Hey now Riddler, Penguin, Joker, Better run and hide!
Okay, so the title has absolutely nothing to do with the content, but in these Final Crisis/Batman RIP posts I’ve been using consecutive lines from Batman by Jan & Dean as titles, and I refuse to let Grant Morrison not putting in a scene of Batvillains running away stop me.
Anyway, Final Crisis #6, publisher DC Comics, writer Grant Morrison, artists Hugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble & Grubb…
Firstly, it is, of course, great. I can understand why Jog doesn’t like it, but to me it’s just about as good as superhero comics get, and Kevin Church has accurately summed up most of the complaints people have had about it on message boards.
There are a couple of complaints that *do* have more substance, of course. First is the art – up to now the various people helping Jones with this have done what I consider a relatively good job of blending with his work. Not perfect, but good. But here, for the first time we have some outright sloppiness – which looks like the fault of the inker, but is really the fault of the unrealistic schedule that these comics were originally put on.
A potentially bigger problem is the colouring on Shilo Norman, which some people are seeing as him being coloured ‘white’ (actually his skin tone looks more like the Japanese heroes in the same panel than anything else). My friend Chris Hilker, in an email to which I’ve not got round to replying (so I hope he’s reading this) suggested that the ‘error’ was actually a sign of Shilo taking on a Godly aspect, being something like a halo or spotlight. I’m not 100% convinced that was the *intention*, but it fits with the story, and I like it, so I’m accepting that.
On the other hand, for every art problem, there’s a simply phenomenal page like Talky Tawny (am I the only one who wants a Morrison-written Talky Tawny series?) saying “Do your worst, gentlemen”. That page is just gorgeous, and makes me wish there’d been the opportunity to put this out on a realistic schedule. All the art teams on this, in fact, do great work when they can – just look at the scene with Batman and Darkseid, or the double-page spread just before Superman’s return.
Even at its worst, though, the art does a competent job of telling the story, which is what I’m buying this for, and which is just getting better. All those people who’ve criticised this for being ‘a bit like Rock Of Ages‘ are comprehensively missing the point. All Morrison’s DCU work in the last couple of years (since the end of Seven Soldiers) has been about making the ‘ultimate’ versions of characters and stories. Not in the Marvel sense, but… actually, in some ways it is like the Marvel sense of the word.
What Morrison did with All-Star Superman (and slightly less successfully with his Batman run, though that’s not completed yet thankfully – as he’s confirmed in recent interviews – and an incomplete Morrison work is never an easy thing to judge) is essentially to throw in every single thing anyone ever loved about the character and make the whole thing make sense. If you gave All-Star Superman to anyone who’d read a Superman comic, ever, they would recognise it. I bet you could convince a *lot* of non-fans that they’d read it when they were a kid. It is, in many ways, the quintessential Superman comic.
And in the same way, Final Crisis is the quintessential superhero crossover – even as, just like with All-Star Superman, Morrison uses it to do other things as well. So all the plot elements here – multiverses collapsing, a war between gods, red skies, heroes turned bad and villains saving the day, a hero who can never use their powers ever again, dramatic deaths and returns from the dead, races with death himself, Superman cradling a dead body in his arms (evoking both the cover of Crisis On Infinite Earths 7 and Batman Dies At Dawn, two stories which have hugely influenced the last few months’ worth of stories), all these are things we have seen time and again in superhero comics over the years.
Morrison is neither so stupid nor so modest as to not know that his own big superhero epics of the past need to be thrown into the mix too, and so they are, but the Rock Of Ages parallels are just another of the many, many echoes here.
