Target” scrawled on it; (ii) a poster for the “Human Blockhead” a panel away from Daredevil being struck in the head; (iii) my favorite is the word “Clone” cut off from the window of what we’re later told is the “Cyclone Bar”—I don’t know if that’s a joke by David Aja & Chris Eliopoulos on Aja’s appropriation of Dave Mazzucchelli’s style circa 1980-whatever, but I’d like to think Aja & Eliopoulos were being self-deprecating.

* * *

So we open with a distant steel God towering over moments solemn, and silly, and empty, and violent, with a man in a devil costume as far from God on the page as can be (his arms also akimbo though). Fine; that’s nice. How does the comic end? Does Daredevil win the spiritual battle the first page sets out? Well: let’s skip to the end! Here’s the last panel:

Again, we see the Parachute Tower but the angle is different. The skyline is higher—and the man in the devil costume is now at the center of page, the city on one end of him, the crucifix on the other, restored to equilibrium, in balance with his environment … though there’s still a gap between him and that crucifix, still that gap. He’s almost a silhouette like the rest of his environment, but no, not quite—colorist Matt Hollingsworth makes sure there’s still just that tiniest hint of red. A little taint of sin that’s not washing off, a little bit of the devil costume peeking through.

Is that last panel a spoiler? No: because that panel in fact is shown on the page immediately preceding the story.

The story of 3 Jacks is there’s a fight between Bullseye and Daredevil at the Coney Island amusement park, and then that fight ends and Daredevil runs off into the night. The end.

But the way that story is structured is this: we start with the end of the fight, the story goes beyond the end of the fight as we watch Daredevil recover from the fight with two people who have witnessed the fight, Larry and Gina. Larry, Gina and Daredevil then talk about the middle of the fight which we see in flashback (we never see the beginning of the fight; the beginning of the fight doesn’t matter—Daredevil and Bullseye will always be fighting).

When we finally reach the ending? We wind up back where we started from-- like I said: the last image of the story is the same image as on the page literally preceding the story itself. It’s like a spiral.



The comic is about a character trapped in a spiral of violence, not explicitly but in the form the story is presented. Daredevil has no way out of that spiral-- the only thing his story can ever be about is the process of Daredevil picking himself up and running into battle again. Not just a spiral of violence: maybe one way to look at the story is it's about how Daredevil is in a loop of constantly being knocked out of spiritual alignment and struggling to restore his relationship with his faith.

So, wait: I'm making "3 Jacks" sound like a totally boring bummer about, like, Jesus or something, aren't I? It's not that. You get to see Daredevil use his radar powers and his lie-detecting powers. Daredevil kicks Bullseye in the face. Daredevil fights Bullseye throughout the comic. The Marvel comics goods are delivered in those 13 pages, besides everything else that’s going on. And by David Aja, Matt Hollingsworth and Chris Eliopoulos, no less. Silent pages, silhouette flashbacks, heartbeat scrawls, graphic shapes, extreme close-ups on big-wide-open eyes, etc. Aaah, comics, everybody…

Plus: I just like Larry and Gina, the two witnesss I mentioned before, the praying girl and the yelling guy from the first page. They represent aspects of Daredevil’s father and mother. But besides that? They’re just funny characters in their own right. There’s comic business with a hammer; the 10 Commandments are re-written; Larry and Gina have interesting things to say for themselves. It’s not an extraordinary amount of characterization. It’s a Daredevil comic, and Larry & Gina are stock comic book characters—“precocious schoolgirl” and “washed-up boxer” don't exactly break new ground. But, you know: they’re really not the worst company you could ask for from a Marvel comic. The lead story of the issue is about ninjas screaming at each other; I’m happy to stick with Larry and Gina instead.

* * *

The heart of the comic is Bullseye has thrown three photos into Daredevil’s chest, saying “Dead Center! You just don’t’ know it yet” as he did so.

The three photos turn out to be meaningful to Daredevil—to the reader, too, if they knows their Daredevil “lore.” If they can put images into context.

Which: I mean, that’s kind of writing comics right there, isn’t it? You pick out still images, little bits of the past frozen in time, and you throw them into another person, hope they stick…? If Ann Nocenti is a character in this story, she’s not the old yelling-guy or the praying girl or the distant steel God; she’s Bullseye. She can’t kill Daredevil—all she can do is hurt him as much as she can. “Dead Center! You just don’t know it yet.” She’s sort of bragging about how good a job she’s doing in the story itself, man. Shit, I kind of dig that.

* * *

There’s more: Daredevil, Larry and Gina are all dealing with their relationships with their parents (which I’m thinking might possibly be metaphorical); Daredevil is "saved" by the prayers of a girl who “hates God” and Larry pleading to a cross to "Keep 'Im Close"; that fantastic page of Gina lying to Daredevil (if I understood the concept of grace, let alone cared, maybe I’d have something to say there); the final images of Larry with a hammer in his hands, which… carpentry? Isn’t that something? You know: from the Bible or Jesus or one of those? Or wait: maybe I’m thinking of that show HOME IMPROVEMENT? Maybe "3 JACKS" is actually a metaphor for how men are pigs HARF HARF HARF (am I right, ladies?). It’s 13 pages, but I'll be damned if it isn't a dense fucker.

Tim O'Neil concluded his review by stating "If Marvel publishes a better story this year I'll eat my hat." I'll go one better: if Marvel publishes a better story this year, Tim O'Neil will eat every article of clothing in my closet, at gunpoint. It's your move, MARVEL DIVAS. Winner takes O'Neil.

* * *

MISCELLANEOUS NOTES ABOUT THE REST OF THE ISSUE:

** Some crap about ninjas, again...?

** What’s the story with Billy Tan’s pages here? They're not professional-quality comic pages. If I had to guess, I’d guess they’d lined up a real talent for this List comic, but the real talent blew it, something came up, Ashton Kutcher's next movie needed a hovercraft designed, whatever; yaddah yaddah yaddah, some editor goes to Tan at the last minute and asked him to rush out pages. That would be my guess what happened, if I had to make a guess. That would be as nice a thing as I could say about Billy Tan's work here: maybe an editor forced him to do that. Or an alternate theory: maybe someone lost a bet. You know, like one of those TRADING PLACES bets. Maybe someone bet Don Ameche $1 that if they gave Billy Tan a real comic book artist's job, he would start to draw like a real comic book artist. Don Ameche won that one; Don Ameche's the big winner. Except... except for the being dead part. Don Ameche: no longer with us. Great in HEAVEN CAN WAIT. But very, very dead. But dead and one U.S. dollar richer, so who's laughing? Well, not Don Ameche. He's dead. I mean, it's kind of a bummer if you think about it, Don Ameche being dead, or just death in general. That's nothing to laugh about. That's sad, really. He was really great in HEAVEN CAN WAIT. It's all just so temporary. We'll never know how Don Ameche would have spent his Billy Tan dollar. You know, this all seemed like a very simple joke at first, but fucker sort of got away from me, I don't know what to tell you...

** The Brubaker DAREDEVIL run ended in the issue. For me, and this is completely unfair, but: that run was like watching air rush out of a balloon. It started so well with that prison arc, but—and this is the unfair part: Mr. Fear…? NO, THANK YOU. As soon as Mr. Fear showed up, I split. How unfair is that? I’ll read all manners of crap, just the crappiest crap that ever crapped, without complaint, happy as can be, but: “Mr. Fear? No, no: fuck you. Daredevil was better back when he fought the guy who was like an Owl, but I am not putting up with this Mr. Fear horse-shit. Fuck you, God!” What a terrible job it is to write mainstream comics. How could Ed Brubaker or anyone conceivably see that I’d draw the line super-arbitrarily at Mr. Fear? There’s no earthly way Ed Brubaker could ever guess that in a million years. And yet: I blame him anyways.

** The last Ed Brubaker comic I read was that new Captain America thing where it was all “Hey, Captain America—we have to get you back to the island using the Constant Sawyer Hurley.” Which was a nice comic, but I remember thinking, “Hey, maybe Ed Brubaker watches that show LOST.” And then Daredevil #500—was it just me or did his story have an identical flashback structure to the season finale of LOST? It was probably written before the finale—or maybe, but…? Am I just seeing things? It's probably just a coincidence. I’m probably just seeing things. Still: I hope the next issue of CRIMINAL explains what that crazy smoke monster is. Smoke monster is my favorite character.

** Or here’s a theory: maybe the night before his pages were due, Billy Tan was walking down a street when he saw a psychotic clown trying to rape a little kid. And he was like, “Get off that kid, Bozo! I’ll make you a sad clown. WITH MY BILLY TAN FISTS.” And then they fought, like bare-knuckles, all night long, man versus clown, and yeah, Billy Tan named his fists after himself, but I think that’s manly, why not. (The clown in this story symbolizes the Buddha on the road; I learned it from reading you, Ann Nocenti). And he wins in the end, Billy Tan wins and saves the kid from being clown-molested, but the price is DARK LIST pages you can look at without feeling sadness in your eyeballs. But that’s a small price to pay. Maybe we all owe Billy Tan an apology. He very well might be a hero to children everywhere, including the child inside all of us. The child inside all of us that is deathly afraid of a clown touching our peener without consent.

** Wait, wait: if Disney owns ABC, and ABC has LOST on it, does that mean Marvel comics kind of does own the Smoke Monster? Smoke Monster's my favorite character.

** Why did Lynn Varley’s colors get destroyed in the reprint? What happened there? The issue I remember seeing had these dark, moody colors. The colors in the reprint—what a bright, shiny, happy comic about Russian Roulette. “It’s the feel good Russian Roulette comic book of the year.” Is that how it looked when it was originally printed? Maybe I'm so used to seeing the old, worn-out, grey, torn-up copies that I never imagined what it looked like when it was brand new. Same exact thing happens when I look at your mom, naked. When she's having sex with Don Ameche's ghost. Dammit. Goddammit. Oh, I shouldn't have even tried; couldn't let it go. Goddammit, I really thought I could save the whole Don Ameche thing, in the eleventh hour, and it's just-- where's the goddamn Cocoon when you need it? Don Ameche Joke Cocoon, you have failed me for the last time!! This started out so earnestly, with the crucifix and the Jesus and the spirals, and ... What happened, Internet? If only keyboards came with delete keys...

Labels: Abhay, Daredevil

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On account of the whole “busy” thing, I’ve missed out on most of the Big Books of the Year so far. And on account of the whole “$4! For what???” thing, I’ve missed out on most of the mainstream, too. Halfway into the year, I think my favorite book so far is probably GUS AND HIS GANG by Chris Blain, published by First Second. Hell, not even a 2009 book, released in 2008, already definitively and thoroughly reviewed by my betters, placing the following somewhere between drastically unnecessary and deeply embarrassing, really. Now up for an Eisner Award in the category of Best Book No One Cares Won an Eisner.

The nomination is well deserved for the art alone; perfectly paced, expressive, *funny*, fast-moving. Enormously pleasurable. But: I liked the story, too, I think, in case that matters especially (it doesn’t).


The premise: three cowboys, robbing banks, getting into adventures, violently dealing with a variety of enemies. None of which ends up mattering very much, none of which the book is particularly about. The cowboys don’t really care about being cowboys; it’s a French comic— the cowboys are just interested in girls.


Westerns. Why do you think “the Western is dead”? The chattering class says that every so often, when some minor movie like Russell Crowe’s dopey 3:10 TO YUMA remake fails at the box office. “The Western is dead.”

A common sub-species is to claim some great movie ended it, usually Clint Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN. “UNFORGIVEN ended the Western, and now the Western is dead.” I don’t know that I understand that. UNFORGIVEN might say “the traditional Western story was all lies.” But why would that matter commercially? What genre fiction doesn’t rely on a little lying? They made four DIE HARD movies regardless, and even the fourth one is pretty rad. Die Hard fights evil computers in it, but he refuses to die thereby making him hard to die a death caused by computers, skyscrapers, airplanes, or terrible Samuel L. Jackson movies. Why not cowboys?

Actually, snobbier types usually blame everything on the same two movies: “STAR WARS and JAWS ended the Western. They ended the 1970’s. They ended actors, writers, directors, and parents mattering. They ended Robert Kennedy’s bid for the Presidency, cookies tasting good to children, and the myth of the vaginal orgasm.”

But I don’t know that I disagree with the premise that the Western is dead, particularly. Genres do sort of diminish in popularity over time. Screwball comedies. Point & Click adventure games. Sitcoms with super-bizarre premises. Steve Guttenberg, in toto. People used to love the Goot; I still think he’s hilarious. Go figure.


I’m inclined to say there’s no ailment on earth that swearing and hookers can’t fix, but there’s a non-existent fourth season of DEADWOOD saying I might be wrong about that.

My guess: I think people’s tolerance for looking at dirty people has gone down over the years. Cowboys, all covered with dust and dirt, with deodorant nowhere to be seen? Maybe that’s all too gross for our sissified age. I remember that was a reaction I heard a couple times over to a non-Western, Kevin Costner’s box-office disaster WATERWORLD: “Why is he so dirty the entire movie if he’s living on the Waterworld? Why can’t he just go bathe in the Waterworld? He’s surrounded by water!” The Western dies around the same time as the rise of metrosexuality and lady-boy action stars— coincidence? Or just one more thing Orlando Bloom needs to answer for, besides fucking ELIZABETHTOWN.


Some day we all must answer for fucking ELIZABETHTOWN, as a species, and there will be no cowboys there to save us.

The Western comes up among comic fans on occasion, strangely prominent on the cliché list of What’s Missing from Comics: “Where are the mystery comics, the romance comics, the Western comics?” But mysteries happen, in life. Romances happen, in life. Walk down the wrong alley at night with money hanging out of your pants, and either and/or both of those things could happen to you.

But when do Westerns happen, in daily life…?


“This is Hi-Fi... high fidelity. What that means is that it's the highest quality fidelity.”

The thing GUS AND HIS GANG most reminded me of wasn’t a Western anyways. It was SEINFELD. SEINFELD, Season 8, Episode 143, entitled “The Abstinence.” That’s the episode where Jerry Seinfeld’s sidekick George has a girlfriend (Louise) who gets sick. As a result, George has to give up sex for six weeks.

When George gives up sex? He becomes a genius.


Jerry, from that episode: “Yeah. I mean, let's say this is your brain. (Holds lettuce head) Okay, from what I know about you, your brain consists of two parts: the intellect, represented here (Pulls off tiny piece of lettuce), and the part obsessed with sex. (Shows large piece) Now granted, you have extracted an astonishing amount from this little scrap. But with no-sex-Louise, this previously useless lump, is now functioning for the first time in its existence. (Eats tiny piece of lettuce).”

I think about that episode basically all the time. And by all the time, I mean the time I spend looking at internet pornography. I could have been a genius, cam whores! All that time, lost! To the internet, magazines, flipbooks. On one confusing yet magical night, a rerun of BARNEY MILLER. Lost, so much time lost! There are entire advanced degrees I could have earned. If I had that time back? I could have easily earned a Ph.D. You would have to call me DOCTOR SHITHEAD in the comments section of this post.

The best way to look at it is, “These things aren’t distractions from work. We work so that we can afford time to spend trolling for creepy thrills in DAWSON’S CREEK chatrooms.” But I’m just not that care-free. It’s just too difficult to spend time guilt-free watching something called PIRATES 2: STAGNETTI’S REVENGE. Because I’m really not sure how Stagnetti got any sort of revenge in that movie whatsoever. Herpes, maybe, but revenge? Aah, sweet mystery of life.

Of course, a more puritanical sort would say the ability to say no, to refrain, is what separates Man from the apes. Guy on the public radio the other day, though, was saying what actually separated man from the apes is that man cooks his food. I prefer that. If we’re lowering the bar to mankind to the ability to sauté, I feel like my cause in this world has been advanced, however slightly. I can cook up all sorts of shit; suck on that, you damn dirty apes.


Success, education, upbringing— none of that might keep a person from unraveling completely, if certain launch codes are pushed in the correct order. People I've known? Lawyers, architects, engineers, all equally screwed up once they're off the clock. Rich, powerful business executives with elaborate “understandings” and "loopholes" in their relationships more sophisticated than a damn WTO treaty. Even in comics: as soon as Spider-man learns to take off his glasses and comb his hair, and he’s 5% less of a nerd socially, he’s out trying to get revenge for his high school years by hate-fucking a model?



(Rhino on the Rampage...)

The characters in GUS AND HIS GANG are similarly distracted. Blain draws what they’re thinking right onto their face: “This could all be so much easier if I could just keep my mind on what I’m supposed to be doing. Robbing banks. Shooting guns. Riding horses. Running from the law. Living a proper, cowboy life.”

But, yeah: no. Not meant to be. Blain takes the most macho of genres, and uses it to wallow in male self-pity. Blain’s cowboys are completely awesome at being cowboys; macho’s easy. But past that, they’re stumbling around in the dark, like the rest of us. I like that; that’s clever.

And I suppose that’s not a lovable comedic topic for everybody, male self-pity. I’m amused by it, but I’ll acknowledge it can be kissing cousins to a very tiresome “men are all dogs, am I right, ladies?” type of humor. Or Benny Hill comes to mind, say— not a lot of people defending Benny Hill in the world. On the other hand, they say Benny Hill was a workaholic who died a lonely, mean virgin, surrounded by cash and un-deposited checks— which, you know, there’s probably a metaphor there somewhere. At least, if you want to listen to what They say. They say the “Western is Dead” and they say “Bennie Hill died a workaholic virgin” and they say “Aliens did not insert a probe into your anus.” Well, how come my rectum is sore, you government sons of bitches? Oh, right: I was fingering my ass while watching reruns of THE BENNY HILL SHOW. That’s what I’m into now. The nervous system gets desensitized to stimuli over time, so you’ve got to up the ante now and then. I upped it to stimulating my prostate to the soulful sound of Yakety Sax. Right… I forgot…


But the older I get and the worse I get, I basically find stories about failure comforting. Blain’s cowboys struggle to interpret a lady’s conflicting signals properly. They struggle to work the bar scene properly. They struggle to keep from cheating. Fail, fail, fail.

So, I relate to that. And yes: I also relate to crying. Why do people keep asking me that?

Stories about characters deciding this or deciding that-- those are fun. When you read them, you get to pretend to believe fun things like “You create who you are. You’re in charge of how you respond to conflicts. You decide your destiny.” But it’s pretty relieving, something like GUS AND HIS GANG. Sometimes, you don't get to decide how your brain works, or control every last thought; sometimes, you just enjoy the ride. That doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to me for a comic book to be about.


Did I ever pitch you my idea for a yaoi Western called WOWBOYS?


GUS AND HIS GANG is divided into a series of shorter comics of varying length. I hope against hope that this is the sort of comic that’s featured by MAD MAGAZINE in France. You know how they have international editions of magazines like TIME? Is that true of MAD? Oh, how I wish MAD FRANCE were true.

American 4th grader, talking about latest issue of MAD: "The new issue, it’s like STAR WARS except Luke Skywalker is called Leaky Aircrutch. They really take the piss out of STAR WARS, man."


French 4th grader, talking about latest issue of MAD FRANCE: "Ahh, yes, the new issue is about a sexual cowboy. Sometimes, there is carnality, and yet sometimes, he is frustrated by his inability to understand women. But alas, life is sometimes like that. Let us smoke and think upon these things, then laugh as we must at the futility of trying to control our manhood. My greatest ambition in life is to become immortal, and then die."


Woman: "You have no values. With you, it’s all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm."

Woody: "Hey, in France, I could run for office with that slogan, and win!"

Labels: Abhay

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At the beginning of March, I spent a week living out of a hotel room.

Hotel-living turns into the fucking Shining for me pretty fast. Long creepy hallways of identical rooms, filled with strangers. Why are there so many pillows on hotel beds now? 9 pillows? 10 pillows? The classier the hotel, the more pillows on the bed. Occam’s Razor says that the logical conclusion is that fancy people like to play pillow fort on vacation. Plus, thanks to the Local Channel 6 News Action Eyewitness Investigation Squad-team on my TV, I’m convinced that if I had UV goggles, the entire room and all 20 pillows would all glow white-hot with fancy-man semen stains, like Tron bukkake aftermath.

After the hotel stay, I visited my hometown, stayed with my family. I was around My Stuff again, not Hotel Stuff. Not just My Stuff, but My Old Stuff. Found a stack of old comics, thirteen random comics from different years, different eras, slung together next to my bed, collecting dust.

I want to write about that stack. Not really "reviews" or anything that formal-- I don't see the point of "reviewing" any of these comics, but just talking about what books were in that stack. Plus there’s another stack, a second stack.


The Mighty Thor #382 by Walt Simonson and Sal Buscema: This was the very last issue of the Walt Simonson run. Thor's soul is trapped in the body of the invincible Destroyer robot, and he has to robot-fight his way through Hell in order to steal his dead body away from the Goddess of Death, in time to defeat an army of evil ice dwarves invading Asgard.

Do they still make comics like that? Maybe they do; I haven’t bought one recently.

In the letter pages, Sean of Tahoe, California, "a fan of legends", writes a letter in support of Thor's new beard. He is responding to a previous letter from an earlier letter column that disapproved of the beard.

Tank Girl 2 #1 by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett: A collection of short Tank Girl stories. They just cram jokes into the margins, nooks, crannies— it’s just filled with drawings and doodles and noodling. It still feel very alive. A lot of people don’t make that effort.

Suicide Squad #18 by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell, and Bob Lewis: After I quit Marvel comics in middle school, I eventually switched to DC. This was one of my first DC books; I got it from the 24-Hour Ameristop next to the chili place in town. The Suicide Squad fights some bad guys. Without even re-reading it, just by looking at the cover, I could remember at least one line from it: Captain Cold tells a bad guy how "Hell isn’t hot. Hell is cold, and buddy, I'm Captain Cold."

When I first got into DC Comics, everyone in them was a middle-aged failure at life. The Suicide Squad was all about Amanda Waller, an aging, widowed, morbidly obese bureaucrat. The Secret Origins story of Cave Carlson ends with one of Cave Carlson’s sidekicks, years after their adventures together, homeless and in a wheelchair, begging for change. The Atom was divorced, after he’d caught his wife cheating on him in the back of a Chevy. Captain Atom had a dead wife and kids he couldn’t relate to. The Swimmer would go from swimming pool to swimming pool, fighting crime. I don’t really understand DC characters any other way, I guess. DC books don’t make any sense to me, anymore.

The Last American #1 by Alan Grant, John Wagner and Mike McMahon: I don't really remember anything about this comic other than buying it for Mike McMahon's drawings, the way he builds drawings out of sharp lines, flat colors, off-kilter shapes. Lego humans, wandering through desolate post-apocalyptic landscapes.

Most of the comics I’ve read lately have just been that sort of “Art Experience” for me. When I got home from my trip, I returned back to a second stack of comics. I’ve been buying #1 issues this year, non-established-universe #1 issues, trying to get some whiff of what’s new in comics, what people making new things were trying to do. But: Jersey Gods (Image), The Great Unknown (Image), Mysterius the Unfathomable (Wildstorm), Bang Tango (Vertigo), The Life & Times of Savior 28 (IDW)…?

Couldn’t catch a scent of anything.

I’m not saying these are bad books necessarily (well: maybe some of them)(Bang Tango), just that my experience of them has been really art-focused. I guess I’ve been distracted. I've already forgotten every single one of Jersey Gods' characters; I just remember enjoying Dan McDaid's performance.

Jersey Gods is about Kirby-style Space Gods fighting in New Jersey; The Great Unknown is about an inventor whose ideas are being stolen from his mind; Mysterius the Unfathomable is about a magician who is a PG-13 asshole; Bang Tango is about a retired gangster who dances tango, who goes back to being a gangster; Life & Times of Saviour 28 is about a superhero who gets murdered while protesting the Bush Administration.

Some of the books are entertaining, for what they are. Mysterius seems focused on “fun” in a very professional way, and in a way I think most people will find effective; I think smart people trying to create fun stories is at least admirable in theory-- it's something I've always enjoyed about the Ocean's 11 movies, say. Et cetera. Sure: entertainment, if you’re in the mood to be entertained.

I just didn't feel very connected to any of them regardless.

American Flagg #3 by Howard Chaykin and Ken Bruzenak: Aaah-- Chaykin, lingerie, blowjobs, Ken Bruzenak lettering, and violence, all for a single U.S. dollar.

But more than that—the way a comic can contain a whole world. You can see signs in the background, you can see what people are wearing, you can see the brand-names of their junk food. The characters in FLAGG, I know what they watch on TV: Bob Violence. The name of the cab company in WATCHMEN? Prometheus Cabs.

Who does that needlepoint right now?

The new comics I’ve read-- none really created an entire world for themselves. Jersey Gods tried but its first issue cribbed so heavily from Jack Kirby that it was hard to take it very seriously as its own thing. But I can’t really criticize all of these new books for failing to tell me their main characters' favorite TV show, can I? That sort of world-building seems rare in general, so singling these books out in particular strikes me as unfair.

X-Men Classics #98 by Chris Claremont, John Romita Jr., Glynis Oliver, Dan Green: Before I’d ever seen an X-Men Comic, or had any idea what one was, another kid in third grade attempted to describe the contents of this issue to me. Do you have any idea how long it took him? “The X-Men fight Nimrod” takes somewhere between nine hours and forever to explain to someone who’d never heard of a mutant, Rogue, Wolverine, Sentinels, Days of Future Past, any of it. Now, you can just rent the movie.

