DC Liveblogging Part Two
Today I’m going to go through the next batch of new number one issues from DC’s ‘new 52′. And like last time, I’m going to read each comic straight through once, then blog my immediate reaction, rather than a more considered one.
As always, I’m only buying those comics which I think have at least a chance of being decent, so if you want my opinion of the Rob Liefeld Hawk & Dove, or anything written by Judd Winick, you’ll have to pay me large amounts of money.
Today is my fifth day without caffeine, and the first of those days I’ve managed to make it as late as 1:30 PM without having a little nap. Will my caffeineless state make these comics seem like psychedelic, hallucinatory masterpieces? Or will their lack of Thrill Power force me into a coma? Read on, as I delve into…
Blue Beetle #1
Writer Tony Bedard
Pencils Ig Guara
Inks Ruy Jose
Colours Pete Pantazis
Letters Rob Leigh
Well, that was a whole lot of rubbish. The series that John Rogers and Keith Giffen did with this character, a few years back, was not the greatest comic ever or anything, but it was fun, funny, and a decent way to spend ten minutes a month.
This, on the other hand, tries to recap most of the background that was dribbled out over a year or two by Rogers et al in a single issue, turning it into foreground. And it does so charmlessly, with not a single memorable line or event.
And the incompetence makes it borderline racist. It’s certainly not *intended* that way – Bedard says in the back-matter that he’s Puerto Rican and so identifies with the hispanic immigrant experience – but having all the characters speak in perfect English *except* for a very few Spanish words, which we could be expected to guess from context (“N-no–! Por favor… we ran tests in Mexico City!– That is the real escarabajo azul in the backpack–! I swear it on the virgin…!”)
This tries to do too much in one issue, and ends up being a confused mess. I accidentally swallowed a filling while reading this, and it was far more dramatic than anything in the comic.
Red Lanterns
Writer Peter Milligan
Pencils Ed Benes
Inks Rob Hunter
Colours Nathan Eyring
Letters Carlos M Mangual
This is, in its own way, an equally bad comic – probably, on any objective scale, a worse one. Certainly, the art is as bad as one would expect from Benes, and Milligan clearly can’t be bothered at all. It’s just generally sloppy – as an example, an old man in the UK says he “fought a war for you”. The old man’s age is later given as 73.
Now, 73-year-olds in the UK actually lived their young adulthood in the most sustained period of peace in British history, so unless he fought in Suez when he’d just turned 18 (almost impossible, as only highly-trained troops were sent there, and British troops were only there for two months- only 16 British soldiers died in that war) he *might* have been a professional soldier in his mid-40s during the Falklands conflict, but in general people of that generation are the least likely to be able to say “I fought in the war for you” in the whole of history. And that level of can’t-be-arsedness seems to pervade the writing.
But at the same time… there’s an *energy* to this comic, a sense of over-the-top grand guignol ridiculousness, that’s totally missing from Blue Beetle. This seems to be aimed precisely at the hearts of 14-year-old boys, and is like listening to ten Iron Maiden albums in a row then watching a slasher film while drunk on a single pint of cider. There’s an energy, and an intensity, here, that make it worth reading despite being, frankly, terrible.
This is going to be the new All-Star Batman And Robin, with people making great claims for its subversive genius precisely because of its apparent incompetence. And given that Peter Milligan, one of the most intelligent and able of comics writers, is writing it, those people may well be right. I’ll certainly pick up at least the second issue.
Frankenstein: Agent Of S.H.A.D.E.
Writer Jeff Lemire
Line Art Alberto Ponticelli
Colours Jose Villarrubia
Letters Pat Brosseau
This is the kind of comic that should be the staple produce of the Big Two, but isn’t. Full of nice little touches and ideas, this is very much the Frankenstein ongoing series that we could have expected coming straight after Seven Soldiers.
If anything, the only problem is that Lemire might be slightly too in thrall to Morrison, but in an age when so many comics are about little more than mopey superheroes sitting around complaining, seeing Frankenstein’s monster, a werewolf, a vampire, a mummy and a black lagoon creature sent into a town overrun by monsters on a rescue mission is certainly refreshing.
Best of the bunch so far, by a long way, but little to say about it.
Demon Knights
Writer Paul Cornell
Pencils Diogenes Neves
Inks Oclair Albert
Colours Marcelo Maiolo
Letters Jared H Fletcher
In many ways, this comic shows more potential than any of those I’ve read so far, but it’s not yet living up to it. Cornell is here very much just putting his pieces in place – moving Vandal Savage, Jason Blood, Madame Xanadu and Sir Ystin together, and planting a few seeds. This is clearly influenced both by Kirby’s original Demon comics and by Seven Soldiers, and like those starts with a fall of Camelot, and seems to be leading up to the creation of a team of seven.
Cornell’s a good writer when he wants to be, and these characters have a lot of potential, especially given that they appear to be mostly immortals. And the multiple falls of Camelot are obviously going to be a major plot point, given how heavily they’re referenced in this issue. But like many of these stories, it seems that this issue is all set-up and no pay-off – although the cliffhanger, dinosaurs crashing through a pub wall, promises something more for the next issue.
And last but, I presume, best…
Batwoman
Writers J.H. Williams III and W Haden Blackman
Line art J.H. Williams III
Colours Dave Stewart
Letters Todd Klein
Look at that list of people. You don’t really need to know anything else, do you?
This does have a script (one that actually has some of los mismos problemas as Blue Beetle, with people speaking Spanish only when it can be understood en el contexto), but is competent enough, setting up a new storyline while connecting it to the past – though this is clearly the story that was meant to happen months ago, straight after the Detective Comics run with the previous Batwoman stories in it.
But this isn’t a comic you read for the script. This is drawn by the single best artist working in mainstream comics, coloured by the best colourist, and lettered (though he doesn’t get much chance to show off) by the best letterer. Every single page is a masterclass in putting together a comics page. Every image is beautiful.
It has faults – Mr Williams is slightly too fond of objectifying the female form – but this is a beautiful, gorgeous piece of work from a master of the form, and is as far above the rest of the comics I’ve reviewed here as Pet Sounds is above Jan & Dean Meet Batman
Liveblogging My Reaction To The New DC
For the last couple of years my enthusiasm for superhero comics has been steadily waning. This is not because I’ve somehow ‘grown up’ or ‘got over it’ or any of that nonsense, but because DC Comics have very deliberately, consciously, chosen to lose my custom.
While the “DC or Marvel?” question is, of course, a meaningless one – “do you prefer your superhero adventures to feature trademarks owned by Time Warner or trademarks owned by the Disney corporation? Which dead, elderly Jewish bloke’s family do you want screwed over more, Jerry Siegel or Jack Kirby?” – the fact is that everyone who reads superhero comics at all *does* have a preference, and in my case I prefer DC to Marvel. It’s not an unthinking or absolute preference – I’d choose to read a good Marvel comic like Nextwave over a bad issue of Green Lantern, because I’m not an idiot – but all else being equal I’d rather read a Batman comic than a Wolverine one, a Superman rather than a Captain America.
But over the last few years, DC Comics have been deliberately trying to drive me away. I don’t say this from paranoia or anything like that – they have obviously identified a target market, and gone after it with brutal efficiency, and I am very far from that target market. As a result, pretty much every comic DC have put any effort into promoting over the last few years has gone as follows:
“Oh no! You know Heroman, that new, young, funny superhero who just recently started fighting crime?”
“The ethnic-minority one, who had a fully-rounded personality and a great supporting cast, whose comic Andrew Hickey really liked?”
“That’s the one. I’m afraid he’s been brutally raped and then eaten by the Ultra-Humanite!”
“Wow, that’s bad. We’d better kill all the villains ever and be angsty about it.”
“Don’t worry, because here’s the Silver Age Heroman!”
“He’s back from the dead! And he has just as little personality as ever!”
“Be fair, he’s got daddy issues now!”
“But he’s still got a blonde crew-cut, and a job in the police or military, and that’s the important thing.”
“Yes it is. Hope has triumphed over despair! Now let us never mention that minority kid ever again.”
So for the past couple of years I’ve been reading fewer and fewer DC comics, and enjoying those I have been reading less and less. Some have begun to feel like a chore rather than a piece of exciting superhero entertainment, and there are some recent comics that I’ve bought out of habit but will now undoubtedly never actually read.
The only two bright spots have been Grant Morrison and Keith Giffen. Morrison’s Batman work has been wonderful, imaginative, and everything a superhero comic should be. Giffen, meanwhile, has been doing great overlooked work. His run on Doom Patrol, in particular, was wonderfully inventive – things like the entire issue that was an Aristocrats joke, or the final issue of his run, where he wrapped up the big conflict he’d been building for many issues by just having Ambush Bug explain to the villain that Dan DiDio had cancelled the title so they’d better just go home.