But it’s the execution of the thing that’s so impressive. Darkseid (and I *can’t* be the only one who’s noticed how much this manifestation of the Dark God of Anti-Life looks like John McCain, can I?) fixing all the continuity fuckups caused by the execrable Countdown (and the Death Of The New Gods series) in one sentence, and doing it in a way that it feels like an organic part of the story and also thematically fits with Morrison’s other work (AND is maybe another shout-out to the Mindless Ones, and the ‘prismatic age’ theory). The way that the whole thing’s a love story, with almost every character in this issue having their own romantic subplot, from the mature married love of Hourman and Liberty Belle to the soap opera of the Super Young Team to the BDSM-tinged relationship of Black Canary and Green Arrow. Pretty much everyone in the story is motivated by getting back to someone they love, which makes sense if, as seems likely, the whole story is a cosmic ‘resonance’ from Nix Uotan being cast out of the world of the monitors.
For someone who’s regarded as a Big Idea man, and who’s pouring every Big Idea he’s ever had into this story – ideas about the superhero genre, the way you can tell stories in comics, the nature of reality, and more – what’s impressive is how well delineated every character is. No character gets more than a handful of panels and a couple of lines of dialogue, but you still get an understanding of who Black Canary, Talky Tawny, Batman, Lex Luthor, Supergirl and so on are – understandings that you often couldn’t get from their comics.
Final Crisis isn’t a perfect comic – far from it. It fails at quite a lot of what it’s trying to do, as at least half of Morrison’s work does. But it fails in interesting ways, and what it’s trying for is also interesting. Even at its worst, its faults are trying too hard, overestimating its audience, and having too much imagination, which are faults I can’t bring myself to judge too harshly. And at its best this is a comic that actually makes a big cosmic Everything Will Change Forever crossover something worth reading for the first time since… well, ever.
Linkblogging for 18/01/09
Off to see Richard Thompson perform 1000 Years Of Popular Music tonight, so I may do an Albums You Should Own on that when we get back. In the meantime, some links…
RAB posts a great video of XTC as a tribute to two great people who died recently – Patrick McGoohan and John Mortimer. As well as being a great song (The Man Who Murdered Love) the post itself is very good and worth reading, especially the last couple of sentences.
Mention of Patrick McGoohan reminds me that because of the remake (which will undoubtedly be dreadful) you can currently stream every episode of The Prisoner, one of the greatest TV series of all time, legally and for free.
Alix at Lib Dem Voice has a good summing up of Prime Minister’s Questions.
Amypoodle at Mindless Ones has a good review of the latest Final Crisis (which I’ll be writing about soonish mysef). Have you noticed how certain ‘net critics (not Amypoodle, who like myself has loved the series from the start) are starting to revise their opinion of this story now it’s turned into a big fight scene and they don’t have to think any more? Jog, on the other hand, dislikes the issue for pretty much that reason. I loved it, myself…
ETA this was taken down (as some of the comments below note) then came back up again, greatly expanded. Some of the comments in the expanded version are very like my own review, written between it going down and coming up, making mine look rather like an ‘edited highlights’ version of theirs.
And Chris Bird looks at the environmental case for eating meat…
Stepping Back a bit… Yet more on Seven Soldiers
A revised and improved version of this essay is in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! – hardback, paperback, PDF
I’ll be posting more about Final Crisis when the next issue comes out (and between following up on Batman on Thursday and then getting Superman Beyond 3D 2 next week, I’m tingling with anticipation (and incidentally, everyone, the title isn’t just Superman Beyond but Superman Beyond 3D – because he’s travelling beyond the third dimension…)). But before that I thought I’d post something briefly about Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle as that comic more than any other is the real prequel to Final Crisis.
One thing I was never entirely happy about in Seven Soldiers was the role of gravity in the story. I wrote about this on my old blog, because gravity is so important as a recurring theme throughout Seven Soldiers and the JLA: Classified story that led into it, but I couldn’t see why gravity was being used in such a similar way to entropy, which is an even bigger theme in Seven Soldiers generally. I came to the provisional conclusion that it was being used as a metaphor for the more difficult concept, as well as for the Life Trap, but I felt like I was still missing something. Given that the Mister Miracle story is about a plunge into and escape from a black hole, it was galling that the gravity and entropy themes didn’t fit together *quite* as neatly as they should.
