Black & White & Red All Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intro:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shame...

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

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

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

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

This Is Going To Change Everything

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And after all, they had to protect the copyright.

Judenhass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holly Reads Glamourpuss So You Don't Have To

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave Sim post

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

Last Week

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

Dave Sim - The Song, Not The Singer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At Last The 1984 Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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