Hat And Beard 1 – Chuck D
As you probably know, today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of two of the greatest people who ever lived, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin, and given that I write here about politics and science it seemed absurd not to mark this (those waiting for the last Final Crisis post will have to wait a bit more – I was going to post yesterday but my home net access was FUBAR, and I’m writing these two today. But I’ll have a very long, special post for you on Saturday). For Lanky Linc I’m just going to talk about freedom generally, rather than Lincoln’s own achievements specifically (though I’m sure this will disappoint my friend Tilt, the one person I know who has a recording of the Gettysburg Address on his MP3 player) as I think everyone reading this will be broadly in agreement that slavery was a bad thing. However, it is likely that people reading this will *not* know some things about Darwin that are worth knowing, so here’s a rough guide to some misconceptions about Darwin, and to what he *actually* did:
Misconception 1 – Darwin came up with the idea of evolution
As a matter of fact, the idea of evolution had been current in biology long before Darwin, starting with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and supported by such notable biologists of the time as Buffon and Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. However, the reason Lamarck is considered to have been mistaken and Buffon and Erasmus Darwin’s names now survive only as footnotes to literature of the time (Buffon mentioned as being current in Shaw’s boyhood in the Lamarckian preface to Back To Methuselah and Erasmus Darwin’s experiments with vermicelli being an inspiration for Frankenstein) is that they hadn’t come up with a satisfactory explanation of how or why evolution happens, ‘just’ observed that it did. Their best guess (and it was a reasonable one) was that, for example, a proto-giraffe wanted to reach higher leaves, so stretched its neck out until it could, then passed that stretchy neck on to its descendants. This idea, of evolution having a purpose or being directed by a mind toward a goal, still seems very popular among the public (it resurfaces, for example in Terry Nation’s Dalek stories and Grant Morrison’s X-Men run) but it’s almost universally regarded as wrong by the scientific community (except for a couple of people on the margins like Rupert Sheldrake, who is also almost universally regarded as wrong by the scientific community).
What Darwin came up with was the idea of natural selection.
Darwin’s work had something to do with genes
While genetics provides a lot of modern support for Darwin’s ideas, and a lot of popularisers like Richard Dawkins now explain his ideas in those terms, the science of genetics developed later than evolutionary biology, and to start with relatively independently. The ideas in genetics were originally the work of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, and the molecular basis of modern genetics was mostly worked out by Rosalind Franklin based on earlier work by Linus Pauling (then Crick & Watson put the finishing touches on Franklin’s work and took the credit for themselves). Genetics and evolutionary theory reinforce each other, but they developed independently.
Evolution is ‘just a theory’, it’s not been proved
This is literally true, but it’s also a misunderstanding of how science works. Contrary to media reports, there is no such thing as ‘scientific proof’ and nothing has ever been ‘proved’ scientifically – everything in science is contingent, and subject to change if new evidence comes in. That, more than anything else, is what makes science science.
However, the word ‘theory’ has a rather more technical meaning in science than it does in vernacular English. When speaking casually, we can say “I have a theory about that…” meaning just “I have an idea”. In science, on the other hand, that would be called a conjecture or (at best) a hypothesis. A theory is an idea which explains things that have been observed, that contains testable predictions, and that has been tested multiple times and found to be correct every time. It could still be wrong, but once something’s called a theory it’s extremely unlikely to be wrong, because it agrees with every test we can put it to. The mass of evidence for the idea of evolution is large enough that we can safely say we’re as sure that evolution happens as we are of anything. We might still improve some of the fine details, just as happens with the theory of (say) gravity, but just as we know that if we drop a heavy weight it’ll fall, even if we turn out to be wrong about the twentieth digit of the gravitational constant, we know that humanity came from an apelike ancestor which came from a monkeylike ancestor which came from a shrewlike ancestor and so on.
So what did Darwin do? Well, two things.