This article has changed that. I always knew, of course, that black holes do strange things to entropy and information (once you’re in an event horizon, you can *only* move towards the singularity. That means that moving forward in time is equivalent to moving towards the singularity. As the ‘arrow of time’ is a thermodynamic one, that means that moving towards the singularity is equivalent to increasing in entropy. That’s a hopeless oversimplification, but it’s sort-of right).
Now, the whole of Seven Soldiers, and Morrison’s work generally, is a meditation on entropy, information and life. Life has been defined by some as localised patches of negative entropy – using energy to create order from disorder. If there’s a real ‘anti-life equation’ then the second law of thermodynamics has a strong claim to the title, because all life is essentially a battle against entropy, and a battle that will always be won by entropy.
But having said that, entropy is the only thing that allows us any freedom at all – entropy is the reason that all iron hands must eventually succumb to rust, the reason none of us can ever be controlled at all. Which is why Darkseid’s search for complete control must go along with his search for immortality – change is both freedom and death.
So I was absolutely delighted to read in the Discover Magazine article linked above that there’s a type of black hole that does even more interesting things with entropy, and that this was known about long enough ago that Morrison may have used it in Mister Miracle. In fact, given that this type of black hole is called an ‘extremal’ black hole, it seems obvious that this must have been the type that Shilo plunged into in his escape act. After all, what superhero comic is going to feature a normal black hole when it can feature an EXTREMal!! black hole?
Now the interesting thing about black holes is that if they’re charged, matter can enter them and *not* hit the singularity (which would again make it the perfect type for Shilo Norman to try to escape from. Admittedly, he’d still be trapped within the event horizon and crushed to death by unimaginable forces, but he’d have room to manoeuvre… ). But even more interestingly (at least if Stephen Hawking is correct in his mathematics, and I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one… ) , if you have a charged *extremal* black hole… it has *ZERO* entropy.
All of a sudden the gravity and entropy subtexts of Mister Miracle come together – Mister Miracle is the story of someone entering a realm with no entropy at all and coming out again. Keep this in mind and reread Mister Miracle and see how much more sense it makes.
Even more interesting is the result that caused the Discover Magazine article to be published – that there’s a range of spacetime in the centre of those black holes that pops out of existence at the same point the entropy becomes zero – effectively taking the entropy out of this universe altogether and into what the authors of the article call ‘whoville’.
Or, as they put it, the entropy…
escapes.
He’s Known As Batman, With Robin The Boy Wonder By His Side…
I’m at a disadvantage with this post, because even though I am in the US at the moment, my comic shop isn’t. So everything I am writing right now could be completely contradicted by today’s issue of Batman, and I won’t know for a week or so…
One aspect of Batman’s life that has been left out of Morrison’s “Everything really happened” take on Batman is Jason Todd. Unless I’m forgetting a brief appearance in one of the Resurrection Of Ra’s Al-Ghul crossovers, there has been no mention of Jason Todd in Morrison’s run on the title at all.
Except… there sort of has…
You see, there are three ‘Jason Todds’ in Batman, and have been for a few years now.
One is the character that is currently running around with no narrative purpose, whose very existence in one panel of a comic requires, out of necessity, the whole comic to be perverted into a rationalisation of the most pointless returns from the dead in comic history, and who has no fixed characterisation. This character is an utterly pointless waste of ink, and an example of the artistic bankruptcy of a superhero comics medium that is obsessed with ‘things being like they were when I was 12, but more badass’.