Which is not to say that other writers and artists weren’t doing good work, but it wasn’t good enough to rise above the sludge and disinterest.
But this month DC are rebooting their entire line of comics, and while the announcements of the new comics stopped me from getting my hopes up too much (apparently DC thought they had too many disabled characters, too many women working for them, and character designs that were too good), just the sheer amount of new comics they were putting out meant that there must be *something* worth reading there. Right? Right?…
So today (the only day this week I’m working less than ten hours) I’m going to read through the first batch of new DC titles I’ve got and comment on them. I’m not buying them all (though I’ve heard such good things about the new Animal Man I might add it to the pull list) and have at least one comic that’s only there because I couldn’t pick up my comics myself this week (Justice League of America), but I’ll be updating this post over the next couple of hours with my as-of-first-reading thoughts on Justice League, Swamp Thing, OMAC, Batgirl and Action Comics.
Remember, I’m only buying those titles that look like they might have some merit, so theoretically I *should* love at least most of these. Check back in a few minutes for my thoughts on…
Justice League #1
writer Geoff Johns
penciller Jim Lee
inker Scott Williams
colourist Alex Sinclair
And so far, it’s not looking good, is it? Lee and Williams draw at least ten trillion lines per panel, in the hope that the completely random cross-hatching will distract the reader from the basic inability to tell a story and lack of anatomical understanding. It features three characters on the cover who are not in the story (such as it is) inside, but the cover *does* also have Green Lantern using his magic wishing ring that can do anything to… make a gigantic gun.
Which about sums up the imaginativeness of this comic. Essentially one long fight scene (apart from one cut away to show that Vic Stone can play American football quite well, though given that this is meant to be our introduction to these characters we’re given no indication in this issue why we should care about this).
There is nothing here that could be described as a ‘plot’ – merely a sequence of not-very-interesting events. Batman and Green Lantern meet each other for the first time and exposit to each other about their powers or lack of them and their entire backgrounds, while alternating between acting like macho pricks and punching a Parademon, which self-immolates. They then fly to Metropolis, where Superman comes out of nowhere and punches Green Lantern for no reason.
Now given that in the new continuity this is our first introduction to any of these characters, we can’t say that anything here is out-of-character *as such*. But it’s certainly an… interesting… choice to take DC’s three most currently-visible characters, have two of them act like macho self-aggrandising idiots and make Superman into a character whose very first reaction on seeing someone who is no threat whatsoever is to fly into them at full speed and punch them on the jaw so hard they fly at least about 70 feet and into a nearby car, knocking it over. It wouldn’t be *my* choice for how to portray these characters, and I wouldn’t want to read anything more about these characters, but maybe someone out there likes that.
There’s also the problem that Lee and Williams are incapable of representational art. Lee has many admirers, so presumably there are things to admire about his work, but one thing that’s certainly true is that his work is not a model of clarity. As a result, the ‘show, don’t tell’ maxim of so much writing has to be ignored, and the expositional burden passes from the artwork to the dialogue.
This would be OK, if Mr Johns had ever heard a human being speak English, but I’ll just leave you with one line, which seems to sum up the general incompetence of this ‘flagship’ comic:
“It combusted into fire!”
Well, maybe Swamp Thing will be better…
Swamp Thing #1
Writer Scott Snyder
Artist Yanick Paquette
Colours Nathan Fairbarn
It is. Much better. This is a good comic. It’s not great, but it sets up a bit of a mystery, it introduces our central character, Alec Holland, and gives him something approximating a nuanced characterisation (he’s a botanist, but he turned into a swamp monster, and now he’s become human again he’s scared of plants, but he still uses his old knowledge to help people). Even though Holland is portrayed as weak and scared, he’s still more heroic than the ‘heroes’ in Justice League, in that he actually does something to help someone else (recommends to a friend that his sore knee will hurt less if he wraps cabbage leaves around it).
The main fault with the story is that it spends several pages at the beginning establishing definitively that it takes place in the DC Universe, in order to satisfy those fans who care about these things (Swamp Thing, for those who don’t know, started as a DC Universe title, and the character used to interact with Superman, Batman and so on occasionally, but later editors ignored the superhero titles so they could tell whatever stories they wanted).
I’m not hugely familiar with Yanick Paquette’s art, having only read a handful of issues he’s drawn before, all to Grant Morrison scripts, but the work here is far more impressive than anything I’ve seen from him before. Especially impressive is the middle section of the book, which is clearly inspired by J.H. Williams’ work on Seven Soldiers 0, with similarly inventive layouts and panel bordering. Fairbarn’s use of different palettes for different sections is also unusually inventive for mainstream superhero comics.
The main weakness in the art is that while Paquette is an excellent layout artist and good draftsman, he’s comparatively weak as an ‘actor’, and a lot of the facial expressions seem to betray an overuse of photo-reference (see e.g. Lois Lane’s expression on the bottom of page one).
But I’ll definitely keep buying this title until it’s inevitably cancelled in about twelve issues’ time. It’s not a world-changing, fantastic piece of art, but it’s a good, enjoyable comic made by people who obviously care about doing a good job. It’s the kind of thing that should be the bread and butter of the big comics companies, but feels like a revelation because the level of quality is usually so low.
I wonder what I’ll think of OMAC…
OMAC #1
story and art by Keith Giffen and Dan DiDio
inks Scott Koblish
colours ‘Hi-Fi’
And this is Keith Giffen in 70s-Kirby tribute mode. Essentially one big fight scene, this just sets up the situation, reintroducing a load of Kirby characters and situations (OMAC, Cadmus, Dubbilex) and variations thereon (Gobblers, wonderful little monsters that are like small versions of Angry Charlie).
The dialogue and captions are perfunctory at best – presumably the work of DiDio (given the credit and Giffen’s normal way of working I imagine this was done Marvel-style, with DiDio and Giffen co-plotting, then DiDio scripting over Giffen’s finished art) – but they don’t get in the way of what is essentially just an excuse to have Giffen do his Giffen thing while trying to throw in as many Kirbyisms as he can.
If you want just twenty-something pages of Keith Giffen drawing like Jack Kirby, this is the comic for you. If you don’t, there’s nothing in the story so far to make you want to stick around. Luckily for me, I do want that, so this is another keeper.
But what about Batgirl?
Batgirl #1
writer Gail Simone
pencils Adrian Syaf
inks Vicente Cifuentes
colour Ulises Arreola
This is another very competent comic, but it saddens me.
For those who don’t know, Batgirl used to be Barbara Gordon, Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, but after she was shot in the spine in the story The Killing Joke, she became Oracle, a unique character in superhero comics. Oracle was a character in a wheelchair who was still able to be a superhero through her intelligence and skills as a librarian – she became the intelligence and data expert for most of the superheroes. Batgirl is just a female Batman knock-off, Oracle was an interesting character in her own right.
Now, however, Barbara Gordon is Batgirl again (explained in one line in this comic – “a miracle happened” – maybe this has been explained in some crossover I didn’t read). This not only gets rid of the fascinating character of Oracle, who still had a huge amount of potential, it also gets rid of the new Batgirl who had replaced her (whose comics I didn’t read but was apparently a good character in her own right – my friends Debi and Jennie both enjoyed that title, but given that DC have stated that they want to appeal to twenty- to thirty-five year-old males with this relaunch, their opinions probably don’t count). Not only that, it’s to fill a void that didn’t really need filling – there’s already a red-haired female crimefighter in a Bat-outfit in Gotham, Batwoman, and her comic is drawn by J.H. Williams so will be much better than this.
Not that this is a bad comic – it’s far from that – but it’s a sign of DC’s insistence on making everything like it was in 1985 again, rather than moving forward and doing new things, and the comic isn’t good enough to overcome that. I’ll probably pick up a few more issues to see how it goes, but this is a comic that just isn’t worth the character destruction that took place to create it.
And now to the one I’ve been looking forward to most… Action Comics.
Action Comics #1
writer Grant Morrison
pencils Rags Morales
inks Rick Bryant
colours Brad Anderson
Only the second-best first Superman issue Grant Morrison’s ever written, this is still clearly the standout of this bunch of comics. Restoring Superman to his 1930s roots as someone fighting against corrupt businessmen, abusive husbands and so on, this takes quite a few elements from the very first Superman story and puts them into a structure based on the old radio show introduction – “faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound”.
Morales’ art is not up to the standard of Morrison’s writing, unless that can of cola in Luthor’s hand is meant to shrink to about a quarter of the size between panels, but this story of a Superman at the beginning of his career, still physically vulnerable and not yet up to his full powers, is clearly the best of these, though like most of Morrison’s work it gives the impression there’ll be a lot more to say about it in a few issues’ time, so I’ll reserve further judgement til then.