Firstly, and least importantly, he provided a greater mass of evidence for the idea of evolution than anyone had ever done before, and all in one place. On The Origin Of The Species is a great book, but it’s also almost unreadable, and for much the same reasons as those other two great unreadable books of the 19th century Capital and The Golden Bough – the sheer, unrelenting mass of detailed evidence he provides is enough to convince you very early on, but then he goes on, and on, and on and on and on, shooting down every possible objection and listing twenty-five bits of evidence for almost every sentence. By the time you get a third of the way through you will know more about the slightly-interestingly-shaped beaks of different species of finch than you ever thought possible.
This makes it sound like a bad book, but in fact it was a necessary book – if you want to convince people of a revolutionary idea, you have to overwhelm them with evidence, and Darwin spent literally decades of his life collating the evidence to prove his point.
But the most important thing he did (along with Alfred Russell Wallace, who came up with the idea independently when Darwin had nearly finished writing his book) was to come up with the idea of natural selection.
Like most great revolutionary new ideas, this was made up of a couple of old ideas that no-one else had ever thought of putting together before (this is not sarcasm – that is how most geniuses work). Darwin took Lamarckian evolution and added to it the idea, originally developed by Thomas Malthus, of competition for scarce resources. What he came up with was brilliant in its simplicity.
To take the example of the giraffe, used above when talking about Lamarck, imagine you have a load of horselike animals living in an environment where there’s not much grass, but there are plenty of bushes and trees. The horselike animals breed rapidly while living off the bushes, and when they breed some are naturally born with longer necks than others – not through any deliberate stretching, but just through normal variation in the same way some people are born with lighter or darker hair. And just like the colour of hair, their children will tend to inherit the slightly longer necks.
So eventually, so many horselike creatures are born that they eat all the bushes, and they start starving. However, the ones with the slightly longer necks can reach the lower leaves on the trees, and eat them and survive and breed. Eventually you have a population of longer-necked horselike creatures. They have then eaten so many of the lower leaves that only those who can reach the higher leaves will survive. Repeat this over many generations, and you have a giraffe.
And this simple process can explain, to the best of our current knowledge, all the near-infinite variety of lifeforms in the world, from the AIDS virus to the peacock to the plum tree to the mountain gorilla. All you need, to get to all that, is some stuff that breeds and eats, and not quite enough stuff for it to eat. Then wait a few hundred million years, and voila! You get a species of ape that seems destined to destroy it all…
That is what Darwin explained, and that is why Darwin is one of the handful of most important people who ever lived.
Ten Pop-Science Books (And Three SF Ones) You Should Read
Zebtron in the comments to the previous post asked what books on the science I talk about sometimes I would recommend. I thought others might be interested, so rather than a reply, I thought I’d post it here…
Here’s ten books on ‘this sort of thing’ that are popular enough to get hold of. Most of these are ‘pop science’ rather than the hard stuff – if you want to go in-depth a good starting point is the three-volume Feynman Lectures In Physics, von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and W. Ross Ashby’s Introduction to Cybernetics (freely, legally available as a PDF here – a great book, but full of *hard* maths)
In Search Of Schrodinger’s Cat by John Gribbin – covers the basics of quantum theory in ways that a layman can understand.
QED – The Strange Science Of Light & Matter by Richard Feynman – more in-depth coverage of what’s actually going on, by one of the greatest physicists of the last century. Proper science but still light on equations.
The Deutsch book reviewed below.
Godel, Escher, Bach, An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter – a book which explains Godel’s work in pure mathematics and Turing’s work in computation very well.
Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos by Ian Stewart.
Mr Tompkins by George Gamow – a collection of short stories illustrating various principles of quantum physics and relativity, followed by more in-depth explanations including the mathematics.
The Code Book by Simon Singh. Singh’s recent stuff about alternative health is a load of piffle, but this is a fascinating look at cryptography and mathematics.
How To Lie With Statistics by Darrel Huff
How To Prove It by Daniel Vellermann – covers concepts of mathematical proof very well.
What Is Life?: with “Mind and Matter” and “Autobiographical Sketches” by Erwin Schrodinger – explains life in terms of fundamental physics.