The second is the character that existed from 1988 to 2005, and is still what most comics fans think of first when they think ‘Jason Todd’. The martyr. Good soldier. He Died So That Others Might Live. Young boy at the height of his powers, struck down by the Joker. An illustration of what happens when Batman Goes Too Far and Lets Others Get Hurt. A character that was more interesting in death than he is now in life, Jasonthegoodsoldier was still, unfortunately, just a symbol for everything that was wrong with Batman comics from the moment Dark Knight issue 1 came out…
But there used to be another Jason Todd. One that we in the Silent 73 remember…
This Jason Todd was, as bobsy put it, “a Robin for the burgeoning Dark Age – troubled, angry, rebellious and a natural brawler”. While his intentions were usually good, he was brattish, spoiled, a criminal before becoming Robin (at least in the post-Crisis retconned origin of the character). He would even kill when he thought it necessary for the greater good.
In short, wasn’t he just a slightly more mature Damien?
While fans have generally disliked the character of Damien, the crucial issue 666 (the most important issue so far of Morrison’s run on Batman, which I’m still praying will continue post-Battle For The Cowl, as Rich Johnston suggests it will) shows the same character traits, but in a far more disciplined, resourceful adult Damien:
I spent my first three years as Batman making the job easy for myself. Turning the city itself into a weapon. The victory is in the preparation…I knew I’d never be as good as my dad or Dick Grayson, but I promised I wouldn’t leave Gotham without a Batman. So I specialised in cheating.
Morrison essentially has taken the character of Jason Todd out of the 80s comics and brought him back under a pseudonym. Making him Batman’s biological son is just icing on the cake. Remember, Jason Todd (pre-Crisis) was the son (adoptive, but also, it was hinted, biological), of Nocturna, a villain who had a love-hate relationship with both Batman and Bruce Wayne. Just like Damian with Talia…
Morrison has, intentionally or otherwise, spotted that Batman really needs a Jason Todd figure. Tim Drake is an adequate Robin, but he’d make a lousy Batman – Batman needs an heir as conflicted as himself who will ‘carry on the fight’ when Batman is gone, and he needs a sidekick who will argue with him to provide some kind of narrative tension.
So he’s done the ultimate Silent 73 trick – he’s made it so Jason never died. He’s just called Damien, but otherwise he’s the same character, with the same narrative purpose. So bringing in Jason thedeadmartyr goodsoldiergoodsoldier or the new, pointless version would just confuse matters. He’s got a character who serves the same narrative purpose for which the original was created, and who could be a fascinating source of future Batman stories were it not for the fact that (as with so many of Morrison’s other ideas) no-one else seems to get the point of the character.
Tomorrow – more on this whole FinalRIPsis storyplex, if I can get to the computer.
But Incognito As Batman He Fights Crime At Night
One of the things that people have found most confusing about the ending (if ending it is) of Batman RIP is the question of who exactly was the villain behind The Black Glove.
Was he, as he claimed, Thomas Wayne back from the dead (if he was ever really dead)? Was he Alfred (or working for Alfred)? Was he Satan himself? Was he operating under orders from some dissociated part of Bruce Wayne’s psyche? The conclusion was left ambiguous enough that all these were left as possibilities. This did of course leave several people frustrated, lacking the ‘closure’ they felt they deserved from such a long storyline.
Well, the answer to who the villain really was is obvious enough, to anyone who’s read Morrison’s other work.
It’s the Anti-Dad..
Morrison lost his own father fairly recently, and since then most of his superhero work has been devoted, in one way or another, to working out his feelings about this, both good and bad. All-Star Superman, for example, is largely about the inspirational power of Superman’s two dead fathers, and also about his power to inspire after his own ‘death’. Seven Soldiers is likewise full of lost or evil father figures – Klarion’s missing father, Zatanna searching for her father’s books, Jake’s father-in-law dying, Melmoth… the complex attitude towards Alan Moore in Seven Soldiers could be seen as part of this – Morrison having to kill his ‘father’ Moore (for a wonderful take on the Moore-Morrison inspirational relationship, see Uncyclopedia’s entry on Morrison ) .