Someday, I would like to travel back in time and give both of those kids wedgies. Then: I'd put them in a figure four leg-lock or a camel clutch, and I'd explain to them that they were gebronies. Then, dangle them over a cliff until they wet themselves, you know like Bill Paxton in True Lies. Then, I would explain sexual intercourse to them because I think at that age, it'd really gross them out and it'd just be super-funny to see their expressions. Plus, I would throw in stuff like vagina dentata or nekomimi fetishes or docking or whatever, just to screw them up a little mentally, you know, for giggles. Then, if I had time, and I wasn't tired, I'd go back in time and murder Hitler and prevent the Holocaust or whatever. But first: beating up those little brats. Priorities.

The last panel of this comic is my favorite-- a Russian with an eyepatch says "We are fast approaching a crossroads, Sasha. And I fear that somewhere, somehow, the decision has already been made...to turn us irrevocably towards Armageddon."

I’m about 100% sure this is how every single issue of the X-men ended in the 1980’s.

Tribe #1 by Todd Johnson and Larry Stroman: this was a black superhero team by Larry Stroman at the peak of his comic career, published by Image Comics near the peak of its fanboy-dominance. 1993. The cover is black cardstock with the Tribe logo in gold-embossed letters. No art-- just the gold-embossed letters. Stroman and Johnson's names are almost bigger than the title of the book. According to Wikipedia, it was cancelled by Image before the second issue came out, because it had been delayed so much. According to Wikipedia, its final issue was issue #0.

If you explained the 90's to a kid reading comics today, do you think they would believe you?

Jinx True Crime Confessions by Brian Michael Bendis: Bendis creates a comic around a series of monologues and interviews, people talking about violence they've witnessed, pranks they've pulled. I think this is reprinted in the Total Sell-Out trade.

The selling point aren’t any characters; it has no characters. The selling point is just Bendis. The old Jinx books were just so packed with entertainment value-- letter pages, reviews, short humor strips from his Cleveland newspaper strip. That’s not really true of any of the books in my New #1 Comics stack. Everyone’s trying to make their stories the stars; no one seems very interested in communicating anything about themselves instead. Only Jersey Gods even has a letter page, and it’s not exactly rich with personality...

I doubt this one-shot would ever get made today, but it’s not like comics have ever really been set up to sell books like this. Plus: not many people seem interested in making stuff like this anyways, comics that are just entertaining without trying to sell some new character / concept / bullshit.

Stray Bullets #3 by Dave Lapham: This issue is titled "The Party," but it doesn’t have Lapham’s best party scene in it. For that, you want issue #5, the first Orson issue. But I remember when this comic first started coming out being so excited, going out-of-my-head excited, that the page numbers continued from issue to issue. You know, how if issue #2 ended at page 45, then issue #3 started at page 46...? Oh, man!

It's a strange detail to be excited by but I think a lot of people overlook how much those little details can matter for fans. The letter page in the old Bendis Jinx comics, the page numbers in Stray Bullets, the lettering in American Flagg-- just some hint that there's something going on, some extra bit of work being invested.

The new comics I’ve seen? Can I really tell any of them apart? The Great Unknown has a one-color all-blue color scheme, but even that’s becoming a thing now, maybe.

I tried Dave Lapham’s Vertigo book Young Liars again a couple weeks back, issue #13 (“The Rock Life”). I hadn’t thought much of the first issue, but the new issue had some Twilight Zone moments that were somewhat appealing. The premise apparently went in more of a science fiction direction than the first issue had promised. I didn’t think the first issue had promised anything with any particularity, at all.

Which: maybe that’s true of the other new comics I’ve read recently-- maybe they’re holding back some key part of their DNA. Reading past a first issue is essentially a leap of faith. One I’m making less often.

I went to a screening of a documentary about Joe Sedelmaier the other day. Yes, THE Joe Sedelmaier. At the Q&A afterwards, he said two things that stuck out. First, talking about the work he'd created that he hadn't felt good about, he said "I always said 'Oh-oh' when someone said to me, 'Joe, it's good for what it is.' If something's 'good for what it is', what it is is usually bullshit." I laughed and thought of Mysterius the Unfathomable. The second thing he said, before introducing a (terrific) short film he'd made: "It's about the importance of having an open mind. Everyone thinks they have an open mind, the same way everyone thinks they have a sense of humor. Usually, they don't have either." I didn't really laugh at that.

Instant Piano #1 by Kyle Baker, Mark Badger, Robbie Busch, Stephen Destefano and Evan Dorkin: This was a very uneven issue of a comedy anthology. Some comedic voices blend together well; these guys, not so much-- everyone's voices were just too different. I remember the second issue being much better, but the series didn’t last very long. Dorkin still makes comics, too rarely; Destefano works on the Venture Bros. now, I think; I don’t know what happened to Badger or Busch, though both have blogs, of course.

Challengers of the Unknown #2 by Steven Grant, Len Kaminski, John Paul Leon, Shawn Martinbrough, and Matt Hollingsworth: Aaah, John Paul Leon working with Matt Hollingsworth-- why doesn’t that happen every week?

This was in a brief era in comics in the mid-90's when everyone was trying to recreate the success of the X-Files television show. DC's solution was a Challengers of the Unknown revamp. I enjoyed it at the time—Grant & Kaminski did done-in-one “weird mystery” stories that Leon & Hollingsworth were suited for more than would always be the case in their later assignments.

But living in something else’s shadow never makes much sense in the long term. I’m no expert on positioning, but-- you know: as fun as Dan McDaid’s art is (and it’s fun), as hard as they try, can Jersey Gods ever be anything besides “that book trying to be Jack Kirby”? Jersey Gods is about Kirby; tango-dancing aside Bang Tango’s first issue didn’t promise anything besides cliched pulp crime fiction; Mysterius is about a Mandrake/Doctor-Who type character; Life & Times of Saviour 28 will likely be compared unfavorably to the current storyline in Captain America, let alone any number of other superhero "deconstruction" stories. An argument can be made here on behalf of The Great Unknown. The Great Unknown at least doesn’t feel assembled from a pop culture erector set, at least. Which isn't to say it succeeds at the whole character/dialogue/plot thing, but...

Of course, The Walking Dead perhaps started out owing some debt to George Romero; Casanova owes a debt to, well, plenty; Umbrella Academy probably pays some small licensing fee to Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol. I don’t know. There’s an expression that “bad artists copy; great artists steal.”

Casual Heroes #1 by Kevin McCarthy: This was a weirdly well-remembered celebrity superhero riff-- very fondly remembered by the few people who caught on to it, though glancing at it now, I don't really know why. The celebrity superhero riff has become old hat since this first came out; maybe it was fresher then. There were rumors that Kevin McCarthy was making comics again a few years back, but I don’t know what became of them.

Super Powers #4 by Jack Kirby, Joey Cavalieri, and Adrian Gonzales: This is terrible shit, a 10-cent bin gamble that never paid off. Jack Kirby draws a cro-magnon Superman fighting the Justice League on the cover, but nothing inside remotely pays off on the promise of that.

Adrian Gonzales draws the interiors. The cover sold the book, though. Jack Kirby. I went with the Jack Kirby hardcover LOSERS collection this week. I’d never seen any of his LOSERS comics, but I love the Kirby HOWLING COMMANDO comics. I'm only a couple issues in; so far, the Losers aren’t quite as cheerfully violent as the Howling Commandos. I like Kirby’s war comics for the violence, but I have a hard time putting the fact that he served in the war out of my head. Kirby almost lost limbs to frostbite, but could still make happy-go-lucky comics about the Losers saving a classical pianist from the Nazis...? These sugary candy-coated explosion-fantasies. But, you know, Lee Marvin made The Dirty Dozen. It's sort of amazing, sort of odd.

According to wikipedia, Kirby’s wife Roz worked in a lingerie store during the war. I’d never read that before today. What were lingerie stores like during World War 2? I never really thought about World War 2 era lingerie stores before, what that shopping experience must have been like.

“Dateline: Normandy. Jerry's nowhere to be found now that our boys landed on their shores. Goodbye, Jerry, say hello to St. Peters. Dateline: New York. Sale on Crotchless Bustiers brings Broadway to its knees-- the bee’s knees. Why, is that Vivian Leigh buying a chiffron babydoll with faux fur trimmed cups, satin bow, and g-string? Those leathers corsets she's buying provide as much support for her, as Liberty war bonds provide support for our boys. Our March to War has been silky smooth thanks to pink-satin corsets with removable straps. What’s that? Francis is getting in on the action, buying a spaghetti-strap fishnet crotchless bodystocking with low-cut, criss-cross backstraps? Thatta boy, Francis! You know who doesn’t likes Lace Deep-V Teddies? That’s right: Adolf Hitler.” Oh god, I could do this all weekend...

And weren’t they rationing fabrics during the war? Was lingerie during World War 2 made out of, what, potatoes? Sex potatoes? I’m guessing Jack Kirby's wife didn't sell very sexy lingerie. Deal with that opinion, nerds. Savage critics.

Anyways, right: comic books. I guess I gave up on my whole first issue plan. It just wasn’t leading me anywhere interesting, and I'm having a better time sticking with Jack Kirby. Same as everybody, I really enjoyed Boom Studios' and Roger Langridge's MUPPET SHOW #1-- I'm not made out of stone. Same as everybody, I liked that they didn't do some "Muppets have a Charles Dickens adventure in Space" bullshit but stuck with the Muppets at their most entertaining: theater-nerds trying to put on a show.

Past that, I’m not finding anything that means anything to me. Whatever inspired these creators to create these particular books, I didn't share in that feeling when I read them. But: I didn't give any of them much of a chance either. If I'm honest about it, I don't think I did. Everyone thinks they're open-minded but... And I don't know why that's the case, why I wouldn't be receptive to what they're selling. They're nerdy books? Well, I'm a nerdy guy so that should be an okay marriage. But: not so much. And it's disconcerting. It’s like being in a hotel-- you’re surrounded by this stuff, and it’s like, “Bed” or “Table”, stuff you like in theory. But they're not right. There’s something not right about them. There’s too many pillows.

Labels: Abhay

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In the coming weeks, it’s probable that much will be written about Bryan Lee O’Malley’s SCOTT PILGRIM Volume #5. It is EXCELLENT. This has been said with every installment, but: Volume #5 is the best written, most confidently executed installment of the series yet. Every comic, every success story attracts its share of Grinches-- you know, it’s pretty fun to be that Grinch. But Volume #5 makes me so enormously sad for SCOTT PILGRIM's Grinches. What a terrible fate that must be, to lack the capacity to enjoy this book. You've made terrible choices in life.

So: I'm gushy sweaty spazzy about this book, basically-- not a state of mind where anything I can write is well-advised or likely to be helpful to you. But I noticed something in a few other reviews that had bothered me, something that I felt had been overlooked.

Most of those reviews had focused on Volume 5 in light of how it developed the stories of Scott Pilgrim, Ramona Flowers, Kim Pine, Knives Chau, and/or Wallace Wells.

Why aren’t people talking about Young Neil?

Because, holy shit, dude: Young Neil!

* * * * * *

Spoilers, severe spoilers ahead.

I know there have been supply shortages and lines and screw-ups at Diamond. I know buying this comic book apparently resembles buying toilet paper in the old USSR in multiple ways for a great many of you out there, and I sincerely don’t want to spoil this episode for anyone. Because there is so very much to spoil. For example: the scene where Scott Pilgrim has sex with a hooker to restore his health and then murders her (just like in video-games!). Don't let anyone spoil that scene for you. Or the scene where Kim Pine takes off her pants and reveals her penis, Shiwasu No Okina style (it’s manga influenced!). Once these scenes are spoiled for you via textual summary, there is no un-spoiling them from your mind.

So, please be certain that I will 100% spoil this comic for you, if you read ahead, even though I’m focusing on Young Neil who you might (incorrectly) think is not a major character in the series.

* * * * * *

SCOTT PILGRIM has never been a series without flaws. For example, in two words: vegan police. And if someone were to tell me that they couldn’t enjoy the series on account of the extent to which it’s saturated in crap culture-- well, I wouldn’t be upset by that. I don't imagine the book’s use of video-game tropes, anime nods, etc. is for everyone, even though I happen to be personally amused by those elements. The most emotional moment of the Vol. 5, the departure of Ramona Flowers, vaguely recalls the worst moments of shitty anime like DNA-Squared or … I don’t even want to know what. Some people might not be able to get past that.

But I think SCOTT PILGRIM fans might agree that anyone complaining too much about those elements is underestimating how relatable the characters are, and as importantly, how there are multiple characters to relate to. In other words, I understand if you don't know what a Super Mario Brother is, but were you really never aimless and selfish in your 20's? Lucky you.

In her book Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (or as most comic book critics call it, The Bible), Susan Douglas discusses how the success of the girl bands of the 1960's can be attributed to how they allowed girls of that generation to "try on" different sexual identities, whether the troubling thrills of dating the bad boy of Leader of the Pack or the hopeful uncertainty of the Shirelle's Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

I've always thought SCOTT PILGRIM likely owed its success to that same quality-- that it didn’t merely randomly reflect some temporary spasm of the zeitgeist, that it’s not some fluke of particles colliding in a vacuum, but that its success can be tracked to how SCOTT PILGRIM fills a different vacuum, a vacuum for cartoon characters, modern cartoon characters, that speak to life experiences other cartoon characters can’t and/or historically haven’t.

Younger fans can see themselves in Knives Chau as much as Ramona Flowers, in Wallace Wells as much as Scott Pilgrim. But the true facts are that many of us, maybe even most of us, aren’t the heroes of any story. We face no thrilling battles; our romances are not action-adventures. Our presence or absence makes no difference to the world around us, maybe even the majority of the people around us.


Many of us are Young Neil.

* * * * * *

Volume 1 is the heyday for Young Neil. He's Stephen Stills's roommate, Sex Bob-Omb's only fan (besides Knives Chau). But by Volume 3, it's over. It's all over Young Neil before he even knew it. He’s expelled from his group of friends for offenses he barely knew he committed.

Well, that’s an overstatement: dating a friend’s ex without the proper hesitation or consideration isn’t a minor offense; you know: ignorance of the law is no excuse. But surely he paid for his crimes! Look at the poor guy.


He thought he might get laid, and instead he's ending the night watching a girl who’s all wrong for him randomly crying for reasons he can't guess. At least, when I look at that scene, based on my life experience? She’s crying. I know: the fact he’s drawn with his heart literally on his sleeve is pretty overt, but… the poor son of a bitch.

I re-read the series on Tuesday, in anticipation for Volume 5. What does it say of my life experience that the thing I most related to in the entire goddamn series was Young Neil and the crying girl? Oh, right: it says I need to change my fucking life. Thank you, Internet. You are a comfort as always.

It was my first time through the books since I'd first read any of them. Probably my first time noticing Young Neil as anything besides comic relief. I hadn't paid attention to Young Neil before. But that's sort of the whole point of Young Neil, I think: because neither do his friends. Young Neil is just there. Until he's not.

Until finally, in Volume 5, there's Young Neil and he's in a dirty room, completely alienated from the people who he used to think (incorrectly) were his friends, just spending a day getting high and listening to music. Move over, crying girl: I now have a new “Scene I Relate to the Most” winner.

How did he end up there? It wasn’t that his friends ever sat down and decided to hate Young Neil in the prior books. They just didn’t care. I’ve done to that people. It’s, I don’t know-- it’s easy. And I’ve had it done to me. That was … well, less easy.

* * * * * *

It’s a tough book, the SCOTT PILGRIM Volume 5, with no shortage of bleak scenes for fans who’ve grown attached to these characters. My favorite scene in the book is the bus station scene, and the simplicity of its dialogue-- for me, it called to mind one of my all-time favorite movie scenes, the Bill Murray “She’s my Rushmore” scene that begins the winter stretch of Wes Anderson’s RUSHMORE. There's something so powerful to watching an apology, and yet they seem so precious and rare in our fiction. Why do we always want to watch people fighting? Fights are brief; regrets take longer. What the hell is wrong with us, like, as a species?

Tribute must also be paid obviously to Volume 5's sex scene, a sad and wildly un-erotic scene. God, look at it. The last sex, the goodbye sex? It’s a sex scene in silhouette. It’s a sex scene that neither of the characters are actually PRESENT for. Just the shape of them in the technically correct poses. Crikey.

So, no, sir, there’s no shortage of scenes to feel horrible about relating to in SCOTT PILGRIM Vol. 5. But I would argue to you that the final Young Neil scene in the book is not in any way less than those others, is in fact one of the hardest scenes to sit through if you have any affinity for that character (which you should).

* * * * * *



My theory is you don’t become less of an asshole when you get older. You just learn to hide it more. But setting that little future Hallmark card aside…

There’s Young Neil at the end of book 5, angry at Ramona, lashing out at Stephen Stills. And there’s Ramona not even pretending to care. And it’s strange and I don’t understand it. You take any close group of friends, and just add time. It’s as if by some magical clock, everyone wakes up one day and decides to start hurting each other. And I wish I could say I’ve only seen it just the once, or that I knew why it happened. What is that exactly? What is the explanation for that? Why do we so persistently do that to each other?

SCOTT PILGRIM seems to subscribe to the same explanation for it that I had in my 20’s, that ancient Latin graffiti of “Penis erectus non compos mentis” (a stiff prick knows no conscience). Stephen Stills betrays Scott Pilgrim’s confidences on account of his crush on Knives; Young Neil’s rejection by Knives didn’t seem to help, etc. Oh, barely legal Asian ladies: is there nothing good you can’t destroy!


But: that's just what I thought in my 20's. I don't think that anymore, though I haven't replaced that hypothesis with anything more considered. It just seems like too pat an answer; I don’t think it explains enough. Even if you could take stiff prick out of the equation, somehow, by some evil voodoo magic, I still maintain that even then, even assuming such a frightening & unpleasant premise, that you’d see that same exact phenomena repeat itself endlessly. What the hell is wrong with us, like, as a species?

Extra-reason why the Young Neil scene is great: volume 4 closes with all of the SCOTT PILGRIM cast around a restaurant table, laughing. Can you see them all together like that after the Young Neil scene in volume 5? The Young Neil scene is great because it makes scenes in earlier books retroactively sad. Goddamn, Young Neil! Goddamn!

* * * * * *

Bryan Lee O'Malley from 2007: "I actually kind of like most of my characters. There’s this character named Young Neil that I kind of don’t like drawing because his hair goes in his eyes. So he has no eyebrows. So it’s really hard to give him facial expressions. So he always looks kind of dopey. Sometimes he has to not look dopey, but maybe I should try writing him so he’s always like that."

* * * * * *

But if Young Neil is an asshole-- and in that final scene with Ramona, he absolutely is, well you can at least see how he got that way, book by book, scene by scene. I would argue that Young Neil in Volume 5 is as sad, as heartbreaking as anything in the book. So much of Volume 5 is about Scott gradually awakening to the fact that as he's had his epic story of growing up, everyone around him has had their own (the shout-out to Jason Kim is especially welcome in that regard).

With Young Neil, as much as is the case with Ramona, Kim Pine, whoever, the threat is that Scott might be waking up to that fact too late.

He’ll get a second chance in Book 6, which I look forward to, which I'm eager to read. But many of us don’t have that opportunity; will never have that opportunity. Absent friends. Friends who are no longer tethered to this, our mortal coil. All the people we’ll never see again. And I don’t know how I can end a review of SCOTT PILGRIM Vol. 5 other than saying I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so sorry.

Labels: Abhay

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Tom Spurgeon interviews Abhay as part of his ridiculously good Holiday Interview series.

Go read it here.

-B

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So, with the eighth and final issue of SECRET INVASION now in hand, we’ve come finally to my favorite part.

Not the ending of SECRET INVASION. The endings of crossovers are always lousy. The end of CIVIL WAR? Terrible ending. WORLD WAR HULK— I have no memory whatsoever of how that ended, and that’s a series I liked. INFINITE CRISIS— I still don't understand the end of that series. RETURN OF THE JEDI— the Jedi wake up next to Bob Newhart from the THE BOB NEWHART SHOW...?

No, my favorite part is spoiler-dodgin'.

Marvel asks readers for, what, $32 (if not far more) for a crossover, by repeatedly promising them an ending that changes things… forever. But if you give them your money, they do everything in their power to spoil the ending of the story for you. So then the fun part is: will you get any shred of your money’s worth or will they manage to spoil every single possible thing for you before that happens?

Certain parts, there’s no avoiding. If you’re a comic fan, there was really no avoiding the fact this series ends with the “Dark Reign” starting. Which means— look: it more likely than not means the bad guys win in some fashion or another at the end of SECRET INVASION #8. But we don’t know the precise mechanism by which they win— well, except that it very heavily involves Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin. They spoiled that in THUNDERBOLTS back in November. But— okay— but the precise mechanism by which Norman Osborn is the conduit for evil winning? That’s kind-of sort-of still a mystery, right?

See, that’s the fun part. Marvel tries to spoil that, too! It’s only a mystery unless you read the New York Times. Because they put an article in the New York Times the day the issue was released, to make sure the ending got spoiled. The New York Times doesn’t cover just anything— Marvel had publicity personnel work very hard to have that story placed. Worked hard to have it placed on Wednesday, and not on a Thursday when none of us would be spoiled. After all: by Thursday, the nonsensical events transpiring in an imaginary universe to fake people would no longer be “breaking news.”

So really: the most suspenseful— strike that, the only suspenseful part of SECRET INVASION for me was this last week: Would all of #8 get spoiled or just most of it? Fun!

Let’s give Marvel some credit, though: Marvel’s only able to spoil the end of SECRET INVASION because they can understand it. DC would have loved to spoil the end of BATMAN RIP, but they’d have to understand what happened at the end. And as far as I can tell, nobody does. The issue after Batman is killed by Satan / his Father / some actor (?) / a helicopter that he punched too hard (!)(!)(!), he’s trapped in a machine by alien gods from the god dimension and forced to relive For the Man Who Has Everything outtakes.

What? What in the fuck? How do you conceivably spoil that?? DC has no idea! They don’t understand it anymore than anyone else.

***

Let’s just get this over with. I wish I could tell you I had anything big and elaborate planned for this final installment, but: I really just want this to be over. I just want this to be over. It’s my most sincere desire for this to be over. This? Over? Yes, please.

*************************************



The status quo prior to SECRET INVASION: a force for evil had infiltrated the very heart of the Marvel universe, and were threatening to bring down the Marvel heroes from the inside. Who can the Marvel heroes trust?

The status quo after SECRET INVASION: oh my god, guys! A force for evil has infiltrated the very heart of the Marvel universe! It’s threatening to bring down the Marvel heroes from the inside! Who can the Marvel heroes trust?

Just tell me who to hand my money to. $4 an issue in a deflationary economy? Sold! No Whammies No Whammies No Whammies!

***

The best line in this entire damn series belongs to Joe Quesada in his afterword: “The surprises in store lie in every corner of the Marvel Universe during DARK REIGN. Who are the DARK AVENGERS? … [H]ow far down can these villains actually get when given greater power? … How will Hank Pym deal with the loss of his beloved ex-wife?”

SECRET INVASION literally did not get more entertaining than that sentence during its entire run.

***

The first half of this comic is just…

The issue starts with the Wasp increasing in size, thereby causing black dots to erupt onto the other characters. The black dots cause pain. There’s a narrator during this scene, but even the narrator can’t come up with any explanation whatsoever as to what’s going on in this scene. Then, we’re told “There was Only One Way to Stop It.”

What was that one way? Seriously: I don’t know. What was that one way? Can anyone even understand what’s happening in this scene? I can’t. Did Thor kill her to save everyone else? That would have been a cool thing to happen— is that what happened? I can’t even make out what was happening.

Blah blah blah: so, the Wasp is dead. Which— at least something has finally happened in this series!! I'll take what I can get.

Then, Spider-Skrull-Woman-Queen wakes up from having been killed in the last issue, so that the greatest heroes in the Marvel universe can unite to kill her again. However, while last issue she was shot in the head by an arrow, this issue she’s shot in the head with a ray gun. The guy who shoots her with a ray gun is a hero to the entire world and gets a Cabinet-level position with the government, while the guy who shot her in the head with the arrow is promptly ignored by the public.

Kids thus learn a valuable lesson about heroism: nobody think it’s heroic to shoot a woman in the head with a bow & arrow; they only think it’s heroic to shoot a woman in the head with a ray gun.

(This is all really incredibly bizarre material politically, and the only thing that makes me comfortable with this series is my deep and abiding belief that comic creators, publishers, and fans are so divorced from the real world around them that they literally have no clue that what they’re creating, publishing and/or reading is completely and totally batshit fucking crazy. I don’t even want to talk about it. No joke, it makes me genuinely uncomfortable.)

***

The rest of the issue? Nothing much happens. Last issue’s cliffhanger involving the Jarvis Skrull threatening a baby, like every cliffhanger in the series, leads absolutely nowhere. Didn't the Jarvis Skrull get exploded by Maria Hill in issue #5? Don't sweat the details.

Various characters come back from the dead, including my favorite character of the series— the LED lights from issue #1.

Finally, Barack Obama (?) puts the Green Goblin in charge of the Government, and Dark Reign starts on the last double-page spread.