And five SF novels that cover these subjects very well – if you don’t get it from the science books, these may give you a feel for things:
The Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy by R.A. Wilson
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Cryptonomicon, also Neal Stephenson
Review : David Deutsch – The Fabric Of Reality
This is a science post…
I was going to write another post about Final Crisis, but then I realised that I would have to explain a lot of what I was talking about, so this is a “I’m saying this so I can say this” post. It’s a bit of a tangent really, but I hope that you’ll be able to see the connections to some of the Final Crisis posts. Tomorrow I’ll write more about FC, and then I’m going to leave the subject of comics for a bit to do some politics, Doctor Who and music posts…
The Fabric Of Reality is an attempt by Deutsch, a physicist who specialises in quantum cosmology and quantum computing, to explain for the layman the worldview he has come up with, sort of a unified theory of reality (not to be confused with the unified field theory which physicists have been searching for for decades). This worldview is based on four strands:
The multiversal interpretation of quantum theory
This view states that every time anything could happen, it does – there are a near-infinite number of universes which differ by the smallest possible measurable amount. In Deutsch’s formulation of the multiversal interpretation, these universes aren’t ‘created’ by the ‘choices’ at the quantum level, rather every instant of time is in effect one point in a giant multi-dimensional array, and what we perceive as time passing is merely one path through this array.
Popperian epistemology
The philosopher Karl Popper stated that scientific knowledge grows by a process in which hypotheses are created and tested to destruction, with the hypotheses either being disproved or surviving, in a clear parallel to Darwinian natural selection. This can be contrasted with Kuhn’s ideas of ‘paradigm shift’. (And see this, which Holly serendipitously sent me while I was writing this…)
Dawkins’ modifications of evolutionary theory
Richard Dawkins, in his bestseller The Selfish Gene, posited that evolution acts, not at the level of the organism or species, but rather at the level of the individual gene.
and the Church/Turing hypothesis
This states in effect that any operation that can be performed by any computer can be performed by any other computer, given enough time and storage capacity.
Deutsch states that all these are the ‘current best thinking’ in their relative domains. Here he is quite probably wrong. The many-worlds interpretation is a minority view among quantum physicists , although its predictive power is the same as any other interpretation and Deutsch makes a good case that it is the clearest explanation. Popper’s epistemology, while I think he’s right, is nowhere near as popular as Kuhn’s. Dawkins’ view, while popular with many biologists, is regarded with suspicion by others (see Jack Cohen’s writing for example, as well as obviously Stephen Jay Gould) though if one were to reword his ideas taking gene to mean ‘all means of transmissible information storage within the organism’ then it would work better. And the Church/Turing hypothesis has never been proven (it’s a mathematical statement so concepts of proof apply in a way they don’t for science) though it’s strong enough to be the basis of pretty much everything we do in computing today.
However, one *can* say that none of the explicit bases for Deutsch’s argument are provably wrong, and from them he builds a consistent view of reality. This view requires a lot of implicit extra assumptions, though, including that the universe is fundamentally understandable, that consciousness is a purely physical process, that the human brain is a computer of sorts, and so on. Most of these are justifiable using Occam’s razor (which Deutsch uses a *lot* and which I must post about soon – I was having an argument with Mat and Jennie about this the other day and they quite rightly said that William of Ockham used the original formulation to essentially say that God explains everything. However, it can be shown that a reformulation of Occam’s razor is necessary and sufficient as a basis for the scientific method when combined with some mathematical proofs…) but with each of them the probability of his worldview being the correct one becomes less – if any one of these is wrong, his whole argument falls down.