The Anti-Dad sums up everything that was hinted at for the Black Glove – the not-really-dead Thomas Wayne who hates his son, the Devil, Alfred (who after all is Bruce Wayne’s surrogate father)… the Anti-Dad is also appearing right now in Final Crisis.
Anti-Dad is actually a pretty good description of Darkseid (the inspiration, after all, for cinema’s most famous ‘Dark Father’) and it is interesting in this context to look at the design notes in the Final Crisis Sketchbook for ‘Terrible’ Turpin.
Turpin of course later in the story becomes the body that Darkseid takes over, but he’s described as being ‘Jack Kirby as drawn by Frank Miller’. Now, that’s actually a good description of how the character should look, but if you wanted to name two people who could be described as the ‘father’ of modern superhero comics, Jack Kirby would obviously be one, and Miller could reasonably be described as the father of modern ‘realistic’, downbeat, grimungritty comics, of the kind both Final Crisis and Batman RIP at least pretend to be.
Both stories are reflections of each other – as above, so below, the microcosm and the macrocosm. As the Earth is being taken over and subverted to Darkseid’s will, so Batman finds that his own mind had been booby-trapped (with a phrase that sounds very like ‘surrender’ – surrender being another subject that has come up more than a few times recently in Morrison’s work).
Morrison is doing Crisis On Infinite Earths and American Gothic at the same time (unsurprising as he’s always claimed Moore’s Swamp Thing run as a big influence). He’s managing to take the little ground-level story and have it reflect the themes and events of the huge mega-complex crossover – and he did it without anybody realising this til after the fact (I thought the two were connected, but I couldn’t be sure). Certainly Batman RIP has far more claim to be a Final Crisis tie-in than most of the books Johns and Rucka are doing with the Final Crisis logo slapped on them (Revelations, to be fair, ties in quite well, but why the others are considered Final Crisis tie-ins at the moment I have no idea).
So the idea that the events of Batman RIP will come to their ‘real’ conclusion in Final Crisis is not a problem for me – the two stories are one and the same.
However, the icing on the cake, if true, is the report in Lying In The Gutters that Morrison *AND FRANK QUITELY* are going to be the creative team on Batman after all the big shake-ups have shaken out. If this is the case (as all right-thinking people hope and pray), it would appear conclusive proof that the story was not, as some thought, messed around with by Dan DiDio, but was what Morrison intended all along.
More on the Final Crisis/Batman RIP mega-story tomorrow…
He’s Known As Bruce Wayne By Day, Wealthy Socialite…
So, I’ve been promising to write about Grant Morrison’s Batman run for quite a while, and the things I have to say have just been getting longer and longer. And then the first of the Last Rites issues comes out and it becomes apparent that the whole story has just been leading to Batman’s part in Final Crisis and everything becomes even longer. So consider this the first of a series of posts that may well continue at least until Final Crisis has finished, looking both at the Bat-books post Infinite Crisis and at Final Crisis – as well as looking at some other comics that have relevance to these.
Before we start, I just want to echo amypoodle’s post on Final Crisis. I think these comics are *great*, some of the best superhero comics ever written, and if you don’t agree you are, objectively, wrong. I can prove it. I have graphs.
I do think, though, that Morrison’s Batman has been less successful than Final Crisis – partly because of the artists (who, with the exception of the always-wonderful J.H. Williams III, have ranged from the competent to the incompetent, never touching ‘good’), and partly because, as my friend Tilt put it a while back “It’s like if the Beatles made Sgt Pepper, but only after ten years of everyone making Their Satanic Majesties Request“. The Batman-facing-the-worst-foe-ever-and-getting-broken-by-it storyline is one we’ve seen so many times before that even though Morrison’s doing it better than anyone else, the story still sagged a little in the middle just because of its similarity to other stories (roughly the couple of issues before the appearance of Bat-Mite, when everything went all Morrison). Having said that, it’s still the best run on Batman I’ve ever read, by a very long way.