"Dark Reign" is just a plain old Masters-of-Evil story. They JLA-ized the Masters of Evil. It's an idea, I guess— I'm not continuity-savvy enough to tell you whether it's been done to death before or not.

There are six Masters of Evil. I was able to identify four of them: Emma Frost, Doctor Doom, Norman Osborn, and Loki. There’s also Namor and the Hood who I didn’t recognize because they’re colored red for… some reason…?

***

So, the big game-changer, the big change in status quo for the Marvel Universe: before SECRET INVASION, there were eight incarnations of the Masters of Evil in the Marvel Universe, and now after SECRET INVASION, there are now nine incarnations.

Truly, the Marvel Universe will never be the same.

Kids today are lucky. In my day, we didn’t have nine incarnations of Masters of Evil. We could only fantasize what a ninth incarnation would look like, with only the prior eight incarnations and the North star to guide us. Kids today don’t know how good they have it.

***


Points to Leinil Yu and Mark Morales, though, for including Elvis on the Skrull ship, in the distant background. I'm an easy mark on a "Elvis isn't dead" joke.

Nice work on the series from those two— especially, on the double page spreads. Personally, I thought they nailed a whole heck a lot of those. We can say that they handled some moments better than others— e.g. I personally was never too taken by their outer space stuff. But like I tried to mention last time: they delivered a quality product on a timely basis. It’d be a damn foolish thing not to have some appreciation for that, in this day and age. Marvel fans should be hoisting these guys on their shoulders anytime they leave their house.

I gave it a sort of re-read. Skimming through the entire series beginning to end, issue 1 to issue 8. It only took about 5 minutes to skim through it.

Conclusions: It’ll be okay enough for trade readers, I suppose, who will pay less and not have to read the series over an 8 month period. Parts of the story won’t work at the trade level, either, though. Anything involving Captain Marvel and Marvel Boy should have been left to spin-offs as those parts went especially nowhere. The trade will work fine as a shallow character-free action comic.

I just don’t know how to judge that or what to make of it. Does it mean anything to you that the trade will be okay? It doesn’t endear me to the work any more that it succeeds at that level, but it’s at least worth acknowledging, I suppose.

I think the key issue has been the timing. For an 8-9 month event, each issue has been shallow and slow. If they could have found a way to squeeze all of this into 4 months, maybe this would have worked out pretty well despite all of its narrative problems. It’d have still been flawed, but the flaws would have come fast enough and often enough that the reader might have stopped caring. 8 months is just too damn long to live with this many flaws and this little substance, though. I guess sales have been good, and fans are happy, but to me... to me, 8 months is a very long time. I don't see how you can expect anyone to sustain their enthusiasm for 8 months. But I have commitment issues, maybe, so...

***

So: what are the “story possibilities” that the new Masters of Evil generate exactly?

Maybe I’m not understanding but isn’t it really just a question of when and how the Masters of Evil’s existence gets revealed? Once somebody goes “Hey, the Masters of Evil are in charge of everything,” isn’t the story over? Which- how long does it take for that to happen if two of the Masters of Evil are good guys? How evil can they get without Namor or Emma Frost stamping down on the brakes?

Or- I'm confused how much damage Norman Osborn is supposed to be able to do just because he runs ... whatever it is that he runs. Is Captain America going to start eating babies because Norman Osborn says so? Would Captain America eat a baby from the feet towards the head, or do you think he'd start from the baby head and eat towards the feet? If Norman Osborn made us all eat babies, I think most of us would eat from the feet towards the head because we'd want to put off realizing that we were eating a baby until the last possible moment. I know I certainly wouldn't start at the head, like some kind of fucking pervert. But Captain America? He fought in the War and probably ate all sorts of crazy stuff while he was wandering around World War 2 era Europe during the winter. I'm thinking Captain America would want to just get it over with because all the time spent playing with his food? Hey, brother, that's time that he could spend fighting for his country. I think he would start at the head and goes towards the feet, but in his case, not because he's some kind of weirdo, but because he's a fucking hero. (Bucky or Steve Rogers Cap; I don't think there would be any difference between the two when it comes to baby-eating).

It seems like they’re angling towards putting together an espionage/conspiracy thriller for the Marvel universe, some kind of "chess match"-y type thing. That could work, I suppose, but… I'm having a hard time seeing how they're not going to tread dangerously close to Roger Ebert's Idiot Plot territory every step of the way, based upon the characters they've chosen.

Am I misreading the situation? Is there any series that people are looking forward to coming out of this? Are people excited?

***

I am so happy this series is done. I am so happy this series is done. But look: it’s not completely the series’ fault. You’re not supposed to read series like how I read this one, with the essays or the hooplah or the thinking about it or the hoping it’d be any good or the expecting anything to happen—anything at all! I’m like the boyfriend who’s “suffocating.” Me and the Marvel Universe just need some space. A lot of space. So much space. The more space, the better.

What happens next for me? I’m going to clean up my apartment, wash my hair, and then get started writing reviews of the new issue of HUSTLER MAGAZINE. I’ve decided that from now on, I’m going to only write reviews of hard-core pornography magazines for this blog.

HOLY SHIT: LAST-MINUTE TWIST ENDING!

Comics used to be a passion before SECRET INVASION, but as you can see that didn’t really work out. But luckily, I have a passion for vaginas.

Here’s a taste of what you can look forward to in 2009:

HUSTLER’S ASIAN FEVER #1: while the cover of ASIAN FEVER (NSFW) promises a “Penetrating Premiere Issue”, it turns out this is a gross overstatement. In terms of insight into either the topic of Asians or the topic of Fevers, very little is offered that would qualify as "penetrating." Why, I hate to say it but this magazine is barely even literate! Instead, Mr. Flynt seems to have intended “penetrating” to be a mere double entendre for sexual penetration involving an erect “penis.” Come on, Mr. Flynt: aren’t we a little old for that sort of low-brow humor? I wish ASIAN FEVER would expect more of its readers. On the other hand, boobies. Very good.

THE SAVAGE CRITIC WEBSITE WILL NEVER, EVER, NEVER NEVER BE THE SAME, NEVER. Except it still won’t update very often. We’re sticking with that.

Labels: Abhay

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I.

Starting in April 2008, the SAVAGE CRITIC website began to bring you a five-part series on the cancellation of BLUE BEETLE. It “technically” hadn’t “happened” yet. “Technically”, BLUE BEETLE was only canceled on November 12th, but...


It wasn't exactly difficult to predict.

And suddenly, last week: our little corner of the internet spasmed. Suddenly: I’m not alone. All sorts of people were asking themselves: “Why didn’t BLUE BEETLE succeed?” And their answers involved things being shoved into asses! I’m not alone, universe! I’m not alone!

So... This one’s going to be extra ramble-y. Sorry.

II.

Before the blog post which received some attention last week, the book’s author, John Rogers posted an earlier statement to his (actually, otherwise quite entertaining) blog, a sort of recap of his intent as the writer of BLUE BEETLE:

We wanted to establish a new superhero for younger readers, and add a different viewpoint to the DCU. Something you could give your 12 year old nephew to read without first forcing him to complete a degree in DC Continuity. A lot of people hated us, then some of them liked us, and then some of them loved us ... while a lot of people still hated us. Those people can go pound sand and collect Final Crisis variant covers.

Let’s begin by seeing if we should go pound sand and collect Final Crisis variant covers. Let’s pound out a single issue of the series, issue #16 of the BLUE BEETLE series. Just so we’re all on the same page as to what it was exactly that got cancelled.

Issue #16 is very near the end of the series (if not the technical final issue of publication). The series’ story concludes in issue 25; it just kept getting published past that point.

So: a rock crawled up young Jamie Reyes’s ass and turned him into the Blue Beetle. In issue #13, Blue Beetle learns that the rock was a device from an alien empire named The Reach. At first, the Reach pretend to be “good guys”, but the book abandons this idea within that issue and reveals that they’re evil immediately, rather than create or maintain any sort of suspense. However, the rest of the world is unaware that the Reach is evil, as the Reach has approached the governments of Earth promising aid & assistance.

A reader might expect this to be a source of tension & conflict in future issues. Nope, not at all: that reader should go pound sand and collect Final Crisis variant covers! Aliens invading Earth-- what’s the logical next thing to happen?


Eclipso opens us up. To the wonders of interpretive dance. FAME, I’M GOING TO LIVE FOREVER-- LIGHT UP THE SKY WITH MY NAME-- FAME! So, for the 12 year old nephews: who is Eclipso?


Dear Joss Whedon, Please go back in time and prevent your own existence, perhaps by seducing your own mother at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. Very truly yours, Me After Having Read BLUE BEETLE. P.s. Would Willow make out with me even though she turned all gay at the end? I hope so. XOXOXO.

Say: Who’s that talking and explaining all of this? It’s Blue Beetle’s brand-new romantic interest, Traci 13, introduced to BLUE BEETLE readers for the first time in issue #16.


Things I Don’t Know To This Day: (a) who this character is, (b) who created this character, (c) if this character is featured in any other DC comic, (d) what other characters she hangs out with, (e) who the “Croato—Uh, some detectives” are, and (f) what love feels like.

The issue begins with Eclipso fighting Traci 13, who is wielding the “stolen Staff of Arion”, a reference to a supporting character debuting in 1982 in the series WARLORD. This will be exciting for your 12-year old nephew, provided that your 12-year old nephew was born in 1970.

To help in the fight, Traci 13 recruits Blue Beetle. Together, they discover that Eclipso has strung up members of the Posse like the victims of the aliens in Aliens, using some kind of sadness-goo. Blue Beetle uses his powers to free them from the sadness-goo that’s holding them.

Blue Beetle, Traci 13 and Blue Beetle’s friend Paco then confront Eclipso. Paco saves the baby, and Traci 13 defeats Eclipso. The issue ends with Traci 13 and Blue Beetle holding each other, presumably to start making out once the comic fades to black. Despite the fact that Blue Beetle mentioned vomiting earlier in the issue. As soon as this comic is over, Traci 13 is going to shove her tongue into Blue Beetle’s vomit mouth, and taste the flavor of his upchuck. I think this will be a huge turn-on for your 12 year old nephew, in so far as he’s probably into some pretty weird-ass kinky shit that I’m not even hip to. You know: like, stuff involving boners, basically.

***

What was the story told by issue #16?

You could argue that the story of this issue is “Blue Beetle gets a girlfriend by being heroic.” But the problem with that interpretation: Blue Beetle never acts heroically once in the issue. Not once. The only thing he does the entire issue is defeat some sadness-goo. Which— hell-naw, if wiping away sadness-goo was enough to get you laid, I got a tube sock that’s Wilt Chamberlain. Furthermore, that interpretation ignores page 21. Page 21 needs to be shown in whole…


So, your 12 year old nephew is now supposed to understand that:

1) This is a reference to the DC character, the Elongated Man, a former Justice League member who dates back to 1960.

2) Traci 13 was apparently raised by the Elongated Man and his wife Sue Dibny.

3) Sue Dibny was murdered by Jean Loring, the Silver Age ex-wife of the Atom.

4) Jean Loring became Eclipso in some issue of something sometime, for some reason. I don’t know when or why myself, but that apparently happened.

This issue is all about the character of Traci 13 and her revenge on Jean Loring / Eclipso for the events of 2004’s IDENTITY CRISIS (which your 12 year old nephew would love since it’s wall-to-wall rape and dead pregnant women).

HOW DID THIS COMIC EVER GET CANCELED???

***

Allow me to head off a counter-argument: I didn’t pick a bad issue from the run on purpose, to make my point. I picked an issue involving two ladies having a sexy catfight. I didn’t pick an issue to make BLUE BEETLE look bad-- this was the part of the B-movie montage where Kato Kaelin starts up a bonfire in the background, and Trishelle from Real World: Las Vegas takes off her top, and George Perez and I high-five. It’s all fucking downhill from #16.

***

Here’s the bigger problem--

Two words are never mentioned in the issue: THE REACH.

The bad guys for the entire series.

They’re never mentioned once. Three issues after their introduction.

In any competent work, The Reach would become the focus of what follows. The stakes would escalate, getting the audience to hate The Reach more and more until the book reached its emotional and thematic climax.

Instead:

Issue #15 is a fill-in issue involving a team-up between Blue Beetle and Superman.

Issue #17 involves Blue Beetle fighting Typhoon, the “Soul of the Storm”.

Issue #18 involves the Blue Beetle teaming up with the Teen Titans to fight Lobo.

Issue #19 minimally advances the La Dama subplot.

Issue #20 is a SINESTRO WARS cross-over that features The Reach, but only while it crosses over to another multi-title crossover I haven’t read, and have no intention of reading.

Issue #21 involves the Blue Beetle meeting the Spectre.

The book ignores its own bad guy until the finale, at which point we’re supposed to care about them again. The bad guys don’t spend the second act … being bad guys, doing evil things, antagonizing the hero, any of that.

They flat-out don’t even appear in the comic.

Dude!

III.

The conclusion I draw from the foregoing:

BLUE BEETLE tried to be a simple story about a young boy learning to be a man and to find his place in the world by heroically facing insurmountable odds with the help of his friends and family.

But that isn’t the story they told. The story they told was: a new DC character introduces himself to other DC characters, and finds his place in the DCU.

The audience for that isn’t 12 year old nephews; it’s DC fans, for whom that story served no pressing need or desire or want. And also: BLUE BEETLE?

Look, it’s sort-of a rip-off of INVINCIBLE.

INVINCIBLE is a creator owned series created by Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker that launched in 2003, and is currently published by Image Comics. It’s about an optimistic teenager who gets superpowers and tries to juggle his exciting new life as a superhero, his teenage friends, and family, without losing his upbeat attitude. BLUE BEETLE, on the other hand, is about…



I was at a bookstore the other day; saw this quote by Stephen King in his book ON WRITING (haven’t read the book, but I thought it was a good quote): “People who decide to make a fortune writing like John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light-years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.”

This was a series that didn’t offer anything to people that they couldn’t already get elsewhere, from a product with more acclaim, less baggage, easier to jump onto, more fun to jump onto, with more issues in the can, and … shit: how about a *twist*…? BLUE BEETLE doesn’t have anything resembling a twist anywhere in it; my theory is that a twist would be too upsetting, and the fanboy definition of The “Fun” Comic usually equates to nothing more than hyper-bland inoffensiveness, but… that’s a separate debate perhaps.

Even if you’re not willing to join me on the phrase “rip-off” – look, would you at least agree that BLUE BEETLE was second place? You don’t get points for being second place; comics don’t have a silver medal. Remember any vampire series in comics after 30 DAYS OF NIGHT? How many worthwhile crime comics have had to live in the shitty shadow of shitty-ass SIN CITY? How many other series about cat-people in wheelchairs fucking and sucking can you name besides OMAHA THE CAT DANCER?

The fact the 15,000 people who stuck with it liked it enough to say so on the Internet doesn't make a series "critically acclaimed." Bart Beaty isn't exactly working on a monograph, as far as I know. It just means 15,000 people live near a public library.

They didn’t have anything new to offer. That’s the sadness of comics. The cancellation is just gravity.

IV.

The cancellation isn’t the mystery here. The mystery is this: DC launches failed title after failed title. Off the top of my head, just in 90’s and 00’s: Young Heroes in Love, Damage, Power Company, Chase, Hawk & Dove, Suicide Squad, Major Bummer, Xero, Breach, Bloodhound, Manhunter, Doom Patrol, Primal Force, Lab Rats, Stars and STRIPE, Vext, Aztek, All-New Atom, Harley Quinn, Hourman, Martian Manhunter, and probably many more I don’t remember. Just for the DCU alone.

None of them ever, ever work.

There’s an Einstein quote President-Elect Obama (yay!) is fond of: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”


The mystery is this: Why do they keep doing the same thing that doesn’t work, over and over again? The pertinent question isn’t why was Blue Beetle canceled. The pertinent question is: why did they publish it to begin with? What did they think would happen, in spite of the overwhelming weight of history and experience? Did they think they were doing anything differently from what had failed countless times before? Why would this cancellation be surprising to anyone anywhere?

Does it even look like a publishing scheme to you, or some kind of elaborate sleight-of-hand so Time-Warner-Keebler executives don't ask too many questions? When the executives come to check on how things are going, do you think there's someone at DC whose job it is to yell "They're coming! They're coming! Pretend you're working!"? It looks like an embezzling scheme.

With respect to the cancellation, as has been widely reported, author John Rogers angrily pointed the finger at DC’s publishing strategy, DC’s confused self-identity, “creepy” specialty shops, DC’s offices in Manhattan, DC’s gender confusion, the time DC fondled his balls at summer camp, DC’s gut-flopping fetish, etc. (And don’t forget the rest of us, still busy pounding our sand and collecting our Final Crisis variant covers.)

The standard Comic Creator “It’s Us vs. Them” finger-pointing... uhm: usually, it’s from people who work in comics, talking about series they still write…? Petty-Me found the whole thing extraordinarily strange: an author who didn’t actually write a comic anymore, angry that DC couldn’t find a way to continue to exploit the creative energies of young writers and artists in order to keep his abandoned creation alive, angry despite the fact sales straight-up cratered during his tenure on the title. The fact people quoted that without comment or question? A little strange.

“How dare DC not continue to suck the creativity of young talent to keep a series I created alive after I didn’t want to do anything with it? P.S. I was completely not in any way at fault for simply having written a comic that shed 35,000+ in sales while I was writing it. It’s time to go rogue on the Internet, maverick-style!”

And by young talent, Petty-Me is referring to folks who didn’t get handed their own DC ongoing series on near-zero comic-writing experience, just based on screenwriting credentials, a comic culture obsessed with Hollywood star-fucking, and well-connected friends, and then completely fail to deliver sales. The disinterest in nurturing native talent in favor of fly-by-night screenwriters is not something that’s wrong with comics at all!


But… But that’s all Petty-Me, and Petty-Me's a bit of an idiot sometimes, so... Let's try to find the deeper issues.

V.

I suppose it’s worth noting here the obvious truth that BLUE BEETLE succeeded by the only criteria that matters. It generated a parcel of IP that DC/Time-Warner-Keebler was able to exploit in a cross-media property. On a balance sheet, the rest—you, me, Grandma Midge-- we’re all minutiae.

Some fans question canceling the series once the character won the IP lottery. But: they have books they can sell curious Blue Beetle fans. They have four volumes of BLUE BEETLE trades that they can sell to all the new BLUE BEETLE fans of the world. All that argument amounts to is “they could have had five or six volumes instead of four.” Oh. Oh, well.

And what lucky new fans! Getting to read SINESTRO WAR or IDENTITY CRISIS tie-ins-- fun! Maybe the error wasn’t canceling the book; maybe the error was not insuring that those four books would be able to stand alone. I’ve heard the argument that you can understand the issues without knowing the specifics of the SINESTRO WAR crossover—but I personally think there’s a distance between comprehension and entertainment that argument doesn’t account for. For me, that SINESTRO issue especially was a huge turn off; you could perhaps understand the What of what happened, but not the Why. Reasonable minds could differ on that point, though.

VI.

My eyes glaze over anytime I hear the phrase “mid-list” though. I guess because I always flash on the same image anytime I hear it, the double-page splash from CRISIS OF INFINITE EARTHS #5:


In my head, I always hear “Why are you reading about Batman? Why aren’t you reading about that one speck instead? The little half-doodle George Perez made in the upper left-hand corner is a really great character. You should really read about the red speck next to the blue-green speck on the left hand cluster of specks. You have beautiful hair.”

It drives me a little crazy when people say “Fans don’t want new superheroes.” Because usually the people saying that? That’s not what they’re selling—— they’re just selling new specks. It’s less than surprising that there’s a ceiling on that enterprise.

But a mainstream comic market that’s as harsh as this one to new series. It’s … well, Jesus, it’s something, isn’t it?

Though: to an extent, it doesn’t make me entirely sad. You know, because I read good comics, too, and those are doing pretty decent lately…? I’ve got BERLIN 2: CITIZENS ON PATROL on the coffee table, waiting to be read. I finished the BOTTOMLESS BELLY BUTTON recently—— pleasant book. I’ll end the year reading POPEYE, maybe. It’s often hard not to look at comics and think that the good guys are winning. And if Marvel and DC can’t get their acts together, and end up with failure after failure, well: there is a part of me that takes a certain pleasure in that. I might be very slightly bummed that I don’t get to read THE ORDER anymore, but if Marvel never sustains a new series again? Well: isn’t that satisfying to the part of you that believes in karma? Marvel, DC, these aren’t companies that deserve any love. These were never people to root for.

But…

But the water’s edge isn’t BLUE BEETLE. It’s Image series, Vertigo series, alternative monthlies. It’s the serial format, paper-and-staples comic. It’s a whole era of comics which, however misbegotten, is the one I was raised with, have affection for, want to continue with, etc. Plus: people I hope good things for still work in that system. For a certain kind of creator, whose work falls outside the narrow confines of what’s considered “artistic”, for genre creators, that’s still an important industry for any number of reasons.

I don’t suppose I’m interested in offering any great solutions to the problem here; having no real-world expertise, doesn’t that become absurd quickly? It’s just too premature to say how digital delivery systems are going to play out, and beyond that, any fancy prognostication becomes silly quickly. Until… until you’re the weird guy in the comment section yelling “Why don’t they sell Batman in an anthology like SHONEN JUMP?? They can sell them like they sell SHONEN JUMP in Japan, at newsstands next to stops for the bullet train. Because this country is also riddled with newsstands and bullet trains. The Japanese have the right idea—they like art, they’re fond of underage girls and they hate pubic hair. Me, the Japanese and John Ruskin, we’re all on the same page. Join us on Team Ruskin, DC.” Which—you know, I shouldn’t speak ill of Team Ruskin: I have my own silly little predilections (stand-alone maxi-series, one-shots, CBZ files, ass-to-mouth, etc). But…

But let’s ask: when people talk about a book like BLUE BEETLE failing, isn’t that an inherently different conversation, just by virtue of being a DCU title? Is the BLUE BEETLE conversation nothing more than-- “Why won’t the guy who buys BATMAN, SUPERMAN, X-MEN, SPIDERMAN, etc. also buy this other book? Why aren’t the people we squeeze and squeeze and squeeze for money—why can’t we squeeze some out of them, for this other book instead?” Isn’t that a question with its answer built into it?

There’s an implied belief in all of this that the important metric in the comic transaction should be the quality of the product, instead of the purchaser’s affection for the characters. That superhero fans should read the best superhero comic instead of the one featuring the best superhero. Which—— it's probably a belief I subscribe to myself, or want to, but…

But look where that line of thinking leads: after 22 issues, I can’t tell you what Blue Beetle’s powers were. At all. I can’t tell you what he had to do with beetles. Holy shit, dude: I can’t even tell you why he calls himself THE BLUE BEETLE. The part where he gets his name? They didn’t fucking show it in the comic. Holy shit, y’all!



...?

If you think a superhero comic should have great writing, those decisions don’t seem like the end of the world. But if you think a superhero comic should have a great superhero in it, then I don’t think that decision and many, many others can be justified.

Blue Beetle? He’s just some lame dude in a suit of arbitrariness. Sure. I remember being a kid and tying a blanket around my neck, and saying “this blanket can do various arbitrary things as the situation and context demands; I look forward to getting beat up in grade school.” Sure, sure.

After Alan Moore and SWAMP THING, we say to ourselves, “There are no bad characters; all those characters are just waiting for the right team.” But comics aren’t long on Alan Moore’s, so maybe we should revise that to "There are oodles of bad characters, but sometimes one-in-a-million creators write those characters for the short period of time that they manage to get work done without DC pissing them off enough to quit the company forever.”

(Tangent: I’m loving the part of WATCHING THE WATCHMEN where Dave Gibbons says “Fortunately, there was a greater pressure on us—that of keeping to the publishing schedule. We had given our own timeline to DC (which incidentally, we met), but they had advanced the publication dates for, no doubt, sound business reasons.” Love that part! Neat book.)

VII.

Recent Tradition demands that anyone writing about BLUE BEETLE conclude by demanding that you, the reader, insert things into your own asshole. This is a tradition that I whole-heartedly support.

I recommend inserting the Tristan 2.


The Tristan 2 is waterproof and made of a silicone material, which it’s heat-resistant, nonstick, and easy to clean. According to the Tristan 2 literature, the Tristan 2 was “inspired by fans” who wanted a plug that was bigger, longer and thicker than the paltry Tristan 1. Much like the Wu-Tang, the Tristan 1 is for the babies. You’ll notice that it indeed has a longer neck than the typical teardrop-shaped plug; that means greater staying power.

However, I should note that the Tristan 2 website has the following warning: “This is obviously not a plug for butt beginners.” This is obviously a warning that should be heeded by all of you butt beginners out there. Leave the Tristan 2 to the butt journeymen. There’s no official butt-ocracy that will tell you when you can advance from butt acolyte to butt made-man, but… pretty soon, you too can butt paraphrase Darth “Lord” Vader, and say “Now, the butt student has become the butt master.”

Very good.

Labels: Abhay, Blue Beetle

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The choice seven months ago was either to do this essay series for SECRET INVASION or to do this essay series for FINAL CRISIS. With it becoming more apparent than ever that FINAL CRISIS has run off its rails or might not have been on rails to begin with, production-wise… I think it behooves me to begin this, the penultimate SECRET INVASION essay by respectfully acknowledging that I win again, suckers. Let’s just say that I picked the right series, and let’s just say that a lot of you comics bloggers didn’t, and let’s just say that means that I won at blogging about comics, everybody!