It’s also interesting which strands of scientific theory he’s chosen as ‘fundamental’ (in Deutsch’s view, which I think is correct, ‘fundamental’ should mean ‘has the most explanatory power’. All else being equal the best story wins. This will be important when I get back to comics eventually…). Were I to attempt something similar to Deutsch’s book (and I’ve been tempted to – only my lack of formal qualification has stopped me, for which the world should probably be eternally grateful) I would have chosen, say, quantum theory (without any particular interpretation being put on it), the second law of thermodynamics, Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (Gavin R, if you’ve never read Ashby, you should – he’s at least as important as Shannon) and Bayesian statistics. Oddly, I would have come up with a formulation that is not that dissimilar from what Deutsch comes up with…
Deutsch’s book is by turns fascinating and infuriating – he shares a lot of qualities with his Oxford colleagues Dawkins and Roger Penrose (with whom he fundamentally disagrees, but in an admiring way), making me at several points want to throw the book across the room screaming “You stupid, STUPID man!” (especially in the last chapter – I want a moratorium on anyone talking about ‘the singularity’ unless and until it actually happens, please) but occasionally coming up with something that makes me sit up and say “That’s actually very interesting…” (something Dawkins has never achieved). I also found his introduction (about the childhood horror at not knowing *everything*) very easy to relate to.
But his main insight is simply this – Information can, in this worldview, be described as “That which remains constant more often than not between universes”. I’ll explain why this is tomorrow, before talking about DC Comics and Grant Morrison some more…
That’s Really Super, Supergirl
One problem I’ve had with Final Crisis that no-one else seems to have had – or if they have, I’ve not seen them mention it – is the portrayal of women and the (lack of) portrayal of gay people.
Now, don’t get me wrong here – I’m not going to get all faux-outraged at the scenes where Mary Marvel and Supergirl are fighting or whatever. I think it’s perfectly obvious that that sort of stuff is as much a commentary on the ‘haunted vagina‘ type of superhero comic as anything else – if you’re unconvinced, then go back and read Bulleteer. Morrison knew exactly what he was doing there, and it’s very different from the way the same tropes were used in the execrable Countdown .
I’m less forgiving of J.G. Jones’ terrible cover for issue 3, which I’ve described before as Supergirl thinking “Oh dear, my mouth appears not to have anything phallic in it, and the closest thing I have is this finger. I wonder if *you* can think of anything I could use?”, but at least that wasn’t part of the story, and we did have a choice as to which cover we got (that was an issue where Holly went to the comic shop for me, and she was fairly horrified by that cover).
But there’s a deeper structural problem to Final Crisis, and one that’s inherent in the story Morrison wants to tell.
Basically, in Final Crisis, we are presented with two stories running in parallel. One is the story of Darkseid’s fall, rise and fall. The other, which has greater ‘cosmic import’ by the end of the series, is the story of Nix Uotan’s search for the love from whom he’s been separated by whole realities. Throughout what is presented as the main story, we are presented with love stories which reflect Uotan’s need to get back with Weeja Dell – J’onn J’onzz’ shouts “M’yriah!” (the name of his dead wife on Mars) as he dies, Hawkman wants to be with Hawkgirl and sacrifices his own life to be reincarnated in a world where she’ll love him, Superman travels through the Bleed and Overvoid to save Lois Lane. Almost every heroic character here is being presented as a man trying to get back to the woman he loves, in clear parallel to Nix Uotan’s own struggle.
I trust that, from that last sentence, you begin to see the problem. With a very few exceptions, male heterosexual love is presented as *the* motivating force for th’ whole whang-dang-doo multiverse, which means that because of the structure Morrison has chosen male characters get to be active, while female characters are *re*active. This also means that characters like Oracle – who given some of the themes of the story that I’ll be returning to tomorrow should have had a *much* bigger role in the story – are sidelined.
(Some of the comparative lack of female action may also be due to Morrison’s decision to take Wonder Woman away from the action for most of the story, because he doesn’t believe he has a good grasp on her character – understandable, as she doesn’t have one, or at least not a consistent one between writers.)
Also surprising is how much this reinforces heteronormative roles – odd for a writer like Morrison, who has introduced more gay characters to Big Two comics than any other writer I can think of. In a story that’s largely about the power of love, ‘love’ here is a strictly monogamous relationship between one man and one woman – the framers of Prop Eight would be proud.