I want to look at every aspect of these stories, and also as far as possible at what the creative process was and to what extent these works have been shaped by editorial diktat rather than the ideas of the writer. I think that any honest assessment of these comics has to take those factors into account, bearing in mind the widespread rumours of disagreement between Morrison and the editorial teams he has been working with, and the extraordinarily non-committal statements those editors have made (along with Morrison’s virtual absence from any publicity for his recent work – odd, given that he is one of the most publicly visible comic creators).
One of the standard phrases that comes into pretty much every internet critique of Morrison’s run on Batman is ‘except for the editorially-mandated Resurrection of Ra’s Al-Ghul crossover’. I must have read that phrase at least twenty times, and yet nobody writing it has explained why Resurrection should be left out of consideration when considering Morrison’s run. I think that the phrase is actually code for “You got other writers to mix with the sacred Morrison! Blasphemy!” – even when the people writing this then go on to damn the rest of Morrison’s run with a variety of types of faint praise.
Now, if you’re going to think of writers to collaborate with Morrison, I would suggest that Dini, Nicieza and Milligan are at least as reasonable a set of choices as Waid, Johns and Rucka – Milligan is a genuinely great comic writer for whom Morrison has expressed admiration in the past, and Dini and Nicieza are both very competent journeymen (much as it pains me to say that about Dini, who I still hold responsible for the execrable Countdown), so I don’t think that this, on its own, removes Resurrection from consideration. But is it ‘editorially mandated’? Was it imposed on Morrison from above?
Now, the main way to tell is just to see if it fits into the larger picture of his run – which I will do when I get to it – but for now I shall stipulate that I can make a good case that it fits with both the larger narrative and themes of Morrison’s run. What does an ‘editorially mandated’ crossover involving Morrison and Dini usually look like?
Well, as we’ve seen recently, what it actually involves is Morrison and Dini writing totally different, mutually incompatible stories, and Dini throwing in one or two lines referencing something that almost-but-not-quite happens in Morrison’s story, and then everyone complaining vociferously about this afterwards. That is clearly not what Resurrection looks like. Some people have complained about aspects of the storytelling, but the fact is, it reads as one story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
It also follows from Morrison’s work in a way that it doesn’t from the others – Dini obviously hated doing the story, having Ra’s effectively destroyed again in the very next issue after the crossover finished. Nicieza and Milligan were brought in just for this story. So if the story came from any of the writers, as opposed to editorial mandate, it must have come from Morrison.
This also fits in with what was said about the storyline in advance of its publication (more than a year ago now – scary how time passes so quickly) – that the original idea of Ra’s coming back was suggested by DiDio to Morrison (presumably to tie in with the character’s increased popularity post-Batman Begins), that Morrison liked the idea and plotted the story, and that only later was it decided to make it a crossover between all the Bat-books.
So to my mind, while that may count as an ‘editorially mandated crossover’ in the sense that it was the editorial team that decided for the story to *be* a crossover rather than a story taking place in only Morrison’s title, it certainly doesn’t seem to me like the storyline, or the effects on the rest of Morrison’s run, were in any way imposed on him. Other things later on may have been (and we’ll know more about that in the inevitable angry interview about how Morrison’s work was fucked around with by editorial after it’s all over – Morrison’s work is *always* fucked around with by editorial in one way or another, and he’s always angry about it) but to my mind, Resurrection is part of Morrison’s Bat-run, and will be discussed as such.
Tomorrow – the Joker.
I’ll be posting about music tonight, but in the meantime, you should go and read pillock on scale…
Geoff Johns – Not Really All That Bad?
My wife, Holly, came home the other week with my comics (she sometimes goes to the comic shop for me if I’m working and she isn’t) and said “I really enjoyed that Final Crisis one.”