And that’s it for now. Overall, the quality of these has been far higher than the recent dire levels DC had sunk to, and the only really bad one is Justice League, but at the same time there’s nothing here that’s truly fantastic, or worth the company-wide reboot to achieve. This is just *what they should have been doing anyway*.
Rebooting The DC Universe
Blame plok. I had a post all planned out for today, about Morrison’s Frankenstein, and about the resurgence of Arianism in the 17th century, but then I read this, and now I have to do my own “How would I reboot the DC Universe in 52 comics?”
Now I agree with plok that we need simultaneously to have less continuity-heavy crossover stories *and* to have a way to bring readers through from one line to another. By stealing some ideas from the Faction Paradox range, and adding a few of my own, I think I know how to do it.
It involves Hypertime, of course.
An entity exists at the end of time. A single entity, that exists for precisely one Planck length of time, but that is all-knowing, all-seeing, and omnipotent for that one Planck time. Call it God – we might as well,
But it’s at war with itself.
There are two possible histories of the universe. One leads to one type of God, the other to another. Both these histories have different laws of physics – one set of laws is what we call ‘science’, the other is what we call ‘magic’. Both are totally self-consistent sets of rules that will lead to a consistent universe.
But there can be only one end of the universe, and only one God, and so both Gods are in an existential struggle to become the one that really exists. If either God actually won, not only would the one that lost cease to exist, it would also cease ever to have even possibly existed – we might as well think of it as two potential universes at war as two beings.
So both Gods are trying to manipulate the hypertimelines, to destroy ones that lead to the other’s existence. But the Hypertime multiverse currently exists in a state of flux, and our universe is an interference pattern between two incompatible universes.
This means that there for many beings, they see a universe of scientific rationality, where the universe operates according to the principles we know now. Another lot of people see a universe where thought and mind have an ontologically basic existence – a universe of magic.
There are the people – the vast majority – who live in a lowest common denominator set of the two worlds, that looks like the ‘real world’.
And there are those, a very few, who exist in both universes simultaneously. We call these superheroes. They appear at first glance to operate according to one set of rules, but don’t quite fit. They, and only they, exist in both universes. They can affect both universes, but only to a limited extent – they can prevent an incursion of one on the other, but can’t affect the overall course of history. Superman can travel in time, or defeat an evil magician, and it’ll be on the front page of the Daily Planet and everyone will believe it – but the next day they’ll still think time travel and magic impossible.
All the big dichotomies in the DC Universe – Heaven/Hell , Order/Chaos, Monitor/Antimonitor – are reflections of this great war, and every power in the universe, be it the New Gods of New Genesis or the Guardians Of The Universe, has taken one side or the other, although the alliances are complex and constantly shifting.
There’s a very small alliance, though – no more than a handful of individuals – who make up a third side in the conflict. They realise that were either side to win, their rich universe would collapse into a dull conformity, and so they stand in the middle and try subtly to play one side against the other. Metron and Rip Hunter are the main ones here.
This then lets us split the comics into four separate lines quite neatly. We have the main-line superheroes, who can operate without continuity constraints, and any real continuity blunders we can just blame on the war. We have the SF/Space Opera stuff, which is where we dump all the real hardcore universe building for the people who are currently buying and enjoying superhero comics. There’s a magic universe, which we aim at the Vertigo readers, and the Twilight/Harry Potter people. And then there’s the ‘ground level’ of characters who could almost live in our universe. The superheroes can appear in any of these stories, but there’s otherwise no crossing over between the four lines.
The main line should be done-in-one stories, accessible to anyone of pretty much any age. The SF line would be aimed at the current comic reading audience, the magic line at the huge ‘dark fantasy’ audience, and the ground-level stuff should be, in general, based around character rather than plot and aimed at the largely-untapped but very real female audience for these types of stories.
Main superhero line
Batman
Superman
Wonder Woman
JLA
Captain Marvel
The Flash (using plok’s idea of The Flash being really about time)
Doom Patrol (keep the current Giffen take on this – it’s essentially Morrison’s version, but done so people who aren’t Morrison can do it and with extra Ambush Bug)
Plastic Man (get Kyle Baker back)
Power Girl
Bulleteer
Tales Of The DC Universe – this would be an ongoing along the lines of 52, done in much the same way.
Frankenstein: Agent Of SHADE – give this to Morrison
Metamorpho
SF line
Green Lantern
Metal Men (Giffen and DeMatteis for this)
Omega Men
Booster Gold (done the way it currently is, with Rip Hunter an important character)
Blue Beetle (Jaime)
The Atom (Ryan Choi)
New Gods
Mister Miracle
Green Lantern Corps
Legion Of Superheroes
Magic line
Sandman (also known as ‘get Neil Gaiman to do any magic-related title we can)
Doctor Thirteen (who has ended up in the magical universe from the scientific one)
Zatanna
Klarion
House Of Mystery
The Adventures Of Detective Chimp In Gorilla City (“I was on my twelfth cigar and third whisky of the day, and thinking about breakfast, when the client knuckled in. I don’t normally go for the larger types, but this gal had arms up to her shoulders and the kind of figure that would straighten anyone’s banana”, with Monsieur Mallah and The Brain as occasional guest stars).
The Demon
Tim Hunter
Animal Man
Hellblazer
Amethyst, Princess Of Gemworld
The Spectre
Ground level
Birds Of Prey (with Oracle, who is Barbara Gordon)
Batwoman (by JH Williams)
The Question (Renee Montoya)
Manhattan Guardian
Action Comics (As I described in my Superman pop-drama, with a Jimmy Olsen done-in-one story in the front and a Lois Lane serial as backup. Clark Kent can appear, but no Superman).
Sgt Rock – Garth Ennis and Joe Kubert
Jonah Hex
Catwoman
Black Canary/Green Arrow
Gotham Central
The Spirit (get Darwyn Cooke back on this)
Hitman
Along with these, I’d have five other comics:
World’s Finest – Superman and Batman team-ups
The Brave And The Bold – Batman team-ups
Showcase – an anthology, the first story of which would be a new character by the best-quality team possible, the backup would be a well-known character by first-time creators
Solo – a showcase title for writer-artists
80-Page Giant – a monthly 80-page reprint of classic stories, usually tying in with something out this month (say if the Penguin is the Batman villain this month, a classic Penguin story would be in there).
Eschatology & Escapology 3: They Call Me Mister Miracle
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), all other ebook formats
“You heard it direct from the mouth of science itself, nothing but nothing can escape the deadly gravitational pull of a black hole!”
Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle 1, by Grant Morrison and Pasqual Ferry
In 2008, DC Comics published a crossover series by Grant Morrison and others, Final Crisis, a gigantic tale featuring all their superheroes. But the story was bigger than it looked. In fact, the gigantic Gods-versus-superheroes sturm und drang in which reality was in the balance was a sleight of hand, while at the same time a seemingly smaller, but in fact much bigger, story was going on.
The story Morrison was *really* telling was going on in the various Batman titles, which intersected only briefly with Final Crisis. It was the story of a man poised between darkness and light, who had had to face death, and a black hole, in order to do what he had to do, and how as a result of this his psyche was shattered, he lost his identity, and was pushed through time to regain both his identity and the universe. Final Crisis, as good as it was, was a sideshow. The death and rebirth of Bruce Wayne was what mattered, as we later discovered.
“As above, so below”
Hermes Trismegistus
In the mid-1990s, DC Comics published a series by Grant Morrison and others, JLA, a gigantic tale featuring all their most popular superheroes. But the story was bigger than it looked. But the story was bigger than it looked. In fact, the gigantic Gods-versus-superheroes sturm und drang in which reality was in the balance was a sleight of hand, while at the same time a seemingly smaller, but in fact much bigger, story was going on.
The story Morrison was *really* telling was going on in The Invisibles, which paralleled JLA (which some have described as using as a Cliff’s Notes version of The Invisibles). Even within The Invisibles though, Morrison was telling two stories. The first was the surface story, the one most people seem to have read for much of the run – an exciting adventure with goodies and baddies – though by “You’re running around shooting people like they’re Nothing. You’re Fucked up, Gideon. You’re not cool, you’re not a hero, you’re just a Murderer” most people had got that King Mob was not necessarily the hero of the story. But then there was the other story, about corruption and redemption. In The Invisibles #12, we’re taken through the life of a henchman shot by King Mob – his whole life, shown out of sequence, the good and the bad, and we’re made to feel sorry for, and care for, this character who could have just seemed like a NPC. And we’re made to feel sorry for him even though he is, by any standards, a truly bad man, just because we get to know him so well in 24 pages that the emphasis is on man, rather than on bad.