What’s particularly galling here is that one of the very few female characters to have an important part in the action, the new Question, Renee Montoya, is gay, yet this is not as far as I can recall mentioned even in passing – in fact one could easily come away with the impression that the ‘Charlie’ she talks about (the old Question) is a former lover, rather than ‘just’ a friend. You’d think that given that DC are about to put Batwoman in Detective Comics, one of their flagship books, and that the Question and Batwoman had a romantic relationship in the past, there would have been a mention of this (someone’s going to point out one I missed now, aren’t they? I did check…)
This could not only have strengthened one of the few female characters to take a major part in the story, it would have helped get rid of the overpowering sense that in this respect at least Final Crisis, far from being innovative and new, is reinforcing a rather conservative world view.
Note, I’m not asking that the comic should have been turned into the left-wing equivalent of a Chick Tract, or for scenes of Batman/Alfred slash (heaven forbid), just that in a world where even the BBC thinks it’s reasonable to use ‘gay’ as a pejorative, it’s a shame when a writer who usually pays a hell of a lot of attention to subtext and buried cultural assumptions and who is generally on the side of the angels in these matters ends up inadvertantly sending the message that the love of men for women is the most important kind of love in the world. It’s not a terrible thing – if I can forgive Alan Moore the obsession with rape and sexual violence in his work, then I can certainly forgive this. And Morrison manages to write the female characters extremely well. It’s just that a very small amount of effort on his part (a couple of added panels would have done it) could have made the comic better in this respect.
Tomorrow, on to praising, rather than burying, what is still, after all, my favourite superhero crossover of all time…
Linkblogging for 08/02/09
Sorry for the delay in getting my last couple of Final Crisis Week posts up – they’ll be up tomorrow and Tuesday. This weekend has been a lot busier than I thought – yesterday alone involved disappearing estate agents, meeting two Daleks, people juggling fire, getting on the wrong train, a samba band and far more walking uphill than I normally do in a month. Here’s some links to last you til tomorrow…
Jonathan at Liberal England argues that “the credit crunch will do for Margaret Thatcher’s reputation“. Personally, I think her policies *never* looked ‘inevitable’ or ‘sensible’, as he claims they did until recently. The problem with Thatcherism wasn’t the collapse of British industry under her watch but, as MatGB was saying to me yesterday, the fact that it happened with no safety net at all for the millions upon millions of people whose lives were made inconceivably worse.
Brad Hicks on the current economic catastrophe and Obama’s ineffectual attempts to stop it.
The third Carnival On Modern Liberty is up at LibDem Voice.
Jennie talks about how Derek Draper doesn’t get blogging.
And Alix talks about cars.
I’m Not A Religious Man, But If You’re Up There, Superman… (Final Crisis Week Part 4)
I’ve started trying to write this several times, but keep getting distracted by twittering spy organisations with filthy names to Tom Peyer ( Federated Espionage Laser Corps – Hardened Elimination and Removal Squad was my best one)…
Steven Grant over at Comic Book Resources talked about Final Crisis in his column the other day, and his conclusion was a sensible one – “Did I like the story? I don’t know. I like my interpretation. Is that what Morrison had in mind? There’s just no way to tell.” (I’ve never read any of Grant’s comics, but his column is usually far more sensible than most comics writing on the big sites – anyone out there read any of his stuff? Any good? Recommendations?)
But he then goes on to talk about Morrison’s quote that Final Crisis is about ‘mythology for the 21st century’, and he gets this *dead wrong*, but mostly for the right reasons. He lays into the morons who take Joseph Campbell’s work as a guide to writing, and quite right too – I remember a conversation on Newsarama (back in the days when I was stupid enough to waste my time there) where someone insisted that there were literally no stories in the world that didn’t follow Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and I suspect there are a lot of people out there who think that…
But he goes on to say:
Not that our civilization doesn’t have myths, but the authors of those myths are Karl Marx and Milton Friedman, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, not Camus or Isaac Asimov or Stephen Cannell or even Grant Morrison. And we no longer live in a world where magical/fantasy/mythological/religious constructs are required, or even useful, to make sense of it.