I know those of you who aren’t sore losers will wave while the sun shines on me in victory lane— I might even wave back. In the meantime, let me assure you that victory tastes pretty sweet. Here’s a photo of some kung fu guy chopping some bricks with the side of his hand:



***

Here’s a summary of issues 1 through 6: what if a ship came to Earth with a bunch of 1970’s Marvel Characters on it? Answer: it doesn’t matter because they’d all be Skrulls, so we’d kill them. Nothing left to do for the remaining two issues of the series but to set up the next status quo in the Marvel Universe, CHOCOLATE RAIN.

What’s the over/under on CHOCOLATE RAIN? I think most people have been betting on “bad guys take over the Earth somehow or another,” but that doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t seem like a premise that can sustain itself for very long—or like a premise that will be easy to explain to audiences reading CAPTAIN AMERICA or DAREDEVIL in trades.

Let me just say this, though: I hope it involves superheroes growing goatees. Goatees, soul patches, maybe one or two porn-staches. I think it’d let people know that the CHOCOLATE RAIN Marvel Universe is a much more dangerous place. Because it’s been filled with awful hipsters. The new Black Panther is a self-facilitating media node; with breasts.

***

This last issue’s just going to be a big fight scene. We all know it-- nothing remotely interesting is going to happen. Maybe there will be some kind of interesting cliffhanger-- but experience with prior issues tells us there won’t be.

What the hell am I going to talk about?

***

A number of people are enjoying SECRET INVASION, and that’s great. Last time… you know, last time I might have gotten a little mean, and I don’t like that because my starting place for this series of essays was a very genuine affection for CIVIL WAR, for the recent Marvel crossovers, for old Marvel comics, and for the current crop of Marvel creators. I like the writer, artist and characters, but you know: everything isn’t for everybody.

So, let me try to be less snotty about it, and just say: look, it’s not what I wanted. We can all be angry people and throw around hurtful words like “mediocre” or “horrible” or “terrible” or “padded” or ‘slow” or “snail-paced” or “perfunctory” or “generic” or “unoriginal” or “vapid” or “empty” or “boring” or “dreary” or “unimaginative” or “shallow”. Where does that get us? SECRET INVASION, it’s just not what I wanted; that’s all. Someone else, it’s what they wanted, and good for them. And sure, we can throw around words like “bad” or “uninspired” or “uninteresting” or “un-good” or “stinky” or “dregs” or “dispiriting” or “illogical” or “malignant” or “poo” or “doo-doo” or “ugh” or “blech” or “yuck” or “nauseating” or “brain-dead” or “witless” or “deficient” or “laughable” or “undercooked” or “half-baked” or “pointless” or “aloha” or “swill” or “pablum” or “crappy” or “shitty” or “shit-for-brains” or “shit-from-an-ass” or “fart-faced” or “rotten” or “decrepit” or “thesaurus.” But-- what’s, that’s not, you know-- instead, let’s, uh... let’s not.

SECRET INVASION’s been sort of a bizarro version of CIVIL WAR, a series which I’d enjoyed. Oh, they have the same main character, Iron Man. Iron Man revealing the Skrull corpse launched the series; the Savage Land stretch turned on Iron Man; Iron Man reuniting the Avengers was the climax of the series to date. But beyond that:

CIVIL WAR was thematically about the Organization triumphing over the individual; SECRET INVASION tried to be about the triumphant Organization succumbing to corruption (uh, like, for one issue before focusing on external threats instead of true corruption). Bizarro. CIVIL WAR ends with Iron Man’s benevolent facism taking charge of the Marvel universe; SECRET INVASION unleashes the CHOCOLATE RAIN, if the promo materials are to be believed. Bizarro. The climax of CIVIL WAR is the Marvel Universe fracturing; the climax of SECRET INVASION is the Marvel Universe uniting. Bizarro. CIVIL WAR’s spin-offs explored different avenues that there wasn’t room to cover in the main series; SECRET INVASION’s spin-offs have been mostly pointless— my favorite are the ones where they go “Guess what the Skrulls were doing during the House of M? Nothing much. Just chilling.” Bizarro. CIVIL WAR didn’t rely on negativity towards foreign people who have a different color skin and a weird religion; SECRET INVASION… Bizarro.

With CIVIL WAR, the fun part of that series for me was that it was fundamentally about the Marvel characters making decisions. Instead of something just happening onto them, and them just lying there, like a cold fish, staring at the ceiling, half-heartedly trying to hold back a yawn, waiting out the twenty/thirty seconds it usually takes for me to be finished, politely ignoring my trembling and crying... Wait, what were we talking about again?

CIVIL WAR was 100% decisions. Iron Man decides this, Captain America decides that, Spiderman decides to take off his mask, Reed Richards decides to build a Clor. But with this series, they’ve totally abandoned that. None of the characters have made decisions. We know as much about every single character in this series as we did when we started because there’s been nothing at stake for any of them dramatically. The invasion’s just something that happened to them, like a car accident.

The only exception right now, that I can think of at least, is the Maria Hill jetpack scene-- still, in my opinion, the best scene in this series. But, shit, when Maria Hill’s the best thing about your Marvel crossover… you know you’re a redneck?

Git ‘er done, Issue 7!

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So…

This issue was certainly published. On paper. Big long fight; nobody that isn’t a Skrull dies. That's... nice...?

Lots to talk about with this issue. Just lots and lots. Lots and lots and lots. Any moment now, I’m going to figure out just so many things to say about this comic. Watch out for that.

...

[Ed. Note: Two days pass, in awkward silence…]

...

[Ed. Note: Sweat coming out of pores.]

...

[Ed. Note: It’s 3:00 a.m. I just want to go to sleep.]

Uhm: The Watcher shows up—and he’s wearing eyeshadow…? That’s sort of interesting; Jack Kirby characters in lady’s make-up.


Why doesn’t that happen more often? Nothing else they’ve ever done with the Fourth World characters has ever worked; why not turn the NEW GODS into a burlesque revue? It can’t get any worse for those characters.

I like the Watcher; I like him in comics; I like when he shows up on that mediocre TV show FRINGE; I’m pro-Watcher. For me, “It Started on Yancy Street” (FF #29) is as good an issue of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR as you could ask for.


It has that wonderful snowball quality where the adventure starts small and gets grander and grander as it contorts itself: it starts with someone throwing a head of lettuce at the FF, and ends on the moon, with plenty of stops along the way. I sometimes wonder if that's something the screenwriters or the manga-raised mainstream artists even know how to do anymore, if it isn't just something that's been lost.

***

It’s not that the fight scene offers no pleasure. I happen to like action comics. But not like this, not like this: It’s the Lord of the Rings idea of “action”. In those horrible, horrible Lord of the Rings movies, they’d just locked some nerd in a basement with a Macintosh and told him to generate 5 million Skeksis and Gelflings on top of each other. And then they’d just put that on screen for 4 hours at a time. That’s not action; that’s just a nerd with a Macintosh.

Part of my problem might just be as simple as I don’t usually enjoy an epic battle scene. There are obvious exceptions: SHAKA ZULU, say, or the Naval battle from BEN HUR. But I don’t sit around thinking fondly of BRAVEHEART, say; I never saw ALEXANDER or KINGDOM OF HEAVEN or the ALAMO. I didn’t make it a half-hour into TROY, though the parts I saw were very, very funny.

That having been said, here are 7 things that I typically like and look for in a superhero action scene-- with examples that... aren't the greatest action scenes I've ever seen, but just the ones that occurred to me, that had been memorable to me for some reason or another:

1. A Sense of Geography


Here’s a page from my favorite action comic when I was a kid, the San Francisco X-men vs. Marauder fight in the UNCANNY X-MEN #222. In this page, Wolverine’s healing factor is on the fritz, so in order to avoid getting shot to death—he risks falling to his death by jumping off a bridge. I like how this page is all about where the three different characters are in relationship to the bridge. You can map it in your head; you can imagine it happening that much easier.

SECRET INVASION #7, on the other hand: the characters don’t interact with their environment. Are the Skrulls to the North or the South? Are they trying to get somewhere strategically important, and the superheroes are trying to stop them from getting there? Or visa versa?

2. Bad Guys


These are two different pages combined, but: this sort of dopey villain named Roxxas versus the LSH from V4, Issue #10. Not a well-dressed villain or a very cool villain but-- this one bad guy systematically dismantles an entire team of superheroes over the course of an issue, and for me, it was memorable. It's better when the villains are the equal if not obvious superior to the good guys. If they have their own powers and abilities-- I'd like to see them being used against the good guy's powers. Or at least let them do something.

Another area where the X-MEN scene above succeeds, that fight with the Marauders: the Marauders end up looking like the cooler team. As a kid, I wanted to read the Marauders’s book instead by the time that fight was over. Every issue of X-MEN that didn’t feature them was a disappointment.

SECRET INVASION, on the other hand, suffers from the same problem as the MATRIX sequels. In the first MATRIX, everyone ran from the Agents; in the sequels, doughy, off-his-diet Larry Fishburne was destroying them left and right. Similarly here, early in the Invasion, one or two of the Skrulls were a serious problem for the heroes.

This issue, none of the Skrulls manage to make any impression at all despite being able to simulate all sorts of powers. Why? What changed? There’s no reason why the Skrulls shouldn’t overwhelmingly win this fight, but for no noticeable reason, that’s not the case.

There’s a scene suggesting that Marvel Boy somehow has come down and changed the tide of the battle, but they only show the part where he comes down and not him doing anything ... anything.


I'm willing to accept that Howard the Duck can kill a Skrull, though.

3. Superpowers.


From AVENGERS ANNUAL #16: the Avengers versus the Legion of Unliving; an undead Hyperion flies into Wonder Man, drives him through a planet, out the other end, and into a sun, killing them both.

Fights between superheros should be cool because you get to see them use their super-powers. That's sort of the whole point of the exercise, no?

SECRET INVASION has Mr. Fantastic stretch a little. The Hank Pym Skrull grows once. And… that’s about it.


Iron Fist doesn’t even use his fist-y power.

4. Clear Goals


Over the summer, I tried revisiting the DC Silver Age— most of it wasn’t very good; Marvel had the better Silver Age. This is from one of the big exceptions to that, though. While I prefer Nick Cardy to Neal Adams, I particularly enjoyed this sequence from Neal Adams and Dennis O'Neil’s BATMAN #243. I like how it’s thought out; they don’t just rely on Batman magically appearing somewhere. They let you go on the adventure with him back then, instead of holding him at arm’s length. And the goal is so simple: Batman needs to infiltrate the enemy stronghold without alerting the guards. Clean simple goal.

Are there any goals in this SECRET INVASION fight other than genocide? Well, unfortunately--


If prior experience guides us-- I think they want to rip her bra! Oh noes! (Did I get that joke right? I didn't pay much attention to the whole Tigra thing since it was so stupid but... should it have been rip her blouse? Eh...)

The entire issue revolves around all of the Marvel superheroes uniting to kill a lady (?), but in order to accomplish what exactly? Keep in mind, while all this is going on, that there are spaceships hovering over New York. That could, you know—drop BOMBS theoretically, if the Skrulls changed their mind abot being evil socialists who want to bring evil-ass socialism to the United States, or whatever...

5. Clear Obstacles

The best action in a superhero comic this year is THE BOYS #21, the Bridge issue. I don’t think I should quote a page since many people might be reading it in trades still, but what makes it such an enormously satisfying action sequence is it’s all about superheros struggling with an increasingly problematic set of obstacles. And how the superheroes use their powers to deal with those obstacles, and what that means is all rooted in and reveals character. If I quoted something, it’d be the page in which the word balloon “Don’t Let Her Go” appears.

With SECRET INVASION #7, the only obstacle is presented by the Hank Pym Skrull, whose eyeball mysteriously explodes for … no apparent reason. They hint that Bullseye might be trying to work at cross-purposes with the other Earth combatants but don’t meaningfully play that out in any way.

6. Cinematic Progression or Escalation


This is on the line of being a superhero comic and being something else, but I love me some Nth MAN THE ULTIMATE NINJA. Larry Hama and Ron Wagner tried to create their own version of AKIRA in 1989; Marvel pulled the plug on it after 16 issues, forcing the creators to jam the final act of the series into a jumbled, nonsensical three issue finale. But issue #3 has this sequence which is a particular favorite. Comics aren’t cinema, but a little bit of cinema to an action scene is appreciated.

There’s one sequence which works in this way in issue #7-- the Hawkeye sequence. I can’t say I have a problem with any of that; I thought that was well handled. But the rest— I just felt like it was at one volume the entire time. I think they were plainly trying to convey a jumbled, chaotic battle, a "donneybrook" and that's a valid choice —- but for me, movement, physical movement, is a big part of why I enjoy action scenes.

7. The Real World Factor


Here’s the first page of an extended sequence from Brian Michael Bendis and Mike Oeming’s POWERS, issue #18. Zora and some villain are having a fight; Walker and Deena chase after them in a car and watch the superhero fight through their car windshield. The fight escalates from a distance, as a passing news helicopter gets involved to disastrous consequences. I like that it presents superhero violence in a logical way from a human point of view. I like that it asks "What would it really be like?", and provides an original answer.


Another example might be this stretch of panels from ASTRO CITY Volume #1, Issue #4: it’s a superhero fight from the perspective of people in a stairwell, rushing out of a nearby building.

You can see a building in the distance in SECRET INVASION #7 occasionally. That’s as close to the world as the fight ever gets.

***

We should close this one out classy for a change by raising up a glass for Brian Michael Bendis, Leinil Yu, Mark Morales and co. for getting this out in a timely fashion, at least. While FINAL CRISIS struggles to get out, the Marvel team’s put out 7 timely issues, and this one – it doesn’t look shabby. With all the talk about FINAL CRISIS this week, and some of the anger about that that’s out there (thankfully and deservedly, most of it directed at DC and it editors, and not entirely at J.G. Jones, whose apology was admirable/kind-of-sad)… I thought it’d have been nice to pause and acknowledge the hard work of the SECRET INVASION team to get this thing out on time.

So... yay them? After all of this bitching? Really? I'm going to try to pull that off? That-- yeah: oh man, that was a disaster. That didn't work at all. I don't think my attempt at sincerity there was well timed, no. Sort of like a story about Santa drunkenly finger-banging one of his reindeers, let's say Blitzen. It tugs on your heartstrings a little because it reminds you of Christmas and Santa and finger-banging, all good things on their own, but put them altogether, during the holiday season, at Sunday School, and suddenly, you're in a room full of crying children. So... SECRET INVASION #7 is a lot like that.

Labels: Abhay

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THE ALCOHOLIC by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel; Published by DC-Vertigo, $19.99.

I.

I’d like to talk about the book design, for a moment. We’re a couple years after the point where smart, contemporary design is still surprising, but—but, still, great googly-moogly, the book design for THE ALCOHOLIC is glossy.

Sepia-tinted author photos. A liberal use of Futura. The pages of the comic are book-ended by dark brown paper of a heavier stock. Taking off the slipcase reveals a carving of a bottle, with the book’s title for the bottle’s label. Every other odd page combines into a map to Bluebeard’s Treasure. Bluebeard’s Treasure is friendship.

And the pull-quotes: a couple are from fanboy-world luminaries like Brian Vaughan and Neil Gaiman, but there’s also Sarah Silverman, Anthony Swofford, Bret Easton Ellis, John Hodgman, Kirkus Reviews, Jerry Stahl, Thomas Beller. Readers, be assured: whoever wrote this book is friends with celebrities! What could a more important thing in America to know than that?

And the back cover text: THE ALCOHOLIC is hilarious yet heartbreaking. Dean Haspiel’s art is gritty yet poignant. My balls are wrinkly yet succulent.

So: so, shit in my shoes, if this isn’t the damn hippest-looking comic. In April of this year, Vertigo announced its intentions to significantly increase its focus on original graphic novels. THE ALCOHOLIC’s book design, for me, is a little window into the future, or a possible future at least. A name author from the world of books; a slick modern design; celebrity endorsements assuring the reader that the author is socially well-connected; stylish fonts; back cover text promising poignance. Poignance!

I was looking forward to and ultimately bought THE ALCOHOLIC because I'd heard of Ames, because I’d heard of his last novel, Wake Up Sir. I knew that it had been well received. But… well received by who? I’m not really sure. By the World of Books. I don’t know who that is, though; I’m not exactly in Michiko Kakutani’s rolodex. There’s a very strange argument that sprung up on the comics part of the internet in the last couple of days (that I don’t particularly understand to be honest) about avoiding nameless, faceless “mediocre” comics. But: very little seems to have been said as to how one goes about doing that exactly. How do you know what to buy? At $10-20 a trade, what’s a safe bet? Who can you trust? How much will packaging and popularity and buzz from unknown people matter? Risks abound in the future.

I took comfort in the “SUGGESTED FOR MATURE READERS” hiding in the small print on the book’s back corner. It’s comforting to know that comics have a past, and the past left fingerprints. I especially like how it satisfies only the letter of some vestigial corporate policy, but not in any way, that policy’s spirit.

II.

I guess point #2 should be that the book itself is decent. I think it’s alright.

In its particular way, at least. Of the book’s 136 pages, about 125 pages feature Ames’s first person narration in caption boxes, multiple caption boxes that dominate page after page. Of those remaining 11 pages, 3 feature the narrator addressing the reader directly in expository monologues overstuffing word balloons, instead.

It’s an illustrated personal essay with a comic book in the margins. If your dream comic can be understood without ever looking at the words, look elsewhere. Ames’s story isn’t particularly surprising or unique; some might find the book “boring” as a result, that dull, perennial insult for memoir comics (or pseudo-memoirs). But I found the book enjoyable enough for other reasons—- the details Ames selected, the timing of events, the choice of digressions, the book’s particular sense of humor, the clever framing sequence. If it’s an essay, I thought it was an okay essay.

Dean Haspiel’s contribution in making this essay work visually can’t be understated, though. The book whiplashes between comedy and drama; the main character goes from pathetic to sympathetic to loathsome in the space of panels—- without Haspiel being able to handle that variety, and provide some visual moments of interest along the way, it’s hard to imagine THE ALCOHOLIC having worked as a comic. I’d use the phrase “steady hand on the tiller” here but I don’t have a fucking clue what a tiller is. Maybe I don’t want a steady hand on a tiller; maybe, I want a hand that caresses the tiller gently, bringing it gradually but sensually to climax. I don’t really know, my friends.

Also: I don’t know how to describe Haspiel’s style here. This isn’t the unrestrained Haspiel of the BILLY DOGMA comics; any of DOGMA’s enthusiasm for Kirby, bold shapes, immediacy—none of that is particularly noticeable in THE ALCOHOLIC (nor does it seem to have been requested, I suppose). I suppose the emphasis here is more for clarity, for an easy transition for the audience from Ames’s novels to comics. More visually inclined readers are urged to consider FEAR, MY DEAR instead.

With Haspiel, I think again we see a little hint of the future. Haspiel working with Mr. Ames, Jim Rugg working with Ms. Castellucci, Farel Dalrymple working with Mr. Lethem; at some point, the reward for cartoonists who successfully create a particular kind of independent comic became a gig chaperoning World of Books writers on comic book holiday. I guess I think that’s probably more of a good thing than a bad thing. As rewards go, this seems like a good one. But I guess what I find interesting is… when I grew up, comic book artists were the super-stars of comics. And writers were just… well, you know, writers.

With THE ALCOHOLIC, consider again the evidence presented by the book design.

The back cover’s only reference to Haspiel is in a smaller font, in a subordinate clause. Look at that! What is that??

It’s not for lack of space. No: he’s just the artist.

III.

THE ALCOHOLIC is a portrait of a man who has a substance abuse problem and his struggles with addiction, from his teen years to the days after 9/11. The narrator is sort-of obnoxiously named Jonathan A., I guess to titillate stupid people that some unknowable portion of the book is based upon the real life of Mr. Ames. Why would anyone fucking care? But after all, I suppose we live in an age of completely fictional autobiographies; tawdry voyeurism became worthwhile to authors and important to reading audiences-- oh, well.

There’s not much of a shape to it. Are addiction memoirs generally known for their dramatic tension? Initially, the book adopts a framing sequence involving lengthy flashbacks, but it abandons that structure mid-way through, though “Jonathan A.” continues to incessantly narrate even past that point. But maybe substance abuse is enough of a shape; with substance abuse comes depravity, sex, sexual dysfunction, horny senior citizens, death, fist fights, vomit, puke, barf, shit, orgies, and chase sequences. Everything a good comic book needs.

The 9/11 portion was my least favorite part of the book. I think it’s supposed to reflect his shame over the petty grief that had driven him to drink in comparison to this greater horror; to humbly acknowledge the inconsequential nature of whether he drinks or doesn’t; or to add to the feeling of the last third of the book of things spiraling out of control both internally and externally.

But: I think there’s an inherent danger with fiction and 9/11 of ... clichés not only become offensive because they’re clichés, but because they become... I don’t know, like, offensive because it’s grief porn? Jonathan A. spends the day with a young woman who has just lost her husband in the attack-- she maybe has three or four lines in the book total, none memorable. Because who she is doesn’t matter; all the book seems to say is “I was reminded what really matters through her! I was there for her! I was the witness of her grief! I learned from her grief! I failed to learn from her grief! Me Me Me.” I think there’s a desperation to remember that day as the day Americans “came together”, and I wonder if that isn’t its own way to avoid experiencing grief or fear, to make it still about us, endlessly us.

To some limited extent, this is all to the book’s benefit, as the portrait the book paints of the main character is ultimately of a selfish and self-obsessed man-child. But... I guess it just makes me uncomfortable seeing it as a thing being used clumsily, even if that clumsiness can be justified or explained, regardless of reason or context.

It’s funny, though: while I was reading Ames’s depiction of 9/11, all I was thinking about was a different disaster. Like the good Mr. Hibbs, like many people in this country probably, I’ve been obsessing over financial news lately that I don’t half understand. It’s a lot of Bloomberg.Com. It’s a lot of “What does Nouriel Roubini have to say about that?” It’s a lot of Roubini and Mish’s Global Economic Trends and Federal Reserve conspiracy theories. It’s a lot of naked Tai Chi in front of an open window, to cheer up the poor people huddled outside. It’s a lot of writing and drawing Care Bear pornography-- you know, Care Bears spraying one another with those rainbows that come out of their bellies, giggling. Care Bear Belly-Rainbow Bukkake? You know, for kids.

Time spent thinking about our economy, thinking about America, asking the big questions like “Is our way of life sustainable? Can you put off paying the piper indefinitely? What is it like when a country addicted to cheap oil and easy credit has to detox? Did any of those Care Bears have drawings of erect wangs on their bellies?” And here, we have THE ALCOHOLIC, a book very much about someone living a lifestyle that’s unsustainable, that won’t work out so hot in the long term, that probably won’t end well. It felt, I don’t know, timely.

I think one of the reasons I like the book was how Jonathan A. got more and more pathetic as he got older. Too Much is a pretty great strategy when you’re younger, but by the end, A.’s got a lousy haircut, wearing an ugly suit, he’s barely wiser, he’s all alone, and he’s as much a danger & pathetic disappointment to himself and others as ever, if not more so. I’m pretty fatalistic when I read the news, and my guess for the last, well, couple decades is things in this country are about to get really fantastically worse; so, I guess that ending struck a chord with me in more ways than one. We're all going to end up in shambles, huh? See you in the shambles! We'll share some toast.

IV.

But: the future, huh? Vertigo not just getting an author from ye' old World of Books, but releasing a book in the hot genre du jour: the fake addiction memoir.

If the future is books aimed equally for bookstores, who are the people in bookstores, what values do they have, what kinds of books will people create for them, and how will we know which to buy? Oprah? Will Oprah get involved? Nicholas Sparks?

I’m confused as to how I feel about that entire genre of the addiction memoir, especially; it’s not a genre I’ve ever sought out before in a book. There’s something troubling about the genre but I don’t feel qualified to say what that is since I’m, you know, I’m not educated enough about the program or the twelve steps or any of it; I have concerns whether writing a book like THE ALCOHOLIC is a healthy or recommendable thing to do for someone struggling with that disease since there’s an inherent element of romanticizing the substance abuse portion that struck me as, I don’t know, risky. But I don’t know what the experts say on that topic. I guess I could say: if he’s subverting the genre in some way, I’m not well read in the genre enough to notice how; I couldn’t say how or if this addiction memoir is particularly noteworthy as compared to any of the many, many others. Do they all have wise old recovering addicts that are roommates in rehab? Or foxy lady rehab employees that the main character wants but ultimately can’t have? Because in my head, I guess I imagine they all might.

I guess the genre makes me especially queasy because – what do readers want out of this genre exactly? I don’t typically spend time in my daily life rooting for an addict to fall off the wagon, but if I’m reading an addiction memoir? Look, if I’m reading an addiction memoir, I know that if the addict falls off the wagon, then the Crazy Drug Madness Haha time can resume and I will benefit from that as a reader.

I rooted for Bubbles to stay off the heroin on The Wire, as much as I ever rooted for anything on a TV show to happen. But… you know: this book? There’s 30-ish pages where the main character stopped drinking and the story got boring, and to be honest, I started thinking how nice it’d be for that boring Jonathan A. boy to start drinking again.