We meet his wife, who he abused, in one later issue, five years later. She saves King Mob’s life, because she can’t stand to see someone shot after what happened to her husband. There’s the story you’re being told, and then there’s the important story.
“fractal essentially means ‘self-similar’ — it implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern, ‘symmetry across scale’”
Helmut Bonheim, “The Nature/Culture Dyad and Chaos Theory.” Das Natur/Kultur Paradigma in der englischsprachigen Literatur des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Paul Goetsch). Ed. K. Groß. Tübingen: Narr. 1994, 8-22
In 1985, DC Comics published a miniseries called Crisis On Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman and George Perez. A gigantic tale featuring every character ever to appear in one of their comics except Hal Jordan, But the story was bigger than it looked.But the story was bigger than it looked. In fact, the gigantic Gods-versus-superheroes sturm und drang in which reality was in the balance was a sleight of hand, while at the same time a seemingly smaller, but in fact much bigger, story was going on.
Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing had a story called American Gothic, about a war between Light and Darkness, which ended with them being convinced that they define each other, and God shaking hands with the Darkness. It’s better than it sounds.
“I’m dying, oh fuck, I think I’m dying”
The Invisibles #12 , Grant Morrison and Steve Parkhouse
In 2005, DC Comics published a crossover series called Infinite Crisis, by Geoff Johns and others, featuring all their most popular characters. But the story was bigger than it looked.But the story was bigger than it looked. In fact, the gigantic Gods-versus-superheroes sturm und drang in which reality was in the balance was a sleight of hand, while at the same time a seemingly smaller, but in fact much bigger, story was going on.
The bigger story was Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers, a series of seven miniseries (Klarion, Zatanna, Shining Knight, Frankenstein, Mister Miracle, Bulletteer and The Manhattan Guardian) all of which were attempts to make old, unprofitable DC Comics characters commercially viable again. The story was about how humanity’s far future descendants, with no culture or energy of their own, feed off the past. There may be a subtext there.
“What interests me is that while Zatanna chastises Promethea it’s also restaging, you guessed it, Swamp Thing – dragging Moore back to his roots, as it were. Morrison revisits the climactic chapter of “American Gothic”, quoting a line of dialogue, duplicating its setting in Baron Winter’s home, and repeating its fatalities. If there is a criticism of Moore here it’s done by paying homage to his older material while snubbing the new. I’ve always thought Morrison had the most interesting anxiety of influence vis-a-vis Moore of anyone in comics (certainly moreso than that faithful but pale imitator, Neil Gaiman); Zatanna offers plenty more fodder for it.”
Marc Singer
In 2005, DC Comics published a crossover series called Seven Soldiers, by Grant Morrison and others – a gigantic tale featuring a bunch of obscure DC Comics characters. But the story was bigger than it looked. But the story was bigger than it looked. In fact, the gigantic Gods-versus-superheroes sturm und drang in which reality was in the balance was a sleight of hand, while at the same time a seemingly smaller, but in fact much bigger, story was going on.
The Mister Miracle story never seemed to fit in with the rest of Seven Soldiers, having nothing to do with the main storyline about the Sheeda’s invasion. Instead, it took us through all the possible lives of Shilo Norman, a Jack Kirby character, as he is trapped in the ‘Life Trap’ – a trap worse than the black hole he’s trying to escape from. We get a non-linear view of one man’s life, and all his mistakes, but almost incidentally Morrison is reinventing Jack Kirby’s Fourth World characters and putting them to a new use. In some ways this reinvention seems at first glance even cruder than Kirby’s own work – and Kirby was not known for his subtlety, with characters like DeSaad and Lashina. But Kirby had many characters straddling the gap between light and darkness, between Apokolips and New Genesis. Morrison’s not interested in that kind of shade of grey – or if he is, he wants it represented by humans, not by Gods. This Mister Miracle is Shilo Norman, a human being, not Scott Free, a New God.
“I believe THE INVISIBLES to be a work of great emotional depths, but I realise most people tend to concentrate first on the surface glamour of the book, which is fine and pretty much as intended. Go back and read it again, concentrating not on the clothes, but on King Mob’s attempt to get over the loss of his girlfriend and the death of his cats by turning himself into a pop god with a gun. Read it for Edith Manning’s guilt, humour and unstoppable enthusiasm or most importantly, read it for the invisible backstory of Audrey Murray, the book’s central character, and her refusal to let a shitty life turn her into a shitty person.”
Grant Morrison
On Barbelith’s guide to the Invisibles‘ character list, Audrey Murray is not mentioned.
“In 2009 DC Comics announced that at some point in the next couple of years it would be publishing a crossover series called Multiversity, by Grant Morrison and others – a gigantic tale featuring all DC Comics’ most famous characters. But the story was…”
Andrew Hickey
And Flex Mentallo is being reissued in 2011.
Eschatology & Escapology 2: Desperate Scientists, Last Hope
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), all other ebook formats
“Doomed planet
Desperate scientists
Last hope
Kindly couple”
All-Star Superman #1 by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant
One of my favourite comics of all time is Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? by Alan Moore and Curt Swan. Its opening is still one of the most powerful bits of writing Moore has done, in a career with thousands of them, and it as much as anything else inspired this series of essays:
This is an IMAGINARY STORY
(which may never happen, but then again may)
about a perfect man who came from the sky and did only good.
It tells of his twilight, when the great battles were over and the
great miracles long since performed;
of how his enemies conspired against him and of that final war in
the snowblind wastes beneath the Northern Lights;
of the women he loved and of the choice he made between them;
of how he broke his most sacred oath, and how finally all the things
he had were taken from him save one.
It ends with a wink.
It begins in a quiet midwestern town, one
summer afternoon in the quiet midwestern future.
Away from the big city, people still sometimes glance up hopefully from
the sidewalks, glimpsing a distant speck in the sky… but no: it’s only a
bird, only a plane — Superman died ten years ago.This is an IMAGINARY STORY…
Aren’t they all?
But strangely, despite this attempt to turn the Superman story into a universal myth, the story then turns into one that is very, very specifically based in then-current DC continuity. This made perfect sense at the time – it was a ‘goodbye’ to thirty-plus years of stories, characters and situations. But it meant that it was rooted in the specific, rather than the universal.
This had benefits, for example this sequence:
From Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?
The first time I read that, I don’t mind admitting I broke down in tears. It’s an astonishingly beautiful piece of writing, and its force is made more powerful by being drawn by Curt Swan (inked by the great George Perez) – this still looks exactly like the simplistic stories of the 1960s, even though there is a lot more going on. These simple children’s characters are being asked to carry a weight they were never designed to carry, and are only doing so precisely because they remain the characters of our collective childhoods.
But it’s only powerful if you have background knowledge. Depending on your familiarity with the Superman ‘mythos’ of the time, this could be anything from near-incomprehensible (though I think Moore gives enough information to give you some context, because he’s a wonderful craftsman) through to heart-stoppingly beautiful. But ‘heart-stoppingly beautiful’ only comes if you know that, for Superman, this had already happened:
Cover of Crisis On Infinite Earths 7, by George Perez
Supergirl had, in the comics, recently sacrificed herself to help save the universe (and this story was so powerful she stayed dead for twenty years – almost unheard of in superhero comics). But this had only happened in the comics – it had obviously not happened in any of the films, TV series, cartoons or other interpretations of the Superman story.
So while Moore is obviously trying for the mythic and universal, in a myriad ways (I think I’m the only one to have noticed, for example, that he has Superman die ten years to the day after Elvis, so when Superman turns out at the end not to be dead, but just living a normal life without his powers, he ties it to the ‘Elvis working in a Burger King in Des Moines’ tabloid stories of the time, as well as to one of the most potent of what can only be called the 20th century’s ‘real-life myths’), to make this the capstone of ‘the Superman story’, what we have is, by necessity, only the end of a Superman story. There’d be another one along in a minute.
[FOOTNOTE the one that came along in a minute was John Byrne's Man Of Steel reboot. This originally looked more exciting and 'modern', but has badly dated - and Byrne's changes can sometimes look pretty unpleasant in retrospect. The original Siegel and Shuster had Superman sent to Earth as a baby. Byrne had a 'birthing matrix' sent, landing on Earth before Superman was born, thus ensuring that someone who had previously represented the Jewish immigrant experience to the US was now born in the USA - a reflection of Reaganite anti-immigration ideas that is very odd coming from a writer/artist who was himself doubly an immigrant (born in the UK, Byrne moved first to Canada before becoming a US citizen).]