Now, I can see exactly what he’s saying here, and to a large extent I agree with him. Clearly the idea that the universe was created in some sort of ‘big bang’, stars and planets coalesced over billions of years, and then on this planet organisms slowly evolved, is closer to the objective truth than the idea that people were created by the great god Enki, who ejaculated the Tigris and Euphrates.
However, I’ve recently been reading The Fabric Of Reality by quantum physicist David Deutsch, and while I disagree with quite a bit of what he has to say (he’s both a Libertarian and a friend of Richard Dawkins – for me to be any more biased against him before reading a word he’d have to be a member of Coldplay as well…) he does make the very good point that a scientific theory should be judged, not as instrumentalists would have it, on its predictive power (I’ve actually seen someone who had the nerve to call themselves a scientist stating in print recently that we would soon not need scientific theories at all – that computers would be able to crunch enough data that they could make predictions entirely without any hypotheses. And the moron thought this was a *good thing*! I despair…) but rather on its explanatory power – how much of the universe a human being can understand if they understand it thoroughly. In other words, if two theories have equal predictive power, the one that can be most easily comprehended is the best one to choose.
This is a pretty good rule of thumb – it’s the one that Deutsch uses to favour the many-worlds hypothesis over other quantum interpretations (to call back to something I was saying in the comments to Holly’s post linked below – in what one might almost call ‘spooky action at a distance’ I was buying this book at almost exactly the same time Holly was talking about how she hoped I had a book like that). Essentially, if you have two otherwise identical theories, the better story should win. (Both Deutsch and his friend and colleague RIchard Dawkins occasionally fall into the trap of thinking the better story must therefore be true – in fact this is Dawkins’ main intellectual failing – but it’s still a good rule of thumb).
Now the problem is, people need stories to involve *people*, and none of the things Grant talks about do (Marx and Friedman do in the abstract, but not individuals). Stories that don’t involve human interaction simply don’t count as stories for a large number of people (remember the Newsarama poster above?) – no matter how true they are, they don’t have any ‘explanatory power’ for a large number of people, which is one reason why religious fundamentalism appears to be on the rise. People respond much better to stories on a human scale than to anything else. In my own case, as an example, I found I had a much better understanding of various aspects of cybernetics and information theory after reading the Illuminatus! trilogy ten years ago – the story dramatises things like Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety in ways that make it viscerally, rather than intellectually, comprehensible.
So the creation of modern myths – explanatory stories that we know are just stories – seems to me to be quite a good idea, if it stops people clinging to the literal truth of older myths.
But also, I don’t think Morrison was speaking of myth in precisely this way. In all older myths, as well as explanations for how the universe came to be, or how the leopard got its spots, or whatever, we also have moral lessons, lessons for how we should live. These lessons may not always be good ( behaving like Lot, for example, would be considered a bit off in modern society ) but by dramatising moral dilemmas and presenting characters making their choices, they allow people to form their own ideas about morality. Stories like this are almost completely missing from modern scientific discourse, which talks about what *does* happen, but not what *should* happen.
So we do need stories with larger-than-life characters making larger-than-life moral choices, to help us make our own moral choices. Grant says that Morrison is fixated, like Kirby, on ‘good and evil’ and that these don’t really exist in the messy real world, but this is only partly true. Absolute good and absolute evil are seen as unattainable concepts in Morrison’s work, and Morrison talks all the time about unifying opposites and finding a higher-order reality. It is notable that the New God who is portrayed most positively in Final Crisis (and Morrison’s other work) is Metron, the Prometheus figure, who is one of the few Fourth World characters to be motivated by something other than ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’ – he’s motivated by ‘Knowledge’ instead.
(Incidentally, Kirby’s Good/Evil thing wasn’t *quite* as simplistic as Grant makes out, given the presence of Orion, Mister Miracle and Big Barda, all of whom were borderline figures in one way or another, but he is right that the morality of the Fourth World stories is fairly unsophisticated even for 70s superhero comics).