This surprised me, because Holly hasn’t been hugely impressed with Final Crisis so far, even though she likes Grant Morrison – but also because Final Crisis wasn’t out that week. But Final Crisis: Legion Of Three Worlds was, and it was that that she had read. And she was right – it was good. Not great, but a very solid, entertaining comic. And, amazingly for something I’d expected to be incomprehensible continuity-porn, accessible to new readers.
It was then that I realised that I actually like Geoff Johns. That was a hard realisation for me to come to, because it went against everything I believed about comics.
Until relatively recently I would have named Geoff Johns as the writer doing most damage to comics. Not the worst writer, but writing terrible comics that were everything that holds the medium back. In 2004 and 2005 I read a few issues of his Flash and JSA and found them to be just awful – tedious grimungritty stuff with villains doing drugs and saying naughty swears to show how grown-up they were, combined with an overawed reverence for the mid-80s work of Roy Thomas and Marv Wolfman, which Johns seemed for some reason to consider worth slavishly emulating.
In short, they were simultaneously so continuity-obsessed that only those with a PhD in DC Comics history could possibly understand them, soapily melodramatic, utterly convinced of the specialness of tedious twelfth-string superheroes and ‘legacy characters’ like the thirtieth Rex The Wonder Dog or whatever, overly obsessed with dismemberment, and so ‘decompressed’ that there might be an actual event in a single ‘arc’ if you were lucky.
This opinion was confirmed for me by the couple of issues of Green Lantern: Rebirth I read, as well as by Infinite Crisis which was just terrible. At that point, the name ‘Geoff Johns’ was one that I had an almost Pavlovian reaction to – my views on him were probably similar to Dave Sim’s on Hilary Clinton.
However, as the more attentive and eagle-eyed of the readers of this blog may have spotted, I have a similar reaction, but in reverse, to Grant Morrison, who I consider easily the most interesting creator working in mainstream comics, and who I would probably put in a ‘top ten all time comic creators’ list. So when it was announced the two were going to collaborate on 52, I nearly split in half with the pain of deciding whether to buy it or not, but the presence of Mark Waid and Keith Giffen, both of whose work I have often enjoyed (though rarely loved) swung it for me.
52 was by turns fascinating, wonderful, dreadful and hilarious. RIght from the start it was fairly obvious who was writing which parts, who had come up with which concepts, and how the collaboration worked. And as I’d predicted beforehand, the parts Johns wrote were on the whole the weakest – the Luthor/Everyman/Infinity Inc/Steel plot and the Black Adam bits. (I still think the best thing to come out of 52 though was Ralph Dibny’s blog). But they weren’t terrible, merely weaker than the surrounding material. And I remember reading that a couple of individual lines I enjoyed were Johns’.
At the same time, I was picking up his collaboration with Kurt Busiek on the Superman titles, Up, Up And Away, because I was planning on reading Busiek’s solo run on Superman which was immediately going to follow it. And it was really good – just exciting, funny, good superhero comics, much denser and eventful than the norm. I put this down to Busiek, who I’ve always quite liked, but I was now of the opinion that Johns wasn’t necessarily a terrible writer so long as he was collaborating with someone else.
I still dropped Action Comics as soon as Johns began writing it with Richard Donner, though, but picked it up when Busiek started doing his fill-ins as Johns and Donner’s story went completely off the rails and for about a year Busiek was writing both Superman titles. I still think Busiek deserves more respect than he’s got for the way he handled a whole host of problems with the Superman line, none of which appear to have been of his making, and turned out reliably good Superman stories week in, week out. But when Busiek’s fill-ins stopped appearing and Johns came back to the title, it remained on my pull list out of inertia, and was actually quite good.
I also picked up the first issue of Booster Gold out of curiosity, because I always liked the character, the concept of the series appealed to me, and it was following up one of my favourite parts of 52. And it was fun!. Not great art or anything, and obviously still hopelessly mired in DC continuity, but having fun with it.