Moore’s story is rooted in specifics of place and time – it takes place in a flashback to 16 August 1987, with a framing sequence on 16 August 1997. Even its future is now fourteen years in the past. That doesn’t remove its power for now – I first read the Crisis issue where Supergirl died when I was eleven, so Moore & Swan’s work still has the power to affect me. But Crisis is ephemera – at best it will last in the same way Sexton Blake or Billy Bunter stories from the turn of the last century have. If it’s read in a hundred years at all, it will be as a footnote to Man Of Tomorrow [FOOTNOTE - or maybe Animal Man], and Man Of Tomorrow will only be read by scholars of Alan Moore’s work.
By contrast, I think Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant’s All Star Superman will (possibly along with the first two Christopher Reeve films, and maybe Siegel & Shuster’s original origin story ) be the Superman story that lasts as long as the human race are interested in stories of superheroes.
Partly, this is because it’s simply a better work. I don’t think Morrison’s quite the writer that Moore is (though I don’t want to get into a Moore-vs-Morrison argument, quite possibly the most tedious discussion it’s possible to have about comics. Both men are superlative writers, and I would rather read even a minor work by either above almost anything by almost anyone else in the medium), but Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? doesn’t play to Moore’s strengths. Moore is Apollonian – he’s a formalist by nature, whose greatest strengths come from rigorous plotting, structural innovation and intellectual bravado. The best example of Moore as writer of a single-issue comic book is probably Promethea #12, which (with the help of J.H. Williams III, Mick Gray, Todd Klein, Jose Villarubia and Jeromy Cox) uses the comic page the way Bach used the keys of the harpsichord, to create stunning contrapuntal effects that no-one else could ever create. Having Moore write a two-issue Superman story to be drawn by Curt Swan and edited by Julie Schwartz is a bit like asking Bach to write a twelve-bar blues. You’d probably get something pretty great, but it would still be a waste of his talents.
By contrast Morrison, while he’s also interested in formal experimentation, is more Dionysiac (for all that All-Star Superman is an Apollonian myth). He works in a more improvisatory way, leaving far more to his collaborators, and seems to be far more interested in emotional effect than in process. If Moore is Bach then Morrison is John Coltrane or Eric Dolphy, improvising wild ideas around the core of a pop song and playing off his collaborators’ work.
And luckily, in All-Star Superman Morrison had the pefect collaborator in penciller Frank Quitely. While I would never hear a word said against Curt Swan’s work, his greatest strength was (as Calamity Jon Morris described later Superman artist Dan Jurgens) “The things he drew sure do look like the things they’re meant to look like”. That’s not quite the damning with faint praise it sounds like – in the comics industry that bespeaks a level of professionalism and craftsmanship that would probably put an artist in the top five percent, sadly. But it’s not a quality that is necessarily suited to making lasting art.
Frank Quitely, on the other hand, is one of the most intelligent, sensitive artists working in ‘mainstream’ comics. While he’s not as innovative as some would have it (many of his innovations come from European or indie comics that many of his readers haven’t read), he is able to use the comics page in a way that few others would be able to. Just consider this panel, for example:
Panel from All-Star Superman #1, pencils by Frank Quitely, digital inks and colours by Jamie Grant
(That image can be clicked through to if it isn’t displayed at full size on your screen)
The interesting thing about this is not just the multiple-images-in-one-frame thing to indicate motion – this had been done before, and was probably invented by Carmine Infantino in Flash stories in the 1950s, though it’s rarely been done so skillfully and gracefully, but the thought that’s been put into it. It’s a cliche to say ‘there’s not a line out of place’ but in Quitely’s case it’s simply true. Quitely uses fewer lines per page than most comic artists will use in a small panel, and as a result philistines accuse him of ‘laziness’ and ‘not drawing backgrounds’. But every line in every Quitely panel is placed to illustrate one of plot, character or environment. And there’s far more detail there than appears at first glance. Take this, for example:
Detail from above panel
That’s Cat Grant’s shoe, poking out under her desk. And precisely the kind of shoe the character would wear. Most readers will never notice that, but tiny details like that add to the impression that this is a real, living world, where things happen ‘offstage’ and characters have lives away from the protagonist. In fact a huge amount of this story only takes place by implication, in the gutters and what is left unsaid.
And this is the reason why All-Star Superman will be read long after Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? is forgotten. Because whereas the latter depends for its (incredible) power on being part of a specific continuity, All-Star Superman only depends on you knowing the outline of the Superman myth – “Doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope, kindly couple” and we’re into the story. It doesn’t matter what shape the rocket he landed in was, or whether there was an Eradicator in it, or whether Super-Horses live on Krypton, or whether he was born Kal-El or Kal-L. All that matters is that he’s Superman.
And it takes aspects from every version of the Superman story to have been published – ranging from an updated version of Jack Kirby’s version of Jimmy Olsen, to Steve Lombard from the 70s stories, to Cat Grant from the 90s soap-operatic comics, to Qwewq The Infant Universe and Solaris The Tyrant Sun from Morrison’s own JLA stories. The Kent/Superman distinction is pure Christopher Reeve – you can hear Reeve saying the Clark Kent lines – but he’s drawn in pure Wayne Boring style. These are incorporated to precisely the extent that they serve the larger story being told, and no more, but all are given their own remarkable stories (Steve Lombard goes from being a blustering bully early in the story to an almost heroic figure by the end).
The story itself is possibly the most audacious ever told in a superhero comic, and probably only escaped right-wing outrage by being so ludicrously good – Morrison doesn’t just turn Superman into a Jesus-figure, like the awful Superman Returns, but actually makes him the personal God that created humanity on the Earth on which we live, pretty much in passing as part of an even larger story.
And in the end, almost everyone is redeemed. Even Lex Luthor, the only person presented as actually evil, has a moment of enlightenment:
Luthor Einstein failed to unify the gravitational force with the other three but he… he had no experience of this…it’s so obvious. I can actually see and hear and feel and taste it and… the fundamental forces are yoked by a single thought.
Nasthalthia Lexie? How do I get this hat to work?
Luthor It’s thought-controlled! Hmm? Sorry… sorry, these new senses…I can actually see the machinery and wire connecting and separating everything since it all began… this is how he sees all the time, every day. Like it’s all just us, in here, together. And we’re all we’ve got.
Nasthalthia Uncle Lex! You’re literally embarrassing me beyond all therapy with this behavior!
Luthor Nasthalthia!
Superman No, he’s just trying to articulate how gravity warps time and how I forced his metabolism to accelerate to compensate.
How gravity warps time? I think I might just have something to say about that, and so might Grant Morrison…
Panel from All-Star Superman 12, written by Grant Morrison, pencils Frank Quitely, digital inks and colours Jamie Grant
On DC’s Digital Comics
I *was* going to write about Batman 700 today, but I’ll leave it til I review Return Of Bruce Wayne 3 this week, and deal with both simultaneously, because DC have announced that they’re releasing digital comics in partnership with Comixology. This has good and bad aspects:
The good:
Creators get royalties from the comics, unlike Marvel’s digital comics at the moment.
That they’re doing it at all
A proportion of money is going to help brick-and-mortar comic shops who might lose customers through this – comics retailing is such a marginal business that otherwise many smaller shops could easily go out of business.
Likewise, while old comics will be priced cheaply (good), new comics will be priced at cover price, so not giving any great incentive to move away from paper comics – I don’t want to see comic shops going out of business, as they’re mostly run by people who do it as much for love as money.
The bad:
The obsession with the sodding iPad. While this material will be available over the web, you wouldn’t know that from the press release, which just says iPad iPad iPhone iPhone iPad app app app app app. And I consider the iPhone/Pad model to be *INCREDIBLY* dangerous – anything that hypes this more is A Bad Thing. Remind me to explain why some time.
The user interface. I tried the free preview of Superman 700 at work at lunchtime and it’s just *horrible*. Rather than presenting a full page, it’s a horrible pan-and-scan thing that swoops down to different panels when you click it, without giving any option (as far as I could see) to see the page the way the artist intended. While that’s not such a problem with whoever drew Superman 700, given that comics drawn by people like Frank Quitely and Brian Bolland are available through this site I’d want to see them as they drew them.
But of course I can’t see them *at all*, because if you don’t have some iCrap you have to use a web-based viewer which requires Adobe’s proprietary Flash 10, and I’m not installing proprietary software that a lot of people go to huge efforts to *block* on my Free Software machine. (And of course any machine not running one of a handful of approved OSes, or not running on x86 architectures, can’t run Flash at all).
You also can’t, unless you’re running an iPad ‘app’ (or application for those of us who speak English rather than marketese, or computer program for those who like to be understood), save the comics you ‘buy’ to your computer, making it reliant on having a permanent internet connection and on comixology’s continued willingness to serve the files.