That made me feel a little weird and more than a little fucking dirty.

And it took bathing in a lot of Care Bear rainbow ejaculate to feel clean again.

Labels: Abhay

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BEFORE WE JUMP:

Are fans excited about the SECRET INVASION? Can I watch them be excited? Through binoculars? Part of the pleasure I hoped to have from SECRET INVASION was voyeuristic.

My emotional investment in the "Marvel Universe" is greater than an average person, true, but my suspicion is that it's far, far, far behind that of the dedicated fans. The guys who love that company. The guys who have a favorite superhero they’ve been reading about for years. The guys who own costumes, and try to talk girls into attending Comic-Cum 2008. The Marvel Zombie. The True Believer. The Huddled Masses. The guys who get blamed for every single thing that's gone wrong with comics.

Part of what I hoped would happen in reading this series, in writing about it every month, involving myself with it, watching fans, watching fans react to it, trying to be as excited as them-- part of what I hoped would happen was that a window might open for me to that enthusiasm. How can you not envy their enthusiasm? Didn’t I use to be more enthusiastic? Not just about Marvel Comics? About life?

So I say to myself, maybe it’s just a question of sense memory. Maybe I can remember how to be that person again, just by moving like he moved! Sure, that sounds completely wrong and doomed for failure, but: maybe a comic like SECRET INVASION could be a road back to some hypothetically more hopeful, more open, more eager person I imagine that I used to be. If I could feel excitement, unembarrassed excitement about something as dumb as a Marvel superhero comic book again, maybe I could take that feeling into other parts of my life; I could become a person unafraid to be unapologetically enthusiastic, again; I could bend spoons with my mind, Uri-Gellar-style. Maybe I'd find out something about Love. Maybe I'd find out that sometimes letting go is the only way to know what you need to hold onto. I didn't see the movie DAN IN REAL LIFE, but I really wanted this to be like the trailer for that.

I wanted SECRET INVASION to tell me that I deserve to be loved-- I don't think there's anything weird about that.

But, obviously, it hasn’t worked. It isn't working. Where's my enthusiasm? What's there to be enthusiastic about? Is anyone out there fired up about the SECRET INVASION? As far as I know, angry fans haven't even demanded anyone be fired once over SECRET INVASION -- demanding someone be fired is how they show their affection. Like Lennie petting the mouse from Of Mice and Men.

Instead, this crossover which should be completely exciting is all over-shadowed on the Internet on Wednesday by ALL-STAR BATMAN printing errors, which... Are you as excited by the ALL-STAR BATMAN printing errors as I am? It's the closest comics get to nip-slips. "Oooh, I shouldn't be seeing this, but I am, because of an 'accident'." It's not a printing error; it's a nip-slip!

The same day the ALL STAR BATMAN issue came out, photos came out of the very untalented Ms. Jennifer Aniston wearing a black dress that to her surprise became transparent when exposed to flash bulbs. Coincidence? Or cross-promotion?!

It's weird to know, after all these years, if those black bars on Batman's dialogue had been removed, we'd have found out that Batman was saying "Criminals are a shit-guzzling and cowardly lot of ax-wounds, who like to fuck babies in the ass while they're shitting even though their herpes sores are flaring-up" all along--? I knew those black bars were awfully big, but I didn't realize Batman was going so hog-wild under there, all these years.

How can SECRET INVASION compete with a nip-slip? By advancing the storyline another 2 whole minutes? Shya'right. But... Awww, hell, show me your nipples, SECRET INVASION #6.

AND NOW WE HAVE JUMPED:

What a fucking failure!

Wow: they just fucked that one up completely.

This comic really lacks the eye of the tiger, man. This isn’t Rocky Balboa at the end of ROCKY 3; this is Rocky Balboa at the beginning of ROCKY 3. This book is an exhibition match with Thunderlips.

Thunderlips, yo.

****

Finally! Finally, we get page after page attacking the true enemy: LIBERAL PROTESTERS.

Where the fuck did that shit come from??

Page after page, not of the first or second or even third issue, page after page of the SIXTH ISSUE-- it wasn’t spent escalating the stakes of the comic, it wasn't spent dealing with characters we care about, it wasn't spent paying off earlier scenes. The fucking SIXTH ISSUE was spent introducing an entirely new cast of straw-men liberal characters, and then attacking them for being naive about the nature of evil.

First, let me just say, on a political level, this comic can go fuck itself. You know-- one pretty easy way a person could read this comic if they were so inclined is that it equates protesting wars with supporting terrorism. I don't think the people who made the comic think that. I don't think they were thinking at all. I don't think they made a big priority of thinking.

Second, the liberal woman character is from INDEPENDENCE DAY. The lady character in the Los Angeles section of the movie who goes to celebrate the aliens arriving on top of a LA skyscraper and gets vaporized in the first 10 minutes? Same exact shit. Don’t be ripping off INDEPENDENCE DAY unless you’re willing to go full-on Goldblum. This comic wouldn’t know full-on Goldblum if the Goldblum poured water on its hand in order to explain Chaos theory.

Three: what does that liberal moment accomplish? Nothing in the issue, not a goddamn thing, whatsoever. But does it accomplish anything conceivably? Anything? Oh, it could be argued that it portrays SECRET INVASION from the street-level perspective. Uh, Except: fans already spend time and money on that. They spend money on SECRET INVASION FRONT LINE. They spend time on the SECRET INVASION web-comic. What does this scene accomplish??

***

There’s also a 2-page splash of New York in ruins. Because I didn’t know that New York was in trouble before now. They hadn’t told me that information in the last 5 issues of nonstop New-York-in-trouble scenes. That came as a COMPLETE SURPRISE.

Even if you want a splash page on New York—- what, they couldn’t do a 1 page splash? What does a 2 page splash accomplish that a 1 page splash wouldn't have? How is that not padding?

Or maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about: maybe people buy superhero comics to look at splash pages of New York City. Maybe that takes 2 pages so people get doubly excited. "Look how much New York I'm getting for my money!" I didn’t realize that’s why people buy comics.

The splash pages are to convey the horror of what’s gone on in New York while the characters on the page before spent FIVE ISSUES on a half-hour long scene in the Savage Land. Except they… don’t bother to show any characters reacting to the splash! That moment of horror that double-page splash is designed to create? Off-panel. Characters reacting? The drama of their reactions? Oh, fans don't want that! They just want New York drawings-- that other stuff is just icing.

What the fuck?

***

Anything I would guess fans would want to see isn’t here. Fans don’t want to see Hawkeye after the last page of the last issue? Fans don’t want to see more of Iron Man interacting with the Skrull Queen after their earlier confrontation? Fans don’t want to see more of Nick Fury doing … anything, after all the build-up for him? Anything at all?

Speaking of that scene-- remember that last page of Hawkeye in the last issue, where Hawkeye is all “We’re going to get those Skrulls?” Remember that? Don’t worry if you don’t because you get two more pages of that EXACT SAME SCENE, except Iron Man and Luke Cage saying the same thing instead. That’s a good scene because they’re different characters than Hawkeye. That’s not repetitive at all! That’s not repetitive at all! That’s not repetitive at all! That’s not repetitive at all! That’s not repetitive at all!

I can’t tell if the villains joined forces with the heroes because there are two characters in this comic with red hoods—uh, both of whom are men. Did all of the villains in the Marvel universe team up with all of the heroes in the Marvel universe (holy shit!) OFF PANEL so that the comic could spend time attacking liberals?

I want to give them the benefit of the doubt they didn’t fuck up that badly... I literally can not tell.

Remember that cliffhanger a couple issues back, where it’s like “Oh my god, y’all, Captain America and Thor are going to show up?” Guess what the payoff of that was?

ONE PANEL.

Captain America says “What’s shakin', bacon” to Thor. Thor says “Give me some love, turtle dove” back. That’s it. That moment was a moment they promised fans would be awesome, and they failed and they failed spectacularly. Fans got one panel. It was a cliffhanger in an earlier issue-— what is a cliffhanger but a promise to fans that awesome shit will ensue? And what's the pay-off?

ONE PANEL!

Holy shit, y'all: they're asking people to pay money for this! Think on that, for a moment. HOLY SHIT, Y'ALL!

Two page splashes of New York, three pages of snarky attacks on liberals, and four pages of wannabe-George-Perez spreads is supposed to make up for a story that’s not doing it’s job. Wow.

Do you think they can rally from this issue? You know, if I had to bet money, I'd bet against them. I don’t think they can rally. It's possible. It's conceivable. But... it'd be an upset. For me, personally, there’s nothing here.

I just look at it, and think, you know, they weren’t hungry. They didn’t have the fire in their bellies. They didn't want the belt badly enough.

*******

I’d seen the basic facts about that issue of some SECRET INVASION tie-in or another, where the Skrulls were making all the Reed Richards Skrulls in order to figure out how he thinks. I’d hoped that it was a hint that my theory was right, and that the Reed Richards we’ve seen throughout the series was a Skrull all along. That the Skrull-ray he invented was a fake, and that the superheroes killed last issue were the real deal. I just think that would be really entertaining.

But with this issue, the way things are playing out, it seems like my theory is a big load of bunk.

But what do we have instead?

The Skrulls imitated Reed Richards but not long enough to find out how he’d stop them…? Here’s the Skrull’s stated motivation: “We hate Reed Richards because he stops us every time. But we’re not going to plan for him trying to stop us. We're not going to find out how he'd stop us this time and plan for that. Instead, we’re going to go play boggle with Catherine Keener.”

I don’t understand that at all. Does anyone even understand that?

***

Could someone tell me anything this comic did right?

I’ve learned enough over the years that a reaction this negative usually means it’s as much if not more me and what’s going on in my life than the comic itself. Which-- you know, it’s been a long day. Sure. It's been a long day. It's been a long month. Maybe I’m in a worse mood than I realized tonight.

But... What did this comic do right?

***

Go to the tundra.

Learn to make comics again by chopping wood. Carrying timber. Turn this around.

Go to the tundra!

Risin' up, back on the street
Did my time, took my chances
Went the distance, now I'm back on my feet
Just a man and his will to survive

So many times, it happens too fast
You change your passion for glory
Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past
You must fight just to keep them alive

Chorus:
It's the eye of the tiger, it's the cream of the fight
Risin' up to the challenge of our rival
And the last known survivor stalks his prey in the night
And he's watchin' us all in the eye of the tiger

Face to face, out in the heat
Hangin' tough, stayin' hungry
They stack the odds 'til we take to the street
For we kill with the skill to survive

chorus

Risin' up, straight to the top
Have the guts, got the glory
Went the distance, now I'm not gonna stop
Just a man and his will to survive

chorus

The eye of the tiger (repeats out)...

Labels: Abhay

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I'm undecided on AIR #1. Well, not really: I think it's not very good. But, shit, I want to like it.

It's an implausible comic book. Action scenes obey no logic; characters' actions make little sense; dialogue doesn't resemble actual human speech; none of the emotions seem real.

Fine. So: dream logic, then...? That seems to be how the book wants to be judged. The book opens with a wink to Salman Rushdie's SATANIC VERSES, perhaps to signal to readers that the book will traffic in a similar sort of magical realism. And-- and that's something, isn't it? Trusting readers to be savvy enough to not only catch that reference but to be able to infer a meaning from that reference-- isn't that something?

It's about flying, after all. Dream of flying, if I remember my Freud, are all about sex and erections. Personally, I like erections. But the relationship between the two romantic leads is just a lift from Stanley Donen's CHARADE anyways, so I don't know how interested I was in that relationship to begin with. Does anyone expect Audrey Hepburn & Cary Grant to be topped by a comic book?

I look forward to future issues where the main character of AIR rides a banana into a train tunnel. (If anything, AIR reminded me not of Rushdie or Pynchon, but Vittorio Giardino's creepy LITTLE EGO comics from early 1990's HEAVY METAL magazines. LITTLE EGO was a Winsor McKay LITTLE NEMO parody involving the dreams of a frequently naked European woman who... Why don't I use ellipses to avoid proceeding with this disturbing paragraph? It's not as embarrassing as Wally Wood's CANNON but ... dot dot dot...)

Anyways: I was frustrated with AIR, constantly saying to myself "but no human being would ever DO that." Even accepting that parts will be implausible-- it's interesting, but is it entertaining? The lead characters are just... dull. Even accepting that it's okay that everything that's coming out of their mouths is implausible, they weren't interesting. Nothing that came out of their mouths was funny or cool or intriguing. I didn't care if they kissed or had sex or blew up or all of the above at once. The main character just seemed ... I don't know, pouty, and ... describing sky-kisses in random narration boxes doesn't quite cure that, no. The male lead didn't seem mysterious and cool; he seemed, I don't know, like a lesser Antonio Banderas character. Some very unsubtle sex metaphors don't make up for that.

All the usual Vertigo critiques apply. The main character's design is DRAB. It's not enough to feature a female main character, and think the job done. Comic book characters, the great ones beg to be drawn. Artists sketch endless variations of those characters; fans get tattoos; grown-ups play dress-up. A great cartoon character is more than just a drawing of a person; it's a symbolic gateway into an entire fictional world. All of the successful Vertigo series have starred comic book characters. Agent Graves, Jesse Custer, King Mob, Spider Jerusalem, Yorick Brown; as a SCALPED fan, I'd happily argue on behalf of Dashiell Bad Horse. And I personally don't think that's a bug to comics; I think that's a feature.

The lead character of AIR is an ugly blonde in a neckerchief, and a severe ponytail. What's comic about such a miserable creature? I'll grant you, this matches the image in my head of the vast majority of the unpleasant, soul-dead flight attendants I've had the misfortune of dealing with in the United States. Air travel was drained of any drip or drop of glamour in the late 70's and early 80's-- the airlines stopped hiring Pierre Cardin after a while (so did the nurses). Was anyone alive for the Coffee, Tea or Me days? If that's a problem for you, fly in Asia. Fly in Asia where sex harassment lawsuits have apparently not yet found a receptive audience.

AIR exists in that glamour-of-flight-is-dead world. Which I actually find extremely interesting, so interesting that I almost want to forgive everything.

While some have derided the book for being vague as to place, I would argue that's the book's greatest strength. The reality of travel is once you step through security, once you're separate from your home, your luggage, your clothes, your supplies... Who are you anymore? You're anonymous; you're an ID in your wallet. You cross over to some fuck-ugly phantom world of Cinnabons, Au Bon Pain, magazine racks, uncomfortable seats, crying babies, identical anonymous spaces. Wondering, "Who the hell buys porn magazines in an airport? And where do they, you know, *use* it?" But someone does buy it and that means someone invariably uses it somewhere, and often too because there's vast swaths of porno in every airport you've ever been in. You could be US Senator, but step into an airport and anonymous gay bathroom sex suddenly becomes a reasonable, logical option.

Travel enough, and the whole world blurs. Here's Pico Iyer describing a Kazuo Ishiguro novel:

"[F]ive hundred pages of action, or its abscence, had taken place more or less in a hotel, in some unnamed foreign town through which a touring artist works through a labyrinth in a dream, surrounded by people and passions he can't begin to fathom. The book is a novel about a state akin to jet lag, a nightmare of disorientation and disconnection, and its main character, at some level, does not know who he is, whom he's among or who he is taken to be."

Or, of course, if you prefer a more vulgar reference, there's FIGHT CLUB, I suppose: "You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O'Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour."

Is there a comic to be set in that world? Maybe there is. Is that comic AIR? I had hoped that it would be, but the first issue's dream logic and fantasy conceits don't leave me encouraged that it's a good fit for me and my personal interests.

MK Perker's art is not competitive with other artists on the stands. Perker's storytelling is weak, his compositions are dull, his drawings only rarely have energy, and his characters lack appeal. The idea of the lead characters having sex is more gross than hot. For some unknowable reason, his editors leave him to ink himself; I can't guess why from the results. I truly, truly dislike being harsh to comic artists since they have a difficult job, especially where, as is the case here, the art on Perker's website is noticeably better than what can be seen in AIR #1 and this might be a poor example of what he's capable of...

Vertigo's typically indifferent colors don't help, of course: strap in for the color brown, everybody! Do they get a discount on brown? Is that how they keep the costs down? Seriously, dead seriously: What is with these people, and the color brown? Does anyone even know? This is an open invitation to any Vertigo colorist willing to do an interview about the color brown. Please explain.

Why don't Vertigo books look as good as Image books, if they have editors and can pay artists a page rate ahead of time? Of course, some might be asking why they don't have first issues which clearly explain a premise that retailers can repeat to potential customers, either, but... But I admire that they gambled on a challenging premise like AIR features, Salman Rushdie quotes and all, however ambivalent I might be about the results. I find the lack of a clear high concept here truly encouraging, personally.

There's this supporting character called Fletcher that's pretty much horrible; the reader's early hopes that he'll be obliterated in an air disaster are cruelly denied. A flashback isn't plainly indicated as such (though I think that can be chalked up to being a feature of the book's dream-like aspirations). The book focuses on some nonsense about competing secret-societies, which... call it Pynchon-esque all you want, it's dull and played-out material. That's all if you can successfully avoid thinking about the poisonous market realities that hover over this book long enough to enjoy it. The less said of the book's final essay, the better, though I would agree with the goodly Mr. Hibbs that having a final essay is something that can only help sell a comic to me.

Plus, the book's commentary on air travel isn't one I can relate to my own experience. The book is fascinated by air travel's relationship with terrorism, but... My own personal experience of air travel after 9/11 (and, heck, before) is not having to cope with terrorists or a fear of terrorism, but with bureaucracy, an endless, numbing bureaucracy. Sure, I have a healthy fear of terrorism, and crashing, and the fact they don't put enough fuel in the fucking planes. But I have more than a fear-- I have a fucking certain expectation when flying that I'll be negatively impacted in some way with the decaying, failed apparatus of the airlines, endlessly arrogant, propped up with government hand-outs, manned by underpaid illiterates, certain to delay and delay and lose luggage and delay some more, awful, awful, awful. A state of affairs which I don't actually blame on terrorism and 9/11, much at all, though reasonable minds can differ who's to blame...

So, I don't know. The book's one big visual moment-- the opening image, that worked, at least. As unbelievable as the rest of it was, that moment still worked. And the book's setting is interesting to me. The premise-- an intelligent adventure comic starring a stewardess? There's something there. The idea of ignoring its problems, having some faith, and looking at #2 anyways has a certain allure.

I don't know how this review sounds-- shit, I don't know how any of them sound, but... I really do want to like it.

Labels: Abhay

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I'll try to avoid spoilers and skip the Jump; sorry if I screw up.

THE ASTOUNDING WOLFMAN #7 by ROBERT KIRKMAN, JASON HOWARD, and RUS WOOTEN: I watched this video of Robert Kirkman the other day; he put out this odd video saying that established comic creators should focus exclusively on their own comics, and quit their jobs, and something-something-kids. But I had a weird time turning 30, too, so who am I to judge?

Anyways, it at least worked as a marketing video, and successfully reminded me that guy existed and that I didn’t really have an articulate reason why I don’t read his comics other than “Tony Moore stopped drawing them.” So, this WOLFMAN thing: it’s apparently about a werewolf who wears a drawing of a werewolf on his chest...?? Part of me wants to applaud, but it doesn’t get better than that: issue #7 is the BIG TWIST issue.

Having not read any prior issue, I had no emotional investment in any of what was happening. It’s funny to see a twist from that vantage point: it all seems so transparent, the things that writers do to push buttons. “Here’s a puppy with a gun to its head.” It makes the whole enterprise seem so mechanical. I don’t want to spoil this comic, but it’s drearily typical in terms of what it thinks is shocking.

There’s not much here of any noticeable interest besides the Twist. But if you liked INVINCIBLE, it's the same sort of thing. It’s similarly simple. The character design works. “Monster hero” is a decent character type no one else is doing very well right now. Characters explain their feelings at each other at numbing length and in precise detail. It’s easy.

Jason Howard is credited as “penciler, inker, colorist” instead of “artist." Which is kind of sad, if you think about it too much. Which I did. I think I spent more time thinking about that than any of the contents.

I’d rather watch more videos where Kirkman calls for the heads of the 5 Comic Families to assemble on a cruise-ship, though(?). That part was fucking excellent.

SECRET INVASON THOR by MATT FRACTION, DOUG BRAITHEWAITE, PAUL MOUNTS, VC’s JOE CARAMANGA, GABRIELLE DELL’OTTO, ALEJANDRO ARBONA, WARREN SIMONS, JOE QUESADA and DAN BUCKLEY: I don’t know about the story-- it takes Thor off the board, in order to service some unnecessary pregnant white woman subplot. Pregnant white women, puppies in danger, crying Chinese babies, cat up a tree, Jessica Tandy on a horse that's headed the wrong way, Michael Clarke Duncan crying while holding a decapitated teddy-bear, Meredith Baxter Birney dying of a Woman's Disease but making a video for the daughter she won't live long enough to see graduate—- sure, all those things work 99% of the time and get the audience on your side; I guess I’m just being a shit-bag, but the pregnant lady caught me in a bad, cynical mood. Not a good mood to be reading comics in, I guess. I’m not really a big fan of the Morgan Freeman narration, either; it's a little anxious to be taken seriously for a comic about Kirby gods fighting green aliens.

But: Doug Braithewaite, huh? That’s a reason to take a look at this comic; it’s a good looking comic book. Paul Mounts colors from his pencils, which is usually not a technique that I’m particularly enamored with. But here, it works: maybe because the unfinished feeling of the pencils somehow conveys these characters as being otherworldly, not part and parcel of our fully-inked reality, not just crappy Vikings with delusions of grandeur. I don’t think it would work on every book; besides, Braithewaite and Bill Reinhold on inks ala their PUNISHER run, say? That’s a pretty solid team I’d rather not see messed with.

I’d enjoyed the Jason Aaron BLACK PANTHER tie-in more, for going into the mindset of the enemy, and being more of a war comic. This one promises to be a little more epic in scale than that though, which might yield dividends in future issues. Heck, maybe the pregnant lady will work in the later issues, and this will end up being a weirdly moving Viking versus Alien comic about birth in the face of war or some shit. Who knows? Not me. Maybe Michael Clarke Duncan.

MUMBAI MACGUFFIN by SAURAV MOHAPATRA, SAUMIN PATEL, V. VENKATA SUBRAMANIAN, NILESH MAHADIK, REUBEN THOMAS, AND SETH JARET: This is the first time Virgin Comics has ever put out a comic I was willing to read. I’m not a huge fan of “Chief Visionary” Deepak Chopra, or I’m guessing “Chief Creative Officer” “Gotham” Chopra, either. I don’t really know much about Richard Branson, except I have the vague impression he’s some kind of doucher. Besides all that, they’re not a company that has me in mind. The company has been fairly open about being dedicated more towards pleasing Hollywood executives than comic book fans. I am not Ashton Kutcher’s agent.

The company employs Indian writers and Indian artists, but this is the first time I’ve ever noticed them putting out a comic about India, and not just peddling a watered-down version of the mythology. It was reasonable. Saurav Mohapatra’s scripts a dopey action-comedy in a mix of Hindi and English, and heaps together a Mumbai filled with gangsters, taxi drivers, hitmen, CIA operatives, spiritualists, and terrorists. It’s a silly mish-mash. It could be better-- the ending makes little sense, and it’d have been nice if they’d given the lead white character a personality, any personality at all. As for the art, the inexperience is noticeable, but it’s at least clear and the character designs are fun enough, even if there’s a definite need for improvement on composition, storytelling, and inking.

But it moves fast and it doesn’t take itself seriously, at least, and I guess I found it endearing despite its flaws, like a B-movie on at 2 a.m. on HBO that’s better than I’d have guessed: it’s not as good as REAL MEN or SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO, but I’d watch it all the way to the end. Light-hearted action-comedies set in the real world? I’m the audience for those. Indian comic creators, inspired by Japanese manga or French sci-fi comics, selling comics in America, swapping spit with Pico Iyer? It all sounds great in theory, before you add in Ed Burns or whoever pitching their shitty D-list movie ideas, or Chopra & Family hawking discount spirituality and crackpot nonsense to credulous westerners, or god knows what ridiculous business practices they’re almost certainly engaged in. There were Indian comic creators before Virgin, and if these guys can improve their game, let’s hope there’ll be Indian comic creators after these Virgin people are gone, gone, gone.

CRIMINAL #4 of VOLUME 2 by ED BRUBAKER, SEAN PHILLIPS, and VAL STAPLES: I don’t know. This arc, the main character is a cartoonist who sometimes visualizes his creation speaking to him-- hardboiled private-dick Frank Kafka. What do you make of that? I haven’t decided if I think it’s clever, or if I think it’s a Dabney Coleman vehicle. I guess we’ll find out.

Besides that, it’s the usual laughs and hi-jinks. As ever, the series’ dedication to un-cool, unpleasant fuck-ups is admirable, though the umpteenth lady character who’s an emotionally-damaged sperm-bank is maybe … I don’t know, maybe going to start getting weird eventually? There’s a fine line between “genre convention” and “skuzzy creep-o shit” that I don’t think has been crossed yet for this book, for me, personally, but… but that way lies Frank Miller, and, shit, I’d hate to see that happen to anybody.