Is Final Crisis a successful modern myth? On balance, I’d say no, because so many people seem to have trouble following the story, and to my mind myths should be extremely simplistic in their form (if not their content) so they can be grasped by as many people as possible. But the *idea* of a modern myth is certainly not one that should be dismissed, and Morrison has made a good stab at it here (and a much better one in All-Star Superman).
Linkblogging for 06/02/09
Sorry for the temporary hiatus in Final Crisis Week yesterday – I discovered that the local IMAX was showing a double bill of both Batman films for nine quid, and so that was five hours of the day gone… I was going to make up for it this morning, but then realised I can’t write in the mornings.
(BTW, I’m building to something with those posts – the fact that the last couple have been sidetracks, as will the next one, shouldn’t let you think I don’t have a point…)
Anyway, linkage:
The Mindless Ones continue their group look at Final Crisis 7. Doctor K also has some thoughts on this.
(Does anyone else think that it’d be a really fun, if totally impractical, idea to do a ‘The Internet On Final Crisis’ (or even On Morrison) book collecting these things? There *must* be several books worth of stuff scattered over a dozen blogs, and some of it’s mind-blowingly good…)
Holly talks about her favourite interpretation of quantum physics.
Laurie Penny has declared the next ten days to be National Take A Photo Of A Policeman Day, which I would be joining in with if I wasn’t the only person I know to own *no* image recording devices at all…
Brian Hibbs has some stuff on Diamond’s recent decision not to stock comics below a fairly high level of expected sales (note for non-comics people, Diamond is the distributor that has an effective total monopoly on comics as individual issues, and a huge chunk of the collected edition market).
And from The Daily Mash – “CUTS in school music budgets could lead to a cataclysmic surge in Coldplay, Ofsted has warned.”
Final Crisis Week Day 3 – Tie-Ins
Before I go on to write a bit more about Final Crisis itself (though after pillock’s perfect review - written without having read a single panel of the comic – I doubt any more on the subject need be said ) I thought I’d talk a little about the weird way in which DC have used the Final Crisis branding.
DC really need to get their marketing of these ‘big events’ sorted out. It’s already been noted all over the internet that they slapped the phrase ‘Batman RIP’ on random Bat-comics, with little thought as to what, if any, connection they had with Morrison’s story (usually less than none at all), which understandably led to people being annoyed at DC for mis-selling bad fill-in issues of Nightwing, but which for some reason also led them to be angry at Grant Morrison, for reasons that I cannot fathom.
However, DC didn’t learn from this (partly because the two events were so close together), and I’m sure part of the dislike of Final Crisis among those who think it should be ‘an event comic’ comes from the bizarre way in which they’ve dealt with the series.
When the tie-ins were first announced, I thought it might even almost be like 52 all over again – Johns and Rucka writing bits of a much bigger, interconnected story. The impression was certainly given by DC marketing (though, commendably, not by Morrison himself) that the various miniseries and specials were part of the story.
Rucka’s tie-ins actually played fair with this. They might not have been especially good comics, but they fitted in relatively well with the story Morrison was telling – both Resist and Revelations (that title *still* annoys me) told relatively self-contained stories set in Rucka’s own little corner of the DCU, but ones that built on characters and events from the main series. The problem comes with the other tie-ins.
I believe Brad Meltzer’s Requiem thing was drivel, but that’s what you’d expect from Meltzer. You’d expect a *little* better from Geoff Johns, who’s actually been growing as a comic writer. But Johns’ Final Crisis stories have, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the series at all. Rogues Revenge was a three-part Flash villains miniseries which didn’t have any connection with the main narrative, and seemed to be a project Johns had come up with himself that had been slapped with the Final Crisis label at the last minute, and was also not very good . Rage Of The Red Lanterns didn’t have even the tenuous connections that Rogues Revenge had, being merely a prelude to this year’s big crossover, and was appalingly bad.