The annoying thing is that these limitations could be overcome – there is already an accepted file format among online comics readers, .cbr or .cbz (I prefer .cbz myself, as .cbr files require the use of .rar, which is problematic, but either is better than a Flash website). Software exists for every platform to read these, people are already used to them, and they allow people to download the comics to their own hard drives.
One can only presume that DC want to prevent ‘piracy’, but these methods actually make it more, not less, likely that someone like myself would ‘pirate’ their comics (although the only comics I’ve got on my hard drive at the moment are either those I have paper copies of or ones that as far as I’m aware are out of print). If the free-but-illegal copy is actually more convenient, easier to use, and more flexible than the legal-and-costly one, then they’re really not providing any incentive at all to buy the legal one, other than a sense of fair play.
Luckily, paper copies of new comics are even *more* convenient than torrents, so DC won’t be losing any of the money I spend on them any time soon, but I suspect they’re going to have to learn the lesson that the record companies learned a few years ago – if everyone already wants MP3s, then just sell them MP3s, not DRMd proprietary files or expensive streams.
So, substantially better than Marvel’s offering, in that they recognise that the people who write and draw their comics, and the people who sell them, are their business partners, but wake me up when they recognise that usability and freedom matter too. In the meantime, I’ll be at the comic shop, buying dead trees.
The Return Of Bruce Wayne… And Hypertime
Return Of Bruce Wayne 2 was a bit good, wasn’t it?
Almost a fifth issue of Klarion in look, with Frazer Irving getting to draw lots more grumpy Puritans, albeit this time living above ground and human, rather than the Sheeda we now have an ‘infestation of Hyperfauna’ – Cthuloid monsters attacking from outside normal spacetime.
In fact, they’re attacking from *our* world.
The ‘archivist’ – and what a fascinating design that is, with a body reminiscent of the Green Man (or perhaps of Swamp Thing), but with something of the fractal around the outside, but with a head that’s equal parts upended-Skeets and Batmask – gives us a description of a ‘cube time’ (not to be confused with timecube) which is, I’m certain, Morrison’s original conception for what Waid turned into Hypertime. We have timelines crossing each other and interacting with each other (“Each track a new vibration, a separate universe, a superstring on a mighty fretboard”) , but as RIp Hunter says “As I’ve always expected, perpendicular to plane time must be cube time, from where we look flat”.
This actually makes sense, incidentally. The DC Universe timeline is, from our perspective, a literal line – the line our eyes follow as we go from one panel to the next. What is a timelike dimension for the characters in the comic is one of our spacelike dimensions, and we can view moments from throughout the DCU’s timeline next to each other (right now I’m looking at cavemen *and* at the last few minutes of the universe).
(If our universe is a two-spacelike-plus-one-timelike-dimension hologram, as some suggest, then we can infer some sort of analogy about the DCU – we perceive a nonexistent third spacelike dimension, while for them spacelike and timelike dimensions must be more mixed up, because they’re only perceiving two dimensions.)
Incidentally, I would be very surprised if, given the multiversal stuff plus the idea of storing all the information about the universe’s timeline at the end of the universe, Morrison wasn’t hinting at something like the Omega Point of insane/brilliant physicist Frank Tipler (an idea which in its basics is quite a neat bit of speculative physics, but which just can’t bear the weight Tipler tries to place on it, and which was also the basis for my favourite Faction Paradox novel).
So these monster attacks are incursions from our world – possibly incursions caused by the writer and artist to give more drama, elements that ‘shouldn’t be there’ in the story.
In fact, given Nathaniel Wayne’s claims that the ‘dragon’ comes from Hell, what does that say about our own universe? We’re certainly willing enough to see characters in the DCU go through horrible torments for our own increasingly apathetic amusement…
And we’re clearly, at this point, getting set up for Multiversity, and being reminded that to a large extent Morrison has been telling one huge story in his DCU work for well over twenty years now – Animal Man, JLA, Seven Soldiers, 52, Final Crisis, All-Star Superman and now RoBW all deal with characters attempting to fight back against authorial interference, with the fight against entropy (and again, saving all the information in the universe *at the precise moment of heat death* seems the ultimate rage against the dying of the light) and with the idea both that we can never comprehend any meaning in the universe *and* that it’s possible to impose a meaning onto the universe, even if that meaning is contrary to everything whatever gods there may be intend.
So here we have Bruce Wayne, still amnesiac, travelling to the very end of the universe in order to break the curse that’s been laid on his entire family by the woman he loves (though to be honest the Wayne family don’t seem to have been especially bothered by the curse, what with the whole fabulous wealth and so on). Cursed til the end of time, Bruce Wayne simply *goes* to the end of time, before carrying on with his mission. That’s what I call making your own destiny.
And all of this is just a few pages out of what is otherwise a totally different story, about nature worship coming into conflict with religious authoritarianism, about the power of love, and how people kill based on what appear to them the noblest of motives. It’s pretty standard third-generation-Crucible-photocopy stuff, but done by a writer and artist on top of their game (and Irving is absolutely in his element in the painted artwork of grim-looking Puritans, though less so in the superhero scenes, where his rather emaciated Superman and Rip Hunter look very little like the characters they’re meant to represent).
So how has Darkseid turned Wayne into a Doomsday Weapon? What do the eclipses have to do with all of this? Why the repeated images of Wonder Woman’s logo when she’s not, so far, appeared in even one panel?
I can’t wait for the next few weeks, with three more of Morrison’s Seven Soldiers collaborators providing art for RoBW while Irving moves on to draw Batman & Robin. Morrison has been hampered with bad artists for much of his Batman run, but whenever someone good – or even competent – has come onboard the results have been magnificent. I only hope DC editorial realise from the success of this series that creating a good comic takes more than just a good writer…
Crisis On Multiple Blogs – A Response To Pillock’s Response To Me (Hyperpost 10)
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), all other ebook formats
Panel from page 1 of Crisis On Infinite Earths 1. Written by Marv Wolfman, drawn by George Perez & Dick Giordano.
Speaking to a troll, Gavin said, in part, “Generally on Andrew’s blog we play the ball, not the man.”
It seems like a very little thing, and I’m sure to everyone else it is, but it confirmed for me that my posts here aren’t just standing on their own, but they’re part of a community – a ‘we’. (Actually, I think my blog’s comments section is the intersection between two or three different communities, which is one of the things I’m happiest about). I like that that community is identifiable enough that you can make generalisations about it, quite casually.
While I blog in great part to get the thoughts in my head out of it, I also do it because I crave discussion, and I get that from the responses people post to my stuff, be it in comments here, or on The Mindless Ones, or Sean at Supervillain or David at Vibrational Match linking my posts, or Debi reposting my NHS post, or James Graham reacting to my posts, or even Charlotte ‘fisking’ me. It makes me feel like my ramblings have some actual importance…
And one of the more important people in the community/ies that this blog belongs to is pillock, who is one of several regular commenters here whose comments inevitably make me feel like I’ve not thought out my original post enough (if you count as a ‘regular commenter’, you’re probably one of these – I get regular small epiphanies from the comments section here – the comments to the postmodernism post being very much a case in point).
So, much like Millennium’s post about my quantum physics post, I think pillock’s post about my Crisis On Infinite Earths post deserves a reply.
His main point, that a reinvigoration of DC Comics was absolutely necessary, and coincided with Crisis coming out, is absolutely true. Immediately pre-Crisis, with a few bright spots like Moore’s Swamp Thing (and if I had infinitely many posts in this series before I exhausted the last reader’s patience, I would devote at least one post to how Moore actually made use of Crisis in ways few others had, and how Morrison references this in Seven Soldiers), DC was full of absolute crap. A while ago I downloaded a torrent of all the Crisis tie-in issues – which is to say every DCU comic from 1985 and 86 – and other than Swamp Thing , and some of Engelhart’s Green Lantern (and even that had horribly dated) there was literally nothing of any value.
On the other hand, the period immediately post-Crisis and for a few years afterwards was probably the most creatively fertile for DC since the late 1930s. Byrne’s revamp of Superman – though widely derided now – was regarded at the time as a necessary move. Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire’s Justice League is still thought of fondly twenty-odd years later. Grant and Breyfogle on Batman introduced more new villains than anyone since the forties, Grant Morrison completely reinvented what could be done with mainstream superhero comics in Animal Man and Doom Patrol, and even the basic filler comics like Booster Gold had a base level of competence that was completely missing from even DC’s top selling comics a couple of years earlier.