TORPEDO 1936 VOLUME 6 by E. SANCHEZ ABULI and JORDI BERNET: IDW recently announced plans to reprint this classic gangster comic, but after I’d picked up a batch of the Bernet run from Bud Plant. Holy crap! Remember my hoity-toity line between “genre convention” and “skuzzy creep-o shit”? This book crosses that line, and the next line past that into “should I be embarrassed to be reading this?” territory. It’s not … It’s not as embarrassing as Wally Wood’s CANNON, say, but still: I didn’t know anything about TORPEDO besides that Bernet drew it, so I was surprised by what a cheerfully depraved comic it turned out to be.

For example: in this volume, the main character organizes a gang-bang—and that’s the least unpleasant part of what happens. You don’t root for the main character to win because you like him, so much as you want to see what horrible shit he’ll pull next. Bernet makes it all look beautiful, of course, but that fact that a dog with a boner playing with lit dynamite is being so well drawn? That sort of adds to the crazy of the whole thing.

I’m still trying to comprehend how Alex Toth worked on this series—how do you spot blacks for a gangbang? “Dear Steve Rude, Why didn’t you research the gangbang? Library card! Dedication! Silhouette! Dildo-play!” That’s not a letter you want in the mail.

SAMMY THE MOUSE #1 and #2 by ZAK SALLY: So, this is about an alcoholic rat either suffering from serious mental problems, or stuck in the middle of some kind of spiritual awakening— which is probably the same thing. The rat’s friends include other broke-down, alcoholic animal cartoons. The art’s got plenty of nervous energy, black & white with blue & brown accents—- the best bits summon up a sort of horrible run-down cartoon world broken down from neglect and mental illness.

The timing’s good; the storytelling’s fun; I’m clueless what any of it possibly means, but I like watching cartoon characters drinking, so I suppose it’s entertaining. Most of the comic’s been spent watching characters hang out; something larger seems to be happening, but there’s no telling what that is exactly. If the project is aiming for 300 pages though, at an issue a year… well, if I’m doing the geometry right there, which I might not be, there might be a pretty decent wait to find out what this is all about.

I don’t know how to judge it really, in the meantime. So far, it at least feels mysterious instead of random, but there’s no telling how long that’ll last. I liked #1 more than #2: #1 was funnier and had better drawings than #2. But I especially liked a panel in #2 where a hand’s absence is depicted by the vacuum it leaves in space. It’s a neat depiction of speed and shock: something should be there but it's suddenly not.

I’ve been re-reading old Jaime Hernandez comics though—early LOVE & ROCKETS stuff. I hadn’t been interested in his superhero half to the new issue (though Gilbert's Martin & Lewis bit was killer). But it got me revisiting things like Mechanics, 100 Rooms, The Lost Women— that brief rocket half of LOVE & ROCKETS. People dismiss that stuff since Jaime’s later stuff was better, but: the early Jaime work isn't exactly shabby. It’s not really fair to read stuff like SAMMY THE MOUSE at the same time; it feels so slow & under-populated by comparison.

That's not a fair place for me to be coming from, maybe. That maybe goes for all of the above. All of these reviews are so goddamn unfair. "Dear Steve Rude, Have you read Death of Speedy lately? Dildo-play!" He doesn't deserve that in his mailbox. Who deserves that? Nobody. Maybe Michael Clarke Duncan.

Labels: Abhay

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As part of my relentless pursuit to understand all things secret and invasive (e.g. your dad's hands), I attended a symposium dedicated to SECRET INVASION comic books, held at the 2008 San Diego Film Festival or "Comic-Con" as it's sometimes called.

Within a half hour of arriving in San Diego, I was standing outside of the Hard Rock Hotel watching four bouncers rub a drunk, overweight, middle-aged Hispanic woman's face into the pavement while she yelled "Yo, why you gotta twist my thumbs? Why you gotta be twistin' on my thumbs?" But unfortunately, the entire weekend could not be that entertaining or make me feel that hopeful about my fellow man.

The way the panel works is about 20-30 gentlemen come into an auditorium, and sit behind a long table; each is introduced as having written or having watched someone write or having once had dinner with someone who wrote one of the SECRET INVASION tie-ins. Lead series writer Brian Michael Bendis, having won at comics, does not attend. The 20-30 gentlemen differ in various respects, though the majority of them seem to share an aversion for tanning parlors. Each is introduced in turn by a slideshow hosted by Panel Moderator and Marvel Editor-in-Chief, Joe Quesada.

Then, a pretty lady enters, and each man dons a Luchadore mask and gets in line to-- wait, no: then, the panel is immediately opened, without any delay, to a call for questions from the audience. The question-and-answer session begin, and a rather surprising fact quickly becomes apparent:

Despite the median age of these winners being about 27, apparently none of these people have ever read or even so much as encountered a Story before SECRET INVASION. In fact, they all seem confused if not maybe frightened by how stories work.

Here is my recollection of the question-and-answer session; these are all pretty nearly exact quotes, I think:

FAN #1: How does SECRET INVASION end?

JOE QUESADA: We can't say because the way a story works is that it has a beginning, a middle and an ending, and we usually try to tell you those things in a particular order. I can’t tell you the ending because we’re not done with the middle yet. Next question, please.

FAN #2: Joe-- at the end of SECRET INVASION, what will have happened to the characters?

JOE QUESADA: Aah, I see your confusion-- yes, sometimes people tell stories orally. In fact, this was the very origins of storytelling, and I'm sure anthropologists would assert that this tradition reaches as far back as to the Cradle of Civilization itself, that at the very Dawn of Man, somewhere in between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, that early, primitive man frequently indulged in oral storytelling. However, SECRET INVASION is exclusively being told through comics and is not being told orally. So I can't tell you what happens because words come out of my mouth, and not comic books.

FAN #2: I have a follow-up question. Will the heroes have defeated the villains by the end of SECRET INVASION, or will the villains have defeated the heroes?

JOE QUESADA: Aah, yes, that raises an interesting point. You "purchase" the comic books we sell using money that is contained in your wallet or pocket or grandma's purse. By "purchasing" our comic books, you get to find out the substance of the events that are depicted in the comic books you've "purchased". We are trying to make money by selling you the comic books. So if we tell you what happens in comic books that have not come out yet, we will not make any money. And that would be bad for us, financially. Next question.

FAN #3: First of all, I'd just like to say how you're all great, and this is great, and congratulations on being great. And I just think it's great that such greatness could be so great. It'd be great to rub your great bodies with a cheese greater [sic] and eat the great skin that I rip off. I think it's great that I said "[sic]" out loud.

JOE QUESADA: Thank you, sir. Do you have a question?

FAN #3: It's... there's... I want to know things.

JOE QUESADA: I think I see the problem. A question is a statement designed to invite a response from another person, with the expectation that the response will relate in some way to the original statement. Next question.

FAN #4: Heeeeey, how youse all doin’ today? I'm a huge fan of the Mighty Thor. Will he appear in SECRET INVASION?

JOE QUESADA: Yes, we are selling a comic called MIGHTY THOR'S SECRET INVASION FUNNIES which you should all buy. Thank you for that excellent question.

FAN #4: I have a follow-up question. What will the Mighty Thor be doing in the SECRET INVASION?

JOE QUESADA: Oh, I went a little fast there; my bad: if you read MIGHTY THOR'S SECRET INVASION FUNNIES, you will find out what the Mighty Thor will be doing in the SECRET INVASION.

[Disconcertingly Enthusiastic Applause]

FAN #4: I have a follow-up question. Will the Mighty Thor use his hammer at some point during the SECRET INVASION?

JOE QUESADA: I'm not sure if I'm allowed to answer that, but I will say this: maybe. Next question.

FAN #5: I don't want to know what happens at the end of SECRET INVASION. I don't want you guys to ruin it because I love the endings of your comics. But what will the middle of the story be like? What will happen in the exact middle? Also: will I like it?

JOE QUESADA: Good question. We haven't discussed middles yet. Now, the middle is the part between the beginning and ...

***********************

The overwhelming majority of fans didn't want to ask about SECRET INVASION-- they were there to "debate" the fact Spiderman wished his wife to the cornfield. Remember that? Apparently, dudes out there still care! Like: a lot!

The point of these debates as far as I could tell...?

On the one hand, fans want to provoke Joe Quesada into admitting that he made a horrible mistake of which he's deeply ashamed of, and then to cry and beg for their forgiveness, and then, for him to cry into the microphone "Spiderman is why my wife makes me pee sitting down" and then for him to hang himself from the rafters, and then for adorable children to beat his dead body with a stick until candy comes out, and then for one of the children to eat a piece and scream, “Oh, that is not chocolate after all, senor!”

Joe Quesada, on the other hand, does not want to do any of these things. Editor-in-chiefs typically won't admit they screwed up the flagship characters with whom they've been entrusted-- it's their weird little way of avoiding being fired from their jobs. That's my guess, at least-- one not shared by most Marvel fans, apparently.

I'd estimate that the Spiderman "debates" took up about 50 minutes of the 60 minute SECRET INVASION panel.

The other 20-30 people? For the most part, not invited or asked to say anything. Just there for decoration. Man-decoration.

At some point, Brian Michael Bendis was called on a cellular telephone. Some fan tried to ask "Why is POWERS being released on a quarterly basis during such an important storyline? The quarterly release schedule has destroyed the book's momentum-- when will that book resume a more timely schedule?" Unfortunately, in greasy dipshit language, that sounds like "YO, AY YO, WHY YOU SELL OUT POWERS, MAN? AAAY." Which just got a hearty "Fuck You" in response. Newsarama changed "Fuck You" in its panel report to ... "Boo You".

Boo-You.

*******************

So: sometimes, in observing Marvel comics from the lofty vantages of the internet, one wonders "Do they really think their fans are THIS stupid?" And the answer is: You bet, and they find out that they're right themselves, first-hand! I urge anyone complaining about Marvel comics on the internet: get thee to a nunnery, and watch one of these panels. The fact any Marvel comic features words that are polysyllabic-- Wow! They trust their audience that much!

So, the review of #5 after the jump.

AFTER READING ISSUE #5:

I don’t know about you, but my hope is this issue is a giant fake-out.

At least, that’s what I’d like to see happen: for the characters revealed to be Skrulls at the end to turn out not to be Skrulls after all. I think it’d be something if the Skrulls saw Reed Richards’s device coming, and figured out a way to use his brains / arrogance against him. I think that’d be a pretty funny twist, actually. I guess that’s what I’m rooting to happen after this issue anyways— for all of the Marvel Superheroes to be accidental murderers. I think it’d be super-funny to see fans react to that. Plus: it’d explain how the Mockingbird “Skrull” knew about the miscarriage (or was that explained in a stupid tie-in?)...

I think that’s plainly what they want fans guessing. It’s just hard to imagine Marvel would interfere with the White Queen from the ASSORTED X-MEN comics. I get the impression she’s a popular character for them. This entire enterprise would be a more entertaining series if it were easier to subtract those kinds of thoughts / considerations from the game, but...

Were you alive for CAPTAIN MARVEL? He was before my time, and that’s not material I revisited in my Marvel inquiries. That character’s most often linked to Jim Starlin, and I don’t rank Starlin personally, at least for the sort of thing I’m usually interested in. With Marvel, I’m most interested in Marvel’s geography, so the cosmic, outer-space stuff is usually completely lost on me. Anyways, I don’t really find that whole Captain Marvel stretch of the book terribly interesting. Plus, I think Leinil Yu’s space opera moments are the weakest he’s been on the series—for me, he definitely seems more “on” for the Savage Land sequences.

Speaking of Yu:
Maybe they shouldn’t let him draw tears anymore. Maybe it’s not right for kids to be looking at that.

Most of the things they promised last issue haven’t happened this issue, but those promises were made with respect to the events transpiring in New York City. I’m perfectly happy not to be stuck in New York for another issue.

The “Skrulls Offer World Peace” spread isn’t terribly interesting to me. I suppose an argument could be made that the finale of CIVIL WAR showed the Marvel populace eager to embrace fascism, and this could be that earlier scene playing out to its logical conclusion. Still: "evil aliens who claim to mean well" is too ancient a bit of business for me to get excited over. Besides the fact it’s another thing BATTLESTAR GALACTICA did already, there was the V, TO SERVE MAN, etc. It's a little familiar.

Plus, the prospect of the Marvel Universe being controlled by Skrulls for the next year or so-- it just doesn't seem plausible. It'd be too distracting for too many books.

I quite like that Maria Hill scene though. That’s the issue for me, personally. I think I’m a pretty easy audience—- any big let’s-all-cheer moment, I’m usually pretty happy to cheer along. Plus, for me, that scene’s about Hill forced to embrace being a superhero in a way I’ve never seen from that character before. Granted, I don’t read all the spin-offs; I’ve hardly read all of her appearances, by any means. But I always got a “I’m the grouch who doesn’t like superheroes and superhero craziness” vibe off how she’s been written before. So, I like that the character wins in this issue by kind of becoming a sort of legacy character for Nick Fury. Not the boring kind of 1:1 replacement character; “here’s the new Flash, just a little different from the old Flash, but with the same exact name, powers, costume, and hometown” legacy character, but as a unique character who’s filling the spy-superhero role that Nick Fury used to fill while he moves on to fill some other role.

I don’t know if I’d call it intellectually satisfying, but "intellectual satisfaction" is what’s tripped me up with FINAL CRISIS. If I find anything distracting to that series, it’s not that I’m confused as to what’s happening, so much as disinterested by how familiar the themes seem. The character imprisoned in human form who’s forgotten his true place in a larger universe, especially. I imagine the Monitor character will eventually “awaken” in some way that’s both thematically significant and of some confusing importance plotwise—- but I won’t really care when it happens, so much as be ticking off a box in my head. Flattering myself for recognizing themes I’ve already seen a half-dozen times before isn’t doing it for me, this round.

While with SECRET INVASION, right this second, I want that “Oh, No!” moment of watching Hawkeye realize he shot his wife to death. Or— or something bad to happen to somebody. This is a series I don’t want to end well for the characters in it; things have gone way too smoothly for everyone so far, and for me, it's absolutely built a hope that they're hanging onto some kind of ace card for issue #8, and that #1 to 7 have been rope-a-dope. That could just be wishful thinking, and this could just be ... well... dope-a-dope. This could all just be one giant Boo-You.

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ALMIGHTY is a 140-page self-published comic book created by Mr. Ed Laroche (with lettering by Jaymes Reed) that I purchased on a whim off the internet, based on the recommendation of a blog entry by comedian Patton Oswalt. It’s a straightforward post-apocalyptic action comic. Here is the back cover text in its entirety:

“A girl has been abducted
and a killer hired to find her
and bring her home.”

For a self-published comic by an unknown that I purchased off the internet, it exceeded my (low) expectations. I don’t think the main character’s arc is entirely earned, but I thought the action scenes were surprisingly accomplished. The book’s best action set piece is a 20 page sequence involving the main characters’ escape from a group of soldiers: the action reflects a sense of geography; characters seem to occupy a physical space; bullets feel like they might have consequences. I don’t know how excited I am by post-apocalyptic action thrillers, but ALMIGHTY at least succeeded for me as a showcase for Laroche’s art & storytelling skills.

You know: it looks like a real comic book. I think Ed Laroche could have gotten a job drawing someone else’s comic if he’d wanted one. Instead, I had a 140 page self-published action thriller sitting in my lap. I approached Mr. Laroche for an interview to discuss that and his book ALMIGHTY.


1. What lead up to your decision to self-publish the comic? I found the fact it was self-published surprising since it seemed like fairly commercial material, at least as I thought I understood the marketplace; you know: it’s an action comic. I was under the impression comic publishers knew how to sell those. Did publishers ask for creative changes you were unwilling to make? Or I get the impression with a lot of publishers-- I'm not sure I'm their audience anymore because I’m not Ashton Kutcher’s agent. Were people asking you to give up rights or what have you that you weren’t comfortable with giving up?

I couldn’t get any publishers to read it. My idea was to create a story that was built on certain principles of what I think a comic should be. One of those principles is the long form comic story, an all-in-one, a comic that is designed simply and laid out clearly, a book that is timed out differently because it’s not a bunch of 22 page issues glued together, but also a story that didn’t depend on a lot of exposition. When I shopped it around I found out that most publishers don’t look at unsolicited work, and the few publishers that did never got back to me. But I guess what’s mostly true is that I didn’t know the right people that would get me past the gatekeepers.

2. What have been the consequences of self-publishing the book? I don’t know how many self-publishing success stories there have been in comics lately. Have retailers been supportive? Los Angeles stores are good about supporting local creators; I know a week after I bought your comic online, I saw it in the window of Skylight Books, over in Los Feliz. You’ve had favorable reviews-- the Patton Oswalt reference got me to buy it. Is it finding an audience? How has it gone for you?

The consequences are still playing out. All I can say for sure is that before I self-published, I was a frustrated artist that had ideas about how comics should be approached. As of now, it’s great to see that my execution of those ideas are being well received. It validates my efforts and gives me the confidence to continue.

As far as retailers are concerned the stores that currently stock my book (this is before being listed in Diamond) are places that I frequented. Not only were they Indy friendly, but because they knew my face they were more willing to seriously consider the book. But by the same token, I found that stores where I didn’t have that relationship were resistant to take on something like ALMIGHTY. I understand why-- they have more to lose. They want a sure bet, a guarantee of a return on their investment. But there are no guarantees-- all you can do is minimize your liability. Unfortunately, this is one of many factors that have nothing to do with whether a comic is good enough to be offered to a retailer’s customer base.

3. ALMIGHTY ends with a teaser page for what looks like a prequel entitled REMEMBER AMPHION (honestly, not as good a title as ALMIGHTY). Based upon your experiences with ALMIGHTY, do you expect to self-publish that as well?

Yes, I plan on self publishing all the titles that I’ve been developing for the past several years (at least their first initial runs). The next book that I’m working on is not the sequel to ALMIGHTY -- it’s called WAVEFORMS. WAVEFORMS will allow me to implement another aspect of my ideas on what comics should be, which is authorial. I want the emphasis to be on the creator and not the creation.

4. Did you ever think about releasing ALMIGHTY as a webcomic?

No.

5. Okay, enough business questions—let’s talk about ALMIGHTY. The part of the book that stood out the most for me was the 20 page gunfight in Chapter 4. A lot of American action comics don’t spend that many pages on an action sequence; long action sequences to me seem like they’re more the domain of manga. Was that a part of the book you knew early on that you wanted to create?

One of the advantages of creating a long-form comic is that if you need an action sequence to play out for as long as it needs to, you’re not restricted to the 22-page limitation of most comics and trade paperbacks.

I found that most comics would spend a lot of time on exposition, establishing motive and resolution (because these are the domain of the writer, not the artist), but virtually no time on the way things resolve themselves visually. This is a byproduct of having the writer be the lead creative on the project. In the best case scenario, you would be able to have these two creative elements complement each other, but most of the time, what you have is this weird disconnect between what you’re reading and what you’re seeing.

With Chapter 4, I had an idea of what needed to happen, but how it unfolded was very organic. The story told me ultimately-- it resolved itself.

6. I felt a strong James Cameron influence throughout the book. ALMIGHTY sort of shares Cameron’s interest in strong women fighting back horrors that are both physical and philosophical. How important were those themes to you when you were preparing the book, as opposed to just giving yourself interesting things to draw? The book is very straightforward in premise, but there’s a swerve late in the book—the final confrontation between the protagonists and antagonists swerves in a way I didn’t expect (and I’m not honestly sure not sure if it succeeds), but that suggested to me that you had something very particular in mind that you were trying to communicate thematically.

James Cameron’s handling of Ripley and Vasquez in Aliens was the first and last time we’ve seen authentic portrayals of the type of woman that could really pull off the action hero thing.

Fale (my main protagonist) isn’t some super-deadly, mid-drift baring model in high heels. That kind of super-female archetype doesn’t work for me. It’s inauthentic.

The “swerve” that you mention and the way that it plays out in the story will have a richer impact when the sequel REMEMBER AMPHION is released.

7. I’m pretty shitty at comparing artists to other artists. I think I see an influence of the early Gaijin Studios guys—Jason Pearson, Brian Stelfreeze, that crowd, but I’m not sure about that. I’ve seen comparisons in other reviews to Eduardo Risso and Dave Lapham-- I personally don’t see that, like, at all; you don’t shy away from a heavy use of black, but that’s as much as I can understand those comparisons. I guess my suspicion, based on the quality of the action choreography, is that you have some experience storyboarding, but—well, that would be a guess.

All those guys are great artist, and they have inspired me in a lot of different ways. ALMIGHTY is my first published work. I’ve made my own comics for a very long time for my own personal use. I make a “living” storyboarding animation and live action.

8. The lead character Fale is sort of in the mysterious anti-hero mold that American action comics tend to feature. In rereading ALMIGHTY for this interview, the first third of the book is especially quiet and opaque; ALMIGHTY only features three splash pages and two of those are in that first third, and are quiet landscape images. Most of the characterization is done through how Fale behaves in the later action sequences. Why did you keep that character at arm’s length?

I have reason for the way Fale comes off in the book but getting into the why of it doesn’t give an opportunity for the reader to form their own ideas. I can say this: you will never know what Fale is thinking; her actions will define her.

9. I was wondering if you could talk about how ALMIGHTY was made. After work? On weekends? And I guess I believe every interview with an artist should include some tool/technique talk, so: what did you ink with? Do you do loose pencils and draw more at the inking stage, or are you particularly precise with your pencils? Did you thumbnail the entire comic before drawing the first page, or did you thumbnail and draw it chapter by chapter? For a book you drew yourself, you didn’t really go easy on yourself. Those three splash pages aside, most of the book clocks in at somewhere between 5-7 panels per page. A lot of those panels are atmospheric panels—the drawings of crows in Chapter 6, say.

I pulled a Kerouac. I saved up enough money to move to Prague where all I did was work on the book and party on the weekends. I plan on replicating the process. Work hard, play hard.

I pretty much just started at the beginning and penciled all the pages. I drew pretty tight pages on 8-1/2 by 11 printer paper, then light tabled them onto Bristol board. Then, I inked them on my next pass -- it was easier for me to take it in sections.

It took my whole life to get to ALMIGHTY. I’m planning on picking up the pace.

10. Do you have goals for the future with respect to comics?

Yes.

Thanks to Ed Laroche for the interview. For more viewpoints on the book-- it has been enthusiastically reviewed by the Broken Frontier website here; positively reviewed by Mr. Steven Grant here. You can find a short preview of ALMIGHTY on the internet.

Labels: Abhay

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1: WHERIN RECENT EVENTS ARE NOTED.

When I was a kid, a big company crossover came out called Secret Wars. There was a lot of fighting and Colossus cheated on his pre-teen girlfriend. It was fun. But then it was followed by a crossover called Secret Wars 2, which wasn’t so good. Bummer. But you know: big world kept on turning.

Jump ahead 23 years: DC puts out the first issue of a crossover called Final Crisis. And it’s not a very entertaining comic book.

The result?

Heads will roll! Jobs will be lost! Say hello to the unemployment line! Say goodbye to your daughter’s virginity! Light the torches! Frankenstein must die! Blow pot-smoke at your parrot! Maybe it’ll get the munchies and want a cracker! Parrot will make us laugh!

Dude losing his job was fait accompli for about a solid week. Psuedo-journalists were reporting on rumors. The comic-convention rumor mill was literally trans-atlantic.

What the fuck happened in those 23 years?

But: I think it’s great, personally; it’s exciting to write about crossovers right now. How great would it be if people really did start losing their jobs? How great that would be! Because: what other comics have any stakes to them besides crossovers? You could make an argument for Lost Girls since there were some obvious issues, and that was an expensive book to print. But… it’s hard for me to think of much else.

All-Star Batman celebrates its 3rd anniversary this month: 9 issues in 3 years. Who gives a shit? I don’t; they don’t; it doesn’t matter. No one’s losing their jobs over All-Star Batman, ala Bill Mechanic & Fight Club. But Crossovers! Crossovers: maybe there could be something at stake. Maybe there could be an element of real risk to them for the creators involved, for a change. How much fun would that be to read? To write about? What could be more fun to write about right now than multi-title crossovers? Answer: Victorian-era group sex parties. Proper lords and ladies, rutting desperately until they die of consumption-- like a Jane Austen novel with meat-flutes. It’s just crazy enough to work.

2: WHEREIN THIS REVIEW IS DELAYED TWO DAYS WHILE THE AUTHOR SPENDS TIME ON GOOGLE IMAGES.

I really feel sad for these crossovers, having to top each other constantly. The 2nd issue of Final Crisis had to end 12 realities, blow up 9 supporting casts, and have 10 pages of screaming Japanese superheros. The 1st issue of Secret Invasion was a 1/2 page of talking and then the rest of it was just exploding interrupted by screaming and bedwetting, and urine-soaked beds exploding, and the fire ripping backwards up the urine trail and...

What are they going to do next time? This is all fun now, but 8 months from now: it’s go-time again. 6 months? 3 months? People say they want a longer refractory period between crossovers, but the incentives in place right now don’t seem to favor that, so…

How do they keep topping this? Eventually, we’re all just going to have to put our phone numbers into a database, and Marvel comic creators will randomly call us up at 3 am shrieking that our grandmothers have gotten stabbed to death. We’ll be too drowsy to understand what’s happened, and, you know, that’s when they get our credit card information. That’s when the identity theft happens. A year after that, they’re actually going to have to murder one of us, like in the Shirley Jackson stories.