The only one of Johns’ tie-ins to be any good, Legion Of Three Worlds, also seemed to have the most to do with the actual storyline, featuring as it does multiversal hijinks and providing an explanation as to where Superman was for issues four and five. It also seemed clearly positioned to be the ‘traditional’ crossover for those who don’t like experimental or different storytelling – you just want thousands of superheroes drawn by George Perez? Okay, here you go…
So of course, the one tie-in of Johns’ that actually tied in was the one that was hit by scheduling problems so badly that only two issues have come out even though the main series has finished…
None of this would normally have been a problem, except that there were three other tie-in issues, those written by Grant Morrison, and at least two of those (the Superman Beyond ones) were *absolutely* necessary to understand the story, and the other one (Submit) provided some useful background. And these started coming out *after* many readers had already decided ‘the tie-ins are rubbish and nothing to do with the main story’.
Now, you or I, being discerning readers, would have picked those up *anyway*, because they were written by the writer of the main series, so they would be more likely to be relevant. And also because they were written by Grant Morrison and (in two cases) drawn by Doug Mahnke, and so therefore likely to be good. And also also because 3D Superman. I’m assuming here that if you’re reading this you pay some attention to the creative teams of the comics (if any) you read, and that they factor into your purchasing decisions.
The problem is that the two big comic companies don’t like discerning readers. They particularly don’t like readers who base their purchasing decisions on creative teams rather than on branding. So for sixty-plus years they’ve been training readers to pay attention to the brand names, not the writers or artists, and a large portion of the customer base now thinks in that way – it doesn’t matter who’s writing or drawing X-Men, you buy it because it’s X-Men. This is not a bad thing – those people get some enjoyment from their comics, and they’re still buying what they like – they just like ‘X-Men’ more than they like ‘Chris Claremont’ (or whoever’s writing X-Men these days).
But that kind of brand loyalty relies on consistency – and normally that’s what you get. If you buy a Superman comic, it might be a good or a bad one, but it’ll be recognisably a Superman comic, of the kind that people who like Superman comics would recognise as such. If you break that consistency – if you have a brand that is plastered over multiple unrelated titles – then those who continue reading will take an all-or-nothing approach and drop *all* the tie-ins. And then wonder why they don’t understand the last issue.
This is not a failure of the comics as comics (and I’m sure even Rogues Revenge and Rage Of The Red Lanterns appealed to fans of Johns’ Flash and Green Lantern work, which I am not), and is certainly not the fault of any of the creators involved. The blame for that lies squarely with DC editorial (as does the blame for the whole Countdown fiasco which put people off FC before it started).
Tomorrow, I’ll talk more about the actual comics…
Linkblogging for 03/02/09
Many on the left have debated whether to support the recent strikes, out of solidarity with the working class, or condemn them for their anti-immigrant slogans. I’ve worried about that myself. The news that they’re being organised by a front for the Bastard Nazi Party certainly makes that decision easier (hat tip Laurie Penny…)
Marc Singer has the most intelligent negative review of Final Crisis I’ve seen. He’s also, unfortunately, giving up blogging. Luckily, he’s writing a book on Morrison, which could well be the definitive word on the subject if his blog posts are anything to go by. Doctor K, meanwhile, has a more positive review, as do the Mindless Ones.
Bob Temuka has a post about the fascination Jeph Loeb exerts despite everything (something I can sympathise with – even though they’re terrible comics, I have his entire run on Superman/Batman and get *something* out of it in a way I don’t from many much better comics).
Gavin B has a post on small press comics.
Alix over at Lib Dem Voice has a rather smart look at Nick Clegg’s tactics at Prime Minister’s Questions, while Stephen lists 25 random things about the Lib Dems.
And Holly has a post about wooly writing at New Scientist coming across as anti-science.
ETA Andrew Rilstone, one of my very favourite bloggers, has sort-of resurrected his pre-blog site, which now holds most of his best longer pieces here. I don’t always agree with him, but he’s always fascinating reading, and someone I admire as a writer a great deal. Read his stuff.
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