We can debate to what extent this would have happened without Crisis – after all, Moore was making great use of the ‘outdated’ Silver Age concepts in his few superhero stories at the time, and my own view is that much of the change was due to the old freelancers who made up most of the DC workforce upping their game in response to the competition from the new blood coming over from the UK (the Giffen/DeMatteis League for example starts out as as blatant an attempt at a Watchmen follow-up as you could get). But I agree that Crisis provided a very good ‘line in the sand’ – we can talk about pre-Crisis and post-Crisis DC in a way we can’t with any other event. There was a change there, and Crisis was, if not the instigator, certainly part of that change.
I’m also perfectly happy to agree that on its own terms Crisis is actually a very good comic. Not a great comic – Wolfman’s purple prose stops that being a possibility – but a solid piece of superhero sturm und drang. Matt Rossi sums up most of my thoughts about the comic, and I can only add my own experience to this.
I first read Crisis when I was eleven or twelve, and the comic itself had come out several years earlier. At the time I had no real access to US comics except through British reprints, living in a tiny town, but for Xmas every year I was allowed to place a mail order for about a hundred quid’s worth with Forbidden Planet. I’d built Crisis up in my mind into some huge, legendary story that was totally unlike everything else ever – and when I read it, it didn’t disappoint me.
(You could actually do an analysis of Crisis as being a psychological journey for Superman – the archetypal superhero – as he rids himself of his demons (Ultraman) before fully integrating his child (Superboy) and father (Superman of Earth 2) aspects into one rounded personality. It’s appropriate that Superman is the only character whose post-Crisis changes really mattered).
But where I do disagree with Pillock is his suggestion that Crisis wasn’t ‘motivated by a nerdish need to enforce continuity’. To which I can only respond with these quotes from Marv Wolfman’s backmatter in Crisis issue one (well before any revisionism could happen):
Writers like to complicate matters and what began as a dream of a story – “Flash of Two Worlds” – had turned into a nightmare. DC continuity was so confusing no new reader could easily understand it while older readers had to keep miles-long lists to keep things straight.
Which simply isn’t true. When I was seven or eight I’d see random issues, out of order, sometimes printed decades apart, many of which were multiple-universe stories, and even then I’d never had any problem keeping track of it. Read Wolfman’s full essay – page 1 and page 2 – and you’ll see that he refers to the very idea of parallel universes as ‘problems’ and ‘complications’ and ‘nightmares’. While I like it as a comic it was very clearly created because Wolfman saw the very existence of these things as problematic.
What I find odd is Pillock defending this story with this reasoning:
All I’m saying is: there are always alternative narratives, and although weighing and judging them to see which ones have the better possibilities in them isn’t doing history either — is no closer to truth! — still as long as “history” isn’t what we’re doing, we might as well feel free to consider our different options. My story of the history of Crisis and continuity here, for all its inevitable lapses and inaccuracies, is at least as true to fact as is the Official Story…and maybe it even has a slight edge over it?
Which is in fact a big part – possibly the most important part – of what I’ve been saying in all these parts, and which is the very thing that Crisis set itself up in opposition to. The whole point of Crisis is a reaction against the very idea of ‘alternative narratives’. It’s a very Reaganite comic in fact – a bright new dawn, but you mustn’t disagree with the consensus. We can build a new future, but there’s only one possible future, and you’re not allowed to prefer the other possibilities.
Just look at that panel at the top of the page – “A multiverse that should have been one became many”.
“Should have been”. Wolfman appears morally affronted by the idea of multiplicity, alternatives, messiness. He wants a nice, orderly universe with everything in its place. And one can argue about whether removing all the ‘clutter’ is a necessary thing or not (just as one could argue about, say, Thatcher’s recreation of the British economy and the consequent destruction of Britain’s industrial base) but I think the impulse behind it is a worrying one, no matter what the result.
Like I said, I enjoy it as a comic, still – it’s one of only a handful of Big Superhero Crossovers that have had anything interesting about them (all the others have been written or co-written by Grant Morrison, without exception) – but it’s a good comic made for bad motives, and for once the early-21st-century consensus is probably the right one, overall…
52, fanfic and Ralph Dibny’s Diary – Hyperpost 5
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), all other ebook formats
Cover of 52 19
“The only thing I can think of to do in that situation is what I usually do, which is lie and pretend I totally meant that to happen all along. Like, instead of a real gun, it’s a magic crime-solving gun, and how I always knew Despero’s secret plan was to take over the universe. I might even mention a few proper detective phrases, like ‘dusting for prints’ or ‘checking the carpet for hairs’. Once I get started, I can keep it up for hours. That’s why I, Ralph Dibny – I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – am, or was, the World’s Greatest Detective! In your face, Batman, you truth-telling beeeyotch.” – Ralph Dibny
In 2006, DC Comics, entirely by accident, put out a really good comic series.
DC had just finished a gigantic mega-crossover Nothing Will Ever Be The Same story called Infinite Crisis, in which absolutely nothing at all edifying happened (the plot, in so far as there was one, involved Superboy going insane, punching time to explain continuity errors away, then killing a different Superboy, while the original, proper, Siegel & Shuster Superman first turned evil, then got mocked by everyone, then also got killed by insane Superboy, while various comic characters stood around in the same poses they’d appeared in in other, better, comics, in order to ‘reference’ them. Utter, utter, irredeemable shit). At the end of this misbegotten mess, every DC comic jumped forward a year, had a new status quo (often the old status quo – so Comissioner Gordon was back in charge of Gotham police force, when earlier he’d been retired, and so on), and *we didn’t know what had happened*.
Dan DiDio (DC’s editor-in-chief) and Paul Levitz (DC’s publisher) decided they wanted to combine the real-time feel of 24 with the doling-out-answers-to-mysteries of Lost and make a gazillion dollars, so they commissioned a series called 52 that would, over the course of 52 weekly installments, tell us what had happened during that missing year. It was to be written by Geoff Johns (the writer of Infinite Crisis) and Greg Rucka (a solid, reliable writer who was also a friend of Johns). It’d cover the whole of the DC ‘universe’, and show why all the changes had been made.
As originally conceived, this would have been terrible, but before writing started it was decided to bring in two more writers – Mark Waid (a solid writer with a good knowledge of obscure DC characters) and his friend Grant Morrison (I may have mentioned him once or twice on here…) and it very quickly turned from an editorial-driven comic to a writer-driven one, keeping only the ‘real-time, missing year’ bits, and forgetting all about explaining dull continuity points. DiDio apparently hated the result (according to Waid he described the next DC weekly series, Countdown – quite possibly the worst thing in existence ever, and the final argument against the existence of a benevolent god – as “52 done right”) but it was a hit.
It was also a genuinely good comic. Not perfect – it sagged a *LOT* in the middle issues, and was wildly inconsistent – but every issue had *something* to recommend it, if only J.G. Jones’ stunning covers, and as a whole work it still works almost as well as it did as a serial, which I wouldn’t have bet on at the time.
Partly as an artistic decision, partly for practical reasons, the structure of the story ended up following very closely Morrison’s earlier work Seven Soldiers (about which more soon) . There was a central mystery, apparently Morrison’s idea (which DiDio decided to spoil before the end) , which was approached by several characters investigating several things, with each thread only briefly connecting. There were more explicit connections between the different threads than there had been in Seven Soldiers, but to a large extent each storyline was handled by a single writer – as Waid explains:
Some plot threads were passed like a baton more than others; I think all of us wrote John Henry Irons at one time, whereas the Montoya stuff was all Greg’s because it was important it maintained a very specific voice, and the space stuff was all Grant’s because none of us could figure out what the hell he was doing even though we enjoyed it greatly. Me, I get credit for Wicker Sue. Geoff and I shared Booster and probably collaborated more as a pair on different plot elements because we were the only two who lived in the same town.
But we definitely fed off one another’s talent and swapped some tips and tricks, and probably permanently raised one another’s game.
While Morrison said “Seven Soldiers was, in many ways, a blueprint for what we did in 52 – the idea of one big, extended epic, featuring a bunch of C-list heroes, and comprised of interlocking story arcs and plot threads had already worked very successfully there. “
It is an interesting experiment to read 52 separated into its constituent stories, as in the 52 remixed project. (NB do not download these as a substitute for buying the actual comics – it’s a very different experience). This reworks 52 into six miniseries – Black Adam: Reign Of Death, Booster Gold: Somewhere In Time, Ralph Dibny: The Quest For Fate, The Mystery in Space , The Question: Answer the Question and U.S. Steel: Be Your Own Hero.
Reading these stories like this is interesting, not only because you get to cut out the utterly pointless Steel story, which has little connection to the rest and is tedious beyond measure, but because you get to see exactly how ‘stand-alone’ the different threads of the story are. Every individual story comes very close to making sense in its own terms, but there are little hanging threads all over the place that never get picked up on in the same story that they start in, even though the big picture makes sense.