So what I think I’m really waiting for is a crossover like The Anniversary Party.

Remember that movie? It was all digital video. Alan Cumming is married to Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the entire movie is about an anniversary party they throw where they invite their most pretentious douche-bag friends. That movie kind-of was a crossover. “Hey, look, Kevin Kline just made a reference to Wind-Up Bird Chronicles so we’ll think he’s smart because he reads Haruki Murakami. Hey, look: it’s the girl from Flashdance, only not flashdancing so who cares. Holy shit, did Phoebe Cates just blow the doors off this movie?!?”

Why can’t there just be a big Marvel crossover about an anniversary party? Why can’t there be a movie about flowers? So yeah: what I’m saying is—whatever they’re trying to do with this Secret Invasion, I really think where they went wrong?

Not enough Phoebe Cates.

3: WHEREIN ISSUE THREE, AND THE AUTHOR’S DISAGREEABLE REACTION THERETO, IS LAMENTED.

So: I wasn’t happy with my reaction to issue #3. It was a smidgen too piss-y, I thought. I’ve been thinking about why that was the case besides the fact the issue stunk. What did Secret Invasion #3 do to deserve that?

I think a lot of it has to do with creator summits.

I really love anything involving creator summits, hearing about those. Oh man-- anytime I hear about creator summits, my ears perk up! Love it! Check out this old quote from Matt Fraction, on how he pitched his new Iron Man comic at one of the creator summits: “Y'know, the ideas kind of found me. It was on a list of stuff to talk about and” and I’m just going to stop there.

It was on a list…?

There was a list in the world with “Talk about Iron Man” on it. Someone wrote that down, maybe on letterhead, with a bullet-point next to it. That’s like me having a list on my fridge saying “To Do: Have Anal Sex with Severed Unicorn Horn.” Except I would never hurt a unicorn that way. That’s something I wouldn’t do. But those people actually talked about Iron Man. They crossed “Talk about Iron Man” off their list!

I think that’s genuinely wonderful. Shit, I love hearing about those summits, man. And for 22 pages a month, readers get invited to go to that summit, and hear what the creators think about these characters. What a treat that is! You get to go to the summit without smelling the farts. A bunch of comic creators in some conference room with stale coffee, maybe a spread from Café Bonjour or wherever, maybe some stinky dry erase board markers? I got $5 that says that room smells like a fart that’s shitting a burp. When you read these crossovers: everything on those lists, all the conversations that resulted from that, this is a 22-page highlight reel.

And after all that… it’s got Hulkamaniac and Bob’s Big Boy getting slapped by a skrull who imitates the powers of the Night Thrasher??? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Anyways: I think I was a little lopsided last time. Let’s hope I try better this time!

******************************************

Hmm: I think the scariest thing about this issue is anyone would admit to liking both Indiana Jones 4 and the new Weezer album on the same page. Oh whoops, switched to talking about the new Powers. Nevermind. Right, right: Secret Invasion…


******************************************

4: WHEREIN THE REVIEW IS FINALLY GODDAMN COMMENCED, ALREADY.

I didn’t enjoy the early parts of the issue because I didn’t think the Osama-Bin-Laden-video monologue that opens the issue was particularly necessary. The point that the monologue makes, that the fight will be difficult because it’ll be hard to know who to trust? I think that’s a point that’s been made many, many times before, and it’s a point that especially didn’t need re-stating. 4 issues in, why is this comic still re-explaining its very simple premise? Are readers this stupid?

Also: Nick Fury and his WildCATs? Underwhelming. They arrive on the scene and win the fight for... well, no apparent reason. Why did they succeed where the lame Initiative characters failed? No explanation. They’re only featured on 4 pages of the issue, which, given the emphasis placed on their arrival last issue, I found surprising and disappointing. The focus is moreso on Ms. Marvel, which-- do people really care about that character? Really? Wow.

One of them’s named Stonewall. Chris Claremont (of course) had a character named Stonewall in the 1980’s, but that character was a large man with a moustache (of course) whose power was really quite brilliant: it was difficult to push him over. So he would go into various fights and, like, stand there, I guess...? That’s how I remember him anyways, sort of a moustachioed metaphor for the resilience of the gay rights movement.

(He was a sidekick of one of my favorite Marvel characters, the Crimson Commando. The last time I read about him was the 1980’s though; according to his Wikipedia entry, that’s not a character that’s been treated well by writers since then. But: which has?)

Anyways: the new Stonewall is just a bald guy with his shirt off who says “Hoofah”. So: as superheros named after a pivotal moment for the gay rights movement go, they went from the bear to the shirtless bald guy. I don’t really know what that means; is that social commentary? This comic features two men with red hoods in it. I’m square; is that, like, a thing? One of the characters is named Yo Yo—is that because she’s bi?

Wouldn’t it be great if the real secret invasion is the Marvel Universe being invaded by the lesbian and gay community? The Skrull invasion isn’t so secret; Skrulls are running around exploding things. But maybe at the end, when all the superheros are celebrating their victory, the Mighty Thor take off his shirt and starts dancing to Kool ‘n the Gang. Maybe that happens; why not? Why can’t there be a crossover about superheros coming out of the closet finally? Come on, Mighty Thor-- you don’t have to pretend to be uptight Donald Blake anymore. Mike Myers isn’t pretending to be Austin Powers anymore, you know? I got $5 says Black Panther is an MSM.

Anyways: once that monologue wrapped up, personally, I started to enjoy the issue. I didn’t understand the two panel cameo by Yellowjacket; what did that mean? But the Iron Man scene worked. I thought that was a more effective scene than the scene in #3. Since so much of this series have been characters reacting to a chaotic situation forced upon them, I especially liked the fact that the Iron Man scene ended with a character I have some investment in finally taking action and announcing that he intended to DO something. I’m fine that hasn’t happened before (or it hasn’t happened as much to my liking before) because of the nature of the story they’re telling, but I think I needed some sense with this issue that the story was going to start being about the characters and who they are, rather than a thing that was happening onto them. That’s why I like my porn with a little bit of a story to it. Same reason.


I particularly enjoyed the three pages of Die Hard involving the Agent Brand character who... You know: people say crossovers should explain every single conceivable thing in case the book is being read by any new readers. I don't always agree. I have no clue who Agent Brand is. Was I upset that the comic didn’t spend a half-hour explaining her to me? Not really. First off, I have access to Wikipedia, and superhero entries on wikipedia are more thorough than entries about U.S. Presidents, famines, several small wars. Second: I don’t need to know who she is to enjoy Die Hard. I’ve enjoyed Die Hard in a Nakatomi building, on an aircraft carrier, in Hong Kong, with a vengeance, without a vengeance; I never required annotations to enjoy Die Hard. People making that argument might have a stronger position with the scene concerning the Hood, but one would imagine a later issue will explain the significance of that for newer readers.

But: this ending doesn’t work at all. The big rousing “now, this fight turns around and it starts in New York” ending? Huh? They did the exact same thing last issue! Nick Fury showed up. And wasn’t the whole point of this issue that Nick Fury cleans up New York of Skrulls? But then at the end, the comic ends with… Skrulls in New York and characters showing up in a big rousing “now, this fight turns around and it starts in New York” moment. This comic just keeps repeating itself.

So far, the secret invasion of Earth has gone all the way from Brooklyn to Central Park West to Times Square. Oh no: if the superheros don’t win in the Bronx, Queens will be next! I hope an entire issue gets set in Kim’s Video; the Skrulls can menace the cash register, while Nick Fury opens up a second front in the Drama section.

What was wrong with attacking the Pentagon or the White House?

Did the Skrulls not watch Independence Day? Maybe that’s how this series ends! The Skrulls won’t even see The Goldblum coming!

Nick Fury says “Let’s Roll” at one point. I don’t know if that was intentionally intended as a Flight 93 reference, but I certainly hope not. If it was, I think that’s pretty fucking sad and pathetic, and everyone involved in this comic is an unmitigated douchebag, and I can explain why on a napkin, using a single sentence from the Let’s Roll entry on Wikipedia: “Country music duo The Bellamy Brothers recorded a song called ‘Let's Roll, America’ on their 2002 album Redneck Girls Forever.” So, you know: let’s hope that was unintentional.

And, ahm.... crap. This review hasn’t gone so well either. I was hoping I’d rally after #3, but that hasn’t happened. Something’s just missing, some important ingredient of…

“Hi, Brad. You always knew how cute I thought you were.”

Needs more Cates!

DER DERRR DER-DER DERRRR DER. DEW DEW-DEW DEW.

You know: my second-favorite part about that scene is Judge Reinhold imagines he’s in a business suit. It’s one of those things you might only pick up on your 15th or 20th watching the scene that... my little tip for you of something else to watch for.

DER DERRR DER-DER DERRRR DER. DEW DEW-DEW DEW.

Oh now, I’m happy with this review, and only sad about my life.

DER DERRR DER-DER DERRRR DER. DEW DEW-DEW DEW.

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I hope the Cybermen show up again.

Here is the beginning of my post.
And here is the rest of it:

Tor #1: I enjoy Joe Kubert’s war comics but I don’t think I’m the audience for his barbarian comics. I’d particularly enjoyed the Sgt. Rock comic that Kubert did with Brian Azzarello a few years ago, but I can’t seem to find a barbarian comic that’s the right fit for me.

What I found interesting about this comic:

There are only 10 panels in the comic which are silent. The overwhelming majority of panels contain insulting narration which explain in obtuse detail what Kubert’s drawn. I haven’t seen issue #2, but there isn’t a panel in issue #1 that needs any narration whatsoever— not a single panel-- and yet only 10 are silent.


This is an amateur hour technique being done by someone I think we’d all call a legend. Why is it there? Without it, what a fine example of a silent comic; with it, it's no longer a fine example of anything-- it's just another comic. I’d hate to be the guy trying to sell a serialized silent comic in today’s market, but hopefully, the collected edition will expect more of the audience.

I guess I’m more interested in who was responsible for the decision to add it in, Kubert or DC editors, than any of the contents of the book itself.

Logan: I think one or two of us on this website mentioned not caring for the writing after the first issue, but I don’t know if anyone checked in on this series after its conclusion with #3. I kept with it because I so love Eduardo Risso’s art.

But I did not enjoy this comic's story, no. To be fair, I’m not a Brian Vaughn fan. While I certainly respect his accomplishments, I tend to avoid his comics. I think the problem I had with this one is it’s about Wolverine at Hiroshima, but it turns out the problem with Hiroshima? It interferes with white guys fulfilling their creepy Asian fetishes. That’s about as bad as it ever gets for Wolverine. After surviving Hiroshima.

Where’s post-Hiroshima Japan? Where are people being vaporized? Where are the dead bodies? Where’s the Barefoot Gen shit, you know? Instead, it’s some nonsense about how wonderful a docile and subservient Asian woman can be. Dudes and their weird, silly fetishes are creepy, sure, but not as creepy as, I don’t know, A NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST. This jut felt like a wasted opportunity, especially with Risso— no slouch with violent imagery— behind the wheel.

Also:

The Grave of the Fireflies shout-out aside, I just found that line ghastly and clunky, though I’m having a hard time articulating why. Something about how he's trying to anthropomorphize the Bomb gives me the willies. You could argue it’s a double entendre, referring both to the bomb and the country making it... I just think that’s a fantastically stupid way of thinking about the United States’s actions during WWII, especially the decision to drop the bomb.

All that having been said, Marvel’s decision to make this available in black and white, as well as color, is maybe the best decision that company’s made in the last 500 years. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Pretty Baby Machine #1: This is historical fiction by Clark Westerman and Kody Chamberlain, published by the Shadowline division of Image, about Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Machine Gun Kelly teaming up to fight Al Capone.

That’s a solid enough premise for a comic book, I guess. Chamberlain’s got a menacing chiauroscuro noir style that I’m a sucker for, but the problem with a style like that is it requires especially strong character designs so that the reader can tell people apart. Here, it seems like the character designs might be based on historical photos; personally, I had a devil of a time telling characters apart. Westerman doesn’t help the reader any by referring to Machine Gun Kelly as, uhm, “George”. Which, yes, was his name, but: I would argue that clarity should have trumped accuracy. At least, I’m confused why he didn’t go with “Kelly.”

Confusion aside, no one’s going to go too wrong with me by doing a comic involving tommy guns. Any comic involving gangsters or crime shit will have something there for me. Chamberlain draws old cars and other period details in a way I enjoyed. However, a gunfight cribbed from Millers Crossing and a later scene involving a match going out and another match being struck both felt like they were written for the movies, not for the comics page, and not for Chamberlain. Big points, though, for a completely gratuitous page involving a stripper. I approve!

Ordinary Victories—What is Precious: This is part two of the Eisner nominated, Angoulême prize-winning graphic novel; it came out a week or two ago, I think. I bought part two by accident (whoops!); I never read part one, but according to the back cover, it’s a novel about “banal sadness”. I don’t think I missed anything too important plot-wise. Very little happened that I didn’t understand; very little happens period, though I unfortunately may not have had the full emotional experience of the book.

It’s about a French guy who smokes cigarettes, has trouble with his woman, sometimes is an asshole. I’d greatly enjoyed a graphic novel with the same premise a year or two ago: Dupuy-Berberian’s way-more-comedic Get a Life collection of Monseur Jean stories had been one of my favorite books of that year, whichever year it came out. I know it’s not true but I like to imagine in France, stories about Frenchmen smoking cigarettes and having trouble with their women is their equivalent of Spiderman comics. That people go to Angoulême, dressed up as Monseur Jean. Massive Multi-player Online Games where characters run around complaining about their nosy landlords, and having wistful flashbacks to their childhoods, and oppressing Arabs. “Science fiction, westerns, romance, mysteries, and Abrasive Frenchmen” – a world where that’s one of the pillars of genre, you know? That’s the world I want to live in.

Anyways: Ordinary Victories #2 is actually not a very funny book, but a meditation on the passage of time, the journey into adulthood, dealing with parents, children, and then at the end, it swerves into this lengthy digression about modern French politics.

It’s the kind of comic that a lot of fans online might want to call boring: “I get enough banal sadness in my life, buddy; when I read a comic, I want to read about lesbian werewolves who use dildos made of silver to kill-fuck one another. The banal sadness I can get for free, buddy. I’m going to call you buddy.” The whole "there's too much minimalist slice-of-life hoo-hee in comics" crowd. I can see the argument. I just don’t get how you can want one flavor of thing all the time, whether that flavor’s sad or crazy or whatever. I don’t get how this existing takes away from or prevents something else existing. Beats me. Anyways, this, it caught me in the right mood. I think a point in favor of the book though is it’s not completely dour and “life is all 100% horrible shit” like the American equivalents that might come to mind for most people.


Anyways, I was enjoying the banal sadness before that swerve at the end. There’s no story to speak of, but the moments of banal sadness are convincing. A favorite moment for me involved the main character watching his infant daughter be bullied by a young boy who she’s infatuated with and pursues, and the father’s reaction to that. That sort of thing.

Larcenet’s art is a pleasure, deceptively loose, but with a strong sense of lighting-- that's a bad scan above; my scanner's dying, the colors are way more muted than that. Anyways: I like how Larcenet draws people. Their noses overwhelm their faces—he takes a delight in wrinkles. Why are other countries so much more comfortable with the idea of funny drawings than we are? But the swerve into modern French politics threw me. The last chunk of the book is a depiction of the night of Nicolas Sarkozy’s election; I mostly know Sarkozy from having spent a few minutes—well, hours-- looking at photos of his super-hot lady. Why are other countries so much more comfortable with the idea of hot, naked first ladies? DAMN YOU, MAYFLOWER!

Anyways, I felt very put out by that portion of the book because I’m sure there were subtleties to what was happening that I didn’t appreciate. But: there’s a moment in Goddard’s Bande a Part where Anna Karina starts babbling about politics on the subway. I’m not a huge Goddard fan; that’s probably my favorite Goddard movie. But I was okay with that moment because it was more so about the Anna Karina character’s youth than what she was saying. Similarly, here, I could at least appreciate that it was about the characters’ aging, that we all try to grasp for something to hold onto as we pass through.

Angry Youth Comix #14: A lot of people profess not to get Johnny Ryan, or not find him funny, but I really just don’t see how that’s possible. Especially in light of issue #14 of Angry Youth Comix. I love how the cover is almost like a brown paper bag, like the contents were the comic equivalent of a homeless man’s liquor.

A lot of people’s Top Ten Favorite-est Comics of the Year lists this year will involve comics about Israel or the exquisite sadness of being an Asian man who likes blondes, all that stuff; mine will involve cheeseburger-flavored semen...? I got dropped on my head a lot as a baby.

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The first act of BLUE BEETLE winds to an end between issues #7 and #12.

I: CREATIVE CHANGES

BLUE BEETLE loses co-writer Keith Giffen after issue #10, leaving screenwriter John Rogers as the book’s sole “pilot”. Artist Cully Hamner leaves the book the same month, ably replaced by Raphael Albuquerque.

Perhaps the most confusing thing about this comic is the fact DC leaves Albuquerque on BLUE BEETLE, rather than promote him to a “higher profile” assignment. Does Marvel transition their stronger artists significantly more often? It seems that way to me but maybe that’s because I pay more attention to Marvel. Anyways, maybe he stays on BLUE BEETLE by choice. I have no idea.

II: THE WORLD TOUR

Two or three boring and inconsequential “adventures” go by, not worth summarizing. A variety of flashbacks answer various minor questions, like “Why does the Peacemaker know Blue Beetle’s scarab came from outer space aliens?” and “What happened to Blue Beetle during the INFINITE CRISIS, eight months earlier?” and “Who would be the wife if Blue Beetle married Captain Atom?”

There are pleasant moments. If you enjoy the wisecracking, you might enjoy a brief appearance by Green Arrow & Whatshername:

Two issues involve a completely pointless team-up between Blue Beetle and NEW GODS characters. DC’s grandest, most epic, most… well, most KIRBY characters once again reduced to rote, supporting cameos in a C-List character’s book.

If you like the NEW GODS, it's annoying seeing those characters treated in such a slapdash way; if you don't, then it's probably annoying to see them at all. So: ellipsis followed by a question mark, yes ...? Then again, Luke Cage once fought Doctor Doom over a couple hundred bucks, and that's a fact everybody (myself included) is pretty happy with so perhaps I'm overreacting.

That’s all part of the World Tour for BLUE BEETLE.

The World Tour’s my pet name for a set of issues that are mostly an excuse to introduce a new hero to some aspect of the DC Universe, rather than tell a story necessitated by the premise or the characters. For BLUE BEETLE, the World Tour includes (i) the time Blue Beetle meets the New Gods, (ii) the time Blue Beetle hangs out with Green Lantern, (iii) the time Blue Beetle meets the Batman, (iv) the time Blue Beetle meets Superman, (v) the time Blue Beetle meets the Teen Titans, (vi) the time Blue Beetle met the Spectre, and (vii) the time Woody Harrelson taught Blue Beetle to retain his ching.

Outcomes vary: for example, the Green Lantern issue felt reasonably necessary to the story. But I personally dislike World Tour issues. It’s time spent away from the supporting cast or from creating a unique point of view for the book itself. And worse, it encourages short-hand characterization of “I’m not like Superman because I ______” or “That may work for you, Green Lantern, but I prefer to ______” or “I can feel you in my _____, Batman; your _____ feels like its tearing me apart; please don’t ______ in my ______ or I’ll become pregnant with your Bat-________.” (Oh, Hentai-Batman, you’re my favorite).


I have an impatience to me. I want to find out what happens next. And a World Tour issue only very rarely says what happens next; it’s typically a distraction away from whatever mysteries or conflicts power a particular book. They're digressions; anecdotes. Look: I hate to brag, but one time, I saw the actor who played Carlton from the Fresh Prince, standing around at JFK Airport. That happened. That’s something that actually happened, for me. I can dine out on that for years to come. But when I write my memoir, (OH SHIT: I'M OLD; Random House: 2012), that’s not going to be a chapter in there. It’ll just be an endnote, somewhere in Chapter 2: “I’ve seen some awesome things; I don’t deserve this shit.” And then “ENDNOTE: One of the awesome things was that I once saw Carlton from the Fresh Prince near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” Poetic license! New York Times bestsellers list ahoy!

There are good things that can be said about a World Tour, but for BLUE BEETLE, during the book’s second act, it ultimately becomes a near-fatal distraction to more pressing elements in the book.

III: AN OUT-OF-NOWHERE DIGRESSION ABOUT STARMAN

I also find the World Tour interesting in how it signals creators oblivious—- if not hostile—- to posterity.

I re-read the DC comic book STARMAN the other day. It had been my absolute favorite comic for the first twelve issues. But by issue #36, I had quit the book, angry, just ... ANGRY, cursing its name.

I’d always wondered if I’d made a mistake, if I'd over-reacted, if I was being silly, so I went and read it beginning to end. Turns out? I got lucky. While the first 18 or so issues hold up beautifully, just beautifully, past that, the book goes into a horrifying nosedive. Story arcs drag on indefinitely; the book’s best feature—- its love of DC history—- becomes an anchor around its neck. The book ends and ends and ends—- it has more endings than some bullshit LORD OF THE RINGS film. Each resolution to one of the book’s mysteries is less satisfying than the next. And Tony Harris’s departure blows open a hole that never gets filled despite some admirable efforts by other artists.

The first 18 issues are such terrific work, though, so exactly and totally what I look for from a mainstream comic, that I’d happily recommend the recent STARMAN OMNIBUS. The main character is both universal and specific; the writer doesn’t pretend only superheroics matter, but is eager to share opinions about art and music, culture; the book is enriched by comics history; the setting, the supporting cast-— here is a world that feels lived in and alive; the DC Universe becomes a fictional world worth visiting.

Re-reading it, I realized I’d been unknowingly and unfairly comparing later books like BLUE BEETLE to that early run. Jack Knight had a personality; where’s Blue Beetle’s personality? Starman reflected its author’s passion for old movies; what passion does Blue Beetle reflect? Et cetera. How much can be done with a mainstream comic!

But… but: STARMAN was another book fond of the World Tour, to its detriment. The book’s unquestionable low point is a 5000 issue-long tour of the DCU’s outer space. And it’s another book oblivious to posterity. A significant chunk of the book relies upon Neron.

You know: Neron.

Neron was the lead villain in UNDERWORLD UNLEASHED, a freakishly awful DC crossover from the 90’s. He’s made minor appearances since but the minutae of the Underworld Unleashed crossover play a notable role in STARMAN. Much like BLUE BEETLE, STARMAN’s creators were eager to incorporate DCU storylines into its plot.

Which is fine: if you expect that no one will ever possibly want to read your comic book months or even years later.

An excerpt from Starman #35 featuring that one super-lame Electric Blue Superman.

Is a disregard for posterity a bad thing? I’m honestly not sure. Orson Welles once said “It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.” On the other hand, after saying that, he promptly ate a live cow, drank a tanker trunk of whiskey, tried to sell some green beans, and performed the voice of Unicron in TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE before vomiting all over one of Peter Bogdanovich’s trophy blondes. So, who knows?

IV: PREJUDICES

Blue Beetle acquires a “mentor” figure in Peacemaker, a minor DC hero notable for fighting evil with a bucket on his head. They at least updated him. By taking off the bucket. Which was a good start.

Bucket.

So: we have a screenwriter writing a story about a Mentor Figure tutoring the Chosen One on his Hero’s Journey.

Ugh.

Look, I’m prejudiced. With a few exceptions, when a comic book writer is a fancy-pants Hollywood screenwriter, I just go in prejudiced. Is it as bad a flare-up for my prejudices as, say, when a wannabe comic tries to look like bad manga? No, not even close—- but I have a good sized chip on my shoulder. I have this irrational thing of...

“You’re not worthy of serious attention. This would be a nice place if it weren’t for you tourists. Fucking tourists!”

How crazy is that?? How many screenwriters do I know that are huge comic fans? How are they “tourists?” It’s completely nuts.

Bucket.

There are these screenwriters who sold a movie version of their Oni comic in April 2008; the comic comes out in an unspecified date in 2009. And I read that story, and I know and remember the name of their comic so I can specifically not buy it when it comes out. I’m THAT prejudiced! Why? Maybe they’re good and decent people who love comics more than any of us.

Why am I the petty and angry guy on the Internet? Is it resentment? Is it pettiness? Maybe it's all those things. Maybe I'm a bad person. I don't know exactly what it is.

I think for some fans, Senor Fancypants makes their delusional fantasies that they’ll somehow magically wind up writing IRON MAN that much more improbable. But I honestly don’t think that’s what it is for me. I really, truly don’t.

Marvel editors have argued in the past, something like “These guys really know story structure more than someone who just read comics.” But that ignores every single successful mainstream creator in comics right now, the majority of whom came from independent comics, smaller venues, clawed their way up. People for whom comics weren’t Plan B.

But: does that matter? Well, no, in the abstract, logically speaking: no.

Or I guess I always have the suspicion of … like when you hear someone go “I’m going to come at science fiction fresh because I’m not a sci-fi nerd. So, my story’s going to be about a spaceship where the computer in charge of the spaceship—get this—it goes insane.” I trust a native to know what’s tiresome and know what’s surprising and entertaining. But: again, that’s based on the faulty assumption that these guys aren’t fans themselves, so...