And now, reading the (pretty good) Final Crisis: Legion Of Three Worlds and the (not all that good, but certainly not terrible) Final Crisis: Rogues Revenge, I have reluctantly to come to the conclusion that Geoff Johns has, over the last couple of years, become a good, competent writer of entertaining superhero comics. I’m not the only one who’s had this change of heart, too – a number of people I read who’d previously dismissed him seem to be coming round to the same viewpoint.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to rush out and buy everything he writes or anything, but it’s one of the only cases I can think of where someone who was successful and not very good has actually bothered to improve – normally if someone as awful as Johns was a few years ago becomes a success, they coast or get steadily worse until they turn into Rob Liefeld. It’s even possible that if Johns keeps improving, he’ll go from being ‘quite good’ to being positively interesting. I can only imagine it’s the positive influence from Grant Morrison, who seems to have taken Johns under his wing just as he once did with Mark Millar, but with notably better results.
I still wouldn’t recommend Johns’ work as anything other than light entertainment, and not even especially original light entertainment – I won’t rush out to buy any of the titles he writes that I don’t already read. And I’ve written in the past about how one of the real problems in comics is our continued acceptance of the merely competent and OK. But I think he should be given a lot of credit for becoming competent and OK…
Linkblogging for 02/09/08
I was hoping to write a review of That Lucky Old Sun today, but my pre-ordered CD/DVD hasn’t arrived yet (other internet orders made in the last two weeks that haven’t arrived – Leonard Cohen tickets, a Doctor Who box set, and a bottle of melatonin tablets, all from different online shops. I’m beginning to think the people in one of the upstairs flats may have something to do with this…)
Bots’wana Beast over at the Mindless Ones has reviewed Final Crisis: Superman Beyond 3D, in a review he was nice enough to compare with mine, but his is better. I’m hoping to touch more on the themes from that comic later this week, as there’s a lot to say there…
A very different comic link – yesterday Dial B For Blog held a day of celebration for Gaspar Saladino, a legendary comic letterer. That link takes you to a list of participating sites (especially check out Todd Klein’s always insightful posts) while this is the start of Dial B’s own 24-hour, one-post-every-two-hours, celebration of Saladino’s work.
Stephen Fry has (oddly, for a Mac person) done a video wishing happy birthday to GNU. While I’m not an absolutist in my support of free software (I do, after all, work for a proprietary software company, and I also use a very small number of non-free apps at home – Gnome Inform7 because it’s a wonderful piece of free-as-in-beer software and maybe the nicest programming language (albeit specialised) I’ve ever come across , Scilab because it’s a standard program I need for my research, and unrar for opening cbr files (all of those are ‘open source’ and freely available, but not free software by the FSF’s definition) ) I do think the GNU project and Richard Stallman aren’t given nearly enough credit for their achievements.
In particular, I’ve made certain to always refer to GNU/Linux in writing, since I discovered that several computing students I work with, all of whom run ‘Linux’ , had no idea who’d written the compilers and other software they used every day.
(I’d disagree with the video in its recommendation of gNewSense as a distro to use if you’re interested in Free Software though. It won’t work on many new systems because some video card makers and similar keep their designs secret, making it nearly impossible to write a totally free OS for new hardware. If you’re new to Free Software, I’d go for Debian GNU/Linux, which has the tiny minimal programs you’ll need to run your hardware but is otherwise totally free, or Ubuntu, which is easier to install but in my limited experience slightly less stable.)
Andrew Rilstone reviews the last two episodes of the most recent series of nuWho. I’m very glad he did so, because Grant Morrison’s comments on how the story with Davros has parallels with his own Final Crisis even though they were conceived independently almost persuaded me to watch it.
Brad Hicks has two fascinating posts about McCain picking Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nomination.
And RIP Don LaFontaine (for those of you who don’t know the name, you do know his voice. He’s the man who did the voiceover for pretty much every film trailer of the last 30 years).
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