But the really interesting thing about 52 – even more than the comic itself – was the level of involvement from fans, of which 52 remixed was only one aspect. Most ‘famously’ (for values of famously that equal being known about among that part of the internet that talks about comics) journalist Douglas Wolk had a blog called 52 Pickup that analysed and annotated each issue as it came out, but by far the most interesting manifestation of this was Ralph Dibny’s Diary.
The Dibny Diary was the work of British comics writer Al Ewing, and is in many ways as interesting as 52, if not more so. Starting from the third issue, every week Ewing wrote a comedy blog post in character as ex-superhero Dibny (or, later, Dibny’s therapist, or Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Master) , dealing with the events of that week’s issue of the comic, but also filling in the rest of the events in Dibny’s life, showing Dibny as a narcissistic, washed-up, delusional, suicidal wreck, desperate to regain his self-respect, or, failing that, die.
Every week, Ewing had to fit together not only the story being told in 52, but his own story, and the comments he quickly started getting from other people, writing in-character as comics characters (some of whom got what he was doing, while others definitely didn’t), and over 50 weeks we were shown Dibny hiring ‘internet superhero’ Ram (an obscure 80s character from the New Guardians) to stop Jean Loring leaving comments on his blog, him getting a new flatmate who doesn’t flush *and* who is a supervillain, his brief, unsuccessful career as a TV pundit, him defecating in Doctor Fate’s helmet (and trying to persuade us that no matter what his psychiatrist said, Doctor Fate’s floating helmet *was* talking to him), Black Adam’s career as a swing vocalist, Dibny’s psychiatrist becoming a genocidal maniac, Dibny’s obsession with Superboy’s penis, the impossibility of getting good Bialyan takeaway the week after Black Adam razed the country, and much more.
I’m sure I saw an interview with the editor of 52 at the time which said that the creative team were reading the Dibny Diary, and towards the end of the story it seemed to me they even dropped in a couple of little nods to it.
Now, to me, this is exactly why ‘canon’ is a ridiculous concept. A large part of my enjoyment of reading 52 was reading Ewing’s work, and to me the experience of reading 52 is inextricable from reading this completely ‘non-canon’ work. As far as I’m concerned, the Ralph Dibny in the comics is less interesting than one who would write about the Flash Museum:
Well, I was all set to launch into the most glamorous suicide of all by using the Flash’s Cosmic Treadmill to project myself back to the beginning of time and be blown up in the Big Bang itself – which may coincidentally have meant that the entire universe would have been remade in my image, which can’t be bad – but then I got a look at the broom closet they’re remembering me with, and I just can’t be bothered. What is the point? I ask you. What is the point of doing anything when these miserable skinflints won’t even spring for a proper room to remember it by?
or
I’ve had enough. Even Dr Fate is starting to sass me, like an unruly teenager, just because I enjoy the occasional methylated spirit. All great men have. Edgar Allen Poe drank meths all the time when we solved the case of Jack The Ripper. Or possibly that was me, I was drunk at the time… well, Edgar Allen Poe won’t have Ralph Dibny to push around any longer! And neither will you, dear reader, you bastard.
And a zombie Ralph Dibny, as we apparently see in Blackest Night, is positively dull in comparison (I had hoped that the resurrection of the character as a zombie would have brought about the resurrection of the blog, but apparently not…)
As the collaborative nature of the internet, blah blah social networks twitter wiki web2.0 etc (this sentence doesn’t actually need to be written, just insert one from any of a billion other things you’ve read), well anyway, I think we will see more of this sort of thing in the future, where the ‘canonical’ text is merely the jumping-off point for more imaginative creations. Not just fanfic as it exists at present (although some fanfic increasingly diverges from the source, especially collaborative online RPGs where people tend to play characters from different sources), but people creating the music made by fictional bands, or creating mashups of entirely different TV stories to try to tell new coherent stories, and so forth. Most of this will be shit, but it will be very interesting to see if we get much great art made out of rubbish.
This has already reached 1800 words and I’ve not even really started to talk about 52 proper. Rest assured, I will do…
In reply to various comments… (hyperpost 3a)
Very tired and stressed today, so the next proper hyperpost won’t be til tomorrow night. Instead, you get this, dealing with various points raised by Pillock and Zom (and anyone else who comments – I notice Sean Witzke just commented) in the comments to the recent posts. This might be a little disjointed, but consider it a series of tangents to the main event – or maybe a hypertimeline tributary that will feed back into the main thing later. The ‘hyperpost’ thing really is turning into my magnificent octopus, isn’t it?
In brief, my love for hypertime is that it’s a brilliant imaginative concept, and the fact that it provides a framework for letting the ‘linear men’ cope with stories where Jimmy Olsen has the wrong hairstyle or something is just a byproduct of what I think is its neglected use, for telling big epic superhero stories a la Final Crisis(see the Hypercrisis description in this interview:
Hypertime has been quietly ignored and no-one quite realises how elegant and perfect the theoretical framework is. It’s very simple. I have a diagram.
My one regret about my brief falling out with DC after the ‘Superman Incident’ is that I didn’t get to do my Hypercrisis series at DC to explain all this stuff and set up a whole new playground. It’s the one thing I could still be arsed doing with classical superheroes. If I ever go back, I’ll explain the whole Hypertime thing and recreate the Challengers of the Unknown as Challengers: Beyond the Unknown.
It’s one thing I still want to do. It had a monster eating the first few years of the 21st century and Superman building a bridge across this gaping hole in time. A bridge made of events. The Guardians of The Multiverse and a new Green Lantern Corps made up of parallel reality Green Lanterns, the Superman Squad and the mystery of the Unknown Superman of 2150 etc, etc. There’s a huge synopsis filled with outrageous stuff.
I want to read that – hell, I want to write that. I’m not particularly interested in having a framework to ‘explain’ inconsistencies between different stories – that’s why they’re called *different stories* – but I think it’s amusing that something that’s primarily a storytelling device – and I am absolutely convinced that that was Morrison’s primary intention for it, rather than as a continuity-fix – has the additional side-effect of totally destroying the Linear Men’s rigid hierarchy of what ‘counts’ and doesn’t count. Doing that by itself is no reason to do a story – in fact, anything to do with ‘continuity’ is a reason *not* to do a story (watch Attack Of The Cybermen if you don’t believe me). But it’s a nice side-effect.
pillock:
I’ll just say that it isn’t like all those delightful Silver Age details you mention were confusing, but that they had gotten boring…which nowadays we think sounds crazy, how could they have gotten boring? Well, they did, though: the DCU lost a lot of life in the years between 1975 and 1985, and after Crisis blew it up it gained momentum again.
The ‘confusing’ thing is brought up by Marv Wolfman in one of the text pieces in the original issues of Crisis – it was definitely *his* reason for doing it.
That said, I agree with you – the post-Crisis DCU is the one I fell in love with first, be it the Giffen/DeMatteis JLA, Moore on Swamp Thing, all the pre-Vertigo titles like Animal Man and Doom Patrol, Byrne’s Superman revamp (a misstep in retrospect, but it seemed a good idea at the time), Grant & Breyfogle on Batman, hell even stuff like *LOBO* seemed funny at the time.
I’d question how much that was a *result* of Crisis, though, and how much Crisis was a symptom of a wider change in the company in the mid-80s (when did Giordano, Levitz et al get in charge?) – the ‘British Invasion’ would have happened with or without Crisis, as would the movement of Marvel creators like Byrne and Wolfman across, and a lot of the general rise in quality then was due to USian freelancers raising their game to compete with the British ones (the Giffen/DeMatteis League, at first, is such an obvious attempt at doing Watchmen-in-continuity that I’m amazed this never gets mentioned when people talk about either comic). And some of those British creators were more than capable of using the tired story elements in new ways – just look at For The Man Who Has Everything (which of course contains another imaginary story…)
Zom:
All that said, one of the biggest problems with any discussion of Hypertime, and where I resist your urge to push the discussion in small part towards physics, Andrew, is how the term seems to point in the direction of some sort of concrete theoretical basis. I tend to think of it as a signpost, a direction of travel, a statement of intent rather than as a theoretical object that’ll bear too much scrutiny, because quite clearly it *won’t*. We should be paying attention to what the concept is trying to achieve and view it as a useful *tool* rather than quibbling over the details because the details will only ever get us so far.
True – however, the physics post, when it comes, will not be about the ‘DCU physics’, but rather about what I suspect was the real pop-science inspiration for the idea…
And there I must leave you, for now, as I have computer problems to fix. More hyperpost tomorrow.
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