So: how crazy does this all sound? Hello, crazy. I know this prejudice is crazy; if it weren’t crazy, I wouldn’t call it a “prejudice.” I just know I have it and I should be honest about it. I think it’s important to have some degree of self-knowledge. For example, I know, I am absolutely certain, about myself that if I were ever a puppeteer, if I ever worked with puppets, I’d build my puppet with a puppet penis, but then I’d put pants on my puppet, right? Like, human pants, that would always be on my puppet, so no one watching would guess that my puppet had a penis. That way, if they ever fired me, I’d be able to pull down my puppet’s pants and scream “Eat this, Jim Henson!” I know that about myself, and I think it’s important to have that self-knowledge.

Anyways, it’s not like BLUE BEETLE should be congratulated for its clichés either. Watching some screenwriter fill out a Syd Field crossword puzzle is the opposite of entertainment. 34 across: “hero finds companions” (That’d be issue #9). 14 down: “mentor figure/guide died / gets injured and can’t accompany hero on final mission” (There’s issue #20). 18 across: Thing that erupts from my butt, four letters. Nor is the fact that each of these events is handled in a completely perfunctory way-- that the companions (a hacker duo, ala Mr. Ram Ridley from the Mark Gruenwald CAPTAIN AMERICA run) end up being insignificant to the story; that the mentor is "taken off the board" in some dull crossover with the SINESTRO WAR-- to the book's credit, no.


Bucket.

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So: where were we...?

Secret Invasion #3-- the penultimate issue to the halfway point. How exciting!

To date, there has been absolutely no explanation to the question that keeps nagging at me: why would anyone go to a restaurant called Hell's Kitchen and then complain that their food's taking too long? Didn't you watch the previous seasons of the show? But week after week, that restaurant fills up wtih people shocked-- SHOCKED!-- that the food isn't very good. It's in its, like, third or fourth season. What are those whiny people complaining about? Scream at them, Gordon Ramsey. Scream at them...

I wouldn't say I'm losing interest in Secret Invasion, but...

So far in this series, about twenty minutes have gone by. It's been an eventful twenty minutes-- but if the superheros ever break for lunch, their lunch break could very well take 8 issues. 12, if they eat at the California Pizza Kitchen. 6 issues of Wolverine going into a Berzerker Rage saying "How long does it take these people to make a Caesar Salad? If it takes them this long to make a Caesar Salad-- are the people who order pizza waiting all day? How long do these other assholes wait? I wonder if anyone has ever died waiting for a Chicken Fajita Pizza. What a horrible sounding pizza. How is that progress? That's not progress. I bet if you showed a Chicken Fajita pizza to one of my ancestors, they'd cry. This entire food experience is disappointing my ancestors." Berzerker Rage!

I once wrote to the California Pizza Kitchen, accusing their Fettucini Alfredo of causing me feelings of depression and sadness. You know: I was bored. Anyways: they never wrote back to address the depression or sadness I'd accused the Garlic Cream Sauce of having caused-- instead, they just sent me coupons for more food. I really think there's a metaphor there for, like, our entire way of life, man. But I guess that doesn't really have anything to do with Secret Invasion.

As I was saying, Hell's Kitchen is a reality television show in which a pudgy, sassy child-molesty-looking guy and a pudgy, sassy, yelling/crying lady compete to be the best chef, and the best part is the end of the episode when show host Gordon Ramsey kicks someone out of the kitchen and their photograph bursts into flame. It's what I'm waiting for the entire episode-- I know it's going to happen, and when it finally does happen, that's the moment of satisfaction that keeps me coming back, I think.

Or there's a show called House about a sassy doctor - the tension builds the entire episode until the sassy doctor figures out how to cure the sicko-of-the week. That's the moment of satisfaction for House. Or if you enjoy politics-- we're all waiting for Hillary Clinton to show up at the Democratic Convention with dynamite strapped to her pantsuit, demanding that we name her Emperor of Pretty. We all see it coming-- it's the only way it can end-- it's the way we all want it to end. Sass-ily!

So: What are we waiting to see happen for Secret Invasion?

With the DC crossovers-- Final Crisis and Infinite Crisis both had the same thing going on: buy this crossover so you can find out what this crossover is about. At the beginning of both of those, it's entirely inscrutable what the hell the story was / is going to be about. DC fans pay for the privilege of finding out what they're paying for-- the moment of ultimate satisfaction, the happy ending , is when they tell you what the point of what they sold you is.

But Secret Invasion... The comic is titled "Secret Invasion"-- are fans waiting to see how the invasion gets repelled? That doesn't sound like much. If you look at 9/11, people sure seemed to want revenge after that day, no matter how ill-advised-- just surviving an incident usually isn't enough for the narrative people want to tell themselves. So: will people want to see the Marvel Superheros get revenge for the invasion? Do they want to see the Marvel Superheros invade a completely unrelated alien race that wasn't really involved in the invasion? Or do fans want to see the invasion succeed and Skrulls taking over the Earth? There's no particular bad guy that the fans are being asked to hate. The Skrulls so far are literally faceless.

But maybe that changes here so-- time to read the issue:

AFTER READING THE FIRST PAGE OF THE THIRD ISSUE:

The first page is a Dramatis Personae page, identifying the name and appearance of a number of characters.

And wow: I don't recognize half of these characters. There's a character called Stature? ... She get really tall, I presume? There's a character called Wiccan, but it's a guy and not a pudgy lesbian. Annex? His power is to be slightly nicer and newer than the rest of the superheros...? Melee, Sunstreak, Gorilla Girl...? Red Nine, Proton, Batwing, Prodigy, Geiger... Geiger?! Gauntlet? Is he unnaturally good at the video-game Gauntlet? Does he team up with Rampage or Paperboy? That'd be a helpful power, if you were short on quarters.

It's like they gave names to those little tiny characters you see floating around in the background of some DC crossover, after George Perez had too many cups of coffee, and let them into the Marvel Universe. Let DC have the coffee people!

AFTER READING THE ENTIRE ISSUE:

What just happened to this comic?

In this issue: all of the Marvel superheros you know and like go away for 22 pages, and, like, these other characters I've never heard of come along instead. The big, hyped-up summer crossover series just put an issue-long spotlight on Geiger and Friends...!

And then Nick Fury shows up at the end, but with these other D-List characters I've never seen before, who...

I think this comic just turned into the Skrulls versus a mid-1990's Image comic! Nick Fury has a gun so plainly about compensating for a small penis-- that gun would make Codename Strykeforce blush. And there's a minority lady, a lady with a robot hand, a guy with his shirt off, Dave Navarro holding a chain, a little kid-- the Marvel universe just got invaded by the 5000th WildC.A.Ts revamp.

Chap Yaep's going to sue somebody.

Seriously though: who are any of the characters in this comic book? ... Maybe this isn't a valid thing to say, but: What happened to Spiderman or the Wolverine? Didn't Marvel used to publish comics with Spiderman or the Wolverine in them? (Though god, speaking of which-- I've been following Spiderman for a couple issues just because I like Marcos Martin's art. The writing though... Jesus Christ! Is that, like-- why is Marvel... Did someone lose a bet?)

I suppose Marvel wants fan reaction to focus on the Iron Man scene, in which it is teased that Iron Man might be a little green man. But... come on: they're not revealing that Iron Man's a little green man a month after his movie comes out. It's just not plausible. What's more interesting is that Iron Man brings the number of characters with a moustache in this comic book to a total of five. Five men with moustaches. One girl who looks like she waxes it... I went to a party once where there was a girl with a moustache. She didn't wax it, and it'd actually grown into, like... like, a full-blown moustache. Regular girl, a little thick, and a moustache. Never occurred to her to wax it. It really blew my mind. Anyways, five moustaches in a single, non-period-piece comic book? That's something, at least. Maybe that's where Secret Invasion is headed-- towards an invasion of guys offering moustache rides? I for one welcome the Mighty Marvel Moustache Rides!

My favorite character I've never heard of before and don't care anything about is definitely Annex. FYI. I hope Hulkamaniac survives though. Or that other character... with the hair...? Who ... seems like he likes good more than he likes evil. I hope he wins in the end. I'm rooting for that guy. Granted, Final Crisis revolves around Terrible Turpin, but... I prefer a DC comic about obscure minor DC characters . Personally, I like the Marvel A-list and the DC D-List, and I don't like the Marvel D-List or the DC A-List. Maybe I'm weird that way, though...

Yeah, nothing really happens in this one. Here's the plot summary for this issue: "Nick Fury shows up." That's about all that happens. I understand why it's plotted this way-- they wanted the issue to be yet another "shit hits the fan" issue, showing how overwhelmingly the Skrulls are winning up until the Nick Fury arrival which they end on. They want to show how the Skrulls really had this invasion planned out, and how it would have worked but for ______. But 9 pages of Skrulls beating up D-listers...? I suspect they've overestimated their audience's patience on this one. Given how little "happened" last issue, and again this issue... I would be surprised if most fans are okay with the pacing... I would guess that'll be the focus of fan reaction far moreso than reacting to that lame Iron Man scene.

I like how a Marvel comic has an advertisement for Batman in it. There are two ads of the Incredible Hulk encouraging an aging douchebag to do his laundry or something. I don't really understand those. For example, why is the aging douchebag wearing that awful belt? Am I right? He's wearing a gray shirt and gray pants, with a gray belt and a gray jacket... Did someone boring die? How about that men's fashion, huh?

Oh, and speaking of douchebags: there's a giant closeup photo of Will Smith smirking on the back of the comic. It's advertising a movie or something, but really, it's only a matter of years before photographs of Will Smith smirking are placed strategically throughout this country just to numb and placate the public. They'll drop photos of Will Smith smirking down onto our food riots to calm us all down. I'm expecting the food riots in November incidentally-- high price of heating during the winter, $80 a gallon gas by then, truckers striking, banking crises, mothers abandoning their babies, nature reclaiming the cities, a madman rising in the East. Basically: photo of Will Smith on the back cover of Secret Invasion #3 reminds me of a rapidly impending apocalypse. But photos of Will Smith have been doing that for me since the music video for Miami... humanity muddles through, I guess.

Also: the Vision gets his head blown off, which would be moving if I knew he was alive before this comic. Didn't he get killed already? I thought that character was dead...

So: that wraps the issue. The plot has advanced another 10 minutes, which-- if the life expectancy of the average American is 77.8 years, assuming this pacing holds, according to my rough calculations, one human lifetime is the equivalent of 408,968 issues of Secret Invasion. A comic telling the story of a single human life at this rate would thus take 34,080 years to be published. Not including annuals.

I hope next issue has the for-real Marvel superheros in it, though. I prefer them.

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Aaah, lazy Saturday, reading my Secret Invasion…

Before Having Read the Comic:

I really enjoyed reactions to issue #1 around the internet. My favorite criticism is from a Mr. Stahl at Newsarama which pointed out that Skrulls revert back into Skrulls when they die:

“Detecting impersonators is trivial: Take a live tissue sample from a suspect, and see if it reverts, immediately upon being removed from the body or after the cells in the sample die. There’s no plausible way for a Skrull to retain control over the sample, especially after cell death.”

I’m not being mean—I think that’s a great reaction. It’s a completely valid, logical solution to the logistical problems that extraterrestrial Skrulls would face in mounting an invasion of the planet Earth from their outer space hives.

My only way of arguing it is a cop-out: I don’t care about logic—I just want to see 2008 Luke Cage fight 1978 Luke Cage, and logic be damned. Logic be damned! Which… that’s how we ended up in the Iraq War, if you think about it. Which I haven’t.

I really enjoyed the reactions, but... I think a lot of times people complain about big crossovers—and with good reason. Very good reason. But I think what gets lost in all of that is… you know, a lot of people like these things. They’re not all bad people. So: what are they getting out of them?

I’m reading my first China Mieville book right now, Perdido Street Station. Mieville is an avowed Marxist and international law specialist who writes these very odd novels about monsters. I guess he's the cutting-edge guy in fantasy right now-- I don't usually read those kinds of novels anymore so I wouldn't know. I saw a quote of his from an interview the other day:

Well I think part of the problem with the modern 'liberal' novel is that it often tends not to conceive of the totality of social life: instead it abstracts one element (stereotypically the middle-class family), and universalises it. By contrast, fantastic fiction that 'world-creates' creates a world - a totality. So whether or not it explicitly spells it out, there's a sense that an economic problem conceived of as background and the romantic plot foregrounded are part of the _same universe_.

Maybe there’s an analogy we can draw to the big crossover. A specific series can only cover so much geography—an issue of The Fantastic Four can talk about family, an issue of Captain America can talk about patriotism. But the daily lives of readers are rarely just one thing—life can often be a series of collisions between disparate elements, between balancing family and work, social responsibility and private needs, etc. People eat dinner with their families, then turn on TV and hear about crazy shit happening on the other side of the world. Everything collides together. Everything’s colliding faster and faster—try and follow the news anymore. One day, the Bush Administration’s corrupt, the next day they’re incompetent, the day after that, they’re back to corrupt—who can keep up? The same machine you’re reading this on, brings you pornography and music, you know? The pornography is sometimes about innocent schoolgirls who get caught cheating on their college geography exams, and have to pleasure their way out of trouble. Sometimes there are moustaches involved; sometimes there aren’t. Sometimes the performances stops in the middle for the two lovers to kick open a piñata, and inside of the piñata are sex toys, and then the porn stars resume their lovemaking on top of the lust-piñata. Sometimes a young pistelero arrives upon the scenes and says “Madre de Dios! You have destroyed my lust-piñata with your naughtiness. I shall teach you both a lesson.” And then he does, sexually, and it’s horrible, and you want to look away, and you want someday to forget what you see, forget what happens next. But it’s border justice, and you learn to live with that.

Usually there are tattoos.

I think a big crossover can speak to that sense that beyond our own limited human stories or what have you, we’re part of a larger social organism, in a way that I don’t know of or can think of any other mainstream comic that can. So: maybe that’s something…?

After Having Read Issue #2:

Not much "happens" this issue, so I don’t have much to say about any of it. This issue’s mostly just follow-through on the events of the first issue-- fight scene, cliffhanger, and done. I thought it was nicely balanced between the big fight scenes, and bringing key events down to a level of how specific characters react to the situation. I've read a number of crossovers which have failed dramatically at the latter.

Mostly, I suppose I liked this issue because there were three double-page splash pages of things going nuts. The hero of the issue to me is inker Mark Morales: having seen Leinil Yu without him, I have to say I’m happy he’s around. I liked each of the double-page splashes so I liked the issue. People who don't enjoy that sort of thing probably enjoyed the issue less, I'd guess.

Unfortunately, the issue hints that maybe the Sentry will figure prominently in this series. I don't think that's a very interesting character, so I'd rather he didn't.

The only part that jumps out at me as being especially interesting is the “cliffhanger” involving Captain America. Basically, a new Captain America pops out and the issue suggests New Cap is real and Old Cap was a Skrull for the last ___ years. I think that's something, but not because anyone is going to believe the cliffhanger for a second and believe that Old Cap could have been a Skrull. Readers have seen his dead body, seen his funeral, etc. Having him be a Skrull would be a horrible take-away on readers, and would badly derail the work done on the regular series. I think it'd very obviously be a huge, huge mistake.

But I still think it’s an interesting cliffhanger because it poses the question that… the Old Cap managed to rally half the characters behind him in Marvel’s Civil War; what kind of damage is the fake New Cap capable of? I think that’s a fun, solid question to end an issue on.

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This is part two of an irregular multiple part series of essays looking at the first 25 issues of the BLUE BEETLE comic book series, recently published by DC Comics. Part One-- a statement of intentions and a look at the first issue of the series-- can be found HERE.

This installment will look at BLUE BEETLE issues #2-6.



I.

The first full storyline of the comic is about Blue Beetle's confrontation with his first set of antagonists. Blue Beetle's "secret identity" is a Mexican-American teenager. So... the first challenge he has to face? A street gang. Named the Posse.

Race is a motherfucker. It’s a tough issue to deal with in any capacity, and I appreciate that the writers are on a tightrope—put in the street gang and you get the “oh, why must we see the street gang” crowd; leave out the street gang and you get the “why’d you white-wash the Mexican-American hero”; have him get a B in Spanish and you get Cheech & Chong fans excited but everyone else gets confused. That damned-if-you- do bind is a reason I think other creators might want to shy away from writing those characters—but also a reason they shouldn’t.

The Posse, though? The same name as the Jamaican bad guys from the Steven Segal epic, MARKED FOR DEATH?


Unfortunately, unlike MARKED FOR DEATH’s Posse, BLUE BEETLE’s Posse are neither Jamaican nor super wicked awesome-est street gang ever; they kind of suck. Luckily, they aren’t featured in the comic very much beyond this arc.

Per the classic shonen fight-comic formula, as the arc progresses, Blue Beetle ultimately teams up with the Posse (who in these issues suddenly include his best friend) to face off against a greater threat—the lady crime boss, La Dama! (Who he will later team up with to face the greater threat of so-and-so, and so-on, as the formula dictates). So although the Posse are the bad guys of issue #2, by issue #6, they’ve become the good guys.

Which… is kind of weird. Because fun-fact about the Posse:


They’re engaged in narco-trafficking.

About 400 tons of cocaine enter into the United States every year. That’s not counting the tons of heroin, meth, etc. So… you know, statistically speaking, if Blue Beetle’s friend ever looked in the back of a truck, chances are he’d discover a big mountain of ye’ old yayo. But on the bright-side, maybe it’s sex slaves—- 15 year old child-brides for our professional ballplayers, if that’s the sort of thing that makes you feel better. Or guns intended for child-soldiers. Or a dirty bomb.

Statistically, though—come on, read between the lines: he’s engaged in narco-trafficking.

The first issue has the main character not caring if one of his friends being physically if not sexually abused by her father— now in issue #5, we have the main character not caring that his best friend is engaged in narco-trafficking. Thank god the space aliens show up in a few issues and change the trajectory of this comic—otherwise, it was really just a matter of time before Blue Beetle’s dad would’ve had a couple baby skulls mounted on his cock, and Blue Beetle would be holding pom poms and cheering him on, and that’d be the cover. “This issue, Blue Beetle’s polygamous first cousin makes a flesh necklace from the ears of his many Vietnamese war-brides, while Blue Beetle eats a delicious French Apple pie.”

There will be readers who’ll insist that the trucks might be carrying pixie dust or robot apes, since this is the DCU and the DCU is built on top of a frothy cake of whimsy and bullshit. Their argument would go: “because the DCU is built on top of a frothy cake of whimsy and bullshit, we can suspend our disbelief and believe it’s possible that a street gang involved in illegal smuggling operating out of EL PASO, TEXAS, is smuggling something that is illegal but does not offend our sense of right and wrong the way smuggling drugs, guns or people might.”

Fine, fine, eat your cake. But the comic still has a street gang in it. And is specifically stating that they financially support themselves by operating in an extra-legal way. And those characters are the positive characters. The negative characters? La Dama’s big crime in the arc is taking a baby away from… a street gang whose engaged in operating in illegal behavior.

Uh, that exists outside the DCU: it’s called Child Protective Services.

II.

La Dama is taking super-powered children from out of the barrio or away from the street gangs, and is keeping them in a safe, structured environment in which they’re provided with an education. The arc ends on a bizarre note where the characters who had been “kidnapped” are urged by the head of a street gang to return to the barrios. They’re urged to abandon the safety of Child Protective Services and to return to the bosom of the societal institutions provided by extra-legal street gangs.


You don’t need white institutions to protect you because now the Mexican-Americans have their own superhero! Gangs ahoy! At least Blue Beetle looks embarrassed by all this, I guess, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the character reacting to the speech, or the artist reacting to the writing.

I think we can all agree at least that La Dama is in the wrong for having been engaged in kidnapping children from their parents in order to raise an army of magical Latinos in the hopes of someday conquering the world. But the rest? Well, at the risk of repeating myself: race is a motherfucker. Sometimes things sound different ways to different people. The arc was perfectly fine to most people who read it. Perhaps most people read the “safety versus freedom” aspects as a commentary on the civil rights situation in this country following this country’s botched response to 9/11. And not the way I read it which is, you know: “minorities should avoid the social support or interference of white institutions in favor of their own institutions—no matter how criminal or decrepit or involved in the narco-trafficking business-- even if it means their friends get beaten by their dads.”

I’m sure fans could angrily argue that the bad guys can’t be a metaphor for white institutions because La Dama is a minority character herself, but—- well, I wouldn’t find that a very convincing argument, and they would, and there’s the impasse. But say a fan argues that “La Dama is the bad guy and she’s a minority, so everything you just said is wrong.” Here’s the thing I don’t get then: Blue Beetle only defeats this threat by exposing La Dama’s wrongdoing to … a higher authority, specifically a cameo from The Phantom Stranger:


So even if you set aside everything else, in the first arc, the minority heroes haven’t really changed anything, but have only created the conditions necessary for a magical White Guy to step in and rescue the minorities from themselves. The arc says a Magical White Guy is the necessary solution to keep the evil minorities and the good minorities in a proper bargaining relationship. If bad minorities act out, the good super-minorities rat them out to the Magical White Man.

Uhm, yeah: no.

But look, we all have our different perspectives, and hey, that plus refracted light is what makes us a rainbow.

III.

The 2nd issue continued to have a “future storyline” taking place after the previously published Infinite Crisis miniseries, along with a “past storyline” taking place before or contemporaneously with said miniseries.


At the end of issue 2, the series adds in the "twist" that the "future" storyline (and the rest of the series) takes place exactly one year after the crucial events of the "past" storyline. Why? Because it's DC and that means... EDITORIAL FIAT! Yay!

At or about the publication of the second issue of BLUE BEETLE, DC's latest EDITORIAL FIAT! du jour was "all of our books take place one year later than the last moments of INFINITE CRISIS." So, BLUE BEETLE, like the rest of the DC line (I guess…?), jammed in a “one year later” subplot.

One Year Later? Really? Even if it's a new book, launching a new character, that doesn't need any added confusion? EDITORIAL FIAT! Even if it damages the compact between a reader and a book that a comic is a window into another world with its own people and geography and rules, by reminding us of the bizarre, haphazard creative forces that go into that world's creation? EDITORIAL FIAT! Even if it damages the relationship between a reader and a creative team by reminding the reader that the creative team includes a bunch of fucking editors? EDITORIAL FIAT! Even if Kyle Mclachlan reached into a kangaroo pouch and pulled out a severed ear, and the kangaroo punched him in the skull, and the ear was on fire, and the kangaroo was on fire, and our loins were on fire, and the whole world was on fire? DRUGS!




Earmuffs, Blue Beetle! Earmuffs!

IV.

The arc isn’t very meaningful long-term. I don’t know if that matters. The Posse plays hardly any role in the rest of the series— red herring.

Blue Beetle’s goal is to meet one particular member of the Posse so she can explain his powers to him. She never does or explains anything of any value, and is never seen again— red herring.

The arc sets up an archnemesis for Blue Beetle, La Dama, who doesn’t really ever do anything I remember being especially evil for the rest of the series— red herring.

The arc sets up a third nemesis for Blue Beetle, a magician henchman for La Dama who never really ends up mattering very much— red herring.

The entire arc is about magic in the DC Universe, and Blue Beetle learning about magic, and coping with magic. The rest of the comic is a space opera sci-fi adventure— red herring.


The most interesting bit is the series sets up a dilemma: should Blue Beetle save his friend from her evil Aunt and save himself the hassle of having his secret identity exposed, or should he allow her to be raised by a crime-lord for his own convenience?

Guess which option he chooses. Also: who ultimately resolves the moral dilemma? Not Blue Beetle— it’s resolved for him by external events. So, I’d personally categorize that under “herring, red.”

V.

Something this arc got me thinking about is Blue Beetle’s relationship with his power.

The Marvel characters-- the nature of power is split for a Marvel character. You either achieve your powers (e.g. Tony Stark builds his Iron Man suit) or you’re victimized by them (e.g. whoops: Hulk). Power in a Marvel comic is not something to be merely enjoyed ala a DC character like The Flash or Superman— there’s more to it than that.

Captain America? Victim: a man out of time. Iron Fist? Achievement: learned kung-fu. Spider-man? Both: achievement-- built his webshooters, but also victimized by how his powers force him to be responsible. The X-Men? Victims. Daredevil? Uh: handi-capable. The Fantastic Four? Both victims and achievement-based heroes! And so on. The Marvel characters … there’s a certain fission element built into their DNA. Their relationships with power defines a lot about how or why those characters work.

The big DC characters are not as interesting in that respect. Sure, there’s Batman (both victim and achievement), but more of them were just sort-of handed their powers. Green Lantern is literally just handed a power ring—end of story.

How about our boy? How about Mr. Beetle? In the first issue, he learned that he had superpowers, and after that—he just goes off and uses them.

In this arc, he’s never really victimized by his powers— he’s more than happy to use them willy-nilly. No, he’s victimized by the unhappy situation of being a part of the DCU. He’s victimized because he was taken away from his family for a year due to the One Year Later stunt event-— that has nothing to do with his powers. He’s victimized by DC editors, which… get in line.

He certainly didn’t achieve his powers-- a magical rock crawled up his ass. He was sodomized with superpowers— wee. The only achievement was on the part of his sphincter.

Anytime I watch a James Bond movie, I want to know how to play Baccarat (it's an